Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4543175" data-attributes="member: 18280">In all previous editions of D&D, the nature of hit points and healing was such that one could describe a wound when the damage was rolled by comparing the damage done to the amount of hit points the character had remaining.If you attempt to do this in 4e, you have the sudden problem of "mundane" healing closing gaping wounds, in any case where (say) a character is dropped to 0 then "talked back to full".  Even without this, if you say that any given hit point loss represents a wound, but it is then "talked away", you either need to retcon it to a non-wound, disjoin hit points to health completely, or live with the fact that your characters are in a world where someone saying nice things to you can provide actual healing.  Conversely, if you say something is just a morale problem, then it begs the question why magical healing helps.....or why a 10th level fighter is having a morale problem facing a single goblin in the first place.If wounds are healed magically, they must have been wounds.  If wounds are healed by "talking them away" they must not have been wounds.  You only know whether or not you have taken a wound after you determine how it is healed.  I termed this "Schrödinger's Wounding", after the famous thought experiment with the cat (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat" target="_blank">SchrÃ¶dinger's cat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>).While the problem becomes very obvious given extreme examples (such as "dying to full through a pep rally"), it is there all of the time, every time damage is taken.There are those who, in order to defend this "Schrödinger's Wounding", have now begun to claim that it was, in essense, always a feature of the system.  Pre-4e hit point loss, however, always represented actual wounding.  4e hit points do not.  While Fifth Element downplays this in his description of the passage he is quoting, he at least admitted that this is included in the passage Gary wrote.  Not everyone is so honest -- especially not on the InterWeb.A Gygaxian hit point, individually, does not have a concrete value, and represents both physical damage and the factors that make that damage either minor or major.  Every hit point loss, however, represents some amount of damage.  There is no such thing in the Gygaxian system as a hit point lost that does not track to some measurable physical damage, no matter how insignificant.The "in-game logic" of healing, rest, etc., depend upon this interpretation of hit points.  Altering this interpretation, as was done in 4e, without understanding it (IMHO, of course) has lead us to Schrödinger's Wounding in a Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail world.This is one of the biggest problems 4e has, though it is certainly not the only one.  Which is sad, because, as the previous thread uncovered, it would have been relatively simple for the designers to rewrite passages in the rules to eliminate it altogether.  Of course, the GSL prevents 3pp from doing so now.Still, it is hardly surprising that only one person would say that he seriously thinks that Gary would have agreed that the 4e hit point paradigm is not a readical departure from the one he devised.  I'd have enjoyed reading Gary's response had someone tried to float this as his idea while he was still alive.RC</blockquote>

Verification