How do you explain overnight Healing in your game?

[Bumbles]

I just break out a copy of Operation!

 

[Turtlejay]

I've had PCs, in character, yell at NPCs for allowing wounded to suffer. I've basically stopped including hospitals (3e game) as background fluff because they make no sense if there are even a handful of low-level clerics hanging around, and most towns have them. (In small towns, a first level cleric with a decent wisdom gets 3 cure lights a day; that's a lot of healing for a town of 100 or so.)

I'm not sure how I want to handle NPC healing; I am tempted to rule that "serious injuries" cannot be healed by spending surges, and it's an artifact of the game that PCs (and NPCs fighting with them) never have "serious injuries". It's the simplest solution. If anyone wants to magically heal "serious injuries", that's a ritual.

This seperation of PC's from NPC's is not wholly new, anyone who spent time with the world building guidelines in the 3.5e DMG knows that a town of 100 did not have a cleric, and probably did not have an adept.

Even *large* towns were lucky to have a very low level cleric.

In short, I don't think there has ever been enough 'civlian' healing to go around in D&D.

Not that this was the point of the thread. The point is, we are all in this game to have run, and different people define that differently. For most of us, it is not fun to suck. So, for most of us, not spending a lot of time hanging back while others play, because we have a 'wound' or are 'crippled' is not fun. Wizards has appealed to the largest common denominator and made that part of the system. As a bonus, you can now have more narrative control over the game.

If you do not like it, then change it. No law exists preventing you from houseruling that which you do not enjoy.

Jay

 

[Nytmare]

I don't know if this has come up before, but I've considered modeling "serious injuries" as a disease by 4e rules

Take a drink!

 

[fuzzlewump]

(Everyone, Heroes, Leaders, Whoever) have access to a healing ritual that requires 6 hours of rest to complete. Vital injuries become less pressing, bones begin to mend, and gives a feeling of well being that leads to heightened morale.

Possibility 1: Most of the "household remedies," like to make one up, 3 cloves of garlic crushed with goats milk, actually work, albeit slowly.

Possibility 2: "Doctors" exist that specialize in these rituals. Each "procedure" from modern times is instead a magical ritual, which probably works more reliably and better, depending on the type of world you are creating.

Possibility 3: Sleeping is just more effective in this alternate world, cells divide faster, perhaps feeding off the natural "mana" or whatever in the world.

Possibility 4: Unlimited wand of cure light wounds, only usable during an extended rest. The magic is too delicate and too time consuming to even be thought about usage in combat or during only a short rest. The wand doesn't use the energy from magic, but instead directs the energy stored in your body from food.

Perhaps healing increases your appetite greatly, as new cells must be created quickly and your body nourished to deal with the healing spells.

Also, Jeff Wilder, respectufully if you are still checking this thread, it seems that you do not want it to make sense in your head. Honestly, all of those possibilities and everything in this thread makes perfect sense to me, and doesn't require me to turn off anything in my brain. I certainly agree that if you say "your character is stabbed 7 times and is barely hanging on to life, 6 hours later, you're perfectly fine with no aid at all," sense cannot be made. But that's not the spirit of the game or the rules at all. That's why I say that perhaps you do not want to like the game.

It might be like, I don't know, playing Spirit of the Century (1920's pulp) and complaining about a gorilla piloting a WW1 style plane because it's unrealistic. It's just not in the spirit of the game.

 

[tfwoods3]

I don't know if this has come up before, but I've considered modeling "serious injuries" as a disease by 4e rules, one with a DC high enough that it's unlikely a common person would recover quickly without aid.

Yeah, that implies that "serious injury" isn't something a PC risks when they get hit by a sword, but I think that's already covered by the HP abstraction.

Great idea for a house rule. Perhaps healing would give a bonus to the condition change roll, so that serious injuries can be healed but not instantly. I would probably reserve this for critical hits that roll high damage and bloody the character or put them under 0hp.

 

[Garthanos]

If you turned "reading threads about HPs" into a drinking game, you could do some serious damage.


[EDIT] I'm not sure how that damage would be expressed, but I'd guess it would be HPs.

heh I will bite...Lets see what word, phrase or action induces a drink response... somebody bringing up previous versions? there favorite house rule? wrestling? Die Hard? mentioning the disease rules? the word Healing Surge? ouch.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Also, Jeff Wilder, respectufully if you are still checking this thread, it seems that you do not want it to make sense in your head.

Respectfully, please don't speculate on my motives, especially given your lack of knowledge of my situation. As it happens, I'm in a 4E game because I do want to give the game a fair shake. (And it's not for lack of 3.5 games, as I know literally nobody who has converted locally. Actually, that's not quite true. I think our 4E DM doesn't run any 3E games.)

4E's healing dichotomy -- either you heal fully (as far as functionality is concerned) in six hours, or you were never really wounded at all -- isn't a matter of opinion, but rather a matter of fact. That some people are okay with one or the other of those choices is great; but that some people don't like either choice doesn't change the fact that they're all that's available, barring house rules.

 

[fuzzlewump]

Respectfully, please don't speculate on my motives, especially given your lack of knowledge of my situation. As it happens, I'm in a 4E game because I do want to give the game a fair shake. (And it's not for lack of 3.5 games, as I know literally nobody who has converted locally. Actually, that's not quite true. I think our 4E DM doesn't run any 3E games.)

Well, to be fair, I did know that much as I read your thread on that subject. What I was getting at was that a "fair shake" of the system would be to try to experience the 'spirit' of the game. An example, other than the one in my original post, would be bringing a high heroics, min-maxer-minded player to a horror game. He either has the worst time of his life trying to optimize his character and his actions only to die miserably, or the best time... dying miserably without the other stuff.

Then again, it's not the player's fault if he didn't know he was coming to a horror game. Did you know a fair bit about 4E before you tried it?

4E's healing dichotomy -- either you heal fully (as far as functionality is concerned) in six hours, or you were never really wounded at all -- isn't a matter of opinion, but rather a matter of fact. That some people are okay with one or the other of those choices is great; but that some people don't like either choice doesn't change the fact that they're all that's available, barring house rules.

Certainly, and I agree that you can either accept that or not. No room for discussion there. But the designers of 4E didn't blindly design the system in that way, and to give the system a fair try might also include coming up with in-game reasons as to why the world works that way, just as others in this thread have. That is of course, just my opinion.

 

[N0Man]

I don't know if this has come up before, but I've considered modeling "serious injuries" as a disease by 4e rules, one with a DC high enough that it's unlikely a common person would recover quickly without aid.

Yeah, that implies that "serious injury" isn't something a PC risks when they get hit by a sword, but I think that's already covered by the HP abstraction.

A few times, I considered making a custom long-term recovery system that would be modeled after the disease condition track mechanics. I was thinking it could be triggered either by a crit or being knocked unconscious from going to 0 hit points. It might temporarily reduce their number of max healing surges until they fully recovered.

However, upon further reflection, unless all the players wanted this I am not going to bother. It's been my experience that custom rules to make things more "realistic", tend to just be frustrating to players and reduce fun, and also tend to still be unrealistic, just in different ways.

However, someone else might feel differently than I.

 

[N0Man]

Bolding is mine, not Jeff's.

4E's healing dichotomy -- either you heal fully (as far as functionality is concerned) in six hours, or you were never really wounded at all -- isn't a matter of opinion, but rather a matter of fact. That some people are okay with one or the other of those choices is great; but that some people don't like either choice doesn't change the fact that they're all that's available, barring house rules.

You see, I don't disagree with that. As far as "functionality" goes, it's true. The thing is, it's not required that the narrative doesn't require it to be (and for some of us, doesn't).

However, even taking a completely pure literal view of hit point loss and recovery, is it really any more absurd than regularly passing around the wand of cure light wounds at the end of the day?

Honestly, except when it applies to the story, I'm content to just say characters are patched up and ready to go again in the next morning (if their rest isn't interrupted) rather than slowing the story down for us to tediously go through heal after heal after heal from the wand and healing spells, and then decide to camp a 2nd time so the healer can get those heals back again.

Really the biggest difference is that the whole party doesn't have to wait an extra day or 2 for the healer to re-memorize spells. Maybe some players enjoy those scenes more than I do, but I just find them dull and tedious, and I just want to keep moving with the story and the adventuring. However

4E is fairly neutral for the "skin", and it's pretty obvious that this is intentional. If you dismiss the mechanic because you think the narrative doesn't make sense, then perhaps you should consider a change to the narrative.