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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5697551" data-attributes="member: 8461">I haven't read this thread from the beginning, so apologies if someone already expressed this sentiment (better).For me, the problem with healing surges is wrapped up in the following:Hit point loss represents taking physical damage. Conversely, regaining hit points represents physical healing.The above point is fundamental to understanding why I don't like healing surges - they necessitate that the above understanding be discarded and replaced with an alternative understanding for what hit points represent (e.g. that hit points are a character's "ability to keep fighting" or something similar).If hit point loss is damage, and hit points gained is healing, then having characters spontaneously, non-magically regaining hit points means they've essentially just had a burst of regeneration; suspension of disbelief breaks at that point.Now, using hit points to measure physical damage taken/healed has some baggage to describing exactly how it works in-character. A big one is the relativity of the damage, that is, why 8 points of damage is lethal to a 1st-level commoner but negligible to a 20th-level fighter.In my game, the loss is looked at as a percentage of a character's total hit points, and then described in-character accordingly. For a character with only 6 hit points, 8 hit points of damage is a punctured vital organ; for a character with 200 hit points, it's a scratch.There are some problem areas with this approach, to be sure. The converse of the above method of "damage as a percentage" is that magical healing actually becomes less effective at higher levels (e.g. a cure light wounds will restore that 1st-level commoner from dying to pristine condition...but for that 20th-level fighter it'll only heal scratches). Housecats can kill commoners with a swipe of the claws or two. High-level characters can fall off cliffs and reliably survive.The thing is, most of these problems are either corner cases, or are easily ignored - they're the rough spots that come with that basic assumption about hit points, and I've long since accepted those problems as part-and-parcel of that way of looking at them. But spontaneous healing surges are too regular to shrug off, too conspicuous to overlook, and too radical a departure from how I view hit point loss/healing in my games. Hence, I don't like them.</blockquote>

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