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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gaerek" data-source="post: 5700912" data-attributes="member: 73666">Sure, I agree with you. I think we may be talking about the same thing here. A 15th level fighter has more HP than a 0 level commoner, not because he can somehow physically receive more damage than the commoner. It's because he's more skilled at doing something to prevent it. I threw luck in there because Gygax specifically mentioned it in his description of HP in the 1e rules. I think a better word than luck would be intuition. I'm an amateur photographer as my other hobby and a lot of times I'll say I got lucky with a shot I made. In reality, my experience behind the lens has lended me a certain amount of intuition and "gut feeling" about things that helps me to make that shot. But, in the narrative, I like to talk about how players got lucky with that one, even though it's more than likely intuition. Keeping in mind, in heroic stories, a very common trope is being "lucky."Yeah, I think we're on the same page then. Something you said earlier had me thinking differently, but we agree here.Understood. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> As a side not, I beta tested an MMO that had perm death, oh, 10 years ago. I got frustrated within a couple hours. In my final bug report, I just wrote, "Resurrection not working, fix with next build." That game came out of beta, but failed within months. Speculation was the perm death mechanic.Been there, done both. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I enjoy both styles, and will play both. I've found that most of the people I've played with, however, prefer combat heavy.It's all in how you work the narrative. My typical narrative involves essentially no real physical wounds being traded until the point where you go from positive to negative HP. This reflects the style of combat more realistically than taking real, physical wounds from the beginning. I commented on this earlier. In a sword fight, you either live from it, or die from it. Any wound you receive thats more than just a cut or scrape will likely be fatal. In this case, non-magical healing (again, I don't consider it actual healing of actual wounds) makes sense. In addition, the idea of not being able to heal, even magically when you're out of surges can start to make sense narratively. There also are ways of magically healing without surges, and those will still work, both narratively and mechanically. Of course, there are issues with this way of doing things as well. But in 95% of the circumstanses, there's no recursive narrative, and it flows quite well.In addition, I don't like describing serious wounds to PCs. 4e isn't as deadly as other systems, and the chances of dying are pretty low. I've only killed a couple players in 3 years, and had one TPK running through ToH. In addition, I have been apt to "capture" characters instead of killing them outright when the situation makes sense. This makes my way of narrating combat work even better since the bad guys can tie up and revive the dead players. Then we get a nice little story break to try to rescue the characters. I used this for the Irontooth encounter in KotS. Two characters got captured, the others ran away. We spent the next session rescuing the player, with the group being filled out by swords for hire, played by the captured characters players. It was a lot of fun.Again, all healing doesn't stop working. Certain types will, and narratively, this makes sense in most cases. Clerics (and other healers) can heal without burning a characters healing surges. A paladin, for example, can burn his own HS to heal someone else. So if the fighter is out of HS and the paladin is not, the paladin can still lay on hands. If the cleric has taken cure light/serious/etc., they can heal without HS as well. If you can think of HP as more than just physical wounds, the system actually make a lot more sense than people make it out to be. HP and HS together represent physical wounds, endurance, mental/physical exhaustion, will power, etc.I will freely admit that there are times, narratively, that HS don't make sense, however, I would have to argue that those times are fewer than if your abstract of HP (in any edition) revolves solely around physical wounds. There's a lot of narrative weirdness you must contend with if HP are purely physical wounds.No problem. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I can respect that. Since D&D is about as mainstream as a geeky pasttime can be, I have a feeling that that will never be the case. If you'd prefer your game, there's nothing wrong with that at all. As you say, play what you like.That makes sense. I remember the old D6 Star Wars game (never played anything after that) that had both Bounty Hunters and Diplomats as character classes. In toe-to-toe combat, the diplomat wouldn't stand a chance against the BH. But you'd also never send your BH to negotiate a treaty between the Republic and a newly discovered world. I played some games where people were bored entire sessions (or more) because their choice of character simply couldn't survive in the current aspect of the game.4e took the foundation of tactical combat that was really first printed in the 2e Players Option: Combat and Tactics book, and refined it into a completely tactical system, so much so that nearly every option a player has in character design is build around being tactically viable in combat alone. Basically, toss everything out that doesn't actually need to be explained by rules (you want to be a blacksmith? Write down blacksmith on your character sheet, no need to dump skill points into it), and keep everything else that you need to make the game function. This works for some, doens't work for others. I personally love the bare bones approach. I love that the force RP aspects of other editions (alignment, class/race restrictions, etc) have been removed. It frees players up to RP their character how they want to, not based on what alignment they thought fit their character the best.Again, that makes sense. But as you said, your system required player  buy-in. Not saying that's a bad thing, just soemthing to think about.In the end, it's all down to preference. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />You can tell that Cook doesn't buy in to 4e. That's why I thought it was an interesting move to hire him. Why would you hire someone who isn't going to champion your livelyhood? It's because you want him to work on the next version.Always!</blockquote>

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