Carnivorous_Bean said:
Which is exactly the same as 1e, 2e, and 3e.
Err, no. We are dealing with two subtly different concepts - the injury condition, that is to say what effect being injured has, and the injury itself.
In all those editions, a fighter with 1 hit point left out of 100 is precisely the same in fighting terms as one with 100 hit points left out of 100.
I fully grant you that. It is a nagging problem many people have had with D&D over the years. So far as I can tell, fourth edition doesn't seem to be particularly interested in addressing it. But that isn't really what we are talking about.
In 1st edition, a fighter with 100 hp and 1 hp left is - barring magical intervention - going to require months of bedrest to heal his injuries. In this manner, we can see that he has something like a real injury. I grant you, that injury will 'unrealistically' cause the fighter no concrete pain and discomfort, but the injury does require time to heal which is what we'd expect of all but the most superficial of injuries. (It does cause abstract pain and discomfort, in as much as a person with 1 hitpoint is too discomforted to dodge away from blows that would previously not have been lethal.)
In 4E, nothing requires more than 6 hours to heal. Hense, there is nothing in the 4E universe that has the quality of a serious injury in requiring a long time to heal. And this is in fact new. In 1E, 2E, or 3E you might via fortune in the middle describe some blow that reduced you to 1 hp as having been a signficant injury that narrowly avoided being a lethal blow. Some players might have objected that such a blow might should cause more pain than that, but that was the principal belief breaking problem in the rules. Now we have added to that one another equally large one. Between the lack of an injury condition and the fact that lost hit points are restored immediately, we can safely say that hit points no longer model injuries at all. That is to say, its no longer ~20% physical damage and ~80% lost luck/providence/confidence or whatever abstract component is involved. The mechanics model hit points as a 100% non-physical component.
Nor was my explanation of my viewpoint a 'rant.' That was a logical and rational explanation, and please stop trying to make disguised ad hominem attacks to lessen the validity of my assertions. Thank you.
Nothing prevents a rant from being logical or valid. A rant is merely an argument freighted with emotional content. That your post was freighted with emotional content was something you felt so important to convey as to include an emote - not that it was necessary.
My problem with it is that anyone who has played D&D extensively knows that hit points model injuries abstractly. Your post was patronizing, and yet seemed to me to indicate you had less knowledge of the hit point mechanic than some of the people you were lecturing. You failed to understand the problem not only the first time, but the second time. When you say, "This implies that hit points are NOT the physical meat that you're made out of increasing its density over time, but your ability to survive additional attacks in every sense.", you act as if you are hitting upon some new idea or change in the system rather than something that has always been true.
Look at it this way. If any part of your hitpoints represents physical toughness, then it stands to reason that the hit points from physical toughness are interchangable which come from some other source (skill, divine providence, fate, luck, whatever it is). We don't make a distinction unless we are using something like a WP/VP system. If we don't make a distinction, then the two sorts of hit points heal at the same rate. If at least some of the hit points are said to be from physical toughness, then we expect those to heal at a rate somewhat believable for physical wounds. Hense it follows if we don't distinguish between toughness coming from physical toughness and toughness coming from other sources, that they all are restored at the same rate (or at least nearly so).
But given that all ills are now healed in six hours, this is no longer believable. Hense, in 4E 0% of hit points represent physical toughness and 0% of damage represents physical damage. This was never true of prior editions. One reason is that it creates a bit of wierdness. For example, why do larger animals have more hit points? Can things without healing surges be truly injured, and how do things without healing surges heal? And so forth.
In my opinion, if you'd just read the 1st edition DMG (among probably many other sources) where it described the justification of hit points, you wouldn't have the arrogance to write something like:
In other words, has someone who's take 95 out of 100 hit points damage REALLY been cut in half 12 or 13 times, yet somehow kept fighting? Or are they just so battered, exhausted, and generally beaten up that they aren't going to be able to deflect or avoid that final, wounding strike which they could have parried with ease earlier?
As if the people in this thread you were responding to hadn't considered that hit points represented more than mere physical toughness. The real source of your confusion is that you built a nice little strawman out of the opposing viewpoint and 'mysteriously' found this strawman too ludicrous to believe. If you had been the least bit open-minded, you might have instead considered that if something seemed too ludicrous to believe, it's entirely possible that other people didn't believe it and perhaps you might have reflected on what they actually believed.
And though you have no reason to care, pulling the 'I an aggreived party' thing doesn't win you much respect either. It was pretty easy to see from your post that you thought anyone that didn't see it your way was being stupid and illogical.
