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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5105213" data-attributes="member: 61155">I'd say the key is to think of it as healing surges representing part of your total pool of hitpoints. You don't have access to all of them at any given time, since enough punishment over a short period will take you down. So say that Rambo has 400 hitpoints, but if he takes 100 hp in any fight, he drops. Which is the equivalent of having 100 hp and a bunch of healing surges.  Yes, at the end of the day, all of it gets restored - you are healed instantly. But... we're already treating all these injuries as not actually impairing you. Rambo got shot in the arm and leg and chest, and it doesn't actually slow him down in any way. So after he has 'healed up', he might still have those injuries all bandaged up, and is ready for more.  The thing is, if we treat every actual hit as a true injury, characters take such ridiculous amounts of damage that we've already passed the point of absurdity. Instead, the rules for hp assume that they represent not just getting hit, but getting worn down and exhausted and losing morale. And thus, healing can represent gathering your resolve and pushing onward, in addition to actual magical healing and the like. The only true injury a character ever takes is the swordblow through the chest that finishes them off.  That isn't a property of healing surges, mind you, but simply the lack of a 'critical wounds' element to D&D. Which you could add in if desired, and could do so in 4E as well - I've seen people draw up such injuries using something like the disease track. When someone gets critically hit, that is when they take a genuine injury - one that might require a significant amount of time to recover from, or genuine magical healing to cure (in the form of a ritual or so forth.)  But D&D, in the default rules, has never really had these sort of injuries as commonly built in. If you want them, you need a house rule to apply them, one way or another.</blockquote>

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