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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5711022" data-attributes="member: 54877">Wouldn't work as a house rule. Part of the point is that this is an aspect of the system that is difficult to house rule now. The changes to the flow of hit point loss and recovery during combat are subtle, but too pervasive for house rules. This is a rough design idea for a new/revised edtion. It merely happens to be a design idea that is difficult to communicate without some discussion of the mechanics. Even in my example, I've probably made the change less subtle than it would be once playtesting was done. The change to hit points, surges, and surge values would be slight, because the current pacing is mostly good. Get too far from that, and you lose one of the better aspects of 4E combat. It's a bit more drastic on the numbers on the monster side, but the goal is a similar pacing that uses surges. Edit:  My example is also probably not subtle enough on the intended effects of having damage acrue to surges directly, thus the confusion with a wound/vitality system.  In the vast majority of times, with intended pacing, a character should not have their hit points bypassed.  Accordingly, monster effects that do so would be rare.  On the character side, losing surges to crits and coup de grace is meant to make the players say, "ouch," but not radically change how they operate.  It is more feel than reality.  However, as presented, this does change once a character runs out of surges but still has a lot of hit points--especially if this is just before a boss fight with some nasty creature capable of taking surges more often. For that reason, a character down to half their hit points and only 3 surges after the penultimate fight (or what they thought was that fight) might choose to only use 1 or 2 of those surges to recover.  Experienced 4E players know that there really isn't much difference between "used all my surges and at full hit points" versus "down about a 1/4 of my hit points and one surges saved back".  This is because surges are only really used for recovery most of the time, and when absent (trek through the desert in a skill challenge) will be taken off of hit points anyway.  The proposed model does change that, and put an extra thing to consider into recovery choices.</blockquote>

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