| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I've been writing a campaign for some time for a group of three players. To give you some context, the campaign is set, at first, in Magnimar. The players are part of an important Guild of assassins, the gameplay would be centered on the idea of planning assassinations, like bank heists, using information gathering and observation. It's been a thousand years since the disappearance of magic in all Golarion. Eventually, magic comes back into the world (as part of the plot), but that would happen in the latter half of the story, and even then, magic items as simples as a cure light wounds potion would be rare, and could not be bought.
My principal problem was how I would deal with healing, since, at least for the first half of the story, there wouldn’t be any healing items, so I came up with a healing system and I wanted to hear some thoughts about it:
Players would have (what I call for now) Combat Hp and Vital Hp. Both are equal to the Total Hp, given by the Hit Dies (So, a fighter lvl 2 with 22 Hp would have 22 Combat Hp and 22 Vital Hp).
Combat Hp symbolises the player’s ability to fight, avoiding vital blows. When he loses Combat Hp, it means he’s being pressured by the opponent, or he avoided just in time a serious blow (it gives opportunity for the GM to make detailed descriptions) Vital Hp is like normal Hp, it simply is the player’s health. When he loses Vital Hp, it means he didn’t manage to avoid the attack.
During combat, when a player is dealt damage, he loses only Combat Hp. If an attack is unavoidable (At the discretion of the GM, but to give examples: a surprise attack, a trap, or a critical hit) the player would lose both Combat and Vital Hp.
When the player is reduced to 0 Combat Hp, he becomes fatigued and every attack thereafter would remove Vital Hp. (If an attack would reduce a player Combat Hp to less than 0, the surplus damage goes to the Vital Hp). Once the player regains Combat Hp, he loses the fatigued condition. When the player Vital Hp is reduced to 0 or less, he falls unconscious and starts dying (as normal)
Outside of combat, the player regains all of his Combat Hp, but his Combat Hp can’t be higher than his total Vital Hp, at any moment. (So, if our fighter with 22 Total Hp, is reduced to 12 Vital Hp after a fight, he only regains up to 12 Combat Hp). Vital Hp doesn’t regenerate, even outside of combat.
The only way to regenerate Vital Hp (without magic) is to sleep. When a player sleeps a minimum of 6 hours, he regains 25% of his Total Hp into his Vital Hp.
That’s it for now. I don’t know if I should change something or add other features, what do you all think?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In other words you have reinvented the Wounds/Vitality system used in both Ultimate Combat and Unearthed Arcana, only a bit more clunky.
You might want to check out the system referenced in Ultimate Combat, or Iron Kingdoms.
Wow, firt time i hear about it! I'll check it out, thanks!
Wow, firt time i hear about it! I'll check it out, thanks!In other words you have reinvented the Wounds/Vitality system used in both Ultimate Combat and Unearthed Arcana, only a bit more clunky.
You might want to check out the system referenced in Ultimate Combat, or Iron Kingdoms.
I personally think that those alternate rules give too few Vigor points. vigor points should be equal to your normal HP, not just your rolled HD.
I don't actually like how healing works, they based it off of HP as if HP was how much blood you had left or the amount of meat not cut up.
HP is an abstraction, it's like luck mixed with combat experience. when you get to lvl 2, you're not suddenly twice as hard to kill with a stabbing, you're twice as hard to be killed. meaning this can be abstracted out to anything(experience telling you how to lessen a blows effect, natural reactions becoming refined, the gods pouring more luck into your character, or maybe that you do in fact simply handle a blow with more will now).
just like how combat isn't you making a single swing or so every 6 seconds in combat. It represents your ability to get effective hits in(during the sword/weapon clashing in those 6 seconds), whether you actually managed to stab someone or not. It's a mixture of fatigue and minor injuries eventually making the character open to a final blow.(and likewise getting a 2nd attack isn't the ability necessarily to get an extra swing in but to make blows more devastating than normal)
basically, they should have made healing come back as a ratio or percentage of whats missing, rather than a flat number(with a min 1 healed). like if you had 30 total hp and 10 current hp. you'd heal 5 from the first night... 15, 18, 21, 23, 24.. etc. with a heal check doubling that amount, and a full days rest further doubling that. think of it as first fatigue from the battle wearing off, then scratches healing, and then the bigger wounds. all more rare and taking more days to heal. like a good way to think of it, is each wound healing 1 hp, so a 1 hp wound which are plentiful heal in 1 day, 2 hp wounds which are less plentiful take 2 days, etc.
there's my 2 cents.(this is my pet peeve)
basically, they should have made healing come back as a ratio or percentage of whats missing, rather than a flat number(with a min 1 healed). like if you had 30 total hp and 10 current hp. you'd heal 5 from the first night... 15, 18, 21, 23, 24.. etc. with a heal check doubling that amount, and a full days rest further doubling that. think of it as first fatigue from the battle wearing off, then scratches healing, and then the bigger wounds. all more rare and taking more days to heal. like a good way to think of it, is each wound healing 1 hp, so a 1 hp wound which are plentiful heal in 1 day, 2 hp wounds which are less plentiful take 2 days, etc.
I like the idea, but it still doesn't help with my problem, same thing for the Wound/Vigor system. Without healing items, my players would always need to wait between battles, it would break the action just because they need to rest. Having one fight a week, because they got injured, might be boring for them. I know it would be more realistic, which is not a bad thing, but I think my players would prefer having more epic battles than a realistic healing system :p
Maybe I could use the Wound/Vigor system, but Vigor and wounds would regenerate faster (Players regain all their vigor outside of combat, or it regenerates gradually over time, fast enough to have various battles in a day? When sleeping, players heal more Wounds, a percentage instead of a flat number?) And, I agree with Adam B. 135, Vigor points should be equal to the normal Hp.
So, you want to make healing hard but you don't?
In my game we have a houserule (our only houserule) that we get (number of HDs + CON mod) hp back when resting. Make sure the player know to get high AC and high CON. This should be enough.
If you don't want them to be able to heal magicly, they shouldn't be expected to fight more than once every other day. Or they would have to be machines.
Making a new system where you don't have to heal is not something that can be achieved with ease with just some modifications to the hp system, you would have to be ready to rebalance combat. Pathfinder combat is built and balanced around dealing damage, taking damage, reducing damage and healing damage.
If you make it harder to damage the players, you avoid the need to heal. But then it's also harder to hurt the enemies, making combat last longer and much more resources are spent every encounter.
If you want a system that isn't the normal or Wound/Vigor you probably don't want to play Pathfinder.
Hmmm, i see. I don't have a problem with Pathfinder system, but it doesn't suit some elements of my campaign. However, It would be easier for me to include those element to my story (healing items made from alchemy and not magic for exemple). I'll work on that!
I like the idea, but it still doesn't help with my problem, same thing for the Wound/Vigor system. Without healing items, my players would always need to wait between battles, it would break the action just because they need to rest. Having one fight a week, because they got injured, might be boring for them. I know it would be more realistic, which is not a bad thing, but I think my players would prefer having more epic battles than a realistic healing system :p
That's more an issue of adventure pacing than availability (or not) of healing. In most cases there will be interaction and problem solving scenes interspersed with the combat scenes, and whether those scenes take a minute or a month of in-world time to resolve won't change the number of battles the players get to fight in each session.
For example, a party of knights in the Arthurian mode fight a battle on the road, then stop in at a castle where they are faced with a mystery or need to solve a diplomatic problem, or something non-combat. It may take days or weeks, but since you're only actually playing out the fun parts and fast-forwarding the rest, what difference does it make?
Wilderness exploration is another example of this type of pacing. So is anything that can follow the comic book superhero model: A few minor skirmishes, investigation, major battle, and then an undefined amount of downtime before the next issue's adventure.
You might also want to consider the 5 room dungeon concept, described at Strolen's Citadel. A party should be able to make it through something like that with little or no healing, and it doesn't matter how much in-world time passes between them.
Ahhh, of course! And it would fit well with my campaign since the players need to plan their assassinations before actualy doing them, so they would get plenty of time to rest anyway. Thanks for the advice!
You could always beef up/ alter the way mundane healing works.
The Rogue Genius Anachronistic Adventures line of products has an archetype in the investigator called the medical examiner. It allows them to use the 'tread deadly wounds' aspect of the heal spell faster, and to do it on someone more then once per day. It also has a 'splint' ability that allows them to temporarily aleviate ability damage. Which in many cases is just as important as the ability to recover hit points.
In addition the medical examiner is a genius style archetype. Which means it can be added to any class in exchange for trading out a specific set of abilities from that class (see their archetype line of products). Or you could just add these in as talents of some existing classes, or just roll those things straight into the normal heal skill.
Either way if you want the ability to keep up the pace when the action is on, you need both the ability to recover hit points AND the ability to remove negative conditions. 5 strength damage is actually probably more debilitating then some hp damage.
I don’t know if I should change something or add other features, what do you all think?
A few posters have worked on something similar on these boards.
At a glimpse, your system looks fine but doesn't take into account the same tricky concepts touch attacks, nonlethal damage, damage taken from exertion, cold or hot temperature, poison etc, what happen on a critical hit, sunder attack, whether or not you have to rebuilt every monster stat block etc.
Evil Lincoln has a pretty thorough Strain/Injury rule here.
I have a similar but more "quick and dirty" version here
If you don't mind having two distinct pool of health points (a la vigor/wounds), there are several more to get inspiration from.