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So my group is just starting out on the plaguestone path, and medicine is kinda OP.
After a rough fight, everyone was pretty hurt. We went to rest for the night, and found that the resting HP restoration rules simply didn't matter. Being able to heal 4d8hp per medic per hour is a crazy level of downtime healing at level 2.
Throw in ward medic or continual recovery and it gets even more absurd.
We ended up hand waving the healing rolls to save time. Sure, you could fail and damage yourself, but it takes 4 failed rolls to cancel out one successful roll. And a critical fail only happens on a 1 for us.
We are considering nerfing the skill as a house rule, since slapping a few bandages on someone near death and then having them good as new within a few hours seems silly.
We are talking about increasing the cooldown to once per day, and removing continual recovery as a feat, or making it have higher requirements.
Any thought(s) / feelings? / Suggested Nerfs?
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Being able to heal 4d8hp per medic per hour is a crazy level of downtime healing at level 2.
It would be, if that's what it got you :-)
The target is then temporarily immune to Treat Wounds actions for 1 hour
They're immune to Treat Wounds by anyone. So it's 4d8 hp per hour, not "per medic" per hour. That's what you were doing, right? How many medics did you have?
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Medicine is intended to be as powerful as it is.
In order to continue being as powerful as it is, one PC must continue investing in it, and taking a Skill to Legendary is actually a huge character investment (unless you're a Rogue, you will only get three such Skills...and Medicine isn't super useful for things other than this).
That said, you appear to be doing it slightly wrong. Once a person has been treated (whether that treatment succeeds or not), they cannot be further treated by anyone until the hour is up, not just the same medic. So it's a flat 4d8 per hour...when it works. In reality, depending on skill levels, some hours it won't work. So, a maxed out non-Rogue Medic at 2nd level has a max of +8, and only succeeds 70% of the time. That's a good success rate, but those failures can pad how long it takes.
Also, waiving rolls is fine if you've got unlimited time...but at one hour per roll, you rarely actually have unlimited time. The fact that you'll likely fail a decent percentage of the time is very relevant to how long this takes to work.
A party exclusively using Treat Wounds may go into every fight at full health, but they also take significant breaks between fights, something that isn't always available depending on the situation.
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If you nerf it, that healing is still going to be “necessary”. That means adventuring less in a day, requiring non-arcane casters to spend their fun tools on healing, making fights easier, or making the game more difficult. You were planning on resting for the night- that would need days of rest to get back to full. If you want to move healing from “ten minutes of dedicated medical attention does most of the work” to “eight hours of bed rest heals your stab wounds”, that probably works all right.
Lots of people disliked needing magic in order to let martials keep fighting during the day. Now, magic is much faster, but it isn’t required to avoid recovering for multiple days after a big fight.
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It might take more book-keeping, but one option would be to be to limit any wounds that have already been treated with medicine until 24 hours have passed. But you could then allow medicine rolls to be used on any new/fresh damage they have taken. That means the more damage they take between chances to be treated, the more likely they have more damage that medicine itself won't be able to treat for a while, leaving more room for a magical need of healing, and making medicine seem less magical.
I understand completely why the base rules don't include such complexity, but the original poster is correct about how with the medicine skill as it is, it makes natural healing per day largely seem pretty irrelevant, which leaves a bit of an undesired flavor to the storytelling of such healing. I honestly hope that GMG includes some default optional rules to scale it back to once a day or something similar.
I remember being disappointed with the video-game feeling of HP in another recent game, and was very happy to see a selection of a few different optional rules to make injury a bit more serious, allowing for a bit grittier setting, for people who wanted that.
I am sure I'll play this as written for the first several adventures, but imagine I may want to customize this in the future at some point, as long as the others playing agree. (I'm guessing as usual, I'll end up being the GM)
Being able to heal 4d8hp per medic per hour is a crazy level of downtime healing at level 2.It would be, if that's what it got you :-)
The target is then temporarily immune to Treat Wounds actions for 1 hourThey're immune to Treat Wounds by anyone. So it's 4d8 hp per hour, not "per medic" per hour. That's what you were doing, right? How many medics did you have?
If you treat wounds for 2d8 taking 10 minutes, you can continue to a full hour for double the healing, so 4d8.
We had 2 medics, working on different people. So it was still 4d8 per medic per hour in this case.
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I remember being disappointed with the video-game feeling of HP in another recent game, and was very happy to see a selection of a few different optional rules to make injury a bit more serious, allowing for a bit grittier setting, for people who wanted that.
I am sure I'll play this as written for the first several adventures, but imagine I may want to customize this in the future at some point, as long as the others playing agree. (I'm guessing as usual, I'll end up being the GM)
This is exactly our problem. Its a very video game feel, and kills suspension of disbelief. Just piling bandages on someone until they go from dying 3 to good as new tap dancing in a few hours is just silly.
We also intend to keep playing RAW for now. It just seems OP thus far.
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Lots of people disliked needing magic in order to let martials keep fighting during the day. Now, magic is much faster, but it isn’t required to avoid recovering for multiple days after a big fight.
Perhaps we disagree on this. We just feel that it essentially makes damage meaningless. If I can get a just shy of fatal wound like a longsword through my abdomen and be back up like nothing happened in a few hours like nothing happened that is silly.
Like our fighter, has 32hp. Average healing for a full hour of treating wounds is 18hp. So in 2 hours he goes from almost dead to full health nothing happened... with.. basic... bandages...
Sure, it's nice for the non healers, but there is a flip side to that coin. When everyone can be as good as or better than your devoted healing magic for free.... it detracts from the role of the healer.
4d8 = 18 average healing. At level 2, yeah, that's going to be quite a bit. A level 2 Dwarf Barbarian with 16 Con has 40 HP, so that's almost half of their HP back (45% on average) in an hour.
A level 5 Dwarf Barbarian with 18 Con has 90 HP. 4d8 is still 18 average healing, which is only 20% on average. Upping the DC to 20 (assuming expert proficiency) is an average of 38 HP (4d8+20 doubled for the hour), which is still only about 42% of their HP, making the healing not as effective.
If you and your group are really having a hard time with it, halve the amount of healing it gives for only being Trained in Medicine. Make it 1d8 per 10 minutes, 2d8 for the full hour. That will reduce the healing at lower levels, while still allowing it to keep up at higher levels.
We talked about nerfing the dice as you suggest. Which is a definite thought.
The other thing we are thinking at might actually go with is increasing the DC by 5-10 (probably 5) every time you are treated. Which ends up lessening the healing via diminishing returns.
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Lots of people disliked needing magic in order to let martials keep fighting during the day. Now, magic is much faster, but it isn’t required to avoid recovering for multiple days after a big fight.Perhaps we disagree on this. We just feel that it essentially makes damage meaningless. If I can get a just shy of fatal wound like a longsword through my abdomen and be back up like nothing happened in a few hours like nothing happened that is silly.
Like our fighter, has 32hp. Average healing for a full our of treating wounds is 18hp. So in 2 hours he goes from almost dead to full health nothing happened... with.. basic... bandages...
Sure, it's nice for the non healers, but there is a flip side to that coin. When everyone can be as good as or better than your devoted healing magic for free.... it detracts from the role of the healer.
It’s two hours of continuous work, so I wouldn’t call that basic bandages. I’d portray it as disinfecting, stitching up the wounds, preparing and applying a poultice, then letting that set to seal off the injuries.
Cleric’s bonus slots covering two hours of work in three rounds sounds reasonable to me, and it doubles at third level. If spending two hours (or resting for the night) is not appreciably more costly than spending three rounds, then yeah, cleric should save that healing for combat emergencies.
Anyway, it’s not working for you, which is what actually matters. One nerf that avoids DC increases is raising the time each check takes by one step. You can patch somebody up once at ten minutes or an hour. Next time it’s twenty minutes or two hours, then thirty or three, etc.
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I can't say I entirely agree with you about the feel, there. Being wounded in battle and needing to find someplace safe to spend an hour trying to bandage people up feels more consequential than pulling out a CLW wand off the pile, and wiping all of the damage away on the spot.
In both cases there is some significant immersion problems if all of those hp worth of damage are described as increasingly severe wounds, because everyone should be long dead, but that's kind of core to hp based systems. They can get really silly based on how you translate between in world injury and hp abstraction. I usually find the action movie hero plot armor description, where most hp damage is minor injury received as the result of barely avoiding the fatal wound that you finally receive from the hit that kills you, but that gets silly in the other direction, as you try to explain the need for more powerful healing magic to handle it quickly.
I don't disagree about the idea of diminishing returns to up the stakes, though I know that I would have to get more experience with the system before I was comfortable in my odds of balancing it well.
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In PF1 it wasn’t just common but the default assumption that any party that could start affording one of the cheapest magic items in the game would wave a stick at their injuries and be back to fighting in under a minute. And I’ve consistently seen new players told how the medicine type skill doesn’t actually heal anything, just throw magic at it. To me this makes things feel much more natural than a wand of cure light.
Personally I’m of the absolutely opposite opinion that this takes anything from Magic healing classes. They no longer have to stand there and wave a stick at an axe wound. They can use their spells to buff, or even attack instead of spending them to patch up wounds. And if they want to they can still cast the spell to save the party literal hours of time. A cleric now gets to be a divine magical agent of their god, instead of a magic aspirin dispenser.
If you want a grittier game where healing takes more time and resources, that’s fine and to each their own. But as the default natural healing isn’t actually going to come up much anyway, people will just use spells to get the same effect at the cost of being able to do something else. And the skill training and skill feats that it will take to keep medical healing up with the damage you’ll take are hardly a small investment.
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There a few poins that may matter here.
First, as someone on this forum pointed to me some time ago, it's not 'just bandages': your characters are living in a world full of magic. There may be powerful medicinal extracts and other things that make mundane healing just much better than it is in real life. An healing kit may be stuffed full of those things, along with bandages.
Second, many people view losing HP not as serious injuries, but scratches and flesh wounds, at least until you reach 0. A few rules reinforce this view: the fact that you still still have 100% functionality when down to 1 HP is an old example, and 2e introduces the 'wounded' condition when you stand back up after hitting 0.
Third, the old standard of going back from low HP to full was about poking the injured character a few times (or many times, at higher levels) with a CLW wand. Using a skill to the same effect looks much more interesting IMO.
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Lots of people disliked needing magic in order to let martials keep fighting during the day. Now, magic is much faster, but it isn’t required to avoid recovering for multiple days after a big fight.Perhaps we disagree on this. We just feel that it essentially makes damage meaningless. If I can get a just shy of fatal wound like a longsword through my abdomen and be back up like nothing happened in a few hours like nothing happened that is silly.
Like our fighter, has 32hp. Average healing for a full hour of treating wounds is 18hp. So in 2 hours he goes from almost dead to full health nothing happened... with.. basic... bandages...
Sure, it's nice for the non healers, but there is a flip side to that coin. When everyone can be as good as or better than your devoted healing magic for free.... it detracts from the role of the healer.
That was deliberately and intentional.
Healer isn't meant to be a required dedicated role to be accomplished with magic. Which is actually your hang up. Someone who invests in medicine is a healer. They just don't do it with magic.
Healer does not mean only mean using medicine to heal. Don't try to make it that and your perceived problem simply doesn't exist.
Magical healing is still faster and more efficient, if time is of the essence or you want to heal in combat magical healing is basically the only option. Outside of combat, resources are too precious to waste spell slots of healing.
Sure Heal spell scale a lot better in PF2, but casters just don't have that many spell slots. And you can't use wands like you did in PF1. Unless you just buy a bunch of wands, because using it more than once per day is a serious risk of breaking it.
What you're wanting to do will turn divine magic casters into walking band-aid dispensers. Which is the opposite of what the devs wanted.
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I've always preferred to think of HP as just being stamina. Being at 0 HP just means you're unable to keep fighting. You have been knicked and cut and bruised, but nothing is going to kill you.
I wish the rules actually, y'know, supported that. If they did, it'd make a lot more sense for it to be easy to regain HP.
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Any thought(s) / feelings? / Suggested Nerfs?
Healing may feel almost inconsequential if the party invest skill feats into the skill, so another option may be to look at the Healers Kit from 1st edition.
This collection of bandages and herbs provides a +2 circumstance bonus on Heal checks. A healer’s kit is exhausted after 10 uses. (50 GP)
The bonus is much the same as 2e in terms of effect (+2 then is +1 now), but the previous version had limited uses and a cost in gold to refill. The lack of a use limit in 2e may be a misprint/error? This won't affect how often they can heal, but the cost will limit them financially and hopefully encourage better tactics when infinite free healing isn't available.
Any thought(s) / feelings? / Suggested Nerfs?Healing may feel almost inconsequential if the party invest skill feats into the skill, so another option may be to look at the Healers Kit from 1st edition.
This collection of bandages and herbs provides a +2 circumstance bonus on Heal checks. A healer’s kit is exhausted after 10 uses. (50 GP)
The bonus is much the same as 2e in terms of effect (+2 then is +1 now), but the previous version had limited uses and a cost in gold to refill. The lack of a use limit in 2e may be a misprint/error? This won't affect how often they can heal, but the cost will limit them financially and hopefully encourage better tactics when infinite free healing isn't available.
No, there's no reason to think the lack of cost is an error. It was even stronger in the playtest.
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No, there's no reason to think the lack of cost is an error. It was even stronger in the playtest.
Seems odd when the bonus and initial cost are identical to the earlier version, after the differences between editions are applied. I'll try the book version first and keep the use limitation in mind as an optional house rule, if I think its needed after that.
In my group, tactical intelligence is directly linked to available healing. The more healing is available, the more likely they are to charge in headlong and keep hitting until the enemy is dead as their only tactic, because they know they'll be always be back to full HP after each fight. Take away that option and they start playing smarter and with more caution, because the consequences are now much scarier.
Other groups may differ. :)
Being able to heal 4d8hp per medic per hour is a crazy level of downtime healing at level 2.It would be, if that's what it got you :-)
The target is then temporarily immune to Treat Wounds actions for 1 hourThey're immune to Treat Wounds by anyone. So it's 4d8 hp per hour, not "per medic" per hour. That's what you were doing, right? How many medics did you have?If you treat wounds for 2d8 taking 10 minutes, you can continue to a full hour for double the healing, so 4d8.
We had 2 medics, working on different people. So it was still 4d8 per medic per hour in this case.
Sorry, I'm not seeing where it says in the rules that you can choose to take a full hour to increase the healing given. But then that may be a misunderstanding on my part?
If you're talking about using Treat Wounds on 2 people per hour with Ward Medic or by just treating 2 different people each and adding an extra 10 minutes to your normal hour-long cycle, then that makes all checks out.
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Any thought(s) / feelings? / Suggested Nerfs?Healing may feel almost inconsequential if the party invest skill feats into the skill, so another option may be to look at the Healers Kit from 1st edition.
This collection of bandages and herbs provides a +2 circumstance bonus on Heal checks. A healer’s kit is exhausted after 10 uses. (50 GP)
The bonus is much the same as 2e in terms of effect (+2 then is +1 now), but the previous version had limited uses and a cost in gold to refill. The lack of a use limit in 2e may be a misprint/error? This won't affect how often they can heal, but the cost will limit them financially and hopefully encourage better tactics when infinite free healing isn't available.
This is one of the problems with the skill. The old CLW wand was an expended resource. As was the old healers kit.
Cleric spell slots are also an expended resource.
Maybe Im just butthurt because the "free" healer's kit uses are way more effective than my crappy 1d6 alchemist elixirs :p
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The Healer's Tools no longer gives a bonus to making checks. Instead it is now required to attempt several actions such as Treat Wounds. And it costs 5 GP.
My mistake, as I was reading the bonus from the Expanded Healers Tools. Even so, 5 GP for a kit with unlimited uses is a hell of a deal.
Barring theft or destruction, nobody would ever need to buy a replacement, so the people who make them must struggle to attract new customers. :)
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Sorry, I'm not seeing where it says in the rules that you can choose to take a full hour to increase the healing given. But then that may be a misunderstanding on my part?
Page 249. "If you succeed at your check, you can continue treating the target to grant additional healing. If you treat them for a total of 1 hour, double the Hit Points they regain from Treat Wounds."
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I mean, except for the part where it takes 10 minutes/1 hour to administer this healing and 2 actions to draw and chug an Elixir.
Maybe Im just butthurt because the "free" healer's kit uses are way more effective than my crappy 1d6 alchemist elixirs :p
Also that investing in Medicine is a permanent dedication of character resources where an Elixir is just what you decided you wanted to make today.
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I ran a one shot yesterday with a houseruled Warforged that can treat wounds on themself every 10 minutes at level 1 (vs level 3 for a medic character. The limitation is that it only works on them vs other people and THEY have to take the feat). It meant that when the Warforged got down to 1 HP in a combat, they didn't need to stop for the day. They could instead take 30 minutes to repair the Warforged. What this also meant was that 30 minutes in game time passed.
I'm using a tension pool system (from this website) which means a complication occurs effectively every hour. Sure enough they were able to treat their own wounds, but then they had to hide when enemy came. They were able to remain hidden so the enemy went by without a fight. But then they had a prisoner they had to do something with.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you make IG time meaningful in an adventure then that medic spending an hour or five treating people's wounds means that there are consequences for doing so. It doesn't need to be a ticking clock (I had a series of random encounters that we would cycle through). But so long as in game time is meaningful then it actually matters if they take the time to treat their wounds.
And if you can't be bothered making time matter, does it matter if they can get to full between fights? Just keep that in mind when constructing your adventure.
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I remember being disappointed with the video-game feeling of HP in another recent game, and was very happy to see a selection of a few different optional rules to make injury a bit more serious, allowing for a bit grittier setting, for people who wanted that.
I am sure I'll play this as written for the first several adventures, but imagine I may want to customize this in the future at some point, as long as the others playing agree. (I'm guessing as usual, I'll end up being the GM)
This is exactly our problem. Its a very video game feel, and kills suspension of disbelief. Just piling bandages on someone until they go from dying 3 to good as new tap dancing in a few hours is just silly.
We also intend to keep playing RAW for now. It just seems OP thus far.
Did you play PF1 and did you use wands of CLW? That was the default behaviour for PF1e (yes I understand this is the internet so everyone is an exception all the time. I'm talking about what was generally assumed). Treat Wounds is intended to replace that. They tried using resonance first but that went down like a lead balloon so now we have a non magical solution.
If Treat Wounds is too video games, I am curious on your stance of wands of CLW.
Any thought(s) / feelings? / Suggested Nerfs?
If you preferred the CLW wands approach, maybe just add a cost in SP/GP for herbs or other magical consumables that are assumed to be used in the medicine skill and increase the wealth you find commensurately?
That way the game assumptions remain relatively undisturbed but your sense of realism may be preserved (?)
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I'm using a tension pool system (from this website) which means a complication occurs effectively every hour.
Thanks for this.
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4d8 = 18 average healing. At level 2, yeah, that's going to be quite a bit. A level 2 Dwarf Barbarian with 16 Con has 40 HP, so that's almost half of their HP back (45% on average) in an hour.
A level 5 Dwarf Barbarian with 18 Con has 90 HP. 4d8 is still 18 average healing, which is only 20% on average. Upping the DC to 20 (assuming expert proficiency) is an average of 38 HP (4d8+20 doubled for the hour), which is still only about 42% of their HP, making the healing not as effective.
If you and your group are really having a hard time with it, halve the amount of healing it gives for only being Trained in Medicine. Make it 1d8 per 10 minutes, 2d8 for the full hour. That will reduce the healing at lower levels, while still allowing it to keep up at higher levels.
We talked about nerfing the dice as you suggest. Which is a definite thought.
The other thing we are thinking at might actually go with is increasing the DC by 5-10 (probably 5) every time you are treated. Which ends up lessening the healing via diminishing returns.
IMO Treat Wounds with Medicine doesnt diminish the role of the healer, it broadens who can be the healer. I personally hate one class being mandatory which is what the cleric is if you remove non magical healing.
I'm using a tension pool system (from this website) which means a complication occurs effectively every hour.Thanks for this.
Seconded - I've been considering running a dungeon crawly campaign to try out the system with my friends but was struggling to make it interesting since we're usually a much more narrative group. This'll go a long way to spicing it up...
I'm using a tension pool system (from this website) which means a complication occurs effectively every hour.Thanks for this.
Let me add thanks, too. This is an amazing idea and I'm totally going to use it from now on in place of normal random encounter rolls. Should be easy to work into 2e, too, since so many things take ten minutes...
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If Treat Wounds is too video games, I am curious on your stance of wands of CLW.
It depended on the campaign. I was never a huge fan of it, but it certainly did crop up sometimes.
At least then, there is a finite resource being expended. One that is quite cheap at higher levels, but still a cost. And at level 2, 750 gold is quite a chunk of change.
Treat wounds only has the initial cost for the kit.
The funny part of all this, is that in pf1 I thought that heal was too weak. So I don't mind that they buffed it, but it seems like they took it too far.
As stated previously, we are continuing with rules as written for now. After all, we are only level two. And our sample size so to speak, is still too small to make any major changes.
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I mean, except for the part where it takes 10 minutes/1 hour to administer this healing and 2 actions to draw and chug an Elixir.
Maybe Im just butthurt because the "free" healer's kit uses are way more effective than my crappy 1d6 alchemist elixirs :p
I'm not saying it's not useful. I actually have a familiar that I gave manual dexterity. So my toad sits on my shoulders and can feed me elixirs if I get hurt. So it actually only takes me one action to command my familiar :)
The distinction between the two, is that one expends a resource and the other doesn't. Is it expanding gold in this case? No. But my elixirs made per day is very limited. It is effectively the expanding of a spell slot. And most of those go to bombs, since I am of the bomber focus. (I saw the picture of the goblin alchemist burning down The docks, and I just had to make one). Yes, I realize I get two elixirs for one batch of reagents. But since I lack cantrips, my bombs and reagents go quick.
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At least then, there is a finite resource being expended. One that is quite cheap at higher levels, but still a cost. And at level 2, 750 gold is quite a chunk of change.
150 gp to 200 gp isn't small change at level 2, no. But when the alternative was not being able to face encounters or facing them at less than full capacity, I didn't ever see anyone hesitate about spending the cost.
And yeah, once you have given the rules a whirl (I'd recommend 3 months of weekly 4 hour games as a decent test) you can then introduce a cost (I'd recommend 2 gp per use to keep it on par with a potion of healing).
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The distinction between the two, is that one expends a resource and the other doesn't.
That's not strictly true. Both expend resources if the GM makes the resource matter. If a GM hands out potions of healing like they're candy, then no resource is being managed by drinking them. If a GM hands out time like candy and never introduces consequences for taking time to do stuff, then no resource is being managed by treating wounds.
It is up to a GM in both cases to make the resource (time or potions) matter.
I'll admit the CRB does make it easier to manage gold/items when compared with the guidelines on managing time. But in both cases a resource is actually being managed only when the GM makes it so.
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There is actually a gp cost to maintain a healer's kit. It's part of "cost of living" just like a spell component pouch. You can't replenish your supplies (which all characters are assumed to be doing during down time) on a subsistence standard of living unless supplementing with survival and a feat. We don't make spellcasters track their reagents, nor expect them to directly pay for each bit of bat guano. Alchemists don't have to pay for their charcoal and baking soda individually. They moved healer's kits to that same idea.
As others have said, treating wounds is more than bandages. It's disinfecting and stitching up cuts, pain killers and poultices to reduce swelling and bruising.
Natural healing is ridiculously unhelpful in a game. An intentional cut with a kitchen knife isn't closing up on it's own just by sleeping. You need liquid skin, bandages, or stitches to keep that from reopening. Even a pulled muscle from swinging your mace too hard might take days or weeks to recover without medical intervention.
If you want your game to have more realisim, just keep those things in mind. You are either relying on magic or weeks of bed rest. Neither of which is fun for most people.
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Personally I'm pretty happy with medicine being as strong as it is.
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Medicine absolutely has a cost. It's just an opportunity and investment cost rather than a gold cost.
This is less true at 1st and 2nd level, which are intended to be fairly forgiving, but by even 3rd level you need to invest heavily in Medicine to stay useful. You need to up it to Expert, then Master, then Legendary, and probably eventually buy an item to up your Medicine bonus as well. If you don't do this, the healing doesn't scale and stops being very useful unless you take a full day off or something.
That's a full, permanent, +6 to +9 you could've had in some skill that was useful for something other than healing (and you only get 3 such Skills unless you're a Rogue...if Medicine is one of them you have a max of two others). To say nothing of the Skill Feats you need to invest to actually be really good.
That is not a small investment or at all free. Contrariwise, in PF1, a Wand of CLW was a meaningful expenditure at 2nd level, sure, but by 10th, they were so cheap the expenditure was utterly meaningless.
I'mma have to check this too. I've had a dystopian campaign idea in the back of my head for years and this sounds like it might be great for it. It's meant to be a bit more gritty and difficult than my other games, so some added tension mechanics would fit great for sneaking around hostile areas and enemy facilities.Let me add thanks, too. This is an amazing idea and I'm totally going to use it from now on in place of normal random encounter rolls. Should be easy to work into 2e, too, since so many things take ten minutes...I'm using a tension pool system (from this website) which means a complication occurs effectively every hour.Thanks for this.
I'm intrigued by it as well, though the blog's a little disjointed and it is hard to figure out what the final evolution of the rules is.
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Second, many people view losing HP not as serious injuries, but scratches and flesh wounds, at least until you reach 0. A few rules reinforce this view: the fact that you still still have 100% functionality when down to 1 HP is an old example, and 2e introduces the 'wounded' condition when you stand back up after hitting 0.
This one right here is worth repeating, IMO.
You're not taking a longsword through the gut until you hit zero. What would be even more ridiculous than this kind of healing is the idea of taking 22 longsword attacks through your body before the 23rd one finally actually took you out. ;)