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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622620" data-attributes="member: 42582">Every injury that a PC adventurer ever suffers in D&D, as a result of garden variety hand-to-hand combat, is one that can be healed, completely, by bedrest.In the real world, some injuries suffered in hand-to-hand combat - like pierced lungs or other organ damage, disembowelling, maimed or severed limbs, blinding, etc - cannot be healed by bedrest.Therefore, one of two things follow: PCs in the D&D gameworld have regenerative biological capacities very different from their realworld counterparts; or, PCs in the D&D gameworld never suffer these sorts of injuries in the course of hand-to-hand combat.Given that the rest of the game appears to presuppose that the first of these options is not the case, I guess that the second option must be the case.The dying messenger scenario, then, relies simply on the GM positing a scene in which an NPC has suffered one of these injuries that the PCs never do. I can see that this might well be jarring at the game table, if the players haven't performed the above inferences. But I don't think that it is cheating. (It would be cheating if the GM did this sort of thing in the course of resolving, rather than framing a scene - which would require suspending the action resolution mechanics.)If a table hasn't thought about it, they might also have to think about what is achievable via spells like Cure Serious or Critical Wound, Heal, Regeneration etc. Do the names of those spells really mean what they say? However any given table resolves this, the upshot is likely to be that the dying messenger setup will work the way the GM wants only against a low- to mid-level party. (And this stands to reason - PCs that can raise the dead, and travel at will between worlds, are also going to be able to heal a dying messenger unless there is some curse or other magical affliction at work.)I share your dislike for adventure-path style scenarios. But I don't agree that the dying messenger "cut-scene" is a railroad - because it's not per se a cut-scene. It's the starting point for a scene that the players can still resolve via their PCs. Suppose, for example, that the players remebmer that one of the PCs has a teleport scroll in her backpack, and the PCs then use this to teleport the dying messenger to the rooms of a high-level healer - only if the GM doesn't allow this to have an impact on the resolution of the scene can we tell the we have a railroad going on.What I personally find interesting about this thread is not the railroad debate - which, as I've just explained, I think turns on a misunderstanding of the difference between scene-framing and scene-resolution - but what it shows about D&D players' understanding of hit points. In particular, it seems many players believe both that (i) hit point damage sometimes represents injuries like disemboweling or a pierced lung, and (ii) hit point damage can always be recovered via simple bedrest. These strike me as obviously inconsistent propositions. That both are apparently believed by many D&D players is all the more striking to me in the context of the debate going on in another current thread about whether 4e is special in having introduced widespread "dissociated" mechanics into D&D!</blockquote>

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