Let's make a Wound/Vitality System

[Xeviat]

Welcome back everyone. Not a ranger thread!

5th Edition has a lot of healing. It's not as bad as 3E and wands of cure light wounds being everywhere, but between hit dice, the healer feat, healer cleric's preserve life, second wind from the fighter, and cheap healing potions (not to mention warlocks picking up cure wounds from somewhere), there's a lot of healing going around. I think 4th Edition's healing surges over corrected the problem, but it is proving to be a problem in my games. Without enough healing, a group can't make it through a long adventuring day, but with it easy fights become nothing. Just take a drink from the keg of healing potions.

I'd like to make a wound/vitality system. Vitality would heal up after every fight, but wounds would only heal after a long rest. Severe wounds could exist, which would require more effort to heal (like 3E diseases maybe).

The point of this would be to make each combat encounter more of a known thing. You know how much punishment the PCs can take. You don't have to worry about providing extra healing to keep them going, or worry about giving too much healing that they never slow down.

3E had a system that worked reasonably well, from d20 Modern, which had wound points equal to Con Mod. Characters took wound damage when they took a critical hit or when they were out of vitality (which equaled hp). This meant a lucky shot could take you out, and it helps to visualize HP.

Pillars of eternity has a similar system, except wounds are called health and you have multiples more health than vitality. You suffer damage to each, vitality recovers after each fight, and wound healing is difficult except for long rests. Health acts as a constantly running timer that tells you when to rest. Zero vitality knocks you out either way. This system may be easier to balance, but it doesn't give you that visceral low wound pool for visualizing a good hit.

What are your thoughts?


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[Shiroiken]

I'm not sure how well this would translate into 5E, but during the Playtest I worked out my own 5E (in case it sucked) using playtest ideas plus a few of my own. I came up with the following Wound System.

You can take a number of wounds based on your Size. Tiny 3, Small 4, Medium 5, Large 7, Huge 10, Gigantic 15. For every 25% of your HP from a single source (attack, spell, or other) you take 1 Wound. If you fall to 0 HP, you take a Wound. If you fail a Death Save you take a Wound (instead of the normal dying rules). If you reach your maximum number of Wounds but are still above 0 HP, you may continue to act until you are unconscious (then you die).

HP would work similar to the way they are now. For every day you spend resting and being treated (no meaningful activity), your healer may roll Wisdom/Medicine DC: 15 to remove a wound (you have Disadvantage if you are treating yourself). Additionally, I was going to have a spell that healed wounds, but I also considered removing 1 wound for every 25% of your HP you are magically healed from a single source. I considered ideas on penalties for having wounds, but never decided on anything.

 

[Bawylie]

I'm using death saving throw-like tracking for lasting wounds and also horror/madness.

When you accrue 3 of these, you gain some permanent injury or madness.

Working fine.


-Brad

 

[Jester David]

I did one in my Variant Rules document on the DMs Guild. I'll cut-and-paste it here some time, but away from my desktop right now...

 

[Leatherhead]

I like the idea of Exhaustion representing Wounds.

But I want to incorporate hit dice somehow, it just feels right that a Barbarian could stand up to more abuse than a Wizard.

 

[davep123]

I use the following house rule:

Every 5hp of healing received (round up) lowers the recipient’s maximum hp total by 1.

So, f’rinstance, a 20hp fighter gets hit for 19 damage leaving her on 1hp. She then drinks from a keg of healing, restoring 15hp. She is now on 16hp, but her maximum hp has been lowered by 3 from 20 to 17. Restoring the maximum hp total takes rest (the DM can adjust the recovery rate to taste).

The in-game explanation is that healing magic draws on the recipient’s inner strength.

With this system, if someone’s hp total yo-yos up and down in a short space of time, their maximum hps will be greatly reduced – they may be unwounded after the last batch of healing, but they’re nevertheless severely depleted. Each new fight becomes a riskier proposition.

The advantage to this system is that you don’t have to find a way to restrict access to healing potions once their cost becomes trivial.

 

[Jester David]

Here's what I did up for the DMs Guild.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Welcome back everyone. Not a ranger thread!

5th Edition has a lot of healing.

Meh. Healing from magic items is dependent on the DM placing magic items. Feats that provide healing/damage-mitigation are, likewise, opt-in optional (at the DM's option). The DMG includes options for slowing the rate of natural healing significantly.

It is true that player decisions make a huge difference in the amount of healing available to the party, from none (no one played a caster - or, more nearly plausibly, no one played a caster with healing spells on his known spell list), and, since that can come down to the slot expenditure decisions, there's a lot of potential healing (you could theoretically be a party of Druids, Bards, & Clerics and blow all your slots on Cure Wounds).

It's not as bad as 3E and wands of cure light wounds being everywhere, but between hit dice, the healer feat, healer cleric's preserve life, second wind from the fighter, and cheap healing potions (not to mention warlocks picking up cure wounds from somewhere), there's a lot of healing going around. ...it is proving to be a problem in my games.

Sure, if all those things line up. If you do have healing potion bars, if you do allow feats and if the players take those particular feats and make those class choices. If it's an issue, the obvious answer is to remove some of those options. Place fewer potions (including fewer and lower volume buying opportunities), remove the offending feats, etc.

I think 4th Edition's healing surges over corrected the problem, but ... Without enough healing, a group can't make it through a long adventuring day, but with it easy fights become nothing.

4e also reigned in healing substantially by requiring most healing to consume healing surges, and by making power slots 1:1 (that is the Command/CLW, Cure Critical/Flame Strike, Heal/Harm, type decisions were made at chargen and level-up, and there weren't many of them, so sufficient healing to get through the day, and no CoDzilla). Getting through the day, every day, wasn't quite as important in 4e, since the classes were balanced regardless of day length, though, so in that sense healing may have been over-engineered.

5e of course, backs off from the 4e model, while returning to a set of class designs that do rely on getting through a reasonably long day to establish any sort of rough resource-managment balance among them.

The problem isn't so much too much (or too little) healing as the amount of healing being too variable on the player side, because you don't have clear guidance about the need for it - though everyone should know you 'need a Cleric' (or other caster with Cure Wounds) because it's a classic D&Dism - and because slots are such a tremendously flexible resource that if they're not used for healing, they can distort the game (though, again, not as bad as in 3.x w/CoDzilla).

I'd like to make a wound/vitality system. Vitality would heal up after every fight, but wounds would only heal after a long rest. Severe wounds could exist, which would require more effort to heal (like 3E diseases maybe).

A 3e disease typically did ability damage on a failed FORT save until you succeeded on two saves in a row. Then you had to heal the ability damage. Not really a model for recovering from a wound. Might work for a wound that festers (essentially a disease) and gets worse, though.

The point of this would be to make each combat encounter more of a known thing. You know how much punishment the PCs can take. You don't have to worry about providing extra healing to keep them going, or worry about giving too much healing that they never slow down.

Sounds like a job for hps. The existing numbers of hps, and an expanded number of HD, that you could spend in combat or after a shorter rest than an hour could work quite well - in conjunction with changing healing spells so that they no longer restore hps (or, at least, are no longer efficient to use that way), and possibly reducing slots by the expected expenditure for healing purposes, to make up for the expansion in HD (or making healing of hps, even with slots expend HD).

What are your thoughts?

A big problem with two-pool systems like hps/wounds or wounds/vitality or whatever, or hps/ability-damage, or the like, is that one of the pools can easily become more critical than the other, undoing the desired effect of having to manage both. So it would have to be even more carefully/robustly designed than hps/surges in 4e. Another issue is the dreaded 'death spiral' in which accumulating penalties from wounds makes you more vulnerable to further wounds...


My thoughts would be along the lines of making Wounds like conditions, rather than like a pool of hps. So you'd have a hp/wounds system, with hps working much as they do now, and Wounds modeling longer-term, more significant injuries. Random thoughts:

• Other than a few spells like Aid granting temp hps or messing with max hps and perhaps the big guns, like Heal, magic shouldn't typically restore hps by itself. Rather, Cure Wounds should do what it says on the label: remove Wounds.
• To work with that Wounds should have a level, from 1-9. The level of a wound depends on level/CR of the creature that inflicted it and any special abilities it may have.
• Wounds could be inflicted by critical hits instead of extra damage.
• Wounds could be inflicted by the first hit that brings you below 1/2 hps or reduces you to 0, or each hit that does over a threshold number (fraction of max hps) of hp damage or each failed death save or something else or several/all of those.
• Wounds should 'Schrodinger' - old saws like "It's not as bad as it looks," "his injuries were worse than we thought," and "I didn't even feel it, at first" should be evoked by the system.
• A wound inflicts a penalty or condition of some sort, based on the nature of the wound. (To limit the 'death spiral' issue the penalty could kick in after the encounter has ended.)
• The nature of a Wound could be based on the attack and any special qualities it may have, the damage type, the mechanic that inflicted it (crit vs dropped to 0 etc), and so forth.
• A wound takes time (and CON saves) and/or care (and Medicine checks) or magic to heal.
• When you take an Action you can choose to ignore the penalties and conditions imposed by any Wound(s) you may have, for that action, only, when the action is completed you make a CON save or take hps damage or make the Wound worse in some way.
• Wounds are long-term conditions and take long-term measures to deal with. Downtime and saves/checks are one way, allowing you to remove the wound at the end of the downtime. Magic is a short-cut, but there should be longer-term price to it. Maybe slots used to cure wounds can't be recovered until a period of downtime comparable to that required to cure the wound in the first place. Maybe the magically-closed Wound is subject to being 're-opened' by further injury or extreme exertion before the requisite amount of natural rest.

Good luck.

 

[Xeviat]

Lots of good points there [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]. I'll look them over more when I'm not at work.
[MENTION=37579]Jester Canuck[/MENTION], likewise I'll read that over when I get home too.


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[Dausuul]

Above all else, do not allow critical hits to bypass vitality. At least not at full power.

We think of crits as rare because they make up only 5% of the total number of attack rolls, but combat involves a lot of attack rolls. In a battle with 5 monsters lasting 5 rounds, with one monster dying per round and each monster attacking once per round, the PCs will have to eat a total of 15 attacks. On average, that's 3 critical hits every 4 encounters. The way you sketched out the system above, a crit is more likely than not to take a PC down with a long-lasting wound. 5-6 encounters and the entire party will be crippled.

That's fine if what you want is a gritty, dangerous system where the warrior's motto is valar morghulis. But for your stated goal, "to make each combat encounter more of a known thing," it's the last thing you want. The whole point of VP is to act as a protective buffer between the PCs and the cruel gods of the d20.

Anyway. To the project itself: I'd start by considering the expected balance of the game, using the current system, and see what happens if we try to match it. Under the current system, hit dice allow PCs to expend up to 200% of their base HP over an adventuring day. The "expected" adventuring day is 6-8 encounters, so if you went with that, it's about 30% of base HP per encounter. That's an appropriate VP value if you're doing the 6-8 routine, with consistent difficulty, and allowing full recovery after each. (I'm assuming you'll get rid of hit dice and make it so taking WP damage is serious business, something PCs strive to avoid.)

However, a lot of DMs don't pack 6-8 encounters in the typical day. Moreover, the hit point system is much more resilient to ups and downs--you might go several encounters with no damage at all, then burn 80% of your party's base hit points in a single boss fight. Hit points let you "save up" your damage soaking over minor encounters to blow it all in a major one. In a VP system, that would be a TPK.

...Maybe just a 50-50 split? All PCs have the same total hit points, but 50% of them are slow-healing WPs and 50% are VPs that come back after each fight. (Get rid of hit dice, of course.) Healing magic can restore VPs at full power, or WPs at a 5-to-1 ratio (five points of healing for each WP restored.) Otherwise, a day's rest gives back your level in WPs.