Spenser said:
Edit: To hong -- I can only speak for my own group, but so far we haven't run into a problem finding people willing to play the medic role. By "medic" do you mean "the person responsible for healing everybody up after the fight?" Or "the person responsible for saving someone who's about to die?"
The first one, of course. In my experience, people are quite willing to play a cleric or other divine caster, as long as they're not expected to dump a large proportion of their spells into curing. Patching the frontline guys up is a supporting cast role, and few people want to play the supporting cast.
Because in the first case, this is not too onerous as long as there are a lot of potions, scrolls, and CLW wands floating around.
Yeah, there's always the CLW wand... but that always struck me as an extremely kludgy solution, something that's mandated by how you need a party medic on any extended foray. Better, really, to get rid of this need in the first place.
Actually, I was thinking of going even further and adapting something like the Star Wars WP/VP system to D&D. Thus your hit points represent dodging/combat skill/fatigue/etc, as opposed to significant physical damage. They are regained at the rate of 1 hp/level/hour, instead of the current 1 hp/level/day. The cure spells would then restore Xd8 + X hour's worth of healing, with X = {1, 2, 3, 4}.
Serious injury could be represented by extending the negative hp range:
0 to -Con: staggered (partial actions only)
-Con-1 to -Con-9: unconscious, lose 1 hp/round
-Con-10: dead
This would have the effect of expanding the region where characters can be slowed down without being dying or dead. At the moment, that happens when you have exactly 0 hp. The chances of going from positive to exactly 0 are pretty small, especially at high levels; usually you go from functioning at full capacity to unconscious in one hit. Negative hp would be regained at the rate of 1 hp/day.
All of this essentially recreates VP/WP, but on the one scale, with zero located at the point where VP is exhausted.
Now I've heard that some groups have tried this and found it was deadly, but I don't see that that has to be the case. 90-95% of the time, VP function just like hit points; it's only when crits occur that there's a difference between the two systems. Under the SW system, crits go directly to WP, which would be deadly with D&D-style damage and armour rules. You could just stick with D&D's method of handling crits (multiplied damage applied to VP), which would get around this problem.
All up, this would have the advantage of reducing the need for healing in the middle of an adventure, thus facilitating the core mission of D&D: going into dungeons, killing the monsters, and taking their treasure. IMO, it's all good.
I didn't actually know the rule, we had never played with spontaneous casting as a full round action, but once I saw the postings I thought I better look it up. I knew my players would want to see it if I started using it.
