One of the perennial issues I've had with D&D is how Fighters and other high-HP characters take longer and more resources to heal up than do M-Us and other low-HP characters. We squint past it, but it seems more plausible and intuitive that for any given injury (whether actual/physical, or virtual/exhaustion/luck), a person in robust health* and one's who's experienced at taking hits will tend to recover faster from and be less debilitated by them than a person who's physically weaker and less-trained. But the rules make it so that the opposite is true.
Similarly, by making healing spells and potions and natural recovery values all unrelated to the character's max HP, we get the counterintuitive effect that it takes longer and more resources for a higher level character to recover from injury or exhaustion than it does for a lower level one. At d3HP per day for resting a 1st level OSE Fighter is basically guaranteed to be healed up after a week's rest, whereas a high level one is likely to require several (unless a friendly Cleric is available to play healbot). We can rationalize that by arguing that the higher level fighter actually sustained more serious wounds which his greater skill and toughness enabled him to fight through, but the narrative nature of HP really suggests the opposite. If a 9 HP M-U and a 27 HP Fighter are both struck by an Ogre for 8 HP of damage, we know the M-U is close to death, but the Fighter clearly is not. And ironically Cure Light Wounds is capable of healing the M-U from 11% to 89% of his max HP, but not of completely healing the Fighter of what is literally a light wound, likely a scratch or bruise per the explanations of what HP are going back to Gary at least as far back as 1977.
5E addresses this concern to some extent, between long rests being full recovery for everyone, and using your Hit Dice as the dice you roll for HP recovery on short rests, though it sometimes runs into the same issue (Healing Potions or Song of Rest, for example, being proportionally more effective on Wizards than on Fighters). 4E, of course, made most healing proportionate to HP, with the Healing Surge mechanic. ShadowDark doesn't quite address the first concern, although it makes the Cure Wounds spell and Potions of Healing have effectiveness go up with level, which does help with the second.
Anyway, all this long preamble is just to give context for a relatively simple idea I've been mulling over- making potions and cure spells proportionate to HD and HP in old school games.
The current idea I'm toying with is that the base value of a Cure Light or Potion of Healing, instead of being d6+1 in B/X or OSE, would be a d8 base for a Fighter or Dwarf, a d4 for an MU or Thief, and a d6 for everyone else. The plus value would be 1/4 of the character's max HP, rounding down. Cure Serious would instead do two dice plus 50% of the character's max HP.
One other benefit that just occurred to me would be that in slot-based encumbrance systems, healing potions also retain proportionate value for the slots they take up.
Whatcha think?
*(I get that Con does factor in, in some editions, like 3E and 5E)
