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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 6239950" data-attributes="member: 79401">Mark me down as another in favour of "Multiple Options", including "Write your own".See, I fall on pretty near the opposite side of the spectrum from Kamikaze Midget here. Were I to have my druthers, rather than he his, you'd see something more along these lines:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Restoring HP should be largely (if not entirely) separate from healing wounds: HP have never represented physical injury in any meaningful way, so I'd just as soon stop pretending that they do. HP are an abstract measure of how far you are from defeat (be it unconsciousness or death), and therefore morale is certainly a significant factor.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">HP should be an encounter resource, not an adventure one: As physical meat makes up very little of what HP represent, once you've had a momentary break in fighting for your life, they should pretty much all be restored to you, free of cost. Being at low HP in a fight creates a sense of urgency, while being at low HP outside of a fight encourages excessive resting or heavy reliance on magical HP restoration.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Wounds should be a consequence of HP loss, rather than an entirely abstract portion of the point loss: Whether it's a result of being reduced to 0, or whether one introduces various thresholds like bloodied or SWSE's Fortitude Defence–based Damage Threshold, or simply tying them to critical hits, wounds should be a potential result of HP loss, and should have some meaningful impact upon your character's performance. Someone with an injured sword arm should really be having more trouble swinging their sword. Someone with an injured leg should really be moving slower. There's all sorts of room here for varying degrees of abstractness, but even a very simplistic system would represent wounds in a much more convincing way than HP ever could. In addition, a component of wounds could be a persistent penalty to max-HP, retaining the element of HP as an adventure resource that KM likes: get too injured, and not only are you hampered in various ways by your injuries, but you have less of a buffer from death. Yes, this can lead into the dreaded Death Spiral, but there's no reason it has to be a rapid one.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">As HP represent an amalgamation of luck, morale, and various other factors, of course all characters should have ways of restoring them: Now, in my approach, there's not much need for out of combat ways (other than the persistent penalties associated with actual injuries) to restore them. But there's plenty of design space for a variety of in-combat restorations. Your cleric need not resort to actual divine magic to restore someone's fighting spirit: perhaps they simply appeal to their religious fervour. Perhaps a charismatic PC of any stripe is able to give his allies a bit of an HP boost through an impromptu battlefield speech. Perhaps even certain feats of daring, taking greater risk upon one's self, could inspire one's allies and restore a bit of HP.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Healing wounds faster than mundane treatment is where magic's dramatic edge should be, not HP restoration: Magical healing making wounds heal faster is A-OK with me. I'd stick wounds on a track something like 4E's approach to diseases, and have each stage have conditions for when it gets worse and when it gets better. Proper treatment would make wounds heal faster than the baseline, and some wounds would get worse if not treated (bed rest is never the appropriate prescription for an untreated severed artery, regardless of D&D's long-standing "rest heals everything in time" approach). The appropriate healing magic would either accelerate healing, avoid negative consequences, or skip you stages of recovery. Cure Light Wounds should actually cure your light wounds, no more, no less (though I suppose if we want to get technical, it should be Heal Light Wounds, as you cure a disease—or a ham, etc.—not a wound).</li> </ol>Anyways, yeah, it's blatantly obvious that no one HP/healing/injury/what-have-you approach is going to be broad enough to capture what'd make me happiest and what would make Kamikaze Midget happiest. So options, options, options … and nothing so tightly integrated into the system that it can't be readily swapped out as needed.</blockquote>

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