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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 4544111" data-attributes="member: 8461">Having just read over the last few pages of this thread, I think Raven Crowking is making an excellent point. I personally found this a very difficult topic to discuss, because it required explaining some assumptions about the interaction of fluff with crunch that I'd always taken as a given up until now. Looking back over this thread, that seems to be the case for several people, as there's a lot of difficulty and misunderstanding in explaining how to concretely represent the abstract nature of hit points and damage.The point that RC seems to be making is that in pre-4e models, hit points represent physical health - ergo, a character that lost hit points was taking physical damage. How bad that damage was overall is based around what I call the "damage percentage," that the wound's severity is equal to the percentage of the hit point loss it deals versus the character's total hit points.For example, Character A with 6 hit points total that takes 6 hit points of damage from a single attack has just taken 100% damage percentage - he has been killed/is dying from a single attack. Inversely, Character B with 60 hit points who takes 6 hit points damage has suffered 10% damage percentage - he's taken a wound roughly one-tenth as great as it would take to kill a person.Now, why the latter character took less damage percentage than the former character, despite both having taken the same amount of hit point damage, is where the fluff interacts with the crunch. The DM describes the latter as being a relatively minor wound, such as a deep but non-fatal cut, whereas the former is a mortal blow, such as having been skewered through the heart. By itself, this system seems to work, however, as was noted, magical healing throws a monkey wrench in things. Why is it that a cure light wounds that restores 6 hit points can restore Character A from his dying state (assuming 0 hit points is dying, rather than dead) to perfect health, but - if Character B were to be reduced to 0 hit points - only bring Character B back up to 10% of his total health?The problem here is that the fluff interpretation of the crunch is much narrower for healing than for damage. Damage can be described all sorts of different ways, which is why 6 hit points of damage believably be called a skewering, or a relatively minor cut. Healing, however, presents itself as a constant in terms of its effects, especially when it's magical - healing isn't different things to different people; if it can bring one person from dying to being fine, why not another person?The solution to this, which I believe is what RC was talking about, is to tweak the description of precisely how magical healing works. The idea here is that the healing energy (the hit points the spell grants) primarily go towards whatever wound pushed the character over 100% damage percentage, and only after that start to heal other wounds.So how would that work from a fluff point of view? Let's look back at Characters A and B.Character A had 6 hit points, and then lost all 6 in one blow - a fluff perspective would be that he suffered an immediately lethal wound, such as being stabbed through the heart. A cure light wounds that restores all 6 is then expending all of its energy piecing his heart back together (as well as the muscle and skin around it, etc.) basically undoing that most lethal of wounds. The spell expends all of its energy doing that, with none left over for other wounds...but since Character A has no other wounds, he's now exactly as he was prior to having been stabbed.Character B, on the other hand, had 60 hit points, but is now down to 0. Maybe he lost them all at once from a single severe wound, such as suffering a red dragon's breath weapon that inflicted 60 hit points of damage and fried him to a crisp, or maybe he lost them piecemeal, such as from multiple sword slashes, the last one of which stabbed him through the heart just like Character A. When Character B receives the cure light wounds for 6 hit points back, the spell is doing the same thing...it's healing the worst wounds first. If it was the sword slashes, then it's healed the one that pierced his heart; if it was the red dragon's breath, then it healed the part of the fire damage that killed him (e.g. the flames' damage to his organs, rather than to his skin). Either way, for Character B the magic worked the same way that it did for Character A; it used all of its energy healing his most deadly wounds first - at that point, the spell is expended, and his other wounds still remain.That's how hit points worked back in pre-4e games (for most people, at least).This changed in 4e because, as someone else said, 4e doesn't use hit points to measure physical vitality anymore. Now it uses them to measure combat effectiveness. This is a problem because it discards the "damage percentage" paradigm of fluff. Now hit point loss can be either physical damage, or it can be loss of morale, or anything else that effectively causes a person to be a less adequate combatant, until at 0 hit points they are unable to continue fighting, whether they're dead, demoralized, or something else.The reason this doesn't work very well is because now, hit point loss has no inherent fluff to it, but regaining hit points does. A spell that restores hit points is healing physical damage; a healing surge restoring hit points is the character raising their morale. This means that the DM can describe hit point loss as physical, and the PC can then receive a morale-boosting healing surge to restore hit points, or vice versa, which makes no sense from a fluff perspective.As Kamikaze Midget once said, there's now a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the fluff and the crunch of the game that wasn't there before, and trying to get around that fence to merge the fluff and the crunch back together isn't fun.</blockquote>

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