Camping: It does a body good!

[Jeff Wilder]

I'll give you that, although a few days to naturally heal from the effects of a 120' fall is pretty darn fast, but you're right that it's better than six hours.

Exactly. It's still unrealistic, but at least there's a nod toward verisimilitude. As I wrote earlier -- maybe in another thread? -- that's all I need, because I really want to suspend my disbelief.

Of course, who knows what the falling rules are like in 4E? I don't.

Or even if we've heard the whole story on the 6HM. It could be that there really are limitations built in that mitigate it, but that those limitations weren't revealed at XP. (The irony is that if that's the case, the folks contorting into all sorts of weird shapes to explain the 6HM are gonna have to scramble to come up reasonably untwisty.)

 

[Iron Sky]

I think of healing surges, bloodied and the like in 4E something like this:

"The last demon falls and Terrek Bladehound winces as he pulls the Ashsteel spear from his side, blood washing away the grime and muck splattering his chain below the wound. He leans heavily on Glittering, his greatsword, while he pulls out his wineskin, takes a deep draught, then pours it over the wound with a grunt, a wince of pain. Glittering flares as Terrek's mailed grip tightens on its hilt.(Fighter)

Jiena Grimborn brings her fist to her face and inhales the last black whisps of the Darkling's soul, her eyes inking black. Midnight wisps trail along her body, clotting in a dozen cuts, glowing as it consumes the blood and damaged flesh where the Jagged One's scythe-arm caught her. The dark miasma slowly congeals, fading to reveal her once alabaster skin replaced in patches with the dark, rough skin of a Darkling.(Warlock)

Tormeran Scholarson pulls himself to his feet with a groan and wearily gestures to his soot-coated Elderstaff, plucking it out of the air and leaning heavily on it as he bends to take a pinch of the blackened soil and a still-cooling half-melted pebble from the edge of the crater where the Searfiend's blast detonated. Murmuring, he presses the burnt soil against the stone, flares of light and a dance of shimmering runes swirling about his hand as he completes the ritual. In careful motions, he passes the newly formed epistone across the burned holes in his robes, sighing in relief his flesh steams beneath but not holding the stone in place for too long so as not to waste its precious, rapidly-fading energy.(Wizard)

Walking out from behind the ruin where Jalrod the Abyssmad had fled, babbling and frothing, Elra the Fadedealer nods to the others grimly, wiping her Scarbinding daggers on the robe of a nearby cultist before striding to the body of the dead Searfiend. Standing over its body, she stares at it grimly before reaching into the still-steaming wound in it's gut. Several malformed organs spill out as she metodically digs into the disemboweled demon, finally removing a small green gland, carefully removing a few small vials from her belt with gore-coated gloves and coating one, end of the organ with the vials' contents.

"Normally poisonous," she murmers to Terrek as draws near, "but not when you combine it with anthelrac and arsenic."

"Is taking three poisons really what you need right now?" he says, gesturing to where the tip of Jalrod's now-shattered Adderstaff punctured her neck.

Black streaks have already spread from the wound up the side of her face and down into the battle-tattered collar of her leather armor. "Sometimes it takes poison to fight poison," she says, brushing her long black hair to the side as she tilts her head, pressing the tip of the strange organ against the still-spreading wound on the side of her neck. (Rogue)

Eldaeric of the Bleakwatch pushes through the tangled undergrowth quickly, vision blurring as he searches for Vitalis, Everbloom, even some Bloatseed to slow the burrowing. He staggers again, nearly falling, and pauses to catch his breath, wincing as his expanding chest shifts the dozens of tiny barbs embedded in his back. His vision blurs again and he clutches the tree tightly, feeling the world shift as though he was stepping through one of the weakened borders between here and the Feywild. He drops to a knee as the barbs twist, burrowing slowly deeper towards his heart.

Then he sees it - Vitalis, last gift of the Faded God - sprouting from the ledge of a nearby cracked granite cliff. Where it can catch the fading light of the sun, he thinks, remembering the words of the Eladrin high Ranger Samanis. He staggers towards the cliff, realizing as he draws closer that the ledge is high, far too high to reach, even if he wasn't wounded. Maybe, just maybe I can... he thinks, feeling the shift, his surroundings blurring.

He falls, landing hard and gasping as the barbs burrow deeper. With shaking fingers, he draw his knife and cuts the bloom from the Vitalis, pawing at his clothing and armor until the skin over his heart is bare. Slowly, reverently, he presses the Vitalis against his chest, feeling its warm glow envelop him. (Ranger)."

Etc.

At least that'd be cool. Assuming my players cared anyway. They'll probably just say, "we heal to full after 6 hours? l33t."

And wow, what a dork. I just wrote a couple pages of fanfic based off of a frikken game mechanic. *Sigh*.

/ignore this guy.

 

[Will]

I'm reminded of LotrO, which has the (rather brilliant) mechanic that hit points don't represent damage, but 'spirit.'

That is, as you fight, you loose hit points because you are demoralized... the fight goes out of you.

Minstrels and champions can 'heal' you... not by closing wounds, but by giving stirring speaches or songs that get you back on your fight and into the fight.

I'm curious how well such a conceit will fit the way healing and damage works in 4e.

 

[helium3]

In practice I've found that it's difficult to describe combat using mostly abstract hitpoints in a way that doesn't elicit groans and laughs from the players. When a player hits, saying something along the lines of "You sap more of the creature's will to fight", doesn't really work. Trust me, even the die hard 4E-Fan thought that was lame as a replacement for "You inflict a wound." About the best I can come up with, and which I'll test next game session, is to describe a successful "hit" on the part of the player as somehow being either parried or mostly ineffective. Basically, it's the hits that push the monster past bloodied and death that are actual wounds that deal damage.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I guess I'll continue with the agree to disagree stance overall.

Precisely because of the fact that in EVERY edition, you got way more HP as you went up in level, which was OBVIOUSLY NOT the fact that you can simply take more shots to the head with an axe. Did experience make you covered in hard, wound reducing scars? No? Did it make you heal faster? No?

It clearly meant that you were better able to roll-with-the-punches, making what would have been a kill shot when you were less able into a light wound, and the ability to handle the shock of a worse wound, so that you can continue defending yourself against the next blow, etc, etc... which I think most of us agree on.

So I really don't see the stretch to continue to experience making it so that you can turn what would have been a kill-shot into SUCH a minor scratch that in the morning you feel good enough to adventure.

Personally I think the system CAN'T give you the specifics of what happens to you, because that's where the role-playing comes in. It's dependent on SO many factors, like what you were hit with, what armour you're wearing (or not), experience level, class, race, and how you are healed (spells or natural), the damage of the shot, and wether it drops you to zero (or bloodied), etc.

Only a role-player can take all those factors into account and come up with a story explanation for what actually happened to the character.

I find it all part of the fun of the game.

An easy excuse for any character in armour is that the blow landed a good solid shot, but that the armour held. The character loses HP from being winded and bruised, but the armour does it's job and saves her life. Even arrows can work this way (one of the harder things to explain how they damage you without putting a big hole in you...)

Hey, instead of arguing over something we kind of agree on, why doesn't everyone (no matter which edition you prefer) share a possible explanation for a given scenario?

Fitz