Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Obryn" data-source="post: 4641126" data-attributes="member: 11821">Only if you make a conscious effort to choose one kind of injury narration.I'm not saying that long-term/magic healing is bad.  It's just one choice among many.The difference in abstraction isn't inherent in the system.  It's a consequence of the narration.I agree that 4e and 1e combats can easily be narrated differently.  I disagree that this makes one necessarily more abstract than another.Reasonable people can certainly prefer one way over the other, but when you're talking about a mechanic that makes no sense at its core - like hit points - we're not really talking about degrees of abstraction.  We're talking about different gaming styles.I think I've already beaten this dead horse a few times.  But I'll try again.  I think HPs are a functional tool: a token implemented in a game to facilitate a certain kind of play.  To me, they're little different from Action Points.  In 1e, healing needs to be magical and characters have no "reserves" to speak of - but when magical healing is available, it's unlimited.  In 4e, characters have a (daily limited) amount of self-healing they can perform, so HPs are primarily an encounter resource rather than a long-term resource.  It's possible to conceive of a situation where a 1e (and certainly a 3e) character could burn through more HPs than a 4e character has access to.  This leads to different strategies, different resource management, and different adventuring timeframes.I think it's great that you have a preference.I know it will sound crazy if you've read the thread, but I really don't.  I like different implementations of HPs depending on which kind of game I'm running.  As I mentioned, I use 1e-style healing times in my 1e game, and 4e-style healing times in my 4e game.  I get different enjoyment out of different games (which to me is kind of the point of having different games in the first place).  I think 1e's healing rates provide a certain kind of fun, 3e's healing rates another, and 4e's healing rates yet another.No rate of healing makes more sense than another because HPs themselves don't make sense.  Each playstyle might limit a DM's sensible narrative choices - but each also opens up its own narrative avenues.  By the same token, each HP style encourages certain kinds of play and discourages others.  Arguing about which kind of HP implementation is "more abstract" is like arguing about whether or not the Enterprise could blow up a Star Destroyer - in the end, neither one is real.-O</blockquote>

Verification