D&D 5E Second Wind: Yes or No?

[Klaus]

That's not how it works in your mind, though. Placebo effects rely on external phenomena. Biologically, it's nothing external, psychologically, it's entirely external. And I think we'd all agree that a fantasy RPG that tries to accurately model biology at the expense of how we actually think and talk about these things as human beings with magical thinking and narrative instincts is aiming for the wrong goals.

The agency is mom's. The agency is the sugar pills', or the snake oil's, or that of the deity you pray to or the medicine man who makes you drink the hallucinogen or the spirits that surround you.

There must be a disconnect between our discourses, 'cause I'm not sure what you meant.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I gotta go with Klaus here. The issue, at least as I see it, is that KM, you don't think that healing should be tied in any way to the healed. Pre-4e this was true. You could be healed infinitely.

But, for me, the issue isn't really agency. The pre-4e character had no agency over his HP whatsoever. All of his healing was at the mercy of other characters (excluding, of course, characters who could actually directly heal themselves ).

With surge mechanics, you get to heal yourself. But, to limit the amount of action you could do in a day, to simulate actually getting tired/exhausted/whatnot, we put a cap on the number of healing surges a character has per day.

Granted, you can die with healing surges left. But, again, is that really problematic? Your character just didn't reach deeply enough and he died. Mostly healthy people have died all the time, barring whatever it was that killed them. Some people die from fairly insignificant wounds - a rapier stab to the heart will kill someone, despite the victim being otherwise pretty much untouched.

Your character shouldn't need to be completely disassembled to be killed. There are sort of kludgy workarounds for this like Coup de Grace rules, but, typically those are so difficult to actually set up in game that they rarely come up. Trying to kill that guard before he raises the alarm, when you have to get through all his HP, is very, very problematic, unless the guard has less than 5 hp.

OTOH, with surge mechanics, you can whack that guard even though you haven't actually eaten through all his actual hit points.

 

[Klaus]

Yeah, I gotta go with Klaus here. The issue, at least as I see it, is that KM, you don't think that healing should be tied in any way to the healed. Pre-4e this was true. You could be healed infinitely.

But, for me, the issue isn't really agency. The pre-4e character had no agency over his HP whatsoever. All of his healing was at the mercy of other characters (excluding, of course, characters who could actually directly heal themselves ).

With surge mechanics, you get to heal yourself. But, to limit the amount of action you could do in a day, to simulate actually getting tired/exhausted/whatnot, we put a cap on the number of healing surges a character has per day.

Granted, you can die with healing surges left. But, again, is that really problematic? Your character just didn't reach deeply enough and he died. Mostly healthy people have died all the time, barring whatever it was that killed them. Some people die from fairly insignificant wounds - a rapier stab to the heart will kill someone, despite the victim being otherwise pretty much untouched.

Your character shouldn't need to be completely disassembled to be killed. There are sort of kludgy workarounds for this like Coup de Grace rules, but, typically those are so difficult to actually set up in game that they rarely come up. Trying to kill that guard before he raises the alarm, when you have to get through all his HP, is very, very problematic, unless the guard has less than 5 hp.

OTOH, with surge mechanics, you can whack that guard even though you haven't actually eaten through all his actual hit points.

And with surges/Hit Dice, you give PCs another resource that you then take away (undead drainging surges/HD, critical hits taking away surges/die, etc).

 

[I'm A Banana]

The issue, at least as I see it, is that KM, you don't think that healing should be tied in any way to the healed.

Nah, it's more that if my character can do something, then I as a player am in control of that character doing it. And it's less important for me specifically than it is for a broader D&D audience.

There must be a disconnect between our discourses, 'cause I'm not sure what you meant.

Basically, if mommy needs to kiss my booboos to make them better, that's a property of mommy, not of me. Without her, they don't feel better. It's not a biological position about wounds, it's a psychological position about agency. Mommie makes me feel better, I don't make myself feel better.

The same is true for any placebo effect. It doesn't work without an external agent acting on you, even if it's not actually doing anything. The fact that this is the essence in myth and history of what eventually became our clerical healing magic speaks to this: it is not you who heal yourself after you pray to your deity, it is the gods who heal you.

And with surges/Hit Dice, you give PCs another resource that you then take away (undead drainging surges/HD, critical hits taking away surges/die, etc).

Yeah, but you can do that in other ways, too. I've personally recently become a fan of reducing maximum HP.

 

[Hussar]

Basically, if mommy needs to kiss my booboos to make them better, that's a property of mommy, not of me. Without her, they don't feel better. It's not a biological position about wounds, it's a psychological position about agency. Mommie makes me feel better, I don't make myself feel better.

I'd say that's an extremely fine hair to split. You feel better because Mommy scream healed you.

But, the question is, whose resources should be drained in order to do that healing? Should Mommy have a limited number of kisses per day, or should you be able to ignore your boo boos a limited number of times per day?

The same is true for any placebo effect. It doesn't work without an external agent acting on you, even if it's not actually doing anything. The fact that this is the essence in myth and history of what eventually became our clerical healing magic speaks to this: it is not you who heal yourself after you pray to your deity, it is the gods who heal you.

Yes, but, unlike real world, in this case there actually is someone healing you. It's visibly effective and a fact of that world that saying the special words makes you feel better. There is a being on the other end there doing this.

But, again, the question becomes, whose resources should be drained. Traditionally, it was the cleric who could only heal X times per day based on Vancian casting. Tying it to the healed and then allowing some resources to be spent without actually being tied to the healed seems a pretty decent way of doing it.

 

[Manbearcat]

Basically, if mommy needs to kiss my booboos to make them better, that's a property of mommy, not of me. Without her, they don't feel better. It's not a biological position about wounds, it's a psychological position about agency. Mommie makes me feel better, I don't make myself feel better.

The same is true for any placebo effect. It doesn't work without an external agent acting on you, even if it's not actually doing anything. The fact that this is the essence in myth and history of what eventually became our clerical healing magic speaks to this: it is not you who heal yourself after you pray to your deity, it is the gods who heal you.

While this is true to some extent (the requirement of the external forcing applied to the system), the two work in conjunction. There is synergy. Not everyone is "vulnerable" to placebo effects. If you give 100 people non-alcoholic beer and tell them it is alcoholic, they will not all universally get drunk, only a percentage will. And that percentage gets drunk because of their own internal susceptibility to making the unreal, real or to buy into phantoms. Kids are inifinitely more susceptible to this of course, hence mommies kissing booboos away almost universally works and is a culturally common means of dealing with childrens' ails. There is "internal stuff" that allows for the "buy-in". It is not just the external forcing perturbing the system. External to that forcing, the system itself has certain facets that perpetuate the system's perturbance that another system may not possess...therefore no change, regardless of external forcing application.

 

[Shayuri]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion, but would bringing up the idea of "Hit points as abstract representations of 'will to continue' rather than physical damage" be useful here?

I've always liked the idea that a person reduced to zero hit points isn't necessarily gutted like a fish, or covered in burns, or missing his head...but rather, he's winded and hurt and just can't go on anymore. He bows his head and passes out. It might take minutes, or hours, for his body to die, but he's done.

Healing magic then becomes more about healing the spirit. Restoring faith and vigor. This is the basis of, say, bards healing you with a song, or a Warlord getting your arse back in gear by shouting at you. Does that close that gash? No...but it lets you fight on anyway!

Of course, you can't just ignore physical injury, and there's no hard line between which hit points represent physical wounds and which represent more abstract damage to your fighting spirit...but it's useful I think in presenting a model of heroic fiction, to have options for hitting zero HP that don't involve grotesque damage that your bard sings away.

And it makes mechanical contrivances like surges...and hit points themselves really...much more palateable to me.

 

[D'karr]

And it makes mechanical contrivances like surges...and hit points themselves really...much more palateable to me.

Absolutely. In an abstract combat engine with an abstract measure of "lifeforce", an abstract unit of "gumption/moxy/mojo/guts" that lets you get back up, suck it up, and get back in the fight is entirely appropriate. Even palatable with the right perspective.

Many people on a battlefield don't die of injuries, they die of "shock". People without actual physical injuries can and have died of shock. Getting somebody back from shock can look a lot like "second wind", or "warlord inspirational healing".

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As an aside, I challenge anyone to come up with a healing mechanics that uses D&D-ish abstract hit points and accomplishes all of the following:

A. There is a finite limit on how much a character can take in a relatively small amount of time, despite external sources of healing being available (such as cure light wounds or potions of healing).

B. The system is elegant, reasonably simple to use and track, and at least nods towards game play and simulation of a typical D&D universe. For example, it's ok for it to support gritty play, but not if the grit excludes more epic play. It's ok for it to model the physics of healing somewhat, but not at the full exclusion of all game decisions.

C. The mechanics do not show much correspondence to the surge mechanics.

I don't think it can be done. If you think me wrong, I'd really like to see your answer.

 

[Hussar]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion, but would bringing up the idea of "Hit points as abstract representations of 'will to continue' rather than physical damage" be useful here?

See, that I think is the heart of a lot of the problem. HP have always been this. But, at the table, many groups have narrated hit point loss as physical wounding. Since the vast majority of healing in D&D for decades has been magical, this isn't really a problem. "Gutted like a fish" at 0 HP is perfectly fine when it's going to take magic words to bring you back.

The problem started when we tried to add in non-magical healing that was actually effective and useful at the table.