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*TTRPGs General
Hit Points & Healing Surges Finally Explained!
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<blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4632996" data-attributes="member: 30001"><p>Maybe. But there have been numerous statements on this thread where people have tried to point to some sort of "contradiction" that arises when a 4E DM tries to describe physical injury to a character. Now if that DM takes into account that the 4E PC has 40 hitpoints, and 8 healing surges, and that he gets those healing surges back in a day, then he can use that information to develop a reasonable description of injury. In the same way that a 1E DM, knowing that a PC has 4 hitpoints, and heals 1 hitpoint per day, would develop a reasonable description of injury in that case. </p><p> </p><p>Certain kinds of injury (like a severed arm) would be beyond plausibility in either system. (Same...yet different...) Other kinds of injury (eg. a wound taking 4 days to heal) might be more plausible in one system than the other if you ignore *any other* approximation of injury (ie. no strength loss, movement rate loss, etc.). But what's the point of describing a 8 hp character with 4 hp left as having a leg injury since his movement rate is the same? </p><p> </p><p>Now obviously there's something about this situation that is *not* understood in the same way by all persons on this thread. AFAICT there were a lot of people applying some sort of implicit description of injury to their 4E examples, and then coming up with some contradiction. I thought it was pretty obvious, from the examples, that the person wasn't changing their injury description strategy (as the 5 hp vs. 100 hp character example indicates) to account for the 4E rules/hp recovery rates.</p><p> </p><p>And ultimately, saying 4E is more vague than 1E would be to suggest somehow that 1E is anything but vague. There are very few guidelines, at all, for when to assign physical injury. The sting of a scorpion can be fatal regardless of the hp total of the character. Lycanthropy is contracted at 50% hp, IIRC. A vampire "hits" me on every hit - I would presume from the level loss. The only time I seem to "bleed" in any substantial way is when I'm hit with a sword of wounding. When I do a summary of all of this in 1E, it really makes no more sense to me than 4E does - it's just that the numbers and strategies have swapped around. My feeling is that largely what has happened here is that long-time earlier edition DMs *think* they have a more concrete injury system than 4E because it's largely untested as a result of 1E healing magic.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="gizmo33, post: 4632996, member: 30001"] Maybe. But there have been numerous statements on this thread where people have tried to point to some sort of "contradiction" that arises when a 4E DM tries to describe physical injury to a character. Now if that DM takes into account that the 4E PC has 40 hitpoints, and 8 healing surges, and that he gets those healing surges back in a day, then he can use that information to develop a reasonable description of injury. In the same way that a 1E DM, knowing that a PC has 4 hitpoints, and heals 1 hitpoint per day, would develop a reasonable description of injury in that case. Certain kinds of injury (like a severed arm) would be beyond plausibility in either system. (Same...yet different...) Other kinds of injury (eg. a wound taking 4 days to heal) might be more plausible in one system than the other if you ignore *any other* approximation of injury (ie. no strength loss, movement rate loss, etc.). But what's the point of describing a 8 hp character with 4 hp left as having a leg injury since his movement rate is the same? Now obviously there's something about this situation that is *not* understood in the same way by all persons on this thread. AFAICT there were a lot of people applying some sort of implicit description of injury to their 4E examples, and then coming up with some contradiction. I thought it was pretty obvious, from the examples, that the person wasn't changing their injury description strategy (as the 5 hp vs. 100 hp character example indicates) to account for the 4E rules/hp recovery rates. And ultimately, saying 4E is more vague than 1E would be to suggest somehow that 1E is anything but vague. There are very few guidelines, at all, for when to assign physical injury. The sting of a scorpion can be fatal regardless of the hp total of the character. Lycanthropy is contracted at 50% hp, IIRC. A vampire "hits" me on every hit - I would presume from the level loss. The only time I seem to "bleed" in any substantial way is when I'm hit with a sword of wounding. When I do a summary of all of this in 1E, it really makes no more sense to me than 4E does - it's just that the numbers and strategies have swapped around. My feeling is that largely what has happened here is that long-time earlier edition DMs *think* they have a more concrete injury system than 4E because it's largely untested as a result of 1E healing magic. [/QUOTE]
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