D&D General 4e Healing was the best D&D healing

[jmartkdr2]

or you could spend a HD as an option when you receive a cure spell. up to 1 HD per spell level.

so a a barbarian can heal for 1d8+mod and an extra 1d12+con mod if he wishes for 1st level cure spell.

edit: having cure spells base healing tied to HD of recipient could have issues with multiclass characters.

I can say form experience: this absolutely works, and makes healing pc's before they hit 0 hp a lot more valuable.

 

[DND_Reborn]

or you could spend a HD as an option when you receive a cure spell. up to 1 HD per spell level.

so a a barbarian can heal for 1d8+mod and an extra 1d12+con mod if he wishes for 1st level cure spell.

edit: having cure spells base healing tied to HD of recipient could have issues with multiclass characters.

No more so then when they spend different type of HD after a short rest.

I already think there is too much healing in 5E, so I wouldn't want the player to be able to spend the PC's HD in addition to the cure wounds spell. Nothing wrong with it, of course, and if I was new to a table that used it I wouldn't care that much.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It's almost as though the expenditure of HP caused them to miss you...

We know that they didn't miss. We rolled to check that. That's what the attack roll is for, and it only inflicts damage if they actually hit. An attack that misses does not cause damage, or trigger other effects of the attack (like poison), unless you're playing 4E.

Unless you want to argue that words mean the exact opposite of their actual meaning, in which case the model is entirely worthless, and there's no point in using it. I'm operating under the assumption that there actually is some underlying reality that the rules are attempting to model, so the trivial solution is not useful at all.

 

[CapnZapp]

Slow healing just matches a completely different aesthetic to modern DnD. If you have slow healing, you end up making magical healing mandatory, otherwise your character(s) get sidelined for ridiculously long period of in-game time, which means you then have to adjust your stories for that possibility.

Or, you end up avoiding combat so much that you might as well not have detailed combat rules because it's a bad idea to have it to begin with. In turn, this makes a class like the Fighter absolutely unnecessary and disposable because it's ONE thing it can do well is to be avoided at all cost... And, again, it gives magical means of overcoming obstacles a LOT of value compared to mundane heroes (which are actually the majority of fantasy heroes, btw).

A game like that s possible, but DnD just isn't that game anymore. You can lament that if you want, but it is what it is. Personally, I think it sounds boring, but I guess I'm not a 'SERIOUS ROLEPLAYER' because, quite frankly, I like a good fantasy tussle and constantly tip-toeing around encounters gets really repetitive.

sure sure... but I wasn't arguing for slow healing.

 

[CapnZapp]

I have nothing against slow natural healing though. My criticism was only with regard to that particular implementation of slow natural healing.

Ah.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The single model of hit points that is most in line with human experience, and it isn't even close is 4e's. That's because hit points in 4e work roughly the way they do during in a boxing match or a Hollywood action movie.

Who was it who said, upthread, that a boxer takes a month or more between professional fights? It wasn't me, but a boxer healing back to full overnight does not support that reality.

So you freely admit that the climbing is just as capable at 1hp as at full hp. It's simply that when rocks fall they are more likely to die. They've the same success chance and would get equally far on a climbing wall; the climbing skill they have is no different.

If you die, then you fail to climb the wall. Moreover, if you're beaten within an inch of your life and likely to die by climbing that wall, then you're unlikely to make the attempt in the first place; and wasting page space on rules that aren't going to come up would be horribly inefficient. Likewise, we don't need rules for what happens when a fighter gets hit while they aren't wearing armor, because that's outside the context of the basic game assumptions.

And somehow a magical world having people who recover fast is more immersion breaking?

Role-playing as Legolas or Gimli is one thing. We have decades of understanding in what that entails. We know what we're getting into when we sign up for it.

Nobody needs or wants an entire world where elves and dwarves also regenerate like Wolverine. That's beyond the scope of the genre.

 

[CapnZapp]

or you could spend a HD as an option when you receive a cure spell.

Yikes - surges all over again

(There's a big BIG BIG difference between suggesting a heal spell heals d6 to a Wizard and d12 to a Barbarian... and suggesting a heal spell lets either spend one of their hit dice)

 

[Neonchameleon]

Who was it who said, upthread, that a boxer takes a month or more between professional fights? It wasn't me, but a boxer healing back to full overnight does not support that reality.

4e combat hit points are similar to those of a boxing match complete with recovery while not healing the damage between rounds - or Hollywood Physics where weapons aren't actually deadly for our heroes except under strange circumstances. AD&D combat hit points are an old school video game that isn't even making the vaguest pretense at realism.

The 4e recovery model is that of Hollywood Physics. The AD&D recovery model resembles exhaustion if it resembles anything - but some weird sort of exhaustion which doesn't actually exhaust someone. It certainly doesn't resemble real world harm because it doesn't inflict any either reduction in capability or lasting harm.

Nothing in either 4e or AD&D remotely resembles anything approaching an actual real world injury. 4e is however the most thematically consistent of any D&D and isn't even pretending to use real world physics.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

4e is however the most thematically consistent of any D&D and isn't even pretending to use real world physics.

And that's the problem. Older editions, where they are pretending to model something, can be salvaged as such. The 4E rules are beyond hope, because they aren't even pretending to model anything.

 

[Fanaelialae]

We know that they didn't miss. We rolled to check that. That's what the attack roll is for, and it only inflicts damage if they actually hit. An attack that misses does not cause damage, or trigger other effects of the attack (like poison), unless you're playing 4E.

Unless you want to argue that words mean the exact opposite of their actual meaning, in which case the model is entirely worthless, and there's no point in using it. I'm operating under the assumption that there actually is some underlying reality that the rules are attempting to model, so the trivial solution is not useful at all.

IMO, the attack roll indicates what will happen outside of intervening circumstances.

An attack against someone with 1 hp will render them unconscious under normal circumstances.

However, a hit against someone with 100 hp cannot normally knock them unconscious unless it deals at least 100 damage.

A hit that carries an effect should make sufficient contact to deliver it. However, it doesn't make any reasonable sense that every attack that hits a high HP character deals a scratch (or bruise).

Otherwise, you'd have two high level fighters who face off against each other scratching each other to death with their swords. It becomes even more absurd if one has a maul and the other a greataxe. Even a glancing blow from such weapons is potentially serious. On the other end of the spectrum, if they are both using daggers, it becomes the death of a thousand cuts.

Hence, I think that most of the time a basic hit is most reasonably described as an attack that would have struck true had the character not twisted aside at the last moment (or utilized a similar evasive maneuver), which is mechanically represented by the loss of hp. It's an attack that would have hit had they been facing a less experienced opponent. Whereas a miss doesn't even come close to penetrating the target's defenses, and therefore would never be a serious threat to this target.