NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5803269" data-attributes="member: 82106">There's another aspect to this as well. Damage is not a LINEAR thing. Take someone, and bruise them and scratch them and cut them, and even ring their bell a time or two, tire them out, etc and you can do that again and again and again and the next small bruise or cut isn't adding linearly to the character being dead. 100 scratches is barely worse than 1. Sure, EVENTUALLY you can be scratched to death or whatever, but hit points are just too simplistic for me. They imagine some sort of linear piling up of damage so that 10 small cuts makes you as dead as having your head severed.At least with the HS sort of system it is MUCH LESS like that. Sure, even wounds that are unlikely to be fatal COULD disable you for a bit, but once you have a chance to catch your breath, apply a bit of ordinary first aid, possibly some minor magic, you're basically ALMOST back to normal. Your longer-term reserves are slowly being tapped out, so cumulative damage isn't insignificant, and a single massive attack CAN just kill you dead in your tracks, but you can go on for a good long time before the little stuff adds up.Clearly ALL versions of D&D (except maybe at the lowest couple levels) are highly unrealistic in terms of how likely it is someone will get hit with that outright deadly gut-shot, but that's always been true and we all know that is pretty much a necessary genre conceit.I just really despise the whole healing potion/healstick sort of gunk. I mean its cool to have a magic potion you can use to get healed, but with the pre-4e sort of notion of hit points you constantly had to be gulping down heal magic at every turn. It just made it way too 'cheap' of a thing, and the whole notion that you had before 3.5 of the party wandering around some adventure just happening to discover heal potions at just a fast enough rate to keep them going was the most utterly gamist thing in existence IMHO. Feh! At least with 4e's HS you could spin your story as your character was tough and deeply resourceful and got through because of his own internal strength and heroism, and not because of some highly contrived flow of dime-a-dozen heal magics that show up at just the right moment or that you stockpile bags full of before you set off.Can HS be a more cleverly presented mechanic? Sure. I don't think it is just perfect and I don't think it has to be presented exactly how it is now if there's a perfectly good way that it can be where I'll be happy and someone else can spin it their way too. There can be less surges, more hit points, less hit points, whatever. The basic concept is what's important, damage isn't a linear track and heroes don't accomplish great things by sucking down a potion every 5 minutes (well, unless you're Elric, but there's always room for that).</blockquote>

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