A Straightforward & Scaleable Method for Hit Point Recovery

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I've analysed and critiqued the concept of Hit Points in the past. The gist of the critique is that whilst hit points conceptually are mostly "hero points", mechanically they are treated entirely as "wound points". And that grates.

The 10th level fighter with 60 Hit points who loses 80% of his hit points will need seven weeks to recover those 48 hp lost, assuming a basic 1 hp/day of recovery. Meanwhile, the 1st level fighter with 5 hit points who loses 80% of his hit points (and was near death with just 1 hp left) will need just four days to make a full recovery.

Besides the incongruence of this, it also has the mechanical downside of necessitating magical healing at higher levels for the game to be at all functional.

Art for the entry is from the old Swedish "Drakar och Demoner" supplement Torshem.

I've seen various elegant and less elegant attempt to remedy this, from healing HP equal to level per day (as 3e faultily suggested) to each added day of healing increasing the amount of HP recovered, to 5e's full "There are no wounds points in hit points" approach. But none of them really scale well to capture the blend of hit points as wound+hero points.

Fear not, this entry is short, because it doesn't actually require much to remedy the situation.

Recovery time: 2-70 days.

All that is needed is to introduce the concept of a "Recovery Die" to jot down on the character sheet and a method for calculating it that will scale to the total of one's HP. Here's the write-up: 

Every two days of full rest allows a Recovery Roll, using one’s Recovery Die [RD], to recover lost HP. To determine the size of one’s Recovery Die: 

Divide Total HP by 5 and round up.

I.e. 47 total HP = 1d10 RD (47/5 ≈ 10 = 1d10).

Round odd-numbered dice down to the nearest even number to reach a rollable die. I.e. a 'd7' result would yield a 1d6 recovery die.

Treat every two full increments above 12 as a +1 to 1d12. I.e.  93 HP total would give a 1d12+3 Recovery Die (93/5 ≈ 19 = 1d12+3).

Characters with 1-5 HP recover at a flat rate of 1 HP every other day.

On average, this means characters will make a full recovery from 1 hp to max hp in 14-19 days, though at lower levels (6-17 HP) the spectrum is more like 7-14 days (at hp 2-5, the math is self-evident). 

If this is too fast for you, simply increase the amounts rest days needed to be allowed to roll the recovery die, until you have a period of time to full recovery that suits the needs of your campaign.

Setting it to a recovery die roll every three days of rest will fit Gygax' original conception of 4 weeks = full recovery fairly well. Setting it to five days of rest per recovery roll will perhaps begin to approximate something non-cinematic.

Some may say that it is not straightforward but complex to calculate, but as I've argued in the past: Whatever can be put on a character sheet as a single number is not complex. You only need to calculate your Recovery Die whenever your hit point total changes. And rounding up your HP total to the nearest 5 or 10 and then dividing that by 5 is not really a complex calculation to do whenever you gain a level.

Yes, there are "quack-fu" ducks in Torshem. 

The Recovery Die can be used elsewhere as well. Maybe that's what you roll for healing potions and healing spells as well. And it's easy to tinker and adjust with, lowering or increasing the die in special circumstances, etc.

Comments

  1. CruxDM5 September 2024 at 07:24

    Why not just use character's base HD?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous5 September 2024 at 07:39

      Actually I thought that was what was going to be proposed too; fighters recovering d8 hp per day and mages recovering d4 etc.

      Delete
    2. Anders Honoré5 September 2024 at 07:51

      because it doesn't scale well to level, con, etc.
      a first level fighter and a 10th level fighter should have very different recovery rates.

      One alternative is to have the recovery die based on level (ie an 8th level character rolls 1d8) but that again means a mage recovers from 1 hp to max twice as fast as a fighter.

      Delete
  2. Jack Tremain5 September 2024 at 14:13

    I actually think that the unscaled recovery rates are a feat, not a bug. A hero who has lost 48 hp has endured bigger attacks, and received hits that would had kill a level 2 fighter. It makes sense that it takes longer time healing both physically and spiritually. If HP are health, they need more rest. If HP are valor, they need some time alone, reflecting on the fear they felt when they fought that dragon. If HP are luck, they need some time doing mundane things as to not push it too hard. And as HP are a mix of everything, they need to do a mix of everything.
    I, personally, think the solution lays on making downtime interesting, a difficult task indeed for which D&D has little guide

    ReplyDelete
  3. John de Michele5 September 2024 at 17:40

    Why not scale it to CON? Normal resting recovers 1/2 CON hp/day, while full bed rest recovers CON hp/day. That way, even an average CON score is worth something, and a high score is especially valuable.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Eric Diaz5 September 2024 at 23:03

    I've been doing 1/4 per day, like SotDL (IIRC).

    4 days of recovery is not too lenient if you consider these arent meat points, and that MUs recover all spells overnight.

    ReplyDelete

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