It has always represented cosmetic level injury that doesn't debilitate. And it is impossible to have a would deep and hard enough measured under the hit point system that can not be affected by sufficient castings of cure light wounds (short of death). To get actual injuries you need to go round the hit point system.
This is your own presumption, which is reflected nowhere in the actual operations of the game. Someone being hit with a red dragon's breath weapon for over a hundred hit points of damage and surviving because they have two hundred hit points has not taken "cosmetic level" injuries. They've taken serious, massive injuries that they're nevertheless gritting their teeth and pushing through, showcasing action movie-levels of toughness. The very idea that something like that is no more than "paper cut" level of injury isn't something that the game tells us; quite the opposite, really.
If you had actually bothered to read
regenerate you would know that it does in fact regenerate.
The subject’s severed body members (fingers, toes, hands, feet, arms, legs, tails, or even heads of multiheaded creatures), broken bones, and ruined organs grow back. After the spell is cast, the physical regeneration is complete in 1 round if the severed members are present and touching the creature. It takes 2d10 rounds otherwise.
Regenerate also cures 4d8 points of damage +1 point per caster level (maximum +35), rids the subject of exhaustion and/or fatigue, and eliminates all nonlethal damage the subject has taken. It has no effect on nonliving creatures (including undead).
Which entirely validates what I said about that spell and others like it curing the physical injuries that hit point loss represents, hence why they all restore hit point damage; the fact that the
regenerate spell specifies that it restores severed body parts is indicative that hit point loss doesn't represent the severing of limbs, which you seem to think indicates means that hit point loss doesn't actually represent any sort of injuries (except for "cosmetic" ones) at all. Which is to say, you're once again making my argument for me, which brings up the question as to exactly what point you're pressing here, since you seem to be saying "you're right, but not
really right" without clarifying what any of that means.
The regenerate part is the part that actually allows you to regenerate severed body members and broken bones. Heal likewise does some actual healing of non-cosmetic damage.
Heal enables you to channel positive energy into a creature to wipe away injury and afflictions. It immediately ends any and all of the following adverse conditions affecting the Target: ability damage, blinded, confused, dazed, dazzled, deafened, diseased, exhausted, fatigued, feebleminded, insanity, nauseated, sickened, stunned, and poisoned. It also cures 10 hit points of damage per level of the caster, to a maximum of 150 points at 15th level.
Yeah,
heal is a spell that cures physical damage as well as conditions that cause non-hit point related debuffs. Now, you seem to be implying that this means that no other spell which restores hit points also cures wounds...leaving aside the fact that they spell name flat-out says that they do, even if you ignore their description. For instance,
cure light wounds flat-out says:
When laying your hand upon a living creature, you channel positive energy that cures 1d8 points of damage +1 point per caster level (maximum +5).
Since undead are powered by negative energy, this spell deals damage to them instead of curing their wounds. An undead creature can apply spell resistance, and can attempt a Will save to take half damage.
I suppose if you're sitting down with the idea that the only wounds hit point loss represents are paper cuts, and that a spell has to explicitly spell out which wounds it cures, then you might not read very much into that. But that's your house rules, not what the game is saying. Regenerate will bring back a lost limb, but if you think there's no middle ground between a lost limb and a paper cut, well, that one's on you.
It's not me doing this. I'm looking at the actual effects of the spells. You, however, are just looking at the names of the spells, paying no attention at all to the description (including the fact that regenerate literally calls out healing broken bones) and saying that somehow that because regenerate actually heals broken bones separately from hit points hit points must be the sort of injuries the spell handles separately.
So in other words, you don't think that there's any informative aspect to the names of the spells, and are looking at the effects purely in terms of hit points being a "lifebar" that measure nothing except the occasional bit of cosmetic damage. That's entirely your presumption here, and not at all what the game actually spells out. Which certainly explains why you've flat-out rewritten Healing Word to be a placebo that only grants cosmetic healing when the description says otherwise.
And you were talking arrant nonsense there too.
And yet you're still unable to refute that "nonsense," which is quite the referendum on your stance.
No you can't. Have you ever tried to use a broken arm? Have you ever tried to swing a polearm with one? Because in your world this gives no penalties.
Because in the world of D&D as it's written in the book, that gives no penalties, since D&D heroes are able to continue using a limb even when it's broken, since they're just that heroic. Don't judge them by your own limitations.
Regenerate is a solution to things like Sword of Sharpness and putting your hand in the Sphere of Annihilation that aren't represented by hit points.
Did you overlook that I explicitly referenced the sword of sharpness before? Because this is, what, the fifth or sixth time you're repeating something I already affirmed.
4e was pushed out before it was ready and is badly explained. I'm not fixing problems, I'm pointing out what the rules say but could have been more clearly expressed.
Leaving aside that "not clearly expressed" is a problem unto itself, there's also the fact that in some cases what they're trying to express isn't adequately represented by what the rules do. Again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to model a fatigue/stamina system in the game. But 4E botched the execution by trying to fold that into hit points, which already modeled injuries. It's not immune to critique in that regard just because you say "I can fix it."
I have never denied that hit points represented bruises and minor cuts. They just aren't more than that. The step forward is you finally understanding what is meant by cosmetic damage.
It's more correct to say that you're taking a step forward by realizing that hit point loss does model injury (even if you're backtracking from your "lifebar" comment by now saying that you "always" said it was injuries), but you're wrong in saying that it never represented anything besides that. A character taking fire damage does not have a cut or a bruise. A character reduced from full hit points to less than half due to falling damage or immersion in lava is not dealing with some minor injuries that are only slightly painful and not at all debilitating. They've taken serious wounds and are simply forcing themselves to keep going despite them.
You can't "play through the pain" for a broken leg. The damage is light.
Again, real people can't. Your D&D character is capable of jumping off a mile-high cliff and not only surviving, but carrying on a life-or-death battle immediately after they land, so they clearly can.
No it doesn't. This is what older editions did. 4e produced multiple metrics.
4E did not produce multiple metrics. Not in any way, shape, or form. It made hit points the sole metric for both injury and stamina, which was a poor decision in terms of modeling them both. Healing surges aren't the differentiation you wish they were.
It has both healing surges and daily powers. It did what you want.
No, it didn't. Healing surges are still using the same operation, which is hit point recovery, that's used by spells such as cure light wounds. If they had done something different, then it would be different, but they didn't.
This is pure projection. You are arguing against a straw version of 4e based on not understanding it.
Incorrect. You're defending a non-existent version of 4E based around your house rules, which is why you've so drastically rewritten how Healing Word works, as per your own description.
This pretends that the only purpose of a healing surge is to restore hit points. They can also be used to power powers, to power rituals, and taken away by both exhaustion and energy drain mechanics. The fact that healing surges can be lost to things sapping overall vitality (such as "a gruelling trek across hostile terrain") in addition to recovering from damage is explicitly called out on p76 of the DMG.
Which speaks not at all to their interaction with hit points being that they restore hit points, the same as other curative methods which are explicitly representative of recovering physical damage. Hence why they're not what you wish they were. The entire issue of healing surges is a distraction, because their interaction with the operations of gaining and losing hit points is no different in that regard (and no, how many hit points they restore at a time isn't a salient difference).
Once more this is entirely based on your having failed the cognitive load to understand 4e (which could have been easier with better writing) and deciding fifteen years after launch to open a long thread about your failure to understand 4e.
Again, your statement here is completely founded on your having rewritten how 4E works, and fifteen years later insisting that your house rules are how the game actually played. They aren't. Healing Word is not "a placebo effect" no matter how vehemently you insist that it is.
Except not the same way because the cost is different.
The cost being different does not change the operation that's performed under the game mechanics.
This is what is colloquially known as an ass-pull. Spending a healing surge is digging into endurance to keep going. It isn't wound recovery, but it is things like catching your breath. You are still weakened and tired
And this is what is colloquially known as nonsense. If you've just taken massive damage from a red dragon's breath weapon, catching your breath isn't going to give you back vitality such that you can survive the 8 hit points' of damage you take from the stab wound next round that would have killed you if not for the hp you just regained from that healing surge you spent due to the warlord's having used Inspiring Word.
And this sentence seems to assume that hit points are a genuine measurable thing and injuries work as in Order of the Stick, rather than that there are approximations involved.
"Assume that hit points are a genuine measureable thing"? Because you can't measure the total of subtracting X damage from a current point total of Y? How does that make sense?
The Healing Word does work on them. The light still washes over the target. They're just exhausted and drained and have no more to give. A simple pick-me-up isn't going to do it any more. Why does a pizza party feel good when people are already OK but do nothing for people who are demoralised?
"You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds." That's what Healing Word does. There's no aspect of "exhausted" or "drained" there; it's using divine power to mend wounds. Which apparently won't work if the target is feeling depressed. That's less a cognitive gap than a cognitive Grand Canyon.
I am discussing what is in the 4e rules. You however are only interested in engaging in your own version of them. And I can say that your version of the 4e rules suck.
The person who thinks that Healing Word is all about the target's state of mind has no right to lecture other people on what 4E actually says. Literally, you just presented your own house rules as if they were what's in the books, and then lectured someone else about what's in the books. Unbelievable.
I'm baffled you think it can.
I suspect that a lot about how 4E works baffles you.
And that all physical injury so represented was largely cosmetic. Minor cuts and bruises.
Except for the parts that aren't, which are considerable.
I've never used 1e psionics in anger. The 3.5 one certainly can do Charisma damage via Ego Whip (Id Insinuation doing confusion). And Cure Light Wounds can't cure that.
Which is indicative of the 3.5 version altering the nature of the power, keeping it entirely in the realm of mental effects, unlike the 1E one. It was a fairly apt change in that regard.
That stat point damage went.
That stat point damage went...where?
What do you think causes the placebo effect? The divine light has trivial direct healing - but it does have enough to help.
So Healing Word is causing "trivial" actual healing...does "trivial" mean that there's no hit point effect whatsoever, and that's why it doesn't work under the game rules? Because if so, that's emblematic of you having to ignore the written text to make the in-character representation match the mechanics, i.e. bridging the cognitive gap.
There is healing magic in there. Just not very much of it. Just enough that the target can feel it.
And where does the flavor text say that it's only doing a little actual healing and is mostly a placebo? What part of that "actual healing" is represented in the game's operations?
Do you actually know what the placebo effect is?
Do you know where it says that in the power description for Healing Word? Go ahead and quote it, if you can.
And when a burn and a light cut are healed at the same time by the same cure light wounds spell two different things are happening. Your argument that an action can only do one thing at a time is sheer nonsense.
It's not two different things, it's one thing: healing injury. That it can heal multiple different types of injury is self-evident if you actually read the description instead of making things up like "it's a placebo." Restricting it to healing different kinds of injuries is much easier to create a coherent game than having it be "it heals all sorts of injuries AND it makes you feel better about yourself!"
No. I am suggesting that a small but non-zero amount of physical damage is healed - in specific at low level 1d6+Wis (with the Wis bonus coming from Healer's Lore) and it uses the target's energy to do this so can't work on the utterly exhausted. But I am suggesting that it feels much greater than that; the target is still injured to the point of having spent a recovery which will need to be recovered normally.
Which, again, would have been fairly good if those two things hadn't been operating on the same pool of points, which 4E wants to represent different things at once. But if you've taken massive burns from falling into lava, or fallen off a mile-high cliff, etc. then recovering only a small point of physical damage and a lot of personal resilience isn't going to bridge the cognitive gap if you then immediately take another source of hit point loss that's mostly damage instead of being something depressing, since your stats then say you're not dying (i.e. above 0 hit points) and yet your "wound recovery hp" is depleted, even though you have plenty of "resilience hp" left.
That you think that only one thing can happen at a time?
When there's one mechanic, it helps if it doesn't represent two different things.
I am suggesting that they don't directly recover injuries. If you have full hit points but few healing surges you are not fully recovered.
"Recovered," in this sentence, is a confusing mixture of how wounded you are and what your state of mind is. Having hit points represent both doesn't help, and that problem gets worse if you've expended healing surges for a non-recovery mechanic, and then have to explain why when you're injured you're suddenly healing less because you feel depressed about having performed those rituals.
Which is still more realistic and interesting than being just fine and unimpeded and then taking 2hp and being on a one way track to death without magical help.
Notice that you're once again talking about "realistic" in a D&D game, which has never been intended to showcase realistic limits for what characters can do.
Let's take an actual real world magic-free example of hit points and healing surges in action. And show why the healing surge model works and the pure hit point model doesn't in the real world. Two boxers having a boxing match.
Oh here we go. Yes, let's once again assume that the game where your character can potentially challenge gods to a fight and win should absolutely be working to model something realistic, rather than an action movie-style fantasy. Because that's not something I already explained to you earlier.
Under the pre-4e model they throw the same attacks over and over, basically unchanging. Breaking between rounds does literally nothing. They start the next round at the exact same pace they ended the old one with exactly the same remaining hit point total and using exactly the same attacks. And when one character goes down to below 0hp they are either fine or out of it. I mean sure? That resolves the fight but not like any real boxing match I've seen, let alone a good one. It's boring and it's unrealistic. And the only way to have less than a ten count is for the attack to hit exactly 0hp.
Meanwhile under the 4e model the three minute break between rounds is being modelled as a short rest. (OK, that technically takes five in 4e). A boxer who was swaying on his feet at the end of one round can spend their healing surges so that they will be able to take more the next because endurance matters. And they will come out at the start of the round with encounter (but not daily) powers refreshed. A boxer who is knocked to the mat can have their coach (or their girlfriend) yell at them to get back on their feet and be inspired by that to stand up as they are being counted out. Inspiration matters on helping them to dig deep. So you can have the back and forth, and three counts and six counts rather than just a ten count without resorting to magic. Combine this with some tactics like baiting out the daily and we have at least a viable representation of a boxing match.
See the boxers.
No, don't see the boxers. The boxers example is entirely built on faulty premises in support of a level of design that D&D was never intended to utilize. The boxers make a case for why hit points under any paradigm don't work to model reality, in a game that doesn't even try to model reality. It's a fantasy game because it presents an amalgamation of fantasy genres, and people who want hit locations, wound tracking, exhaustion mechanics, and "death spirals" in terms of personal ability deteriorating when you take wounds should be playing something else! If you want to inject those into the story on your own terms, that's fine, but trying to contort the hit point system into representing that many disparate things is a recipe for disappointment, which explains why you've had to introduce "placebo" effects into abilities that don't mention anything like that.
Except it does say what it does. Creates light that does a little bit of healing. Nothing I have said is incompatible with this.
You think that just because you're not flat-out contradicting the entirety of what the power description says, that means that you're not making something up that changes what it represents? Nothing in the Healing Word description says or even implies that it's a "placebo." That one's entirely yours.
View attachment 341978
Above is an image from the video game Doom. As you can see as his HP (or "health") gets lower he gets more cosmetically injured. But this doesn't slow him, just bringing him nearer to death. This is how hit points work. And they do tell something. They tell how long until the game over. This is what pre-4e hit points do.
Yes, because he's taking serious (not just cosmetic) injuries. I don't know how you overlooked that the screenshot above is only showing his face and not his whole body, but that's not the support for your argument you seem to think it is.
My irony meter just exploded.
That's because it wasn't calibrated properly to begin with.
No. I work with the game as it actually works because it supports good storytelling. This takes no reflavouring.
Says the guy who's added the placebo effect to Healing Word. Again, if you can fix things and don't mind doing so, that's good for you. But that doesn't change the critical analysis of what's actually in the books.
What 4e fighters can't do is fight at full strength indefinitely. They have a limited number of encounter and daily powers.
So them not being able to use their encounter and daily powers without limit means that they've lost strength? Because that loss of strength seems to be reflected almost nowhere else in their combat prowess. A 4E fighter can still use their daily powers without limit, and even their encounter powers reset after five minutes (because reasons), so where does it become more "realistic" (to use the term you keep reintroducing) that they're too tired to perform their daily power again, but can us their other powers indefinitely?
And yet the DMG p76 is explicit that "a gruelling trek across hostile terrain"
Explicit in saying that healing surges can "sometimes" be the cost for failing a skill check, is what I think you're trying to say. So when the characters make a "gruelling trek" that's somehow the result of a failed check, that means that they're demoralized to the point of losing a healing surge. Okay, great. Except then that sidebar says that "other times" it can be shorthand for taking damage, i.e. that there are times you lose a healing surge that are taking damage, and times that aren't. Note the cognitive gap here, as the same operation is two different things: damage and non-damage.
And there is zero problem with having a mechanic that tracks multiple related things. The "cognitive gap" you are talking about is a lack not in the 4e rules but inside your head and your mental model of them.
Again, it's not a problem for you because you don't seem to mind the extra workload that's a result of the game offloading more of the work that comes with figuring out what its rules are representative of. But just because you're fine with that extra cognitive burden doesn't mean we can't critically analyze it, despite fans rushing up to say "no, you can't be critical of the game I love!"
