Of course, it's required in 4e, especially now. You'd need to:
a) Reduce monster damage;
b) Reduce monster health;
c) Increase PC defenses;
d) Increase PC damage
in some combination to make in-combat healing not required. Basically, you'd have to kill them before they killed you.
All true. And it was true in previous editions as well, to a varying extent. For a theoretical 5e, I would like to see them at least consider the options for removing it.
(Also, bear in mind that if the party has no Leader, the vast majority of their in-combat healing disappears. It's not idea, but the game
can run that way...)
Of course, let's say we do that, and there's no in-combat healing at all. Then, people are going to complain about bandaging after combats being unrealistic,
Nothing at all unrealistic about wounds being bandaged after combat. What is unrealistic is the lack of any form of persistent injury, and that's the same as in 4e.
or you're going to require some kind of magical healing, possibly in the form of one of the PCs, or possibly a stick with curing spells stored in it.
Hrm, that sounds kinda like 3/.5.
Not everything in 3e was bad.
FWIW, my view is that this is the only way that a hit point system can be consistent.
True. But IMO they should sacrifice consistency on this one. The "hit point damage" = wounds way of thinking is just too ingrained into the gamer psyche such that simply divorcing the two leads to all sorts of cognitive dissonance. It just doesn't work.
IMO, the best they can do is go back to the old model that hit points represent a combination of physical wounds together with luck, skill, divine favour, and so on. In 3e, when a PC takes hit point damage then he has suffered at least
some injury (even if it's just a nick).
It only works if you don't look at it closely, but it does at least work. Completely disassociating hit points from wounds just seems to cause too many problems for too many people.
