While perusing my unearthed arcana book I took onemore look at the ideas of vitality and wound points and my question is this: how do vitality points heal, at what rate and why does DR not affect wound points?
While I like the concept yet I find it somewhat confusing, have any of you ever used this system within your game and if so, how did it turn out?
I had used it once. My players didn´t like it, as it made the game more complicated (separate bookkeeping) and less heroic, as they put it. So I don´t use it any more.
Stefan
Yeah. We played under this system for a campaign or two, and we hated it tremendously. The bookkeeping wasn't the problem, the problem was that healing became severely crappy. In your average game the PCs will be put into negatives and dropped fairly often, but then the cleric will pick them back up. I dunno if it was a house rule or not but in these campaigns the dice rolled for a "cure wounds" spell would go to vitality, the bonus would go to wound points. So a third level cleric would heal 1d8 vitality and 3 wound with a CLW.
The biggest problem there is having a non cleric heal. Our party's cleric tended to buff up and go frontlining, and was knocked out fairly often. This meant that the ranger would have to burn 14 or so charges off of a wand of CLW instead of 1 or 2 just to wake him up. This specific issue cost the cleric his life in the climax of the campaign, during the "Holy crap, we need to teleport away before the demiplane collapses while we dodge the Demon Lord's attacks" phase of combat. If the Ranger or Rogue could have burned a turn or two waking him up we would have saved him.
And don't even get me started on the critical hit chart that was grafted onto the wound point system. It's never a good sign when the PCs would rather roll low so they can avoid doing the cool effect that has no effect.