OSR Healing tweak - proportionality

[Mannahnin]

I wonder, in practise, do your players use potions and wand mostly in combat or out of combat?

By mentioning wands, are you thinking about 3e?

Potions and scrolls and prepared healing spells: Mostly outside, with rare emergency use of a bigger potion (Extra Healing or similar) or more powerful healing spell (Cure Serious or equivalent) in combat if a front-liner is really getting mauled, in significant part because the baseline cure lights (Suture, in 5TD) are not efficient enough from an action standpoint. The monster is reasonably likely to do equivalent damage in the same time, and the fighter taking the round off to drink a potion means they're not outputting damage themselves either.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

By mentioning wands, are you thinking about 3e?

Potions and scrolls and prepared healing spells: Mostly outside, with rare emergency use of a bigger potion (Extra Healing or similar) or more powerful healing spell (Cure Serious or equivalent) in combat if a front-liner is really getting mauled, in significant part because the baseline cure lights (Suture, in 5TD) are not efficient enough from an action standpoint. The monster is reasonably likely to do equivalent damage in the same time, and the fighter taking the round off to drink a potion means they're not outputting damage themselves either.

Yeah action economy is major with healing, and is a part of game design that videogames, especially MMORPGs have been considering for at least 20 years, arguably more like 25+, but that TTRPGs seem to only have really started often considering in the last 5 or so years (notably 5E 2014 doesn't really consider it much, but 2024 kinda does). It's particularly important when downed is not the same as dead.

So I definitely think your ideas about scaling healing with HP to some extent are entirely sensible. They can avoid at-the-table math easily too by simply having PCs pre-calc 25% and and 50% of their HP (or whatever values you're using as additions) and write them down on the character sheet.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

By mentioning wands, are you thinking about 3e?

No, I was thinking about consumables but what if I was?

Potions and scrolls and prepared healing spells: Mostly outside, with rare emergency use of a bigger potion (Extra Healing or similar) or more powerful healing spell (Cure Serious or equivalent) in combat if a front-liner is really getting mauled, in significant part because the baseline cure lights (Suture, in 5TD) are not efficient enough from an action standpoint. The monster is reasonably likely to do equivalent damage in the same time, and the fighter taking the round off to drink a potion means they're not outputting damage themselves either.

Now do you want to improve the efficiency of healing? In combat? Out of combat? or both?
Scaling the healing will work in all cases.

 

[Mannahnin]

So I definitely think your ideas about scaling healing with HP to some extent are entirely sensible. They can avoid at-the-table math easily too by simply having PCs pre-calc 25% and and 50% of their HP (or whatever values you're using as additions) and write them down on the character sheet.

Definitely. Though with the smaller absolute values I'm usually dealing with in OSR, the math will still be pretty quick if they drop the ball on that.

 

[Lanefan]

For simple resting, proportionality makes loads of sense IMO. That a 75 h.p. Fighter and a 20 h.p. Mage each can only rest back 1 hit point per night (as per 1e RAW) is silly.

Further, people in the setting would heal and recover at vaguely the same rate regardless of their class etc.

And so, a long time ago I made it that an overnight (or, in 5e terms, "long") rest gets you back 10% of your total h.p., rounding ALL fractions up; i.e. someone with 29 h.p gets back 3 while someone with 31 h.p. gets back 4. We call this a character's "Heal Rate", or HR. Result: absent any other means of healing everyone rests back to full in at absolute most 10 days (usually quite a bit less) no matter how many h.p. they have in total.

Now, we do use a body-point/fatigue-point system which complicates things a bit, but that's our headache to deal with.

One could, for the sake of either variety or realism or both, complicate this slightly by tweaking the numbers by species e.g. Hobbits naturally recover a bit faster, Elves a bit slower, and so forth; probably a simple +1 or -1 (to a minimum of 1) baked in to the HR would be enough.

Curing spells, items, herbs, and other effects, however, do what they do without regard to the level of either caster (they don't scale with level) or recipient (they're not proportional). This is somewhat intentional, as healing otherwise gets too easy at mid-high levels* and doesn't really need any more help.

* - of course, once they get to 12th and Heal comes online it becomes trivial anyway, but IME most games have packed it in by that point.

 

[Moving Pictures]

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)

This is my homebrew, because 5e made things so that people just long rest and poof and I wanted gritty.

Body points:

Body points are a function of a creature’s species more than anything else. To put in blunt terms, small creatures are generally more fragile than large ones.
For player character species, body points are generated as a function of race. Dwerv receive 5, humans and elves 4, gnomes 3.

Combat rest:
After an incident that causes damage, a being can take a “combat rest,” which amounts to a turn of general inactivity. This “brief rest” allows creatures to regain some of their lost fatigue points – by bandaging minor wounds, stretching kinked muscles, taping sprains or otherwise engaging in minor self care. The points a being regains from such a rest is a function of their martial training.
Fighters, Crusaders War Clerics, Rangers d3+d(F-level/2) – capped at d3+d5
Spirit Warrior: d4+d*level, not capped
Rogues: d3+d(f-level/3) – capped at 2d3
Others: d2.
Spellcasters: If at least half of the damage sustained by a spellcaster was magical in nature, a spellcaster can opt to combat rest at d3+d(max spell level ability). Thus a fifth-level mage can rest at 2d3. A spellcaster cannot rest physical and magical damage at the same time.
REST: class dice (max) + CON for any long rest.

 

[Lanefan]

This is my homebrew, because 5e made things so that people just long rest and poof and I wanted gritty.

Body points:

Body points are a function of a creature’s species more than anything else. To put in blunt terms, small creatures are generally more fragile than large ones.
For player character species, body points are generated as a function of race. Dwerv receive 5, humans and elves 4, gnomes 3.

Combat rest:
After an incident that causes damage, a being can take a “combat rest,” which amounts to a turn of general inactivity. This “brief rest” allows creatures to regain some of their lost fatigue points – by bandaging minor wounds, stretching kinked muscles, taping sprains or otherwise engaging in minor self care. The points a being regains from such a rest is a function of their martial training.
Fighters, Crusaders War Clerics, Rangers d3+d(F-level/2) – capped at d3+d5
Spirit Warrior: d4+d*level, not capped
Rogues: d3+d(f-level/3) – capped at 2d3
Others: d2.
Spellcasters: If at least half of the damage sustained by a spellcaster was magical in nature, a spellcaster can opt to combat rest at d3+d(max spell level ability). Thus a fifth-level mage can rest at 2d3. A spellcaster cannot rest physical and magical damage at the same time.
REST: class dice (max) + CON for any long rest.

Some of this looks strikingly familiar! For our 1e-adjacent system:

We have body points, rolled in a narrow range determined by species and with your Con score setting a floor. Dwarves and Half-Orcs roll d6, Humans and Half-Elves d5, Elves, Hobbits and Gnomes d4. Con higher than 7 sets a floor of 2 (thus if you roll a 1 it becomes 2); Con 15 or higher sets that floor at 3. These are rolled once during char-gen and (with extremely rare exceptions) are locked in for life, and are in addition to the normal points you get for class and level. For example, a 5th-level Fighter might have 38 f.p. and 3 b.p. for a total of 41 h.p.

We also have an after-combat rest system, though not as generous or complex as yours, where if you're still in fatigue points (the ones you get from your class and level) you can rest for a few minutes and get back (usually) a straight d3 points regardless of what class or species you are. If you're out of fatigue points and into body points, resting in this way doesn't help.

 

[Moving Pictures]

Some of this looks strikingly familiar!

It should. I pillaged the core from RVR.
You might be interested in some of the alterations I've made.....

 

[Lanefan]

It should. I pillaged the core from RVR.
You might be interested in some of the alterations I've made.....

Would be, yes. PM me if it's too long to post here.

 

[Moving Pictures]

Would be, yes. PM me if it's too long to post here.

It's basically an entire game system, but the attachments seem to work

• fixed armour class so unarmoured is 0, and AC increases from there; hit matrix is Hit >=10-F+AC
• did away with d20 rolls (now 2d10 for rolls to hit, 5d6 under a stat [modified by spell level of caster] for saves, 4d6 for perception... generally)
• did away with subclasses, but introduced a point-buy skills system that allows customization this means things like

herbfinding is a skill, unique to rangers
sneak attack is a skill, unique to rogues. Damage scales on the skill for any surprise attack
dual weapon use, tracking, horseriding, mounted combat are all skills

spells can be upcast - so there is no cure light/cure serious wounds - the healing power is a function of caster capacity and spell points

pillage what you want!

Things are still in playtesting, errurs will be found.