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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatula" data-source="post: 5697216" data-attributes="member: 2198">"Healing Surge" covers a lot of different topics, but people seem to be jumbling them all together, making it hard to tell what it is that they object to exactly.I mean, what is a surge? This is how I see it:1) The amount of healing received is relative to the max HP of the heal-ee, not the power of the healer (at least, not 100% the power of the healer). This to me is what a healing surge "is", and it's an elegant solution to some of the HP-related oddities from earlier editions. It also eliminates the need for multiple, separate healing spells that differ only in their potency.2) A resource that limits how many times a character can be healed in a day. This limit is necessitated by the existence of unlimited (encounter) healing spells in 4e, but might not be needed in a system when spell-casting was more constrained.I also see people bringing up general 4e healing rules, which aren't really tied to surges.1) Second wind / self-healing / non-magical healing / healing to full HP after a battle. Healing to full after a fight has been the norm in D&D for as long as I can remember, so I am guessing that it's being able to do it without magic that bothers people.2) The lack of any damage that last longer than a day (diseases & starvation excepted).As for why people object to them, I agree with what Bedrockgames stated upthread. HP have always meant to be abstract, but most (if not all) gamers don't think of them as such in practice. Being "hit" by a sword means that a sharp deadly weapon has connected with your body. That higher-level characters can survive many such sword hits while lower-level characters cannot is just how it is. That you don't suffer any "real" injuries until you're at or below 0 HP is just how it is. It's easy to hand-wave it all away and not really think about it. But on some level, 4e forces players to confront the abstractness inherent in the rules, and a lot of people don't like that.</blockquote>

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