Well, since HP sans magic in every edition aside from 4e only return at a very slow rate naturally
As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] pointed out, this is not true. HP sans magic return at a very rapid rate in 3E (eg a wizard can return from near-death (0 or 1 hp) to full health in less than a week, or in a day with bedrest).
The slowest healing rates I know of are in B/X (1 hp per day, from memory), but hp totals are also generally lower. Most 1st level PCs are going to recover from near-death 91 hp) to full in not very much time at all.
The "HP=meat" crowd seem to believe that each and every single HP contains an admixture of meat + moxie (with the meat portion decreasing as you level up), whereas the other crowd proposes that individual HP are either (a) one or the other or (b) "abstract", as if that's somehow an answer.
I regard hp as a classic FitM mechanic, connected to combat resilience. When you are losing them, your ability to hold on is ebbing. When you're gaining them, you're experiencing resurgence. The details are to be narrated accordingly - for instance, a 6 hp blow that drops a 2nd level fighter from 20 hp to 14 hp can sometimes be narrated as a nick or scratch (eg if it delivers a poison rider) but on other occasions can be narrated quite differently (eg as a near miss that wears down the fighter's resilience).
I don't think this is too bad as a mechanic. BW uses a version of it for the Duel of Wits (though interestingly not for its actual combat rules); and HeroWars/Quest used to use a version of it ("action points") for its extended conflict mechanic.
Hit points won't work if you
don't treat them as FitM. Gygax worked this out at least by 1979 (and he worked out the same thing about saving throws), which is why he characterises them in his DMG in a fashion that could be lifted straight from some Forge-y explantion of FitM written 25-odd years later.
I find it ironic and probably true that in the Great Hit Point Debate, it is too easy to forget to question the hit point mechanic itself.
I haven't forgotten about this. I've got a lot of experience with a system that doesn't use a D&D-style hit point mechanic (Rolemaster) and am familiar with many other systems that don't either.
In those other systems, there may be no mechanical room for the battle captain archetype (eg Rolemaster), or it may have to be done differently (eg Burning Wheel).
I've recently reread the books and it seems to me like there's a bunch of subtle magic going on. (D&D doesn't model this very well, either.) I certainly don't interpret the Theoden episode as restoring HP (or at least not simply that.) Something a lot bigger and mystical than "regaining some HP" is going on there.
In 4e, and in Burning Wheel, and perhaps in other systems too (including maybe other versions of D&D) a lot of the "subtle magic" could be considered to be bonuses to skills (or simlar things like eg abilities to negate failures in a skill challenge). I don't see that it has to be modelled as a
spell in the classic D&D sense - and if I've read you right, you agree.
That said, restoring Theoden isn't necessarily hit point restoration. In 4e terms it's more in the neighbourhood of condition removal.
I do not read many of these supposed Warlord exemplars as functioning the way the 4e class did. A lot of "I see X, Y, and Z as Warlords" seem pretty stretched to me. I don't ever recall hearing pre-4e complaints about the failure of the game to model these characters (at least in any way that would pre-sage 4e Warlords).
I don't know about pre-4e complaints. For my part I didn't complain: there were things the game couldn't do, and I played a system (namely, Rolemaster) that in my view did a better job at the things the system
could do. When 4e came along and it was obvious that it would do most of what I was getting from Rolemaster plus other stuff too, I changed systems.
On the issue of whether these Warlord exemplars function in a 4e-ish way, I'll reiterate something I said upthread.
In D&D, much of the action happens on an in-fiction timescale with which the authors of romantic fantasy don't deal - the moments and minutes of combat. But due to the D&D legacy, of breaking combat down in to short rounds and resolving it in some detail within those rounds, what takes a short time in-fiction often takes a noticeable time in the real world, at the gameing table. And so emotional response that probably wouldn't typically take place in 12 seconds - like being struck by despair, but then roused out of it - can take place, as a player sees his/her PC (or perhaps the whole party) approach the brink of defeat, but then recover.
The warlord, plus other elements of theme in 4e, in my view play upon the implications for pacing, and the experience of play, of this gap between the imagined world of the fiction and the real world of the metagame. Other genres deploy comparable devices - for instance, super hero comics use dialogue in combats that is not easily imaginable from the in-fiction point of view (there would be neither the time nor the breath to speak all those words) but that fits in well from the real world point of view of someone engaging with the medium (the dialogue conveys story, encourages your eyes to linger longer on the panel, etc).
(Another example wold be Burning Wheel scripting: it's not a
model of what happens in the fiction, because conflict doesn't work by particpants prescripting their manoeuvres like that. It's an attempt to make the players at the table experience the same sense of anxiety, uncertainty, surprise and coup that their PCs are experiencing within the fiction.
A contrasting example would be Runequest, which in my view doesn't produce a lot of excitement in the actual resolution of combat, because the player has so few decision points due to the simulationist austerity of the rules that it tends to simply turn into a series of dice rolls.)
For those for whom imagination of the infiction situation is the pre-eminent aspect of RPGing, I would not expect warlords (or 4e more generally) to be that appealing. But for those whose pleasure comes from engaging the mechanics and therefore (in some curious proxy fashion) experiencing some limited version of the emotions the PCs themselves experience, warlords et al I think can convey the sense of being an inspiring leader. The
fiction is not identical to Tolkien, but the theme and emotion are there.
