D&D 5E Healing Surges, Hit Dice, Martial Healing, and Overnight recovery: Which ones do you like?

[Jester David]

This is no more true this time than the last time you said it. Healing surges in fact allow two forms of attrition.
First the in encounter attrition because there are hard limits on the number of healing surges you can spend in any given combat. Limits provided by the powers the party has - but this is a definite form of attrition.
Second the long term attrition. Your healing surges are strictly limited. And if you've never had the fighter hide behind the malediction invoker because they ran out of surges, I have. If you've never seen a wizard savagely beaten down but survive so that after the short rest at the end of the first encounter in the day they only have a single spare healing surge, I have.

The limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available. It’s not a hard limit. It exists, but often the action economy and range is more of a factor.
The second, attrition of healing surges, only exists with finite healing surges. It’s a cyclical argument: healing surges allow attrition because you can run out of surges.

This ignores slower health attrition where the actual hitpoints a character has slowly decreases over successive fights.
Or the reduction of healing resources as people run out of spells. While the number of healing surges you can use in a given encounter are finite, the majority of the time, this number is constant and resets at the start of the encounter. 4e PCs very seldom have access to less healing because of a hard fight.

And I disagree. I believe that the main reason you find this to be the case is that you personally (along with a lot of other people, granted) have spent years mainlining the pure gamist logic that underlies oD&D. 4e mitigates this gamist logic just about everywhere - but like hit points it forces you to relook at the rest of it without eliminating it all. Which means you're made aware of all those places where gamist logic is in play - simply because of the familiarity difference.

Hrm… that’s actually a really good point. Kudos.
I am likely a little indoctrinated to the existing gamist logic so it’s more ignorable.
Still, it doesn’t change the fact drawing attention to it with new mechanics is awkward and problematic. And while the other edition may have X amount of gamist logic (that I am accustomed to), 4e still has X+1, increasing the total proportion of gamist logic. And many of the changes it made were for gamist reasons, reducing the total amount of simulation.

If you have all your surges but 0hp you are down and potentially bleeding out or haemoherraging, granted. But it is flat out wrong to claim that if you are on full hit points and no surges that you are unaffected. You can not spend a second wind. You can not take (much) advantage of Healing Words or even Healing Potions. You are brittle and at the end of your strength. Claiming that having your surges exhausted doesn't matter is quite simply wrong.

True, but your response ignores my point that healing surges are only the loosest reflection of health. You don’t die any less quickly at full surges, you don’t stabilize any faster, or healing a greater amount. HP is the reflection of health.
While at 0hp you cannot take advantage of any healing, if at full hp you don’t need to. The results of entering a combat with 10 surges or 1 surge is the same, especially if you don’t spend a surge.

This might be your experience as a DM - but it is not mine. If you give the PCs all the time in the world then yes it is an issue. I don't.

I don't recall ever having asked the party for a stop because we were low on either consumables or because I was out of daily powers. For that matter the times it happened we told the nova-ing player to suck it up and that they had encounter powers. (The one exception here is if you have a space to rest right before a BBEG fight). Stopping because we were running out of surges? Oh, hell yes.

Your experience is not my experience. And I don't believe it's the intended experience. Or the expected one with any pressure.

As I’ve said before, I had to change the stories I told to accommodate 4e. I didn’t have to between 2e and 3e, between 3e and PF, and won’t between PF and D&D5. In fact, D&D5 makes it easier to tell the stories I want.
Which is the big difference. Had I more interest I might have mangled 4e into something more appealing, but my player’s reliance on the character builder made that impossible.

The whole “that wasn’t my experience” argument always seems a little… off to me. What’s the point? Are you suggesting you’re a better DM than me? That I’m playing wrong? That the problem does not exist because you haven’t experienced it?
I’ve never experienced racism. Or sexism. Or poverty. But I’m not going to suggest those problems don’t exist due to a lack of personal experience.
Experiences will always vary, and if one segment of the player base regularly experiences problems with play, then that problem exists and needs to be acknowledged.

It sounds like 4e really works for you. So much so that you’re heavily defending it in a thread dedicated to healing in D&D5. Cool. Glad you have a game with no problems that impact your play. So keep playing it.

For that matter you say you like to run an episodic game like a TV series? 4e runs brilliantly that way. Just make a simple house rule. You can only take an extended rest either by taking a severe time consequence or at the end of the episode.

I tend to run sessions as self-contained stories that tie into a larger story. Extended rests at the end of each session. Except if I want a “two-part” session, which I avoid unless I know I can schedule another game quickly enough to avoid details being forgotten.
So, yes, part of my problem is that I’m playing the game “wrong” by not tracking resources between sessions and not having more than 1-3 combats per session. But, if I cannot play D&D how I want, I will (and did) find games that do work for me.

Still... even in the games I played rather than ran, the story dictated when we rested much more often than healing surges.

 

[Jester David]

I've never been accused of Fan Wanking but thanks. I'll note it for further non-conversation.

Fan wanking could also be called “reading between the lines”.


It’s only as derogatory as you make it, especially since the writer who coined the term applied it to their own work.
Really, you’re not a fan of something until you’ve tried to explain away a minor inconstancy. And the number of fan wanks that have become canon is staggering.


Mod Note: Folks, a hint - If you say something that's purposely worded in a rude manner, in a way to dismissively paint with a broad brush, and you get called on it, blaming the people you've painted for taking offense is *not* a good strategy. We suggest the stunningly useful, "I'm sorry," instead. ~Umbran

 

[Jester David]

You repeat and repeat this refrain: healing surges do not give any long term attrition; they are "only there" to allow characters to "fully heal" before each fight - in fact, they "prevent attrition"...

Where are you getting this from? What version of "4E" have you been playing that this is true? Did you miss the bit in the rules that makes it clear that, if a creature has no healing surges left, they *do not heal* when they try to (unless they can get some "magical" surgeless healing). And, if they get reduced to zero hit points with no surges, they are very likely to die - much more likely than if they have surges that can be called upon.

I'm getting this from a couple places.
1) The many people who agree that 4e does not do incidental mook fights well (include people who are otherwise fans of 4e)
2) The year of running, and year plus of playing 4e

In both my games, the number of times we rested because someone was low in surges happened maybe two or three times. I can count the number of times people ran out of surges on one finger and most of the time people got low we continued on and just shifted tactics.
Healing surges had zero impact on when we decided to rest.

As for attrition, because of readily available healing, PCs always started fights at full health. So there was no gradual reduction of actual health with PCs starting fights at 3/4 or 1/2 hitpoints after a few small fights. There’s no nickel-and-diming of hitpoints in 4e. You’re either at full hp, or above 85% hp and saving a surge.

Another theme of your posts - again untrue. The "mook fights" in 4E can cost healing surges. Which is essentially exactly the same function they had in earlier editions - to run down total hit points. They also might cause action points to be used up - and, incidentally, the "milestone" (at which extra APs are gained) happens only when encounters equivalent (roughly) to two at-level encounters have been completed. So, no, APs would not "build up" through multiple below-level fights; it would take 4 encounters at L-3 to reach a milestone.

Fair point on the milestones. My 4e RAW is rusty.

Still, while mook fights will run down surges, the PCs are very, very unlikely to enter any given fight below 80%hp. The moment they are hurt enough to use a surge, they will use a surge. Which is the point.
Thus the lower level mooks will never be threatening enough to damage or scare the party, because they’ll never be able to deal enough damage. The number of mook fights needed to bring a character down to near death is, well, a lot.

Ah, the old saw that "combat isn't roleplaying, roleplaying is the talky-stuff". Look, play your game with as much or as little "talky-stuff" as you like - when I play RPGs there is shedloads of roleplaying going on *in combat*. Characters talk in combat, for a start, and when things get "sticky" is when real character shows through, not when gassing in a bar.

Just because you’re talking in character during combat in a game of Battletech, doesn’t mean it’s not a tactical miniature combat game.
When I play Clue or Monopoly I roleplay, talk in voices, and make decisions based on what “Professor Plum” or “Scooge McDuck, Land Baron” would do. That doesn’t make them roleplaying games.
(Try this sometime as a warmup before gaming. Break out Clue, do some RPing, have a blast.)

Stories will arise as a result of the action in play - sure. That applies to any human activity, because that's the way human brains are wired. But that doesn't really say anything about roleplaying games, or place any restrictions at all on the activities that give rise to the stories. I can go to the WC (bathroom) and tell a story about it.

Saying that "to play an RPG you have to tell a story", therefore, I assume means something more. I assume that it means that you have to play in order to tell a specific story. I don't accept that that is *at all* necessary in order to be playing a roleplaying game.

If you’re not telling story then the game is just a series of unconnected encounters. That’s not a campaign, it’s playing a board game with different scenarios. Like Castle Ravenloft.

To be a roleplaying game there needs to be a connected narrative between the encounters. A direct continuity. And the players need to be playing the same characters, or have some continuity between the current and past characters.

I'm pretty sure that, if you read what pemerton actually said, he was saying that in 4E the flavour text _does_ impact upon the mechanics of play, not _doesn't_.

Which is why I highlighted it. Because flavour text in 4e means absolutely nothing.
There are lots of great examples. An extreme one being Sly Flourish reflavouring a large white dragon into a medium cyborg assassin for a Gamma World game. Or someone changing the tone of each and every one of their powers.
The only bit of flavour text that means anything in 4e is the damage type, and that’s one bit of DM approval away from changing.

You might no have personally trotted out these tired old arguments before, but throngs have, before you. You might prifit from reading the myriad threads that spawned from their strident ruminations.

I don’t read threads without participating. If I’m saying the same thing as someone else, that means that we both came to the same conclusions independent of each other.
This is actually pretty important. If you’re seeing the same arguments and concerns again and again, maybe it’s not people quoting each other, maybe it’s people having the same reaction?

The onlt alteration I can think of that I would need to make to run most older edition modules in 4E would be to change or limit extended rests. I have already used some restrictions on extended rests in my home game, and it's really easy to do so. Other than that, it should work fine.

The very first thing I did when I got my 4e books was try and update Keep on the Borderlands. I never ran, as it was just some theorycrafting to get a feel for the edition.
Try it sometime. Run it straight, just updating monster statblocks. See how well it works.
I had to regularly combine rooms and encounters to get the right number of adversaries. The entire dynamic changed. Not to mention the tone of having every encounter be a balanced challenge for the party. And none of the traps worked just right, being the quick gotcha traps that did a bit of damage and then were disarmed, which would have a negligible effect on a party, being the kind of minor attrition doesn’t work as well. Especially since the party could easily back-up and rest.

I assume that these are simply your opinion, not implying that you have the capability to read the minds of the developers and know that these "facts" are indisputably true?

You mean other than the dozens of interviews and articles they wrote on game design, and entire preview books devoted to the creation of 4e?
It’s really, really easy to look back at the thought processes and chain of events that led to most of the 4e designs. There’s a LOT of changes that were heralded by complaints on message board.

This was in a post written in reply to you; did you not read it? If you didn't, that might explain why it seems so hard to communicate with you.

But where does it say that in a book?
Your argument seems to be “there isn’t a problem with the flavour, because you can just adjust the flavour.” This is a fluff-variant of the Oberoni Fallacy (aka the Rule 0 Fallacy).

 

[herrozerro]

In Savage Worlds' case I'm willing to forgive this aspect of meta-gamey-ness for two reasons:

1) The wound / soak mechanic is largely the ONLY pure meta-game construct in the game. Nearly everything else operates from a very consistent, process-resolution basis.

2) It fully serves the purpose of the system to meet its designed mode of play.

I don't really view them as meta gaming. It's just luck. having the lucky or bad luck hindrances modifies ones luck in that game. Yes, the player decides when the luck kicks in, but it's not really disassociative from the character.

 

[D'karr]

The limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available. It’s not a hard limit. It exists, but often the action economy and range is more of a factor.

Not true. Healing per encounter's hard limit is the number of remaining healing surges, unless you have some way of triggering surgeless healing.

The second, attrition of healing surges, only exists with finite healing surges. It’s a cyclical argument: healing surges allow attrition because you can run out of surges.

Healing surges are, and have always been, a finite resource so this makes no sense.

This ignores slower health attrition where the actual hitpoints a character has slowly decreases over successive fights.

The actual hit points, and consequently healing surges a character has slowly decreases over successive challenges.

Or the reduction of healing resources as people run out of spells. While the number of healing surges you can use in a given encounter are finite, the majority of the time, this number is constant and resets at the start of the encounter. 4e PCs very seldom have access to less healing because of a hard fight.

Not my experience, or that of many others, in the least. Challenging the characters usually takes care of that. In 3.x characters went to every combat full up on hit points as long as they had heal sticks (wands of cure light wounds). But you could heal as long as there was a heal stick. In 4e there are no heal sticks, but let's use a pack of 50 healing potions as the same cost if not encumbrance. Even if I have 50 healing potions I can only heal up to my limit on healing surges. Healing surges DO NOT reset at the start of an encounter. That is a limiting factor.

HP is the reflection of health.

Not in D&D ever. HP is a measure of how long it takes to get the PC to not combat capable. A 100HP fighter at 50 hp is just as combat capable as he was at 100hp. At 1 hp he is still as combat capable as he was at 100hp. The only difference is the time it will take to make him not combat capable. Because of this paradigm, HP in D&D have never had anything to do with health only the ability to stay in combat. This is the internalization that people have been making for years, and the real problem with ascribing HP as meat, or health.

While at 0hp you cannot take advantage of any healing, if at full hp you don’t need to.

Huh? When has it ever been the case that PCs lose the capacity to heal at 0HP?

The results of entering a combat with 10 surges or 1 surge is the same, especially if you don’t spend a surge.

The results of entering a combat with 10 hp or a 100 hp are the same, specially if you don't get hit. That is exactly what would happen to somebody that doesn't spend a surge. If the PCs HP are not reduced during an encounter they don't need to heal - the same as in any version of D&D. What is your point here? You really are making no sense.

As I’ve said before, I had to change the stories I told to accommodate 4e. I didn’t have to between 2e and 3e, between 3e and PF, and won’t between PF and D&D5. In fact, D&D5 makes it easier to tell the stories I want.
Which is the big difference. Had I more interest I might have mangled 4e into something more appealing, but my player’s reliance on the character builder made that impossible.

I can sympathize with this. On the other hand 4e made it so that the stories that I've always wanted to tell are easily accessible. I always had to mangle D&D to accommodate. The promise of Moldvay D&D finally became a reality with 4e. I have easily converted and used adventures from Basic, Expert, 1e, 2e, 3e and PF to my 4e game. I have even made some system changes that allow me to incorporate short term, and long term injuries to my game - all within the framework of 4e.

I agree the character builder is really nice and convenient. Doing it by hand might be a chore but it is completely doable. Thankfully I got the CB fixed and I was able to incorporate custom equipment, classes, companions, themes, and other things that as specific to my campaign. Works like a charm.

The whole “that wasn’t my experience” argument always seems a little… off to me. What’s the point? Are you suggesting you’re a better DM than me? That I’m playing wrong? That the problem does not exist because you haven’t experienced it?
I’ve never experienced racism. Or sexism. Or poverty. But I’m not going to suggest those problems don’t exist due to a lack of personal experience.
Experiences will always vary, and if one segment of the player base regularly experiences problems with play, then that problem exists and needs to be acknowledged.

I don't think anyone is suggesting they are a better DM than anyone else. At least they are not engaging in fan wanking.

I believe that the "that wasn’t my experience" quote was meant as an indication that your experience might not be exactly representative for everyone, specially for those that are not having the issues you mention. There are many ways to play the game, and your experience is definitely not the only one. The game provides a very robust framework that can be very tweakable with little effort.

You experienced some issues. That is perfectly fine and nobody is dismissing your experience. But don't discount the experience of those that have seen how the basic framework of the game was put together and have used it to great effect. However, continuing to repeat false statements as if they are fact does cause a problem for many of us that have had to deal with that sort of ridiculousness for some time. Making incorrect or flawed statements as if they are absolutes, such as "HP is a reflection of health", "the limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available", or the boardgame comment don't add more to the discussion either.

It sounds like 4e really works for you. So much so that you’re heavily defending it in a thread dedicated to healing in D&D5. Cool. Glad you have a game with no problems that impact your play. So keep playing it.

Yes this is a thread about 5e. So why keep making flawed, incorrect and disingenuous statements about how specific mechanics actually work in any other game? We get it, 4e didn't work for you. So much that you keep on attacking it on a thread dedicated to healing in 5e. Looks like 5e might work better for you. Great. Go play what works best for you, but how about not continuing to spread the lies that have been told about 4e for so long.

 

[Jester David]

Not true. Healing per encounter's hard limit is the number of remaining healing surges, unless you have some way of triggering surgeless healing.

Wha....???

Okay, stop and read what I was responding to.

Neonchameleon said:

First the in encounter attrition because there are hard limits on the number of healing surges you can spend in any given combat. Limits provided by the powers the party has.

Meaning, you can only heal people so many times in a combat, as the healers only have a couple healing words and related powers.
To which I replied:

The limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available. It’s not a hard limit. It exists, but often the action economy and range is more of a factor.

I was mostly responding to his claim of there being a "hard limit", when it's really a squishy slightly gelatinous limit given multiple powers from multiple characters, second wind, healing potions, wands, and even use of the Heal skill.

Yes, of course the number of healing surges is a limit, but that's unrelated to the hard limit "in any given combat" of Neonchameleon.

 

[Jester David]

I don't think anyone is suggesting they are a better DM than anyone else. At least they are not engaging in fan wanking.

I believe that the "that wasn’t my experience" quote was meant as an indication that your experience might not be exactly representative for everyone, specially for those that are not having the issues you mention. There are many ways to play the game, and your experience is definitely not the only one. The game provides a very robust framework that can be very tweakable with little effort.

You experienced some issues. That is perfectly fine and nobody is dismissing your experience. But don't discount the experience of those that have seen how the basic framework of the game was put together and have used it to great effect. However, continuing to repeat false statements as if they are fact does cause a problem for many of us that have had to deal with that sort of ridiculousness for some time. Making incorrect or flawed statements as if they are absolutes, such as "HP is a reflection of health", "the limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available", or the boardgame comment don't add more to the discussion either.

Every time someone says "that wasn't my experience" it seems to be a shorthand for "that's your problem and yours alone" or "I don't have that problem, so it's not a problem". Heck, even earlier in this very post you said:

Not my experience, or that of many others, in the least. Challenging the characters usually takes care of that.

I.e. I haven't experienced that, it's easily fixed. You haven't seen the problem, argument dismissed.

I almost want to make a "that wasn't my experienced" drinking game.
But I'll probably go off and fan wank Man of Steel some more or work on my unified X-Men Movie timeline. It's more fun.

 

[D'karr]

Meaning, you can only heal people so many times in a combat, as the healers only have a couple healing words and related powers.

Which is only part of the assumption of a limit.

In a party of four 1st level characters each covering one of the classic roles you can:

• Trigger second wind once for each (4)
• Leader HP Recovery twice (2)

For a total of 6 possible times per combat. If this is done on each combat of the day by the 3rd or 4th combat the characters have no healing surges left to trigger. If in addition to the in combat recovery the party also uses additional healing during rest periods - They might not even make it to a 4th encounter.

I was mostly responding to his claim of there being a "hard limit", when it's really a squishy slightly gelatinous limit given multiple powers from multiple characters, second wind, healing potions, wands, and even use of the Heal skill.

I kind of follow you there until you come up with this.

Yes, of course the number of healing surges is a limit, but that's unrelated to the hard limit "in any given combat" of Neonchameleon.

That would be like equating the range in distance of a vehicle to a "squishy slightly gelatinous limit" because you can push the car, or coast it downhill. When the vehicle has no fuel it does not move of its own power. When a character has no healing surges left - no manner of "second wind", "healing potions", "or healing skill" (no wands in 4e) is going to recover HP. There is the 1HP exception to this by the way but the argument still illustrates the point. Only surgeless healing is possible at that time and that is more rare than most other forms of HP recovery.

In other posts you have mentioned that you've hardly if ever seen a situation where characters were out of surges. This possibly colors your perception that these things always work they way you experienced. To me that seems like a very limited experience. If all I had run or played were games at 4th level making assertions of the entirety of the game to include paragon paths, epic destinies, etc. would also be limited.

Comments like the one below also don't help for taking your arguments with any seriousness:

To be a roleplaying game there needs to be a connected narrative between the encounters. A direct continuity. And the players need to be playing the same characters, or have some continuity between the current and past characters.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The limits of healing per encounter are solely limited by the number of powers/consumables available. It’s not a hard limit. It exists, but often the action economy and range is more of a factor.
The second, attrition of healing surges, only exists with finite healing surges. It’s a cyclical argument: healing surges allow attrition because you can run out of surges.

You mean that Healing Surges are designed to be a finite resource and this is woven into 4e. Healing surges are, contrary to your assertions, designed and intended to allow attrition as you yourself admit here. You claim it's a cyclical argument. What you actually mean here is that it is true. And because it is true claims otherwise are strictly and unequivocally false. Now please stop making false statements.

This ignores slower health attrition where the actual hitpoints a character has slowly decreases over successive fights.
Or the reduction of healing resources as people run out of spells. While the number of healing surges you can use in a given encounter are finite, the majority of the time, this number is constant and resets at the start of the encounter. 4e PCs very seldom have access to less healing because of a hard fight.

Because very few daily powers allow you to recover hit points? And because healing surges are never reduced by a hard fight? And because there are a lot of non-daily powers that grant surgeless healing?

In fact let's actually check your maths on "4e PCs very seldom have access to less healing because of a hard fight."

We can fairly easily define a hard fight in 4e as one in which many PCs take more than their base hit points worth of damage. Or to put it another way one for which they have to spend four healing surges to recover back to full hit points. And this happens fairly frequently in my experience (normally for one or two PCs).

So. If we're saying that a specific PC has spent four healing surges, which classes is this likely to hurt? (Other than the Vampire, of course...) If we assume that most people have a Con-mod of +1 then any class with 6+con mod healing surges that goes down in the course of a fight uses over half their healing surges for the single fight. First most of the controllers (other than druids, bladesingers, and possibly seekers which have 7 and are all pretty unpopular IME). Second, most of the strikers and especially most of the popular ones - rangers, rogues, warlocks, sorcerors have 6+con mod. So in a hard fight these classes commonly spend more than half their surges recovering.

So no, you aren't right even if you think attrition doesn't mount up from fight to fight. There are plenty of classes that can spend more than half their surges on one tough fight - and you can readily go over four surges spent for one fight if you are taking focus fire.

Hrm… that’s actually a really good point. Kudos.
I am likely a little indoctrinated to the existing gamist logic so it’s more ignorable.
Still, it doesn’t change the fact drawing attention to it with new mechanics is awkward and problematic. And while the other edition may have X amount of gamist logic (that I am accustomed to), 4e still has X+1, increasing the total proportion of gamist logic. And many of the changes it made were for gamist reasons, reducing the total amount of simulation.

I straight up disagree that 4e has more gamist logic rather than simply being a better gamist game.

True, but your response ignores my point that healing surges are only the loosest reflection of health. You don’t die any less quickly at full surges, you don’t stabilize any faster, or healing a greater amount. HP is the reflection of health.

You are strictly wrong here. The combination of the two is a reflection of your health - and a much better reflection of overall health than hit points.

The results of entering a combat with 10 surges or 1 surge is the same, especially if you don’t spend a surge.

This comes from the same assessment that the result of entering a combat on 1hp is the same as entering on 1000 hp if you don't get hit.

As I’ve said before, I had to change the stories I told to accommodate 4e. I didn’t have to between 2e and 3e, between 3e and PF, and won’t between PF and D&D5. In fact, D&D5 makes it easier to tell the stories I want.

And here I'd argue that D&D 2E has very D&D specific stories that are associated with it. Ones that take into account things like Vancian Magic and hit points that appear in almost no other form of fiction anywhere (Vancian Magic doesn't even resemble the works of Jack Vance). 2e also is very different from 1e. 4e's stories are different from 2e's - but whereas 2e is suitable for D&D stories 4e is suitable for general action/adventure stories. Yes, unlearning was a problem for you and I'm not surprised. But once more I think that it's the change that's the difference, not that 4e is less flexible.

The whole “that wasn’t my experience” argument always seems a little… off to me. What’s the point? Are you suggesting you’re a better DM than me? That I’m playing wrong? That the problem does not exist because you haven’t experienced it?

It's saying that you are presenting things as necessary consequences of the system rather than consequences of how the system meshes with your personal DMing style.

In the comment I was replying to you straight up say "healing surges, as currently presented, prevent attrition". They do not prevent attrition. They make attrition less obvious. The two are not the same and one single counter-example where they have not prevented attrition shows that they don't necessarily prevent attrition. I am such a counterexample.

I’ve never experienced racism. Or sexism. Or poverty. But I’m not going to suggest those problems don’t exist due to a lack of personal experience.

I'll take strawmen for 10.

I'm getting this from a couple places.
1) The many people who agree that 4e does not do incidental mook fights well (include people who are otherwise fans of 4e)

Including me here

In both my games, the number of times we rested because someone was low in surges happened maybe two or three times. I can count the number of times people ran out of surges on one finger and most of the time people got low we continued on and just shifted tactics.

"Just shifted tactics". Right. Your innocuous little statement here explodes your entire thesis. If you need to shift tactics because of attrition then attrition is a very real thing that you are taking account of. You have experienced attrition in the game. You have taken in character mitigating actions. You've changed tactics because people were no longer in a shape to take what would be their best tactics. You pull them off the front lines. What more do you want? The change to be due to a risk of death? You did that.

The result of attrition is that people do things differently than if there wasn't attrition. In 4e you do things differently due to attrition. You make sure the targets are differently protected. Any further claims you can possibly make that it doesn't exist should just be referred back to your own statement here.

To be a roleplaying game there needs to be a connected narrative between the encounters. A direct continuity. And the players need to be playing the same characters, or have some continuity between the current and past characters.

How is this relevant?

Which is why I highlighted it. Because flavour text in 4e means absolutely nothing.
There are lots of great examples. An extreme one being Sly Flourish reflavouring a large white dragon into a medium cyborg assassin for a Gamma World game.

Actually, no. That doesn't say what you think it does. Explicit monster rules were changed to do that. The white dragon for one thing breathes frost. The assassin's size changes. The assassin's defences change. The White Dragon as written is in no sense a cyborg assassin and you need to change actual rules text to make it such.

Or someone changing the tone of each and every one of their powers.

Doesn't mean that it hasn't changed. Merely that the direct mechanical effect is the same. Until people start responding to what they are actually doing which is approximated by numbers.

The very first thing I did when I got my 4e books was try and update Keep on the Borderlands. I never ran, as it was just some theorycrafting to get a feel for the edition.
Try it sometime. Run it straight, just updating monster statblocks. See how well it works.

I've only ever run Keep on the Borderlands in D&D Next. It was a pretty terrible experience, especially with those rats.

Fan wanking could also be called “reading between the lines”.

Would you kindly stop accusing people of masturbation.

It’s only as derogatory as you make it, especially since the writer who coined the term applied it to their own work.

And people have the right to make accusations about themselves and not be rude that they don't about others.

 

[Jester David]

I'll take strawmen for 10.

Yeah, I'm done here. At this point if I said water was wet you'd disagree with me, so goodbye.