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

[mach1.9pants]

It's the complete perfect recovery of individuals -- including those 1 HP from actual death -- in only six hours that I have a problem with.

I have no trouble with this. The reason is given by C Bean. In his example of Hector he was at about 1HP just before the fatal blow. He was bruised, had minor cuts. If Achilles had been a nice guy and had not executed the killing blow he could have been up and fighting 6 hours latter with full capacity. I am not saying in real life but it is close enough to be believable, to me. The Troy fight is an example of how a fight can go to within one stroke of death and have the weary warrior back on his feet in 6 hours. My fights in 4E will be explained like this.
I would feel that 5 minutes, with that sort of level of exhaustion etc, would not be long enough. However one could easily come up with a slightly less knackered fighter example that would make 5 minutes believable to me. I think the six hours is a nice compromise and is probably a lot to do with the designers trying to maintain some sort of resource management.

EDIT: Totally divorcing HP from major physical damage is a verisimiltude enahncer for me. I have used wound points etc before and that is more realistic but much slower. Having 'troy' fights means I can easily believe that a fighter has been hacked at 20 times by a longsword and survive. His skills are such that they have hardly touched him. However his skill can only protect him for so long...when his luck runs out and the killing blow impacts then we can talk about major physical injuries. If he recovers from his near death blow his head injury, for example, has knocked him unconcious and given him minor concussion but he'll be right after a 6 hour rest. If he dies well that head blow caused internel bleeding...

 

[hong]

I have no trouble with this. The reason is given by C Bean. In his example of Hector he was at about 1HP just before the fatal blow. He was bruised, had minor cuts.

Note that when Jeff says "1 hp from actual death", he means being at, say, -24 hp if your max is 100 hp.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Note that when Jeff says "1 hp from actual death", he means being at, say, -24 hp if your max is 100 hp.

OK, if this is true, my bad- I was thinking still concious. However I hope my edit on the post above has answered that part

 

[Grog]

So the heroes -- the PCs -- are never injured ... until they're dead. Right? If you're fighting, say, an elephant, it can take actual injury -- say, a couple of daggers hilt-deep in the ribs -- before dropping, right?

And BTW, I get that HP are something different in 4E.

No, they're not. This is the point you keep missing. 4E is no different from any other edition of D&D in this regard. In every other edition of D&D ever made, the PCs were never injured until they were dead (barring rare exceptions like Swords of Sharpness and such). That is how it has always worked. If you want serious injuries, you need to play some other game system.

 

[Sashi]

Don't forget wounding weapons in addition to swords of sharpness.

bleed xhp/round for y rounds.

 

[hunter1828]

That's what D&D 4E hit points represent. 4th Edition is a larger-than-life fantasy action movie, and every PC is as tough as John McClane.

And I think that's what bothers me most about 4e. If I want superheroes I'll play Mutants & Masterminds again. And that's nothing against John McClane, because I loved Live Free or Die Hard.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

No, they're not. This is the point you keep missing. 4E is no different from any other edition of D&D in this regard. In every other edition of D&D ever made, the PCs were never injured until they were dead (barring rare exceptions like Swords of Sharpness and such).

That's simply incorrect.

In 1E and 2E, after a tough fight (and absent healing magic) it could take weeks to be back to full strength. In 3E that was significantly shortened to days. If heroes aren't "recovering from wounds" during that time, following a fight with a dragon or whatever, what were they doing? And why was it called "healing"? And if heroes are "never injured" in earlier D&D, then how is "injury poison" introduced?

I'm not saying that earlier D&D was a great model of injury ... there are literally dozens of problems with it. But I am saying that it does at least one thing better than 4E does: it modeled long-term injury. (As far as we know, 4E simply does not care about long-term injury, not even to the extent earlier versions do. And that's weak.) Any claim otherwise is simply wrong.

I really don't understand how this doesn't bother people. I get the Hector versus Achilles fight, completely. The problem with 4E is that's the only kind of fight you can have. You are either perfectly fine in six hours -- even if you were literally a dagger-scratch from death -- or you are dead. There's nothing in the middle.

In 1E and 2E, there was "healing for quite a while or magic." In 3E, there was "healing for a few days or magic." In 4E there's "well, I'm not dead, so I'll be perfectly fine in six hours."

Can someone house-rule it? Of course. There've been several good suggestions. But the fact that something as basic to combat as "an injury that lasts longer than six hours" has to be wholesale added to the game ... that's a weakness in the game.

[EDIT: Could I have changed tenses more haphazardly in this post? I thought not. However, I was too lazy to have changed it, so now I would have been ignoring it, and will hope that everyone else has ignored it, too.]

 

[RigaMortus2]

No, they're not. This is the point you keep missing. 4E is no different from any other edition of D&D in this regard. In every other edition of D&D ever made, the PCs were never injured until they were dead (barring rare exceptions like Swords of Sharpness and such). That is how it has always worked. If you want serious injuries, you need to play some other game system.

So in 2E, when it takes a PC 2 weeks to recover all their hit points, they are simply recovering from fatigue or some other non-physically damaging condition? That is a long time to have the wind knocked out of you.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

While I've somewhat enjoyed this discussion, it looks like there's never going to be any movement between the "two camps".

We have

The group that can't suspend their disbelief that major injury could occur without effecting a person's ability to fight beyond a next-shot-will-kill-you level and therefore prefers to see hit point loss as insignificant injury, fatigue, and otherwise general attrition, and as a result accepts, or prefers, a good solid night's rest will have you back in action. Most of this group agree that one night's rest is acceptable, some would be fine with it being even less. (Personally, as a martial artist, I find it hard to fight for more than about three hours without being pretty wasted the rest of the day, though pretty recovered after a nights rest - less than six hours would really allow you to do too much in a day for my SOD.)

And we have

The group that can't suspend their disbelief that a skilled fight could occur in which you take so little injury that only six hours of rest would have you back in action, or at least prefer to have semi-serious injury occur that two to three days healing will take care of, but one night is too much for the suspension of disbelief. (In my opinion Jeff explains this better than I do.)

Both groups agree that hit points are abstract and represent many things, and that role-playing is important either way.

Anyone feel any movement at all towards at least understanding the other side, even if you don't subscribe to it?

Fitz

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Also, let's not forget that magical healing still exists, so it IS still totally possible, when you KNOW you will be able to be magically healed, to describe a more serious injury than is realistic to heal in six hours, and accept that the cleric's healing word stitched it right up.

Fitz