Design principles of healing - no mechanics allowed

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Just one random thought - Torg for example has some very different design principles behind healing.

For more nitty-gritty details check the spoiler block:
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You split between wounds and shock damage, basically. Wounds is physical damage and takes a long time to heal. If you take damage, you take some shock and some wounds. You can spend some game resources to take away some of those wounds or some of that shock, or a combination. If you take too much shock, you fall unconscious. Most of the time people will buy of wounds, but when they are close to being knocked out, they may decide to rather accept a wound.
But that's not all - during the game, random events occur - one of them adds more shock, and another (Inspiration) removes it all.
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The interesting aspects here are:

• Damage is split between wounds and fate/fatigue/skills
• A lot of focus is on damage avoidance via resource expenditure*
• Mid-Combat healing is not an element controlled by the DM or players, but a random event.

Overall, Torg doesn't seem to have as much yo-yo-health as, s ay D&D had, but thanks to the random events, it also allows for mid-combat recoveries, and these can be very important (unfortunately, in the real dramatic situations, they are rarer than in standard scenes).



But I think the 3rd point is rather unique - instead of having Clerics casting magic spells to close wounds, Bards inspiring people to bigger deeds and Warlords demanding you to toughen up, mid-combat non-wound healing is a random event outside of the control of the players or the DM.





*) In Torg, while mechanically the resource - possibilities - have all the trappings of a metagame resource, it actually has an in-setting rationale.

 

[pemerton]

somehow[/I]. In your example, you replenish it by starting a new gaming session. It's an unconventional recovery mechanic, but hardly unheard-of.

Just to add to the examples here, Burning Wheel has a bit of per-session recovery of resources, and some of that is even linked to healing/recovery.

From the lastest Rule of Three on adventure design, I also get the impression that WotC are thinking of "per day" as, at least roughly, a proxy for "per adventure", and are thinking of "per adventure" as, at least roughly, a proxy for "per session" - or, perhaps, "per 2-4 hours of play".

In 4e, both ingame and metagame langauge is used: "encounter powers" are technically defined as "once between short rests", but as their name makes clear, are intended to be recovered on the metagame basis of "per encounter/scene".

As was being discussed a bit earlier upthread, I think the strongest argument for in-combat recovery/healing is the contribution it makes to combat being exciting. Conversely, if combats are meant to be short and not involve incombat healing and to get their meaningfulness from attrition, then some thought needs to be given to framing them so that they avoid becoming mere filler.