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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 6319706" data-attributes="member: 17077">I don't agree with you that it's bad design. From a purely game design point of view, I think second wind is well thought out. It only takes a bonus action, so it doesn't interrupt a fighter's ability to do what people want to do when playing a fighter - fight. It also reduces the burden on the party healer, allowing them to spend more of their resources on things that they want to do, rather than having to spend so much time keeping the fighter up. IMO it makes the game more fun for both the fighter and the party healer, and that's a good thing.Hit points themselves are a very unrealistic abstraction. The way D&D has handled injuries has always been far from realistic. It makes no sense at all for someone to be able to be hacked multiple times with an axe, fall off a cliff, or be dunked in lava and survive, and yet these things can easily be survived by a high level D&D character. But this is one thing where Gygax decided that realism should give way to playability. Hit points may not make a lot of sense from a simulation point of view, but from a game design point of view, they make a lot of sense. They make combat quick and easy, and keep the game flowing without the characters having to be hospitalized after every battle, allowing them to keep adventuring. Second wind, likewise, is about the same things. It may grate simulationist sensibilities, but D&D has never been a simulationist game. That's all I really want to say about that matter here. I don't think people would like for us to derail this thread with another long argument over hit points and martial healing.As for hit dice, I agree with their decision not to use them to fuel second wind. As Mike Mearls explained in the video where they unwrapped the starter set, Second Wind isn't as easy to abuse as it might seem. When you're spending an hour to take a short rest, you're better off using your hit dice to heal yourself and to save your second wind for emergencies later. Sure, you can let the fighter rest for hour after hour, but if you're going to do that, you might as well just take a long rest and recover fully anyway. That, and DMs can easily counter such behavior with wandering monsters, time constraints, etc.</blockquote>

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