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<blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4460975" data-attributes="member: 74166">First of all, you can be up and running in 5 minutes after you've been &quot;beaten within an inch of your life&quot;, assuming you have either 4 healing surges or a slightly smaller number and a friendly leader archetype. Faced with your own initial story of what happened - &quot;I was a pile of mangled limbs 5 minutes ago and now I can do cartwheels&quot; - why do you conclude that the underlying mechanic must be flawed, rather than admit the possibility you need to tell a new story?Consider this: hit points do not represent what you think they represent - they are not a spectrum between perfect health at full and a mangled pile of limbs and organs at -CON. That's what they may represent for NPCs after facing the business end of a bugbear ranger with serrated swords, but for PCs hit points are simple: they're your will to fight. This isn't Journey to the West, where Goku and Gojo pound on each other for 20 hours before one of them starts to get tired - fights take seconds, perhaps a minute or two. You don't die at 0 hit points, you pass out because you can't take the shock. Sometimes, yes, people can't recover from a shock and the body shuts down. But when you go from full hit points to single digits you only take the single bleeding wound that represents your getting bloodied - perhaps it's the only strike that even lands straight on. That's my story of hit points.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="GlaziusF, post: 4460975, member: 74166"] First of all, you can be up and running in 5 minutes after you've been "beaten within an inch of your life", assuming you have either 4 healing surges or a slightly smaller number and a friendly leader archetype. Faced with your own initial story of what happened - "I was a pile of mangled limbs 5 minutes ago and now I can do cartwheels" - why do you conclude that the underlying mechanic must be flawed, rather than admit the possibility you need to tell a new story? Consider this: hit points do not represent what you think they represent - they are not a spectrum between perfect health at full and a mangled pile of limbs and organs at -CON. That's what they may represent for NPCs after facing the business end of a bugbear ranger with serrated swords, but for PCs hit points are simple: they're your will to fight. This isn't Journey to the West, where Goku and Gojo pound on each other for 20 hours before one of them starts to get tired - fights take seconds, perhaps a minute or two. You don't die at 0 hit points, you pass out because you can't take the shock. Sometimes, yes, people can't recover from a shock and the body shuts down. But when you go from full hit points to single digits you only take the single bleeding wound that represents your getting bloodied - perhaps it's the only strike that even lands straight on. That's my story of hit points. [/QUOTE]

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