Possible house rules - wound track, recharge powers

[RangerWickett]

After talking with potential players and a GM who has a lot more 4e experience, I've narrowed down my changes to the following small ones.

Hit Points
Flavor-wise, HP represents your verve and short term resilience. Healing surges represent your longer-term endurance. Neither tracks actual injury in the 'tissue damage' sense. For that, I'm adding a very simple wound track.

Wound Track
Whenever you are reduced below 0 hit points, you make death saving throws as normal. Whenever you fail, you move a step down the wound track.

• Stage Zero. Fully healthy.
• Stage One. Injured. No penalty, but it gets you closer to the worse stuff.
• Stage Two. Wounded. -1 penalty to attacks, checks, and saves.
• Stage Three. Disabled. -2 penalty to attacks, checks, and saves. Slowed.
• Stage Four. Crippled. -3 penalty to attacks, checks, and saves. Slowed and dazed.
• Stage Five. Dead.

So now, yes, to die you have to fail five death saves instead of three, but towards the end you're getting penalties, so it's harder to get back up. Note that this does give the game a sort of quantum wound system, where if you drop to 0 and suffer no wounds, you just got knocked unconscious, but if you drop to 0 and suffer 4 wounds, we discover retroactively that the giant actually shattered your ribs with that blow of his.

Healing Wounds
Like with disease tracks, every day you make Endurance checks (or have an ally make Heal checks) to get better or get worse. I'm still working on a DC, but I'll probably set it at 10 or less you deteriorate, 11 to 19 you stay the same, and 20 you get better. Rituals like remove affliction could also help (I'll have to check the specific rules when I'm back home). I'm also considering letting cure wounds powers let you ignore the penalties of a stage or two, but not actually heal the wound.

I want to encourage more resting time at low levels, but the recovery DC is static, because I have no problem with paragon heroes having no chance of dying by infection, or with epic heroes just automatically getting over a crippling wound in a few days.

Staying Conscious
I'm also considering allowing characters at or below 0 hit points to remain conscious but be dazed if they make an Endurance check (DC 20) each round. Effects that would daze them would instead stun them.

Inflicting Wounds
Players want to have fun too, so I'm considering letting PCs inflict wounds. Whenever an attack crits and deals damage greater than the target's Fortitude defense, that target gets a wound. This only works on non-PCs, though, because monsters and PCs use different rules, and I'm fine with that. This might not work out, though. I'll have to check the numbers and see how easy this is, because I'd hate to have every fight with solos ending with a whimper.

But if I do this, I'll probably be more visceral with monster wounds than I would with PCs. Lots of severed limbs, juicy punctures, and spurting arteries.


Powers
I'm considering letting PCs keep their lower level powers as they get to paragon and epic, instead of capping them at 4 encounter and 4 daily, but you'd still have the same limit to how many you can actually use in any given encounter/day.

I'd probably only use this option if I ran a game from low levels up to high, because I'd want to avoid the paralysis by indecision that could be caused by starting at 20th level with tons of powers you're unfamiliar with.

Recharging Powers
This is tentative, but I'd consider letting a PC recharge an encounter power by spending a healing surge, or recharge a daily power by moving a step down the wound track. Basically, pulling off awesome combat moves or channeling daunting magical energy is physically taxing, and you can only do it so many times a day without hurting yourself.

 

[Garthanos]

In general you have some very interesting ideas on this. Remember to describe all attacks on minions as resulting in wounds of course.

ps: I guess that is only significant for color unless you are using tough minions or bloodieable minion house rules.

 

[RangerWickett]

Oh, I need to ask my DM friend what his minion house rule is. I think it's something like hp equal to their level, but once they're bloodied, any damage auto-kills them.

 

[Garthanos]

I am a bit hesitant about spending a healing surge for recover.. it seems like it could be a push into the 15 minute day. I was thinking myself of using a second wind in its place but maybe that isn't greatly different.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Hey RW, This looks very close to a HR I have 'adopted'.. but haven't really had used in play. The rule is very simple:

Wounds reduce the maximum number of healing surges you recover at the end of an extended rest and grant a -1 penalty to all attacks. At the end of an extended rest you can heal from 1 wound. You gain wounds by:

- Fail a Death Save
- Get hit by a Critical Attack
- Player choice, as an immediate reaction when hit you can burn a healing surge to gain resistance equal to your healing surge value against one attack.

This rule makes getting hit something you don't just sleep off. I bantered about having a CON check to heal from wounds, but decided to keep the rules relatively clear.


Regarding recharging powers with healing surges.. if your players play anything like my character... I have yet to get close to running out of healing surges but always run out of encounter powers... I would jump all over being able to recharge some of those powers!
{not sure if that is a recommendation....}