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An idea for healing in 5th edition D&D:

In 4th edition D&D, I find the question about when a character should use his Daily abilities to be a bit problematic.  I would rather that most abilities be At-Will or Encounter.

I wanted to come up with a way for a character to recover from damage without needing to use a daily resource, such as the Healing Surges of 4th edition D&D.

D&D Gamma World deals with the problem by simply giving a character full recovery of all hit points during a short rest.  This is convenient, but rather too good, and makes the consequences of injury almost unimportant.  Certainly traps that deal damage would be useless outside of combat.

The following rules can work with any D&D game, though with the importance of healing surges in 4th edition, perhaps it would be best considered for use in the upcoming 5th edition D&D.

These rules can also be made to work with OGL-based games, such as 3rd edition D&D.  Note, however, that it increases the characters' healing rate quite a bit without use of magical healing, and effectively doubles the effects of magical healing.  Therefore, you might want to make adjustments to compensate.

The rules:

Injury is tracked in two simple ways.  A character has Hit Points, which start at his maximum (uninjured value), and Damage Points, which start at zero and are accumulated.

Whenever a character takes damage, it is added to his Damage Points.

If the character's Damage Points ever exceed his current hit points, then the character gains the dying condition and may expire if not helped.

When the character takes a short rest, he recovers some of his vigour -- half the Damage Points are subtracted from his Hit Points, and his Damage Points drop to zero.

If the character is healed a number of points, say with a spell or potion, then the healing is applied to both the Damage Points and the Hit Points -- Damage Points get reduced (minimum zero), and the same number is added to his current Hit Points (up to his normal maximum).

An alternative version of healing may be equivalent to a short rest, as described above.

Natural healing occurs after a short rest has occurred (when the character has zero Damage Points and less than maximum Hit Points).  A character naturally heals 1 hit point per day for each character level.

For example, suppose a Fighter is uninjured and starts combat with his full 63 Hit Points and 0 Damage Points.  After sustaining a couple hits, he has accumulated 16 Damage Points.  He still has 63 Hit Points, however.  After winning the fight, he takes a short rest.  His Hit Points drop to 63-(16/2)=55, and his Damage Points drop to 0.  As you can see, he has partially recovered from his injuries, but has been weakened to an extent.  During a second combat encounter, if he is badly injured, and his Damage Points exceed his current 55 Hit Points, he may die.  If he imbibes a healing potion that heals 5 points, then his Damage Points are reduced by 5 points and his Hit Points are increased by 5 points.  Thus, a character who needs healing badly gets more benefit than one who is at maximum Hit Points or has accumulated no Damage Points.

To maximize magical healing benefits, a character may choose to use magical healing after combat but before he begins his short rest.

This method allows a character to recover from injuries quickly, but not completely.  Damage that occurs during combat is no more or less deadly when using these rules. However, injuries can still carry over from one combat to the next until a character has sufficient time (or magic) to fully recover.  The only resources expended are those which accelerate healing (such as healing spells and potions), and a character never has to worry about running out of healing surges.  With every new injury, he has the ability to recovery partially, but not completely.

Thus healing still has its limits, yet effectively becomes an Encounter ability.

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You lost me with your premise. I like daily resources, which you don't, so I reject a system that is based on doing away with them.

Change the font / tags then people might actually like to read this. Thanks.

Mar 8, 2012 -- 11:36AM, JRedGiant1 wrote:

You lost me with your premise. I like daily resources, which you don't, so I reject a system that is based on doing away with them.

He also said that he wants most abilities to be at-will or encounter.

That's very easily doable in 4E. Most racial powers and class features are at-will, once-a-round, or encounter. A level 1 character starts with (typically) three at-will or encounter class powers, and one daily class power. As the character levels up he gains new encounter and daily attack powers at the same rate. Utility powers are a mix of at-will, encounter, and daily, but I think mostly encounter and the player gets to choose which powers so can choose to never take a daily utility. Item powers are frequently daily, but the big virtue of magic items is not in their powers and there are a lot of excellent magic items with at-will or encounter powers - or no powers at all but really nice properties.

In other words, he doesn't like 4E and instead wants a different system that does what 4E does.

Why do I get the feeling nobody read past the OP's first paragraph?

I think it's not a bad idea, actually, with a few caveats.  First of all, applying healing to damage AND hitpoints is doubling it's effectiveness,
which he recognizes is a problem for stuffing the rule into a system not balanced for it.  Unfortunately it's also necessary to prevent healing
during the first encounter from being half as effective (unless you instead let it heal twice as much damage as it would HP, in which case in
combat healing becomes much more potent and you have a different balancing problem).  Personally, though, I would sooner mess with the
effectiveness of in-combat healing than the effectiveness of all healing all the time. 

The other problem I have is with daily healing at 1HP/level.  I know there are some realism problems with full healing overnight, at least if
you're wedded to the idea of HP as physical damage,  but slow natural healing just results in story-destroying periods of down time while the
party chills and licks their wounds in town for weeks and the BBEG puts his world domination plans on hold until you're ready to foil him (or
worse, has to be someone who would be a total pushover if only the party could reach him fully rested).

At the end of the day, though, it isn't easy to apply this as a simple fix to old editions, and if you're starting from scratch it doesn't make my
top list for best ways to handle the problem.  You've still got a fairly rapid draw-down of HP in even moderately challenging fights, so there's
still huge incentive for the 5 minute workday and all the problems that go with it.  You've halved the problem rather than ripping it up from
the root.  I think there are ways to solve it completely without making damage stop hurting.  My favorite quick fix to 4e is just to dramatically
reduce surges per day and that allow players to regain them when they achieve certain victory conditions (letting them go on forever provided
they never take more than their bloodied value in damage, but making damage beyond that point or out of combat pull from a very limited 
resource).  If starting from scratch, I'm rather intrigued by another thread's dual pool idea (HP regenerates by the day, but a second pool of 
tempHP that forms the other half of your damage absorbing capacity recharges by the encounter, thus achieving much the same effect as my
idea while maintaining a flavor of HP as physical damage, which healing surges destroyed).  Making it all damage above a threshold instead of
half damage all the time means smart play or easy encounters drain no resources at all, so there's no need to rest after beating up the gate
guards and fighting your way to the real threat, while still making damage hurt.
 

I'm not seeing how this is horribly different from healing surges.  Either way, you have a limit on how much healing you can get in a given timeframe.