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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herremann the Wise" data-source="post: 5717390" data-attributes="member: 11300">The only time I pull out a "serious wound" description in 3e is when the character goes into the negatives. The only time I pull out a "serious wound" description in 4e is in retrospect when the party is examining the corpse of their former ally. "You remove his breastplate to find his ribs pressing out at different and unnatural angles"; or something else that was "hidden" and now can be revealed.In 3e a character that goes into the negatives and is untended will likely die and so I do feel compelled by the mechanics to describe a serious if not immediately fatal wound.In 4e a character that goes deep (but not fatally) into the negatives and with no surges still makes me hesitate to describe a "serious" wound although I will consider one of consequence where they are not getting up anytime soon without assistance. I would not feel mechanically supported though in describing a potentially fatal wound though.Perhaps theoretically, what seems quite small ends up in practice being very noticeable for a lot of players. Let's go for the most extreme example, the chest-sucking blood spurting critical wound. No expense has been spared in scaring the be-jesus out of the players that without immediate  assistance, their ally is going to be dead within seconds. How confident are you to give this narrative?In 4e:1) If he saves and second winds then he's acting at capacity within seconds. Fair to say major fail by the DM here.2) If there's a warlord around, then through charisma or intelligence you're up and at them if you have surges left or not! Again, I would expect a few rolled eyes at the DM here in describing a wound that was obviously not that bad.3) If he saves but can't second wind, then he's down until he spends surges during a short rest.4) If he saves but can't second wind, and has no surges, he has to wait for the opportunity for an extended rest and 6 hours from there. By forcing a party to not achieve an extended rest, you can extend this out indefinitely but I dare say, the players will be rolling eyes at you for an additional reason, aside from sloppy and over-enthusiastic description.I think in all cases, from the chest-sucking wound to even one quite serious, I have little confidence of my description not getting contradicted. Only if magical healing is used would I feel like I had "got away with it". The point being that this shuts off quite a few narrative options when describing wounds (to the point where when DMing 4e I simply state hit point loss when PCs go into the negatives.]In 3e:1) A character in the negatives needs to be successfully tended otherwise they are in a very bad way (as statistically described on the other thread - they are incredibly likely to die).2) If they do get tended to successfully through only mundane means they regain hit points naturally and so will likely be conscious within the day (as long as they are of higher level; otherwise they might remain in the negatives for several days). [On that other thread, I have described healing as related to level a deplorable way of doing it as it produces so many anomalies, it should be related to constitution instead]. From this point they will take many days to reach full capacity (although more days for a hale barbarian than for an anemic and sickly wizard). 3e healing still has a lot to answer for you know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it even just a little bit better than 4e? Yes, if not by a huge margin. However, the clincher for all of this is not the theory but what typically happens in each game in practice.3) The chance of the PC actually being forced to be naturally healed (particularly with a chest-sucker which focuses the group on producing the best magical healing available) is very low because of the ready access to this very same magical healing. Now this is the point, many see little difference between healing surges on one hand and magic sticks on the other; they are effectively performing exactly the same game function - they keep the party adventuring rather than twiddling their thumbs. Except that narratively speaking, magic cures all ills including over-enthusiastic DM wound descriptions! With magical healing as my backstop, I can be much more confident in practice than in theory that my outrageous wound narratives will never be contradicted in 3e. And it is this, perhaps more than the theoretical "ledge" that widens wound description options for the DM in 3e vastly more than how 4e potentially contracts them even further because of the common nature of restoring hit points through non-magical means.Essentially, people will "buy" that magic is at work where as naturally they will not. My confidence for this wide range of wound narratives in 3e is substantially greater than I have when DMing 4e.[By the way: No edition of D&D has ever produced healing to my liking because of the conjoining of physical damage with the abstract qualities of hit points.][As well: I actually like the idea of combat surges and hope that 5e will utilize them in a way so that you don't have the logjam of anomalies that you do with every other version of D&D.]Best RegardsHerremann the Wise</blockquote>

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