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View Full Version : Healing Houserule (Peach)



Lev
2010-11-24, 02:53 AM
Ok, keep in mind I impose a 3 level difficulty system for my players, scroll down to see how it works.

Players in my campaign are USUALLY blue, it's the best option and provides benefits with minimal hassle, this houserule is for blue characters who accept the added difficulty.

Magical Healing
When healing through alchemical, arcane, divine or other such non-natural means other than fast healing or regenerative qualities the wounds simply regenerate and mend the tissues or organs.

As such, tissue that is currently displaced or missing will not grow back unless powerful magic is used, such as spells like regenerate, or overhealing a wound when first healing it, such as curing a light wound with a cure moderate wound spell.

As such, scarring and tissue loss can occur even after healing, lacerations where objects may be still inside the body are not magically ejected. An example would be that if an arrow is through your torso, you now have a healed torso piercing with a sharp stud at one end and a feathered stud at the other :smalltongue:

Healing does by no means clean you, scabs, blood, excess or displaced/ejected materials stay there but are only covering already healed tissue underneath. Anything on the dermal later is usually ejected and sticks on top of the skin, if it's deep then it's healed around but generally if the arm was working before the wound it's still working after the wound if not very gross looking.
Because of these factors, mundane heal checks and charisma based checks and abilities that use appearance in any way are impaired depending on the severity and players may eventually take ability damage from their loss of tissue.

Aurin (a magical powder, SORT OF like a pre-4e essentia), can be applied with any healing spell (as in my campaigns it can be applied with any spell as a metamagic component) to upgrade the ability of the healing spell to magically regenerate missing tissue or even help regrow scarred or missing tissue whether it's a fresh wound or a healed one. - Aurin is like "weave juice", it's extracted from the weave and is essentially an alchemical form of what the planes that have weave were first created from.


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To sum difficulty up:
:smallwink: Green means Easy, AKA: RAW
:smalltongue: Blue means Balanced, AKA: Semi-Real
:smallfurious: Red Means Hardcore, AKA: Realistic

Characters get to choose their difficulty, when they finish making their character and are ready to start they choose and I stamp the top of their sheet with a color and the harder difficulty they picked the more bonuses they get, difficulty system is like the flaw system like that. The easier the difficulty, the more protected they are by the rules.

Anything not integral to the story is always red, a monster might break a leg when falling down a 10' hole, you can easily turn a called shot -2 into a called shot "they're boned".

Most NPC's and things of importance are blue, if I don't want my players messing with it it's green and protected by RAW.
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dsmiles
2010-11-24, 07:55 AM
It's not my bag, baby. But it sounds pretty gritty and realistic. At least more so than standard DnD healing (which is what I use).

panaikhan
2010-11-24, 08:16 AM
My system is slightly softer than that, but still 'grittier' than D&D.

mundane healing only 'patches up' the character. They may be mobile, but they still need time to rest and recuperate. 0-level healing also falls into this category.
1-2 level healing will cover most weapon wounds (cuts, minor fractures etc.)
3-4 level healing covers truly broken bones, missing fingers/toes and other small 'replacements'.
Missing limbs need Regenerate or similar.

Magic healing ejects foreign materials from the body, as the wound heals from the inside out (no carving people up to remove arrowheads / buckshot). If the material cannot be ejected (it passes completely through the body, like the arrow example in the OP), the spell cannot complete - the spell goes 'on the stack', and resolves once the item is removed.
Removing foreign items from a body requires a Heal check (DC 10 + item's maximum unaided (non-critical) damage)

Lev
2010-11-24, 09:24 AM
I am in favor of ejection mechanics as they do make a lot of sense, but the timeframe required would need to be much longer or it would carve the living daylights out of the users flesh. I do allow arcane casters to get healing spells and such but they do not create any positive energy to do so and thus don't have any pain negation, and let me tell you, having the body contort and break and reform magically causes a LOT of pain. This allows arcane casters to heal offensively.

I remember my mentor telling me stories of going to a small beach area in mexico early 70's and getting a black urchin through the foot and having it's poisonous barbs embedded in his foot and ankle which swelled up to the size of a football and turned blackish purple.

The doctors told him he would need to amputate it because the barbs could not be removed, they tried and carved up his foot, he himself had surgery training and couldn't do it, but they needed to remove it or else the barb's micro barbs would go into his blood stream and travel to his heart, ironman style.

He said he needed a moment to say goodbye to his foot, once his friend who had confirmed and vouched for the amputation had left the room he got up and hobbled out of the room to the courtyard where he saw a woman carrying a book on aloes. The area he was staying in apparently had over 70 aloe species, and remembering his shaman training he escaped and got in his van and drove back to where he stepped on the urchin, and followed a direct line up from the water he found a thin green aloe and picked several large sections off and hobbled off to a sea cave where the waters tide rose to envelope the entire entrance so no air could enter.

He slathered the aloe all over his leg, top to bottom and there he stayed, constantly applying the aloe, drinking and eating nothing for almost 3 days, the only thing he could do was watch the poison in his foot, re-apply the aloe and watch the barbs sink in as they are designed to go one direction only.

Nearing the end of the second day, quills started popping out the other side of his body, and by the beginning of the 3rd morning the poison had dissipated and the quills had worked their way through his entire leg, even up to the knee at some parts.

He is fully recovered now, an adept body worker, sage and qigong/tai chi teacher.

Quietus
2010-11-24, 09:33 AM
Crazy natural healing stuff

Holy crap man.. that dude was hardcore. I can't imagine how much it must have hurt to have those spines traveling up his leg like that... but I CAN imagine how terrifying it'd be to go "Yeah, you're going to have to lose a part of your body, permanently". Damn.

randomhero00
2010-11-24, 02:50 PM
You are aware there is something simple, and more elegant and refined already in existence that's official?
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm

Lev
2010-11-24, 07:02 PM
You are aware there is something simple, and more elegant and refined already in existence that's official?
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/vitalityAndWoundPoints.htm

Well it's elegant and refined in terms of how far precise RAW can go, but hell, I usually don't let my players even look at their HP. Players control the players, the numbers are the DM's job IMO.
Some people play it differently, but I just happen to think "Spinning wildly around to see what caused it pain the orc batters you with the side of it's axe knocking you to the ground." sounds a lot better than "Orc's turn, he attacks you with his axe dealing ## damage and leaving you prone.


I do like the wound system, might implement it.

But more likely I'll just have it as a red rule and have crits deal con damage. Heh.

CodeRed
2010-11-24, 11:14 PM
Well it's elegant and refined in terms of how far precise RAW can go, but hell, I usually don't let my players even look at their HP. Players control the players, the numbers are the DM's job IMO.
Some people play it differently, but I just happen to think "Spinning wildly around to see what caused it pain the orc batters you with the side of it's axe knocking you to the ground." sounds a lot better than "Orc's turn, he attacks you with his axe dealing ## damage and leaving you prone.


I do like the wound system, might implement it.

But more likely I'll just have it as a red rule and have crits deal con damage. Heh.

How then does a player keep track of how close to death he is in one of your games? How would you even be able to know when to apply a healing spell or to run as its obvious your going to die? That's what the number system is there for. If you want to say to a player how hurt they after an attack thats fine but you might as well get rid of HP on the sheet then as damage rolls only work when their are numbers to work off for the players.

Tengu_temp
2010-11-24, 11:42 PM
Some people play it differently, but I just happen to think "Spinning wildly around to see what caused it pain the orc batters you with the side of it's axe knocking you to the ground." sounds a lot better than "Orc's turn, he attacks you with his axe dealing ## damage and leaving you prone.

Why not both? Describe the attack, then note its mechanical effects.

WinceRind
2010-11-25, 12:53 AM
How then does a player keep track of how close to death he is in one of your games? How would you even be able to know when to apply a healing spell or to run as its obvious your going to die? That's what the number system is there for. If you want to say to a player how hurt they after an attack thats fine but you might as well get rid of HP on the sheet then as damage rolls only work when their are numbers to work off for the players.

Well, you could use really descriptive language to indicate danger and what not. Plus there are some skills like Sense Motive that might help you with establishing how dangerous the encounter is.

There's a difference between "The farmhand swings the hoe at Joe the Fighter. As it bounces off the armor, it draws a little bit of blood. Seemingly unaffected by the blow, Joe swings back..." and "The angry giant orc swings his battle axe and nearly obliterates Jack the Sorcerer in one fell blow. Blood and gore fills the air" and so on.

This is what roleplaying "should" be more like, in my opinion. The numbers are just the mechanical part of the game, the players shouldn't even know or see most of them for a real roleplaying experience.

You could use spot and heal checks to see how harmed players are during and after the fight - heal, of course, would be more reliable and would take enough time to be practically useless in combat and act accordingly.

CodeRed
2010-11-25, 01:04 AM
Well, you could use really descriptive language to indicate danger and what not. Plus there are some skills like Sense Motive that might help you with establishing how dangerous the encounter is.

There's a difference between "The farmhand swings the hoe at Joe the Fighter. As it bounces off the armor, it draws a little bit of blood. Seemingly unaffected by the blow, Joe swings back..." and "The angry giant orc swings his battle axe and nearly obliterates Jack the Sorcerer in one fell blow. Blood and gore fills the air" and so on.

This is what roleplaying "should" be more like, in my opinion. The numbers are just the mechanical part of the game, the players shouldn't even know or see most of them for a real roleplaying experience.

You could use spot and heal checks to see how harmed players are during and after the fight - heal, of course, would be more reliable and would take enough time to be practically useless in combat and act accordingly.

Then remove the dice and numbers at all. They are there to help put a framework from which to roleplay but if you don't need them to do so then you might as well get rid of them.

To me the problem with this is that you are coming too close to sacrifice the "game" part of roleplaying game. Yes, I want a good roleplay experience as that is the part of the games you remember but playing well mechanically in the framework of the game is also something I enjoy. The numbers make it a game or else it is solely a roleplay experience that you can do without numbers at all. If that's not how you see D&D then we disagree in a way that can't be fixed.

Hanuman
2010-11-25, 02:32 AM
Then remove the dice and numbers at all. They are there to help put a framework from which to roleplay but if you don't need them to do so then you might as well get rid of them.

To me the problem with this is that you are coming too close to sacrifice the "game" part of roleplaying game. Yes, I want a good roleplay experience as that is the part of the games you remember but playing well mechanically in the framework of the game is also something I enjoy. The numbers make it a game or else it is solely a roleplay experience that you can do without numbers at all. If that's not how you see D&D then we disagree in a way that can't be fixed.
There are spells such as deathwatch which allows players to automatically detect these things.

Heal checks allow you to detect and view another person's wounds, to determine your own wounds you could use a wisdom check + the number on your HD (a wizard would get +4 and a barbarian would get +12) or you could use a heal check, but in the heat of battle that's pretty difficult especially if you are using full attacks at the same time.

It's not like I disable the HP system, it's just that it's a bit more reasonable to say "yeah, you partially dodged the dragons fire breath and continue to wail on it while dodging around it's claws and tail, you got a little burned, smell burnt hair and could feel hot bites of fire all around your body and you can see you are covered in soot" instead of "you stop, grab a bucket of hot water, take off your clothes and start cleaning the soot off you, underneith you carefully examine the wounds and can see directly what injuries you have, you put your clothes back on, pick up your sword and dodge around the tail and claws while wailing on it within a 6 second round.

No, it takes unbelievable knowledge of healing to be able to identify non-apparent wounds by glance, and even a greater power of insight to be completely full of adrenaline and have your hands full with getting burned and shot at and battered and mentally manipulated via magic and have your shield come alive and try and eat you, ect.

An adventurer such as one who gains heal as a class skill might have an unbelievable knowledge of healing, for instance.

Again, this system is for blue characters, players who don't want the added realism for their characters are not forced to have it.

CodeRed
2010-11-25, 11:19 AM
There are spells such as deathwatch which allows players to automatically detect these things.

Again, this system is for blue characters, players who don't want the added realism for their characters are not forced to have it.

Ok. I get your point. Personally I enjoy the game aspect of D&D just as much as the roleplay part so this kind of idea just isn't my bag. If you and your players like it though, awesome. D&D is all about enjoying yourself so if that's happening, you've got a good game.

I would however definitely involve a Wis check or something of the like you suggested to determine how hurt you are. Deathwatch as written in the SRD has the Evil descriptor so good-aligned casters are not going to be using that. You could just remove the Evil descriptor if you wanted to though.