Camping: It does a body good!

[Sitara]

But even going by you rexample Plane Sailing, after six hours of rest they suddenly find their cuts, scrapes , singes and bruises all magically healed up? In SIX hours?

Wjhy didn't they just cut down on the damage capability, instead of giving everyone and their grandmother healing surges, healing class abilities, and ability to recover all that AND your hp in SIX hours?

 

[HeinorNY]

How are you, as a DM, are going explain this crunch narratively?

The same way I explained in 3.5.
Natural healing in 3.5 was a bit more "realistic" than 4E's, but from a true realistic POV, both are incredibly fantastic and impossible. Sometimes even absurd. So it shouldn't be harder to rationalize 4E natural healing than it was in 3.5.

Thumbs up for extended rest/full heal.

 

[FourthBear]

Wjhy didn't they just cut down on the damage capability, instead of giving everyone and their grandmother healing surges, healing class abilities, and ability to recover all that AND your hp in SIX hours?

Because encounters with low damage would have a very low risk of death. I believe this method allows each encounter to significantly deplete hit points such that the character can be sweating in each battle. Otherwise, the low damage battles will tend to be cumulative slow grinds that gradually lower your hit point total, until you finally reach the interesting battle where you are actually at low hit points and in danger.

 

[med stud]

But even going by you rexample Plane Sailing, after six hours of rest they suddenly find their cuts, scrapes , singes and bruises all magically healed up? In SIX hours?

Wjhy didn't they just cut down on the damage capability, instead of giving everyone and their grandmother healing surges, healing class abilities, and ability to recover all that AND your hp in SIX hours?

Realistic healing times would be far too long for a RPG. The 3.5 healing rules were also too generous. So, if realistic times are out, you might as well make unrealistic healing that makes play easy and relieves the dependency on clerics.

 

[Li Shenron]

Indeed, this was also the underlying conceit of VP/WP. The system itself was meh, but there's nothing wrong with the rationale itself.

I think that the main difficulty is just getting used to it, after years of treating HP as actual damage.

Now that natural healing is brought into the discussion, I cannot deny that the 3e natural healing rules make little sense: if damage is real physical injuries, then 3e natural healing is way too fast; if damage isn't real wounds, then 3e natural healing is way too slow.

It's difficult to get used to it, but once we do, the 4e idea seems to work much better.

 

[Douane]

There is an extreme but effective way out of the problem:

describe only killing blows as an actual hit, everything else is just a near-hit that wears you down during battle

After all, most hits by a sword or axe in real life would cause the target to die.

The one problem I always saw with this approach is: What if the "killing blow" isn't a hit by an axe or sword but merely being scratched by the enemy mage's commoner-killing, 3.5 cat familiar? (Or any other kind of negligible damage that just happens to deplete your last hit point(s)? )

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I've got no problem explaining hit points as an abstraction, and I understand what several folks are suggesting. I also understand why they've done what they've done from a gamist perspective.

But given that, how does the game represent grievous injuries? I doubt it uses Con damage, as the designers have dissed ability damage pretty hard.

So how do you end up with a character that, barring magic, really does need days or a week or two weeks to recuperate? Does the game just not handle it? (We don't really know yet, obviously. But I bet a lot of people would be reassured to know it's been considered and handled, even if not how.)

In the absence of such a mechanic (and were I planning to play 4E), I'd create a house rule based on critical hits and hits causing unconsciousness. Maybe something as simple as "any damage that is caused by a critical hit, or that renders a PC unconscious, only heals at the rate of X points per three days, where X is the HP/level gained by the class."

 

[hong]

The one problem I always saw with this approach is: What if the "killing blow" isn't a hit by an axe or sword but merely being scratched by the enemy mage's commoner-killing, 3.5 cat familiar? (Or any other kind of negligible damage that just happens to deplete your last hit point(s)? )

I don't see any problem. Say you take 100 points of damage from a pack of greataxe-wielding ogres. Then their kobold slave throws a dagger at you for 2 points, knocking you out. Well, even a 1d4 dagger is still potentially a lethal weapon, so this can be described as the dagger striking you square in the throat, or in the eye, or someplace else that's vital. The severity of an injury relates to how close you are to that KO threshold, rather than the size of the weapon that inflicted it.

 

[Li Shenron]

The one problem I always saw with this approach is: What if the "killing blow" isn't a hit by an axe or sword but merely being scratched by the enemy mage's commoner-killing, 3.5 cat familiar? (Or any other kind of negligible damage that just happens to deplete your last hit point(s)? )

That's a problem of the familiar Anyway, the house cat or rat can kill you even with the old approach. How is "slowly being shred to pieces by a rat" more credible?

 

[HeinorNY]

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