Hit Points & Healing Surges Finally Explained!

[Fifth Element]

OT: I was going to let this slide, but since at least two other people praised it and continued the thread further off-topic, I have to say that I'd find that kind of label for a power just a bit sexist and off-putting.

ON topic: The great and mighty Mearls solves nothing.

From chastising someone's use of the word "princess" to calling Mr. Mearls "great and mighty" in a clearly derisive manner, all in two sentences. Well done.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Closest thing I've seen matching this is Palladium's armour system. Armour has SDC, and depending on how well the hit roll is, you either hit the armour or bypass it and hit the target directly. Damage done to armour decreases its SDC, and at zero, it's broken.

I'm not familiar with the Palladium system in terms of performance, so I can't tell you if it works out, but you're still going to do a fair bit of rebalancing which includes figuring out how much punishment your armours are going to be able to take. And for the enhanced natural HP, how does it differ from normal 'real wounds' HP?

I played Palladium for quite a while and the armour system did not really work. At low levels it worked ok but repairing the armour was a bookeeping pain. Also it has its own issues wrt realism. However, at high levels it broke down completely because almost all hits that got through your parry defense would be over the armour rating and so the armour was almost invaribly bypassed and you might as well not bother with it.

Now a half level bonus to attacks and defenses a la D&D 4 could change that but that is a whole 'nother ballgame.

 

[gizmo33]

And if you've been bathed in acid, bull-rushed into lava, sliced with a poisoned knife, thrown off a cliff, and harpooned, you're not going to be better after a few hours of rest. You're not tired and bruised; you're burnt, poisoned, stabbed, exfoliated, and have broken bones. There needs to be a plausible narrative explanation for why you're better.

Really? Because no prior edition of DnD has had that explanation. When does a PC have broken bones? He never suffers a movement penalty, he never takes a penalty to attack rolls. In fact someone with a broken arm swinging a sword would probably take further damage. There's a risk of internal bleeding that would kill someone rounds later IRL. None of this happens in any edition of DnD.

Let's say you fall into lava and somehow survive. I guess at that point you're a skeleton. But it's not like other undead cut you some slack. Your charisma doesn't drop. In fact, all of your muscles burning away would probably impose a strength penalty, but it doesn't. Your eyeballs would probably boil and explode. That's got to be a penalty to Spot checks.

I'm only half-joking. There's absolutely no simulation of any injury in the hitpoint mechanic. Requiring that a cleric be around and use his spells to get your luck back might be a preferred way of playing the game for some people, but I don't find it a better simulation of anything.

 

[Oni]

I have always thought it might be interesting to run it straight, essential making HP and healing surges exactly like what they sound and making the character's men and women part from others. Fated or something similar. The fighter rises Jason Voorhees style after his Boromir style exit. They've already made PCs different, but you can take it a step further and make that a story point. Let them be marked or something similar, and let them be loved or feared in equal number.

I've kind of been leaning toward this in my own mind lately as I've been reading a lot of manga. Some people just have more vitality than others, and it can be increased via training. The sword blow that would have killed Joe Commoner just pisses a PC off. Witnesses exclaim, "OMG, he's not human!" and we move on. They might look bruised, battered, and bloody but if they've had a few minutes to catch their breath, they're back on top of their game, it won't catch up to them until after the adventure is over and even then it's nothing a little sleep, bandages, and meat won't cure.

[edit: because it's funny. http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=228 ]

 

[Kzach]

OT: I was going to let this slide, but since at least two other people praised it and continued the thread further off-topic, I have to say that I'd find that kind of label for a power just a bit sexist and off-putting.

Then you're being hyper-sensitive.

Suck it up, Princess.

ON topic: The great and mighty Mearls solves nothing. When you use a harpoon with a rope attached, you need to know if the damage you caused was due to hitting the person because you can yank them towards you in your next action. For injury poison to do damage, it has to cause an injury. If you're making a save vs. poison, it can't be paired with sword damage that's described as caused by muscle fatigue.

Again, this is a very binary thought process.

Use a little imagination provided by the context of the situation. The idea of abstraction is flexibility and simplicity. Use that flexibility to describe the attack appropriately.

Really, sometimes I wonder why people play this game when they're so adamant to stick to rules or interpret rules literally and as set in stone when really they're meant as spring-boards for the imagination. It's a game of imagination, use it.

 

[Obryn]

And if you've been bathed in acid, bull-rushed into lava, sliced with a poisoned knife, thrown off a cliff, and harpooned, you're not going to be better after a few hours of rest. You're not tired and bruised; you're burnt, poisoned, stabbed, exfoliated, and have broken bones. There needs to be a plausible narrative explanation for why you're better. Spells are that widget. A nap is not that widget.

I'd argue that if one nap isn't that widget, several naps have pretty much always been that widget.

A character in 3e who survives a fall off a cliff might be better in a few days rather than in 1 day, but I'd say that's still pretty remarkable. I guess by some definitions it's less remarkable, but there you have it. There are still no broken bones, long-term maiming, or anything of the sort. If you fall and survive you're still perfectly okay.

-O

 

[Kzach]

Hehe

 

[Harlekin]

Although there are a few people who don't "get" the abstract nature of hit points, it's a caricature -- and thus a straw man -- to attribute that to all, most, or many of the people who don't like 4E's system.

Personally speaking, I like healing surges. My beef with 4E is that there's no way to be actually injured ... at least beyond six hours. There's simply no denying that changing "three days" -- the average time for natural healing in 3E -- to "six hours" -- the maximum time for healing in 4E is a significant change.

Any attempt to characterize dislike of that change as a failure to understand that "hit points are abstract" is disingenuous. At best.

Not so sure it's disingenuous, given your post. You claim that you understand that hp can represent all kind of things other than physical health, but at the same time you seem to imply that characters cannot be physically injured when they are at full hitpoints. If loosing hp does not have to represent physical wounds, why does recovering hp have to represent healing physical wounds?

All the 4th edition rules say is "After a night of resting you got somewhat used to the pain, recovered your moxie and can fight without being impeded by the wound". The wound is still there and will take a while to heal.

 

[underthumb]

Really, sometimes I wonder why people play this game when they're so adamant to stick to rules or interpret rules literally and as set in stone when really they're meant as spring-boards for the imagination. It's a game of imagination, use it.

Perhaps the best answer is that some spring-boards are better than others. Not all mechanics are equal in terms of their ability to generate believable, in-game results. Even in the context of fantasy, certain situations do so much violence to our intuitive understanding of physiology and physics that they break the simulation.

Being able to generate less ambiguous descriptions of recurrent events (such as hp damage) helps to create an immediate, collective understanding of what has occurred, which speeds up play and helps adjudicate certain critical situations (such as the application of poison).

I'm not saying, btw, that older versions of D&D didn't have problems with hit points. In my case, I think this problem has persisted and the specific clarifications provided don't really help much.

 

[Cadfan]

Aww, I didn't hear that

Don't suppose you remember roughly what timestamp that was said at or who said it?

It was later on, when they were talking about whether you could pick up a prone ally. Their answer was that they'd probably let you do it if they were DMing, but it would cost you your move action in the process. Then one of them mentioned that your buddy wouldn't thank you when the head level poison darts fired out of the walls hitting you both, and they started cracking jokes from there.