4th ed D&D does have rules for environmental hazards

[Silverblade The Ench]

I know this should probably be in the 4th ed forums, but so many folk seem not to know this!

DMG 4th ed, page 159 has rules for environmental dangers: extreme heat, cold and many other effects like smoke etc).

Extreme heat/cold, DC 26 Endurance check, checks made 1/8 hours, fail = lose 1 healing surge.
Resting in environmental hazzard areas only restores surges lost in combat, but not those lost to the environment.

Very simple, easy to deal with mechanic. Unlike 3rd ed and prior, you can't simple heal it away, as it's not just lost hit points. That issue made environmental damage a joke in 1st to 3rd ed if you could easily heal it, or too complex to track if it reduced stats.

Anyway, just to let folk know such rules exist, and that they are, IMHO, very good!
Keeps Dark Sun, or planar etc adventurers on their toes, muhaha!

 

[Remathilis]

But now the PC has to track whether he lost a healing surge to environment or combat. Unless the PCs know and remember to track those separate; there's going to be a lot confusion at the next extended rest...

 

[Destil]

Not really. I had some sessions like this earlier, where we were suffering from a disease that would take surges and we couldn't get them back without recovering on the disease track.

Since I track Hit Points, Action Points and Surges by totaling how many I loose/use/spend/ instead of how many I have, I just added a slash to separate my tally marks. When the two totals hit my max I was out for the day, and when we took an extended rest I just erased the count of normal surges spent.

 

[delericho]

DMG 4th ed, page 159 has rules for environmental dangers: extreme heat, cold and many other effects like smoke etc).

True.

Very simple, easy to deal with mechanic. Unlike 3rd ed and prior, you can't simple heal it away, as it's not just lost hit points. That issue made environmental damage a joke in 1st to 3rd ed if you could easily heal it,

Nitpick: In 3e, for a lot of the environmental conditions the damage caused could not simply be healed until such time as the condition causing the damage was removed. The example that comes to mind here is starvation damage, though there were others.