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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seusomon" data-source="post: 4395622" data-attributes="member: 68641">I think the 4e hitpoint/healing mechanics go a long way to fixing a sort of silliness that has plagued D&D since the very beginning. It's a silliness that has become so familiar, though, that many people take it for granted as being natural and logical.Hit points are (and always have been) an abstraction to represent a character's capacity to "take a licking and keep on ticking". Healing magic (including potions, wands, etc.), as a fantasy element, adds atmosphere and fun when it allows a character to miraculously get through a combat situation that might otherwise have brought him down. After the encounter is over, characters rest and recuperate a bit, and then head out to face the next challenge. This is all nice fantasy drama stuff, like you might see in a book or movie.Unfortunately, in previous versions of the game, it plays out that way only for low-level characters without many hit points or many modes of magical healing at their disposal.Once you get a lot of money, magical loot, and spells, then healing loses much of its drama and charm. It becomes a commodity - pay out so many hundreds of gold pieces to restore so many hundreds of hit points. It's a game-mechanical work-around for something that ought to be simple. Why can second-level characters just rest after a tough encounter and start fresh the next day, while tenth-level characters have to spend cash on wands and potions to do the same thing? Toting around expensive magical items for a routine, mundane purpose (recovery after a fight) is just silly. It has no drama or intrinsic fantasy interest to it. That's why you never see healing working this way in a book or movie.Healing surges help bring back the original spirit of magical healing - a few times during an encounter, you can get a magical "second chance" to revitalize yourself and keep on fighting when things otherwise look pretty bleak. But eventually, you reach the point where you've just done all you can do without stopping to recuperate. Gold pieces do not prevent that now; they never should have.The 4e healing potion is not a bottle of hit points. You don't sit around after an encounter chugging them by the dozen just because you need to to make the game work. Instead, they are one of a few ways to get a magical boost when you really need one. They are especially effective for low-level characters, where 10 may easily exceed their normal healing surge value, and other in-combat healing options are limited or awkward to set up.We're finally moving into a set of rules that keep the hit-point mechanic focused on what it is intended for: establishing the magnitude of threats a PC can face before reaching the end of his rope. Now, it no longer spills over into silliness like buying increasingly huge batches of healing magic or else sitting around for days to recuperate from an encounter just because you are high level.</blockquote>

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