Increased Nonmagical Healing HR

[Voadam]

So I've been thinking about non magical D&D healing.

I dislike having the party dependent on clerics or wands for healing to keep pushing on during adventures. Default D&D has nonmagical healing as a long term rest activity so you have to stop adventuring to get back your hps without magic. The PCs in my games sometimes end up without healers and I want that to be a viable adventuring group for the types of games I like to run. I prefer the party to be able to reasonably keep going and not have to stop after a decent fight whether they have magic or not. I don't mind having magic be superior to nonmagic for healing, but I want a party without a magical healer to be able to adventure reasonably without constant camping.

I currently use reserve points from UA which basically gives PCs 2x the hp they can take for a day but no increase in a single fight. This is an OK solution but the healing end is an issue after the reserve points are used up as you have to heal twice as many hp to be back to full. A party of fighters can go twice as far in a dungeon for one day, then they need to spend twice as long naturally healing up.

I like 4e's healing surge mechanic but don't really want to come up with a formula for how many surges each 3e/d20 class should get. I also like 4e's bloodied as a physical descriptor.

I checked out Monte Cook's BoXM and BoXM II and saw his grace hp mechanics. I remember liking some aspects from there but not the formulas he uses.

So I'm thinking of handling healing as follows:

Total hp are as normal (after applying whatever independent house rules are desired).

Half of these hp are normal, half are temporary hp.

Damage comes off of temp hp first as normal, then once these are gone damage is taken from remaining normal hp.

Normal hp are healed normally through magic or standard non magical healing. Magical healing heals the normal hp wounds first.

Resting briefly (i.e. minutes, not hours) to catch your wind will restore the temp hp. A rate of 1 hp/level will give these temp hp back fully after a couple of minutes.

This means that PCs can go back up to at least 1/2 total hp after fights. Fights with minor damage don't lead to hp attrition, only ones where PCs are down to less than half their hp. Nonmagical parties can reasonably push on when at 75% or so of their hp and keep going with adventures after fights that drop them down to 25% of their total hp. Nonmagical parties have less of a need to stop and camp then. Magical healing still provides a significant advantage, because they can heal hp up to full quickly and heal in combat. Nonmagical parties can handle the same single fights they could under normal rules, they get no extra hp in any single encounter.

This means that encounters are less about the standard wittling away of hp/healing spell resources across an adventuring day and there can be more encounters with challenging foes.

Thoughts? Feedback? Implications you think I've missed or not considered?

 

[Dagredhel]

Hi Voadam.

I think your plan is quite sound. I can think of only two minor quibbles.

Unless one of the unnamed house rules gives low-level characters more hit points to start, it won't help them as much. When a couple of hp are a matter of survival, characters are still better off waiting until they are fully healed.

You may also want to consider calling the quickly healed half of the character's hit points something other than "temporary hit points", since that phrase has special rules significance.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Going into an encounter with 1/2 hit points is going to kill PCs quickly.


'oh, it's ok, you have half hit points' says the dragon shaman, right before half the party dies.

'great idea' says the players as they make new characters.

just go with reserve points, much better way of going about this.

 

[OneWinged4ngel]

Going into an encounter with 1/2 hit points is going to kill PCs quickly.

Yes. Half hit points is complete fail. Either make nonmagical healing worth a damn, or make someone *suck it up and buy a vigor wand or healing belt* already.

I can't emphasize this enough. You must restore your hit points to full after every fight if you want to stay alive against a DM who is actually making you fight a level appropriate set of encounters per day, the chances that you will die horribly very soon are quite high. Going into a challenging encounter at half-durability is just asking to go down in a round.

 

[Voadam]

You may also want to consider calling the quickly healed half of the character's hit points something other than "temporary hit points", since that phrase has special rules significance.

Well that was deliberate, I want them to work like temp hp (i.e. damage goes there first but healing goes to normal hp first). I just need to specify that I want these to be separate from and stack with temp hp from other sources like the false life spell.

 

[Voadam]

Going into an encounter with 1/2 hit points is going to kill PCs quickly.


'oh, it's ok, you have half hit points' says the dragon shaman, right before half the party dies.

'great idea' says the players as they make new characters.

just go with reserve points, much better way of going about this.

Eh, you only end up with half hp if you went all the way down to 0 hp in a fight. Otherwise it is whatever you had left at the end of the fight plus half. For fights where you don't take more than half total hp in damage you will recover fully from resting.

Reserve hp have the drawback of requiring twice as much healing to fully heal up to get back to full reserves. It delays the initial need to camp fairly well but then basically doubles the amount of camping needed to get back to full.

This does raise an interesting point I had not considered though. Dragon shamans and resreve healing now would heal up to full by actually healing up to half hp.

 

[necroblivion]

I had been working on this as well. I have found a few things that you might find helpful. One, if you look at the Unearthed Arcana's Reserve Hit Points system, there is a pretty interesting idea. They give you 100% of your hit points back through slow healing in a given day, representing rest and such.

This led me to realize that 4 healing surges (at 25% value) would do the same thing. So, I have allowed Second Wind as a standard action in my game, and every player has 4 surges available to them. There was a lot of discussion about other classes getting more surges, and Con mods, etc. but it comes down to the fact that all of that is already implemented in the total hp of the characters. There are some feats in 4e that increase the value of healing surges and total number of healing surges as well, they can be translated easily.

The last thing of note is that we are looking into minor healing effects for each class as well. Here's my quick thoughts, perhaps we could expand on this. I don't have names for these abilities yet. Also changed how healing works for some of the classes based on thematics.

Fighter: You gain temporary hit points equal to your level whenever you successfully land a critical hit.

Ranger: When killing a favored enemy, you gain temporary hit points equal to that creature's level or hit die.

Cleric: have the one true healing source. Divine curative magic works as written, healing instantaneously and for large amounts. Also, no clerics get to swap out spells for curative magic, instead swapping out spells for domain spells. Less heal-bots and more divine instruments.

Druid: may cast curative magic, but is not instantaneous. Heals back one hit point per round per level of the spell until the total value of healed points is reached. (Ex: a 3rd level cure moderate for 2d8+5 would normally heal an average of 14 hp. It now does 3 hp a round for 4 rounds, and 2 hp on round 5.) This simulates the more regenerative nature oriented magical healing. This also may be cast as a buff on tanks going into battle!

Bard: I want to rewrite this class entirely. First off, they need access to the spell lists of the other classes. They shouldn't cast as equals, but be able to dabble. Secondly, a healing song that affects all allies in a solid radius, again not as great as a clerical direct heal, but AoE and midlly effective.

Wiz & Sorceror: Should have the ability to "consume" spell energy to temporarily gain physical power. They can cannibalize their spell energy to create temporary hit points. Level of spell x 2 in temporary hit points. This encourages using high level slots to buff since temp hp doesn't stack.

Paladin: can already lay on hands, using the Pathfinder variant anyway, with many more LoH uses.

Barbarian: When raging, if he drops a foe gains temp hp equal to that creature's level or HD.

Monk: can already heal self at 7th level, perhaps a weak version at lower levels.

Rogue: Upon successfully dropping a foe with a sneak attack, or entering stealth, gain temp hp equal to his level.

These might be implemented as feats, or added to the classes. Depends on your tastes.