Why Not Just Call Them Stamina Points?

[Grossout]

...also, why are there two separate terms? What's the difference between a "second wind" used in combat, and a "healing surge" used out of combat?

...I've been trying to figure this out as well. Anyone?

 

[rkwoodard]

new abstraction

I have just decide how to view hitpoints (it has only taken me 22ish years). ZERO Does not equal Death.

You do not take any physical damage of note till you hit zero. Zero is not dead, never was. Zero is simply the point at which you can not help yourself anymore. You are either unconsious, or lying there watching your guts spill out. It is literally that last blow that has fully penetrated your defenses and "opened you up".

If you are not at zero, even at 1, you have no noteworthy injuries. So, rest will do just fine.

RK

 

[Dalamar]

Why wouldn't you use a more visceral word like 'guts', 'vigor' or 'resolve' and drop the whole 'points' thing ?

Because losing 25 guts sounds.... splattery.

...also, why are there two separate terms? What's the difference between a "second wind" used in combat, and a "healing surge" used out of combat?

Second Wind is a standard action you can take once per encounter that allows you to use a Healing Surge and gives you a +2 bonus to Defenses for a short while. There are likely other mechanisms tied to Second Wind as well.
Healing Surges are a measurement of a character's ability to recover and can be used with Second With, during a short rest, or with some powers. At least the bodak can reduce a character's available Healing Surges with its attack.

 

[SaffroN]

You could change names and Terminology all day long... The game is not going to make any more sense. In fact, changing well known terms like hit points would be detrimental. Everyone knows what HP stands for nowadays. If someone comes along and picks up the PHB and sees "Stamina Points" they won't understand what that is. After they have read the description, they will just end up thinking, "so its basically HP then... why didn't they just call it that?"

 

[Pbartender]

...I've been trying to figure this out as well. Anyone?

Healing Surge is the useable resource for "healing" that you keep track of on your character sheet... Just like hit points or action points. "I have only 3 Healing Surges left."

Second Wind is the action that lets you use a Healing Surge in combat to replenish your hit points.

A Short Rest is the "action" that lets you use Healing Surges to replenish your hit points outside of combat.

 

[Ourph]

That still doesn't make much sense. Healing simply doesn't work that fast. Even if your only injuries are scratches and bruises, it'll be a day or two before they heal, minimum. A deeper cut could take weeks. Such injuries may not affect you once the fight is over, but they haven't healed.

HP don't track all injuries, they track injuries that determine your ability to stay functional. Being at full HP doesn't tell you anything about your character's appearance (cuts, bruises, burns, etc) it just tells you that those minor physical conditions don't matter in terms of his ability to survive.

...also, why are there two separate terms? What's the difference between a "second wind" used in combat, and a "healing surge" used out of combat?

A Second Wind is a healing surge you can activate yourself, while under the stress of combat, without resting. A healing surge used out of combat is triggered by resting.

:edit:

Or what pBartender said above.

 

[JohnSnow]

That still doesn't make much sense. Healing simply doesn't work that fast. Even if your only injuries are scratches and bruises, it'll be a day or two before they heal, minimum. A deeper cut could take weeks. Such injuries may not affect you once the fight is over, but they haven't healed.

Well, that sorta depends what you mean by "healed."

I know that sounds a little bit like arguing about the definition of "is," but hear me out.

When you are "hit" by a blow, the effort it takes to turn that lethal hit into a nonlethal one almost certainly causes you fatigue. It also might rattle your teeth or make you twist an ankle, pull a hamstring, bruise your knuckles, open a blister, bruise your ribs (or somewhere else) or even, potentially, cut you.

All of those things contribute to "lost" hit points. But is a character with a cut on his hand really "hurt?" How about a shallow scratch on his chest? Sure, it stings...and it can get infected, but once it's "healing nicely," it hardly counts as an injury. Sure it might bother mere mortals like us, but is it really a big deal to a big tough hero?

That's what those healing surges represent. They're what happens when you have time to let those wounds stop bleeding (they scab over and/or get bandaged), or the pain of that twisted ankle to fade, or to recover after a blow to the ribs has knocked the wind out of you. You might still be bruised, or sporting a number of small cuts and pulled muscle, but it's nothing a hero like you can't tough out. So, for all practical purposes, you're "healed." Even if you still look battered, bruised, and probably a little grimy.

I kinda thought this through when I started playing with Reserve Points, á la Iron Heroes and Unearthed Arcana. It was a bit jarring at first, but once you accept that hit points are abstract, most things in the game make a whole lot more sense.

...also, why are there two separate terms? What's the difference between a "second wind" used in combat, and a "healing surge" used out of combat?

This may sound retarded, but I think it's called "Second Wind" because it's something you can do to yourself (catching your "second wind") and (barring some exceptional abilities) you can only do it once per combat. It's your natural, readily available "reserve."

In other words, Second Wind is the inborn ability a character has to trigger a "healing surge" in himself, in combat. In addition, you also get +2 to all your defenses, to represent that "will to win."

Healing surges, on the other hand, are a way of strictly limiting the amount of punishment a character can take in a day. Technically, in 3e, there's no limit to the amount of hit points you can recover in a day. So with the proper resources (most likely potions or wands), a party of martial types can literally keep adventuring forever.

In Fourth Edition, by contrast, an individual character's healing surges are instead triggered by the various healing abilities, be they his own Second Wind, skill-based healing, or clerical prayers. Outside of combat, he can trigger them freely, but he can still only recover so many hit points in a day (because he only has so many healing surges). That puts a strict limit on the number of challenges he can face before he just HAS to call it a day. That's a nod to realism, to some degree.

So to sum up, I think that's why there are two terms.

 

[JohnSnow]

I have just decide how to view hitpoints (it has only taken me 22ish years). ZERO Does not equal Death.

You do not take any physical damage of note till you hit zero. Zero is not dead, never was. Zero is simply the point at which you can not help yourself anymore. You are either unconsious, or lying there watching your guts spill out. It is literally that last blow that has fully penetrated your defenses and "opened you up".

If you are not at zero, even at 1, you have no noteworthy injuries. So, rest will do just fine.

RK

Emphasis mine.

Excellently put.

As for how long it took you to get it, that's okay. It took me playing Iron Heroes and trying to rationalize Reserve Points to fully "get it."

No damage is "real" until you hit negative hit points. And even those injuries aren't always life threatening in the end.

Part of me wonders whether something similar to the Condition Track (from Star Wars Saga Edition) could be added to represent the effect of actual injuries sustained from going to negative hit points. My gut says that while it might be a neat addition to the game for some people, I think in the end it would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

On the other hand, once I'm used to the Fourth Edition rules, I might play around with it.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

The thing is, HP represent many, many things, and they NEED to.

Otherwise, you'd have to have a chart or something, and you know what's wrong with that? No matter how convoluted your chart is, it can't cover all the things that could happen in the game. There is, quite literally, infinite possibilities.

So HP HAVE to represent many different kinds of attrition.

HIT does not mean wound, so there's nothing wrong with them being called hit points. They mean "hit" as in the difference between the opponent rolling a "miss" that is, the opponent's attack roll beat the defender's defense score. That's ALL the term Hit Point is implying. (Yes yes there are damage sources that didn't have to roll attacks, but that's still where it comes from.)

The term HEAL has been used for ages to indicate an Increase in HP and the term Damage has been used to indicate a Decrease. These are likely not the best terms as they have obviously caused much confusion. Much more than the name Hit Point. But these terms also have traction in the gamers lexicon, so there they are.

Fitz

 

[Corinth]

Unless, you know, one actually read the First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, where Gary discussed the notion of "hit points as actual damage" (on, I believe, page 82) using phrases like:

"...completely unreasonable to assume a human being could survive a dozen sword blows"
"Hit point represent a combination of toughness, grit, resolve, divine favor, luck and stamina..."
"the physical and metaphysical peak of 100 hit points"

I could find the actual quotes yet again, but suffice it to say that this notion that hit points are actual damage has been thoroughly debunked since at least First Edition.

The only amazing thing is that it took this long for someone to decide that you ought to be able to recover fully with a day's rest, rather than a week, thus eliminating the absolute necessity of magical healing. In the "real world," serious injuries take months to heal, so clearly hit points have never been that. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous. It took longer under 1st-Edition, but there's hardly an appreciable difference between Third Edition's 3 days, and Fourth's one night, except that Fourth simultaneously does away with the tyranny of magical healing.

Besides, realistically in Third, if the adventure was over, your cleric just burned his daily spell selection making everybody instantly better. Which is SO much more realistic. (Again...where's that "rolleyes" smilie?)...

Hit points are a nice, playable game abstraction for what happens when someone scores a "hit." They're what determines whether that "hit" is serious. They could have called them luck points, heroic luck, vigor, grit or something else, but Hit Points is what Gary decided to call them, so hit points they remain.

Gary could define them all he liked, but in reality Hit Points means "Hits To Kill" and really are nothing more than that; anything else, at best, was self-delusion (and more often is outright fraud). The rules of the game model nothing other than literal damage capacity, due to the interaction of the rules for attacks, injury, healing and follow-on effects like poisons or Bane weapons- and they always have. What you see is what you get, and the majority of gamers--tabletop or electronic--understand them as such, treat them as such, and believe them to be such. Gary's sophistry couldn't change that, and no one after him did either; this is why 4.0 had to make such radical changes to how Hit Points worked, for the design team (at some level) grokked this and acted accordingly.