Healing Reform

Well, as I mentioned this particular rule looks at first glance as if it is too powerful. Because of this I will elaborate a little bit about it to show why it makes sense.

First I show how the system works and then tell you why it might be OK.

Healing Reform:

The healing reform consists of a modification of how damage is healed or better of how much damage is healed in what time or by what spell.  

Spells and potions:

A Cure Light Wounds spell will no longer heal 1d8 points but 1d10+5% of the recipients maximum hit points. A Cure Moderate Wounds Spell now heals 2d10+15% of the recipients maximum hit points. It is the same with the other spells (but with different percentages, of course).

Here a table:

Cure Light Wounds (CLW)	1d10+5%
Cure Moderate Wounds (CMW)	2d10+15%
Cure Serious Wounds (CSW)	3d10+35%
Cure Critical Wounds (CCW)	4d10+50%

Table 1: Reformed healing spells

(the same applies to the reverse forms)

One can do the same with healing potions:

• Potion of healing (before 2d4+2): 1d10+10%
• P. of extra healing: Same as one Cure Critical Wounds or three times a Cure Light Wounds spells.

Example:

A character with 50 hp as maximum who is wounded to 37 hp is healed by 10%. This is 5 hp of healing and so the character has now 42 hp. If he is healed by another 32% one can say, even without calculation, that he reaches maximum hit points.

Natural healing:

• Normal (before 1 hp a day): 2% per day (of the maximum hit points)
• Tended by healer: additional 2% per day
• Healer has herbalism proficiency: yet another additional 2% per day
• Wounded has the fast healer trait: well, ... +2%/day

When dealing with regenerating creatures treat (in general) one hp as 2%. So a troll will regenerate 6% per round (which were 3 hp per round)

Healing and herbalism:

If a character falls below zero hit points he can not be healed above 1 hit point (now 2%...) by any cure wounds spell short of heal before he has rested one day. (This is an official optional rule which most groups I know make use of.)

A character with the healing proficiency who succeeds a proficiency check can heal 1d3 points of damage (now 1d3 * 2% ) once per day per character. 1d3+1 hit points ( (1d3+1) * 2% ) if he also has the herbalism proficiency (see Skills & Powers).

As an optional rule we say that with this proficiencies a character can be healed above 2% of his maximum hit points even if he fell below 0.

Example:

A fighter with 100 hp maximum was wounded to -5 hit points. A cleric cast cure light wounds on him and rolled 12%. This would normally heal 12 hit points, but since our fighter was below 0 hp he is only healed to 2% of his hit point maximum (= 2 hp). Now the cleric attempts to treat the wounds and rolls a healing proficiency check. He succeeds and since he also has the herbalism proficiency he can heal another (1d3+1) * 2% of that fighters wounds. He rolls the maximum of 8% and so our fighter gets another 8 hit points and reaches the maximum (for this state) of 10%. He will recover from no more of his wounds before he rests or a heal spell is cast on him.

Critical Wounds:

Critical wounds like struck or broken (see Combat & Tactics) are NOT affected by this reform.

Comment:

(a character dies at -10 (or -con) hit points)
The main thought for setting up this rule was the following:

Imagine a 1st lvl wizard with 4 hit points. When this wizard is wounded to 0 hit points his wounds are quite severe (he is near death), but it is possible to heal him with a simple CLW (1d8) spell far over maximum.

Imagine now a 15th lvl fighter with 100 hit points. If he is put to 0 hit points he is in the exact same state of wounding as the wizard (lost 100% of his hit points) but if you try to heal him with CLW spells you will need about 22 or so when you calculate a single CLW spell with 4.5 hp. Even if you use CCW spells you will need about 6 of them if one does 16.5 hp.

So, the before mentioned wizard will die of a single "critical" wound where a fighter may take 6 of them and live. This makes no sense. A critical wound should be exactly that: critical. But for that fighter 17 hp are only a mere scratch. On the other hand: A light wound should also be no more than a light wound but the "4 hp wizard" can be killed with a single cause light wounds if he is left untended.
You can do the same line of thinking when comparing those two characters having lost 2 hp for the wizard and 50 hp for the fighter which is in both cases a loss of 50% of the hit point maximum and by that, in principal, the same wound.

I do not think that it is good to see hit points as a pure capacity of the body and that a 15 hp wound looks the same on both the wizard and the fighter. It must not look the same because if a wound kills one man it should approximately do the same to the other. But, ... well 15 hp of damage might be a sword put through the heart of that poor wizard, because he is instantly stricken dead, but it can not be much more than a flesh wound to the fighter for he can live quite good with it. That means that one hit point is not the same as one hit point. The fact that the fighter can take "more" damage than the wizard can be explained by saying that the fighter actually evades part of it (by twisting around or so). So, where the wizard will take the sword straight on, the fighter "places the wound to a better place". In game he simply gets more hp's.

What is also not so good is that there is such a wide gap between the "normal" cure wounds spells and the 6th lvl Heal spell. With this spell a priest can heal 100% of all damage done to a creature be it wizard or fighter. In one case it substitutes one CLW spell in the other 22.

This all leads to the same question:

Why not make all the other cure wounds spells also percentile?

Because one has to calculate more. No, that is not true. In play we experienced that we had less to calculate, for when you lost definitely less than half of your hit points and are healed for 57% of your max. hit points you need no calculation to say that you are fully healed. Mostly one can simply guess without calculation.

If one realizes this, the only problem is to say what (in percent of the max. hit points) light, moderate, serious and critical wounds are.

We say the following:

• Light wound: loss of 10% of your hit points
• Moderate wound: loss of 25% of your hit point
• Serious wound: loss of 50% of your hit points
• Critical wound: loss of 70% of your hit points

(one may set other borders but these look nice to me)

This done the only thing to do is setting a die code which resembles roughly the given definition. That is possible if one says a d10 (we chose the d10 because it has a nice range) will show a 5 in the statistic middle (the correct value is 5.5 but one percent more or less is not important). With this we can simply say the following:

We start with 1d10 for a CLW spell if the d10 is counted as a five we need another five points to reach the ten for a light wound as an expectation value. Now we have 1d10+5 for a CLW. Done this we continue with 2d10 for a CMW spell which leaves 15 points to add to reach the 25. This results in 2d10+15 for a CMW spell. Same thing with 3d10/4d10 for the cure serious/critical wounds spells. The result is shown in Table 1 as shown above.

One should make some restrictions:

• Spells like Slay Living (reverse form of Raise Dead) should not be transferred to the reform. Which means that not a cause serious wounds is inflicted if the save was passed but 2d8+1 points of damage.
• Monsters like the eye tyrant should also not be transferred (think: the tyrant would kill one character per two rounds with a near guarantee, and only with the cause wounds eye).

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