D&D 5E Should 5E have Healing Surges?

[JamesonCourage]

There needs to be some way to explain how you heal non-physical wounds.

What about natural healing?

The problem here is you're fighting against healing surges; if you try to work with them, they're perfectly sensible from a nonmechanical standpoint. They're an abstraction. Nothing more.

"Nonmechanical", I assume, means in the fiction. What's the justification within the fiction for healing spells no longer working once you run out of healing surges?

Part of the issue comes down to what Hit Points are; a measure of damage taken, or an abstract of luck/determination/heroism/whatever.

With the former, it is inexplicable that everybody fights at maximum effectiveness, until they topple over.

With the latter losing 50% of your Hit Points to Dragon Breath, isn't actually getting "burned half to death", therefore various methods of Hit Point recovery become potentially reasonable.

That's why I suggested two different HP pools: one long-recovering pool called HP (wounds or the ability to take a hit better), and one very quick recovering pool called THP (luck, skill, fatigue, morale, fate, divine protection, etc. [I prefer fatigue, and this is the mechanic I use in my game]). Without this divide, you have Cure Light Wounds inexplicably healing "HP" when "it's not really physical damage anyways."

There's problems with healing surges where they stand now, and there's problems with HP where it stands now. That's why the two pools should be separated, in my opinion.

I'd much rather see 5E create a system that makes severe injury and death more realistic, interesting, and fun

Agree with you here. My RPG has rules on losing limbs, eyes, getting mortally wounded, getting a wide wound, getting a badly bleeding wound, getting knocked down or stunned (when that wasn't necessarily the intent), etc. However, I don't think 5e should have that built in.

Somebody proposed a "if you would die, you can get crippled instead" mechanic. If you'd die, you can say "I live" and the DM says "okay, but you lose an arm." There may be a chart for severity so that the DM doesn't get flack for saying "you lose an eye" to one player, and "you lose an arm" to another.

It's not my preferred cup of tea (he was bleeding out, and then... lost an arm?). It's back to Schrodinger's wounds all over again. But then again, we're they're already, so it's not directly worse for my style. It's just as bad in that department, though. As always, play what you like

 

[Kingreaper]

What about natural healing?


"Nonmechanical", I assume, means in the fiction. What's the justification within the fiction for healing spells no longer working once you run out of healing surges?

Simple. There's only so far a body can be pushed. The basic healing spells can't break that limit, but more powerful ones can draw life from one person, to heal another, or can even heal someone using nothing more than the power of the caster.

You have to remember, there were sources of healing that worked without surges. But it makes perfect sense that it's easier for magic to tap into someone's reserves than it is to simply heal them with purely external power.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Simple. There's only so far a body can be pushed. The basic healing spells can't break that limit, but more powerful ones can draw life from one person, to heal another, or can even heal someone using nothing more than the power of the caster.

You have to remember, there were sources of healing that worked without surges. But it makes perfect sense that it's easier for magic to tap into someone's reserves than it is to simply heal them with purely external power.

This makes it seem like magic is healing physical damage, then. I was under the impression that HP was mostly nonphysical. Am I missing something?

 

[LurkAway]

But it makes perfect sense that it's easier for magic to tap into someone's reserves than it is to simply heal them with purely external power.

Sounds to me like a placebo effect of faith healing.

I have never seen a fantasy movie or read a fantasy story or played a pre-4E game where it seemed that magical healing wasn't externally sourced, and since the soul of D&D is now officially the story, I see no great reason to suddenly change my story.

 

[Kingreaper]

This makes it seem like magic is healing physical damage, then. I was under the impression that HP was mostly nonphysical. Am I missing something?

HP, to me, includes exhaustion, being battered and bruised, scratched and tired. Things you can recover from, and work around, given time to pull yourself together.
It's certainly not being poked through with spears.
(Note: Things like poison work on the basis that even a SCRATCH from a poisoned blade/stinger is still enough to get some into your system. If they actually hit straight-on you'd be dead.)

But given enough bruises, enough exhaustion, etc. there's no way you can pull yourself together any more.

And all most healing is doing is *helping* you to pull yourself together, to ignore the wounds.

But some, particularly powerful, healing actually removes the exhaustion and the bruises (or, in the case of lay on hands, transfers it to someone else instead)

That's just my way of interpreting it, for most characters. For some, it actually is that they're stabbed through with a spear. But those guys are from Tarascon, so what do you expect?

 

[JamesonCourage]

HP, to me, includes exhaustion, being battered and bruised, scratched and tired. Things you can recover from, and work around, given time to pull yourself together.
It's certainly not being poked through with spears.

It seems the large majority of those advocating for healing surges disagree with this assessment. It seems to be the consensus that HP represents mostly nonphysical damage, and healing surges help represent that. If so, your reasoning doesn't really hold, for me. But hey, that's me.

At any rate, time to start game with my group. I'm just trying to work out problems with internal consistency, not say "don't play that way". Because, as always, play what you like

 

[CleverNickName]

So you house rule the damage system. It's pretty cool actually but more bookwork and minutia than I want to deal with.

Thanks. I wish I could take credit for it, but it's not a house rule. My interpretation is probably new, I guess, but the rules for hit points, ability damage, suffocation rules, poison, and so forth are right out of the 3.5E core rules.

But it's not like this comes up a whole lot at my game table. When characters take damage, it is almost always of the physical sort...therefore, hit point damage. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in the last decade that a PC was in danger of collapsing from exhaustion. I only mentioned the rules for ability score damage in answer to Naszir's question: he wanted to know how I would explain hit points as being only physical damage, and that's how.

 

[kiltedyaksman]

I'm not interested in hero-play.

We hates them, we hates them forever...my precious.

 

[CleverNickName]

Wow. Do you track changes to all the other things that the abilities affect as well? So every time a character gets a str penalty they are adjusting their attacks bonuses. Everytime they suffer a Con penalty they are readjusting their hps? What about how these affect saving throws?

Maybe you don't bother with that, which would make sense because that would be a lot of time consuming adjustment on the fly.

You must be under the impression that my players are always at risk of exhaustion and poison. When the PCs get hurt in my games, it is almost always hit point damage.

Honestly, this just doesn't come up very often. And when it does, the 3.5E rules for ability damage are easy enough to handle for the ten minutes or so until the afflicted character can drink a potion or take a nap or whatever. I never thought that they were hard or time-consuming to calculate on the fly. (Level drains, on the other hand, are a royal pain in the posterior...so I houseruled them into oblivion.)

(shrug) I guess I don't see what all the fuss is about.

 

[Herschel]

And at the end of the movie he needs to go to the hospital.

He's not going to the hospital, he's going with Bonnie Bedelia. She knows how to trigger his surges.