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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5716967" data-attributes="member: 2205">Although I've never played 4e, I adopted healing surges--somewhat--into my house-ruled 3e game by making them something you can do with Action Points.  To me they aren't really too terribly unrealistic.  Or rather--they aren't too terribly out of genre, I should say.  It's pretty much a staple of every good action movie I've ever seen that the protagonist is beat to within an inch of his life in one scene, and in the next (or heck, later in the same scene, often) he's up kicking butt and taking names as if nothing had happened other than that the actor is not covered in fake blood to simulate his earlier beating.  If anything, it improves protagonist performance to have been beat to within an inch of your life.  It works even better if right before finishing the protagonist off, the antagonist makes some kind of smarmy remark that pisses the protagonist off.Since a good action movie is often the genre and vibe I'd like my games to represent, I naturally saw healing surges as a valuable tool to emulate this curious convention of the genre.  And since I've pretty much house-ruled away a lot of the magical healing that standard D&D would assume, it also has a gamist/strategic element too--it keeps the game from bogging down while the PCs sit around for weeks healing after every major fight.Also, my games are strictly low-level to low-mid-level games anyway.  In fact, I've toyed with officially adopting an E6 tophat, although it seems a bit of a moot point because my games tend to 1) have slowed advancement, and 2) not be open-ended, so they end before it becomes an issue anyway.</blockquote>

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