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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5878355" data-attributes="member: 54710">I understand the reason for trying to get away from the yo-yo.  For all the abstraction of hit points, terms like "hit", "damage" and (even more so) "cure critical wounds" all strongly suggest that hit points are physical damage.  There are enough DMs who describe hit points as physical damage that it's hard to say that they are "doing it wrong" per se.  (Or, to be more accurate, it's easy to say that they are doing it wrong on the internet, but it would be foolish for WotC to do so.)Putting aside the question of whether a non-magical warlord should be able to heal damage (or persuade an ally to fight through it even though it isn't healed), even the cleric "magic healing" yo-yo has a serious genre problem: few if any of the heroic fantasy genre conventions that D&D attempts to model involve combats where wounds are magically inflicted, healed, inflicted, healed, inflicted and healed again.  Other than stories that take after D&D (e.g. other RPGs and RPG-based books and games), that sort of battlefield healing doesn't really happen.And then, of course, there are a new set of people who object to non-magical healing (either Inspiring Word or the overnight rest) that heals deadly wounds at implausible speed.So I understand the motivation for getting away from the healing yo-yo.  The problem is that the healing yo-yo is (1) exciting and (2) very D&D.  Healing is an essential part of what makes D&D combat fun.  One of the key parts of fun combat is experiencing both the feeling of danger and the feeling of overcoming danger.  A key part of that is giving the players in the impression that the PCs are in more danger than they actually are.  (Put the PCs in a campaign where they die in 50% of encounters, and you get a very short campaign.)  That's why PCs have healing and monsters don't.  This gives the PCs the ability to survive for longer than it seems like they should and provides the impression of danger ("I have only 4 hp left!") even if there is a cleric to heal the character up next in the initiative order.The hit point yo-yo has also been a part of D&D for decades.  I think there's a strong argument to be made that battlefield healing should be tuned down and made more like BECMI/1e/2e than the 3e or 4e.  But suggesting that D&DN should get rid of it is madness.  Elements of D&D that have remained constant across the editions should be preserved, less we end up with a game that's not D&D.  That having been said, I would be very interested to read house rules that produce combat that combines the feeling of danger with the ability to recover for the next encounter without so much of the healing yo-yo effect.-KS</blockquote>

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