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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9229884" data-attributes="member: 8461">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.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).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 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.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."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.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.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.Yep.Because you're apparently only interested in discussing your own, rather than what's in the 4E rules.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.So you grant the premise that hit point restoration was traditionally (prior to 4E) only about restoring physical injury. Good to know.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."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.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.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.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.Are you suggesting that healing surges don't recover hit points?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.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!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."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.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.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 <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html" target="_blank">after-the-fact construct</a> 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.It couldn't be less clear, if you actually read what's there. You should try it; you'll be surprised.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.</blockquote>

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