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Houserule: Variant Natural Healing - Still Uses Hit Points (Feedback Wanted)
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<blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8979397" data-attributes="member: 6777737"><p>I certainly think you could make that work. I would probably not describe it as using the same pool of hit points. I'd probably describe it as hit points and stamina points. That would just ease play at the table. You can also say things like, "when you're out of stamina, you're bloodied."</p><p></p><p>There are some oddball issues like Champion Fighter's Survivor and Life Cleric's Preserve Life and deciding how effects that increase max HP work, but they're really not that difficult to handle.</p><p></p><p>The first real issue I see is that it's not really clear what's magical and what isn't. Is a 50gp healing potion magical? How about the Healer feat? Paladin Lay-On-Hands? Bard's Song of Rest? Fighter's Second Wind? The game as written doesn't care if it's magical or mundane. It only cares about magnitude. You can decide which is which as you want, but I don't think it's clear.</p><p></p><p>But it goes deeper than just that. I think "magical healing" becomes a more significant issue. Magic is too powerful if a single Goodberry or Healing Word can eliminate four weeks of bedrest. (Especially given that OneDND's Spare the Dying literally just heals 1 hp if you're at 0 hp.) You're actually just making access to magical healing a de facto adventuring requirement, and I don't think that's your goal. There are a lot of knock-on effects to changing HP recovery, too. I remember seeing someone post an alternative recovery system, and one of the first comments was that it was easier to kill a creature and restore them with Revivify than the alternatives. Part of that is that Revivify is kind of a dumb spell for level 3, but the point stands.</p><p></p><p>Years ago we did play a similar rule. I'm trying to remember it because it was just a horror one-shot in 3e in basically Ravenloft.</p><p></p><p>PCs had HP as normal, but they also got a Body Point pool equal to their Con score plus their max starting hit die (e.g., a Ranger with Con 14 would have 10 + 14 = 24 body points). Or maybe it was twice Con or twice your HD. After you lost HP, any further damage was BP damage. If you ran out of BP, you were dead. As long as you had any BP damage, you were considered "injured". The exact effects were left up to the DM, but injured characters were basically unable to participate in combat beyond short movement. If they tried to do anything productive very often, they had to save or spend a round in pain or take HP damage doing it (and maybe fall unconscious). BP would recover naturally at a slow rate like 1 per day. Magical healing of BP was very difficult. It would always stop bleeding or similar, but magical BP recovery required at least level 3 (4?) magic, and it would only recover like 1 BP. I think you were limited to doing it once a day, too, but that might be something else.</p><p></p><p>The purpose of it was to make hurt characters real liabilities. That's why it made PCs <em>more</em> durable than the core -10 hp = dead rule. You were supposed to drag the other PCs down. It ended up not coming up because the only characters who got injured died pretty quickly. As I recall, they would've died even without these rules, though. We were using some flavor of sanity rules, too, and I remember one of the PCs got badly injured and then went insane like in the next room after being stabilized.</p><p></p><p>Going back to the original topic, maybe you do something similar and rename Revivify to "Heal Mortal Injury." Making injuries cost 300 bucks a pop to heal on short notice certainly changes things, and if Revivify gets around the system then Revivify should be changed anyways.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bacon Bits, post: 8979397, member: 6777737"] I certainly think you could make that work. I would probably not describe it as using the same pool of hit points. I'd probably describe it as hit points and stamina points. That would just ease play at the table. You can also say things like, "when you're out of stamina, you're bloodied." There are some oddball issues like Champion Fighter's Survivor and Life Cleric's Preserve Life and deciding how effects that increase max HP work, but they're really not that difficult to handle. The first real issue I see is that it's not really clear what's magical and what isn't. Is a 50gp healing potion magical? How about the Healer feat? Paladin Lay-On-Hands? Bard's Song of Rest? Fighter's Second Wind? The game as written doesn't care if it's magical or mundane. It only cares about magnitude. You can decide which is which as you want, but I don't think it's clear. But it goes deeper than just that. I think "magical healing" becomes a more significant issue. Magic is too powerful if a single Goodberry or Healing Word can eliminate four weeks of bedrest. (Especially given that OneDND's Spare the Dying literally just heals 1 hp if you're at 0 hp.) You're actually just making access to magical healing a de facto adventuring requirement, and I don't think that's your goal. There are a lot of knock-on effects to changing HP recovery, too. I remember seeing someone post an alternative recovery system, and one of the first comments was that it was easier to kill a creature and restore them with Revivify than the alternatives. Part of that is that Revivify is kind of a dumb spell for level 3, but the point stands. Years ago we did play a similar rule. I'm trying to remember it because it was just a horror one-shot in 3e in basically Ravenloft. PCs had HP as normal, but they also got a Body Point pool equal to their Con score plus their max starting hit die (e.g., a Ranger with Con 14 would have 10 + 14 = 24 body points). Or maybe it was twice Con or twice your HD. After you lost HP, any further damage was BP damage. If you ran out of BP, you were dead. As long as you had any BP damage, you were considered "injured". The exact effects were left up to the DM, but injured characters were basically unable to participate in combat beyond short movement. If they tried to do anything productive very often, they had to save or spend a round in pain or take HP damage doing it (and maybe fall unconscious). BP would recover naturally at a slow rate like 1 per day. Magical healing of BP was very difficult. It would always stop bleeding or similar, but magical BP recovery required at least level 3 (4?) magic, and it would only recover like 1 BP. I think you were limited to doing it once a day, too, but that might be something else. The purpose of it was to make hurt characters real liabilities. That's why it made PCs [I]more[/I] durable than the core -10 hp = dead rule. You were supposed to drag the other PCs down. It ended up not coming up because the only characters who got injured died pretty quickly. As I recall, they would've died even without these rules, though. We were using some flavor of sanity rules, too, and I remember one of the PCs got badly injured and then went insane like in the next room after being stabilized. Going back to the original topic, maybe you do something similar and rename Revivify to "Heal Mortal Injury." Making injuries cost 300 bucks a pop to heal on short notice certainly changes things, and if Revivify gets around the system then Revivify should be changed anyways. [/QUOTE]
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