That's obviously cool for you. In the games I have played over the decades though, we have always treated resurrections of any description as special - it's just how our group likes to play such things and how I think we'll continue to play things in 4E, even though as you say, it can be viewed as mechanically just a healing spell that can take even the most severely damaged creature/blob back to running around.
Well, it is a ritual, and you do need to invest some money in it. Maybe it can also only be done in special places with the permission of the right people. As long as you're clear about that up front you can make it as special as you want it to be.
Fine but as I have said, the mechanics of the game don't inform the players very well how to do this - and while your guidelines work for you, they leave several ramifications that do not mesh with my group's play style. The style of game our group plays, the players more look to the mechanics and DM to define what is going on in the game. Your style of play is different (no better, no worse, just different).
Yeah, I seem to have lucked into a group of players who are okay with me being a lazy bastard and shifting most of the narrative impetus onto them.
So if the DMG had included a wound resolution system, with, say, 1 Head 2-4 Arms 5-8 Chest 9-0 Legs (unless the GM gives you an obvious target, like ye legbreaker) and then random tables for each rough body location, with sample descriptions of normal concussive wounds, obvious but shallow wounds (bloodied), KO shots (0 hp), and apparently lethal wounds (-bloodied) that would be okay for your players? Let's say 20 wound samples and maybe 6 or 8 for the other types? Probably 6, it'd be easier to balance them in two columns that way.
Now, I'm not in the mood to write down 160 entries for a problem I don't have, but if it's severe enough to slow down play for your group, either through people trying to come up with ways to describe damage or carping on about how it's so unreasonable, maybe come up with 10/3/3/3 for one location and then see based on that if it's a reasonable time investment?
Herremann the Wise said:
That is one solution to the problem. Or you could have a mechanic that produces a result that can be quickly interpreted because the mechanic is clean and elegant and meshes well with the flavour it is representing.
It'd be nice if anything like that could ever actually exist.
Elegant proofs are elegant not because they can completely explain what they prove, even to the layman, but because to someone who already has the necessary mathematical knowledge to work a longer proof they can evoke it with a minimum of information. They are concentrated essential knowledge, just add water, but first you have to put the "water" in your head.
Herremann the Wise said:
However, at zero hp or less, injuries are quite severe (involving a tracking system like you have with the Legbreaker! - which I'll comment on below).
Well, one of the problems with any kind of damage modeling is that it makes the "take damage" step of combat resolution take longer.
Yeah, even the bugbear legbreaker with his 2 rolls per attack instead of 1, though you could probably speed up the condition resolution with, like, an index card with the states on it and a paper clip under "slowed".
Herremann the Wise said:
A different but I think equally valid solution to the processing gap/overload you describe. The one thing human's are very good at doing is judging a situation quickly. Give them easily interpreted variables and I think most people are OK.
Quickly and, generally, wrongly, if it involves any kind of conditional, negation, or multiple subsets. I've seen the research. You would not believe how bad even master's-level students are at fitting those kinds of relationships into the human mindset.
(And don't even get me started on assessing states with, and making predictions from, derivatives. That was the toughest thing to wrap my head around when I was learning to drive, and I was kicking calculus and taking names at the time!)
