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

Ultimately, however, the heavy focus on mechanics first, come up with something to explain it in game later ended up turning me off the system. Just not what I wanted in D&D.
Really? For me reflavoring has been an option since AD&D describe your dart throwing as rune casting (hey scribing is nimble fingers) with a staff which carries them and after the battle recapture your runes by touching where the rune impacted ... why not? Part of this is exercising imagination and part of it is game. That was what D&D has always been for me.
 

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Fair enough, perhaps I just don't care for the connection then. I can't get away from the idea that healing doesn't mean healing, and damage doesn't mean damage.

As demonstrated by the HUGE TANGENT in this topic, that particular issue has been a problem for year, and is not unique to 4e.
 


Are 4e and 5e (and 3e) hit points supposed to mean different things? Haven't they always been the same nebulous gamey thing since the very beginning? It's not like 5e dropped "martial healing" either since fighters heal themselves all the time by "shouting".

My experience, from 3e to 4e to 5e, has been that hit points are the same: context specific, and really gamey, yet easy to track, compared to more realistic injury rules in some other games.
 

Are 4e and 5e (and 3e) hit points supposed to mean different things? Haven't they always been the same nebulous gamey thing since the very beginning? It's not like 5e dropped "martial healing" either since fighters heal themselves all the time by "shouting".

My experience, from 3e to 4e to 5e, has been that hit points are the same: context specific, and really gamey, yet easy to track, compared to more realistic injury rules in some other games.
Like many things in 4e, the issue I had is that these things were made explicit, putting the "G" in "RPG" in unassailable first position. In previous editions, it was easier for me to imagine healing being healing, for example, or that player abilities meant more in the fiction than "damage and effect, rinse repeat". Obviously not everyone feels the same, and this debate was rendered moot years ago anyway.
 

Like many things in 4e, the issue I had is that these things were made explicit, putting the "G" in "RPG" in unassailable first position. In previous editions, it was easier for me to imagine healing being healing, for example, or that player abilities meant more in the fiction than "damage and effect, rinse repeat". Obviously not everyone feels the same, and this debate was rendered moot years ago anyway.

If nothing else, you're not alone in this. 4e showed that a LOT of people don't like to think of their role playing game as a game.
 

If nothing else, you're not alone in this. 4e showed that a LOT of people don't like to think of their role playing game as a game.
Yeah, creating a world and telling a story with my friends is what roleplaying is about for me, and I felt 4e's relentless push for mechanics first got in the way of that.
 

As demonstrated by the HUGE TANGENT in this topic, that particular issue has been a problem for year, and is not unique to 4e.
Sure. But 1E, 2E, and 3E have a kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge solution to the problem: You carefully explain that hit points are not just meat, and high-level characters are not made of iron, there's luck and fate and stamina involved and so on and so forth.

And then, throughout the rest of the rules, you treat hit points as if they were 100% meat, and high-level characters are made of iron. You use words like "heal" and "damage" and "wounds" everywhere. Any time someone complains about the absurdity, you point them at the place where it says hit points are not meat, and mostly they shut up.

4E's big mistake was ignoring this unspoken arrangement and thinking that players took that "hit points are not meat" section seriously.
 

Hmm. Let's look at the utility powers of some of the classes in the PHB1. The bolded ones are the ones I figure could have lots of uses for solving things out of combat.

Cleric 2: Bless, Cure Light Wounds, Divine Aid, Sanctuary, Shield of Faith
Cleric 6: Bastion of Health, Cure Serious Wounds, Divine Vigor, Holy Lantern.
Cleric 10: Astral Refuge, Knights of Unyielding Valor, Mass Cure Light Wounds, Shielding Word.
Cleric 16: Astral Shield, Cloak of Peace, Divine Armor, Hallowed Ground.
Cleric 22: Angel of the Eleven Winds, Clarion Call of the Astral Sea, Cloud Chariot, Purify, Spirit of Health.

Fighter 2: Boundless Endurance, Get Over Here, No Opening, Unstoppable.
Fighter 6: Battle Awareness, Defensive Training, Unbreakable.
Fighter 10: Into the Fray, Last Ditch Evasion, Stalwart Guard.
Fighter 16: Interposing Shield, Iron Warrior, Surprise Step.
Fighter 22: Act of Desperation, No Surrender.

Ranger 2: Crucial Advice, Unbalancing Parry, Yield Ground.
Ranger 6: Evade Ambush, Skilled Companion, Weave Through the Fray.
Ranger 10: Expeditious Stride, Open the Range, Undaunted Stride.
Ranger 16: Evade the Blow, Longstrider, Momentary Respite.
Ranger 22: Forest Ghost, Hit the Dirt, Master of the Hunt, Safe Stride

Wizard 2: Expeditious Retreat, Feather Fall, Jump, Shield.
Wizard 6: Dimension Door, Disguise Self, Dispel Magic, Invisibility, Levitate, Wall of Fog.
Wizard 10: Arcane Gate, Blur, Mirror Image, Resistance.
Wizard 16: Displacement, Fly, Greater Invisibility, Stoneskin.
Wizard 22: Mass Fly, Mordenkainen's Mansion, Time Stop

I'm not going to go through all the classes, but I think the trend is pretty clear. Sure, some utility powers are not necessarily combat-related, but most of them are (and a significant portion of those I marked are ones that let you fly or something similar, because that is amazingly useful in many situations). This may have changed in later books, but at least this was the state of the game when first released.

As for my choice of classes, I started with the first ones in the book, then decided I didn't want to do them all and figured the ranger and wizard would probably have the best chance of non-combat ones.
I mean, I literally said already that the utility powers opened up after the phb, but okay. I'm also not gonna get into quibbling over details, but...yeah, not all of those that you haven't bolded are actually specific to combat. Useful in combat doesn't mean not useful outside of it.

Regardless, this is all nit picking. 4e has a large amount of out of combat stuff for players, and spends a hefty amount of the dmg advising DMs on how to run things other than combat. If it had made social interaction and exploration and survival work like combat, that would have been extremely bad.
No one I have ever played with wants to reference turn order, action economy, and distinct character abilities, in combat. I've seen a few online folks suggest things like social HP, and I know there are games that use something like that, but every single person I know who has tried such things absolutely detested it.

Skills work well. Skill challenges work well (problems with it early on were overblown, and it just got better from there) but even they are too structured and work better if you don't worry much about the structure and just let the narrative flow and use the skill challenge rules to adjudicate how many checks are needed and what level of challenge the scene is.
 

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