Tiers of Damage − Rates of Healing

[Yaarel]

Tiers of Damage.

For me this is the best description of damage (Players Handbook, 197):


• When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum,
you typically show no signs of injury.
• When you drop below half your hit point maximum,
you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises.
• An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly,
leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious.


This description strikes the balance between realism and simplicity (and gaming balance):
glancing hit → impacting hit → lethal hit

There are tiers of damage:
vigorous → bloodied → dying



Rates of Healing

The DMs Guide gives options for rates of healing. I would like these recovery mechanics to reflect these tiers of damage.


Ideally I want something like:
• Vigorous: if remaining over half hit points, use per-15-minute rests to recover hit points
• Bloodied: if reaching half hit points, use per-day rests to recover hit points
• Dying: if reaching 0 hit points, use per-week rests to recover hit points (or something like that)


Tiers of damage, with their rates of healing, marries flavorful combat descriptions to elegant mechanics.



Hit points are complex, because essential mechanics from Fighter superiority short rests to Wizard spell long rests balance around them. The above tiers of healing and damage should work well, gamewise. Are there any mechanical concerns being overlooked?

 

[Yaarel]

The following tentative hit point set up was emerging in discussions in an other thread. (The Enworld crash had to revert to a backup from several months ago, and recent activity was lost.)



Split hit points 50%-50% into two separate pools.

• Vigor hit points (nonphysical: energy, alertness, skill, luck, dodging, deflecting, keeps guard up)
• Blood hit points (physical: skin, blood - drops guard down, bloodied, fatigued, sloppy, woozy, getting beat up)

One cannot deal bloodying damage until wearing thru the vigor hit points. Similarly, one cannot heal blood hit points, until vigor hit points are maximum.

When all hit points − first vigor and then blood − reach 0, then the hero enters the Dying condition, and starts making saves versus death.

• Dying (internal damage: muscle, bones, vital organs, main arteries, brain, gut, etcetera)



Rest and Healing

The following schedule for rest and healing, seems to roughly approximate reallife rates of healing:

• At the end of an 8-hour long rest, you can spend the hit dice that you have remaining from the previous day to heal 1 hit point of blood per hit dice. Afterward, you regain your total hit dice.

• At the end of a 15-minute short rest, you can spend one or more of your hit dice to heal your hit points of vigor.



Note. hit points dont refresh at the end of the long rest. But you get all of your hit dice, that you can use during short rests for vigor during the day. At the next long rest, you can spend hit dice to slowly heal physically. So, days of rest where you dont waste your hit dice to be vigorous, allows your physical body to heal more rapidly.

Even if you only have 1 physical hit point (of blood), you can still use short rests to recover all of your nonphysical hit points (vigor) to remain viable in combat during the adventure.

Note. Short rests can only heal the nonphysical hit points of vigor. You cannot use short rests to the heal physical hit points of blood. Only long rests can heal physical hit points of blood, at a rate of 1 hp (!) per (entire) hit die. So, physical healing is slower than regaining nonphysical healing.

 

[Yaarel]

Descriptions of Damage
Normally, the DM will decide arbitrarily, exactly what an injury looks like, depending on the damage type (slashing, bludgeoning, fire, cold, etcetera). But it can help to keep the following in mind.



Location of Injury

[FONT=courier new][I][B]d10    Bodypart
[/B][/I]
1-2    Head
 3     Chest
 4     Abdomen
5-6    Right Arm
7-8    Left Arm
 9     Right Leg
10     Left Leg[/FONT]

Variant: Location of Injury
The more detailed statistics here derive from reallife studies on combat wounds and work accidents.

[FONT=courier new][I][B]d20     Bodypart                                Reallife[/B]

[/I]        [B]Head                                    [/B]20%
 1      • Brain Concussion                                   
 2      • Face                                                     
 3      • Crown                                                    
 4      • Neck                                                     

        [B]Chest                                   [/B]15%
 5      • Breasts                                                
 6      • Sternum                                                
 7      • Back                                                     

        [B]Abdomen                                 [/B]10%
 8      • Belly                                             
 9      • Lower Back/[FONT=courier new]Groin[/FONT]

        [B]Arms                                    [/B]30%
10      • Right Hand                                             
11      • Right Shoulder                       
12      • Right Arm/Elbow/Wrist               
13      • Left Hand                                               
14      • Left Shoulder                  
15      • Left Arm/Elbow/Wrist                 

        [B]Legs                                    [/B]25%
16      • Right Knee                                             
17      • Right Leg/Hip/Ankle/Foot              
18      • Left Knee                                               
19      • Left Leg/Hip/Ankle/Foot                 
20      • Buttocks                                        [/FONT]

Scar?
Reducing to 0 hit points and failing one save versus death, almost ALWAYS leaves a visible scar. Exceptions might include damage from drowning, poisons, or so on.

Low level healing spells (Cure Wounds, Word of Healing) close wounds, but cannot remove scars. Spell slot level 6 or higher can remove scars (Heal, Regeneration, even Cure Wounds using a slot level 6 or higher).

Medical data about skin and scars, including burns.

[FONT=courier new][B][I]Skin     Dermis      Scar? Bleed    Cut      Rip      Burn       Bruise  Pain[/I][/B]
               
[I]If Bloodied[/I]
[B]Surface[/B]  epidermis   [B]no[/B]    minimal  scratch  redness  redness    light    pain
[B]Shallow[/B]  palpillary  [B]no[/B]    drip     knick    scrape   blister    dark     lots

               
[I]Fail a Save v Death[/I]
[B]Deep[/B]     reticular   [B]scar[/B]  flow     cut      tear     whiteness  severe   pressure
[B]Thru[/B]     hypodermis  [B]scar[/B]  spurt    gash     flayed   brownness  severe   no pain



[I]Notes[/I]
Burn damage types: acid, cold (frostbite), fire, lightning, radiance
Bruise damage types: bludgeoning, force, thunder
Rip damage types: bludgeoning, slashing
Cut damage types: piercing, slashing
Piercing might not leave a scar if surgically tidy or a pin prick
Thunder might represent pressure damage in deep sea or outer space

Determine any internal injury separately, depending on failed saves versus death: 
blood loss, contusion, muscle impairment, broken bone, vital organ failure

[/FONT]

If Face?
I cant find clear medical statistics for facial injuries (some refer to bone damage only, others tissue damage only, and so on), but the gist seems simple, something like the following.

[FONT=courier new][I][B]d20     Face[/B]

 [/I]1      Right Eye
 2      Left Eye
 3      Right Ear
 4      Left Ear
 5      Forehead
 6      Nose
 7      Mouth
 8[FONT=courier new]      Right Cheek
 9      Left Cheek
[/FONT]10      Jaw
[/FONT]

 

[Xeviat]

I think you found a cool way to address this, but I feel that it's too easy to go below half that things will be "normal" most of the time. I'm not sure what you'll get out of this.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Blue]

I'm working with the assumption that unlike the DMG rest variants, you intend this just for healing, not for Long Rest options like regaining spells. That would be weird to have some characters regain all resources in 15 minutes and others not.

The effects of the rule I see:
If you're not too hurt, it's easy to rest up to full and regain all of your HD between every combat.
If some are hurt, out-of-combat healing is VERY useful to get them over the line and then let them heal up the rest of the way.
If (almost) everyone is bloodied, your party heals 32x slower. (8 hours rest instead of 15 minute rest). Since your calibrated to be fully healed every battle thsi si a very dangerous spot. I can see most parties wanting to take a long rest at this point to get out of there if they don't have enough healing magic to do it otherwise.
If you are badly hurt, either the party has magical healing and it doesn't matter in the least, or you hold back you adventuring party for a week.

That's a particular style of game, if that works for your table great. I think it penalizes players who play tanks and are willing to take damage to protect the rest of the party because they are more likely to be over a threshold. I'm not a fan of the full heals all the time for lightly damaged parties, it makes it hard to have lwoer difficulty combats have any lasting repercussions in resource usage.

 

[Yaarel]

The entire hit die can only heal 1 hp of blood, and only after a long rest.

Note. Short rests would only heal the nonphysical hit points of vigor. You couldnt use short rests to the heal physical hit points of blood. Only long rests can heal physical hit points of blood, at a rate of 1 hp per hit dice. So, physical healing is slower than regaining nonphysical healing.

So, players want to avoid getting bloodied, and to stay vigorous.

 

[Xeviat]

If you are badly hurt, either the party has magical healing and it doesn't matter in the least, or you hold back you adventuring party for a week.

Kind of what I'm seeing. That's my worry.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Yaarel]

Kind of what I'm seeing. That's my worry.

Is it a problem?

Its more realistic. A badly hurt party would normally need to stay low.

Heh, a person wanting to avoid getting hurt, is realistic.

A party can still function adequately at half hit points − the vigor half.

Even if a party decides to leave the adventure to rest up, it is sorta like a TPK, except the party actually lives to fight an other day. This too is more realistic.

The imbalance between healing spells and nonmagical healing might be an issue. Maybe if healing spells need to spend hit dice, at the rate of 1 hp per hit dice, then it balances.

 

[Blue]

Is it a problem?

This will give a specific feel to a campaign, quite a bit different than "traditional" healing. If that's the feel wanted at the table, then this works well.

Its more realistic. A badly hurt party would normally need to stay low.

Again, depending on the feel you are going for that's likely either a benefit or a detriment.

To me, hits vs. misses and saves and who is targeted are so swingy that having these additional thresholds that force long extra periods of rest that I can't predict are a detriment.

If I plan something where rests are hard (time pressure, wandering monsters, etc.) then I'm forcing some characters to carry a much higher risk than others depending on how the dice fall.

Even more importantly I'm increasing dependence on magical healing like we had in the editions up through 3.5, which strongly changes the resource balance of healer types to much more support characters. I like that self-healing has allowed those characters not to have to focus on using their spell slots so heavily I heals and can do other things without feeling like they are letting their party down.

As a corollary, this effectively removes the ability to play without magical healing.

Realism over heroics is a decent thing at some tables. 3.x does a better job of simulating the real world than 5e, personally I'll play that system if I'm looking for it.

 

[Yaarel]

I updated the third post to include:

d20 random location of wound (based on reallife combat, accident, and medical statistics)

Scar? Descriptions of damage to skin