Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 mellowship Sep 07, 2014 17:57:19	Here are some ideas for a healing system that balances realism with playability.   My fundamental assumptions are twofold.  First, Hit Points are not meat.  They are a measure of your ability to continue fighting, which combines morale, luck, and stamina.  Second, D&D is a heroic fantasy game.  The PCs are supposed to be heroes.  If the PCs feel they have to run away from fights because they're too wounded to continue on, or spend too much time recovering from wounds, that's not heroic.  Situations like that should be avoided wherever possible, and if the game forces the PCs into such situations too often, the game is wrong.   The main innovation in this system is a mechanic for Wounds, which represents real, debilitating physical damage.  Hit Points are a buffer which protects you from Wounds.  So here's how the system works.   Each time you take damage while below 0 HP or suffer a critical hit, you receive a Wound.  Some spells and powers can also impose Wounds, but these should be few and far between.  For each Wound, you have a -1 penalty to d20 rolls (attacks, saves, checks), which stacks.  This represents the debilitating effect of real damage.   However, to mitigate the death spiral effect, there are ways to temporarily ignore Wounds.  If you start your turn with temporary HP, you can ignore Wound penalties until the start of your next turn.  If you use your action to Dodge or Disengage, you can ignore Wound penalties until the end of your next turn.  Bonus actions such as the Rgoue's Cunning Action feature don't count, but the Fighter's Action Surge would.  You can also use your action to Inspire an ally who can hear you (which means that Inspire doesn't work on deafened allies).  An Inspired ally ignores Wound penalties until the end of your next turn.   Whenever you end your turn below 0 HP, make a DC 10 Con save or fall unconscious.  Wound penalties apply to this save.  If you're already unconscious at the start of your turn and end your turn below 0 HP, take your level in damage, unless you have been stabilized.  If you fall below negative max HP, you're dead.   For each instance of magical healing, you also heal one Wound in addition to regaining HP.  Once per short rest, you can make a DC 15 Medicine check on yourself or an adjacent ally.  One use of a healer's kit grants advantage on the check.  Success heals one Wound.  Each long rest also heals one Wound.   Another thing which could use some rethinking is Hit Dice.  Basically, PCs don't get enough HD to sustain them through the kind of adventuring day which is necessary for the rest of the system to balance.  So here's a first pass at a solution.   Add your proficiency bonus to the number of Hit Dice you get (At 1st level, you'd have a total of 3 HD, at 20th you'd have 26).  The size of these HD is based on your first class.  After each short rest, you regain half your proficiency bonus worth of HD, starting with the lowest (so if you have Wizard levels, you'd regain those HD first, with the HD from Barbarian levels being regained last).
#2 Tony_Vargas Sep 08, 2014 0:26:29	mellowship wrote:
(Reply to #2) mellowship	Tony_Vargas wrote: