NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5704374" data-attributes="member: 42582">The reasoning, as restated by Hussar, is that in the real world humans don't recover from near-fatal wounds inflicted by bladed weapons with a few days to a few weeks of bedrest.Hence, whatever injuries are in 3E (and to a slightly lesser extent, given its longer recovery times, in AD&D) they are not near-fatal wounds inflicted by bladed weapons.Sure. Which is what I said, ie, that wounds in 3E must be pretty much like wounds in 4e ie minor bruises, cuts, etc that are not "terrible, nasty wounds".At which point, the difference between a few hours, a few days and a few weeks strikes me as one of taste (and preference in adventure pacing), not one of realism.Well, 3E substantially narrows narrative options too - namely, it is impossible in 3E to narrate a fantasy game in which, flesh wounds being only flesh wounds, heroes can proceed without being hampered by them after a night's rest.But opens up others.And in any event, serious injury or debilitating injury is not completely shut out - it is only excluded by application of the combat mechanics. So, for example, nothing in the mechanics stops a GM having an NPC perform a coup-de-grace on a helpless or unconscious PC and narrating a death result (that is, a result which takes the game out of the combat mechanics, at least until upper Paragon and Epic tiers) as something else - a mortal wound, a limb severed, or whatever. That might be a little bit beyond the rookie GM level, although perhaps not all that much beyond it, and in any event I think there was a Dragon magazine article that discussed this. (The trickier element of this is actually deciding what ritual is required to deal with such an injury. In my own game, it's Remove Affliction. I can imagine others wanting to use Raise Dead instead.)Anyway, and as I said upthread, I can understand why some prefer gritty to cinematic. But cinematic doesn't narrow the options of gritty-lovers any more than vice versa. And I can't see that either is open to accusations of being possible to narrate coherently or without absurdity. There is certainly nothing in 4e that differs from 3E such that it would require assuming that every PC has Wolverine-style regeneration (which some in this thread have asserted).One such system was published in White Dwarf 30 or so years ago now - Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". I think that WotC's Wounds and Vitality system is nearly identical to Musson's system.Another version, just as old, is Runequest's, which uses hit points to measure both damage to particular body locations, and to measure overall injury and hence fatigue/exhaustion/bleeding/concussion.Another similar system is Rolemaster's, which uses hit points (called "concussion hits") to measure fatigue, some bruising, and bleeding, but uses wounds as superimposed conditions to reflect serious injury.  Concussion hits heal easily (either naturally or via magic), while wounds are generally hard to heal (and unless healed magically tend to leave permanent debilitation).As to tweaking dials - having read this thread, it seems that more people object to the rate of surge recovery in 4e, than object to the intricate dynamics of healing that are part of the game's combat mechanics. If I was WotC wanting to incorporate dials, this one is trivially easy - just stick in a sidebar explaining that you can make the game grittier by slowing down surge recovery to one per exteneded rest, or one per week of extended rest. You could also include an optional role for the Healing skill. Nothing else about the game mechanics would have to change in light of such a sidebar (although adventure design might have to).</blockquote>

Verification