Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9229759" data-attributes="member: 8461">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.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.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.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.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.)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."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.I'll do you a solid and correct your mistakes here:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">4E widens the cognitive gap by having hit point loss and recovery be physical injury and a loss of stamina.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You pretend that healing surges represent one of those things exclusively, leaving hit points to represent the other.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">In fact, the game doesn't say this, but explicitly says the opposite.</li> </ol>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).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.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!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.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.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.See above. I think you might want to double-check what the 4E rules say.You're right, but not in the way you think you are. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.</blockquote>

Verification