D&D 4E Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting

[Voadam]

Ideally, a gunslinger would have much more then that, making the similar base a non problem.

So you are suggesting 4e would have less cognitive gap if the cleric power was called inspiring word instead of healing word and given the sample narrative description of the warlord's inspiring word so that the two were default narratively consistent instead of being more narratively tied to the different class/power source concepts?

"You call out to a wounded ally and offer inspiring words of courage and determination that helps that ally heal." instead of
"You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds."

I don't think it would work quite as well narratively in reverse because of the divine light and tying into prayer aspects which would not work as well for a warlord narrative.

 

[Shardstone]

So you think 4e would be better if the cleric power was called inspiring word instead of healing word and given the sample narrative description of the warlord's inspiring word so that the two were default narratively consistent instead of being more narratively tied to the different class/power source concepts?

"You call out to a wounded ally and offer inspiring words of courage and determination that helps that ally heal." instead of
"You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds."

No, I don't think that. I dont think the mechanic should have been repeated at all. Warlord as temp hp and cleric as real hp is the mechanical difference i prefer. Warlord would progress into lowering cooldowns while clerics get more vivid and fantastical heals.

 

[Voadam]

No, I don't think that. I dont think the mechanic should have been repeated at all. Warlord as temp hp and cleric as real hp is the mechanical difference i prefer. Warlord would progress into lowering cooldowns while clerics get more vivid and fantastical heals.

I edited my question slightly for a different emphasis.

This seems a different objection entirely though than the two classes having the same mechanical power (the way cure light wounds worked for clerics, druids, and bards in 3e, or your hypothetical flamebolt example) but different names.

 

[Voadam]

So you are suggesting 4e would have less cognitive gap if the cleric power was called inspiring word instead of healing word and given the sample narrative description of the warlord's inspiring word so that the two were default narratively consistent instead of being more narratively tied to the different class/power source concepts?

"You call out to a wounded ally and offer inspiring words of courage and determination that helps that ally heal." instead of
"You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds."

I don't think it would work quite as well narratively in reverse because of the divine light and tying into prayer aspects which would not work as well for a warlord narrative.

Following up on this, I could see that working for clerics and bards. Inspiring to rally either by faith or fanatic fervor for clerics or heroic inspiring speeches for a bard. I am not really that familiar with the other 4e leader classes.

It would change the flavor of some of their healing from prayer and magic to inspiration, but it works with the default flavor of the classes fairly well. They would also still have the prayer and magic healing from specific powers that are unique to the classes.

 

[Neonchameleon]

See, the thing about connecting the gap between the mechanics and what they represent is that this bridging isn't done in isolation. It's being done in pursuit of a larger goal: to contextualize an entire fictional world, one which is meant to be expansive and persistent over multiple courses of play (even if it can be used for smaller, or even single, such instances). To that end, bridging the gap means not only tying the operations of the game mechanics to the in-character actions they represent, but to do so in terms of a larger, cohesive whole.

Which brings us back to the two powers cited above. Both have the same mechanic, which is that the target gets to spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. But the in-character representation for this, the same operation, is two very different things: one involves healing physical injury, whereas the other involves "courage and determination" rather than closing wounds (with a reference to healing that's also hard to contextualize with the rest of the sentence).

If hit point loss can represent entirely different things then I see no reason why hit point recovery can't. If a sword thrust, many poisons, fireball, and a psychic attack like phantasmal killer all take away hit points despite doing different things I have no problem with there being many ways of getting them back. In addition it's entirely clear under the pre-4e model that hit points aren't real injury; they do not have any effect as long as you have a single hit point left. There's no exhaustion component and no debilitation component.

Finally you completely missed the important thematic part of the mechanics. Spends a recovery. Healing Word does not provide the healing energy, it enables the target to dig deep and use their own resources. Inspiration, both in fiction and real life, can cause people to dig deep into their own resources. It also can in 4e (but not really other D&Ds). Meanwhile there is magical healing in 4e; Cure Wounds actually provides the resources for the target to heal without spending a surge. Healing Word doesn't.

One game mechanic, i.e. hit point restoration, is now being contextualized as two different things.

It always was multiple separate things. Because bodies are complex. 4e simply much better reflects the way the real world works and the way fantasy fiction does than "sword thrusts, fireballs, and Phantasmal Killers all do the same thing and are all healed by the same type of magic but none of them ever impede the target unless they are reduced to 0hp".

Faced with two different explanations, the question of what that mechanic represents from an in-game standpoint becomes murky, with different explanations being offered, meaning that they have to be reconciled if the different interpretations come to clash in the course of play. (For example, if you only have 2 hit points left after being dealt an injury, recover 7 hit points of "courage and resilience," and then take 5 hit points of injury, you have 4 hit points left, but you've lost all of the hit points that were previously tagged as being contextualized as wounds, so how are you still alive?)

So either Cure Wounds is a universal cure despite being a first level spell in your world or psychic damage, surface burns, and sword thrusts don't have interactions. And you are actively and directly ignoring the 4e mechanics to create this example.

In 4e you don't have one hit point track but two. You have hit points and healing surges. Your hit points are effectively a stun and shock track, while your healing surges are your resilience. And, more importantly, you do not die at 0hp so asking "how are you still alive?" is simply a strawman question.

What is happening in 4e with the use of either Inspiring Word or Healing Word you are not significantly less injured. What you are is less stunned or shocked. But you have still taken the injury because your healing surges are down. If you want to actually cure the injury rather than just be able to handle it then you need to

And just like that, we've the cognitive gap has widened.

I mean sure. The cognitive gap has widened because (a) you created a strawman of dying at 0hp and (b) you ignored the actual mechanics, pretending healing surges are not a thing that is written on the character sheet and that have been depleted. If you want "true" healing you need to either replace the healing surges or to recover the hit points without spending surges the way the Cure Wounds or the Paladin's Lay on Hands (or whatever it is called) does.

There are therefore three fundamental problems here.

1. That 4e doesn't clearly explain the role of Healing Surges in endurance and recovery
2. That you come up with strawmen and ignore the actual mechanics
3. That more than 15 years after the launch of 4e you are still coming up with the same hoary old misrepresentations.

The problem here is that, outside of one or two other places (i.e. the AD&D PHB p. 34) where Gygax makes the same claim, he never actually makes this point in the game's actual mechanics. Insofar as the actual operations of the rules go, there are simply no instances of the "hit points are a lot of different things" idea to be found.

Indeed. There are simply just about no instances of "hit points other than the last are injury" in the entire rules. Hit points are as ephemeral and consequence free as a video game health bar and their only effect is to say "how long until this character falls over?" There is just about no time in any version of D&D save 4e at which loss of any except the last hit point can be seen to be significantly more debilitating than a papercut.

Take, for instance, the basic clerical healing spell, which is named cure light wounds (AD&D 1E PHB, p. 43). Even if we overlook the name itself (which we shouldn't, as the name is also part of what the game is telling us about the mechanics in-character presentation), it says (emphasis mine):

And this does not get supported by the mechanics. There have been almost no "normal injuries" because normal injuries hurt and impede people. What we're dealing here is fluff that's largely disconnected from the mechanics. Either you're fine or you're at or below 0hp. Or you've taken effects that Cure Wounds won't solve such as stat penalties.

It's not that there's no "cognitive gap" here. It's simply that you don't look at it. 4e has less of one - but by actually having a more consistent and more coherent model 4e forced you to look at it.

If that last one sounds like a further repudiation of hit point loss being injury, read it again. Gygax says it's not an injury "at least in proportion" to the damage taken, which essentially grants the idea that the damage is being taken...it's just not "proportional" and so might be a "mere scratch."

A "mere scratch" is all it can be unless the character has been reduced to 0hp. D&D characters get hurt like action movie characters. There are death scenes. There is being taken out of the fight. And there's cosmetic scratches.

That's actually rather important, because it reminds us that the bridging the cognitive gap is essentially an order of operations wherein we take what the game's rules are and build upon them until we've reached the desired level of in-character presentation. For instance, using the method described in the actual AD&D 1E game rules (as opposed to the Gygax's mini-essays), a player bridging the gap would go through some variation of the following cognitive process:

1. Determine hit points regained
2. Contextualize this with injuries taken when hit points were lost.

In 4E, which made the mechanics of losing/regaining hit points explicitly acknowledge multiple ideas, there's an extra step added in this process:

1. Determine hit points regained
2. Determine if this means injuries were healed or courage/resilience is restored.
3. Contextualize this with how injuries were taken and/or how courage/resilience was lost when hit points were lost.

In other words, there's not only an extra step that needs to be taken to bridge the gap, but what needs to be contextualized now has its own and/or process that can be fouled up, requiring greater work on the player's part to keep straight.

Once more you are pretending that Healing Surges do not exist. 4e characters dig deep to overcome shock. Meanwhile characters in other D&Ds prance around with no effects. If you have lost Healing Surges you are not fully healed. You are just fighting fit even if you are still bandaged up.

As noted before, different people have different degrees to which they're fine bridging (or simply ignoring) a particular gap. But when you change one or more gaps for an established game, you run into issues of confounded expectations.

Indeed. And even when it has dealt with it you still get a cadre of people who, even fifteen years after launch, selectively ignore the mechanics that provide the solutions to their "problems" and then are surprised that when they ignore the mechanics they have problems understanding what is going on.

For whatever reason, few things upset fans more than having their expectations betrayed, and for a lot of people 4E's shifting of where the bridges over its cognitive gaps needed to be built was quite a few bridges too far.

Clearly. And more than fifteen years after launch there are still upset fans, edition warring about their selective readings when their entire point is that they haven't actually understood the rules.

The hit point issue is just one example in that regard, but remains a central one, as it's still being talked about all these years later.

And that it is only shows exactly how unwilling to read the rules and how willing to make strawmen people are.

Now if you'd come up with a critique of the idea of Healing Surges I'd have more sympathy - but your entire critique here rests on the foundation of ignoring core 4e recovery mechanics. And that you have to ignore core 4e recovery mechanics after fifteen years shows that the problem is not so much with the rules but a mix of the presentation and how intransigent some of the players are.

 

[Alzrius]

If hit point loss can represent entirely different things then I see no reason why hit point recovery can't. If a sword thrust, many poisons, fireball, and a psychic attack like phantasmal killer all take away hit points despite doing different things I have no problem with there being many ways of getting them back. In addition it's entirely clear under the pre-4e model that hit points aren't real injury; they do not have any effect as long as you have a single hit point left. There's no exhaustion component and no debilitation component.

You've overlooked that hit point loss doesn't represent entirely different things, or at least that it didn't before 4E tried to integrate different things into the same operation. Prior to that edition, all of the game rules indicated that hit point loss was a single thing: physical injury. Now, it doesn't account for the type of physical injury, to be sure, but whether it's a sword thrust, a fireball, a poison (where that deals hit point damage at all instead of instant death), or a psychic attack (see the note in the OP about damage from psionics in AD&D 1E), etc.

As for the idea that "they aren't real injury because there's no concomitant loss of personal capability," that's an appeal to realism that the game has never supported. D&D isn't a reality simulator, and never was. Your character is understood to take an incredible amount of damage and keep going because they're a John Rambo type of hero, the sort you often see in myths and legends, pulp fiction, and action movies/shows. While you can absolutely describe them as being injured, the important thing to note is that they take a licking and keep on ticking.

Finally you completely missed the important thematic part of the mechanics. Spends a recovery. Healing Word does not provide the healing energy, it enables the target to dig deep and use their own resources. Inspiration, both in fiction and real life, can cause people to dig deep into their own resources. It also can in 4e (but not really other D&Ds). Meanwhile there is magical healing in 4e; Cure Wounds actually provides the resources for the target to heal without spending a surge. Healing Word doesn't.

Which indicates that those two operations are very, very different in the in-character effect that they produce, despite using the same mechanic. In other words, that they widen the cognitive gap, which is a dramatic departure from how D&D used to handle that particular operation. Hence how you can have someone repeatedly take "injury hp loss" and not die, even though they're only receiving "inspiration hp recovery" to restore their hit points. D&D characters are supposed to be able to keep going even in the face of terrible wounds, but they're not supposed to stay alive regardless of how hurt they are so long as they feel good about themselves.

It always was multiple separate things. Because bodies are complex. 4e simply much better reflects the way the real world works and the way fantasy fiction does than "sword thrusts, fireballs, and Phantasmal Killers all do the same thing and are all healed by the same type of magic but none of them ever impede the target unless they are reduced to 0hp".

Different types of physical injury are not "multiple separate things," because they all fall under the umbrella of "physical damage," with the game mechanics making no real distinction between the types of injury dealt (at least for the purposes of hit points lost/regained). 4E is much worse in that regard, because it makes hit points be "physical damage" or "demoralization," widening the cognitive gap and requiring you to figure out if an injury has even been dealt in the first place, something you knew had happened in previous editions.

So either Cure Wounds is a universal cure despite being a first level spell in your world or psychic damage, surface burns, and sword thrusts don't have interactions. And you are actively and directly ignoring the 4e mechanics to create this example.

What exactly is the problem with cure wounds being a universal cure? Is there some rule somewhere that says that a 1st-level spell can only heal certain types of physical injury? Because if that's the case in your world, your world is a dramatic departure from how D&D has always functioned. And as you can see below, nothing was ignored: this simply calls a spade a spade, something 4E wasn't willing to do.

In 4e you don't have one hit point track but two. You have hit points and healing surges. Your hit points are effectively a stun and shock track, while your healing surges are your resilience. And, more importantly, you do not die at 0hp so asking "how are you still alive?" is simply a strawman question.

Except we've already established that "spending a healing surge" is something the target of a Healing Word and an Inspiring Word can do, even though those represent two different things from an in-character standpoint (i.e. curative magic and an increase in personal resilience due to having encouraging things shouted at you). That's 4E's deciding to make two different things be represented by the same operation, so the differences that you're drawing here simply aren't reflected in the game rules. (Likewise for saying "but you don't die at 0 hit points!" since at that point the rules say that you're dying, which just means that you're about to die unless you make a death save, and if you have no healing surges left then you can't recover, which is a massive cognitive gap to bridge.)

What is happening in 4e with the use of either Inspiring Word or Healing Word you are not significantly less injured. What you are is less stunned or shocked. But you have still taken the injury because your healing surges are down. If you want to actually cure the injury rather than just be able to handle it then you need to

Need to...what? Because you seem to be saying that healing surges represent one condition track (i.e. personal stamina) while hit points represent another (i.e. physical injury), which would almost be a plausible take on things if only 4E didn't have them working identically (i.e. the same operation) despite being described in vastly different terms.

I mean sure. The cognitive gap has widened because (a) you created a strawman of dying at 0hp and (b) you ignored the actual mechanics, pretending healing surges are not a thing that is written on the character sheet and that have been depleted. If you want "true" healing you need to either replace the healing surges or to recover the hit points without spending surges the way the Cure Wounds or the Paladin's Lay on Hands (or whatever it is called) does.

"A strawman of dying at 0 hp" doesn't contrast with the game saying "When your hit points drop to 0 or fewer, you fall unconscious and are dying." (4E PHB p. 295) Likewise, you've ignored the actual mechanics by assigning healing surges to operate as exclusively one condition track when the game rules themselves don't do any such thing. Now, that's certainly a credible attempt to fix things on your part, but you can't fix things without admitting that they need to be fixed in the first place. Bridging the cognitive gap means that you still have to build a bridge. Talking about Cure Wounds and Lay on Hands doesn't address the fact that Inspiring Word and Healing Word use the same operation to represent wildly different things.

There are therefore three fundamental problems here.

1. That 4e doesn't clearly explain the role of Healing Surges in endurance and recovery
2. That you come up with strawmen and ignore the actual mechanics
3. That more than 15 years after the launch of 4e you are still coming up with the same hoary old misrepresentations.

I'll do you a solid and correct your mistakes here:

1. 4E widens the cognitive gap by having hit point loss and recovery be physical injury and a loss of stamina.
2. You pretend that healing surges represent one of those things exclusively, leaving hit points to represent the other.
3. In fact, the game doesn't say this, but explicitly says the opposite.

Indeed. There are simply just about no instances of "hit points other than the last are injury" in the entire rules. Hit points are as ephemeral and consequence free as a video game health bar and their only effect is to say "how long until this character falls over?" There is just about no time in any version of D&D save 4e at which loss of any except the last hit point can be seen to be significantly more debilitating than a papercut.

I've seen this idea – that there's no representative (i.e. in-character) aspect of the game's operations whatsoever – and quite frankly I've always found it baffling. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that idea, but it seems to ignore one of the main strengths of a role-playing game, and adopting a lot of extra work for yourself for no extra benefit (beyond simply ignoring the representations that you don't like or don't agree with).

And this does not get supported by the mechanics. There have been almost no "normal injuries" because normal injuries hurt and impede people. What we're dealing here is fluff that's largely disconnected from the mechanics. Either you're fine or you're at or below 0hp. Or you've taken effects that Cure Wounds won't solve such as stat penalties.

See above. This is an appeal to realism; if your proof of hit point loss not being injury rests on the idea that there should be penalties to personal ability due to wounds taken, then D&D has never been your game, because Big Damn Heroes don't slow down just because they're injured.

It's not that there's no "cognitive gap" here. It's simply that you don't look at it. 4e has less of one - but by actually having a more consistent and more coherent model 4e forced you to look at it.

You're tragically misguided, here. The cognitive gap is the difference between what the game tells you about what's happening in-character, and what you have to fill in yourself (i.e. where the representation stops). In that regard, 4E has even more of one, because it can't decide what hit point loss/recovery actually means!

A "mere scratch" is all it can be unless the character has been reduced to 0hp. D&D characters get hurt like action movie characters. There are death scenes. There is being taken out of the fight. And there's cosmetic scratches.

Are you saying that action movie characters don't take terrible injuries and keep going with no loss of prowess? Because earlier in your post, you were saying that hit points can't be injuries for that very reason.

Once more you are pretending that Healing Surges do not exist. 4e characters dig deep to overcome shock. Meanwhile characters in other D&Ds prance around with no effects. If you have lost Healing Surges you are not fully healed. You are just fighting fit even if you are still bandaged up.

And here, you're pretending that 4E assigns a single representation to healing surges, relieving hit points of that particular burden. This despite having two actions (Healing Word and Inspiring Word) that do the same thing, yet are said to be two different actions from an in-game standpoint. Unless you think Healing World's "helping them heal" clause means that they're spontaneously closing lacerations and regenerating burns, that's not really something you can just handwave away.

Indeed. And even when it has dealt with it you still get a cadre of people who, even fifteen years after launch, selectively ignore the mechanics that provide the solutions to their "problems" and then are surprised that when they ignore the mechanics they have problems understanding what is going on.

Saying that "you're not dying at 0 hit points" when the game rules say you are, and saying that healing surges represent something specific when two different mechanics have them representing different things, tell us exactly who's ignoring what 4E says.

Clearly. And more than fifteen years after launch there are still upset fans, edition warring about their selective readings when their entire point is that they haven't actually understood the rules.

See above. I think you might want to double-check what the 4E rules say.

And that it is only shows exactly how unwilling to read the rules and how willing to make strawmen people are.

You're right, but not in the way you think you are.

Now if you'd come up with a critique of the idea of Healing Surges I'd have more sympathy - but your entire critique here rests on the foundation of ignoring core 4e recovery mechanics. And that you have to ignore core 4e recovery mechanics after fifteen years shows that the problem is not so much with the rules but a mix of the presentation and how intransigent some of the players are.

Again, Healing Word has the target magically recovering, despite them spending a healing surge of their own. Inspiring Word just inspires them to get up and keep moving, despite them spending a healing surge of their own (unless, again, you want the "helping them to heal" clause meaning they're experiencing bursts of regeneration). Ignoring that means that you're ignoring the nature of hit point recovery in 4E, which says quite a lot about how intransigent some of its fans are, refusing to look at the cognitive gap even after fifteen years.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You've overlooked that hit point loss doesn't represent entirely different things, or at least that it didn't before 4E tried to integrate different things into the same operation.

And you've overlooked that hit point loss does not and never has represented injury. What it represents is a mix of endurance, luck, and cosmetic damage before which you take an actual injury more debilitating than a paper cut. Actual injuries have never been a consequence of hit point loss. You can't break your arm or lose a hand with hit point loss and no amount of castings of cure wounds will fix that. There is a spell that will cause actual meaningful injuries to be healed in at least 3.X and 2e but it's not Cure Light Wounds. It's regenerate.

And even if injuries worked the way you said, it wouldn't be relevant. Because what is relevant is that the cognitive gap is entirely about whether people can be bothered to learn and engage with the rules or not. Engage with the 4e rules and your argument as shown vanishes in a puff of smoke. It only exists in the minds of people who don't think that separate rules sets can work different ways.

As for the idea that "they aren't real injury because there's no concomitant loss of personal capability," that's an appeal to realism that the game has never supported. D&D isn't a reality simulator, and never was. Your character is understood to take an incredible amount of damage and keep going because they're a John Rambo type of hero, the sort you often see in myths and legends, pulp fiction, and action movies/shows. While you can absolutely describe them as being injured, the important thing to note is that they take a licking and keep on ticking.

So what they haven't done in D&D cases is taken an injury more debilitating than a paper cut is to a normal person. It's almost entirely cosmetic.

Of course 4e better reflects these characters this way. Characters can go down, bandage themselves up, dig deep, and keep going. This is because 4e, by splitting short term resilience and endurance better models this type of fiction. 4e therefore narrows the cognitive gap by including the ability for people to go down within the scene, being under serious threat, but being able to keep going afterwards using their own resources. Which is what e.g. Rambo does. He recovers from rest and from bandaging, not just from magic. But the injuries are still there even if he's recovered.

Hence how you can have someone repeatedly take "injury hp loss" and not die, even though they're only receiving "inspiration hp recovery" to restore their hit points. D&D characters are supposed to be able to keep going even in the face of terrible wounds, but they're not supposed to stay alive regardless of how hurt they are so long as they feel good about themselves.

Once again you are simply demonstrating that the cognitive gap is in your head and caused by your inability to understand 4e rules even after fifteen years. Inspiration doesn't provide the energy, it encourages the target to dig deep into their own resources.

In 4e the main effect of Inspiring Word is that it allows the recipient to spend one of their own healing surges. If you don't have a recovery to spend then you can't spend it. As you yourself quoted in your OP

Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. ​

But if you have no healing surges left you can't spend one. So it's not "a character stays alive as long as they feel good about themselves", it's a character with sufficient inspiration can keep going until they are completely exhausted (as measured by their running out of Healing Surges). But when they are out they are out.

At that point they have run out of endurance and need something magic. Whether something like Cure Wounds (which causes the target to recover as if they had spent a healing surge but the energy is provided by the spell) or Lay On Hands (in which case it's the Paladin not the recipient spending the healing surge as the paladin transfers their own energy).

Different types of physical injury are not "multiple separate things," because they all fall under the umbrella of "physical damage," with the game mechanics making no real distinction between the types of injury dealt (at least for the purposes of hit points lost/regained). 4E is much worse in that regard, because it makes hit points be "physical damage" or "demoralization," widening the cognitive gap and requiring you to figure out if an injury has even been dealt in the first place, something you knew had happened in previous editions.

Nope.

What exactly is the problem with cure wounds being a universal cure?

That it never has been and I'm not interested in discussing your house rules. If you want to cure a hand being chopped off you need the Regenerate spell. I'm fascinated however that you think that it's appropriate for a first level spell to be able to cure literally anything.

Is there some rule somewhere that says that a 1st-level spell can only heal certain types of physical injury?

Yes. It only heals hit points.

Because if that's the case in your world, your world is a dramatic departure from how D&D has always functioned.

You're confusing "how D&D has always functioned" with your personal houserules. When an intellect devourer eats someone's intellect that is an injury and Cure Wounds has never been able to do that.

Except we've already established that "spending a healing surge" is something the target of a Healing Word and an Inspiring Word can do, even though those represent two different things from an in-character standpoint (i.e. curative magic and an increase in personal resilience due to having encouraging things shouted at you).

Except they are less different than being stabbed with a sword and being burned by a fireball. Healing Word is largely the placebo effect. There is a tiny trickle of healing magic in there but it largely perks the target up.

Meanwhile if you want actual healing magic then you want to look at something like Cure Light Wounds which explicitly allows the target to recover hit points as if they had spent a healing surge. Or Lay On Hands where the Paladin is the one who spends the surge.

Oh, and in terms of fluff

Healing Word​

You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds​

The primary result of Healing Word is light. The level of actual healing provided is minor, but it produces the placebo effect.

Cure Light Wounds​

You utter a simple prayer and gain the power to instantly heal wounds, and your touch momentarily suffuses your target with a dim light.​

It's worth mentioning that if you just look at the hit point total Healing Word actually causes the target to recover more hit points. But they are still wounded because they are down healing surges. Cure Light Wounds however instantly heals wounds because it doesn't leave surges spent.

That's 4E's deciding to make two different things be represented by the same operation, so the differences that you're drawing here simply aren't reflected in the game rules. (Likewise for saying "but you don't die at 0 hit points!" since at that point the rules say that you're dying, which just means that you're about to die unless you make a death save, and if you have no healing surges left then you can't recover, which is a massive cognitive gap to bridge.)

If you want to take issue with the death and dying rules go tell the 5e forum it doesn't make sense. It's the same mechanics.

Need to...what? Because you seem to be saying that healing surges represent one condition track (i.e. personal stamina) while hit points represent another (i.e. physical injury), which would almost be a plausible take on things if only 4E didn't have them working identically (i.e. the same operation) despite being described in vastly different terms.

What do you mean by healing surges and hit points working identically?

"A strawman of dying at 0 hp" doesn't contrast with the game saying "When your hit points drop to 0 or fewer, you fall unconscious and are dying." (4E PHB p. 295)

Sorry, to clarify I meant dying instantly at 0hp. At 0hp you are down but not dead.

Likewise, you've ignored the actual mechanics by assigning healing surges to operate as exclusively one condition track when the game rules themselves don't do any such thing.

[Citation needed]

Now, that's certainly a credible attempt to fix things on your part, but you can't fix things without admitting that they need to be fixed in the first place. Bridging the cognitive gap means that you still have to build a bridge.

You can do that by actually reading the PHB and understanding what it says. Or by talking to people who do. It's not my fault that after fifteen years you haven't done this.

Talking about Cure Wounds and Lay on Hands doesn't address the fact that Inspiring Word and Healing Word use the same operation to represent wildly different things.

Except that as shown they don't represent that different things. Inspiring Word and Healing Word are both ways of encouraging the target. Healing word explicitly creates light but does not "instantly heal wounds" the way Cure Light Wounds does. Both have the primary effect of convincing the target things will be fine.

I've seen this idea – that there's no representative (i.e. in-character) aspect of the game's operations whatsoever

Which is not something I hold.

See above. This is an appeal to realism; if your proof of hit point loss not being injury rests on the idea that there should be penalties to personal ability due to wounds taken, then D&D has never been your game, because Big Damn Heroes don't slow down just because they're injured.

And this is complete nonsense and a failure to understand good storytelling. Big damn heroes absolutely slow down because they are injured. What they don't do is give up just because they are at a disadvantage. Even superheroes get hurt and injured, and this meaningfully slows them. The untiring robotic nature of pre-4e fighters that just spam their attacks is one reason I really dislike them. They do not match the fiction they are based on. 4e was the best here, with many 5e subclasses being at least passable (and for the ones that aren't? I don't have to play them even if I'm playing a fighter).

You're tragically misguided, here. The cognitive gap is the difference between what the game tells you about what's happening in-character, and what you have to fill in yourself (i.e. where the representation stops). In that regard, 4E has even more of one, because it can't decide what hit point loss/recovery actually means!

pre-4e it meant something impossible. In 4e it is clear. It just goes over your head.

Are you saying that action movie characters don't take terrible injuries and keep going with no loss of prowess? Because earlier in your post, you were saying that hit points can't be injuries for that very reason.

I'm saying absolutely that only bad action movie protagonists keep going with no loss of prowess. (There are action movie villains that legitimately keep going without loss of prowess, but that's one of the things that makes this group of villains so terrifying). Good action movie characters keep going and respond to what is happening to them, clearly weakened but still able to pull through. I expect the PCs to be playing Kyle Reese not The Terminator.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And you've overlooked that hit point loss does not and never has represented injury. What it represents is a mix of endurance, luck, and cosmetic damage before which you take an actual injury more debilitating than a paper cut. Actual injuries have never been a consequence of hit point loss. You can't break your arm or lose a hand with hit point loss and no amount of castings of cure wounds will fix that. There is a spell that will cause actual meaningful injuries to be healed in at least 3.X and 2e but it's not Cure Light Wounds. It's regenerate.

And even if injuries worked the way you said, it wouldn't be relevant. Because what is relevant is that the cognitive gap is entirely about whether people can be bothered to learn and engage with the rules or not. Engage with the 4e rules and your argument as shown vanishes in a puff of smoke. It only exists in the minds of people who don't think that separate rules sets can work different ways.

So what they haven't done in D&D cases is taken an injury more debilitating than a paper cut is to a normal person. It's almost entirely cosmetic.

Of course 4e better reflects these characters this way. Characters can go down, bandage themselves up, dig deep, and keep going. This is because 4e, by splitting short term resilience and endurance better models this type of fiction. 4e therefore narrows the cognitive gap by including the ability for people to go down within the scene, being under serious threat, but being able to keep going afterwards using their own resources. Which is what e.g. Rambo does. He recovers from rest and from bandaging, not just from magic. But the injuries are still there even if he's recovered.

Once again you are simply demonstrating that the cognitive gap is in your head and caused by your inability to understand 4e rules even after fifteen years. Inspiration doesn't provide the energy, it encourages the target to dig deep into their own resources.

In 4e the main effect of Inspiring Word is that it allows the recipient to spend one of their own healing surges. If you don't have a recovery to spend then you can't spend it. As you yourself quoted in your OP

Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. ​

But if you have no healing surges left you can't spend one. So it's not "a character stays alive as long as they feel good about themselves", it's a character with sufficient inspiration can keep going until they are completely exhausted (as measured by their running out of Healing Surges). But when they are out they are out.

At that point they have run out of endurance and need something magic. Whether something like Cure Wounds (which causes the target to recover as if they had spent a healing surge but the energy is provided by the spell) or Lay On Hands (in which case it's the Paladin not the recipient spending the healing surge as the paladin transfers their own energy).

Nope.

That it never has been and I'm not interested in discussing your house rules. If you want to cure a hand being chopped off you need the Regenerate spell. I'm fascinated however that you think that it's appropriate for a first level spell to be able to cure literally anything.

Yes. It only heals hit points.

You're confusing "how D&D has always functioned" with your personal houserules. When an intellect devourer eats someone's intellect that is an injury and Cure Wounds has never been able to do that.

Except they are less different than being stabbed with a sword and being burned by a fireball. Healing Word is largely the placebo effect. There is a tiny trickle of healing magic in there but it largely perks the target up.

Meanwhile if you want actual healing magic then you want to look at something like Cure Light Wounds which explicitly allows the target to recover hit points as if they had spent a healing surge. Or Lay On Hands where the Paladin is the one who spends the surge.

Oh, and in terms of fluff

Healing Word​

You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds​

The primary result of Healing Word is light. The level of actual healing provided is minor, but it produces the placebo effect.

Cure Light Wounds​

You utter a simple prayer and gain the power to instantly heal wounds, and your touch momentarily suffuses your target with a dim light.​

It's worth mentioning that if you just look at the hit point total Healing Word actually causes the target to recover more hit points. But they are still wounded because they are down healing surges. Cure Light Wounds however instantly heals wounds because it doesn't leave surges spent.

If you want to take issue with the death and dying rules go tell the 5e forum it doesn't make sense. It's the same mechanics.

What do you mean by healing surges and hit points working identically?

Sorry, to clarify I meant dying instantly at 0hp. At 0hp you are down but not dead.

[Citation needed]

You can do that by actually reading the PHB and understanding what it says. Or by talking to people who do. It's not my fault that after fifteen years you haven't done this.

Except that as shown they don't represent that different things. Inspiring Word and Healing Word are both ways of encouraging the target. Healing word explicitly creates light but does not "instantly heal wounds" the way Cure Light Wounds does. Both have the primary effect of convincing the target things will be fine.

Which is not something I hold.

And this is complete nonsense and a failure to understand good storytelling. Big damn heroes absolutely slow down because they are injured. What they don't do is give up just because they are at a disadvantage. Even superheroes get hurt and injured, and this meaningfully slows them. The untiring robotic nature of pre-4e fighters that just spam their attacks is one reason I really dislike them. They do not match the fiction they are based on. 4e was the best here, with many 5e subclasses being at least passable (and for the ones that aren't? I don't have to play them even if I'm playing a fighter).

pre-4e it meant something impossible. In 4e it is clear. It just goes over your head.

I'm saying absolutely that only bad action movie protagonists keep going with no loss of prowess. (There are action movie villains that legitimately keep going without loss of prowess, but that's one of the things that makes this group of villains so terrifying). Good action movie characters keep going and respond to what is happening to them, clearly weakened but still able to pull through. I expect the PCs to be playing Kyle Reese not The Terminator.

Is the effect of their "weakness" a reduced ability to recover hit points due declining healing surges? Because I can't see any other effect in 4e or any other official edition that could possibly be described as a "loss of prowess". Outside of corner cases, it is simply not possible to suffer any injury between "just a scratch" and "unconscious and dying, but also probably just a scratch" in the actual rules. Injury simply doesn't exist. I have nightmares about what I would do if any PC or NPC told me they were breaking someone's arm, for example, as there are zero rules to represent how that would work and what the effect would be, in any official edition.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Is the effect of their "weakness" a reduced ability to recover hit points due declining healing surges? Because I can't see any other effect in 4e or any other official edition that could possibly be described as a "loss of prowess".

It's actually not a loss of prowess due to direct injury, but 4e characters definitely tire. There are only a limited number of times you can dig deep and encounter/daily power or action surge or second wind (in 5e) so by the time you've been through hell you won't have the same resources you started the day with - and the two correlate as when you need to dig deep you dig deep. It's not perfect but is at least an approximation even if it could be better.

Meanwhile (with a couple of prestige class exceptions) pre-4e fighters feel to me like almost untiring robots, unaffected by what they have been doing.

 

[Alzrius]

And you've overlooked that hit point loss does not and never has represented injury.

Except for the fact that it does and always has. Or do you think that we're not supposed to understand anything from the fact that recovery spells are named "cure light wounds" "heal" "regenerate," etc.

What it represents is a mix of endurance, luck, and cosmetic damage before which you take an actual injury more debilitating than a paper cut. Actual injuries have never been a consequence of hit point loss. You can't break your arm or lose a hand with hit point loss and no amount of castings of cure wounds will fix that. There is a spell that will cause actual meaningful injuries to be healed in at least 3.X and 2e but it's not Cure Light Wounds. It's regenerate.

So you selectively decide to pay attention to what one spell name/description says, but not the others? That's not a very consistent way of looking at things. Likewise, the idea that hit points are a mixture of luck, divine protection, etc. was dealt with in the OP, i.e. that there's an essay or two that says that in the Core Rulebooks, but the game's operations don't reflect that, and never have until 4E tried to shoehorn them in. You can, in fact, represent a broken arm with hit point loss, and so repair it with cure light wounds. Losing body parts is something else (hence the perennial argument that "regenerate is an answer to a problem that isn't present (notwithstanding a sword of sharpness)" argument).

And even if injuries worked the way you said, it wouldn't be relevant. Because what is relevant is that the cognitive gap is entirely about whether people can be bothered to learn and engage with the rules or not. Engage with the 4e rules and your argument as shown vanishes in a puff of smoke. It only exists in the minds of people who don't think that separate rules sets can work different ways.

You've almost stumbled upon a good point here, but gotten a salient point wrong, which is that the cognitive gap is about how much effort the players (which includes the DM) have to put in in order to bridge the different between what's happening in the game world and what the rules tell them. Unfortunately, the 4E rules are more obscure in many respects than what previous editions represented in that regard. The fact that some people don't mind that work doesn't mean that it's not there, which is demonstrated by how you keep saying that just because you can fix the problem, it's not a problem.

So what they haven't done in D&D cases is taken an injury more debilitating than a paper cut is to a normal person. It's almost entirely cosmetic.

So you acknowledge here than an injury is being taken. That's a step forward. The fact that they're playing through the pain, as it were, doesn't change the fact that it's still an injury, however, and potentially a serious one. That's markedly different than a paper cut. Again, the characters are being damaged, they're just not letting it slow them down.

Of course 4e better reflects these characters this way. Characters can go down, bandage themselves up, dig deep, and keep going. This is because 4e, by splitting short term resilience and endurance better models this type of fiction. 4e therefore narrows the cognitive gap by including the ability for people to go down within the scene, being under serious threat, but being able to keep going afterwards using their own resources. Which is what e.g. Rambo does. He recovers from rest and from bandaging, not just from magic. But the injuries are still there even if he's recovered.

In point of fact, an examination of 4E demonstrates that it's much worse at reflecting characters in this way. That's because while it wants to measure characters' injuries as well as their ability to keep going in the face of them, it foolishly tried to measure both of those by the same metric: hit points. Had it moved the personal stamina issue over to its own mechanic, then that would have worked out much better. But it didn't, and therefore widened the cognitive gap. Note that this remains true despite your attempting to tie healing surges to a different narrative representation, which the 4E rules themselves don't do (again, a place where the game could have done better, but didn't). As you yourself mentioned in another thread, the Core Rules are "undercooked."

Once again you are simply demonstrating that the cognitive gap is in your head and caused by your inability to understand 4e rules even after fifteen years. Inspiration doesn't provide the energy, it encourages the target to dig deep into their own resources.

And this goes to show that you yourself don't understand the game you're defending, which is why you have to keep misrepresenting what the books actually say in order to get your point across. The lack of a gap is entirely in your own mind, because you keep reassigning terms and definitions in ways that the books you're championing don't acknowledge.

In 4e the main effect of Inspiring Word is that it allows the recipient to spend one of their own healing surges. If you don't have a recovery to spend then you can't spend it. As you yourself quoted in your OP

Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points. ​

But if you have no healing surges left you can't spend one. So it's not "a character stays alive as long as they feel good about themselves", it's a character with sufficient inspiration can keep going until they are completely exhausted (as measured by their running out of Healing Surges). But when they are out they are out.

This overlooks that the operation of a healing surge is to restore hit points. The same way other curative effects restore hit points, even when those effects are explicitly stated to heal injuries. So if the healing surge is the character spending their own healing surges, what does that mean from an in-character standpoint? And why is it activated by another character's actions if it's something the target is doing? Because the answer here is that the regaining of hit points via a healing surge isn't wound recovery, whereas the recovery of hit points from certain other operations is. Ergo, the game has hit point restoration (and loss) being two different things, even though it's the same instance of game mechanics. Hence the widening of the cognitive gap.

At that point they have run out of endurance and need something magic. Whether something like Cure Wounds (which causes the target to recover as if they had spent a healing surge but the energy is provided by the spell) or Lay On Hands (in which case it's the Paladin not the recipient spending the healing surge as the paladin transfers their own energy).

So why doesn't a Healing Word work on them when they've run out of healing surges, even though the description for Healing Word says "You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds." Does divine light that helps to mend wounds no longer function because the target is out of endurance? Godly power requires someone to still feel like they aren't completely exhausted? Whatever explanation you come up with here is an instance of bridging the gap, which is wider because now recovering hit points is no longer solely about wound healing.

Nope.

Yep.

That it never has been and I'm not interested in discussing your house rules.

Because you're apparently only interested in discussing your own, rather than what's in the 4E rules.

If you want to cure a hand being chopped off you need the Regenerate spell. I'm fascinated however that you think that it's appropriate for a first level spell to be able to cure literally anything.

Which is why very few effects specify losing a body part, hence why that specific operation is called out in regenerate. However, I'm baffled that you think a cure light wounds spell can't repair a broken bone.

Yes. It only heals hit points.

So you grant the premise that hit point restoration was traditionally (prior to 4E) only about restoring physical injury. Good to know.

You're confusing "how D&D has always functioned" with your personal houserules. When an intellect devourer eats someone's intellect that is an injury and Cure Wounds has never been able to do that.

I think what you're saying here is that Cure X Wounds spells have never been able to heal damage dealt by an intellect devourer, which is a rather odd position to take. In the AD&D 1E Monster Manual, intellect devourers deal psionic damage (i.e. the eating the intellect part) via ego whip or id insinuation, which as per the OP deals physical damage to an opponent, and so can be cured via cure light wounds. In the 4E MM3 book, their "thought feast" power (for the intellect glutton) deals 10 points of psychic damage, which can also be cured via a cure light wounds power. So I'm not sure what your point here is.

Except they are less different than being stabbed with a sword and being burned by a fireball. Healing Word is largely the placebo effect. There is a tiny trickle of healing magic in there but it largely perks the target up.

"Less different"? One is them accessing a personal reserve of stamina, and the other is bodily harm of some kind. If Healing Word was a placebo effect, why does its description say that divine light is washing over the target, helping to mend its wounds? Why is there no mention of the target "perking up"? You say that there's also some healing magic, but it's also a "perking up" effect; that's literally two different operations at the same time, which is what the OP refers to.

Meanwhile if you want actual healing magic then you want to look at something like Cure Light Wounds which explicitly allows the target to recover hit points as if they had spent a healing surge. Or Lay On Hands where the Paladin is the one who spends the surge.

Which is another acknowledgment on your part that two different things can potentially be happening even when the operation is that hit points are regained. You're making my argument for me.

Oh, and in terms of fluff

Healing Word​

You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds​

The primary result of Healing Word is light. The level of actual healing provided is minor, but it produces the placebo effect.

Cure Light Wounds​

You utter a simple prayer and gain the power to instantly heal wounds, and your touch momentarily suffuses your target with a dim light.​

It's worth mentioning that if you just look at the hit point total Healing Word actually causes the target to recover more hit points. But they are still wounded because they are down healing surges. Cure Light Wounds however instantly heals wounds because it doesn't leave surges spent.

So in other words, you want to suggest that Healing Word doesn't actually heal physical damage despite what it says because of how many hit points are being regained? Because that's kind of the central point regarding 4E widening the cognitive gap.

If you want to take issue with the death and dying rules go tell the 5e forum it doesn't make sense. It's the same mechanics.

It doesn't make sense, but that it doesn't make sense in 5E doesn't make 4E's use of it any better. Tu quoque isn't logically valid.

What do you mean by healing surges and hit points working identically?

Are you suggesting that healing surges don't recover hit points?

Sorry, to clarify I meant dying instantly at 0hp. At 0hp you are down but not dead.

But still dying, because you've taken wounds so severe that you can no longer function in spite of them. And yet the "personal reserves of stamina" issue still works to let you recover.

[Citation needed]

If you need a citation toward your own alteration of how healing surges work, I don't know what to tell you; that was your own previous post!

You can do that by actually reading the PHB and understanding what it says. Or by talking to people who do. It's not my fault that after fifteen years you haven't done this.

Oh, the irony here. You've postulated that healing surges represent personal reserves, apart from hit points themselves, then turned around and said that the flavor text for Healing Word doesn't really say what it does. It's pretty clear which of us needs to go back and read the 4E rules, and by "which of us" I mean "you."

Except that as shown they don't represent that different things. Inspiring Word and Healing Word are both ways of encouraging the target. Healing word explicitly creates light but does not "instantly heal wounds" the way Cure Light Wounds does. Both have the primary effect of convincing the target things will be fine.

No, Healing Word does not "encourage" the target, except under your weird house rules. It flat-out says that it produces divine power that heals the target. You can change that if you want in order to bridge the cognitive gap that produces when you look at Inspiring Word, but you're still bridging the gap, not showing that it doesn't exist.

Which is not something I hold.

You literally just said that hit points don't tell us anything, that they were a video game lifebar, etc. So clearly you do hold that position.

And this is complete nonsense and a failure to understand good storytelling. Big damn heroes absolutely slow down because they are injured. What they don't do is give up just because they are at a disadvantage. Even superheroes get hurt and injured, and this meaningfully slows them. The untiring robotic nature of pre-4e fighters that just spam their attacks is one reason I really dislike them. They do not match the fiction they are based on. 4e was the best here, with many 5e subclasses being at least passable (and for the ones that aren't? I don't have to play them even if I'm playing a fighter).

This is an excellent demonstration of why your points are all over the place. You're bringing your own biases to the table, i.e. how you think the game "should" function in order to abet "good storytelling," because you apparently want a more narrative experience. No wonder you have to keep reflavoring what 4E says! The fact of the matter is that D&D has never been a narrative-first game; the story is an after-the-fact construct that you put together later. Even in 4E, fighters can fight indefinitely so long as they don't take damage, so if you think it solves that problem, well, it was only "the best" because you've introduced a lot of things that aren't in the books.

pre-4e it meant something impossible. In 4e it is clear. It just goes over your head.

It couldn't be less clear, if you actually read what's there. You should try it; you'll be surprised.

I'm saying absolutely that only bad action movie protagonists keep going with no loss of prowess. (There are action movie villains that legitimately keep going without loss of prowess, but that's one of the things that makes this group of villains so terrifying). Good action movie characters keep going and respond to what is happening to them, clearly weakened but still able to pull through. I expect the PCs to be playing Kyle Reese not The Terminator.

And again, this is you bringing your own issues to the table, rather than engaging with what's actually there. You want a game that includes an exhaustion/stamina mechanic, and that's fine. But having that be the same as the mechanic that tracks mounting injuries means that you have the same operation doing two things, and that's going to widen the cognitive gap, as it did in 4E.