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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7841277" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a newly introduced problem though. The problem is that we've kept the mechanical structure of the hit point and the attack action that has been core to D&D since the beginning, and we've radically changed the definition of healing. As a practical matter in D&D most healing has been magical, which allows us to handwave away the problem of how someone got better. But until recently, natural healing at least had some sort of verisimilitude to realism in that a person who had taken nearly lethal wounds needed (depending on the system) days or weeks of rest to recover up to the peak of their vitality. So the important point to make here is that the disconnect is not with the hit points, but rather there is a disconnect with the idea of natural healing. And the idea that everything is better in the new scene is not verisimilitude to realism, but verisimilitude to cartoon violence or its close cousin action movie violence where the Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis in one scene takes wounds which should have put anyone in the hospital for an extended stay, but they grit it out and 10 or 15 minutes later in the movie you can't really tell that 10 or 15 minutes earlier they had taken traumatic damage. If you are trying to reconcile that mechanic in terms of realism, you are automatically going to fail. There will be no realistic and coherent explanation for the whole of the system. No redefinition of the hit point is going to account for everything that is going on mechanically in the system. You've changed genre from fantasy casual realism of the old pulp fiction titles that inspired the game, over to video game, cartoon, or action movie violence. And you'll never get that to line up. If you want to go back to fantasy casual realism, then you have to adjust the concept of the short or long rest. And I think the system is built to let you decide what sort of plausible duration of rest you need for the genre you are going for and the level of suspension of disbelief you feel comfortable with.</blockquote>

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