Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5706869" data-attributes="member: 957">1) I readily agree that the 3E model could be improved and I'm eager to consider options that improve it.  I would not agree that having some issues with the 3E system makes it remotely ok to add further problems with no narrative merit.2) We spent a ton of time in this thread debating the abstract vs. real elements of hit points and you are now basing a complaint on the assumption that wounds to high HP and low HP characters represent the same degree of physical harm.  Both wounding and healing in 3E include physical and abstract concepts in harmony.  The problem with surges is that they force 100% of the healing to be abstract because there is no such thing as a wound they can't heal.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.  But there is no narrative or cinematic disconnect in saying that the low level fighter is physically healed before his full HP are restored and the last few HP represent the abstract "karma/luck/fate" element.  And, in exactly the same way the high level fighter could return to full physical recovery in the same time.  And, it is important to keep in mind that the high level fighter is regaining HP faster than the low level guy, he just has so much more that the healing still takes longer.  So it is acceptable to say that they are both fully recovered in exactly the same time.  But the high level fighter has both (a) more "fate" already regained on the day they are both healed and (b) will continue to regain fate for days to come, assuming he doesn't have another encounter.And the key to all that is that, unlike surges, simple HP retains full narrative control because they do include both abstract and physical elements.  Surges discard that dynamic for game expediency.And all that leads to :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."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.</blockquote>

Verification