Other limits for Healing

[Tasha]

Powers don't necessarally suggest playstyle. Hero is the game system that requires the Most GM input into character generation. Just like some GM's not allowing certain powers, frameworks, skills etc. It SHOULD be up to the GM to decide how Healing works and what Limitations should be on the ability. For some genres Healing won't be appropriate. Others, healing is severely limited in active points allowed. Powers that can be unbalancing should be pointed out (ie Transformation, certain change environments, certain limitations etc). Hero is a tool kit, the tools should be there that allow for any kind of play the GM can envision.

It is up to me the GM to decide how much I want the game to be a resource management game, End and Stun already have some of that during combat. If I don't like that End fully comes back, I can use Long Term Endurance Rules. If I want something like D&D's style of so many spells per day. I can require that my game's spell system use an End Reserve that only Fully recovers after the PC takes 6hours of uninterrupted "rest" time.

For some genres erasing body after a battle is completly in keeping with the genre. Kind of like how having high enough defenses to prevent PC's from taking ANY body is a part of the Superheroic Genre,

 

The system NEEDS to be 100% consistant between all of it's attack powers. This whole everything is cumulative except Healing is really annoying and such things detract from gameplay. They make a rule set that is otherwise pretty easy and pretty consistant in it's treatment of abilities an exception.


 

[Markdoc]

In the case of Markdoc's notion of Healing acting as a bandage that is eventually replaced by natural healing over time, I have this image of the victim of Dispel Healing finding all his unhealed injuries suddenly reopening all at once.

 

That is in fact, precisely what happens in my game. There's even an "open wounds" spell which is a limited dispel aimed at creating that effect: though it's typically a bad-guy spell.

 

As Manic Typist noted, the in-game rationale for why healing works this way is that it is magically substituting for the injured tissues and bones, so that the real ones can heal. You can only substitute so much, though, before there's no real tissue to support.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Powers don't necessarally suggest playstyle. Hero is the game system that requires the Most GM input into character generation. Just like some GM's not allowing certain powers, frameworks, skills etc. It SHOULD be up to the GM to decide how Healing works and what Limitations should be on the ability. For some genres Healing won't be appropriate. Others, healing is severely limited in active points allowed. Powers that can be unbalancing should be pointed out (ie Transformation, certain change environments, certain limitations etc). Hero is a tool kit, the tools should be there that allow for any kind of play the GM can envision.

 

It is up to me the GM to decide how much I want the game to be a resource management game, End and Stun already have some of that during combat. If I don't like that End fully comes back, I can use Long Term Endurance Rules. If I want something like D&D's style of so many spells per day. I can require that my game's spell system use an End Reserve that only Fully recovers after the PC takes 6hours of uninterrupted "rest" time.

 

For some genres erasing body after a battle is completly in keeping with the genre. Kind of like how having high enough defenses to prevent PC's from taking ANY body is a part of the Superheroic Genre,

 

The system NEEDS to be 100% consistant between all of it's attack powers. This whole everything is cumulative except Healing is really annoying and such things detract from gameplay. They make a rule set that is otherwise pretty easy and pretty consistant in it's treatment of abilities an exception.

 

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, except the first sentence. Really, the rules do suggest playstyle - more, they define playstyle. Even players who know little about the rules as a whole, don't minmax (or even know how to minmax) their PCs, will gradually (or in some cases, swiftly) adapt their playstyle to that rewarded by the rules, even when they are not aware that they are doing it. I've taught a lot of people to play Hero, and an even greater number to play RPGs in general, and I've watched this happen over and over again, regardless of player background and RPG experience. It's not just me as GM, because the same thing happens in all the groups I have played in as well (and actually you make this point yourself in your own post, when talking about unlimited healing being appropriate for some genres. You're right, but that's a playstyle thing).

 

The rules are the agreed deinition of the PCs universe, and so, inevitably, the PCs come to conform to it. In games where we have altered the baseline rules (and in the old days, the group of GMs I was part of, tinkered with the rules a lot), inevitably those changes were reflected in character design and gameplay. If you make healing cumulative and moderately priced, it will become a must-have and players will start to treat physical damage casually (because after all, it's only temporary). This is exactly what happened in some of our earliest FH games where we had to homebrew some version of healing, and initially made it too easy.

 

Now of course, if that's what you and your players want, that's cool, and it's very easy to tweak the rules to make it so. It's apparently not what most fantasy or heroic level GM's want though: it's a very different playstyle from most fantasy/Spy/street level games.

 

I do understand your problem with the inconsistency - I suffer from that too. I'd much prefer a better method of dealing with healing, but I've been thinking about it for a long time, and haven't yet found an answer I like. The reason is simple: BOD was designed to be a limited resource; that's why recovery was set at REC/month. Cumulative healing can do an endrun around that, even at the very lowest level of effect. The closest I have come to what might be "better" approaches actually involve quite radical departures from the way we do things now.

 

Cheers, Mark

[mhd]

One thing that was quite neat about RoleMaster is that you could have long-term wound effects, but they were separate from your "can I fight at all" buffer zone, i.e.e your hit points. So there was a difference between impairment and ability to withstand new punishment.
Of course, mathematically you could be worse off, as a penalty to your offense and especially defense will make those hit points vanish more quickly.

 

I'd also say that it seems more realistic if an impairing injury takes longer to recover from than points that mostly remain abstract (system overload? blood loss?). Even worse if the latter came from a plethora of minor wounds that barely penetrated armor. Going all Frodo because you got hit really well one time feels different than taking the same time to get back from a thousand papercuts...

 

I think one of HERO's bastard cousins thus treated wounds by degree (multiple of some core stat/bonus), so you had to document your wounds and each of them had a different healing time (and degree of difficulty for medical treatment).

 

One of the more narrative systems I've read recently gave this option in player hands, where you could either take the hits or take a penalizing wound.

[Steve]

Hmmm... Perhaps any impairment penalties incurred from really hard hits could remain even after magical healing occurs?

 

Yes, the character may be at full Body and Stun, but some lingering effect remains until natural healing can occur.

[mhd]

Which would work nicely with quicker BODY recovery, treating it like LTE in that regard.

[Steve]

Restoring STUN and BODY through magic would only be taking care of part of the problem. Characters can't just keep going through fight after fight and depending on the healer to patch them back up to full. Lingering penalties and reductions to other stats would start accumulating.

 

I'm thinking this could be something more serious than impairment effects but maybe not as harsh as RAW disabling effects.

 

Then again, in a gritty campaign, keeping disabling effects but allowing more liberal STUN and BODY healing might be a good medium. It would require more tracking, but get away from the D&D hit points feel.

[mhd]

Now that I think of it, I always wanted my resident non-magic healer to have a bigger impact. As is, compared to magic First Aid and its ilk is doing diddly squat. Even with the optional rule where you restore 1 BODY scrapes.

 

Clearly distinguishing between impairments and BODY/STUN losses would give more room for actual medical care and surgery. Constant care could alleviate the penalties. Just pumping magical energy into literally isn't a cure-all, some lingering effects remain. It probably should take off the worst impairment penalties, as you're not running around with a broken leg after all the BODY is magically healed. But there's some remnant aches and pains that will take a while.

 

Expert magical help (i.e. a magical healer who also knows the mundane stuff) could do miracles, but that would be an advanced perk or spell, whereas just buying your "Cure Wounds" spell is just spackling and duck tape.

 

I think I remember a healer in some fantasy novel who made similar remarks, where healing just was done on the physical level without concerning itself with the mental trauma and spiritual side-effects of wounds. One of the Malazan books?

[bluesguy]

One of the players in my current campaign could easily heal the characters after a battle and I was ok with that.  We went with the a healing per wound and everyone needed to track each wound separately.  That player is now in college so her character is adventuring the with rest of the party at this time.  That leaves the party with no one who can heal them.

 

It will be interesting to see how that changes the dynamic of the game.

[Markdoc]

One of the players in my current campaign could easily heal the characters after a battle and I was ok with that.  We went with the a healing per wound and everyone needed to track each wound separately.  That player is now in college so her character is adventuring the with rest of the party at this time.  That leaves the party with no one who can heal them.

 

It will be interesting to see how that changes the dynamic of the game.

 

Trust me, it makes a huge difference - I've run games for groups without a healer or with very little magic healing, and one good hit on a PC can take them out of action for days or even weeks, potentially crippling the party as a result. I dealt with that by providing plenty of down time between adventures for people to heal up and making most adventures with significant combat short, sharp affairs, so that a downed PC's player had to sit out one evening's play at most.

 

You can do it, and in my opinion it gives games a gritty, desperate feel that I really like, but I literally had to design the entire game around the fact that magic healing was not readily available. Even so we had PCs who were wounded and literally died of wounds in front of their comrades (just ask Susano on these boards about Jiro) because without a magical healer they could not stop the bleeding.

 

This is what I mean when I said that rule design affects gameplay - that one change, made more difference to the game than practically everything else - it affected the kinds of adventures I could run, the pacing of adventures, the danger value of NPCs, how the players played, how they developed their characters ... everything.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Chris Goodwin]

Trust me, it makes a huge difference - I've run games for groups without a healer or with very little magic healing, and one good hit on a PC can take them out of action for days or even weeks, potentially crippling the party as a result. I dealt with that by providing plenty of down time between adventures for people to heal up and making most adventures with significant combat short, sharp affairs, so that a downed PC's player had to sit out one evening's play at most.

 

You can do it, and in my opinion it gives games a gritty, desperate feel that I really like, but I literally had to design the entire game around the fact that magic healing was not readily available. Even so we had PCs who were wounded and literally died of wounds in front of their comrades (just ask Susano on these boards about Jiro) because without a magical healer they could not stop the bleeding.

 

Did none of the PCs have any mundane medical skills?  Also, while I'm aware this might not have been the case for your campaign world, there's nothing that says a fantasy world can't have medical knowledge equivalent or nearly so to our own, or even to our own in the recent past (WWII era would be "good enough").  (I recall at least one crossworlds-style fantasy series where one of the fantasy world characters remarks to a modern one that they know about the germ theory.)  

 

Even if there's limited or no magical healing, could there be magical support for mundane healing?  Knowledge of germ theory (meaning sterile instruments and dressings), microscopic and x-ray vision spells, deep-sleep spells for general anesthesia, even advanced knowledge of herbal remedies.  Obviously this would be less likely to apply in a low magic world, but even there it's not impossible; medicine in India about five thousand years ago was nearly at the level of, say, WWII era western medicine.  They certainly knew to sterilize their instruments and made use of anesthesia.  

[Markdoc]

One thing that was quite neat about RoleMaster is that you could have long-term wound effects, but they were separate from your "can I fight at all" buffer zone, i.e.e your hit points. So there was a difference between impairment and ability to withstand new punishment.

Of course, mathematically you could be worse off, as a penalty to your offense and especially defense will make those hit points vanish more quickly.

 

I'd also say that it seems more realistic if an impairing injury takes longer to recover from than points that mostly remain abstract (system overload? blood loss?). Even worse if the latter came from a plethora of minor wounds that barely penetrated armor. Going all Frodo because you got hit really well one time feels different than taking the same time to get back from a thousand papercuts...

 

I think one of HERO's bastard cousins thus treated wounds by degree (multiple of some core stat/bonus), so you had to document your wounds and each of them had a different healing time (and degree of difficulty for medical treatment).

 

One of the more narrative systems I've read recently gave this option in player hands, where you could either take the hits or take a penalizing wound.

 

 

One of the things I have considered while playing around with this was the idea of dropping BOD completely, or making it a fixed stat. not a "consumable" one. The basic idea was that when you take more STUN damage than your CON, you are stunned - I had thought of taking the same basic idea and applying it to BOD damage - the idea being that when you take BOD damage you may acquire an impairing or disabling wound. I've toyed with and modelled two approaches. The way that BOD works, you are unlikely to take all your BOD in one hit, since attacks do far less BOD than STUN. So we need an way of modelling damage when you take just some BOD, instead of "more than" the way that CON and stunning works.

 

The first way I thought about is based straight off the current rules for impairing and disabling. If you take 1/4 your BOD, you take an impairing wound, if you take 1/2, you take a disabling wound; These fractions could be changed if you use hit locations and damage multiples. That's simple, but a bit rigid for my taste - it also makes very high BOD scores highly desirable, since they make you essentially immune to small hits.

 

So the second approach was to make a BOD roll: just a normal 9 + [CHA/5] roll any time you took BOD damage, with a -1 on the roll per point of BOD damage suffered (alternatively, you could just dump BOD altogether and just use CON). A failed roll would gain you an impairing wound, a roll failed by 5 or more would gain you a disabling wound, 8 or more and you are fatally wounded and bleeding to death. At that point, you have a number of segments equal to your BOD before you die - you can stop the bleeding with a healing (paramedic) roll, with a penalty equal to the BOD damage, similar to the case today, or with a healing spell. You could tweak these numbers: they were set up with heroic level games in mind, where BOD would typically run from 8-20, and to give a slightly cinematic feel, where heroes could fight on, despite multiple major wounds.

 

That means that for a normal healthy adult (BOD roll 11-), even 1 BOD that actually penetrated defences would give a 50% chance for an impairing wound, and a 9% chance for a disabling wound - you would have to roll a 3 to be down and bleeding to death. Bear in mind that neither impairing or disabling wounds usually takes you out of the fight!

On the other hand, a mighty barbarian with 23 BOD - a paragon of human strength, at the outer limits of what's normally possible, with a BOD roll of 14- would only have a 17% chance of being impaired by 1 BOD and would have to roll an 18 to be disabled. He's just not gonna die from a puny 1 BOD damage, ever.

If on the other hand, you took a heavy hit - let's say 7 BOD through defences - the normal's chances are: 98% chance of being impaired, 63% chance of being disabled, 9% chance of being killed outright, while the physical paragon has an 84% chance of impairment, a 26% chance of a disabling wound and only a 2% chance of being killed outright.

 

If I was going to go this route, I would almost certainly beef up the impairing and disabling tables a bit, and use a 2d6 roll to give some more diverse outcomes - and also to make the more severe outcomes less likely.

 

There are a couple of nice (but hidden) features of this approach. First, it provides a border zone between unconscious (no STUN) and dead, where PCs are wounded, which has appreciable effects in-game. Right now BOD damage is kind of abstract. I've done just a little playtesting with this idea, and players with wounded PCs play differently to players with PCs who have lost some BOD: they are more cautious and more prone to retreat. Secondly, it makes PCs a bit more durable, without making them invulnerable - the odds of being killed outright are (deliberately) relatively low, but the odds of being seriously wounded are quite high. This approach also means that armour is important, but not so crucial as it is now, since a player might survive (they are unlikely to be in great shape, but they might survive) multiple wounds doing 20+ BOD in total, that would 100% wipe them out under the current system. Thirdly, it requires no more book-keeping than the current system: instead of tracking body taken, you track wounds taken, and you won' take wounds from every hit. And fourthly, the damage is nicely "spiky" like damage in real life. A dagger thrust is highly unlikely to kill your beefy barbarian in one hit ... but it could. 5 bullets at point blank rage from a .45 into your unarmoured character are highly likely to kill them ... but just like in real life, there's a small chance that you'll survive.

 

There are disadvantages too. First, more dice-rolling (though fights with this system tend to be relatively short, if the GM rules that severely-wounded NPCs drop out of combat, which is reasonable enough). Second, it's relatively hard to ensure one-shot kills (I don't mind this, as it reflects real life, but some players hate it). Third, there's a risk of PCs entering a "death spiral" where they lose combat effectiveness, as they go through an adventure and then keep getting hit more and more and taking more and more wounds - with the current system, you remain at full combat effectiveness, even if you have 1 BOD left, making heroic defiance more effective. I took this into account when juggling the numbers for this system, balancing the fact that PCs are harder to kill against the fact that they are easier to degrade.

 

The idea for this approach actually came from my reading (summarised in a relatively recent post on Tanks, over in Hero system discussion) about combat injuries in real life. The US doctors who were involved in classifying injuries during WW2 (the so-called Bouganville project) noted that injuries basically fell into 3 classes. The same has been been described in Vietnam and Iraq. Basically they noted that some wounds were rapidly or instantly fatal. Some were disabling, taking the soldier out of combat. And some were minor. Minor wounds might require treatment, even hospital treatment, after combat, but they did not prevent the soldier from continuing to fight. When they looked at different weapons, they all induced these kinds of wounds, but at different frequencies, and where you were shot also altered the chance that you would end up in one of the three categories. So oddly enough, in some ways, this proposed system is more realistic than what we have now, in terms of outcome.

 

Anyway, to loop back to healing, in a system like this, healing (and regeneration for that matter) ceases to be about boosting BOD and instead is about removing wounds. Basically they could be two variants of the same power - one you can use on others, the other only on yourself. For natural healing, you could simply give the PC a BOD roll - perhaps at a penalty - once per "time interval" to decrease the status of a wound - a wound that had you down and bleeding to death, becomes disabling (assuming a healer or medic stopped you actually bleeding to death), disabling becomes impairing, impairing goes away. Time interval could be discussed, but I had thought once per week would be sufficient - that means that severe wounds could lay you up for several weeks (not that different from the current BOD/REC rules). The regeneration power would simply let you move that interval down the timescale (1 day, 6 hours, 1 hour, etc). Healing, in this case simply becomes Regeneration usable on others. I had played around with making the cost 10 points per step down the table, with no lower limit, taking into account the fact that PCs are more likely in this system to be wounded rather than dead, so it's not as crucial to have high level in-combat healing: a decent paramedic roll would be enough to stop someone dying and you could easily build that into a talent ("healing hands" or some such) or spell if you wanted, and that 30 points of healing would be enough to have everybody healed up in a few hours. Interestingly, this approach also makes it possible to build Wolverine-style characters whose healing factor brings them back from almost anything - which is really really expensive to try and do in the current system. It's expensive, but 70 points and a decent BOD score means that the character could take multiple lethal wounds, and get back up on his feet in a few seconds and be back to normal in under a minute (assuming he was still conscious, of course)

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Did none of the PCs have any mundane medical skills?  Also, while I'm aware this might not have been the case for your campaign world, there's nothing that says a fantasy world can't have medical knowledge equivalent or nearly so to our own, or even to our own in the recent past (WWII era would be "good enough").  (I recall at least one crossworlds-style fantasy series where one of the fantasy world characters remarks to a modern one that they know about the germ theory.)  

 

Sure - healers from some cultures in my own fantasy world know all about microbes, and mundane surgery (though it's kind of a niche interest, since magical healing is better and faster).

 

However, in the game in question, several players had the healing (paramedic) skill, but when you have a PC at -5 BOD, that's a -5 on your paramedics roll. In this case, even the most skilled of the PCs just didn't make his roll. Equally importantly; in a game with no magical healing, a PC who takes one good wound may be prevented from dying, or may even be "fine" just on low BOD - but that puts them one single good hit away from death.

 

So you bet the game played differently. It's not a question of in-game knowledge: it's a mechanics-driven change to style of game.

 

cheers, Mark

[bluesguy]

Trust me, it makes a huge difference - I've run games for groups without a healer or with very little magic healing, and one good hit on a PC can take them out of action for days or even weeks, potentially crippling the party as a result. I dealt with that by providing plenty of down time between adventures for people to heal up and making most adventures with significant combat short, sharp affairs, so that a downed PC's player had to sit out one evening's play at most.

 

And that makes a bunch of sense.  Also I don't run 'dungeon crawl' adventures.  Rather most of my games take place in towns, villages, tracking down what is on that 'treasure map', and the travel in between.  The party has a couple of fantastic scouts so they are rarely surprised and tend to be able to sneak up and surprise their opponents.

 

So they will have time to recover from combat.

 

You can do it, and in my opinion it gives games a gritty, desperate feel that I really like, but I literally had to design the entire game around the fact that magic healing was not readily available. Even so we had PCs who were wounded and literally died of wounds in front of their comrades (just ask Susano on these boards about Jiro) because without a magical healer they could not stop the bleeding.

 

Ouch.  Yeah the players have first aid/paramedic skills.  I should encourage them to buy those skills up :-).  One of the players is also kind of a ranger type and knows a bunch about plants and herbs and has paramedic.  I may allow him to buy a 'power' that allows him to heal.  Basically healing 1 or 2 dice and it takes hours for it to take effect. 

 

However, in the game in question, several players had the healing (paramedic) skill, but when you have a PC at -5 BOD, that's a -5 on your paramedics roll. In this case, even the most skilled of the PCs just didn't make his roll.

That would hurt.  How did that affect the gaming group and the player whose character died?

 

I am going to give them the opportunity to buy some healing potions and other healing aids before they leave the city they are in.  They won't be cheap and their won't be a bunch.

 

Equally importantly; in a game with no magical healing, a PC who takes one good wound may be prevented from dying, or may even be "fine" just on low BOD - but that puts them one single good hit away from death.

 

Based on past combats most of the time the PCs tend to have been hit for a few points of body one to three times.  So maybe they got hit two times and took 2 body on each hit.  They are still functional but now they will probably want to rest up for at least  a few days before pressing on.

 

I can also see players asking to up their recovery so they recover Body faster :-)

 

 

This is what I mean when I said that rule design affects gameplay - that one change, made more difference to the game than practically everything else - it affected the kinds of adventures I could run, the pacing of adventures, the danger value of NPCs, how the players played, how they developed their characters ... everything.

All very good advice.

[Markdoc]

 medicine in India about five thousand years ago was nearly at the level of, say, WWII era western medicine.  They certainly knew to sterilize their instruments and made use of anesthesia.  

 

Just as a side point, having read and studied Ayurveda quite a lot over the last 20 years, and worked for 6 years in indian hospitals, it's safe to say that Ayurvedic medicine was not even remotely comparable to western medicine in the WW2 era. It wasn't even comparable to western medicine in the Franco-Prussian war era! I think it's fair to say that it was comparable to traditional Persian or Chinese medicine (though older than either) and clearly better than medieval european practice, but that's about it. Traditional ayurvedic practiioners "purified" their instruments and their locality by Agnihotra, and Dhoopan, but that was not the same as sterilising them and even today, infections via - for example - contaminated things as apparently safe as guasha instruments are a real problem in India (not really in western ayurveda, where, ironically, western sterlising techniques are widely used). I actually had a colleague in Bangalore who tested Dhoopana Dravyas for sterilising surgical tools and published the results in an Indian medical journal - to his disappointment, they were more heavily contaminated after the procedure than before.

 

The idea that ayurvedic practicioners knew about anesthesia is kind of true. They knew about (and used) pain-killing medicines (alcohol, cannibis, henbane and opium-derived, etc, etc) but then, so did the Romans, Arabs, medieval Europeans and ancient Chinese. These are analgesics and sedatives rather than true anesthetics, though - and in all cases rather dangerous to use.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

That would hurt.  How did that affect the gaming group and the player whose character died?

 

Actually, in this particular case, it went OK, which is testimony to the quality of the players. The players knew (and the PCs knew) that the character was bleeding to death, and the dying PC went on to make a one-man stand against the pursuing foes so that the rest of the PCs could escape, eventually expiring of his wounds on top of a pile of enemy corpses. Instead of being a bummer, it turned into a legendary death in the campaign, much admired by the other PCs.

 

But it's worth noting that this happened even though as GM, I was really careful to try not to kill the PCs. If I had been a bit more brutal, the death toll would have soared.

 

cheers, Mark

[bluesguy]

Actually, in this particular case, it went OK, which is testimony to the quality of the players. The players knew (and the PCs knew) that the character was bleeding to death, and the dying PC went on to make a one-man stand against the pursuing foes so that the rest of the PCs could escape, eventually expiring of his wounds on top of a pile of enemy corpses. Instead of being a bummer, it turned into a legendary death in the campaign, much admired by the other PCs.

 

But it's worth noting that this happened even though as GM, I was really careful to try not to kill the PCs. If I had been a bit more brutal, the death toll would have soared.

 

cheers, Mark

 

You are right about the quality of the players.  Were the pursuing foes added to provide an epic end by you the GM or were the pursuing foes coming anyway?

 

Kind of like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNeu5CRwITQ

[Grailknight]

A solution my group used in the past was to tie healing to Long Term Endurance. 

 

Magic could restore your BODY fairly easily and keep you from dying but too much could sap your reserves. Eventually you could get to the point of being too tired to fight and passing out from exertion.

 

We used 1 LTE per 2 BODY taken and 1/1 in the case of disabling/impairing wounds. 

[Markdoc]

You are right about the quality of the players.  Were the pursuing foes added to provide an epic end by you the GM or were the pursuing foes coming anyway?

 

The pursuing foes were coming anyway. The players wrote quite a lot of fiction during that game: you can read about the demise of Jiro in this piece  on my ancient and long-gone website from last century, preserved like a fly in amber on some aggregator site

 

cheers, Mark

[bluesguy]

The pursuing foes were coming anyway. The players wrote quite a lot of fiction during that game: you can read about the demise of Jiro in this piece  on my ancient and long-gone website from last century, preserved like a fly in amber on some aggregator site

 

cheers, Mark

 

Very cool story.  Really enjoyed reading it.

[Markdoc]

Good to hear. It was a fun game to GM - the entire campaign ran every other week for 4-5 years.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Lucius]

You're a hard act to follow, Doctor.

 

Somewhat on the topic of limiting Healing, I have always been inclined to allow Regeneration based builds for "fast healer" or "cinematic healing." I just now checked the rules and if Regeneration takes the Charges Limitation, it apparently does NOT require the Charges to be "Continuing" to cover the time the Regeneration takes.

 

But requiring that might be one way to allow Regeneration for heroically tough characters, but still keep it somewhat in check. I was interested in what you all might think of it.

 

While I'm at it, how do you see Regeneration interacting with the Impairing and Disabling rules?

[Markdoc]

Regeneration is a bit of a gamechanger, once you allow it past the week/day level. In the last FH game I played in, as opposed to GMing, I played a character with some trollish blood in his background (not so weird if you are thinking of norse trolde, instead of D&D trolls). It was not enough for him to go all Wolverine in combat, but it did mean that with a few hours rest he was fine, even if severely wounded. It gave the character far more staying power than any of the other martial types. Like Combat luck, if you allow (or even suggest) it, it rapidly becomes something that most martial characters will see as a must-have, because wounds which regenerating characters shrug off may cripple their character for prolonged periods. That means that either everybody else stops while their PC heals, or their PC hangs around in the background while everybody else is active, and essentially nobody wants that.

 

That in turn means that the nature of the game will change, because it makes it much harder for a GM to "threaten" PCs with physical harm - by which I mean that combat becomes much less consequential, and often therefore less exciting for the players. If wounds heal very rapidly, you don't really care if your PC is wounded. It becomes much like taking STUN damage. If you have good players and a game plot where combat is incidental, that might not matter much. But if physical combat plays a major role, it will change the whole gamestyle, as noted above. I think it works fine for any high fantasy game, and it does avoid the "someone has to play the healer" thing which often afflicts fantasy games.

 

You can also work with regeneration by limiting it, as you suggest. In the last campaign I ran (not the one in which Jiro died!), I allowed regeneration and also the big stop-sign power regeneration usable on others. And it worked fine, because the powers were heavily limited. Regeneration usable on others was only available as "empathic healing" - where as a side effect, the healer took the same damage that he healed (in effect, transferring the wound to himself). The healer also had access to regeneration via a "healing trance" which allowed him to regen 1 BOD/hour: but he was definitively out of action while doing it. That worked in the context of the game, since it set a natural limit (empathic healing could heal no more BOD than the healer could sustain at any one time - and obviously while they were in the middle of an adventure, there's a limit to how much the healer wanted to gakk himself) but allowed him to heal the entire group in a day or two when they had downtime - or, as described below - perform the occasional feat of heroic healing.

 

That gave us some good gaming stories. In one adventure, a PC got infected by a demon that implanted larvae (horrible writhing things covered in barbs and hooks) in its victims with a long "stinger". These would grow with unnatural rapidity, killing the victim in an agonizing fashion and hatching another demon out of their corpse. When this happened, the healer took control, getting the victim swiftly out of his armour, and getting two of the burliest PCs to hold him down. The healer then sliced  him open - with a sword - none of yer namby-pamby scalpel work here, and tore the larvae out of the victim's chest (inflicting more damage in the process). Everybody involved was sprayed in blood, the PC in question went from nearly full health to -7 BOD and near to death in two phases - and then the healer healed him empathically. Talk about heroic healing! Neither of them were in great shape (both ended up on 1 BOD, IIRC), but they both survived.

 

As for disabling and regeneration, technically speaking it only works on things that work off BOD, like injuries and transform, so it should have no effect on impairing/disabling. But it's hard to see why a character should remain disabled if they can rapidly heal all damage, except in cases where there is actual loss of a body part and the PC lacks the "can heal limb" adder. I guess you could argue that the disabling reflects a wound "that doesn't heal right" or some such. Either way it's a GM call. 

 

cheers, Mark