One of my favourite RPG healing rules

Bill Zebub said:

Kelsey Dionne could do it in 3 bullet points.

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To be fair, rules as bullet points was not a thing when this game was published. Wordiness was the norm, even for shortish games like Bunnies and Burrows.

Arilyn said:

To be fair, rules as bullet points was not a thing when this game was published. Wordiness was the norm, even for shortish games like Bunnies and Burrows.

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I also wasn't being completely serious.




But she could.

Bill Zebub said:

I also wasn't being completely serious.




But she could.

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Yes, she definitely could!

Bill Zebub said:

What I find interesting is that @pemerton has consistently advocated for rules that determine who players are supposed to behave in different situations, as opposed to just letting players decide whatever they want.

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Huh?

Bill Zebub said:

But here one of their favorite rules is to just let the GM decide whatever they want, sans rules.

Is this because it's an entirely different game with a different aesthetic, or is because it's the GM, not the player, making arbitrary decisions? Or because healing is just that much different from, say, persuasion?

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In any RPG where the GM gets to decide pacing - which is many if not most of them, at least since the early 1980s - and which don't have "downtime" rules, then specifying healing times doesn't really do anything but introduce complexity around how the GM narrates the passage of time and recovery of injuries.

(Downtime rules make a difference, because then healing times become, in effect, a penalty/debuff to downtime.)

The Prince Valiant rules take away all that complexity and just invite the GM to narrate stuff. The GM - via their control of pacing - gets to decide whether and to what extent the consequences of one scene are carried through into a future scene, without having to also worry about not contradicting minutiae of healing rate rules.

For people who are interested in realism or simulationism, these more free-form rules can feel more true to reality. Even systems with fairly complex healing and recovery rules can't fully model the chaotic nature of how bodies respond to injury and heal from it. Sometimes wounds linger and take a long time to heal. Sometimes there are weird psychological issues at play. Sometimes you're back on your feet in a jiffy.

GURPS is my system of choice, and it includes many optional subsystems to add layers of complexity to the healing rules. I typically ignore them unless I'm specifically aiming for a gritty "dungeon crawl" dynamic featuring mechanically predictable resource management. In most of my campaigns, I follow a system closer to what you've described from Prince Valiant.