D&D (2024) 5.5/6e - Is it time for Wounds/Vitality?

[Ruin Explorer]

We already had a wound/vitality system in D&D.

It was in 4e. They called wounds "healing surges." It worked really well. But people decried it as "unrealistic" and weird, so it was abandoned.

Now we have hit dice, which look superficially like healing surges, but at this point people know quite well that hit dice cannot serve as a "wounds" system without heavy rewriting.

5E's HD system is vestigial and unintegrated. The kindest and smartest thing 5.5/6E could do is just straight-up remove it and replace it with a better system.

Something like Healing Surges would probably be the way to go - a suggestion I made in a previous thread was:

1) Each class has 6 healing surges that fully refresh on a long rest (there's little reason to vary this in the way 4E did, and 4E had too many). Definitely do not add CON bonus to this number.

2) Healing surges are worth a fixed value, let's say 1/4 of your max HP, minimum 5HP (so they're a bit more useful at low levels).

3) Once per combat you can activate Second Wind to use a Healing Surge as an Action (so it doesn't work whilst unconscious), which will cause you to regain 1/4 of your max HP. Fighters get an extra use per combat at level 2, and maybe at level 7 and 14 they get an extra Healing Surge per day.

4) If a healing spell/power that heals at least 1HP is cast/used on you, you can use a Healing Surge as a free action once per round. Obviously it still costs you.

5) Outside combat you can you can freely spend healing surges. They still heal you for 1/4 of your HP. If something added a bonus to HD healing, like Bards, add the bonus to EACH HS used.

The other advantage of a system like this is that it would be relatively easy to remove and replace if someone wanted an entirely different system.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I had no issue with Healing Surges conceptually in 4E... I thought that they could (and did) work relatively well for what they were trying to accomplish. And the idea that they were essentially "wounds" (IE the number of Surges you had were basically the number of "wound points" you had) is an interesting idea. But my two issues I ended up finding with the system when I ran all my 4E games though were that classes had just too many Healing Surges (and thus I never once experienced any of the games I ran in 4E come close to seeing any character run out of them) and that higher level PCs had too many hit points to burn through to trigger enough Healing Surges to treat them as defacto "wounds". Since none of the PCs in my games ever risked running out of them, the idea of equating Surges as Wounds just never took hold as an idea. (Not to mention of course the naming antithesis of Healing equalling Wounds-- had they named the different parts of the system differently to fit this thought paradigm it might have gotten ahold of people easier.)

Now to be honest... part of my issue was that my own particular style of DMing only usually produces one or maybe two fights in a day. So the odds of ever coming close to killing a PC via Healing Surge expenditure was nigh impossible. For example, say we have a Fighter with 60 Hit Points and 12 Healing Surges (numbers I'm sure are not completely accurate to what it'd actually have). With each Healing Surge being 1/4 of your hit points, that means those 12 Surges grant the Fighter a potential 180 extra hit points (60 x 1/4 = 15 hp and 15 x 12 = 180) for a complete total of 240 Hit Points this Fighter has at its disposal per day. I could never, ever, ever do that much damage to this Fighter in a single day using normal encounter building rules-- let alone also try and damage the other five PCs in the party, all of whom also had potentially 150 to 250 total potential hit points at their disposal. For the way I ran the game... thinking of the system in that way where spending Surges was like taking Wounds just never worked. So instead, the system got treated as normal-- just "knock the PC to 0 and get them to fail 3 Death saves" and they die... with no "wound point system" in play.

Now this all being said... I think that if you were to fundamentally change the whole system in D&D to take this all into account, it could be something that would work better and be really intriguing. Give me characters whose Hit Points are only their CON score, but then have a pool of 8 to 12 "healing surges" (or whatever you name it) that get spent to heal those pools of 10 to 16 points throughout the day, and you might have something. I'd be fine trying to knock PCs down 10-16 hit points at a time to create "wounds" at 0, with "surges" then resetting their 10-16 HP for the next drop during the fight. Something like this might be more usable for more different types of tables.

 

[jmartkdr2]

You'd need a better system than the star wars d20 W/V system. The main issue with that, from memory, was that a critical hit bypassed vitality and went straight to wounds. Since wounds were generally just your Constitution Score it often didn't matter how powerful you were or if you were at max vitality, a lucky hit could straight up kill you.

Star Wars SE used hit points and a condition track, I don't think they had wounds/vitality and I can't recall how you moved down the condition track, though I assume that critical hits were one of the things that pushed you down it. Things like that always seemed cool, but I'm with others in that I prefer my games without death spirals as they take away from our fun when playing dnd.

With SE, you had about 5 or six levels on the condition track. So five or six crits would take you out, but that's fine. The downsides were twofold;

1. At low levels, you ran out of hp well before you worried about the condition track. At high levels, you tened to get dropped on the condition track before you were even low on hp. It balanced around level 10 or so.

2. There were feats/talents etc that let you do multiple condition drops (ie two ticks on the condition track.) There were not, however, any feats or talents for gaining extra ticks or otherwise counteracting these feats, so those feats were OP.

Both of these are pretty solvable.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

There are healing options in the dmg.
I think they deserve to be in the phb, as tgey really set the tone for different kinds of campaigns and actually need to fit yor style, or otherwise balance between classes is way off.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The rules are simply not set up well to allow fleeing. You start engaged, eat an attack of opportunity, then end up engaged after they catch up. Any slower companions (small or heavy armor wearers) are left behind to die. The chase rules are also awful. 5E (and D&D in general) is simply not set up mechanically well to allow for players to escape without magic or the DM just letting you get away.

yup... I have seen players get SUPER pissed cause they move away, take an Opp attack, just for the attacker to move up on there turn... like there is no point

 

[Stalker0]

So a number of people have complained that the W/VP system is too complex. There are a few ways to possible mirror that in the current HP system.

Here is just one concept:

Wounded: Whenever a creature is lowered to below 25% of their max hitpoints, they become wounded. A wounded creature's max HP is lowered by 25%.

Removing the Wounded Condition: To remove the condition, a creature must take a long rest at their max hitpoints.


And then you have hitpoints heal "quickly". So in this example, you can heal hitpoints normally but when you get wounded (aka you have blown through your vitality), you lose a chunk. And of course you can tune the dials, maybe wounded occurs at 50% of your max. Maybe removing wounded takes a week of long rests instead of 1, whatever you want.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I didn't read past the first few posts, so apologies if someone mentioned this, but I was always a fan of the True20 Toughness save as an outside-the-box approach to tracking damage. I wouldn't mind seeing this (or a variation thereof) as an option in the next iteration of D&D.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I didn't read past the first few posts, so apologies if someone mentioned this, but I was always a fan of the True20 Toughness save as an outside-the-box approach to tracking damage. I wouldn't mind seeing this (or a variation thereof) as an option in the next iteration of D&D.

https://freeronin.com/gr_files/d20toTrue20.pdf

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I don't mind hit points that much. But when the numbers get higher, it does tend to become a bit tedious.

However, Starfinder does something very simple. You have your hit points and your stamina points. Any damage is first deducted from Stamina Points, and if depleted, then goes to Hit Points. Stamina Points fully recover after some rest and there's plenty of ways with features to replenish them. Hit Points are a more long-term healing.

It was simple enough that it created no friction during play. I think they did not use the full potential of that system, but it's definitely on my inspiration list for some of my projects.

 

[SteveC]

I played with Wounds and Vitality a lot and have a love/hate relationship with it. The hate part is the critical hits go right to Wounds. It's just something that happens at random, and it really becomes an issue at higher level or with larger combats. The GM rolls a ton of dice when combats have large numbers and the crits just appear all too often in those cases.
Combining that with monsters that cause a lot of damage at higher level means you can go from healthy to dead in a single bad roll. There just isn't any agency in how that works, and it takes something that can be fun (combat) and turns it into something you want to avoid at all costs.
There are alternatives that sort of strike a middle ground, such as Pathfinder2's Stamina system that might do what people want.