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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4544249" data-attributes="member: 42582">The problem with the above is that Character B was killed by being skewered through the heart, the same as Character A. In the narration, the earlier damage did not contribute to Character B's death except indirectly, by making him less able to dodge the killing blow.So why, given that both suffered the same (near-)fatal wound, is it so much harder to heal Character B to full health than Character A - requiring either a lot more time, or a lot more magic? Your narration of damage implies that it is not a cumulation of nicks and grazes that kills B, but rather that these wear him down so that eventually he dies the same death as A. But the healing system strongly suggests that B did die through attrition, and thus that healing B just requires restoring more "meat" than is required to restore A.This makes no sense to me. Cure Light Wounds heals a (near-)fatal wound, but healing all of Character B's nicks and grazes requires Cure Critical Wounds? At best, the spells are badly misnamed. At worst, your model for hit points has broken down.And the problem arises with natural healing, also. Consider Characters A and B after they take 5 hp and 15 hp of damage respectively. Character A is badly injured - any blow will kill him. Character B has suffered only some minor wounds. Yet Character A will heal to full strength in less than a week, while Character B will require more than a fortnight to heal. That makes no sense to me, unless we assume that hit points are measuring something other than "meat" - eg some spiritual prowess or luck that Character B takes time to regain.Of course, you could change the natural healing rules to be more like 3E. But that is hardly a defence of the consistency of the AD&D hit point mechanics under your interpretation of them.Why do you say that magical healing in 4e is healing physical damage? If the damage taken is all psychic damage, for example, or is all the untyped damage inflicted by the Dread Wraith's hideous gaze, than the healing spell is presumably raising morale also.Only if the GM or the player are playing poorly.I didn't understand this when KM said it, and I still don't.Look, if 4e's mechanics were novel, and no one had ever RPGed with them before, then I could understand all this angst. But 4e's mechanics are old hat. They have existed for years in games like HeroWars/Quest, The Dying Earth, etc. These are not obscure games written by non-entities. These are major games written by the likes of Greg Stafford and Robin Laws, and they are full of discussions of how to narrate things like 4e hit point loss and healing in such a way as to avoid contradiction or the need to retcon. LostSoul in his posts has also given numerous examples and explanations.If you narrate an injury as physical, and then when a warlord heals you you don't know what to say without retconning, that is your problem as a player. As LostSoul and I have posted, the narration here is quite easy: "Despite my wound I grit my teeth and go on."And if you narrate an injury as a severed limb or something of that sort, which you think can't be teeth-gritted through, then you are no worse off than you ever were in D&D, because no Cure X Wounds or Heal spell has ever been able to heal a severed limb - it has always required Regeneration (in 3E this also seems to be required for the healing of ruined organs - like a heart pierced by a sword, presumably). So if you as a GM were in the habit of inflicting non-healable wounds on your PCs when playing AD&D -  not something supported by the damage mechanics - then I'm sure you can go ahead and do the same in 4e.</blockquote>

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