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Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Healing and Recovery Woes

One of the things that hadn't worked to anyone's satisfaction in this Encounter Critical edition of UWoM was healing.

Now, EC's roll hit dice method, and receive a bonus if luxuriating, was not to my liking, mainly because it is too chaotic, with the disappointment of low rolls, or too speedy recovery, etc.

I had been using a variant of Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes recovery rules until I realised that it actually took longer to recover the fewer points needed to be healed.  I ran a lot of analysis, and couldn't believe that I hadn't spotted that before.  That was out, especially when players complained it required too much in-game downtime (yeah, I know, whiners).

I briefly toyed with the thought that tougher characters should heal faster, but it turned out that that approach simply made everyone heal completely in 10 days.  That wasn't it either.

Now, I have a method which is still proportional, but where folk with more hit points recover faster from lesser injuries, but still take longer to fully heal than characters who have fewer and lost all of them and mend faster.  I'm still not happy with this.  Something charty looks like it will have to be done, which also doesn't thrill me.

Thoughts or suggestions to fulfill my design criteria?

1). Tougher creatures recover more quickly
2). Having fewer HP and losing most or all of them should take longer to recover from than a creature with lots of HP who lost a lot, but proportionately fewer than the low HP creature
3). Simple method; easy to explain; etc.