Can gaining Temp HP ever be the equal to gaining regular HP?

[fletch137]

No lie, the Warlord is my favorite class in 4e (especially the Bravura Warlord), but as much as I enjoy the tactical and boosting abilities, my brain balks at the idea of motivational healing.

I've the ghost of an idea, though, that says Temporary HP are more fitting to the Warlord than just straight up healing, but how can I houserule that without making the Warlord a crappy leader?

True, Temp HP allow you to go above full Hit Points, but they don't stack and they (obviously) go away. Is there some other advantage which could be given to Temp HP that a houseruled Warlord wouldn't mind the change?

Perhaps his Inspiring Presence gives temp HP to every ally in the burst rather than just a single target? Target doesn't have to spend a healing surge? Both?

 

[DEFCON 1]

The only problem with going the Temp HP route is that you're basically asking your players to spend their Healing Surges twice for the same wounds. Every Inspiring Word makes a PC spend a healing surge to gain Temp HP... then at the end of the encounter, those Temp HP go away and they are now forced to take a Short Rest and spend a healing surge again to gain the "real HP".

Personally... I'd think you'd be better off just houseruling it that hit points themselves aren't wounds. At all. The wounds you take are the Healing Surges you spend. Every time you spend a Healing Surge, that's a wound you've taken (because that Healing Surge won't come back until after you've taken an Extended Rest).

Now granted... yes, that sets up the disconnect within the fiction where it seems like the wound doesn't occur during the combat (at the point of lost HP) but after the fact during the "recovery" period. And many people will balk at that. I understand it. Now if that kind of disconnect doesn't bother you... then great, you're home free. But if it does... then you need to rethink things in your head as you play to make it work. So for example...

A Healing Surge is 1/4 of your hit points. So during play... every time you take 1/4 of your HP in damage... you've suffered a "wound". Now that "wound" is still not directly connected to your HP-- hit points are still just a representation of your staying power within a fight. Stamina, luck, fatigue, whatever you want to call it. And those HP can still go up and down via all the different Leader abilities and such.

Your "wounds", however... are basically your healing surges. You won't regain those after a fight. Not until an extended rest. The way those "wounds" are counted will occur after a fight... when you lose the healing surge to recover your HP/stamina... but technically, you still lost them DURING the fight (because the expectation is those 1/4 HPs you've just lost WILL be covered by the expenditure of a Healing Surge after the fact.)

A PC with 40 HP take a hit from an orc and loses 10 HP. So you narrate that he's been wounded and is bleeding. The thing to remember though... is that it's not because of the loss of 10 HP that he is bleeding... but because of the loss of the Healing Surge later on to cover it that he is bleeding. That lost Healing Surge is the wound. You the player won't "count" the wound until you get around to spending that Healing Surge... but that wound still occurred during combat (just behind the scenes of the hit point tally).

Thinking of the game in that way would take a little time getting used to. But it certainly would help you justify why HP loss can be recovered by inspirational action.

 

[FireLance]

What I would suggest is to introduce the concept of vigor points. Vigor points work exactly like temporary hit points, except that they don't go away until the character takes an extended rest, or they are lost through damage.

Like temporary hit points, vigor points don't stack with each other, but as a character gets more injured, he can unlock additional pools of vigor points (due to the effects of increasing adrenaline). Say, when the character is bloodied, he can have two pools of vigor points, and when he is down to less than 25% of his full normal hit points, he gains a third.

So, at the start of the day, a 1st-level warlord can grant all his allies Healing Surge Value + 1d6 vigor points. As long as the target is unbloodied, whenever the warlord used inspiring word the vigor points replace any current vigor points possessed by the target.

Once the target is bloodied, however, he can have a second vigor point pool. When one of those pools is reduced to 0 vigor points, additional vigor points can go to that pool instead of overlapping with any existing vigor points in the other pool.

The third vigor point pool for a character at 25% or less hit points allows a warlord to keep the sum of vigor points plus hit points approximately equal to a character's full normal hit points, allowing him to maintain parity with other Leader-type characters.

This approach could be used for all other types of non-magical healing (second wind, spending healing surges during a short rest). However, in the absence of a warlord, a character only gains his first vigor point pool when he is at less than 75% of full normal hit points.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Don't have the Warlord's healing spend surges. She's still limited to 2/encounter.

Doot doo doo.

 

[fletch137]

Don't have the Warlord's healing spend surges. She's still limited to 2/encounter.

Doot doo doo.

That does seem like a simple solution. I do like that it makes the warlord's healing a unique game element from clerical healing (fer instance).

Along with this question, though, is how much is too much temp HP? If I just applied the 'Inspiring Word' booster dice (1d6 at 1st level up to 6d6 at 26th), would that be enough? Would an entire healing surge's worth of HP be too much for an encounter power with no healing surge cost?

 

[I'm A Banana]

It sort of depends.

The big limits on temp HP is that it doesn't stack and that it doesn't go away. If you have a Warlord in your party as the main Leader, and you use that rule, the party is going to be walking around with a good chunk of their HP as temp HP.

These limits are mostly counteracted by the fact that temp HP ignores your normal upper HP limit, so they're ALWAYS useful. You may find your warlord dropping temp HP on the defender and the squishy party member and then not reacting to damage a lot -- possibly to the point where you might as well just make it a passive ability instead of an active one.

I'd be fine with that effect personally (it's all the same in the maths), but if you want to make it more active, you may want to rule that the Warlord can only use their ability on bloodied characters.

As far as quantity goes...I'd go for the whole thing. If you only go for the smaller amount, it's likely to not be enough, unless you also make the ability at-will (always keeping the party topped off?), which might be a little too strong. Doing the whole thing lets the warlord serve as the main leader. It may make other abilities that grant temp HP less useful, since the Warlord hands 'em out regularly, but they'll still be useful when the warlord is out, and anyway if the warlord is the only party leader the other party members won't be handing those out very often anyway.

 

[fletch137]

The big limits on temp HP is that it doesn't stack and that it doesn't go away.

Is that a typo, because Temp HP go away after any rest (long or short). Technically the players could choose not to take a short rest after an encounter to keep their temp HP, but then the warlord's Inspiring Word wouldn't reset so they wouldn't get any new temps.

It's a good observation that the Warlord doesn't need to wait for them to lose HP to want to use this power. Personally I would wait until I new which two characters needed them most in an encounter, but I don't think it's counter to intent to have the Warlord give a moto speech at the start of an encounter and let them go in with a little boost.

Still not sure on how much is an appropriate amount of Temp HP to grant, though. Getting a full healing surge's worth of temp HP without spending the surge is a level 2 clerical daily power, not a level 1 encounter. Still, it doesn't stack, so just getting 1d6 HP at 5th level (fer instance) seems kind of pointless.

I'll have to search for other temp hp granting powers to see what the precedence is.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, typo on my part.

The "surge value HP without spending a surge" is valued for the cleric at a higher rate because it is healing on top of the encounter-based healing that all leaders get. If the Warlord could ALSO let allies spend surges, then healing without spending a surge would be more valuable. But as the only leader in the party, the temp-hp Warlord doesn't actually have the capacity to let allies spend surges (at least, not for HP) -- those temp HP are then just "delayed surges:" you don't spend them during combat, you spend them instead afterwards.

I do absolutely enjoy the idea of the Warlord giving a "pep talk" to his allies before the big fight, reminding Ted the Fighter about his blind spot and telling Sally the Wizard to not be afraid to get in there (giving each of them temp HP). It's a cool idea.

If you'd like to reduce the amount of temp HP that's given out, I'd just increase the frequency at which the Warlord could use the ability. If you drop it too low, the Warlord's gonna feel useless (5 temp hp takes the sting out of a sword-wound, but it doesn't feel as safe as 15 temp HP does!), but you're right that surgeless "big buckets" of temp HP has generally been fairly highly valued.

Whatever you decide, I suppose you're avoiding the issue of motivational healing!

 

[Ferghis]

my brain balks at the idea of motivational healing.

This may just be the least helpful response in the thread, but imagine HP as if they were fatigue, luck, stamina, or "light wounds." Imagine that a bloodied character is one that is first genuinely threatened. And imagine that wounds that drop a character to a dying condition are the first serious hits a character receives. After all, death is potential consequence of any serious wound. And a character who might be unconscious need not be genuinely so, but simply unable to help him or herself ("helpless" if you will) very much, and in danger of death. In this framework, HP would not be wounds at all, and D&D healing not the closing of wounds that you frame it as. In this vision, healing HP is the same as "pulling yourself together." And you need not adjust the game much at all.

If death saves were the only real threat to characters, then warlords, and healing in general, would need much less of a specia effect. And it just happens to be the case that hit points are actually defined as luck, stamina, courage, and training; and not actual health or wounds.

 

[MarkB]

This may just be the least helpful response in the thread, but imagine HP as if they were fatigue, luck, stamina, or "light wounds." Imagine that a bloodied character is one that is first genuinely threatened. And imagine that wounds that drop a character to a dying condition are the first serious hits a character receives. After all, death is potential consequence of any serious wound. And a character who might be unconscious need not be genuinely so, but simply unable to help him or herself ("helpless" if you will) very much, and in danger of death. In this framework, HP would not be wounds at all, and D&D healing not the closing of wounds that you frame it as. In this vision, healing HP is the same as "pulling yourself together." And you need not adjust the game much at all.

If death saves were the only real threat to characters, then warlords, and healing in general, would need much less of a specia effect. And it just happens to be the case that hit points are actually defined as luck, stamina, courage, and training; and not actual health or wounds.

The other thing that helps conceptually is to grasp that a character who is at full health but has expended healing surges is not unwounded. They've simply managed to patch up their wounds through either mundane or magical means to make them less immediately life-threatening. A Leader's "healing" ability merely makes that process more efficient.

Once you start using healing surges as the primary measure of how injured a character is, rather than hit points, the concept of easy "healing" gets a lot less jarring.