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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5105114" data-attributes="member: 61155">Except that the entire model for hp itself has no real basis outside the game. How come someone with 200 hp can take 190 damage and be perfectly fine, and then another 20 damage instantly kills him? How come each of those attacks don't inflict various long-lasting injuries on him? Some games use those models - D&D doesn't. Instead, it treats hp as a combination of many factors, including both health and fighting capability. Healing surges are just an extension of that - how much vigor a character has over the course of an entire day, rather than at any one time.  I've never found a version of D&D hp that reflects 'real life'. It honestly used to bug me quite a bit that a high-level fighter could literally let someone take a dagger and cut his throat, repeatedly, a dozen times, without dying. But that comes with abstraction, and 4Es embrace of that abstraction - and tying it more to cinematics and narrative over anything else - actually worked for me a lot more smoothly than trying to accept it as based on reality.  So... yes, at least to me, healing surges are perhaps video-gamey, but no more so than hitpoints themselves.</blockquote>