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View Full Version : 3.5/Pathfinder Variant Rule: Healing Surges



Thomar_of_Uointer
2011-02-11, 02:05 AM
http://kobolds-keep.blogspot.com/2011/02/variant-rule-healing-surges-healing.html

Because I like the idea of doing a dungeon crawl with no cleric.

Feedback? Any ideas?

Roderick_BR
2011-02-11, 10:53 AM
Interesting for games with little access to healing magic.
I should also point out Reserve Points variant: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/reservePoints.htm
I'm sure these could be combined to free up clerics from the healbot role.

Wannabehero
2011-02-11, 01:51 PM
In general I like it (especially the converting lethal to non-lethal, rather than just healing up HP, which makes temporary HP effects more powerful), though it is fairly powerful.

In the past, in certain games we have house-ruled a different variant like this (sorta), where players each had 50% of their total HP in reserve. Players could either spend ten minutes of rest and a successful constitution check to replenish these extra hitpoints, or when stabilizing from zero or negative hit-points make an additional fortitude save to pop back up with these extra HP.

It worked allright, but we no longer needed it once we switched to Pathfinder.

Thomar_of_Uointer
2011-02-11, 05:06 PM
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the Reserve Points variant. It looks okay, but it has the side-effect of making parties with dedicated healers able to run very long dungeon runs without stopping. The system I put together here requires PCs to use healing surges to benefit fully from healing magic so that the healers' importance is minimized.

On the other hand, Reserve Points are dead simple, and make magical healing only useful in the middle of combat. But I do like using healing surges to help dying characters stabilize. I'd have to try this out in a campaign to see how well it works.