I’ve been thinking recently about healing out of combat, and it’s led me through some strange places.
Overall, though, I think they could make for longer ‘days’ and simpler play overall, and reasonably get rid of that stupid healing stick that it seems like everyone carries in his pocket… which can only, in my opinion, be a good thing.
Existing Healing Models in D&D
Out of Combat Healing in AD&D
One hit point per day of rest. I think the rule was the same, but I can’t seem to find it in the BECMI Rules Cyclopedia.
Out of Combat Healing in D&D 3.x
Once a party bootstraps and reaches a certain level of wealth, one of the most efficient ways to spend their money is to ensure they have a wand of cure light wounds available at all times. This provides about 275 points of healing (mean; 1d8+1 fifty times is 5.5 hit points on average fifty times, and with that many rolls you’re going to end up quite close to the mean). At low levels this provides multiple hit point top-ups per character, greatly extending the party’s combat durability for the day. At high levels it doesn’t stretch as far, but they become proportionately cheaper compared to the treasure the PCs can expect to acquire in the additional fights.
TL;DR: you can reasonably expect PCs to go into every fight with full hit points.
You can also heal naturally, one hit point per level after a night of rest, doubled for a full day of bed rest.
Out of Combat Healing in D&D 4e
During a short rest (five minute rest), you can spend as many healing surges as you want, recovering 1/4 your maximum hit points with each one.
During an extended rest (6+ hours, at least 12 hours between them) you recover all hit points without spending any healing surges (and in fact, recover any healing surges spent prior to the extended rest).
Out of Combat Healing in Trailblazer
When you take a rest in Trailblazer, there are two primary effects. All ongoing spells expire, and you recover a number of hit points equal to half your maximum.
Proposed Healing Model
This is where I might have to talk fast, since it took me a couple of days to accept it myself.
What are Hit Points?
Step the first, we should review what hit points really measure. Doug said to me once something rather like “hit points are the measure of a creature’s ‘hard-to-kill’”.
At various times hit points have been described as “fate, luck, toughness, and other things that prevent a character from getting killed”, and similar ideas. That is, “how much hard-to-kill” the creature has.
It does not measure ‘just’ meat. If it did, it would be pretty hard to have a human with more hit points than a horse, let alone something like a bear. But in D&D high-level characters do, because they have lots of hard-to-kill. Whether because the character has unnatural durable thews, has an indomitable will and desire to live, has fantastic agility and ability to avoid serious injury, has been touched by the gods, or is just a lucky son of a bitch, he has a lot of hard-to-kill. Attacks that would kill a lesser man leave him relatively unscathed — a little bruised or cut up, but otherwise mostly okay.
Until he runs out of hard-to-kill. At that point he has been beaten down, he is mentally exhausted and gives up, his injuries and fatigue hamper is ability to dodge, the gods forsake him (or vice-versa), or his luck runs out… and the next attack might be enough to kill him.
I have seen a similar description of hit points in previous editions of D&D (or AD&D). It works pretty well as an abstraction, even to the point of explaining why cure light wounds can fully heal a peasant but do almost nothing for a high-level fighter: the peasant has very little hard-to-kill, and thus is easily restored to what little he has, while the hardened warrior who has faced down armies and demons (and perhaps armies of demons) has a great deal of hard-to-kill, and minor magicks to little to recover it.
Losing Hard-to-Kill
I’ve spoken to several practiced (read: black belt) martial artists, at least one of which has competed on the Canadian national team, and they’ve confirmed that in most fights, most ‘successful attacks’ really don’t cause much injury. However, they can easily disorient, distract, or inhibit the ability to fight — they wear down the fighter’s hard-to-kill until the opponent can land a winning (which I will take as ‘killing’ for this purpose) attack.
Being punched in the face doesn’t necessarily cause any severe damage. Even a broken nose is not that serious an injury. However, it’s hard to fight successfully when your face is suddenly pain and you can’t see because your eyes are watering. Within the bounds of this model, it is not unreasonable to consider such an attack to take away a fair bit of “hard-to-kill” — if you can’t see, it’s much easier to hit you again.
This sort of reasoning can lead to death spiral mechanics, but I think they are not needed (especially since they tend to make for distinctly unfun play).
Granted, the above suggests it the model best suits unarmed combat, but I think it can apply to armed combat as well. I have seen various armed styles that make regular use of nonlethal attacks to inhibit or otherwise reduce the opponent’s ability to fight effectively before landing a ‘serious injury’. If you can’t reach his head or heart, go for what you can reach — hands, arms, legs, whatever, and work him down. Shield bashing can be a remarkably effective technique, even though it often does relatively little trauma.
Recovering Hard-to-Kill
Here is where things take a sudden jump. What if most ‘damage’ sustained in a fight is simply wearing down hard-to-kill, and not significant trauma? If this is the case, it should be relatively easy to recover, so let’s try a simple rule.
When you take a rest out of combat, you catch your breath, clear your mind, refocus your will, clean and bind wounds, and so on. You recover all hard-to-kill (that is, hit points) that are not associated with serious trauma or systemic injury.
Perhaps the simplest definition of serious trauma would be a successful critical hit.
“‘Put a bandage on it’? I can see your lung!“
Systemic damage? That could be caused by poison or disease, probably by necrotic/negative energy damage. Possibly falling, I don’t know yet.
As long as you survive a fight, you get back probably a fair amount of the hard-to-kill you’ve used by taking the time to clean up and regroup before moving on.
Consequences of this Change
I see the following consequences of this change:
- This should do quite a bit to extend the adventuring day, at least as far as hit point damage is concerned, without requiring the ubiquitous healing stick.
- In fact, I’m pretty sure the healing stick first showed up in D&D 3e. Let’s get rid of it, it serves little purpose in combat and is no longer needed out of combat, and could cause this new scheme to not work right.
- If someone wants to burn up a really big healing stick (staff of healing) on out of combat healing, I won’t stop him. But I might point and laugh.
- This should do nothing to extend a particular combat because it does not provide a way to recover hard-to-kill during a fight.
- A critical hit with a greataxe now has more effect than three hits with a greataxe, which should make the critical ‘bigger’ than before.
- No real extra work for the DM (the monster goes down, he goes down, and I don’t care if he gets up).
- In fact, may make it easier to take prisoners, simply rule that when a creature is out of hard-to-kill he’s helpless and can be rescued if desired, or left to (probably) die. It might be worth considering the attack to be fatal anyway if the last one was a critical hit — you wanted to capture him, but he was so out of hard-to-kill that he ran himself right onto your blade.
- For that matter, ’0 hit points’ might now just mean helpless. Forget the fallen until you have time to do something with him. Unless he has a way to act while helpless.
- Over the course of a day, the party can still get worn down (by criticals, if nothing else), but is unlikely to suddenly ‘run out’ (as they might with the healing stick).
Secondary Changes
Other things to consider when making this change:
- As mentioned above, lose the healing stick.
- I want to simplify spell durations anyway, and Trailblazer seems to have a decent mechanism here. Let’s say that all “combat” duration spells expire when you rest… so do you rest and recover hard-to-kill, or keep your buffs up? This can provide an incentive to keep moving, which in turn reduces the “start all fights with full hit points” behavior mentioned earlier.
- If this is a tough decision, things are right.
Closing Comments
I haven’t tried this change in play. It seems consistent with where the game has been going for a while (D&D 3.5 it just became a paid-for tax — you could earn enough money with the extra encounters to pay for the wands of cure light wounds, in D&D 4e and Trailblazer it’s pretty close to built-in, as long as you don’t get your hit points get too low before you rest). It doesn’t add work to me, it makes some effects a little scarier compared to normal damage, it may make it easier to not-kill things (when it’s out of hard-to-kill and helpless you can do what you want, so if you want to capture you can).
This looks worth a try, I think.
People can be surprisingly hard to kill. Even people who’ve suffered a mortal wound and are on their way to the great sorting algorithm in the sky can hang on for longer than you’d think (certainly longer than the few seconds you usually get in D&D). I’ve started tending towards making death “non-mechanical” for this reason. Once you’ve got them helpless you can just chop their heads off anyway, so it just helps avoid awkward moments when you accidentally one-shot a PC miles from the nearest cleric. :-)
Presumably, then, the staff of healing is primarily useful for dealing with aggravated damage from criticals etc. Speaking of which, does that work by reducing your maximum HP for the duration of the injury? Or inflict some condition instead? If you wanted to get all detailed you could have muscle tear (-1 Str), concussion (-1 Int), and so on. A bit more bookkeeping but it does distinguish clearly between the two. A few options for applying such conditions: choose one randomly, or randomly based on damage type, or maybe use a sort of “retroactive called shot” and let the player pick?
I’d really rather avoid so avert a death spiral. That gets ugly, fast, and doesn’t suit my purpose. I’d rather see the more serious injuries as “reducing hard-to-kill” until it can be fixed. It still limits your capacity to take further damage, which I suspect is sufficient, without necessarily inhibiting your ability to act otherwise.
This sounds like a good way to use hit points not all being meat as more than a hand wave without adding major mechanical changes, (e.g. soak dice).
I might just try this out.
The term I use for HP is “Mojo that protects you”, but “hard to kill” works fine too. The herowars implementation of Glorantha that existed between RuneQuest III and the current Mongoose game had free HP recovery between battles.
The Homebrew I’m working on now has HP (mojo that protects) and DC (damage capacity, aka meat). If you take more than half HP in a combat scene then recovering HP requires one mojo or one DC (depending on whether the scene was physical combat or something else), but otherwise HP recovery is free. DC recovery times are very long (I keep worrying too long, but I want DC damage to wear you down for the adventure not just for one day and serious wounds should take a very long time to heal).
I don’t really like “crits bypass HP” unless skill somehow makes crits much less likely. Otherwise you’ll find that high level combat is “hit each other till someone gets lucky and crits”.
I’m not too concerned about critical hits ‘bypassing hit points’ because in this model they don’t actually end any particular fight faster, as it would in the Wounds and Vitality model, where critical hits go straight past the fluffy hit points into the meaty hit points and can end a fight really fast. The ‘only’ effect critical hits have is that they are harder to recover from.
Considering that this ‘harder to recover from’ is no harder than it would be in RAW (modulo absence of a healing stick), it’s still not all that hard.
I’m another one who dislikes “crits bypass HP” and who doesn’t care all that much for crits in general. IMHO one of the best features of the 3e crit system is the way it inhibited DMs from applying even more extreme crazy-stupid critical hit systems of their own. So I’m skeptical of anything that makes crits “bigger” even if, as you point out, it doesn’t result in “crits bypass HP.”
Setting that aside…
Another concern is that no one ever used the “natural” healing rules in older editions if they could possibly help it. Instead they used healing sticks (or in older editions, healing potions) if they could at all afford them. I suspect that the same effect will happen here: Players will still do their best to get healing sticks or healing juice of some sort to heal that last ~15% of hit point loss from crits, applying the healing juice after the new non-combat healing. They really really won’t want to wait for that last ~15% to heal naturally, and trying to push them into doing so will be like bailing with a sieve unless you’re willing to take some incredibly drastic measures and to force them on the players with a will of iron.
from a post in RGFD (or was it IM?) regarding the guidelines for normal vs. lethal damage:
If it takes a hit roll and gets a critical, or if there is a Fortitude save, it counts as lethal damage. The first because the attacker landed a better than average blow, the other because the Fortitude save indicates it is systemic damage.
This gives me lethal damage on normal weapon attacks (sometimes), certain spells (such as acid arrow), poison and disease that do hit point damage, and spells like disintegrate and finger of death.
Might I suggest taking a look at the luck VS body point mechanics of Neoclassical Geek Revival? combined with how healing works it may be of interest to you.
http://zzarchov.blogspot.com/2010/05/on-elegance-of-luck-points-versus-hit.html
This is some good food for thought. We’ve fooled around with a couple of different ways of dividing hit points in to what shake you up but can be recovered vs what really injures you and can kill you quickly – wounds vs vitality, HP vs CON, etc. Looking at what you’ve done here, I don’t think what we’ve been trying to achieve is really a way to kill characters quickly (not fun, who wants that?) but a way to make some injuries more serious so that characters will try to avoid that damage. So maybe certain don’t really do more serious damage as in making you die faster, but only in taking longer to recover from… yeah, I like that.
For book-keeping on character sheets, this also suggests to me that instead of scratching out and reducing HP as damage is taken, we just leave the HP number along, and in a different space (or even just on scratch paper) keep a rising total of “hard-to-kill” damage taken, and a separate rising total of “real” damage taken – and when those two numbers add up to HP the character is down or knocked out or helpless. This would also allow for separate tracking of other types of damage such s nonlethal – when all three numbers add up to your HP total, you’re down/helpless. Although with this type definition and recovery of “hard-to-kill”, there seems little reason to separately track nonlethal.
It would be reasonable to treat normal damage in this scheme as nonlethal damage in core rules. Normal damage adds up (easy operation) and gets removed altogether on resting, while lethal damage is subtracted from actual hit points. If you track them separately you will find you need to keep adding them together and comparing them to total hit points. Since nonlethal actually happens relatively infrequently I would think that it would be easier to just subtract them when needed. Then you are comparing hit points to normal damage. When normal damage equals or exceeds hit points, the target is disabled. If hit points goes to zero (and when the target is helpless that is much easier to achieve, especially if all damage at that point becomes ‘real’) the target dies.
This means that fights end in the same amount of time as usual, but you can reasonably expect to have survivors, if you want them.
At low hit point totals it is easy for a critical to kill someone outright, as can a normal hit (15 points done to someone with 7 hit points total kills him — 7 normal damage gets him helpless, and the remaining 8 kills him), but if you do between 7 and 13 points of damage you have disabled the target without killing him (knocked unconscious, put into shock, what have you). For low-level characters this is actually reasonably realistic, given the abstractions.
At higher levels you see similar behavior (especially if damage tends to stay proportional to hit points). Within your weight class you have some chance of dying regardless of your attacker’s desired outcome, but also a good chance of being defeated but not killed (unless someone wants to ensure it while you are helpless). If you are fighting opponents below your weight class you have a huge advantage, but might kill them more or less by accident. Fighting above your weight class you are likely to be in the opposite situation.
All things considered, this has characteristics I want to see in a combat and damage system. The realization that hit points measure ‘hard to kill’ rather than physical trauma really helped me make better sense of it.
Rather than having =all= hard-to-kill regenerate fully between encounters, I’ve been looking at various healing surge proposals, although I still haven’t found one I really like. I agree that h-t-k as we’re discussing it here should mostly come back between encounters, or you’re just going to have parties carry healing sticks to accomplish that anyway, but it seems that some mechanic is needed to say how fast that happens – otherwise, what about when enemy reinforcements arrive quickly? Also I kinda like some limit on getting back h-t-k within the same day; going back to your martial arts example, any kind of strenuous contact sport is going to take it out of you over the course of repeated games/fights in one day, and a weekend tournament can leave you feeling pretty beat-up and needing some serious R&R to get back that h-t-k you’ve lost. (I’m still exploring around your new blog format here; last time I visited was a few years ago and there was a different kind of index to the articles, so I don’t know if you have written about healing surges or not.)
I just checked (after touching up the search function), and I don’t see any sign that I’ve spoken about healing surges here at all.
I considered some kind of mechanism for incremental healing out of combat, then decided it wasn’t really worth the effort to me to track. If there were a decent fatigue mechanism, perhaps that would work. I was expecting that accumulated real damage would eventually do it.
If each person normally has 20 hit points (not unreasonable in Echelon at fourth level, probably — I’m still working out details) and takes 1d4+2 per successful hit (Str 14-15, for +2) that’s a mean of 4.5 points of damage. Assuming these are real blows (as opposed to sparring) you could probably take four or five in a fight before being unable to continue. This is probably not unreasonable. Assuming a 5% chance of each hit being a critical, there is a 20% chance (19-23 if it’s 4-5 successful hits, but assuming crits double, let’s call it 4… and 19.55% is close enough for this purpose) per fight of taking a real injury.
If you have three matches per day you’re now looking at a 48.8% chance of taking at least one real injury; four matches is 59%. Even two matches is 36% you’re going to be hurting at least a little.
Assuming a tournament where you have eight matches over the course of two days (which would be a big tournament, I think), you stand a better than an 80% chance of needing some downtime after.
In fact, a few minutes with Pascal’s Triangle gives me (approximately):
16.7% 0 real injuries
33.6% 1 real injury
29.3% 2 real injuries
14.7% 3 real injuries
04.6% 4 real injuries
00.9% 5 real injuries (and probably dead)
00.1% 6 real injuries
Considering the kind of abuse PCs can go through under RAW and still function more or less normally (“Anything more than one means I’m ready for action, baby!“), at this point I’m prepared to handwave it. You’re heroes, act like it. Suck it up and carry on.
*headslap* Search function, duh! I should have tried that.
I see what you’re saying about the accumulated real damage from crits. We play with a little higher hit points, so I’m not sure I want to rely on the real damage from crits as the only carry-over between encounters, although referring back to your first post in this thread I agree that it should be pretty easy to recover h-t-k between fights, or else they just solve the problem w healing sticks if available, or one encounter per day if healing is limited, and I don’t want to encourage that.
I think in my sword & sorcery game, which is grittier w healing magic rare, I’ll probably go w real damage taking days or longer to heal as you’ve suggested above, while h-t-k can mostly be healed between encounters by some surge mechanism (better if there is some time to actually rest/bandage before moving on), but if you’ve been through multiple fights you run up against some limit and need a good night’s rest to get your h-t-k back up to snuff.
For my more standard “D&D” flavored game, I guess I’d use the same rules for real damage and h-t-k, but there would be some healing magic available, just not a cheap and easy healing stick or equivalent – it would cost something in terms of resources/spells if you need to heal up more h-t-k than your surges can cover, or need to heal up some real damage without taking the normal amount of time to do it.
well, I did expect it would take some time (‘a rest’) in order to heal. I expect to move to a simpler duration tracking mechanism — spells are either immediate (such as fireball), short duration (until your next turn… can’t think of an example right now), medium duration (until your next rest), long duration (until your next ‘long rest’ — until you next sleep, or possibly when you wake up).
So, if you want to recover HTK you take a rest… but it takes some time (10 minutes?), costs you most of your buffs, and will allow events to come to you (reinforcements, as you said).
I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and I saw it presented best in Trailblazer. That book includes a mechanism for spell recovery (spells with certain characteristics — single target, and/or no real duration, etc. — would recover automatically, others might cost resources to recover, others not at all).
Hrm. I don’t seem to have it here, and I thought I had a to-do item to put it up. I should maybe fix that.
Okay, added Trailblazer’s Rest Mechanic, taken verbatim from the book. I don’t expect to use it exactly as presented, but I may be fairly close.
Cool. Marked to look at later. Thanks!
5e is using a healing-stick-tax replacement of the following nature:
* your hit dice double as a “recovery dice” pool; during a short rest (~10 minutes to catch your breath and stick on some bandages) you can use up any number of your recovery dice to recover hit points. Eventually you’ll run out of recovery dice, so:
* during a “long rest” (8 hours) your recovery dice pool resets, and you also regain all hit points. There is the option to skip that last part, which is my personal preference.
This means you can recover piecewise during the day and hence last longer, but there is still a limit to how much you can do before you need a long rest. Incidentally, other things that used to be “per-day” (e.g. spells) are tied to “long rest” now, which is IMO a bit tidier.
As I recall, Iron Heroes had a recovery mechanic where you had a number of hit points equal to your normal total available for out of combat healing. Take a rest, use up some of your recovery pool, and move on.