Long-Term Injury Fun?

[Dausuul]

So, we've had endless threads hashing and re-hashing the Great Hit Point Question.

This is not intended to be another such thread. Within this thread, I do not care what 4E hit points represent. Or 3E, or 2E, or 1E. I would appreciate it if everyone else would also agree--within this thread--not to care.

Instead, I wanted to play some theoretical games. What if we were going to have a mechanic for long-term injuries that take weeks or months to heal? (Yes, I'm aware that no edition of D&D ever has had this.)

How could such a mechanic work, such that it would actually be a benefit to the game? Typically, long-term injury mechanics are detrimental in many ways (added complexity; disrupting the game as the PCs have to make an unscheduled stop; characters end up maimed in ways that make them less fun to play), and the gain in terms of realism is widely viewed as too small to justify the costs. So what would make the gain greater, and/or the costs less, so that it would be worth including?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I would not bother with long-term injuries of weeks or months. As you mentioned there is the issue of added complexity. "You have suffered a compound fracture to your leg. You will have 1/2 movement and -2 Dex for two weeks, which will then become 3/4 movement and -1 Dex for two more weeks."

Now you add to it a need for "proper" campaign design to make it worthwhile. If you don't have a campaign with an urgent need to keep going, most players will hole up in an inn for a couple of weeks (money isn't usually much of an issue after the first couple of levels) until they are back to full health. Press fast forward to when they are willing to adventure again, or play out weeks of dullness while they sit around and heal. Might as well skip the long-term injury.

I could see some form of medium-term injury in the form of ability damage that will last until the end of the adventure, assuming the adventure will continue for another week or so at most.

 

[Cadfan]

I, personally, would not enjoy realistic long term injuries in my game. Why would I? What it adds in realism it takes away in bed rest. And many truly realistic injuries would never heal at all.

I also would not enjoy realistic long term injury rules coupled with magic that bypasses them and heals you instantly. That would be an additional level of complexity that didn't actually DO anything, since we'd always bring along a healer.

 

[Imban]

Long-term injury mechanics would make more sense in a game that, unlike D&D, is assumed to be played over a longer time-scale. In a game where you had an adventure every year - I think Pendragon does something like this - you could have opportunities to train and do other things during downtime that would be hindered by any long-term injuries you received during the corresponding adventure. In that system, they could be used as more of a mechanic to reward, say, not coming home maimed.

Alternatively, you can take Exalted's tack on it, which I always liked. Long-term injury mechanics exist because long-term injuries are things people who go on dangerous adventures have to worry about, but the PCs can easily become so cool as to never have to worry about long-term injuries. Of course, this more or less requires magical healing.

(On a sidenote, what seems to be an issue in these debates is that in 3.5e D&D, you would almost always fully recover overnight, much as in 4e - however, that's because in 3.5e, you will use your remaining magical healing resources to restore HP before going to sleep. There's not much gameplay difference, but a big difference in feel between making camp and sleeping off the loss of all but one of your HP and making camp and breaking out the remaining daily uses of Cure (X) Wounds.)

EDIT: My ideal "long-term injury" mechanics for D&D would probably be pretty simple: everyone recovers 1 HP/night, unless they have a class feature granting them better recovery rates. For instance, Fighters, Paladins, and Monks would recover their level in HP/night, Rangers and Barbarians would recover twice their level in HP/night. The Heal skill would (at the "commoner" end) add slightly to recovery rates, while at the higher end it would have instant healing effects much as NWN's Heal does.

 

[kennew142]

I, personally, would not enjoy realistic long term injuries in my game. Why would I? What it adds in realism it takes away in bed rest. And many truly realistic injuries would never heal at all.

I also would not enjoy realistic long term injury rules coupled with magic that bypasses them and heals you instantly. That would be an additional level of complexity that didn't actually DO anything, since we'd always bring along a healer.

My thoughts exactly. When I first heard about the rules for healing completely after a long rest in 4e, I set out to create rules to simulate long term injury. After much number crunching, I came to the conclusion that magical healing would always be a quick fix for it, and it would add little to the game.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Also, long-term injuries only impact long-term characters - i.e. the PCs (and maybe some recurring NPCs).

The PCs are a small fraction of the characters that interact with the game. To penalize them for being involved in the story long-term as opposed to the 20 kobolds they fought that lasted two rounds is unbalancing (IMO).

 

[Ourph]

I think Action Points might be a good tool to use for representing long term injury. From what we've seen so far, AP's seem to allow a character to push beyond their normal limitations to do something extraordinary a couple of times a day. It would make sense that a seriously injured character would be able to do this less than a fully healthy person. Perhaps a character who is forced to make death saves (but eventually succeeds and recovers) receives a "negative AP". This negative AP cancels out one AP the character earns per day. So, a character with -1AP would lose his first AP of the day automatically and not gain another until after the second encounter. A character with -2AP would lose this AP as well and need to go through 4 encounters in order to gain a usable AP.

"Healing" of -AP could take a week per -AP or a month or however long you want. It could also require special conditions, like complete rest or constant medical treatment.

 

[I'm A Banana]

One possibility:

#1: When dropped below 0 hp, you suffer a long-term injury, even if your hp are later healed.

#2: When you suffer long-term injury, your MAXIMUM HIT POINTS are reduced by the amount of damage that dropped you below 0 hp. So if you took 7 points of damage, it would lower your max HP by 7. If you took 36 points of damage, it would lower your max hp by 36. As a consequence, at higher levels, you usually sustain more debilitating injuries, largely. This is because you are facing dragons that eat you, rather than goblins that stab you. This damage is called your Long-Term Damage.

#3: Long-term injury won't heal by itself. Healing it requires a complex Heal skill check over the course of one week for every 10 points of long-term damage you have. A Regeneration spell halves the time it takes the Heal skill to recover that damage.

That's pretty quick and dirty, and it forgoes "-2 penalties" for just nearly-permenant hp reduction, but it also means that if you want to soldier on despite the long-term injury that you can.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

funny, I was about to start this thread

I have always modeled long-term injury as ability damage. Such injuries actually impair your ability to fight and otherwise go on adventures, and they can take over a week to heal naturally. I have even considered allowing ability scores to drop below 0, to model injuries that require multiple weeks to recover. For example, severe head trauma might put somebody to negative wisdom, so that they don't regain consciousness for days or weeks. You might house-rule that a character with negative strength can move, but only pitifully feebly. A character with negative dexterity could move, but only with crutches.

Depending on your interpretation of hit points, you can add serious injury to typical combats by having a character take some appropriate amount of ability damage once they fall below positive hit points, thus losing the ability to convert hits into merely superficial wounds. I've noticed that Paizo's Critical Hit Deck also includes some effects along these lines: critical hits can inflict ability damage to reflect the fact that these are no mere glancing blows.

Of course, my understanding is that 4th Edition removes temporary ability score bonuses and penalties. I can only assume that it will include some way to handle more explicit elements of the 3rd Edition rules, such as poison and disease, that cause lingering impairment.

 

[Transit]

I think I'd try to make it similar to other 4E effects:

LONG TERM INJURY
Your character has sustained an injury that will take some time to heal.

Until this condition is removed, you suffer the following penalties.

-1 square of movement
-2 to attacks
You get one less healing surge per day
You are considered "Bloodied" regardless of hit point total

(Or whatever penalties you feel like giving, depending upon how serious you want long term injury to be in your game)

You can attempt a save once per week/Save ends

Or the save could be once a month, if you wanted REALLY long term injury. Or base the time between saves on their constitution or something...