Not really at a certain point every pathfinder character carries multiple wands of cure light wounds or infernal healing and fully heal up after every fight anyway.
All you are doing is saving your party some gold, so to balance it out give them a little less treasure. I like the feel of not having magic healing sticks being thrown on the ground like trash when done, it makes the world feel less magical somehow so your idea is fine.
There are rules for using the healing skill to give back h.p by the book you can only use it once a day but maybe make it usefull after every fight.
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Philosophy of HP
HP as 'wind':
if you allow your PCs to recover HP after every fight, at low levels, you free up the party from needing to have a healer (Cleric) amongst them, which to me is a good thing because i have seen people 'forced' to play a healer (Cleric) because they 'had' to but didn't really want to. you also allow yourself as a DM to present greater challenges as they will less likely be bearing the hindrances of previous ones.
another option is to have any character who is reduced to 0 HP exempted from the post-combat recovery (partially or fully) until they get some Real Healing. this makes the healer role important again.
HP as 'wounds':
this is the standard model of Pathfinder. which is why people carry around the sticks. which is kind of silly but actually does make sense.
HP as toughness and ability to take damage; not to avoid a hit entirely, but to lessen the potential of hits to kill you quickly.
This is how I more explain it, as you increase in hp, you are getting better at taking injuries, you are deflecting a lot of what is behind each attack. It also represents grit and damage resilience, but it is not in the same field as DR.
If you roll for hp, this is one part of character gen that can be all over the place. Someone may get a tough rogue that seems impossible to kill (for sure take die hard if you roll max hp over and over) and another may get a fragile fighter (you can't rely on your hp to survive).
Examples 1: so a level 2 fighter is tougher than a fresh fighter recruit, and is regardless of his AC, able to take damage better than a level 1 fighter. If their hp is good, if they have toughness and good con, they can put their damage-taking skills to use, and not die to a hit for 20 damage.
If a wizard of 2nd level takes that, they don't have the roll-with-the-punches skill/training/background. They take it square and die (or go to negatives).
Example 2: a barb rushes at opponents, takes some arrows and thrusts, no x3 crits, so doesn't die. Keeps going. This barb has a low ac but high hp. This character is not great at deftly avoiding attacks, but is skilled at rushing, closing, turning a solid hit into effectively a graze, and battling on despite multiple small injuries.
Example 3: high hp, high ac, low str fighter. This one wears down opponents, is very skilled at avoiding hits, but also pretty good at taking multiple blows, and won't go down easy. This char is offensively not so great, but is a sort of endurance lightweight boxer. As they move and fight, what hits they take they try to endure so that they can win over the medium term.
Examples 4: sorcerer laughs at a sellsword, mocking that the party have just dispatched the sellsword's lover. Wizard is charged and cut, tries to use acrobatics to escape, fails, is run through and killed. A tough fighter-barb defeats the sellsword, but it is a vicious fight in close quarters where the ability to take injury is necessary to last any real length of time. The sorcerer couldn't take multiple hits from a bastard sword, it ended the life of cocky adventurer quickly.
Example 5: in some online medieval games, the ability to move with strikes and not be quickly dispatched really comes out. See games like mount and blade or dark souls, where the judgement of distance and timing is crucial in how much damage you take from attacks.
I've though a bit about hp over the years, and have a background of plenty of kickboxing. I am in sparring, more a defensive build type guy. Having had to argue against multiple people that see the hp system as ridiculous, this is how I see hp and to me it makes sense. Those who are not familiar with weapons and injury die to these unfamiliar things quickly.
On the 5 minute rest, I do not approve. Only subdual damage comes back quickly.
Now 1-2 hp per meal eaten, that I could get behind. A great meal can do wonders.
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Basically, HP is an abstraction that covers a great many things, including but not limited to (because I'm going to forget at least one):
- Actual physical health & ability to withstand damage
- Luck & Mythological Imperative: the ability to turn an incoming attack into a near-miss or graze that doesn't really hurt
- Stamina & energy: this is typically represented by non-lethal damage
In 4th edition, the majority of healing is tied to healing surges, which are a per-day limit, and the luck, stamina, mythological imperative aspects are emphasized. You have the ability to recover hp out of combat in a short 5-minute rest, but because it uses up a resource that is not replenished until the end of the day, killing a bunch of goblins without threat isn't free healing.
I guess Dragon Age is doing something similar.
I would have no problem with it, but you could prevent abuse by imposing a simple cap; the maximum hp recovered in a short rest after an encounter is the amount of hp you lost in that encounter.
This setup obviously works better with the Wounds / Vitality setup, which explicitly separates Wounds (the amount of physical damage you can sustain) from Vitality (the energy & luck you have to avoid taking actual physical damage from attacks). But that is a substantial change that I would not blindly make.
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I remember a game where the dm was using the vitality point system. Never seen a fight with level 1 goblin warriors last half an hour before. Had to wonder if they were packing fullplate beneath their goblin skins.
Yep, and sneak attacks always missed, because they couldn't get through all the vitality points. The luck saved the goblins, till eventually they were "not" hit over and over, and the last one would kill them.
Worst idea ever.
There is a set of stamina/deadly wounds house rules floating around on the boards put through by Evil Lincoln, essentially separating HP damage where you are 'worn down' and hp damage where you are injured. The stamina damage can be recovered by a short rest, and the 'deadly wounds' cannot and require healing or long term care.
There is a set of stamina/deadly wounds house rules floating around on the boards put through by Evil Lincoln, essentially separating HP damage where you are 'worn down' and hp damage where you are injured. The stamina damage can be recovered by a short rest, and the 'deadly wounds' cannot and require healing or long term care.
I don't know these stamina/deadly wounds rules you mention, but isn't that what lethal/non-lethal damage already does?
There is a set of stamina/deadly wounds house rules floating around on the boards put through by Evil Lincoln, essentially separating HP damage where you are 'worn down' and hp damage where you are injured. The stamina damage can be recovered by a short rest, and the 'deadly wounds' cannot and require healing or long term care.I don't know these stamina/deadly wounds rules you mention, but isn't that what lethal/non-lethal damage already does?
No. The original thread is here.
The jist of it is that HP is an abstraction. Every time you take a 'hit' in pathfinder does not mean you actually took a sword to the chest. That doesnt make any sense, otherwise a 10th level barbarian could be walking around with 4 swords through his heart and be fine. The idea is instead, the bulk of hitpoint damage conceptually is a wearing down of the character. Narrow escapes, minor injuries and bruises, and just plain fatigue wear down a characters ability to resist untill finally they take an actual wound (the injury that moves them to 0 hit points).
Stamina damage will still eventually lead to your death (unlike non-lethal damage) but only certain 'hits' will yeild 'deadly wounds' which are harder to recover the stamina.