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5.5/6e - Is it time for Wounds/Vitality?
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8683479" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>I had no issue with Healing Surges conceptually in 4E... I thought that they could (and did) work relatively well for what they were trying to accomplish. And the idea that they were essentially "wounds" (IE the number of Surges you had were basically the number of "wound points" you had) is an interesting idea. But my two issues I ended up finding with the system when I ran all my 4E games though were that classes had just too many Healing Surges (and thus I never once experienced any of the games I ran in 4E come close to seeing any character run out of them) and that higher level PCs had too many hit points to burn through to trigger enough Healing Surges to treat them as defacto "wounds". Since none of the PCs in my games ever risked running out of them, the idea of equating Surges as Wounds just never took hold as an idea. (Not to mention of course the naming antithesis of Healing equalling Wounds-- had they named the different parts of the system differently to fit this thought paradigm it might have gotten ahold of people easier.)</p><p></p><p>Now to be honest... part of my issue was that my own particular style of DMing only usually produces one or maybe two fights in a day. So the odds of ever coming close to killing a PC via Healing Surge expenditure was nigh impossible. For example, say we have a Fighter with 60 Hit Points and 12 Healing Surges (numbers I'm sure are not completely accurate to what it'd actually have). With each Healing Surge being 1/4 of your hit points, that means those 12 Surges grant the Fighter a potential 180 extra hit points (60 x 1/4 = 15 hp and 15 x 12 = 180) for a complete total of 240 Hit Points this Fighter has at its disposal <em>per day. </em>I could never, ever, ever do that much damage to this Fighter in a single day using normal encounter building rules-- let alone also try and damage the other five PCs in the party, all of whom also had potentially 150 to 250 total potential hit points at their disposal. For the way I ran the game... thinking of the system in that way where spending Surges was like taking Wounds just never worked. So instead, the system got treated as normal-- just "knock the PC to 0 and get them to fail 3 Death saves" and they die... with no "wound point system" in play.</p><p></p><p>Now this all being said... I think that if you were to fundamentally change the whole system in D&D to take this all into account, it could be something that would work better and be really intriguing. Give me characters whose Hit Points are only their CON score, but then have a pool of 8 to 12 "healing surges" (or whatever you name it) that get spent to heal those pools of 10 to 16 points throughout the day, and you might have something. I'd be fine trying to knock PCs down 10-16 hit points at a time to create "wounds" at 0, with "surges" then resetting their 10-16 HP for the next drop during the fight. Something like this might be more usable for more different types of tables.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 8683479, member: 7006"] I had no issue with Healing Surges conceptually in 4E... I thought that they could (and did) work relatively well for what they were trying to accomplish. And the idea that they were essentially "wounds" (IE the number of Surges you had were basically the number of "wound points" you had) is an interesting idea. But my two issues I ended up finding with the system when I ran all my 4E games though were that classes had just too many Healing Surges (and thus I never once experienced any of the games I ran in 4E come close to seeing any character run out of them) and that higher level PCs had too many hit points to burn through to trigger enough Healing Surges to treat them as defacto "wounds". Since none of the PCs in my games ever risked running out of them, the idea of equating Surges as Wounds just never took hold as an idea. (Not to mention of course the naming antithesis of Healing equalling Wounds-- had they named the different parts of the system differently to fit this thought paradigm it might have gotten ahold of people easier.) Now to be honest... part of my issue was that my own particular style of DMing only usually produces one or maybe two fights in a day. So the odds of ever coming close to killing a PC via Healing Surge expenditure was nigh impossible. For example, say we have a Fighter with 60 Hit Points and 12 Healing Surges (numbers I'm sure are not completely accurate to what it'd actually have). With each Healing Surge being 1/4 of your hit points, that means those 12 Surges grant the Fighter a potential 180 extra hit points (60 x 1/4 = 15 hp and 15 x 12 = 180) for a complete total of 240 Hit Points this Fighter has at its disposal [I]per day. [/I]I could never, ever, ever do that much damage to this Fighter in a single day using normal encounter building rules-- let alone also try and damage the other five PCs in the party, all of whom also had potentially 150 to 250 total potential hit points at their disposal. For the way I ran the game... thinking of the system in that way where spending Surges was like taking Wounds just never worked. So instead, the system got treated as normal-- just "knock the PC to 0 and get them to fail 3 Death saves" and they die... with no "wound point system" in play. Now this all being said... I think that if you were to fundamentally change the whole system in D&D to take this all into account, it could be something that would work better and be really intriguing. Give me characters whose Hit Points are only their CON score, but then have a pool of 8 to 12 "healing surges" (or whatever you name it) that get spent to heal those pools of 10 to 16 points throughout the day, and you might have something. I'd be fine trying to knock PCs down 10-16 hit points at a time to create "wounds" at 0, with "surges" then resetting their 10-16 HP for the next drop during the fight. Something like this might be more usable for more different types of tables. [/QUOTE]
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