D&D 4E 4e Healing - Is This Right?

[AZRogue]

Here's another comment to consider: how will the game feel when it's played?

The concerns raised are, IMO, good ones and shouldn't be brushed aside. They might not be concerns for ME, but I can easily understand why people have them.

But people who have been playing around with what we know so far, running their own playtests, have seemed to like the game. It may turn out that the synergy (and, yes, I believe this) of the game while PLAYED makes it more than it appears and will help smooth over a lot of rough edges. I think that those who are willing should give the game a good honest playtest, at least, when it comes out. I know that several people, for instance, were dead set against the new diagonal movement but, after playing, said it wasn't bad and that they quickly got used to it and forgot about it. The same may hold true for healing.

 

[tuffnoogies]

Ask yourself this: Why six hours? Why not simply say "five minutes after every fight, you're completely healed"?

Cuz they're saving that for 5e?

 

[HatWearingFool]

EDIT: Sorry quick reply seems to work differently than I would expect..

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Ask yourself this: Why six hours? Why not simply say "five minutes after every fight, you're completely healed"?
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Yes, that's right. In many novels/movies that I like the hero manages to return to action after a very minimal break. It's basically alive/superficial wound/dead in most novels/movies/comics.

 

[Gort]

Surely if "six hours" is your big stumbling block for healing, doesn't houseruling it to "two days" put us back with beloved 3.5 ed healing rules?

At the end of the day a GM saying, "Okay, you camp for two days" instead of "Okay, you camp for six hours" is pretty much the same thing. Unless you run your game based entirely on some kind of clock rather than on dramatic necessity... In either case it's pretty much up to the GM if the players get to rest, and if they're interrupted if they do, and you'd have to plan around either timeframe in any case.

 

[tuffnoogies]

Just out of curiosity, for those who keep saying (or buying) that HP are not and have never represented actual injury, do y'all really not describe (or have described to you), "the crunch of his nose breaking under your spiked gauntlet," or "the spray of blood as the orc's blade bites into your shoulder," or "the audible snap as your mace cracks the beetle's carapace"?

If you do, how do you justify it?

If you don't, you're missing out. It's not something you want to do with every swing, obviously, but a few times a fight, injury descriptions are some of the most easily-visualized and exciting parts of the game. (Probably because, due to slasher and horror movies, everybody at the table knows what you're talking about when you say, "the spurt of arterial blood.")

I save colorful describtions of that sort for when the foe's been dropped. Until then it's all nicks and grazes. Maybe a jarring attack parried.

 

[tuffnoogies]

Yes. And there's only so far you can abstract something before it stops representing what it was originally intended to represent. 4E has reached that point. Every other D&D, very abstract as they have been, had not.

I think you're starting to catch on, Jeff. Hit points in 3.x mean something different than they do in 4e.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

Because HP loss doesn't model wounds which impair your fighting efficiency?

It's abstract, and as long as you're willing to accept HP as a combination of fatigue, morale and actual wounds, it works. Yes, you have the falling example which is the most grevious offender in this system, IMO, and yes, sometimes you shouldn't heal to full when you've been down to 1 HP...

But get over it. =) HP has always been abstract, unless you play that a 10th level fighter can literally suffer ten times as many sword wounds as a 1st level fighter. If you do, well, just acknowledge that seeing as how he can suffer ten times the wounds as a normal warrior, he's also capable of fast healing.

This.

Actually, it increases my suspension of disbelief, because it shows that hit points aren't increasing resistance of meat -- they represent your skill, staying power, morale, and general 'sharpness.' The idea of someone being hacked 15 times with a sword and still being alive, never mind healing, is just about as laughable an idea as I can think of.

Take the fight between Hector and Achilles in "Troy," for example. Regardless of what you think of the movie, it's the perfect illustration that hit points are NOT wound points. By the end of the fight, Hector is exhausted, demoralized, and at a disadvantage even though he's barely taken a scratch. In short, he started out with 100 hit points (for example), and now is at 5 hit points. One more hit is going to cause physical damage and kill him, because he has no fighting energy (hit points) left to deflect/avoid it. And that's what happens.

Hector lost most of his hit points without being wounded thirty times. The only serious wound was the one that pushed him past 0 hit points and killed him.

If he'd had the chance to rest overnight, he would definitely have been fighting fit again the next day. If he'd had the chance to rest 6 hours, he would probably have been able to put up a pretty good fight again.

And we won't even consider the suspension of disbelief needed to accept a hit point concept that has a superb fighter walk away from EVERY fight with dozens of gaping wounds. If that were the case, we'd have to assume that armor is very, very weak and ineffective, and that parrying and dodging were never invented in the D&D world.

Now, I grant you falling damage. Perhaps it's best solved by having these damage sources that can't be avoided by skill deal Constitution damage rather than hit point damage ....

Edit: oh yes, and I remember a zillion threads from the old Wizards boards, pre-4e-announcement, complaining at how the then-current healing system destroyed suspension of disbelief because it was implying that hit point damage was ALL "meat damage" and not "combat readiness damage." A substantial number of vocal people loathed the concept and didn't hesitate to make that known. It looks like WotC responded.

 

[Puggins]

So do I. Having fewer HP impairs your ability to fight. It doesn't give you attack or defense penalties, but it sure makes you die more quickly.

Your description of someone dying more quickly meshes up with my definition of hit points extremely well. Clearly the problem is what we define as serious injury.

That's because you invented it. I didn't say "debilitating" (by which I'm assuming you mean "imposing combat-math penalties.") I said "injuries that take time or magic to heal." This has been modeled in every D&D until 4E.

The problem is that your definition of serious injury is extremely nebulous. You define it as "an injury that will cause the next injury to hurt even more," for all intents and purposes. That is a fine abstraction for hit points, but not for a serious injury. Is, for example, a broken nose a serious injury? It certainly is in terms of impairing your ability to fight- no one who has suffered one will tell you that your ability to hit the guy across from you remains the same- but you choose to abstract it as merely making the next injury (or the third one down the line) more serious. That's fine, but it's no more realistic than the way 4e does it.

So you'd be fine if, instead of six hours, characters completely healed in five minutes, right?

As long as the game was balanced that way, sure. Note that I wouldn't be against some form of exhaustion effect or something along those lines. I also wouldn't be against some form of long-term injury rule. But mixing it in directly with hit points is simply not a good idea in terms of suspension of disbelief- which you've amply shown.

No, I'm observing a function of the game. In every edition of D&D prior to 4E, it took time or magic to heal fully from being down heavy HP. You were seriously injured.

Only in the most abstract sense. A fighter with 2hp in 1e (they existed, unfortunately) would be on death's door when they took a 1hp wound, but they'd always heal up to their full fighting strength overnight. A second fighter with 24hp would take FOREVER to heal back to full from 1hp, which doesn't make much sense if you think hp models real, physical injury. The number of fallacies injected is pretty daunting.

 

[Skaven_13]

No edition of D&D has ever modeled serious injury (barring optional rules about coming back from negative hit points).

Actually, there were a lot of traps in AD&D that lopped off hands, fingers, feet, etc (I managed to take one of the pc's arms with one). and there were penalties associated with those injuries. 2E kept the swords of sharpness and vorpal blades, but no, you really don't see any serious injury past that.

Which brings up a point: why couldn't WOTC come up with a model to reflect the increase of wounds/fatigue/etc? Something like at 75% the pc has this penalty, at 50% another. I'm on the side of not liking healing surges, but I would be ok with them if they were used to ignore the wound/fatigue penalty and represented temporary hp defined as (whatever). So, after that burst of adrenaline, the weight of the injuries/fatigue comes rushing back.

Just my 2 cents.

Skaven13

 

[Warbringer]

Take the fight between Hector and Achilles in "Troy," for example. Regardless of what you think of the movie, it's the perfect illustration that hit points are NOT wound points. By the end of the fight, Hector is exhausted, demoralized, and at a disadvantage even though he's barely taken a scratch. In short, he started out with 100 hit points (for example), and now is at 5 hit points. One more hit is going to cause physical damage and kill him, because he has no fighting energy (hit points) left to deflect/avoid it. And that's what happens.

Best description of hit points in a fight I think I've ever read.

For me the issue with hit point has been they don't represent actual damage, yet they take forever to freaken heal. I like the idea of healing quickly after comabt, though I think its clunky in 4e (surges and all). I'll proably just keep if you leave a fight without becoming bloodied you regain all hit points back affter 5 minutes