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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 5807973" data-attributes="member: 32164">So the pre-4e system is "consistent," is it? Then why, for all that's holy, can "Cure light wounds" fully restore one person who's close to death, but only gives your 5th-level fighter back SOME of your hit points? Hmm?My point is that the old system had its own internal inconsistencies too. And that doesn't even address that the healing system is probably the major culprit for the so-called "15-minute workday." If you don't do anything about that, you're basically stuck with the notion of the 4 encounter day.A logically consistent hit point system that dispensed with the need for someone to be "stuck playing the cleric," but still allowed cleric players to feel useful, would be welcomed with open arms, I think. 4e was an attempt at this, but the designers didn't realize how vehemently some people would react to having "hit point abstraction" rubbed in their faces.However, the 4e system has flaws. And I say that as someone who loves having alternatives to clerics in the party. I personally have no problem narrating all of the hits in a fight without getting too graphic, but even for me the Schrodinger's wounds thing is...troubling. So, what to do? First, we need to agree on a few things.Premise 1: Hit points are, and always have been, an abstraction. They're a combination of toughness with immeasurable things such as sixth sense and luck. They have been thus since the earliest editions of the game.Premise 2: Until a character hits zero hit points, he's not, physically speaking, seriously hurt. This is why there's no penalties associated with losing hit points. This doesn't mean he's uninjured, as he might be scratched, scraped, bruised, or even bleeding from what are mostly superficial wounds.Premise 3: In the earliest editions of the game, going down in a fight meant that you were out of the fight. Once a character went down, they were OUT. Maybe not dead, but they sure weren't coming back into play. 3e changed this - and created an incipient problem (which could be glossed over by saying "it's magic!").Premise 4: 3e changed this because combats took a long time, and a player that was unlucky enough to go down early would be bored for a long time unless he could get back into the fight. With magic, this is believable. With martial healing - less so.So the solution is simple - Warlord "healing" only works on conscious (not seriously wounded) targets. If a character goes down and the only healer in the group is a warlord, well, they'd better win the fight quickly. So his healing is a bit worse than the cleric's - so what? You can balance that by having the warlord provide his allies with better tactical buffs (for example) than the cleric can. Or just make him a more effective fighter than the cleric is.Once you do away with the need to restore characters from 'dying' mid-fight, the discrepancy between martial healing and reality goes away. No more Schrodinger's wounds. That character who dropped is dying, until he receives some form of magical healing or medical treatment. But between combats, there's plenty of time to make a poultice, bandage him up, have him chew some medicinal herbs, and so forth.At this point (sans magical healing), our dropped character, like John McClane in "Die Hard," is still HURT, he's just bandaged up and fully combat effective. Yeah, it might start to stretch suspension of disbelief if the character keeps going down in fight after fight, implying he's the recipient of a dozen wounds, but a smart DM might start to narrate what takes the character down as a grazing blow plus an existing wound re-opening.Simple. Elegant. It still means that between combats, you can recover full hit points. So hit points become strictly an encounter resource - no more attrition and no more 15 minute adventuring day.(Yes, this system does assume that eventually the party of characters will either receive magical healing that fixes those wounds, or that they'll knock off adventuring for a while and take a lengthy rest - on the order of a few weeks - during which the wounds they sustained on their last adventure will heal naturally).Anyway, that's my suggestion. It also allows them to do away with counting surges, which is basically unnecessary bookkeeping. On the other hand, some people like the restriction surges attach to how much adventuring can get done in a day, so, I dunno. Maybe the switch I propose above to martial healing will totally change people's opinion of healing surges. I doubt it, but I can hope.</blockquote>

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