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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6292447" data-attributes="member: 87792">In short  you're trying to separate what healing surges actually do from their  method.  Healing surges are one way of doing this - but this is  something they do.  So it is something you can attribute to healing  surges.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.Strictly false, as I've  shown.  Just because the way you run 4e doesn't pressure the PCs enough  to make such things happen doesn't mean that they don't.  It means that  you don't pressure your PCs.Me, I find it less like a pure board game than any of oD&D, AD&D, or 3.X.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.Yet you've ducked the issues the way people  do in this discussion.  You've yet to say why you think that hit points  without healing surges are, contrary to the real world and fictional  examples I've provided, more gamist than hit points without healing surges.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.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.I don't.  Fair enough.Your claim that hit point attrition can not take  place is disproved by a counterexample.  I've already said things that  have happened in my games.  Hit point and healing surge attrition can and does take place in my games both when I play and when I DM.Now  admittedly I find 4e runs better when I redefine an extended rest as a  long lazy weekend in a safe and inhabited place because it's more likely  to trigger the attrition.  But 4e does not need this.  What you say can  not happen is an experience I have lived from both sides of the  screen.  It can and does happen.This is flat out untrue.  The effect would be equivalent if and only if healing surge attrition did not happen.  It does - and all your claims otherwise don't make them true.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.  Once more this is counter-factual.  Run low on  healing surges and you start not spending to top up to full HP - you  need to preserve those surges.  Run out of surges and you are screwed.   Run out of surges and hit points and you're almost doomed and the rest  of the party is running an escort mission.Once  more this is strictly false.  If what you were saying were true then  powers would directly heal hit points and you wouldn't get a limited  number of healing surges per extended rest.  Limiting the endurance is a  deliberate design goal - and that your parties take extended rests when  they have only expended a couple of powers is the unintended factor.   They are playing 4e as if they were 3e wizards.  This is an aberrant  playstyle (for that matter nova-and-rest and the 15 minute day was  aberrant in 3e).First it uses healing surges - it must unlock something within the  target character.  Second it's divine so it must use the God.  There are  multiple ways of combining the two - but that's a particularly obvious  one.</blockquote>

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