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Friv
2014-01-29, 04:53 PM
So, I'm mumbling around 3.5 again, and one of those really tiny little things that I usually ignore but kind of bugged me cropped up - namely, that having more HP doesn't help you in the long run, only in the short term. In individual fights it's great, but it means sucking down three times as many potions and monopolizing healing items, or else resting for goddamn ever, or else using cheesy builds to effectively regenerate.

So I figured I'd steal shamelessly from Saga / 4e and put in a rough system for more HP making healing work better on you. I assume that I've missed some fairly critical way that this will shatter the game, so let me know?


Healing Factor

Tougher, more resilient heroes recover their injuries and their morale more quickly, ready to return to battle. To represent this, all characters have a Healing Factor. This is a numerical rating equal to (HP / 5), rounding down to a minimum of 1. For example, a character with 4 HP and a character with 8 HP both have HF 1, while a character with 16 HP has HF 3. Each night of rest, instead of healing (Level) HP, characters heal (HF) HP.

In addition, Cure spells work much more efficiently on resilient characters. Each d8 in a Cure spell or potion is replaced by d4 + HF. So Cure Light Wounds heals 1d4 + HF + (Caster Level, max 5). Cure Medium Wounds heals 2d4 + 2HF + (Caster Level, max 10), and so on. Note that Cure Critical Wounds will almost always heal a creature's entire HP track in one go, which means that Heal is likely not necessary only for HP damage.


So, other than mid-level healing spells being much stronger as the game goes on, what have I just broken? :smalltongue:

Domriso
2014-01-29, 06:34 PM
I like it. It adds an interesting mechanic that actually helps higher level characters. It also opens up the possibility of feats and whatnot improving a character's healing factor. I might use this (or something based on it) in my own games.

Yitzi
2014-01-29, 09:18 PM
So, other than mid-level healing spells being much stronger as the game goes on, what have I just broken? :smalltongue:

All healing spells are stronger on more powerful characters; in particular, healing now goes quadratically rather than linearly with level, making it overpowered at high levels (a high-level character can, with a single spell perhaps not even of their highest level, undo all damage the party has taken.)

Perhaps more importantly, a low-level ally with low-level healing spells can still contribute substantially by healing high-level characters, which has a lot of potential to break the game as well.

chaos_redefined
2014-01-29, 10:57 PM
Not quite full health.

At 7th level, you can heal anyone 80% of their health + 4d4 + 7. That is full health for anyone who has less than 85 HP, which should be most people, but it is possible to get more by this point in the game.

Similarly, at 15th level, you can heal the whole party 80% + 4d4 + 15. This is full health for anyone with less than 125 HP, which isn't everyone. If your tank has less than this, then you need to talk to him about finding a new job.

For the record, the math is based on 4d4 ~= 4 x 2.5 = 10.

Friv
2014-01-30, 01:53 PM
All healing spells are stronger on more powerful characters; in particular, healing now goes quadratically rather than linearly with level, making it overpowered at high levels (a high-level character can, with a single spell perhaps not even of their highest level, undo all damage the party has taken.)

Given that combat healing is considered to be basically junk at the moment, that doesn't actually bother me too much; it makes clerics better, but only if they're around high-HP folks, who are usually the martial types.


Perhaps more importantly, a low-level ally with low-level healing spells can still contribute substantially by healing high-level characters, which has a lot of potential to break the game as well.

That, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid I'd overlooked. A level 3 cleric can now contribute immensely in a high-power battle, although only until they get squashed. Hrm. Back to the drawing board...

*EDIT* Although I suppose I could just claim this is an E6 rule only and pretend I'd though of that ahead of time. :smallwink:

chaos_redefined
2014-01-30, 11:12 PM
In E6, it heals over 60% of the targets HP.

ISitOnGnomes
2014-01-31, 03:40 AM
Simplest solution to me would be to set a hard cap on HF per cure. (10 for CLW, 20 for CMW, etc) These are just examples I pulled out of my butt. You should play around and see what feels right. The idea is to reward people that aren't playing full-casters, basically, but you also don't want every mid-high level character hiring a small army of low level clerics to follow them around.

chaos_redefined
2014-01-31, 05:37 AM
I always figured it would be better to do somthing like:
Cure Light Wounds: 1d4 HP/(2 CLs)
Cure Moderate Woulds: 1d4 HP/CL
Cure Serious Wounds: 1d6 HP/CL
Cure Critical Wounds: 1d8 HP/CL

ddude987
2014-01-31, 01:22 PM
In E6, it heals over 60% of the targets HP.

and that breaks the game how? Not to mention, that means a player used up their turn to heal, and it still doesn't stop crowd control. You can heal all you want, if a character is paralyzed, they're still doing nothing.