I was unconsious 20 minutes ago, but I'm ok now..

[Mort]

Here's the thing... I, at least, have never considered D&D in any of its incarnations to a game that has anything to with believability. For me, it has never been a game that was meant to model anything even approaching the way most things work in the real world -- especially when it comes to the heroes and villains. I've always viewed D&D as a game meant to emulate the fantasy fiction of popular novels and action movies, more than anything else.

Think, for a moment, about movies like Conan the Barbarian, The Beast Master, Clash of the Titans, Willow, Red Sonja (okay, so not all of these are good movies, but they make my point ). In respect to those sorts of movies, D&D rules in general are perfectly believable.

Eh, but maybe that's just me. It's not something that bothers me a lot, I just shift my play style slightly to embrace it.

That's pretty much it for me in a nutshell.

I just re-read The Hour of the Dragon (One of Howard's best Conan stories, in my opinion) and Conan gets beaten, bruised, bloodied, knocked out etc. Yet he's always rearing to go shortly thereafter. It works for the story and can work very well in a campaign.

 

[Wormwood]

Exactly. When I play D&D, I don't want to be Joe Schmoe, who needs a couple of day's good lie-down to recover from a nasty crack to the back of the head. I want to be John McClane and kick asses even after fighting a kung fu master in an elevator shaft. I want to be Jack Bauer and stride out of the wreckage of a crashed airplane. I want to be a hero.

Preach it brother!

 

[PeterWeller]

D&D has never really modeled injuries with HP, or, to be more clear, D&D has never really modeled the effects of injuries with HP. If you've wanted a sword wound to the gut to have lasting effects, you needed to houserule it. Since all healing came from magic or extended rest in earlier editions, it was a lot easier to ignore this. 4E is going to require you to be a little more creative about this, but if you look at HP as capability to fight and not a measure of how much physical punishment one can take before collapse, it's not that difficult. The fighter who takes a savage wound in the first encounter bandages up afterwards. He still has a great big gash, but by wrapping it up or whatever, he's able to fight on. That night, he eats a hearty meal, stitches his wound (or gets it stitched), and gets a good night's rest. In the morning, he sees that no infection has set in and the flesh is beginning to knit. He cleans the wound, wraps a fresh bandage around it, and is ready to go.

In a certain light, by taking away our ability to hand wave limb loss and organ puncture with a cure spell and a couple D8s, 4E is encouraging more roleplaying. I would expect savvy DMs to expect their players to describe just how they're using those healing surges between encounters. I know that's what I'm going to do.

 

[Delta]

Exactly. When I play D&D, I don't want to be Joe Schmoe, who needs a couple of day's good lie-down to recover from a nasty crack to the back of the head. I want to be John McClane and kick asses even after fighting a kung fu master in an elevator shaft. I want to be Jack Bauer and stride out of the wreckage of a crashed airplane. I want to be a hero.

I suppose there's an analogy that can be made here with the classic distinction between DC and Marvel comics. For me, heroes need to have some real-world type conflicts for me to feel connected to them. I was a big Marvel fan; I don't watch either of the series you mention above.

 

[parvatiquinta]

This is the same sort of problem as we had in 3e-3.5 games when the figher was at 1/250 hit points and just full attacked swinging for the fences to kill his opponent (without even a dent in his offensive capability).

It has always been like this. D&D is an epic fantasy game about heroes overcoming villains and challenges.
For that matter, economy, historical accuracy and the like are quite forgotten as well.
This is simply not the game cut out for "realism". It's a game of sword-swinging and magic.

If you want a realistic (-ish) feel to your games, I'd really recommend getting some other system like GURPS. Or why not CJ Carella's Witchcraft, the core book is free (pdf)!
Yes, you can always patch-up and band-aid D&D. But you won't get as true a feeling of [something different] as when you have a game tailored to create that feeling.

 

[Revinor]

If someone comes around and beats you to inches from unconsiousness, you can't take 20 minutes to use 4 healing surges and a few short rests to be back to feeling fine. No one can. Characters in 4e can no longer be hurt, only killed. They can be knocked out, but provided someone can wake them up and they still have healing surges they'll be fine in 20 minutes, tops.

I had a discussion about it with my long time friend who is a 3e DM and we came up with following explanation for ourselves:

For sake of argument, you have 24hp and 8 healing surges (6hp each). What it means is that your 'body' is able to withstand 72 points of damage before giving up (and another 12 to be dead). Your mind on the other hand, will give up after 24 points of damage received in short period of time. If you can take a short break, you can calm down/rest/whatever and regain some points - but you still cannot improve you overall status. If you receive too much damage in short period of time (one encounter, which will be probably 1-2 minutes of in-game time), you pass out from shock. If you cross -bloodied, your heart gives up. Only if you used all your healing surges, then you are really at the edge of your physical resources.

Not 'real-world'? Think about torturers. They work on the subject hard, but they have to make a break sometimes. If you do too much, too fast, person will die. If you allow him to catch some breath once per some time, you can continue for days. D&D encounter = torture routine, short rest = break in torture.

We were very happy with our explanation - fitting the rules, pleasing our simulationist devil inside, just great. Then we have recalled that overnight you fully heal your damage and recover healing surges. And THIS is something which at the moment puzzles me, as far as non-metagame solutions are concerned. Because I just don't subscribe to the fact that after bathing in acid/fire for 60 hp of damage, only your luck/morale/agility is damaged. Hp is majorly an abstraction, but this abstraction DOES contain part of real wounds.

Current solution is just to assume everybody/everything in world regenerates perfectly overnight, unless hit by some kind of disease. It is not that world-shattering as you may think - it will not really change the way society works (what is the benefit of peasant having to heal from knife cut for 4 days instead of 1 day?). You know, people are drinking clean water, not using preservatives in their food, so they are more healthy then us

If we are at this subject, we also considered another idea - that healing surges are real healing. Real visible healing. PC can get hired in circus, cut himself with a knife and close the wound with the crowd watching ("Watch the Ameba Men Regenerating His Appendages"). As only PCs (and maybe very, very few NPCs) are getting healing surges, it would lead to quite interesting results. For sure, there would be a major hunt for anybody showing such powers, and high-level mages would catch healing-surge-capable people, put them in captivity and perform horrible experiments trying to find out the limits of this power. For sure, many power-hungry NPCs would try a lot of creative ways to extract healing-surgeness from PCs, by consuming their brains/blood/souls/whatever. PCs could differentiate themselves from the rest of the world in very real manner. At this point, full heal overnight is not any issue of course. Same goes for resurrections -no more 'destiny' crap, just raise dead works only on healing-surge positives.

This route is probably bit far - suddenly, healing surge would change it's role from small game balancing element, to most defining factor of entire campaign. It could be explained by some kind of god spark in PCs, correct gene combination, being cursed at birth by faerie, etc. It would also explain a lot of other special abilities PCs may have.

 

[baberg]

D&D encounter = torture routine, short rest = break in torture.

Wow, you must really hate D&D if you think each encounter is torture

(Just kidding of course - I love taking quotes out of context )

 

[DreamChaser]

As others have said: it's been discussed nearly to death. Here's one example:

Thread about realism / HP

DC

 

[shilsen]

As I've noted in a few threads, this is just a little more of something which has generally been true of D&D in all its incarnations - D&D does not do reality well and has never replicated literary fantasy that well either. What D&D does quite well, however, is replicate mythology. Characters fighting with complete effectiveness despite ghastly wounds, characters fighting with total effectiveness until the one hit that kills them, and unconscious characters jumping up and going instantly back to complete effectiveness, are things that occur regularly in mythology across the world. Check the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Kalevala, the Nibelugenlied, etc. D&D does mythology quite well, And that, from what I have seen, 4e will continue to do.

 

[Lackhand]

Death spirals are bad. Downtime is good, however.

So what you want is some non-hand-wavy to reflect that "you're wounded and should be in bed".

Might I suggest... http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4116671&postcount=137 ?


The key insight here is that someone at full health, with all their surges, isn't necessarily unmarked. They're just not leaking and can manage the pain from the injuries that they have right now. They could do it all again, and come out looking twice as bad. Really, as long as they sleep in between, they could take a month's worth of just-short-of-deadly acid baths and come out looking worse & worse each time, but if they (on the thirtieth misadventure) were to break free, they'd be no worse for wear mechanically.
Death spirals are bad. If you're doing something that ridiculous to a character and want it mechanically represented, you want to start applying circumstance modifiers.

The wounds that remain are cosmetic. The cosmetic effect of divine healing includes sealing these wounds. Martial healing doesn't. That's life.