Probably one of the biggest "failed promises" of 5e was the notion of a "healing dial", that the system would accommodate many different styles of healing, from super gritty to superheroic. Ultimately what we got was a fine system, but it never really met that promise.
For those who don't know, Wounds/Vitality (W/VP) was a system used in the Star Wars SE edition of d20. Effectively a characters hitpoints were divided into a small pool of "wounds" and a much larger pool of "vitality". Damage was first subtracted from vitality, and once it was empty, damage went to wounds (there were however certain things that would bypass vitality and go straight to wounds, such as critical hits). Vitality recovered very quickly, representing more "stamina" than "flesh points", whereas wounds were considered true bodily injuries and took much longer to heal.
To me, W/VP is probably the best reflection of what dnd players often want in their healing systems. It gives a way to delineate the more vague aspects of hitpoints (stamina/luck) from the meaty "I am actually taking an injury" aspect. It both gives a way to let PCs recover damage quickly AND maintain that injuries take a long time to heal without assistance. And probably best of all.... its easy to turn into a dial. You could have the base system be something like 75% VP and 25% Wounds....and then if you want a superheroic game you could go 100% VP, or if your playing gritty maybe its 100% wounds....or anything in between.
I actually think what ultimately killed the system were the exceptions to the rule, predominately critical hits. The issue in SW was that once you had a lot of low level threats, you were going to generate a fair amount of critical hits (all you needed was a 20 on the roll)....and those would go right to wounds. This meant that as the game got higher level, vitality became less and less relevant as more things just bypassed it entirely in favor of wounds. I think for such a system to truly work, exceptions have to be extremely rare or even non-existent. The point of dnd style games is that players have a pool of hitpoints to tank damage....if you remove that you remove a core aspect of the game. An updated version of VP/W would not have any exceptions, everything goes to vitality first, then you take wounds...and of course dms can always add in their own exceptions for their personal games, as 5e already encourages.
I feel like W/VP would be perfect for the next edition or half edition, solving a long outstanding complaint about hitpoints while maintaining a system that is still easy to use and pretty intuitive. What do you think?
For those who don't know, Wounds/Vitality (W/VP) was a system used in the Star Wars SE edition of d20. Effectively a characters hitpoints were divided into a small pool of "wounds" and a much larger pool of "vitality". Damage was first subtracted from vitality, and once it was empty, damage went to wounds (there were however certain things that would bypass vitality and go straight to wounds, such as critical hits). Vitality recovered very quickly, representing more "stamina" than "flesh points", whereas wounds were considered true bodily injuries and took much longer to heal.
To me, W/VP is probably the best reflection of what dnd players often want in their healing systems. It gives a way to delineate the more vague aspects of hitpoints (stamina/luck) from the meaty "I am actually taking an injury" aspect. It both gives a way to let PCs recover damage quickly AND maintain that injuries take a long time to heal without assistance. And probably best of all.... its easy to turn into a dial. You could have the base system be something like 75% VP and 25% Wounds....and then if you want a superheroic game you could go 100% VP, or if your playing gritty maybe its 100% wounds....or anything in between.
I actually think what ultimately killed the system were the exceptions to the rule, predominately critical hits. The issue in SW was that once you had a lot of low level threats, you were going to generate a fair amount of critical hits (all you needed was a 20 on the roll)....and those would go right to wounds. This meant that as the game got higher level, vitality became less and less relevant as more things just bypassed it entirely in favor of wounds. I think for such a system to truly work, exceptions have to be extremely rare or even non-existent. The point of dnd style games is that players have a pool of hitpoints to tank damage....if you remove that you remove a core aspect of the game. An updated version of VP/W would not have any exceptions, everything goes to vitality first, then you take wounds...and of course dms can always add in their own exceptions for their personal games, as 5e already encourages.
I feel like W/VP would be perfect for the next edition or half edition, solving a long outstanding complaint about hitpoints while maintaining a system that is still easy to use and pretty intuitive. What do you think?
