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

[glass]

So what are you doing in 1E and 2E for the weeks that you're "healing" (game rules term) up to full HP? If you aren't healing from injury, what exactly is it you were doing?

In 3E, what are you doing when you're waiting for days while "healing" (again, game rules term) up to full HP? If you aren't healing an injury, what exactly's going on?

That is a very good question. I don't really have an answer for it.

It is also an interesting question, because it highlights a verisimilitude problem of previous editions -one that 4e fixes.


glass.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So what are you doing in 1E and 2E for the weeks that you're "healing" (game rules term) up to full HP? If you aren't healing from injury, what exactly is it you were doing?

In 3E, what are you doing when you're waiting for days while "healing" (again, game rules term) up to full HP? If you aren't healing an injury, what exactly's going on?

Ever had that year of work that was just WAY too stressful? You know when you decided you needed at LEAST a week of rest before you were willing to go back to that again? Just imagine if your job was killing creatures who were 3 times your size and could turn you to stone.

I'd rest for a week after every adventure as well.

But, seriously. It has ALWAYS been a MIX of wounds, luck, skill, divine intervention, fate, morale, and badassness. If you took 6 hitpoints of damage, it might have been that you narrowly avoided the blow, that it just nicked you, that it knocked you over and you got bruised in the process but it didn't get through your armor, that your god deflected the blow at the last second, and so on. Regardless of what the in character reason was, the game result was that you lost 6 hitpoints and needed some time to get them back(which varies in time depending on the edition).

During the rest time you might have been healing back the large cut in your leg or you might have been sleeping all day and trying to forget the harrowing experience, it might be you drinking ale, carousing and telling stories about your greatness so you could feel better about yourself again.

The whole point of an abstraction is that it is abstract. If you define the details of it, then it is no longer an abstraction.

D&D works in abstractions to avoid needing detailed rules for everything.

If HP are wounds then you run into a problem with realism where PCs can survive being stabbed 20 times with a sword and not dying. Also, you can recover from being on your death bed in just a day or two and go back to adventuring when in real life it might take years of physical therapy before you'd be able to even walk again. Plus, wouldn't it be hard to swing a sword effectively if you are in that much pain with a big gash across your arm?

If HPs are not wounds at all then you run into problems like "What happens when you fall 50 feet? Do you miss the ground?" and "How can you go from perfect health to dead due to the goblin with the dagger who rolled a 1 on damage?"

On the other hand, if you combine ALL the reasons into one and simply NEVER answer the question of "what are hitpoints anyways?" you get a mechanic that works really well for a fantasy adventure role playing game. It is a rule that is easy to keep track of, easy to learn, and seems to simulate what we as players want it to fairly well. Plus, it answers ALL of the questions at least half decently.

 

[Puggins]

More or less agreed. But it's there. It's basically a "rule" in writing a script that if you injure a character, you continue to have the injury affect him, or you explain how and why it doesn't. I just want the same thing from the D&D rules. In a game so heavily based on combat, that seems inarguably reasonable to me.

I agree with you, but there is a fundamental problem that pretty much precludes it in RPGs- in a script, a long term injury can be manipulated into oblivion in terms of fulfilling the plot- the hero breaks his foot in the ultimate encounter, but remembers the venerable "crane on a dock pole" technique and slams the guy with his OTHER foot.

In D&D, though, there is no script, no Deus Ex Machina that would rescue our heroes (without usually ruining the game, that is). If our cleric-less party gets beaten to within a hair's breadth of its life and needs to rest three days to recover, then that princess that will be executed in 12 hours is out of luck.

I know that there should be consequences of not having a healer in the party in 3.5e, and I know that time-critical missions are hard to pull off in 3.5e. I'm willing to abstract away "serious injuries" (which, let's be honest, aren't so real-life serious if they just need a couple of days under a physician's care to go away) for those tropes to be available to me as a DM. I want Conan to work in D&D. He hasn't before, but I have some hope that 4e will change that. I think the recuperation time is a trivial price to pay. And I say that recognizing that it isn't so trivial for you. Fortunately, this appears to be fairly easy to house rule.

Out of curiosity, do you think there will be rules for (non-supernatural) disease? Do you think there should be?

I for one hope there will be rules for them.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

But he was cured by a horse

If it was a cleric horse, then there's no problem, right?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

The whole point of an abstraction is that it is abstract. If you define the details of it, then it is no longer an abstraction.

I can't believe it took this long for someone to point this out.

If we're going to accept that hit points are abstract, the problem with them isn't that it takes this long or that long to get them back, or that you can cure them instantly with magic, or that there's no debilitating effects that come with low HP. The problem is that people keep trying to figure out what HP represent, in a concrete fashion, which is a stance that is incommensurable with the notion that HP are abstract.

 

[glass]

Actually, it is true. There is a misrepresentation going on by the people on your side of the argument.

The only misrepresentation is on yours and Jeff's side.

You keep stating that previous editions represented serious injuries with the hp system. It just isn't true. Injuries that do not inhibit you in any way are not serious, they are superficial. Conditions that require two days in bed are not a serious injury, they are a head cold.

They always did, even in 3E. Cure Light Wounds is called that for a reason and that reason has not changed since 1E.

Yes, and that reason is called 'tradition'. The spell was named before anyone gave any real though to how hp really worked, and the name stuck.


glass.

 

[KarinsDad]

The only misrepresentation is on yours and Jeff's side.

You keep stating that previous editions represented serious injuries with the hp system. It just isn't true. Injuries that do not inhibit you in any way are not serious, they are superficial. Conditions that require two days in bed are not a serious injury, they are a head cold.

I never said it represented serious injury. I said it represented injury and damage. Talk about misrepresenting.

Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one.

...

Providing long-term care means treating a wounded person for a day or more.

...

Massive Damage
If you ever sustain a single attack deals 50 points of damage or more and it doesn’t kill you outright, you must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If this saving throw fails, you die regardless of your current hit points.

My only point is that 4E regards hit point wounds as mostly superficial unless they bloody you, knock you unconscous or kill you. They are almost totally superficial with regard to one combat to the next or one day to the next. They are mostly a per encounter resource.

In previous editions, hit points represented two things: damage and turning damage into lesser damage. The concept that they were mostly superficial except in a few special cases like with 4E was not a part of the previous editions. Without magic, it took a longer time to recover from one's wounds in previous editions because they were considered actual injuries. They were more of a per dungeon (or per adventure) type of resource.

Now, if you want to argue this point, fine. Quote some rules (as opposed to misrepresenting what I am stating).

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

In previous editions, hit points represented two things: damage and turning damage into lesser damage. The concept that they were mostly superficial except in a few special cases like with 4E was not a part of the previous editions. Without magic, it took a longer time to recover from one's wounds in previous editions because they were considered actual injuries. They were more of a per dungeon (or per adventure) type of resource.

Now, if you want to argue this point, fine. Quote some rules (as opposed to misrepresenting what I am stating).

Yes, I will argue this point. Because if this was what the previous rules were really modeling (and yes, I agree that this was implied), then they both did a lousy job of what they were supposed to be doing, and were so illogical and, IMO, stupid, that you can't even talk about suspending disbelief. More like hanging it by the neck until dead and then leaving it for the crows.

Stating that hit points indicate increased meat resistance is infinitely more unbelievable (I'm not getting into that verisimilitude stuff, it's too clumsy -- what the heck am I supposed to say, "unverisimilitudinous"? Mary Poppins lives....), than saying that they represent combat readiness and can be recovered between fights.

If you accept hit points as wound points, then you have to also accept that, 1. nearly every hit causes physical damage, which is absolutely absurd, 2. that a character with 50 near-mortal wounds can function at full capacity, because previous-edition hit point damage has NO PRACTICAL EFFECT WHATSOEVER, except making it easier to kill you in the future, so it doesn't "model" injury any better than 4th edition does, it just makes Hit Points into something so dumb that you wince when you think about them, and 3. that fatigue and combat advantage/disadvantage doesn't exist.

I happen to think that no edition of D&D models wounds at all, in any realistic sense.

I also happen to prefer the idea that hit points represent "combat readiness," which is eroded by combat, rather than adding the complexity of calculating fatigue, opponents getting advantage, and specific defensive maneuvers which you'd have to put in if you were to replace it with a more detailed divide between "combat readiness" and "hit points." You would need two systems in place -- an active defensive mechanic which would be whittled away by fatigue and loss of morale, and a wound mechanic that would trace the precise consequences of hits that passed the defensive mechanic.

That would be a lot of frustrating complexity for very little reward.

I will agree that I would prefer a wounding system under 0 hit points, rather than '3 strikes and you're dead,' but them's the breaks, and it's a very minor point, IMO.

I believe that having hit points represent "combat readiness" rather than "meat resistance" is more interesting, satisfying, and intuitive idea, and increases suspension of disbelief, and verisimilitude. I'd put in the Hector & Achilles thing again, but I've already typed it once and I'm getting sick of reiterating it, even though it illustrates the modeling of "hit points as combat readiness" very clearly and succinctly.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

I never said it represented serious injury. I said it represented injury and damage. Talk about misrepresenting.

No, it is not misrepresenting.

Don't change your argument after its logical flaws have been pointed out.

You have directly implied that the injuries represented by hit points in previous editions are serious, because you speak of them requiring weeks or months to recover from. I've never seen scrapes and grazes that took that long to heal, and I've gotten my share of cuts, including one in the flesh of my knee from a chainsaw. If they're minor injuries, they're going to be healed enough to function as normal in a day or two at most, not after weeks or months of complete bed-rest.

 

[AZRogue]

I feel badly for those who don't like the blow to verisimilitude that SEEMS to have taken place. It isn't a problem at my table, really, as the "Die Hard/cinematic" explanation was acceptable without anyone blinking an eye. I think they only care what happens in encounters and everything else they do just to throw ME a bone (they draw the line at speaking "in character" though, and will revolt instantly if asked).

I hope you guys can find either an explanation for yourselves that serves or that there's something we haven't seen in the books that will satisfy.