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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fox Lee" data-source="post: 5730197" data-attributes="member: 4346">Personally I dig surges, for several main reasons, starting with my feeling that they've really opened up the possibility for a variety of healing powers (as opposed to the traditional "dx hp" sets). Healing is a more abstract, and much less owned by divine classes.I value tremendously the fact that they get better for characters with bigger hp pools. It's awful to feel that you have made a healer's job harder by having a bigger hit point pool, and I have always found that the best way to address that is to express healing as a percentage of the recipient's total. Healing surges are the solution to making that work in a system where you don't want to waste time calculating those percentages in play.They are an excellent resource. As soon as you give the characters a new resource pool, you can use it to fuel other things - for example, penalising a failed skill check/challenge with surge loss, using them to activate items, and so forth.Since there aren't many "per day" resources in 4e (as opposed to per-encounter), They are important for maintaining a good move/rest pattern for adventuring.My only gripe is that I rather wish they had left off "healing" from the name. A more generically-named "surge" could have had even more interesting applications as a resource, especially for cinematic plot devices and other things that aren't strictly rules-appropriate. Want to throw yourself in front of the sword to save that civilian? Sure, you sacrifice a surge and get a dramatic shoulder injury. Your heroic act inspires the crowd to turn on the aggressor! Villain uses deus ex machina to escape, so as not to ruin the major plot? Your pride wells up as you swear you'll track him down, granting you an extra surge!I dunno, it sounds pretty compelling to me. Your Game May Vary.</blockquote>

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