Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="N0Man" data-source="post: 4872551" data-attributes="member: 64066">If they are being healed using divine magic, absolutely.  However, NPCs aren't usually designed with ways to heal themselves or spend healing surges, mechanically speaking.Players are supposed to be heroes.  They are the exceptions.  They are supposed to be able to endure when the normal person could not.  This is not new or  unique to this edition.I might also point out that your previous example of WotC not knowing how they are "supposed" to play hit point loss because they still described them as wounds completely misses the point.Getting wounds is certainly what we're accustomed to saying in D&D, and it's dramatic.  Nobody is saying that a fighter is going to cleave into that gnoll minion and making the gnoll minion collapse from exhaustion or lack of will power.  When I say "hit point loss isn't just wounds, and hit point recovery isn't just total healing of wounds", I mean precisely that.  They aren't *only* wounds.You, however, are creating a false dichotomy.  You seem to be implying that it's either a wound or it's not, and that's absolutely not true.  Hit point damage isn't *just* a quantification of the severity of a wound, nor is it strictly the other factors in allowing a hero to endure.A loss of hit points can be directly due to a wound.  It can also be the other effects such as fatigue, pain, morale loss, bleeding, or the ability to remain conscious and not succumb to shock.  It can be both of these things at the very same time.  However, that doesn't mean that you are going to (or should) hear, "your long sword draws a heavy gash across the monster's chest, and he loses... 3 points of wound hit points, 2 points of morale hit points, and 2 hit points of fatigue hit points."I think my favorite summary of hit points was, "Hit Points are plot protection."The other side of the coin (healing)is very much the same way.  Recovering hit points through rests doesn't mean all the wounds go away magically (though sometimes magic does do that).  It means you're ready to continue, and stay in the plot.  It can be a combination of actual healing, a burst of adrenaline, a new found resolve, sudden inspiration, patching a wound, slapping on a bandage and treating a wound, or countless other things.  We may simply have "an extended rest", but that doesn't mean that everyone just goes to sleep and wakes up refreshed.  However, not describing every one of these types of actions doesn't mean that they can't happen or be implied.One both has to use their imagination to provide an acceptable narrative, and accept that in a heroic fantasy adventure, one has to put away some notions of reality to even get in the door. After all, this is D&D, not a medical television drama, there will be liberties taken.</blockquote>

Verification