A Hit Point Proposal

[3catcircus]

Because going any further than this means a dramatic change to the health system that many players will be unhappy with. Believe me, I like more realistic systems, but I know it'll never fly, so this interjects a little of what I want without really changing the Hit Point system.

As I mentioned in a post above, I'm floating the hourly dying concept to see its reception. It replaces the idea of bleeding out on the battlefield with needing urgent medial care at the hands of a trained surgeon while hoping the patient stabilizes. The current system pretty much says, If you're seriously wounded, you will be dead in less than a minute, but someone can walk by and stop the bleeding in six seconds. My thought was, "saving someone's life takes time. Let's experiment with that."

I guess my reaction to this would be to tell your players to suck it up - you are playtesting a new house rule. For all they know, whatever you come up with in a non-watered-down version could be exactly what they never realized they were missing.

As to the dying concept - saving someone's life actually doesn't take a lot of time - mere seconds. That having been said, once they are stable, staying stable and recovering does take time. I'd say that urgent response takes care of stopping someone from bleeding out, but that first aid/field medicine is where the body part bleeding out gets a temporary patch - the party's medic manages to clamp off an artery, seals a sucking chest wound, etc.