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Message: <blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 6674856" data-attributes="member: 6796566">That is entirely correct. A hit point is not so much a thing as it is a unit of measure. You and I agree on this.So, taking your points a little bit out of order, I think suggesting lost hit points are a representation of injury might be disagreeable to you because you have a more narrow definition of injury than I do. I consider any harm you sustain to be an injury, whether it is physical, mental, emotional, or even financial. From my perspective (as an attorney) anything you can sue over is an injury. If you think of an injury as the lingering effect of physical trauma, then I can see your point - but I don't think we disagree here on anything more than semantics. I am by no means suggesting that "particular bundles of lost hit points correlate to particular injuries," I think the exact opposite is true.I will point out, though, that even semantically D&D has always characterised hit point loss in that kind of language. When you lose hit points, you "take damage." When you record that damage on your character sheet, it has often been in a category called "wounds" or something similar. If losing hit points is "damage" and lost hit points are "wounds," than "injury" is not an incongruous term, is it?Anyway, regarding mechanics: I agree with your points, but I draw a different conclusion from them. I especially agree with your statement that "[healing] is about recovery." That's an important distinction, because in the fiction that inspires the class feature we're talking about a character doesn't recover from being damaged, rather the character goes on despite being damaged. The character is still on death's door, but is possessed of a grim determination to fight and win anyway. There's no recovery in that scenario, and in fact those scenes are so compelling because there is no recovery. The character may be up and fighting, but he's still seriously damaged and the viewer or reader should remain concerned that he might not make it or, at the very least, be impressed with the character's 'grit.' After the fight is over, that damage still needs to be mended.Yeah, temporary hit points can be front loaded, but we're trying to represent a sort of leadership action, so that's appropriate. It makes sense to me that the same sort of action could both fortify your resolve before a fight and motivate you to carry on after being seriously damaged. Your last statement was that "[healing] is about encouraging a friend to overcome the burdens that action and struggle have inflicted." To me, that's what temporary hit points can achieve. Healing, by contrast, removes the burden entirely. Put another way, if you are carrying a heavy bucket of damage, healing empties the bucket whereas temporary hit points let you run with the weight as if it were empty.I also agree with you that temporary hit points are inadequate to handle an ally unconscious at zero. That's why I've previously suggested an entirely separate ability or abilities to handle that specific scenario, something that would operate mechanically similar to the Barbarian's Relentless Rage (perhaps as part of a command aura) or the half-orc's Relentless Endurance (perhaps triggered by the Warlord as a reaction.) As I've said several times in this thread, I think the Warlord should have the ability to restore hit points - "heal" - comparable to the Healer feat, or the Second Wind feature of the Fighter, both in terms of the amount of hit points restored and the limitations regarding the frequency of use on a particular ally.</blockquote>

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