Martial Healing

[mkill]

While it is possible to do "realistic" wound tracking in an RPG, it would prohibit any form of heroic swordplay. It's simply not fun to play a 2nd-level character with a missing sword arm and an infected chest wound. Heroes regularly do stuff that would be a quick, painless death, or a slow painful one. If a dragon chews on you, if you get swallowed by a purple worm, impaled by a hornet the size of a barn, there simply is no need to track wounds in an abstract way, it's time for a new character.

D&D mercifully abstracts these things to allow the group to create a heroic narrative: Your hand can't be cut off, you never sustain 3rd-degree burns from a fireball, you never lose a limb from wound infection, a fall from 100 ft. never breaks your spine and binds you to a wheelchair, an ogre with a giant club can bash your skull but won't turn you into a babbling imbecile. You'll never suffer an anaphylactic shock from giant bee poison as the system doesn't care about allergies. Even if a hit breaks your kneecaps you'll be walking full speed again with a 55% chance at the end of your next turn.

When you play D&D, all of these are taken for granted. It's no fun to send a crippled beggar into the dungeon.

You can accept all that but you can't accept if a fighter regaining his battle spirit is represented by adding to an artificial number and demand that this is covered by some kind of abstract holy power that is never clearly defined?

Okay, so that's pre-4th edition narrative conventions vs. 4th-edition narrative conventions, but both are equally abstract. Neither is in any way "realistic".

 

[Wormwood]

"Forget about the minions, the size of the solos, their fancy powers, and remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we've gone over time and time again. And most important, don't get caught up thinking about winning or losing this combat. If you put your effort and concentration into killing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don't care what the DM says at the end of the fight. In my book, we're gonna be winners!"

Wormwood's boilerplate Inspiring Word.

Gene Hackman is much more impressive with a nice set of horns.

 

[Tuft]

... her enticing dance ....

plspostpicskthanx!

If you say so:

Drawings (Runelords) - Hastur

(warning, some not very dressed pics on that page)

 

[DracoSuave]

I don't see a problem with 'healing' that doesn't involve magical forces being able to undo 'damage' that doesn't involve debilitation.

If the damage doesn't cause you to be crippled, it's not hard to imagine being inspired to tough against it.

 

[Nichwee]

My current character could be woken from unconciousness by a shout of "healing" with ease.
Shout the following "Nivel, your daughter is being kidnapped!". He will bolt awake and be looking to charge after the kidnappers (despite the fact he is a wizard and should be looking to cast at them).
Now that he is on his feet again, he will find he can keep going for a while, as the adrenalin surge has pushed down the pain that caused him to pass out so he is now fine to continue.

This is basically the "Magic Sponge" effect from football. You deaden the pain for a bit (via cold compress for the sponge, via inspired adrenalin for a Warlord) and then the pain slowly drifts back but it does so gentlely, so you can manage to push through it quite easily - plus the increased blood flow of activity also improves the healing, and encourages the adrenalin surge to keep acting as a painkiller.

I know I personally, IRL, find that if I am feeling a bit ill/in pain getting up is a real hardship. But once I force myself to get moving I stop noticing my fatigue or my pain as much (cos my brain has other things to concentrate on). I haven't suddenly "got better" but I have suddenly "felt better".

Warlords are just a class built around getting you moving again so your own body can maintain the activity.

If HP loss was always "broken arm/punctured lung" then Warlords wouldn't work, but 90% of damage taken in a real fight is cuts/bleeding/bruising/fractures/pain which only stop people because the average person fractures a bone and doesn't move it again, because it hurts - not because it won't work anymore.
(This is why being on drugs can make people seem impervious to damage - cos they are impervious to pain and so don't slow down any because of it).

 

[Zaran]

I've always thought that Warlords should grant Temporary Hit Points instead of healing. If their healing power was twice an encounter, giving an ally temporary hit poings equal to their healing surge plus stat without having to spend the surge I think that would work alot better. That way at the end of the encounter they lose the points and replace their damage with healing surges during a short rest.

 

[The_Fan]

I find. Martial healing emphasizes the idea that has been around in D&D for years, that hit points are not necessarily just damage taken, but the yadda yadda, almost every other poster has said it. When virtually all healing was magic, it was easy to get in the mindset that a cure spell was reattatching lost limbs and such. Now, since there's a possibility a character could be brought from the brink of death by a guy shouting "ON YOUR FEET, SOLDIER!" you really have to put more creativity into combat descriptions.

I have it quasi-codified into a series of loose rules about combat descriptions:

1) A hit is not necessarily a hit: If it fails to bloody, doesn't deal bleed damage, etc, it may in narrative terms be a miss, parry, or other close call. Even a massive crit that somehow doesn't bloody might only result in a slow-mo limbo shot and a new haircut. If it does have a rider that requires a hit (like a poison), make it minimal, like a scratch.

2) Severity is determined by outcome (schroedinger's wound): it helps if you don't describe just how bad a wound is until its final effect is resolved. Dropping below 0 and making death saves means you took a powerful blow and are probably looking bad, but if you make that save or the warlord helps you up, turns out the fireball just took the wind out of you. All that blood was from surface vessels. The poison knocked you out, but now its time to do a honey badger impression. Etc. On the flipside, if you don't get help in time, it was exactly as bad as it looked.

3) Bloodied means something: if you are bloodied or bloody a foe, that hit should really count. It should be immediately obvious to both allies and enemies. Some hazards (like that one trap fungus) are worse when you're bloodied, so some form of open wound (even just a psychic nosebleed) is preferable. Also, this means if you're no longer bloodied, you have fixed it somehow (stopped on its own, torniquet, rubbed some dirt in it, etc).

Hmmm...there's more, but my brain just hit a ditch. Those are still some good guidelines for narrating nonmagical healing, since it will ensure no wound is greater than your capacity to overcome by a scary man shouting at you.

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[MrMyth]

Yes, I'd admit that hit points are perhaps even more abstracted now in 4E than they were in prior editions. But really, they were never very realistic or a reasonable simulation of physical damage in the first place.

I'm pretty much in agreement with everything said here. Prior to 4E, I actually hated the hitpoint system because of how unrealistic it was - viewing things as pure HP, it just didn't make sense that my character could stand there, letting someone slit his throat twenty times before actually dropping.

Once it was pointed out that HP didn't just represent physical damage, but were more of an abstraction - and always had been - I finally was happy with them. 4E took that approach and ran with it, and I'm glad for that. A game that actually insisted all hitpoint damage was purely physical would not be a game for me.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I find these arguments to always be so stupid. You think this is strictly a problem of Dungeons & Dragons? C'mon! In games like d20 Modern, Shadowrun, Feng Shui and other modern rpgs... people can get SHOT at point blank range and all that happens is they lose some health and they keep going.

In the Star Wars games, lightsaber combat involves taking damage... which implies the fighters are getting hit with the lightsabers... and yet do these hits take off people's arms off immediately or instantly kill them? Of course not! They lose some health but keep fighting.

In superhero games... a villain build like the Hulk (someone who can benchpress over 100 tons) can punch a guy in the face and send him flying 50 feet back into a brick wall... and the guy will still get up, brush himself off and keep fighting.

If you can accept all these ridiculous premises but aren't willing to accept the swordfighting combat of D&D... maybe you shouldn't be playing any RPGs at all. Or at the very least, stick with something like Riddle Of Steel, where you *can* get gutted in a single shot and dropped to the ground, thereby requiring several weeks of bedrest to recover while the other players go off doing their own things. But I can tell you, as someone who has played a character to whom that exactly happened to in the very first session... IT SUCKS.

 

[KarinsDad]

I'm totally for hit points being an abstraction. How can they be anything else? They are numbers.

I just don't want that abstraction to not include damage at all. That's totally illogical and screws up my sense of verisimilitude. I think the D&D community over the decades has mostly shifted from hit points mostly meaning damage to hit points hardly meaning damage at all. I prefer somewhere in the middle.