Overnight healing potential house rule

[Exen Trik]

This is probably a little premature (if not a little, then very much so ) but with the hubbub over characters getting a full heal with overnight resting I thought I'd throw this house rule idea out here:

When resting, a character can freely use their healing surges. They can use as many of that days healing surges as they have remaining. If resting overnight, they can use some or all the next days healing surges as necessary.


This way, you get the healing necessary to keep the game moving, but get with a little more verisimilitude. You may recover from the previous days wounds, but not with full vigor as if it never even happened.

This could also work well with forms of long term damage, if such a thing were house ruled in. They could be worth a certain amount of healing surges to fix properly, with possibly a limit to how much you can put towards it depending on whether it is normal bed rest or full medical care, etc. In any case, healing surges can be an important mechanic to draw on for "grim and gritty" house ruling.

Of course, we need more info on the role of healing surges, especially out of combat. If you can heal like this any old time, then perhaps overnight rest gives a couple extra surges, or increases the hp recovery of them.

 

[EricNoah]

Nice. I forsee a market for grittier rules for 4E and look forward to seeing what such would look like.

 

[Exen Trik]

Nice.

Thank ye.


I guessed I missed it before, but healing surges do indeed work anytime between encounters. So, simply give an extra surge or two that are provided during extended rest in place of full hp recovery. Or, give them nothing at all.


While I'm at it, here's some other ideas for grimy grit:
- When brought to 0 hp, each failed roll to recover incurs a small penalty to max hp. Should the character recover, this penalty will be slowly reduced with overnight rest, moreso for a full day of recovery and medical attention. This penalty has no effect on anything else, such as hp required to be in bloodied condition.
- Apply a condition 1/4 hp: Bleeding. It's only effect is to cause 1 hp of damage per round, any recovery of hp or use of a heal check ends it. Giving it an additional -1 to all attacks can rub salt in the wounds, as it were.
- Make saving throws be a move action, so that ongoing effects need a moment to be 'shaken off' rather than passively resisted. Obviously, a character that isn't able to take actions because of some ongoing effect wouldn't be kept from doing so.
- Alternatively, saving throws can be made more difficult to remove by requiring multiple successful checks, perhaps in a row. This however may already be true of abilities we haven't seen yet.

And finally, an option in the other direction:
- When dying, only three sequential failures results in death. There successful saves stabilizes the character


I think 4e as a system will lend itself well to modification for a variety of play styles, be it grim and gritty, high/low fantasy, or whatever. The at will/per encounter/per day mechanics will also see very creative reinterpretations.

 

[Propheous_D]

To be honest this is why the rule exists. I mean if you think of it a Leader character will have the ability to trigger healing surges AT WILL and so therefore heal the party. With the bonus the cleric receives from holy word it will only take one healing surge to bring a character over 50% ( at early levels and assuming it scales at all) unless you roll really bad. So I don't get what the problem is. Even if you were to house rule it so they didn't they just need to rest when they have 1 or 2 healing surges available depending on presence of a pally or leader class. This doesn't take into account that you usually rest for resource management (ie healing will drain if we don't do this). Taken into account that you could just wake up and take a short rest blowing more healing surges this becomes an even smaller problem.