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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8421937" data-attributes="member: 7032025">Agreed. But you still have been (usually, considering the types of adversaries and the type of damage that they inflict) wounded enough that you are dying (in both the technical and narrative sense) and sliding towards death.AD&D, due to Gygax perspective, had a number of things:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A sometimes very gritty perspective.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Uncountable options, which went from the very commonly used (not dying at 0 but at -10 for example) to the (almost) never used (at least at our tables) ones, like the one that you mention above.</li> </ul>In our case, because we played, in addition to the low levels, at very high level, extremely epic, there was very often enough magic to counter the effects above. At low level, the risk was much more death than losing limbs, there was an area between raise dead and regeneration where limbs and eyes were sometimes lost, and after that, the biggest risk was losing your soul and becoming non-resurrectable.Can I please ask you to use such derogatory wording about the interpretations that other people make ? Because, honestly, I could easily use the same words when you claim to play in an epic way and all I see is the use of very technical powers on a grid, but still modifying the rules when it suits you.4e RAW interpretation is not silly, it's just a different paradigm, like every edition (although it's more "closed" than others due to the formal rules) it can be played in a variety of ways. But the most important thing to understand is that it is not a realistic simulation of our world. At best, if it's not purely technical (which is, by the way, one of my problems with many powers there and is one of the reason for which it does not appear silly to a lot of players, they are just playing the rules), it is a simulation of the genre books/movies/shows where people are certainly out of the fight and look like they are dying just enough that the other heroes and the audience becomes worried about them. And indeed, in a number of cases for the most dramatic stories, it actually happens.But when it does not happen, it's very rare when there are even medium-term effects of that "dying" state, because it does not make for a dynamic story, so there are always reasons for quick recovery. After that, it can be attributed to many things, but it's usually technology or magic, not simple recovery or a few words, no matter how commanding. Why ? Because that would indeed look silly to most readers/viewers, whose suspension of disbelief would be to say "but that is so mundane that it should at least, for the mundane part, mirror what is happening in our real world".This is why applying the rules exactly as written in 4e for warlord healing does not make sense to me, because it gives me both the impression of a purely technical power given to a class so that it can do what other classes of the same role can do and the impression of a badly written show where things happen that stretch my suspension of disbelief.Again, it does not mean that I can't envision the case where a guy believes he is dying and the voice of his officer rouses him, gives him incentive to fight, he rallies and is later saved. Why not, it's suitably heroic, and interesting as a story that can happen once. But if you give a power like this to a class in a TTRPG, it will get used in every fight, and while it might be explainable once, having it happen technically over and over again is just ugly to me, and forcing combat to become, in effect, fictionless, because you start to completely ignore the fiction just to apply technical powers that don't really make sense, over and over again, for the whole campaign.And this is why the 5e view of the "warlord", infusing his troops with the power to fight longer (by temporary hit points) rather than having them "recover" looks much better to me, in particular with my views (as a marathonian) about the difference between sustaining effort and recovery. It makes it exactly as fictionfull as a commander inspiring troops would be, and it does not force me to twist the meaning of "dying" right and left, and retcon things all the time like you do.Again, if retconning is your preferred way of doing things and your players like it, all the better for you. It's just that, at our tables, and as you probably saw from my examples of play, we want fights to be hard and fast, fully integrated in the story, and not spend time on them more than absolutely necessary for the story and drama. And we have found out that any sort of retconning, especially by other people during one's turn, is absolutely fatal to the pacing of combat, because it sparks discussions, people wanting to understand how reality is different from what they had envisioned it, etc.Shield is certainly not a retcon, it's just the DM saying "the monster rolls an 18 to hit, does he hit you ?" and the player answering "no, my AC is normally 14 but I cast shield, so it's a miss", and that's it, part of the standard resolution. But saying during one's turn "he is dying", and a few turns later someone else saying "actually no, he was not really dying, he just needed a few words of encouragement" is a retcon and a change of the story. Again, once at a table for dramatic effect, why not, but I can guarantee that at our tables, it would degenerate into a comedy effect extremely quickly, and that every time a DM would say "he is dying", people will start to say "or is he? Dum dum dum...."No, this is YOUR way to look at it, but it id by no means the only one, and if I may add, it's not the one that is supported by the rules as written. This is certainly not something that I will hold against you, I'm just pointing out again the important part, especially linked to the subject of this thread, the more formal a system is, the more full of technical rules, the more you need to "interpret" them if you want to play the game narratively and make your combats less fictionless.</blockquote>

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