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This is getting brought up in another thread repeatedly, and I feel terrible linking people to ancient threads with hundreds of posts. So here's a new point of entry!
Any damage resulting from a critical hit, a failed saving throw, or a hit that put you below zero hit points is "injury" damage and must be healed with magic or the Treat Deadly Wounds application of the heal skill.
All other damage -- "strain" -- heals after a short rest (≈2 min).
There's a ton of theory behind it, and I'm happy to do a Q&A type thing here.
I also know there are many people still using the rule, and also some who used it and have moved on to something simpler. There are also people who have tweaked it to suit their needs. I'd love to hear from any of you!
I stumbled upon the rules in 2013 and have been using them in my games ever since. There's a little more bookkeeping, but I like it a lot better than the default system.
Isn't this basically the Wounds & Vitality/Vigor system?
Not that I dislike W&V (I actually greatly prefer it to standard HP), but this seems like it's kinda reinventing the wheel a bit.
Isn't this basically the Wounds & Vitality/Vigor system?
The Vitality Point system uses a separate pool to represent two types of damage. That means that crits actually have a different mechanical effect in that system -- they skip over a bunch of Vitality HP. It's an innovative system which influenced the Strain/Injury variant, but I didn't like how it changes the combat balance of the game when you apply it to Pathfinder campaigns.
Strain and Injury both come from a single pool of hit points (still called "hit points"). So you track hit points as normal, but whenever an attack meets the injury criteria, you record it. Strain + Injury = Damage, exactly as much as you would have in the RAW.
This is why we make the case so often that Strain is less intrusive, rules-wise, than Vitality. It doesn't change the outcome of combat whatsoever. Zero effect. All it does is adjust the healing rate to be more generous for some damage, and more punitive for other damage. It is also potentially more "realistic", if you adjust your descriptions of attacks that result in strain.
Example: If you're hit for 9 points of damage, and you have 40 HP, you record as normal (some people tally up and some tally down, y'know). The next attack is a crit for 18 points of damage, you would have 13 HP left (40 - 18 - 9 = 13) -- but you'd also write "18 Injury" on the side. Luckily, most character sheets already include a space that's perfect for this. I personally tend to describe the explicit nature of the injury to my players, so they sometimes write "Broken leg 18".
Dot. Been reconsidering implementing this and want to find my way back here.
Why 2 minutes?
Well, because that's equivalent to a "scene" in my duration house rule.
Some other people have adjusted this to 5 or 10 minutes, and that's great. They should do what feels right.
The spirit of the rule is this quote from the PRD:
What Hit Points Represent
Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to , and the ability to .
As you can see, lost hit points already represent two different things. They can represent being slashed open by a sword (high damge), or they can represent straining your mighty thews in parrying a blow (low damage).
The Strain/Injury variant just gives the two aspects of hit points their own healing rates.
Injuries doesn't heal on their own. You need a doctor. Your GM might be generous and allow it to heal naturally by some amount, but generally if you are badly injured and you don't even use the heal skill, things will not end well for you. And magic healing is (usually) abundant.
Strain recovers quickly. If you have ever taken a karate or boxing class*, you know that fighting for even two minutes is pretty taxing. Even a break of a few minutes can improve your ability to fight and defend yourself (i.e. replenish hit points).
We count both strain and injury together in one pool because both factors diminish your ability to ward off a killing blow. You can be really tired, or really injured, or just tired AND injured. All of these things make you easier to take down.
*Evil Lincoln must register his hands with the state as lethal weapons. Evil Lincoln knows how to fight with swords.
But what about Bleed damage, you might ask?
Bleed damage requires its own heal check or magical healing -- the same requirements as injury damage to staunch. This means the bleed damage itself is effectively the same as injury damage (though it's really neither strain nor injury). The hit points lost to bleed, however, are just strain (unless there was a save involved). Once the wound is treated, the character may recover with rest.
And poison?
How is it possible for an attack that doesn't injure to administer poison damage? Being poked with a needle might take some HP away, but it probably doesn't qualify for Injury damage since such wounds don't require any treatment at all. So a non-critical hit that administers poison simply did so through a wound that will not require treatment -- a scratch or a prick.
What if I fall off a cliff?
Many GMs first instinct is to say "that's really deadly, it should deal injury damage". Try to suppress this impulse. In fact, the deadlier the damage seems, the more likely strain was used to survive it.
By RAW, characters are falling off cliffs and walking away uninjured all the time. That's still possible in this system (and in real life, believe it or not)
If there's a save involved, use the rules as normal. Fail the save, get injured.
If there's no save and the character is pitched bodily into the void, you're up against the same paradox as you would face in the core rules. The character either has enough hit points to justify his survival somehow or they fall below zero HP and are injured. They either land on something soft or they didn't.
Bonus energy damage on weapons?
I typically handle this with descriptive finesse -- lesser-degree burns through your armor, that kind of thing. Kind of like the falling damage above, you're dealing with the same silliness that hit points have always had. Now you just have the additional tool of Strain to describe things that aren't injuries that still hurt the character's chance of survival.
Bumped because someone recommended it.
Yay! Glad to see this is still of use. Definitely the best rules idea I ever had.
I like the idea behind this allowing for longer adventuring days, (and a boost to martials). Would you consider recharging other pools over a shorter period of time; rage, ki, spell points/mana if one uses such a system, etc.
I never personally found the refresh rate on those other resources to be problematic. Of course you could try including them! But this rule was always targeted at increasing "realism" while decreasing cure math.
Not realism, actually... but it was inspired by the difficulty I encountered while narrating battles during Fortress of the Stone Giants.
Any penalties to being injured? Have you ever experimented with that?
Any penalties to being injured? Have you ever experimented with that?
I have dabbled in damage penalties, actually! But every time I do, I find that it interferes with the basic balance of the game.
It's hard to create penalties that affect martial and caster characters equally, and it's impossible to do that while keeping the rule simple enough to satisfy me.
Damage penalties also create a death spiral, which escalates the "rocket tag" phenomenon in gameplay. This could probably be mitigated through feats and abilities that compensated for damage penalties, but that's a lot of structure to add to an already complex game. It'd be one thing if the game was "broken" by the lack of these rules, but it plays just fine.
Interestingly, though, the Strain rule was born of the sudden realization that "fewer hit points are a defensive penalty!"
In a system where you perform 100% until you run out of HP, any loss of HP is in essence a penalty to your ability to defend yourself. Imagine that instead of HP, there was a defense roll for each attack. Each time the opponent delivers a solid hit, you take a penalty to that defense roll... well the more solid hits, the more likely you're going to fail that roll, right?
In my vision of the strain rule, 0HP is the failed roll.
Anyway, I welcome experimentation with damage penalties (there's even a thread for discussion of that, somewhere in the archives). But my personal opinion is that such a rule is very hard to craft and not really necessary. It wouldn't improve gameplay, and it might improve realism but this is the least realistic system ever, so why bother?