Why all the healing?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

That actually sounds pretty cool, to me. If dynamic situational advantages and disadvantages in combat are "another kind of hit points", then they're a far more interesting one than a single pool of undifferentiated points representing physical health, combat readiness, luck, fatigue, and so on.

Puts me in mind of Spirit of the Century's "consequences" mechanic, where a target can elect to take a specific injury or temporary combat disadvantage instead of generalized health damage . . . which, of course, runs the risk of being exploited to cause them more damage the next time they're attacked, or otherwise impairing their own actions. I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, myself, but I hear it works so well that some folks are houseruling the hitpoint-esque damage track to be less important, and focusing the combat system on consequences instead.

Sure, it ain't D&D. But it definitely sounds like fun.

An interesting approach I know is from Torg.
Torg had a very low number of conditions, and two types of damage. (Maybe I am forgetting something, I didn't have the pleasure to play it often). In addition, there was a resource called "Possibilities" that were a mix of action & hit points.
Whenever you took damage, you suffered a number of shock points and potentially one or more wounds. In addition, some attacks and situations could give you a "K" or an "O". If you had both a K and a O, you were (surprise) KO. You could spend possibilities to negate shock points Ks, Os and Wounds, though you could only spend a limited amount of possibilities each round. So sometimes you had to decide between taking a wound or dropping unconscious (either due to shock points or Ks and Os.). In Torg, you didn't have to stay unconscious for long - sometimes, the Initiative Card could come up and signal "Heroes have an Inpsiriation") which would remove all shock points, Ks and Os from you. (Off course, it could also be "Villains have an Inspiration", which meant bad things... )

I think if there are things I'd wanted to add to the system would be a better "Possibility Recovery System" (as it stands, you needed to complete an adventure or part of adventure to gain some new ones. Since Possibilities are used in many different contexts, I think this is sometimes to limiting.).

 

[CleverNickName]

There's nothing "broken" about hit points and resting per se, it's just that the current system doesn't reflect how people actually want to play.

Well, like they say: "If it ain't broke, fiddle around with it until it is."

 

[Son_of_Thunder]

4E - Why all the healing?

Because it's not fun when someones beloved character dies?

 

[Counterspin]

Having lots of healing around allows you to have good skin of your teeth fights (because you don't have to inflate the hit point cap, or base the system around DR whittling) with lots of swings in HP totals while still keeping the starting point for fights relatively stable, which improves the quality of your CR recommendations.

 

[JohnSnow]

Two comments:

Firstly, from the playtest reports, I think there's a good chance that the Fourth Edition management of hit points might actually be essentially "per encounter." From what we've heard, it sounds like people run a real risk of dying in combat (perhaps being "healed" mid-fight) but that they'll be mostly "fine" with a few minutes to rest. So, there's not sense in 4E of the "4 encounter attrition mechanic" that was so common in 3E.

The question is how to square that with characters that can actually end up injured and in need of real rest and recovery. For me, the logical way to handle that is something like Saga Edition's "Condition Track" that allows for a persistent condition of "wounded" or "seriously wounded" or the like. A character suffering from such a condition might be -1 on all checks and defenses, but actually possess full hit points.

Secondly, based on the information in the latest podcast, it sounds like Fourth Edition D&D characters acquire hit points using a totally different mechanic than their counterparts in Star Wars Saga Edition, and that hit point recovery is handled differently, but that the actual hit point totals are comparable.

Thoughts?