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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Njall" data-source="post: 5105478" data-attributes="member: 54719">Wow, it's strange how people can react differently to the same mechanic. To me, "healing surges" were something that made the game more realistic, rather than more "video gamey".HP never made sense for me: I accepted them as a game construct, a necessary evil if you will. Let me explain: since the beginning, Gygax made clear that HP didn't represent actual health; rather, they were a mixture of luck, skill, physical health and plot immunity. Ok, that makes sense. If someone slashes at you, it doesn't really make sense that you can take the full force of the blow and survive unless you're really lucky, and the chances that you can take 5, 6 swings in a row and walk away on your feet are pretty slim. However, it took an experienced fighter days, if not weeks, to regain his defensive prowess after even a moderately challenging fight, barring magical healing. Furthermore, since HP were influenced by Con and Class while natural healing was a constant value, the toughest fighter's wounds were proportionally slower to heal than the frail magic user's, and it took him a lot of time to fully recover from fatigue.This...didn't really fit the genre, IMO, and I don't even saw how it was realistic at all. In fantasy novels, the main characters don't spend days recovering after a minor fight, and the tough, experienced combatant is back on his feet way before his frail companions. With healing surges, suddenly HP make sense: recovering from a tough fight doesn't take days or weeks simply because you're not really wounded: you're just bruised and battered ( and, considering that no edition of D&D ever supported long lasting injuries, crippling wounds or mutilations, this doesn't really break my suspension of disbelief...after all, if I can assume that a sword slash will never cut one of my hands off, I don't see why I can't assume that it's not going to deliver a grievous wound no matter what).And, really, healing surges are the closest a game has ever come to simulating fatigue, for me: if you run as fast as you can, for example, you'll be exhausted after awhile. Take a short rest, catch your breath and you can run again for awhile. If you do this over and over, though, you'll tire out pretty quickly, and, in the end, you'll need a long rest to recover.Healing surges are pretty much the same thing, except that they represent how long you can defend yourself before you're too tired to parry or dodge another blow.In addition, they tie the amount of HP healed to the recipient rather than the healer, meaning that healing you from 0 to full will take the same number of healing spells at both 1st and 30th level.That's pretty consistent with Gygax's original explanation, IMHO, and I don't really see how it's more "video-gamey" than needing a pocket healer to keep you alive fight after fight, but I guess it's a matter of opinion <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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