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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4466531" data-attributes="member: 74166">I agree 4E has some vocabulary problems. But IIRC as was said about 3E some of the vocabulary choices are as a result of an attempt to maintain or reflect gaming culture. If they renamed hit points "concussion points" and healing surges "recovery surges" and called dead characters "beyond help", even though those names IMO contribute to a better mental model of the damage, the charge could be made that this was change for the sake of change, deliberately unfamiliar. And as far as it goes, that would be true. "Hit points", "healing", and "death" are part of a common vocabulary, however applicable or accurate their use is.Well, Raise Dead is the "ritual healing" I'm talking about. It works on any character with "dead" status.It makes no practical distinction between these two characters:- the fighter the fire giant boss killed by golfing him into an obsidian pillar -- he was aiming for the archway but lifted his head during the downswing -- who collapsed on the ground, tried to get himself up, and in the end just lay still. He is still breathing and his body may twitch reflexively but none of the healing powers the characters have work on him. He has "dead" status, and only Raise Dead can get him up and running again, though he'll have to shake the kinks out: he's at -1 to a lot of rolls until 3 milestones go by.- the rogue the fire giant boss killed after she landed on his back to deliver a vicious stab between his shoulderblades. Before she could jump away he exploded in flames -- free action when first bloodied -- and she dropped like a stone into the lava. Did I mention the boss was standing in lava? He's a fire giant, they do that. Anyway, all the rest of the party could recover after the battle was a mostly melted boot, sole-up in a rough cone of obsidian they chipped away after the wizard dropped an ice tomb on the general area. They hope her ashes are somewhere inside. She also has "dead" status, and only Raise Dead can get HER up and running again, in a ritually reconstituted body she'll have to get used to: same penalty, same duration.It does so more for metagame reasons: if it's more costly or risky or carries larger penalties to bring someone back to life from scattered remains than from a mostly intact body, that could present the uncomfortable choice between dying in a recoverable fashion and surviving -- or helping the party survive e.g. "GO! I'll hold them back!" -- but in a way that risks or even assures less recoverable death. The game is built to encourage risk-taking.Well, then, give the players my handful of guidelines and tell them they're responsible for describing wounds to their own characters. I mean, it's their story too, right? You can describe the monsters as getting beaten up however you like since they generally don't have to worry about recovering.Lemme hit you with a little human information processing theory. Shannon and Weaver propose a unit of information called the "bit", which is equal to the negative log, base 2, of the probability of an occurrence. If there are four equally likely events, say, notification that one of them has happened contains 2 bits of information. Experimental research into reaction times and the like tends to show that the human brain, even from an exceptionally intelligent person, is about a 2 Hz processor (2 bits per second) with a working memory of perhaps 3 bytes -- 24 bits. It's frankly pathetic, but it's coupled with a crazy mad wonderful information storage and retrieval system, which is where most of the difference comes in. Going freeform is slow because you've got to call up possibilities for what could happen next, and they take time to consider - unless you're working with mental scripts which tend to have the next step happen with a high probability, but if you go off-script things get slow again. A way to speed it up is to predetermine certain things, giving them a probability of 1 and effectively zero processing time. But that can become too predictable, so most systems with predetermined mechanics tend to incorporate random variety and lookup tables.Systems that go too far down that road tend to hit not only processing gap but overload working storage - and Rolemaster is a great example of this. It's a way to basically experience page faults in real life. Some of my best times hacking and slashing, though, were in an online MUD with basically a Rolemaster engine - GemStone III and IV, if anyone's heard of those. The computer does the math and I absorb the results, and it worked out pretty well. Even the stuff that happened during special GM-intervention events was scripted to some degree - and I still remember 2 times when I think I actually dumped some severely unintended behavior into a script and "broke the game" by trying to introduce a narrative. If anybody's interested, I can spill.I think a good middle ground is a system that gives you the guidelines to predetermine your own stuff ahead of time, like how you describe wounds or what the monsters look like and how they act. That way it doesn't have to overload processing and memory by trying to simulate all things to all people but still passes on an awful lot of processing savings to the end users. And here's a special gift to Herremann: a Bugbear Legbreaker!melee attack "Gentle Persuasion" (standard; recharge 56) +10 vs. AC, 1d12+4 damage and make a secondary attack: +10 vs. Fortitude, inflicts "Kneecapped".Kneecapped - level 9 "disease", Endurance DC improve 19 worsen 14.The character is cured^The character's speed is reduced by 1.^ vInitial State: The character is slowed.^ vThe character loses 2 healing surges; these cannot be recovered until the character improves.vFinal State: Whenever the character is first bloodied, he immediately falls prone. He cannot run or charge, and if he spends a move action to walk he falls prone again at the end of his turn (save ends)</blockquote>

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