ruleslawyer
Registered User
nope. I highly recommend reading the Conan stories; they're available for free on Gutenberg. In short, in the story in question, Conan is attacked by assassins and left for dead (modeled best in d&d as negative hp and stable or 0 hp and successful death save, depending on edition) and then picked up by a galley in need of an extra sailor. There are plenty of other examples of him recovering pretty fast.I haven't read the text in question, but given that he ended up in slavery, it stands to reason that not all of his assailants were attempting to kill him so much as merely subdue him. And there's no saying whether he was perfectly fine when he woke up. Nor is there perfect insistence that this can be modeled exactly using game rules, as long as the general concept is close enough.
If you wanted to represent that situation in AD&D or 3E, the enemies would be attacking him non-lethally.
As you said, YMMV. Given that hp were pretty clearly explained as early as 1e, I don't see the need to go with a different interpretation and thus I'm fine with hp as a bit of meat and a lot of other factors, meaning that "healing" is part patch-up and part recovery, which fits HD and surges just fine.