Healing without clerics or potions in D&D

[ishy]

So from an encounter design perspective, how much of a penalty should I assume the PCs have?

[OgreBattle]

And the thing is that a middle ground was found - in the early 70s. If injuries take a long time to heal unless you wave healing magic at the problem, and the player characters have healing magic, then the needs of game and story are both satisfied. There is much to quibble about the implementation, people don't really like playing Gygaxian healbots, nor do people like being told that they can't make a party without a Cleric. But to be honest, 3rd edition sort of stumbled into a solution to that as well - Clerical heal spells are kind of ass, but any character with a level in ranger, druid, bard, cleric or paladin can activate the heal sticks that people use out of combat. So you don't miss the 'main healer' and fully half the classes can play medic when it's necessary for someone to do that between action scenes.

Refluffing healsticks into first aid kits and potions that traditional chinese medicine and alchemy practitioners can make works for me. A setting where people who don't shoot rainbows from their fingers can make 'magical' items out of fantasy materials is what I like.

It's not hard to just make something else the actual "hit points" and make hit points into a resource that heals every battle.

Wouldn't "the first half of your hitpoints recover from a short rest/surge, the 2nd half need long rest+healing" solve that problem?

[Stubbazubba]

Yeah, at some point, it's just a variation of the VP/WP system, except the WP are either on the same scale number-wise as the VP, or they can only be dealt one at a time. That way you have a buffer before you start accumulating consequences, but also some attrition between when consequences start accumulating and when you do, in fact, drop.

I'd just rename VP to Stamina; it's your ability to absorb or shrug off light blows, and it returns with any 5-minute rest. Wounds are numbered like Stamina, but come back slowly, maybe Hit Die+Con per day, plus Heal checks. If you run out of Stamina and take Wounds, though, your max Stamina is capped at 75% of your normal max until you either rest a night or are treated with a Heal check. For instance, if you have 40 Stamina and 30 Wound Points, and take 55 damage in one combat, then you end the combat with 0 Stamina and 15 Wound Points. After a 5-minute rest, only 30 Stamina come back, unless you are treated by a Heal check in those 5 minutes. It makes in-combat healing generally unnecessary, allows you to contribute fully to most combat, and still makes lasting wounds a problem you have to address.

[Chamomile]

Wounds are numbered like Stamina, but come back slowly, maybe Hit Die+Con per day, plus Heal checks.

I don't like this - natural healing should improve with your level, rather than being very effective at low level and agonizingly slow at high. Level+CON or level*2+CON might work better, or whatever, depending on how fast you want Wounds to recover.

[Omegonthesane]

Wounds are numbered like Stamina, but come back slowly, maybe Hit Die+Con per day, plus Heal checks.

I don't like this - natural healing should improve with your level, rather than being very effective at low level and agonizingly slow at high. Level+CON or level*2+CON might work better, or whatever, depending on how fast you want Wounds to recover.

Ideally HD = Level, so Stubbazubba's proposal already scales with level to be exactly as effective per unit "proportion of your hitpoints". The issue I see is that HD is not the same proportion of HP for every class - ignoring CON, a Wizard under this proposal would at most sleep for 4 days to heal up as opposed to 12 days for a zombie nazi zombie barbarian.

[Stubbazubba]

Wounds are numbered like Stamina, but come back slowly, maybe Hit Die+Con per day, plus Heal checks.

I don't like this - natural healing should improve with your level, rather than being very effective at low level and agonizingly slow at high. Level+CON or level*2+CON might work better, or whatever, depending on how fast you want Wounds to recover.

As Omegon said, it would probably be (Level*HD)+CON.

The issue I see is that HD is not the same proportion of HP for every class - ignoring CON, a Wizard under this proposal would at most sleep for 4 days to heal up as opposed to 12 days for a zombie nazi zombie barbarian.

That just proves you can't ignore CON. A Wizard with +0 CON will restore an average of 2.5 WP per night of rest, so two nights to full 4 (assuming they're equal to HP), on average. A Barbarian with +3 CON will restore an average of 9.5 WP per night of rest, out of 15 total. So these guys are healing almost the exact same percentage of WP per night.

And as I do the math, I'm realizing that's probably way too much to heal per night. The Wizard starts at, on average, 62.5% and by level 16 is healing over 100% of his WP in a single night's rest. The Barb's CON mod keeps him from escalating quite so quickly, but he starts at 63.3% and gets to 76% before magic items, so he is also likely to heal to max in a single night.

I suppose you could argue that by level 16, or even by level 8, a Barbarian healing from the brink of death in a single night fits right in with the mythic nature of those levels (though that's questionable for a Wizard). And since retreating at level 16 just means hopping into a pocket dimension to rest before coming back out apparently only moments later, it doesn't much matter how long it takes inside the pocket dimension.

However, healing from any injury in 2-3 nights, tops, is still unacceptable at low levels. So Level*HD + CON simply won't work, if the WP are equivalent to your HP. Even if they're 1/2 of your HP like OB said, you have the same problem. I suppose you have to figure out how long you want people to heal; from the brink of death, how long should a low-level character have to rest to heal back to full? A few days? A few weeks? A few months?

[OgreBattle]

At this point why bother with a hitpoint inflation system when you can say "You have 10 hitboxes, damage is rolled vs soak to see how much damage happens"? The only advantage I can think of is that people like to roll dice and see big numbers come up.

Speaking of which, is there a hitbox/soak system that has anything like healing surges or have a quickrecoverhitpoint/realhitpoint divide?

[Hicks]

For 3 D&D, I think it was Red Rob in his Simplified Tome Armor thread that solved this problem, kinda. Anyway, after playing for several levels the "solution" I found is to make your AC bonus from armor convert damage from every successful hit into non- lethal damage. This does not change when people drop unconsious in combat, but heals 1 per level per hour instead of 1 per level per day and nearly doubles in combat magical healing (which heals an equal amount of lethal and nonleathal damage at the same time). Critical hits and blows from giants and ogres are still devastating, as they should be, but the party takes a short rest to catch their breath and gets on with the adventure. It also really differentiated characters; rogues who relied on light armor could only absorb light blows and felt really exposed to danger, while knights tanking in fullplate were only winded after being battered around in combat.

As a bonus house rule: creatures who regenerate or who otherwise don't take nonleathal damage (like constructs and undead) just get DR X/-, where X is their Armor Class from their Armor.

[8d8]

...the "solution" I found is to make your AC bonus from armor convert damage from every successful hit into non- lethal damage.

I've played with this rule and I second everything you said about it. Incredibly good. The only downside is the extra math every time you take a hit; while you can get used to that, it is extra bookeeping that slows things down.

[souran]

The net result of cheap wands of cure light wounds and healing potions is that the players enter every combat with maximum hp.

This is not a bad thing because it also seems to be the assumption of the encounter designers of every 3.x based game.

What it does do is cheapen healing magic to the point where it no longer is impressive in the slightest. It defaintly changes the stories you can tell, and pretty much all for the worse.

If you honestly want a game that runs on the 3.x platform that doesn't need healers I would suggest just lettings everybody have full hit points after each combat Vitality and Wound Point systems work ok, but honestly its a lot of work to impliment what is in reality a system that is very swingy where crits are generally fatalities.

Now if you do do a system that restores everybody to full Hp after combat you do need something that represents being seriously injured. So, create a status effect that is "wounded" you take a penalty to AC and/or Saves and whatever else you think wounded people should be missing (movement rate, maximum hp, whatever). You still die if your hp goes to negative [insert death rules from prefered version of 3.x here]. You still die if you get coup de graced, all the rules for dieing due to loss of hp still applies. However, you also die when you more wounded conditions than your con modifier +3 or if you have more wounds than your level or whatever. The leathality level can be set wherever you like.

That lets you get around the problem of healing in a way that doesn't rely on magic band aids.