Healing

[Lonely Tylenol]

So you need a Paladin in every party? so they swapped needing a Cleric with needing a paladin so you won't die if you run out of surges hmm Okay.

Yes, they deliberately designed the game to kill players off as fast as possible. Happy?

I swear, can you people please ease up on the deliberate interpretation of every aspect of 4e in the most negative and pessimistic light possible? It's really starting to get tiresome, and I was already tired of it in September.

Does it not strike you as absurd to think that you have somehow in the span of a few minutes found a critical problem with the overall class balance and game design that the actual designers, developers and playtesters have overlooked? Does that not make you wonder if perhaps you are wrong, and that perhaps you should reserve judgement--and hold your tongue, so as not to look foolish--until after the information you require in order relieve your ignorance and make a sound judgement has been released?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

3e doesn't have a mechanic for grievous injuries.

Sure it does.

All HP damage can be quickly healed by a cleric, or just slept off in a few days of rest.

See?

In 3.5, grievous injuries required actual magical healing, or at least a few days of rest. In 4E (so far as we know), there are apparently no grievous injuries. You go from "uninjured" to "dead," without suffering injury along the way.

 

[HeinorNY]

Its how clerical healing works. It seems there's now a basic limit on how much hp damage you can heal in 24 hours. Magic will stretch that limit, but we have no reason to think it will remove it entirely.

Yes but I've paid for that potion. It's different from a power that recharges every 5 minutes of resting.

So you need a Paladin in every party? so they swapped needing a Cleric with needing a paladin so you won't die if you run out of surges hmm Okay.

You can drink a potion, or roll a 20 on your stabilizing check, or use a heal check to bring you up. If your players are "courageous" to keep going without healing surges, they better be prepared to die. Saying the character with 0 hp and no HS is hopeless is assuming on nothing.

Try not be so snarky here, it's not against the rules, but other members will eat you alive.
I'm a nice though

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Sure it does.

See?

In 3.5, grievous injuries required actual magical healing, or at least a few days of rest. In 4E (so far as we know), there are apparently no grievous injuries. You go from "uninjured" to "dead," without suffering injury along the way.

I hardly consider an injury grievous if you can perform acrobatics without penalty while suffering from said injury. In 3e, HP are just as abstract as 4e, and represent exactly the same "bumps, morale, and luck" as they do in 4e. They just take longer to get back naturally. They're not more grievous, they're just more inconvenient. A 3e character has to sit around for days waiting for his luck to come back, his nicks and scratches to heal, and his morale to reassert itself. A 4e character can do so in less than a day.

My campaign involves grievous injuries, using the house rules referenced in my signature. Regular D&D has none.

 

[med stud]

Sure it does.

See?

In 3.5, grievous injuries required actual magical healing, or at least a few days of rest. In 4E (so far as we know), there are apparently no grievous injuries. You go from "uninjured" to "dead," without suffering injury along the way.

An injury that you can fully heal in a couple of days is hardly "grievious". A RL grievious injury takes months to heal after surgery and with physiotherapy. Even then you won't get full function back in many cases.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I hardly consider an injury grievous if you can perform acrobatics without penalty while suffering from said injury.

There is a penalty. You don't heal as fast -- or possibly at all, if you performed acrobatics while waiting to heal naturally.

In 3e, HP are just as abstract as 4e, and represent exactly the same "bumps, morale, and luck" as they do in 4e. They just take longer to get back naturally.

"Taking a while to heal" is, at the very least, more representative of a grievous injury.

A 3e character has to sit around for days waiting for his luck to come back, his nicks and scratches to heal, and his morale to reassert itself.

Or he sits around for days waiting to heal from a grievous injury.

A 4e character can do so in less than a day.

Right. So far as we know (and that could change), there are no injuries at all in 4E.

Regular D&D has none.

Every edition of D&D has had them. They are, as everything to do with HP is, abstract, but they're there. In 1E, 2E, 3E, and 3.5, it's possible to be sidelined for days. To me, that's exactly what a serious injury is. Could you add more effects to simulate injury? Sure. But something that requires significant time to heal (or magical healing) has to be considered a serious injury.

So my question stands: I wonder if 4E handles that?

 

[HeinorNY]

Griveous injuries should be part of story mechanics and plot, and not something happening in a random basis.

 

[Lizard]

Yep. I'm all for getting rid of the "15-minute day," but I don't think a complete removal of limits does the game (or its verisimilitude) any favors.

IME, the healing surges makes for a good way of handling it. You can go for a good long while, but eventually you're going to have to stop for a breather.

I like the idea of 'healing surges' as a consumable resource, which can be used to heal yourself or (with some powers) others. I also like the fact they run out. I was really worried about at-will healing by clerics, leading to every village priest being able to keep people alive indefinitely. Two of my worst fears about worldbuilding, in terms of low-level at-will spells, have been wiped by the preview data. (No at-will unlimited healing for the level 1 cleric, and Magic Missile is no longer auto-hit, because an at-will, never miss, attack is just "rude", to use one of my younger friends' common utterances.)

Damn, I'm starting to like this. Bring on the social fu already!

And, hey, does Necromancer need writers?

 

[Goobermunch]

He was also wearing what was probably the best armor in all of the middle earth.
OK, maybe there are some powers that put some kind of "permanent" damage to pcs, but even so I don't like the idea that outisde of these powers a character is either dead or six hours away from full health, and I don't even liike that the the so called per day encounters can easily become 4/day encounter. They didn't fix the "15 minutes day" they just made days of six hours.

If that's the case, we'll just do what we did with 3.x. We'll state that you can't rest for at least 8 hours after your previous rest.

Given that they've claimed to have eliminated the 15-minute adventuring day, I wouldn't be surprised, however, if there was some kind of limitation on how frequently you can rest. Otherwise, you're right, they haven't fixed the problem.

--G

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Griveous injuries should be part of story mechanics and plot, and not something happening in a random basis.

So death can be simulated within the game, but injury can't be?

Okay, I think people are getting hung up on my use of the word "grievous." Ignore it. Wherever I've said "grievous injury," read it as "an actual injury, that takes either significant time or magical healing to fix."

Does 4E have that? (We obviously don't know for sure. Just asking.)