Hit Points & Healing Surges Finally Explained!

[chaotix42]

LOL

And don't drown in that pool of your own blood! *rolls friend over on back*

 

[Mallus]

Yeah it could be silly, but I would also argue cinematic for the warlord's words to be so rousing as to wake his allies from violence-induced comas.

This would be particularly funny in our campaign, since the party warlord looks exactly like Dr. Phil (in chain mail).

 

[Scribble]

LOL

And don't drown in that pool of your own blood! *rolls friend over on back*

It's a quote from The Abyss.

Neo, I'm not afraid anymore. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that that man... the man that I loved would be The One. So you see, you can't be dead. You can't be... because I love you. You hear me? I love you.

Now get up!

The Matrix is slightly more on the philosophical side though.

 

[Halivar]

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Goddammit you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now Fight! Fight! Fight! Right now! Fight goddammit! Fight! Fight! Fiiiiiiight!!!!!!!!!

LOL I was thinking of exactly that scene!

 

[chaotix42]

It's a quote from The Abyss.

Neo, I'm not afraid anymore. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that that man... the man that I loved would be The One. So you see, you can't be dead. You can't be... because I love you. You hear me? I love you.

Now get up!

The Matrix is slightly more on the philosophical side though.

Great quote then! I thought that all came from the heart!

Another good example, too.

That's how my games go though - a very heavy dose of what I think is "cool" and very little of what anyone would consider "real."

 

[gizmo33]

No character in 1st edition ever takes 40 or 50 days to naturally heal.

It's 1 hp/day, right? Maybe 2 or 3 or something with complete bedrest. Remember the example of the 95 hp character? Your not sharing your math here. Take a 100th level character with 300 hitpoints and how long does he take to heal?

As for lying in bed because you feel unlucky, that's not as ridiculous as it is sounds at first, but I don't even have to defend it because its such an obviously false claim.

Well, I've heard it again and it still sounds ridiculous, or at least strange. In fact, you don't try to explain it as much as make vague allusions to some idea that I don't understand 1E "rules". You can keep saying that but it would be helpful (and more relevant, actually) if it were substantiated.

If you've read page 82, then you'd realize that Gygax never assumes all of a high level characters hit points are intangible - some he admits represents the ability to absorb damage. So a high level character is slowly healing up all those aforementioned nicks, gashes, bruises, cuts and bumps. While he's doing that he's also restoring his confidence, his flexibility, his stamina, the favor of the gods or whatever else you think his hit points represent.

Well whatever they represent never really is an issue. "Flexibility" means his dexterity is lower? No, you only "say" flexibility. But heck, in 4E I can say that your character is feeling sore and tired when he's at max hitpoints. A 4E character goes through an adventure, takes X damage, heals it back with healing surges, then goes home. I can describe him as being injured and it's as demonstrable as claiming that a 95 hp character that takes 20 hp of damage is injured.

Please stop pontificating over rules you don't know or understand. Besides which, I'm not sure what points you hope to score by proving that 1st edition D&D is unrealistic.

These aren't rules, first of all. And secondly "pontificating" is in the eye of the beholder. I've been pretty specific about my objection. The points I'm "hoping to score" have to do with the issue at hand. Plus, you haven't contradicted anything I've said about the 1E "rules" that you're talking about.

First of all, you are again completely clueless about the 1st edition rules.

"Completely" would mean I hadn't heard of hit points before. You don't use language very precisely. You should be more specific about what it is in the "rules" that I don't get. Keep in mind that some general musings by Gygax about the concept of hitpoints are not "rules". Allowing hp damage to essentially mean "anything you want them to" is not a rule, really, is it?

No one that has actually read page 82 of the first edition DMG would write the above.

I have read it. "No one who has eaten coleslaw likes it", according to your strange reasoning. I'm not sure why you find it necessary to base your arguments on stuff that you don't really know.

Secondly, I think it can be fairly assumed that a character spending a couple weeks resting would have signfiicant physical injuries.

In what way is that "fairly assumed" other than you say so? Those so-called "significant physical injuries" manifest themselves in NO OTHER WAY in the rules. He still has 18/00 strength. He still has 18 Dex. He still has a 12" movement rate. He's not more likely to be surprised because he's dizzy or tired. I've gone over this though - I'm really trying to get you to recognize that the abstractions between 3E and 4E are very similar.

As for the rest, why should I bother explaining how I'd narrate and justify the above to someone that so clearly has a chip on his shoulder that he's willing to pontificate on the effects of rules even without knowing what those rules are?

All sorts of things are clear to you that I don't agree with - I'll add this to the list.

Or to condemn explanations without even knowing the full explanations?

Is finding your explanations, as they stand, contradictory, unconvincing, and not entirely informed by either the 4E rules or the logical consequences of 1E philosophy considered "condeming"? I've tried to explain the basis for each one of these opinions. Step 1 of me "knowing the full explanation" would be for you to give one.

Oh good grief. You are willfully misunderstanding me now.

There's already been a post on mind-reading. What I"m "willfully" trying to do is explain why what you say doesn't seem right to me.

I wasn't really speaking about 'daily resource management at all' nor making any claims about 1st editions 'daily resource management'.

Then AFAICT you're talking about something that has nothing to do with 4E hitpoints, since healing surges are a daily resource.

For one thing, in 1st edition you usually can't reset - even at high levels - in as small of a time period as a day. You can probably recover all your hit points in a day if you have enough healiing spells, but then you'll need to wait another day to recover your spells.

You can recover all of your hitpoints in several rounds. Then you can recover those spells in a day. I don't think I need to spell this out, do I? You can "reset" in a day in 1E, and IME it was not uncommon - mainly because PCs wouldn't wait to lose all but 1 of their hitpoints before they retreated.

But I never claimed 4e doesn't have reset management, I merely said that the feel of the resource management was very different than earlier editions and 1st edition in particular.

I think it's pretty much indisputable that 4E has a different "management" philosophy - that was the whole point of the change. The 4E designers felt that this management philosophy would address game issues like the "15 minute adventuring day". The the point that I was mainly trying to address is that there don't appear to be any real conceptual differences between what 1E and 4E hitpoints system represent.

Well, if you honestly think that its obvious to both of us that this is true, why are you assuming that my opinion doesn't take it into account?

I thought the answer to this was obvious. I'm assuming this because it appears to be the case from what I'm reading. IMO two people can know the same set of facts but come to different conclusions for reasons of logic and preference.

So are you seriously advancing the argument that nothing has really changed with regards to tempo or granularity in 4e compared to 1e?

No. How close is your question here to what the objection really is? I'm not objecting to the statement that 4E has different granularity. I'm objecting that 1E is somehow less abstract than 4E.

How can you possibly claim this and at the same time mock 1st edition for a guy resting for months (not even true, but nevermind)

You keep asking me to nevermind something that you say over and over. And you have a backspace key, which would make it easier for me to ignore this. Maybe just explain how long you think someone who takes 95 points of damage would take to recover?

And I'm not mocking 1E. I'm objecting to the certainty that certain persons apply to their interpretation of 1E rules. I'm critical of the seeming fact that anyone who tries to suggest that 1E injury is somehow better defined than 4E can't really provide any specifics. The mechanics and resource mangement issues are different but you're claiming that 1E gives you information that I really don't think it does. I can *say* that a guy in 4E is walking around with cuts and bruises on him with an equally convincing (ie. not much of one) basis as in 1E.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

you're claiming that 1E gives you information that I really don't think it does.

But it demonstrably does. In 1E (and 2E and 3E) if you, as DM, describe someone to your players as "having a shoulder wound that's still bleeding through the bandage," your players will have concrete information. Namely: "This guy is easier to beat in a fight now than if we wait for that wound to heal." That's real information.

I can *say* that a guy in 4E is walking around with cuts and bruises on him with an equally convincing (ie. not much of one) basis as in 1E.

Sure, you can do that. In which case, if you're the DM, you're actually misleading the players. Obviously it's not misleading if you tell them, as my hypothetical DM did back on page 5, that "the wounds don't really mean anything." But in that case, at a very minimum you're losing some ability to accurately transmit information about your world to the characters. The characters will honestly not know when someone is "beat up and easier to beat in a fight" or "beat up but no easier to beat in a fight."

And I think losing that kind of information is kind of a shame.

That's the problem with 4E healing, from my perspective. Neither the narrativist nor simulationist approach works. The narrativist approach breaks down because described injuries don't actually mean anything, and the simulationist approach breaks down because it's impossible for any PC to be injured for longer than six hours.

That leaves the gamist approach, in which (as someone earlier argued) hit points don't really model anything ... they're just a number. You could as easily track character "health" with Monopoly money.

 

[Obryn]

No character in 1st edition ever takes 40 or 50 days to naturally heal. Whether that's a problem is a whole different discussion, but it would lie on the side of 'D&D treats wounds too abstractly'. As for lying in bed because you feel unlucky, that's not as ridiculous as it is sounds at first, but I don't even have to defend it because its such an obviously false claim. If you've read page 82, then you'd realize that Gygax never assumes all of a high level characters hit points are intangible - some he admits represents the ability to absorb damage. So a high level character is slowly healing up all those aforementioned nicks, gashes, bruises, cuts and bumps. While he's doing that he's also restoring his confidence, his flexibility, his stamina, the favor of the gods or whatever else you think his hit points represent.

Under the OSRIC-ized rules, which are the only ones I have convenient at the moment, you...
(1) Heal 1 hp per day, but if you have a Constitution penalty, need to rest a few days before healing at all
(2) Get bonus HPs equal to your constitution HP bonus after resting 1 week
(3) Always heal completely in 4 weeks.

Whether or not this is the same as the healing rates found in the 1e DMG, I can't tell you right now.

So are you seriously advancing the argument that nothing has really changed with regards to tempo or granularity in 4e compared to 1e? How can you possibly claim this and at the same time mock 1st edition for a guy resting for months (not even true, but nevermind) to recover his hit points? Does that ever happen in 4e?

Sheesh.

I think that hit points have only changed a very slight bit from 1e to 4e, but it's a slight bit that I can understand people having an issue with. All along, from 1e to 4e, the following have been true...

(1) HPs are abstract and represent both physical damage and non-damaging things such as luck, stamina, parries, and so on.
(2) At higher levels, characters have more of them. Characters with high Constitution scores also have more of them, but not characters with high Strength or Dexterity.
(3) Even though it's not all physical damage, vanishingly few things that aren't potentially physically damaging ever take them away.
(4) In some cases, HPs allow characters to routinely fall 100' or more, get dipped into vats of acid, and eaten by purple worms without dying or even suffering noticeable ill effects like burns or broken bones - especially at higher levels.
(5) Include "rider effects" such as energy drain, paralysis, poison, and the like that occur on a hit without considering if the hit was actual physical damage, luck, stamina, or anything else.
(6) Generally disregard any physical symptoms such as sprains, broken bones, concussions, amputations, and the like; instead subsuming everything into "hit points." (There are exceptions, but usually these are specific creature abilities or items like a sword of sharpness.)

About the only new thing, in my mind, is...

(7) In 1e-3e, natural and unaided healing is slow, though it is significantly faster in 3e. In 1e/2e, it could take weeks. In 3e, it could take days. In 4e, natural and unaided healing is much faster, and except for disease considerations, generally completes overnight. Although HPs can be refreshed after each battle, the amount is limited by daily healing surges.

-O

 

[billd91]

It's 1 hp/day, right? Maybe 2 or 3 or something with complete bedrest. Remember the example of the 95 hp character? Your not sharing your math here. Take a 100th level character with 300 hitpoints and how long does he take to heal?

I'm going to assume you don't have the 1e sources on hand to look it up even if you say you've read it. But it's p82 of the DMG. Twenty-eight days of continual rest will restore any character to full health.

 

[Scribble]

But it demonstrably does. In 1E (and 2E and 3E) if you, as DM, describe someone to your players as "having a shoulder wound that's still bleeding through the bandage," your players will have concrete information. Namely: "This guy is easier to beat in a fight now than if we wait for that wound to heal." That's real information.

Sure, you can do that. In which case, if you're the DM, you're actually misleading the players. Obviously it's not misleading if you tell them, as my hypothetical DM did back on page 5, that "the wounds don't really mean anything." But in that case, at a very minimum you're losing some ability to accurately transmit information about your world to the characters. The characters will honestly not know when someone is "beat up and easier to beat in a fight" or "beat up but no easier to beat in a fight."

Why is it different? Because of the healing surges? You have a limited supply of healing surges, so there's stilla loss of something.

He's beat up, bloody, and you can see his eyes showing less of a willingness to keep going then before.

That's the problem with 4E healing, from my perspective. Neither the narrativist nor simulationist approach works. The narrativist approach breaks down because described injuries don't actually mean anything, and the simulationist approach breaks down because it's impossible for any PC to be injured for longer than six hours.

Meh... I've always felt that D&D healing was way to quick and easy even in earlier editions to really be "realistic." I've always just had to say D&D people are just better... So the extra speed doesn't really bother me.

Extra long/ more complicated heal times is handled by me in the same way I handled it before- by over riding the system.

That leaves the gamist approach, in which (as someone earlier argued) hit points don't really model anything ... they're just a number. You could as easily track character "health" with Monopoly money.

Which is kind of the way it's always been. Which is also why I kind of don't agree witht hat whole GNS design idea too much... Because it usually amounts to just different people describing the same idea in different ways.

HP = ability of the player to over ride the games percentage chance to make you dead and say no at this point I am 100% likely to not die. That ability decreases the more you tap into it.

BTW Jeff... we're neighbors. I live just north of you right by stonestown mall!