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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8492267" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As others noted, that's a bit high. 30+ HP at first level is pretty beefy in 4e, but having less than 20 HP would be notably fragile. (IIRC the only way to get that is to play a Wizard-like fragile class that dumps Con.) Most classes get 10-15 base HP and then add their Con score which is usually 10-16, giving a typical range of about 20-30. Characters with more than 35 HP at first level are either rare or specially built for that goal.As others noted, though, HP scale statically with level, no Con mod applied. So you start out with seemingly high HP, closer to a 3-6th level character in 3e or 5e, but by the early teens, anyone who has a decent Con score has caught up; many 20th level characters in 3e/5e have more HP than 30th level 4e characters!Correct, but do note that damage values could be quite high. Losing 25% of your HP was a typical standard hit, losing half or more of your HP was a solid crit (crits were IMO simpler in 4e, literally just flat double the damage, sometimes with a few bonus dice for extra damage after doubling.) Obviously these numbers skew depending on whether you play a fragile (e.g. low-Con Wizard), typical (e.g. 12 to 16 Con Ranger), or beefy (e.g. 18+ Con Fighter) character, and how dangerous the monster you're fighting is, but that's the loose shape of it without further details.Correct. Outside of combat, you could use any number of healing surges you liked. In this case, the "Second Wind" action is meant to have rather a literal meaning. That is, it's you reaching into yourself and finding the strength to carry on. It's (very) hard to do that twice or more in a single minute (most combats being 4-8 rounds would be even less than that), but possible with assistance from others. Warlords don't "shout hands back on," they use exhortation and psyching people up to get them back on their feet, for example--but even this has its limits. (Believe it or not, this has IRL parallels: many deaths due to injury are actually caused by the loss of homeostatic equilibrium, the state known as "shock." It is possible to help a person consciously maintain homeostasis when their autonomic functions begin to falter. This can quite literally save that person's life. It's part of why you want to keep, say, hypothermia patients conscious, as that helps support homeostatic equilibrium.)In practice, monster damage was high enough that most characters could not take more than ~6 encounters without being completely out of healing surges, and that's close to an ideal case where damage is spread across the group roughly proportionately to number of healing surges. In practice it was not uncommon for some characters to be drained and others to still have some gas in the tank after only a few encounters if things went pear-shaped early on.True, though again there are some wrinkles. As an example, healing potions are rather inefficient for healing most characters: they consume one of the target's surges but restore a fixed value of HP (regardless of the character's maximum HP), more points for more expensive potions. On the other hand, some classes had daily powers that could restore HP without spending surges, but since these were also daily resources, they basically just acted like flexible bonus surges you could use where you wanted them. (Cleric was the king of this, being able to pick up a "Cure X Wounds" family of powers that provided sizable surgeless healing once a day. These powers were not particularly popular, because they were seen as merely delaying victory or defeat, rather than bringing the conclusion of the fight closer. Fans tended to prefer actions that did direct damage while buffing allies or removing pesky conditions or the like.)There are some parallels, but cery different purposes and thus meaningfully different execution. 4e combats were designed to be what fans call "volatile" rather than "lethal." While it is perfectly possible to kill characters in 4e (in the last long-runner game I played, we had two deaths by 4th level and a razor-thin near-miss at 5th level), most combats instead have characters whose HP and status bounce around a lot but don't tend to result in actual deaths most of the time. This allows a feeling of tension, as the game state can change rapidly, without punishing the player for a mere chance hit like "welp, monster crit, you're just toast, sorry." It takes foolish actions, generally speaking, for a 4e character to die. One of the deaths I mentioned above was my own PC. I failed to make use of some free healing I had, thinking that being slightly under half health for one round would be fine. It wasn't. The "solo" (think what 5e does with "legedary" creatures that have lair actions and bonus saves) we were fighting got a crit on its nastiest attack, and I went from about 40% HP to about -51% HP in a single blow, instantly dying. (I got better and the RP for that revival was TOTALLY worth it. But it was sure shocking in the moment.)Point being, the extra HP in 4e are not so much there to make characters invincible as they are to cushion the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They allow players to make one or two mistakes, or to take one or two nasty unexpected hits, and still bounce back and rally to victory. But if you make a couple bad calls, well, you're now in the realm where chance alone can kill you, and likewise if you're noticeably down on your luck you really do need to think about your next moves because a bad decision may mean death. The game gives the party just enough room to be able to figure out "hey...the poop has really hit the fan, hasn't it? We should run," and actually still survive to run away. (Had that experience in the aforementioned 4e game too! Fight that should have been no problem went pear-shaped because the solo kept regaining its recharge powers almost immediately and we couldn't withstand an assault like that. So we booked it and lived to fight another day.)</blockquote>

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