I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[Nagol]

1)

<snip>

Suppose a low level fighter and a high level fighter are together out in the woods and both survive an encounter but each have just 1 HP left at the end of the fight. Now they have no healing available but time and natural healing. For sake of discussing healing, we will assume they find a safe place hole up. You are correct that the low level fighter will be back to 100% hit points more quickly than the high level fighter.

<snip>

Ignoring Constitution variance, the low-level fighter will take a bit longer to heal than the high-level fighter in 3.X. Since healing is level in hp per day, Getting from 1 to full is based on the average hp / level. At first level you get max hp so it takes 9 days to go from 1 to max. The high-level fighter almost certainly hasn't managed to roll max on the die every level and has a lower average.

The rest I pretty much agree with.

 

[BryonD]

Ignoring Constitution variance, the low-level fighter will take a bit longer to heal than the high-level fighter in 3.X. Since healing is level in hp per day, Getting from 1 to full is based on the average hp / level. At first level you get max hp so it takes 9 days to go from 1 to max. The high-level fighter almost certainly hasn't managed to roll max on the die every level and has a lower average.

The rest I pretty much agree with.

edit: It seems in my experience that it still goes up. I think this has to do with that over the long haul CON goes up for fighters.

But, you are correct. Maybe I should have used a fighter and a sorcerer as the example....

 

[Derren]

Honestly, I have no problems putting in a wounds/vitality system. The only thing I would worry about is that it's just one more thing you have to track.

And, really, if you have to blow through vitality to get to wounds, why bother? Wouldn't it simply be easier to add in a rider effect on making death saves? I mean, the Raise Dead ritual has the following rider:

What a W/V system would solve is the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of character health" as now you have a clear distinction between luck based HP and physical HP.
Also, such a system can be used to solve some of the traditional issues with teh HP system like falling or backstabbing/CDG.
Have such things simply ignore Vitality and decrease wound points directly (which according to the V/W system would be rather low. I think it was just your constitution score).
Now falling from high places would be dangerous while you still could have loads of HP for combat.

Depending on your need for "realism" you could also attach a stacking penalty to loosing WP to simulate wounds. Or ignore wound points altogether and just add your con score to vitality and play like with the 4E HP system.

 

[LostSoul]

First of all, that post I made last night was after a long game of D&D and didn't make the point I wanted.

A 3-CON Wizard is going to heal up a greater percentage of max HP a night's rest than a 20-CON Barbarian. I think that's a head-scratcher, the same way that a Warlord's Inspiring Word can somehow make unconscious characters get back on their feet. There's probably a way that you can make either case work in the game's fiction, but I don't think it's controversial to say that both pre-4E HP and 4E Healing Surges put stress on coming up with a coherent narrative.

Which gets me thinking - maybe all this talk about realism and narrative consistency is missing the point.

Lately I've been thinking of RPGs in terms of choices that the players make. What kind of choices do we make when we play? What kinds of choices do we want to make? That's what the game is about.

It's my belief - biased by personal preference, I'm sure - that RPGs are more engaging when those choices are grounded in "fictional positioning". That is, when you make your decisions, they are based on the details of the game world. Mechanics provide value to those choices (and different games, being about different choices, give different values to choices).​

So anyway, HP and Surges. If we look at the difference between them in terms of choices the players make - how HP support one set of choices and Surges another - what do we get?

I don't know what the answer to that is, but I'd bet that there is a fundamental difference in the kinds of choices a player can make. The value that Healing Surges put on different player choices (making some choices more important, other choices less) are probably what accounts for the dislike that some people have.

*

3) You can fix surges if you make them acknowledge physical wounds. For example, declare that surges may never heal a character above 50% of full HP. Now Jack Bauer can be battered and bleeding, but he keeps surging back to 50% and saying "yeah, I'll need stitches and the like later, but I don't care right now, I'm here and I'm gonna kick your ass and bleed later."

My 4E Hack has some rules for "maiming" characters. They're not perfect but so far they've worked. It goes like this:

If your action would result in a permanent injury to your target, the target of your attack is Bloodied, and the target has no way to avoid the damage, the target takes a permanent injury.

The obvious problem is that characters with more HP have a larger Bloodied range, and therefore are more susceptible to permanent injury.​

A simple example in game: A PC was hanging onto a wall from one hand. On top of the wall were some goblins; they hacked at his hand and brought him below Bloodied. Since he had no way to avoid the attack, his hand was chopped off.

That means I need to determine how fast you can heal such wounds, so I did:

Healing
Type of Wound				Healing Required
Cuts, bruises, sprains, pulled muscles	Rest, bandages, sucking it up
Broken bones, torn ligaments		Lots of rest (1d4 weeks), any magic
Nerve damage, minor organ damage	Any magic that brings your HP total 
					above Bloodied
Severed limbs/appendages, missing 	Remove Affliction
organs

Interesting that I don't describe what type of healing a Healing Surge provides...

 

[Pentius]

As long as surges can restore any and all HP damage they don't fit with quality narrative that includes actually being wounded. And the mechanics of surges require that you end up describing all wounds as gone forever, in all ways. I'm not adding anything to that. The 3E HP rules make no requirement on how you describe wounds and healing. You have added something not found in the rules when you declare that the high HP guys takes longer to *physically* recover than the low HP guy.

This is only true if you hold that HP, on their own, mechanically fit any quality narrative about being wounded. I don't see how they do. Your 1hp fighter in the woods could decide to hop to his feet and run a marathon in his armor. By raw, this marathon would go exactly as well as the same marathon at full HP. HP damage, on it's own, never gives you any sort of quantifiable wound, unless it knocks you under 0, at which point things get cloudy.

A character at full HP and a character at 1HP have the same physical abilities, with the lone exception of "HP damage one can take before dropping". If surges can take our hypothetical fighter from "Able to run a marathon in his plate armor" to "Still equally able to run a marathon in his plate armor" then what wounds did those surges heal?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Your 1hp fighter in the woods could decide to hop to his feet and run a marathon in his armor. By raw, this marathon would go exactly as well as the same marathon at full HP.

Nope- not in 3Ed or 3.5Ed.

SRD
Hustle
A character can hustle for 1 hour without a problem. Hustling for a second hour in between sleep cycles deals 1 point of nonlethal damage, and each additional hour deals twice the damage taken during the previous hour of hustling. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from hustling becomes fatigued.

A fatigued character can’t run or charge and takes a penalty of -2 to Strength and Dexterity. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue.

Run
A character can’t run for an extended period of time.

Attempts to run and rest in cycles effectively work out to a hustle.

<snip>

...when your nonlethal damage equals your current hit points, you’re staggered, and when it exceeds your current hit points, you fall unconscious. It doesn’t matter whether the nonlethal damage equals or exceeds your current hit points because the nonlethal damage has gone up or because your current hit points have gone down.

The guy at 1HP would be staggering around the woods, barely able to make much progress before he fell unconscious. When he awoke- assuming it was less than 8 hours- he would be fatigued. Attempting to resume his journey at any greater pace than a walk would render him unconscious again in an hour or 2. It would take him many hours to reach his destination.

Meanwhile, the full HP guy would be at his destination, enjoying ale & whores.

...alongside both the 1HP & full HP 4Ed PCs, unless I'm mistaken.

 

[Pentius]

Nope- not in 3Ed or 3.5Ed.



The guy at 1HP would be staggering around the woods, barely able to make much progress before he fell unconscious. When he awoke- assuming it was less than 8 hours- he would be fatigued. Attempting to resume his journey at any greater pace than a walk would render him unconscious again in an hour or 2. It would take him many hours to reach his destination.

Meanwhile, the full HP guy would be at his destination, enjoying ale & whores.

...alongside both the 1HP & full HP 4Ed PCs, unless I'm mistaken.

Okay, I stand corrected. But still not convinced, really. The 1hp 3.5 fighter would run for an hour, then get a point of non-lethal damage and be staggered.

A character whose nonlethal damage exactly equals his current hit points is staggered. A staggered character may take a single move action or standard action each round (but not both, nor can she take full-round actions).

A character whose current hit points exceed his nonlethal damage is no longer staggered; a character whose nonlethal damage exceeds his hit points becomes unconscious.

So he runs for an hour without problem, then in the second hour(not sure whether that'd be at the start or the end or what, I'll go with the start) he gets staggered, which forces him to slow down to a walk for an hour, because

You heal nonlethal damage at the rate of 1 hit point per hour per character level.

In the bit you quoted, it mentions that eliminating the non-lethal damage also eliminates the fatigue, so after an hour of walking, he can run another hour. Then repeat. He misses the first drinks and the prettiest whores, but he's still capable of running for multiple hours in the day with no medical attention. So, what wounds did he have that he can still run around in plate armor, for multiple, if non-consecutive, hours with no medical attention? And how does this enable the hit point mechanics to support a quality narrative about being wounded?

 

[prosfilaes]

This is only true if you hold that HP, on their own, mechanically fit any quality narrative about being wounded. I don't see how they do. Your 1hp fighter in the woods could decide to hop to his feet and run a marathon in his armor. By raw, this marathon would go exactly as well as the same marathon at full HP.

So what? Wounds don't effect you in any form of D&D. A nasty cut across the hamstring doesn't slow you down in D&D 4 or D&D 3. Your answer is that there's no such thing as a nasty cut across the hamstring in D&D. My answer is that (a) our characters are the definition of badass and don't let things like that slow them down, and (b) it's a gameable approximation, designed for emulating the fantasy and action genres more than reality, and playable fun more than either of them. One can validly accept that approximation and not like the further minimizing of wounds that healing surges create.

 

[Pentius]

So what? Wounds don't effect you in any form of D&D. A nasty cut across the hamstring doesn't slow you down in D&D 4 or D&D 3. Your answer is that there's no such thing as a nasty cut across the hamstring in D&D. My answer is that (a) our characters are the definition of badass and don't let things like that slow them down, and (b) it's a gameable approximation, designed for emulating the fantasy and action genres more than reality, and playable fun more than either of them. One can validly accept that approximation and not like the further minimizing of wounds that healing surges create.

Right up until your last sentence, I'm with you. My point is that HP didn't fit a quality narrative about taking wounds anyway, thus surges aren't taking anything away.

 

[BryonD]

This is only true if you hold that HP, on their own, mechanically fit any quality narrative about being wounded. I don't see how they do. Your 1hp fighter in the woods could decide to hop to his feet and run a marathon in his armor. By raw, this marathon would go exactly as well as the same marathon at full HP. HP damage, on it's own, never gives you any sort of quantifiable wound, unless it knocks you under 0, at which point things get cloudy.

A character at full HP and a character at 1HP have the same physical abilities, with the lone exception of "HP damage one can take before dropping". If surges can take our hypothetical fighter from "Able to run a marathon in his plate armor" to "Still equally able to run a marathon in his plate armor" then what wounds did those surges heal?

Yes, your critical comment toward the 3E HP system is completely valid and I agree with it 100%.

And that does NOTHING to make Surges any less flawed.

You CAN work with the narrative issues of HP and describe the situation here. You can not work with surges the same way. Surges declare that any and all wounds can be NOT simply ignored by a hand wave of adrenaline or whatever heroic narrative one selects, but be made now and FOREVER GONE. Either fighter CAN NOT be wounded or fighters can heal flesh by thinking about it. That is mechanically implicit to surges.

3E HP have issues.

4E HP have every issue that 3E HP have. I'm fine with that.
4E surges bring a whole new realm of nonsense to the table.

I'm completely on board with accepting the high fantasy / heroic / Jack Bauer / Die Hard ignore my wounds and keep kicking ass cliche. That is awesome. And running a marathon when seriously wounded falls into that. Being immune to being wounded does not. Being able to be wounded but cause the wound to cease to exist does not.

It is 4E fans who have over and over POINTED OUT the Jack Bauer idea in an effort to hand wave away surges. And yet suddenly it isn't ok under 3E? That is more than a double standard. Because running a marathon when highly wounded is consistent with cinematic stories and making wounds vanish is not. If running the marathon at 1 HP is unacceptable to you then surges should make your head explode.

If someone comes along and tells me that HP is one key reason they really dislike ALL versions of D&D and they prefer systems with wounds which cause the character to be less effective, then I completely respect that. But that person isn't going to turn around and tell me that not being hurt by wounds is unacceptable but being immune to wounds or blinking them away is fine.

This thread is about surges. Telling me about a different issue that 3E and 4E share is not insightful.

If you want to propose a better plan for HP that could, possibly, apply to both 3E and 4E, lets have a new thread.

Your post provide zero rebuttal to the actual issues with surges, which is the point here.