Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4542752" data-attributes="member: 29398">By and large, your analysis is about right; except the main difference between 4e and pre-4e is the *amount* of h.p. a very low level character has rather than how those h.p. behave or what they represent.That said, you hit the biggest problems - shared by all editions - bang on the head: the massive difference between +1 and -1 h.p., and the fact that someone who was on the brink of death a moment ago (-8) is now rarin' to go (+15 after a couple of cures/heal surges).  Completely unrealistic.There's a solution, sort of, but it does add complication: a variant of SW's wound points.  These points (we call them "body points") are something everyone has, over and above whatever ordinary hit points ("fatigue points") you get from your class etc.  Body points are rolled by race and just about everyone has between 2-5 b.p. including commoners (they just don't have any f.p., or extremely few).  When you get hurt you lose f.p. first, when you run out of those you go into b.p., and anything between 0 and your game's death point (traditionally, -10) is also considered b.p. damage. Mechanically - and here's where the complexity arises - body points and fatigue points cure differently.  A cure spell does a smaller die, with no '+' for level in 3e; 4e healing surges would work the same way.  Also, if you go  below 0 and survive, you cannot normally be cured above full b.p. until you've had some rest...how much is determined by how far below 0 you went...we call this status "incurable".For recovery times, in 1e we have roughly one full 8-hour rest period being required for each point below 0 you went to, with a bit of a J-curve making it even longer if you went below about -6.  Each cure spell dumped in to an incurable character reduces the required rest by one hour but does nothing else.  In 4e, with its hyper-fast recovery rates, maybe make it an extra extended rest required if you went below 0 with a further one required for each 5 point below you went...thus if you went to -15 you need a total of 4 extended rests to be back to full health; 3 to become curable and the 4th being the one you'd have needed anyway to get your h.p. back.Does it slow things down?  Of course.  Someone who is incurable isn't likely to want to take much risk, so the party has to decide whether to press on regardless or wait for the incurables to rest and recover.  But it adds at least a few shreds of realism and grit to the game, never a bad thing in my books.Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification