But we're trying to tell a story here, and Conan can't be both bleeding to death and fine in 5 minutes without the intervention of magic or anything.
I don't really have a problem with action movie healing where someone takes some minor wounds and is fine next scene. But if you get hit with a wound that's enough to drop you (and by the dying roll mechanic, kill you), you don't just spontaneously get better from that after a short rest without magic.
Or are we assuming everyone has Wolverine healing factor here?
Thing is, you don't get spontaneously better. You're catching your breath, binding your wounds, ect. during that short rest.
It is action movie healing, more or less - even without magic, an action hero can take damage in one scene, then move around only with a slight limp (if that) in the next, especially if he's wrapped a bandage around the wound.
The other thing is that there's a bit of narrative laxity here - you may not have been as badly injured as it looked at first. A bit of retroactive continuity, if you will, but only over the short term. It looked like you got run through, but rather they missed and sliced through the flesh on your side - it hurts, and it knocked the breath out of you, but when you got yelled at you rose to your feet, demonstrating that the wound was not fatal.
Maybe so, but this is a game of tactical combat, or at least it's supposed to be. And the healing system is tactically fucking boring. You always want to heal people who drop, like all the time. The tactics are boring, the story it creates is just nonsensically stupid.
Yes, you do want to heal people who drop, like all the time, and that's a good thing because the optimal way to play the game is also the most enjoyable way to play the game.
I mean I understand that people are upset if they get dropped in one hit or due to one failed save, that's fine. I can understand removing save or dies. But at the point we're saying that no PC can ever get knocked out of a combat... we've gone too far.
Having played 4th edition, I can tell you that PCs do, in fact, get knocked out of combat. Its just that you only get knocked out of combat a number of rounds into the combat, rather than quickly. You only see people downed once the party runs out of healing.
Because this system leads to a bunch of bullshit, where monsters should really just focus fire CdG people who die, because it's the only way to actually take someone out of combat.
Its actually seldom worth doing because you have to do so much damage to them. If you are fighting a 100 hp character, you have to reduce him 50 hp below his bloodied value, which is very difficult for most monsters to do in a single round - and if you fail to finish him, then you've wasted all that damage. As monsters typically only maximize their damage on criticals, this acts to discourage CdGs.
I thought the same thing at first but, in practice, it is seldom worth CdGing unconscious PCs.
Only unfortunately, they're not nearly as tactically interesting as 5 monsters. They occupy one space, and they really don't do anything remarkable. So it's just fighting one big monster that takes fucking forever to kill. Really, that's not very fun.
This is only true of the badly designed solo monsters. The well designed ones are interesting to fight against.
But the problem is that in 4E, there aren't fragile glass cannons you want to protect. Everyone, including the wizard, has a respectable AC and HP. So much so that you really want him up there taking some hits from time to time, because that actually helps your meleers when that happens.
There's a huge difference between wizard HP and fighter HP. In my current party, the Wizard has 74 hp to the Fighter's 128, and the fighter's healing surges are further aided by Dwarven Durability, adding an additional +5 to them. So not only is there a 54 hp difference in total HP, but the wizard has a healing surge value of 18 as compared to the dwarven fighter's 37 - which is to say that the dwarf heals more than twice as much per healing surge spent on healing him than the wizard, which means that, until you're out of healing surge granters, you want the dwarf to take damage because it can be healed up for much less of the party's in-combat healing surge granters. Sure, once the dwarf is on his last legs, maybe its good for the wizard to get in there... but many ranged characters are quite bad in melee (most don't have Thunderwave), which means that getting into melee is still usually a bad idea.
Honestly, I just don't see how a ranged group would suffer. They have great focus fire, and none of the ranged classes are really all that vulnerable that they need protection. Even a wizard has respectable AC and HP in 4E, and the bow ranger is fucking awesome.
It really isn't that good. Their defenses are somewhat worse, but it is in HP that they really get screwed - its not just your maximum hp, but also your healing surge value. It also hurts that, without a defender, you cannot force them to focus on the "best" character in terms of soaking up damage, and instead they'll focus on the character least capable of soaking up the abuse or of getting away. Moreover, if the monsters flank a lot of these characters, they not only get attacked, but a simple shift can't get them out of opportunity attack range.
