Schrödinger's Wounding doesn't exist if you choose not to have game terms have direct meaning in the narration (i.e., choose not to narrate damage or healing in this particular case). But that seems rather....lame.....to me.
It is true there is no fixed correlation between hit points lost and gained (game mechanical events) and physical damage suffered and healed (gameworld events). But on any given occasion of damage or healing something happens in the gameworld, and it can be narrated with no need for retconning or suspension of description.
1. Someone got hit by 12 damage and goes down and is dying(I haven't said that this is the only hit he took)
2. Because this guy can recover by his own, can be shouted into action or can actually be healed by magic the nature of the hit he took can't be specified at this point.
3. Only after the the character got healed can you say how he was wounded based on the method of how he was healed. (But I wanted to use the sentence "can neither confirm nor deny" as joke).
You are ignoring that you can say that the game mechanical event of regaining hit pionts does not mean that there has been an ingame event of repair to the physical injury, but rather corresponds (on that particular occasion) to an ingame event of recovery of the will to fight.
At most your issue is with the rate of healing. But this has nothing to do with a wound being either a wound or not a wound depending on whether or not an inspiring word or some other healing effect is used.
I agree with this. The 4e rules for damage, healing, healing surges, short rests - in short, the bundle of rules that give rise to so-called "Schroedinger's Wounding" - are quite distinct from the rules for recovery after an extended rest. The latter is intended to remove mechanical impediments to play, and (for those who use it) can be written off as a genre convention.
In episodic play, the DM can narrate a healing break between episodes, thus removing the problems that arise from this disjoining (unless the "episode" runs on for game days or game weeks, anyway).
In sandbox play, it is generally anathema for the DM to tell the players what they must do, so there is nothing enforcing an extended rest to allow the narration to rejoin with the game mechanics. You could change the rules to make it so, but then we wouldn't be discussing the 4e rules anymore.
I still don't see why it has to be up to the GM, and why players who are offended by the non-verisimilitudinous nature of 4e extended rests won't just call their own longer healing times, even though the rules do not insist upon them (or, alternativley, make sure that there is a cleric in the party and narrate how that cleric heals everyone up during the extended rest). If they won't do these things, yet continue to complain about the mechanically permitted rapid healing ruining their senses of disbelief, they have only themselves to blame.
Ithere will be many statements that you are ignoring rules that cannot be quoted, and that you are playing the game wrong despite insta-healing being clearly what was intended by the 4e designers.
I don't know exactly who you have in mind as the author of these "many statements". But the 4e rules obviously draw on rules systems from other RPGs with narrativist inclinations (eg HeroWars/Quest, The Dying Earth).
Those other rules systems have better discussions of how to narrate fortune-in-the-middle action resolution mechanics than the 4e rulebooks (one of the weaknesses of those rulebooks in my view). But there is nothing in my statements (or those from LostSoul, or Scribble, or Lacyon, or TheCasualOblivion) explaining and defending the 4e healing and recovery mechanics that could not be reconstructed pretty straightforwardly from those other rulebooks. Fortune-in-the-middle mechanics really exist (and have existed in RPGs for many years, including the saving throw rules in 1st ed AD&D). People play RPGs using them. And the narration of their games does not collapse into contradiction.
I have never seen pages and pages of complaints about so-called Schroedinger's Wounding in HeroWars. It doesn't come up, because the rulebooks explain how to narrate combat in that game. The only reasons I can see for it continually coming up in relation to D&D is that either (i) simulationist views (ie that there must be a fixed correlation between every game-mechanical event of hit point gain or loss and every ingame event of physical injury or recovery) are so entrenched that other ideas aren't contemplated, or (ii) the 4e rulebooks are so poorly written that they fail to communicate the key ideas of narrative freedom and flexibility in the relationship between game mechanical events and ingame events (despite comments in both PHB and DMG that flavour text is just flavour text and ripe for reskinning from moment to moment).
That's not to say that anyone should
enjoy narrativist D&D. I don't care who does or doesn't enjoy it. But it's possible, it needn't involve contradiction or absurdity, and the 4e rules support it.
