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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5965961" data-attributes="member: 58197">Well, I want the term "healing" to refer to the closing of fictional wounds. But if we are going to have a survival buffer (as every edition of D&D has done), there will obviously need to be a way to replenish it, and it's probably worth having a word for that. I'll call it "recovery."Anyway, since Crazy Jerome has clarified that he's talking about buffer-restoration, here are my principles, which are partly aesthetic and partly functional:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Some form of rapid recovery can take place without the use of magic, so that a party without a cleric is not crippled.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Recovery that is fictionally described as "healing" must be mechanically distinct from that described as "restoring morale" or "catching your breath" or what have you. (That doesn't mean we need a separate buffer, but healing-recovery and resting-recovery should work in slightly different ways.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rapid recovery has limits. At some point, characters can push beyond those limits and suffer long-term consequences that cannot be shrugged off with a few minutes of rest. Ideally, the limits should be "soft limits," so that the long-term consequences are mild at first and get worse if you keep pushing.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Whatever terms are used for recovery, the buffer, and so forth, the mechanics should mostly conform to the fiction implied by the terms used. If recovery is called "healing," then it should work like healing. If loss of buffer is triggered by a "hit," that should imply that the character was struck by an attack. There will inevitably be corner cases where fiction and mechanics part ways, but those should be the exception (e.g., falling damage) rather than the rule.</li> </ul>That last bit is quite important IMO, because rules terminology is one of the most powerful devices in the game for shaping the fiction. Whatever those terms imply about the fiction, those implications are getting constant reinforcement. You can talk till you're blue in the face about how a "hit" could be a near miss, but the word "hit" is telling a different story, and it's telling it every round of every fight of every gaming session, drumming it into the players' minds through endless repetition. A paragraph or two in the rulebook doesn't have nearly the same impact.</blockquote>

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