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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6896740" data-attributes="member: 996">Meh.  Healing from magic items is dependent on the DM placing magic items.  Feats that provide healing/damage-mitigation are, likewise, opt-in optional (at the DM's option).  The DMG includes options for slowing the rate of natural healing significantly.  It is true that player decisions  make a huge difference in the amount of healing available to the party, from none (no one played a caster - or, more nearly plausibly, no one played a caster with healing spells on his known spell list), and, since that can come down to the slot expenditure decisions, there's a lot of potential healing (you could theoretically be a party of Druids, Bards, & Clerics and blow all your slots on Cure Wounds).Sure, if all those things line up.  If you do have healing potion bars, if you do allow feats and if the players take those particular feats and make those class choices.   If it's an issue, the obvious answer is to remove some of those options.  Place fewer potions (including fewer and lower volume buying opportunities), remove the offending feats, etc.4e also reigned in healing substantially by requiring most healing to consume healing surges, and by making power slots 1:1 (that is the Command/CLW, Cure Critical/Flame Strike, Heal/Harm, type decisions were made at chargen and level-up, and there weren't many of them, so sufficient healing to get through the day, and no CoDzilla).  Getting through the day, every day, wasn't quite as important in 4e, since the classes were balanced regardless of day length, though, so in that sense healing may have been over-engineered.  5e of course, backs off from the 4e model, while returning to a set of class designs that do rely on getting through a reasonably long day to establish any sort of rough resource-managment balance among them.The problem isn't so much too much (or too  little) healing as the amount of healing being too variable on the player side, because you don't have clear guidance about the need for it - though everyone should know you 'need a Cleric' (or other caster with Cure Wounds) because it's a classic D&Dism - and because slots are such a tremendously flexible resource that if they're not used for healing, they can distort the game (though, again, not as bad as in 3.x w/CoDzilla).A 3e disease typically did ability damage on a failed FORT save until you succeeded on two saves in a row.  Then you had to heal the ability damage.  Not really a model for recovering from a wound.  Might work for a wound that festers (essentially a disease) and gets worse, though.Sounds like a job for hps.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  The existing numbers of hps, and an expanded number of HD, that you could spend in combat or after a shorter rest than an hour could work quite well - in conjunction with changing healing spells so that they no longer restore hps (or, at least, are no longer efficient to use that way), and possibly reducing slots by the expected expenditure for healing purposes, to make up for the expansion in HD (or making healing of hps, even with slots expend HD).A big problem with two-pool systems like hps/wounds or wounds/vitality or whatever, or hps/ability-damage, or the like, is that one of the pools can easily become more critical than the other, undoing the desired effect of having to manage both.  So it would have to be even more carefully/robustly designed than hps/surges in 4e.  Another issue is the dreaded 'death spiral' in which accumulating penalties from wounds makes you more vulnerable to further wounds...My thoughts would be along the lines of making Wounds like conditions, rather than like a pool of hps.  So you'd have a hp/wounds system, with hps working much as they do now, and Wounds modeling longer-term, more significant injuries.  Random thoughts:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Other than a few spells like Aid granting temp hps or messing with max hps and perhaps the big guns, like Heal, magic shouldn't typically restore hps by itself.  Rather, Cure Wounds should do what it says on the label: remove Wounds.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">To work with that Wounds should have a level, from 1-9.  The level of a wound depends on level/CR of the creature that inflicted it and any special abilities it may have.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wounds could be inflicted by critical hits instead of extra damage.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wounds could be inflicted by the first hit that brings you below 1/2 hps or reduces you to 0, or each hit that does over a threshold number (fraction of max hps) of hp damage or each failed death save or something else or several/all of those.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wounds should 'Schrodinger' - old saws like "It's not as bad as it looks," "his injuries were worse than we thought," and "I didn't even feel it, at first" should be evoked by the system.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A wound inflicts a penalty or condition of some sort, based on the nature of the wound.  (To limit the 'death spiral' issue the penalty could kick in after the encounter has ended.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The nature of a Wound could be based on the attack and any special qualities it may have, the damage type, the mechanic that inflicted it (crit vs dropped to 0 etc), and so forth.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A wound takes time (and CON saves) and/or care (and Medicine checks) or magic to heal.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When you take an Action you can choose to ignore the penalties and conditions imposed by any Wound(s) you may have, for that action, only, when the action is completed you make a CON save or take hps damage or make the Wound worse in some way.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wounds are long-term conditions and take long-term measures to deal with.  Downtime and saves/checks are one way, allowing you to remove the wound at the end of the downtime.  Magic is a short-cut, but there should be longer-term price to it.  Maybe slots used to cure wounds can't be recovered until a period of downtime comparable to that required to cure the wound in the first place.  Maybe the magically-closed Wound is subject to being 're-opened' by further injury or extreme exertion before the requisite amount of natural rest.</li> </ul>Good luck.</blockquote>

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