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Severedevil
2009-05-01, 04:26 AM
Magical healing is too weak; why give Conan a reassuring pat on the back if you can kill one of his attackers?

Magical healing is too strong; why nurse Martin back to health if he can do a line of CLW charges?

Spells that restore health are rarely viable as a combat strategy, and trivially guarantee full hit points otherwise. So... low excitement and low grit. Let's switch that up.

New Rule - Healing magic only applies in or around events which cause damage. This is trivial to enforce - just make healing a matter of temporary hit points. It's a surge of positive energy to keep you alive and fighting, but it'll run its course in a few minutes. Try to enjoy them.

New Rule - Healing magic heals a meaningful amount. This is also trivial to enforce - just double the numbers on the Cure spells. Cap the amount of temporary hit points they can give a character, of course - healing shouldn't give you more (HP + temp HP) than your max HP. (Or maybe max HP + CL. I'm not against using low-level cure spells as a pre-combat buff, but in the interest of full disclosure, I'm your medic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH4D7Uod4Cg&fmt=18))

Now the Cleric can more effectively prop up his collapsing companions in combat, but his powers aren't permanent. Someone needs to know his way around a Heal check if your party wants a brisk recovery.

(Note - melee combatants get shafted in rates of natural healing, because of their larger hit dice. Perhaps we should replace 1d8/1d10/1d12 with 2d3/2d4/2d5 hit dice. This also make CON bonuses and HD checks more fair for durable classes, although a few of the values the cue off number of hit dice might have to be corrected.

Negative hit points should also be expanded to at least 9 + hit dice, while we're at it.)

lord_khaine
2009-05-01, 04:40 AM
you missed the part about how this will improve the game...


Magical healing is too weak; why give Conan a reassuring pat on the back if you can kill one of his attackers?


because its much more fun to kill one of the attackers, instead of letting Conan hog all the glory.


Magical healing is too strong; why nurse Martin back to health if he can do a line of CLW charges?

because its usualy not fun being forced to wait a week while whoever got unlucky and caught a critt have to rest in bed, its even less fun if the situation force the rest of the party to move on, while martin is forced to stay in bed for the rest of the session.

in short, i personaly think these changes are a bad idea.

Learnedguy
2009-05-01, 04:51 AM
They might work for a grittier kind of campaign though. Offering options for speeding up mundane recovery might get necessary though. Maybe some buffs to the heal skill?

Satyr
2009-05-01, 04:56 AM
you missed the part about how this will improve the game...

Well, it increase the importance of a whole branch of class variants, and it increases the suspense of the game and its combats as damage suddenly become an important part of the game and is not as easy to handwave away. Suddenly, being hurt has a meaning beyond a very temporary limitation.
That may be a very subjective position but I always found that a severe burning or a smashed in skull should be more of a limitation than a temporary inconvenience. My solution for this problem always looked a bit different, but the issue is one of those that appear more regularly.

Talic
2009-05-01, 05:10 AM
I will second that serious injury makes for tense, explosive combats.

It also lends to meat-grinder, when players have a line of backup characters.

I imposed a new disease in a zombie game. The disease was pretty much 100% fatal, given enough time. Any zombie that hit you had a chance to pass it on. Any zombie that bit you? Was certain to.

Remove Disease was unreliable. Immunity to disease was unreliable. Both were long shot odds, and created a situation where everyone was fighting to not get hit.

But everyone went through at least 2 characters. The record? One guy went through 7. In 6 sessions. There was always at least one death a session, sometimes more. One was nearly a TPK.

Simply put, lowering healing between combat either slows the out-of-combat pace down... or increases lethality.

My variant?

"Oh, there's more... but only the first one's Free"
Curative magic, while powerful, can get saturated in large doses. The body can only absorb so much readily at a time. Anyone can be the target of a restorative spell or similar effect (a magical/psionic ability which restores HP or ability damage to the target) once a day without any change to standard rules. However, every time after the first in a day that a character is targeted, the caster must make a heal check. The DC of the check is 10+5 for every previous restorative spell the target has benefitted from that day (2nd spell requires a DC 15 Heal check. 3rd requires a DC 20. etc)

This also has the benefit of making higher level cure spell more desirable.

mcv
2009-05-01, 05:19 AM
If you want realistic recovery times, just ban healing magic and give clerics something else to do.

You could also take a look at D&D4. It completely revamps the way clerics heal to the point of silliness, but it could be your thing: everybody has a number of healing surges per day, and outside of combat you're free to use as many of them as you like. In combat, it costs you an action to use a healing surge, however. Unless there's a cleric present. He can attack an enemy and allow an ally to use a healing surge (with a bonus even, I think). It's silly that a cleric can heal by hitting someone, but it does limit the amount of out-of-combat healing, and it lets the cleric hit people just like everybody else.

Talic
2009-05-01, 05:59 AM
I'm not sure he wants realism, as much as he wants a consequence.

Even if it was just nagging injuries, such as a -1 to all non-damage rolls for 2 days for every time your HP go below 50% (stacking). After a few times of that happening, you're gonna wanna recover for a couple days, but it doesn't incapacitate you with just one occurrance.

It affects saves, skills, attack rolls, ability checks, initiative. Any roll that isn't damage.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-05-01, 06:20 AM
The healing/damage system of Decipher's Lord of the Rings is probably portable into D&D. Let's see...

Everyone's got a Health value; in D&D let's say, (X + Con mod) x level, with X a number around 1-3 based on your class. (Jiggle around with the number X until you are satisfied.)

edit:
Screw those numbers. Let's see, we want a 20th-level barbarian with a good Con to have, I don't know, 240 hit points total? 300? So we divide that by six, get down to 40-50 per wound level. Divide that by level, we get 2 - 2.5. That won't work. Level + Con modifier + class-dependent modifier on each wound level? Let's say barbarians get +4. That'd give us something like 6x30 total at 20th level, or 180. Better, but still needs tweaking!
/edit

You have six Wound Levels, each with a penalty; 0, -1, -3, -5, -7, and -9 (Healthy, Dazed, Injured, Wounded, Incapacitated, Near Death). The penalty applies to all checks, including attacks, saves, and skill and ability checks.

You have hit points equal to your Health on each level; when you lose that amount of hit points, you're down to the next level, and take the corresponding penalty.

There's no instant magical healing - you recover your level in hit points every day, or thereabouts, provided someone makes a Heal check (DC dependent on your wound level; say, 20 for Dazed, +5 for every wound level past that). Healing spells grant the caster a bonus to the check.

JellyPooga
2009-05-01, 06:30 AM
My variant?

"Oh, there's more... but only the first one's Free"
Curative magic, while powerful, can get saturated in large doses. The body can only absorb so much readily at a time. Anyone can be the target of a restorative spell or similar effect (a magical/psionic ability which restores HP or ability damage to the target) once a day without any change to standard rules. However, every time after the first in a day that a character is targeted, the caster must make a heal check. The DC of the check is 10+5 for every previous restorative spell the target has benefitted from that day (2nd spell requires a DC 15 Heal check. 3rd requires a DC 20. etc)

This also has the benefit of making higher level cure spell more desirable.

I once considered a similar thing except if you failed the Heal check there were dire consequences dependant on the severity of the recipients wounds (minor wounds result in abilty damage, moderate wounds result in permanent HP loss and critical wounds result in ability drain...or somesuch).

mcv
2009-05-01, 07:06 AM
I'm not sure he wants realism, as much as he wants a consequence.[/quiote]
I think he wants clerical healing not to make non-magical healing obsolete. That's why I suggested D&D4. It's not realistic at all, but the cleric simply gives you access to your regular out-of-combat healing during combat.

If you want realism, you shouldn't be using hitpoints in the first place.

[quote]Even if it was just nagging injuries, such as a -1 to all non-damage rolls for 2 days for every time your HP go below 50% (stacking). After a few times of that happening, you're gonna wanna recover for a couple days, but it doesn't incapacitate you with just one occurrance.
For a light-weight, realistic wound system that hurts your performance, I really like how Fudge does it. You've got a couple of boxes for several wound levels: scratch, light wound, serious wound, incapacitated, etc. When you're hit, you don't lose any HP (because you don't have any), but you tick one of those boxes (depending on strenght of attack and your resistance to damage). You can take a couple of scratches, but when you're out of scratch boxes, the next scratch becomes a light wound. When you're out of light wound boxes, it goes to the next level up, etc. Powerful attacks can result in a serious wound on the first blow. If the attack is big enough, any attack can kill you outright (although it usually won't). Your highest wound level determines which penalty you have on everything: light wounded is -1, seriously wounded is -2, etc.

caden_varn
2009-05-01, 08:03 AM
Iron Kingdoms had an interesting system - the pain of healing. Basically, clerics were alloted a certain amount of healing per day, something like 10 Hp/level. If they went over that, they suffered consequences - fatigue, temporary blindness, damage and in extreme cases even death - the idea being the gods discouraged over-use of healing.

Knaight
2009-05-01, 08:09 AM
By default Fudge actually caps out at near death, and you can't get instantly killed. Knocked to the ground and bleeding out over the next three seconds is totally a possibility, but you can't get instantly killed when dealing with the default wound track.

The vehicular wound track can be instantly destroyed, as well as the less cinematic wound track, where it is way easier to get injured in the first place(ie if RD+ODF-DDF is 3, then its a very hurt wound). Its a great wound system, but not highly realistic. Better than hit points, but if your willing to accept a little more crunch(and its Fudge, its not like your going to be overwhelmed by the mechanics anyways), then there is the other wound system, introduced in Fudge Factor, where you can take an unlimited amount of various kinds of wounds, and have to make health checks to resist effects, they all apply some penalty, which includes affecting health checks to resist effects and to heal. And you can get instantly killed, which some consider a plus.

It may sound like I'm being hard on fudge here, so I'm going to go with a positive side. Fudge contains some of the most brilliant mechanics I have ever seen. The trait ladder, where skill, attribute, and difficulty levels are all rated with the same word scale, is a truly brilliant innovation. The ability to swap out applicable skills and attributes from each game easily is a brilliant innovation. The concept of scale, a numerical stat to measure mass, which affects combat, is incredibly elegant, leading to any two creatures of the same scale being able to fight normally, without constantly increasing numbers from the lot of them, as well as making it easy to run combat between characters of different sizes, scaling perfectly upward or downward. The die system, with a bell curve around zero, is also brilliant.

And its free. If you actually buy the complete book, you get even more cool stuff. The dogfighting system(as in planes, space ships in space opera settings, small boats, etc.) is the best combat system I have ever seen, provided that the players are only using one ship. On a larger scale it doesn't really work as well. Fudge Fu is the best turn based melee combat system I have ever seen, although its pretty much rendered obsolete by Simultaneous Combat (which is in the free system). Basically its a beautiful system, and worth taking a look at if you want wound consequences, the ability to run a gritty or cinematic game with them, and the ability to use one system for a lot of genres. I've confirmed modern, low fantasy, hard sci fi, sci fi playing robots(with attributes including Traction, which turned out to be extremely useful), sci fi black ops, high fantasy, medium fantasy, and espionage.

Philistine
2009-05-01, 10:50 AM
The healing/damage system of Decipher's Lord of the Rings is probably portable into D&D. Let's see...

Everyone's got a Health value; in D&D let's say, (X + Con mod) x level, with X a number around 1-3 based on your class. (Jiggle around with the number X until you are satisfied.)

edit:
Screw those numbers. Let's see, we want a 20th-level barbarian with a good Con to have, I don't know, 240 hit points total? 300? So we divide that by six, get down to 40-50 per wound level. Divide that by level, we get 2 - 2.5. That won't work. Level + Con modifier + class-dependent modifier on each wound level? Let's say barbarians get +4. That'd give us something like 6x30 total at 20th level, or 180. Better, but still needs tweaking!
/edit

You have six Wound Levels, each with a penalty; 0, -1, -3, -5, -7, and -9 (Healthy, Dazed, Injured, Wounded, Incapacitated, Near Death). The penalty applies to all checks, including attacks, saves, and skill and ability checks.

You have hit points equal to your Health on each level; when you lose that amount of hit points, you're down to the next level, and take the corresponding penalty.

There's no instant magical healing - you recover your level in hit points every day, or thereabouts, provided someone makes a Heal check (DC dependent on your wound level; say, 20 for Dazed, +5 for every wound level past that). Healing spells grant the caster a bonus to the check.

That seems like it would be particularly brutal on low-level characters, where a single hit could easily drop them clear down to Wounded, Incapacitated, or even Near Death, and where the party healer probably would not be able to make DC 30+ Heal checks (unless the bonus granted by healing spells was really huge). Whereas high-level Clerics and Druids, who are pumping WIS anyway, could reliably hit the DC 40 check to heal a victim from Near Death even without any boosts from spells.* That may be just what you're aiming for, of course.

But I'd suggest scaling the check DC some other way. Perhaps have a DC 20 check heal the target by one stage, plus another stage for every 5 points by which you beat the check? That way low-level characters aren't lying at death's door for weeks until the party healer finally hits a natural 20 on the Heal check. And high-level characters who've kept up on their Heal ranks are rewarded with reduced downtime.

My only other concern would be that clerics only get 2+INT skill points. As it stands, it's quite possible (even desirable) to ignore the Heal skill, leaving points free for things like Concentration and Knowledge (Religion). Now, it's true that I generally advocate giving everyone more skill points anyway, but this seems like a clear case of adding additional SP dependency to a class that's already hurting for skills. Which, again, may be just what you intended.

Interesting idea, anyway.


* It's not that difficult to get a check bonus of 39 at level 20: 23 ranks in Heal, +2 for a healing kit, +14 from WIS mod (17 starting, +5 from levels, +6 from an item = 28 easily, without Tomes, racial mods, or anything else).

Bulwer
2009-05-01, 11:51 AM
What if you implemented temp HP healing as per the first post, and then had permanent healing take longer-- say, 1 minute. Add on a fairly expensive (but not prohibitive) material component, and injury is serious, but not so much so that it interferes with the flow of the game.

Sstoopidtallkid
2009-05-01, 12:01 PM
Bad idea. An NPC Rogue with Craven and a surprise round will make a player stay in bed for days. Over a week if he beats the Cleric in initiative.

11 Kobold Rogue using 3 nat weapons-6d6+1d3+11(34) damage per hit. 3 times that on a full attack. A player heals 10 HP a night. Yeah, there's a problem there.

John Campbell
2009-05-01, 02:07 PM
* It's not that difficult to get a check bonus of 39 at level 20: 23 ranks in Heal, +2 for a healing kit, +14 from WIS mod (17 starting, +5 from levels, +6 from an item = 28 easily, without Tomes, racial mods, or anything else).

A 28 Wis only gives you a +9 Wis modifier.

Not disagreeing that the d20 skill system scales poorly with level, though.

Philistine
2009-05-01, 02:45 PM
A 28 Wis only gives you a +9 Wis modifier.

Not disagreeing that the d20 skill system scales poorly with level, though.

Bah, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking with that. The saddest part: my degree is in Mathematics.

So, okay. Instead of human with 17 WIS, take a race with a bonus (Aasimar comes to mind), and start out at 20. Add a +5 Tome to get to 36 WIS at level 20, which should be a +13 modifier. Which is good for a +38 Heal check, still without breaking out of Core. So the point - which was that static DC skill checks eventually become trivial - still stands, if somewhat weakened.

mcv
2009-05-02, 05:14 AM
Bad idea. An NPC Rogue with Craven and a surprise round will make a player stay in bed for days. Over a week if he beats the Cleric in initiative.

Being bed-ridden for days or weeks due to a nasty stab wound is quite realistic. The problem is that D&D is not made for realism, and anything that makes it more realistic breaks the classic D&D-style game. It might work for some, though.

Dixieboy
2009-05-02, 07:36 AM
you missed the part about how this will improve the game...



because its much more fun to kill one of the attackers, instead of letting Conan hog all the glory.



That is exactly his argument

Flickerdart
2009-05-02, 08:53 AM
This will also make Melee classes suck even more, since the Wizards will replenish their resources overnight anyways, while the Fighters will languish in bed for days. It'd work better with 2E's version of spell casting, which, as far as I've heard, makes you take X time to prepare for each spell slot.

Thane of Fife
2009-05-02, 09:01 AM
This will also make Melee classes suck even more, since the Wizards will replenish their resources overnight anyways, while the Fighters will languish in bed for days. It'd work better with 2E's version of spell casting, which, as far as I've heard, makes you take X time to prepare for each spell slot.

10 minutes per spell level per spell. That will indeed eat up your life quite quickly.

Kylarra
2009-05-02, 10:29 AM
Being bed-ridden for days or weeks due to a nasty stab wound is quite realistic. Realistic is somewhat less fun when it means: "Okay, after every single battle we have to wait a week to heal up."

Tsotha-lanti
2009-05-02, 10:56 AM
Realistic is somewhat less fun when it means: "Okay, after every single battle we have to wait a week to heal up."

You'd have to be silly to write a D&D-like combat system with hit points and then apply "realism" with slow healing times.

Compare, instead, to something like The Riddle of Steel, where wounds have four effects: pain, shock, blood loss, and possible amputations and other crippling effects. If someone smashes a mace into your shoulder and shatters your arm, that's it - your arm is shattered and you're probably going to get your brain pulped while writhing in pain on the ground. Therefore, you do everything you can to make sure you don't get wounded - which is, hey, realistic. Only idiots (and noble knights who know their enemies would rather take them alive, for ransom) get into fights they could avoid, and only idiots (and, again, noble knights; gee...) neglect to take every advantage they can to make sure they don't get hurt in a fight.

Using your brains to avoid or win combat is much more fun than rolling a lot of dice, anyway.

Kylarra
2009-05-02, 11:03 AM
I'm not sure why we care about "realism" in a game with dragons and reality-bending magics on the other side anyway.

Diplomancing and avoiding fights is all well and good, but when walking through the city can lead to you being shanked and out of action for 2 weeks, it may be realistic, but it's certainly not fun.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-05-02, 11:13 AM
I'm not sure why we care about "realism" in a game with dragons and reality-bending magics on the other side anyway.

Because a combat system that is realistic is generally superior to a combat system that is not, allowing for differences in genre (realistic physics and superheroes don't work together), and up to a certain complexity (which is another reason TROS's system is great: it's smooth, straightforward, and easy to learn).

Your objection is nonsensical, anyway. Realistic physics and magical reality are not mutually exclusive: look at The Lord of the Rings, Song of Ice and Fire (except for how they cleave through harness with swords), Conan, Fafhrd and Mouser, and a host of other fantasy (high and low) books. The source material is already "realistic" - it's just that the RPG field has been unfairly and unfortunately dominated by D&D and its influences for years, which has skewed expectations into video game reality. (And then people complain when 4E makes it work. Oy!)


Diplomancing and avoiding fights is all well and good, but when walking through the city can lead to you being shanked and out of action for 2 weeks, it may be realistic, but it's certainly not fun.

If you're stuck with the notion that roleplaying games are 90% combat, 10% counting treasure, then yes, realistic combat systems won't work for you.

If, however, you think that roleplaying games are about stories, and that combat and wounds should be important and significant in those stories, like they are in real life (and in endless books and myths and legends), realistic combat systems are pretty great.

For instance, the whole point of Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 combat, in theory, is to be "unfair" and lethal, because PCs aren't supposed to run in guns blazing and draw attention to themselves.

Glyde
2009-05-02, 11:36 AM
In a sci-fi setting I'm working on, magical healing degenerates as time goes on (And I mean in 'rounds' so the degeneration is bound to happen.) Further damage taken after being healed magically takes away from the 'real' HP. When the battle finishes, the character often degenerates all the way down to 0, or their original HP before being magically healed (If any of those hitpoints still remain of course.) Medics/Surgeons/Nurses/Whatever have to take care of the character and speed up mundane healing. It's a sci-fi setting of course, so this is REALLY sped up. This rule for magical healing could be applied to any campaign, really, with some adjustments.

This made the Medic actually an important role on the team, instead of just having a magical healer going around healing people left and right. I also have rules for surgery bringing back 'dead' characters and saving characters from deadly injuries - but that's another topic.

Frosty
2009-05-02, 11:58 AM
This sounds a lot closer to 4e than 3e.

monty
2009-05-02, 02:00 PM
Realistic is somewhat less fun when it means: "Okay, after every single battle we have to wait a week to heal up."

I've played games like that (not D&D). It can still be fun.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-05-02, 02:34 PM
I've played games like that (not D&D). It can still be fun.

Yeah. A week can be a ridiculously short time. Why shouldn't an adventure stretch over months, and campaigns over decades? It's just a matter of compressing it in story-telling, and focusing on important events. Heck, one of the foremost idiosyncracies in D&D is characters going from zero to demigod in two or three years - which is inevitable if you run an adventure a week (game time).