Topic: Regaining Hit Points

[Hurin]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I had an idea that I thought might be something to consider for the new edition of Rolemaster.

One problem with the 'gain 1 hp back per hour' (3 if resting) system with Rolemaster was of course that it meant that characters with higher hps took a lot longer to recover to full than those with low hps. This seems counterintuitive, since tougher characters should be expected to recover faster.

My suggestion would be to tie hit recovery to ranks in Body Development. If a character is active, say they get half their ranks in Body Development (rounded down) back in hps per hour. If resting, make it equal to their ranks in Body Development.

Thus, a character with 5 ranks in body development would normally get 2 hps back per hour while active, and 5 while resting.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could multiply the result by the racial recovery multiplier. Hps back per hour would thus equal:

ranks x recover multiplier (resting)
(ranks x recovery multiplier) / 2 (active)

Just a suggestion.

[yammahoper]

Personally I think recovery should be Co mod + number of ranks in body dev per day.  Deep bruising last much longer than a few hours.  I also think weapons should do less cocussion on average, with most being delivered via crit.

Not very heroic I know, but still more heroic than real life.

[Arioch]

My suggestion would be to tie hit recovery to ranks in Body Development. If a character is active, say they get half their ranks in Body Development (rounded down) back in hps per hour. If resting, make it equal to their ranks in Body Development.

I really like the idea, and I'm probably gonna test it in my game very soon!

[intothatdarkness]

Something to keep in mind for more modern settings. Honestly, I never worried about healing rates in fantasy settings because of magic, herbs, and so on.

[Old Man]

I used something along the lines of (2 + CON bonus/5) CP per hour of rest for CP damage.

(I then added blood loss as separate and that healed per day.)

[GrumpyOldFart]

Something to keep in mind for more modern settings. Honestly, I never worried about healing rates in fantasy settings because of magic, herbs, and so on.

Having seen one-on-one games where the PC was a 1st level spellcaster, I've had to pay attention to it in fantasy (RM2, it was) as well. The spellcaster in question spent much of his time at first hauling off to a safe place and healing up before going back out.

That's one of the things I've always appreciated about ICE games for that matter, the fact that yes, you might even benefit from things like paying attention to 'normal' recovery rates, the kinds of things nobody has to pay attention to in other fantasy games but everyone has to pay attention to in RL.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Of course, one of the reasons for that in my case is because I never did buy into the idea that giving a healing herb an "instantaneous effect" made all its problems go away. On the contrary, it made all the biochemical price of using that herb come due all at once, just like the effects take place all at once. "Makes the effect instantaneous" to me meant "speeds up the process until it's too fast to consciously register."

Practical effects of this attitude:

1. If you're going to take nearly any kind of instantaneous herb, you should probably drink water until you're practically sloshing out your ears before you take it. Depending on the herb, you might have to roll system shock to keep from dying of dehydration if you fail to do this. Almost anything animal bodies use, up to and including oxygen, use up water in the process of performing their functions.

1a. Because of the above, most instantaneous herbs are not suitable for use on unconscious patients.

2. Many "healing" herbs not only provide fuel for recovery and or/tweaks to blood chemistry to alter the healing process, they purge the system of unwanted substances. Note that it's just an herb, the only avenues it has for this are those inherent in the patient's biology, such as respiration, perspiration, urination and defecation, vomiting, etc. If "the effects are instantaneous" in any herb with purgative qualities, the avenues it uses for those functions are likewise instantaneous. In other words, you might want to take off the patient's clothes before administering the herb, and he'll probably want a bath afterwards. For that matter, anyone who stood too close to him when he took it might want a bath as well.

2a. Due to the above, an animal that can track you by scent for a day will be able to spot the place where you took that healing herb a lot longer than a day later.

3. Unless the herbal mixture in question also contains items for recovery (healing generates its own forms of fatigue poisons, no? And it also certainly uses up a lot of a body's fuel reserves) then once the effect takes place the patient will likely have to make some sort of Constitution RR in order to remain conscious. So now you have a patient who's healthy.... just starving.

[yammahoper]

Unless of course the herbs accelerated effects are magical in nature, then no side effects need apear. 

Still, I like the thinking.  It certainly would contribute to story telling and setting the scene.  I like it.  Yet I think the RAW doesn't intend it...as if that means anything   

[Hurin]

Oh, I should probably note, for both my suggestion and Yamma's: there should be a minimum of 1hp per hour. If someone had no ranks in body development, s/he should still get the minimum.

[yammahoper]

I would like to see new rules for healing blood loss.  It is the elephant in the room regarding hit loss and healing.  I have been enemic.  A few hours of sleep doesn't make it go away.

My best house rule was to track blood loss from Co.  You had as many blood hits as Co which were tracked seperately: and there is one of the problems as all these additional optional rules require considerable paper work.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Unless of course the herbs accelerated effects are magical in nature, then no side effects need apear.

Depends on the nature of the magic involved. I've been heavily involved in "spell research" using the 'Aspects' and 'Attributes' idea from HARP College of Magics. If you treat a magical effect as something built up from smaller bits, odd things can happen, basically program glitches. The above list was based on the idea of taking a normal herb growing wild and using druid spells on it to make its normal effects over hours or days take place in less than 1 combat round.

But yeah, if the magic of the plant was put in place at sometime past by someone who got all the fiddling little details right, and/or was done long enough ago that evolution has weeded out whatever didn't work, then there may be no side effects. If there are side effects, even subtle ones, you get however many hours or days worth of that all in less than a combat round, too. And what is subtle spread out over 2 days may not be when spread out over 2 seconds, or even 10 seconds.

I wonder what 2 days' worth of applying aloe vera juice to the skin would do if the effects were speeded up to 10 seconds or less. More than just treat the sunburn, I bet. I'd think a big part of the skill of 'Herbalism' consists simply of knowing those kind of details.

Hmmm... "Instant" Foxglove. "Instant" Belladonna. The assassin's pharmacopeia could get really interesting...

 

[jdale]

In our game, we track bleeding damage separately from other hits (we automate this so it's not any more work). It has to be healed as a blood vessel injury, with the appropriate recovery time calculations.


I agree about the base concussion hit recovery rate, incidentally. Hits don't merely model your physical ability to withstand damage. There is also ability to withstand shock and fatigue. Otherwise it would be grossly unrealistic to gain so many at higher levels, and also this helps explain why people in heavy armor take so many extra. But if your ability to withstand damage is in part your ability to shrug off shock and keep going, it doesn't make sense that a high level warrior should take much, much longer to recover than a low level warrior.

[arakish]

I am a little late getting in on this...

Here is the method I have been using for about 25 years (or from when the first RoCo had the BodDev skill).

Active: (Co bonus + BodDev ranks) per hour (Co bonus < 0 = +0)
Resting: Active x 2
Sleeping/Bed Rest: Active x 3

Resting did include the normal activities of "call of nature", fixing/eating meals, etc. just nothing more than general "walking" movement.

I never found any unbalancing in play with using the above.  Besides, if all the party suffered were concussion hits, it allowed them to recover faster and get back into role playing instead of playing out "You are still recovering from your beat down." crap.  And I did apply these rules to the monsters as well.  Can't give the PCs too much of an advantage.

Wounds still took normal recovery times such as "deep" or "bone" bruises, slashes, punctures, broken bones, and sometimes the effects of some viral infections.

Bleeding damage is recovered at a rate of 1 per day.  This is to simulate the body's need to remanufacture new blood.  However, even though this was in my House Rules, I never truly enforced it unless the PC lost a LOT of hits due to bleeding (usually at least 20+).

rmfr

[RandalThor]

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could multiply the result by the racial recovery multiplier. Hps back per hour would thus equal:

ranks x recover multiplier (resting)
(ranks x recovery multiplier) / 2 (active)

Except, in RM the recovery multiplier is a fraction if it is good. Which means, by your method, someone with a .5 recovery multiplier (which is supposed to represent faster healing) would heal at half the rate of someone with a 1.0. Instead of multiplying the Hits healed, have it affect the time in which those hits heal. So, two characters that are otherwise equal, except one has a .5 recover multiplier and the other has a 1.0 would heal the same amount, only the guy with the .5 would heal it in half the time.

Otherwise, I like the idea. But I would add that as a character gets further along into the aging process (provided they aren't an immortal elf, that is), this gets affected in some way, as to make their healing slower - I know I don't heal as fast as I used to. Perhaps each age category past middle could add one-half (rounded up) more to the recovery multiplier. So, a normal human, with a RM of 1.0, gets to middle-age +1, so his RM goes from 1.0 to 1.5.

[Hurin]

Ah yes, you are right-- I did not realize that.

So should it be:

(ranks x hours spent) / recovery multiplier

?

[RandalThor]

Ah yes, you are right-- I did not realize that.

So should it be:

(ranks x hours spent) / recovery multiplier*

?

No, I don't think so. From what I gather, the recovery multiplier is supposed to modify the length of time it takes for specific injuries to heal, so it modifies the time, not the hits. (Though an argument could be made that one affects the other.) And, actually, the RecMult isn't supposed to affect how fast a character heals hits at all, but specific injuries noted in the descriptions of criticals (like broken arms, bruised kidney, etc). But, as GM you can always change that.

[Nortti]

I also think that the guy with 150 hp should recover to full hp about the same time as another one with 15 hp. Theres some good ideas here how to implement this and I will also choose a method to remedy this.

[RandalThor]

I think that because Body Development and a character's constitution grant them greater hits, they shouldn't necessarily also grant them faster healing.

Maybe it should be more like an injury takes a set amount of time to heal, say 10 days, and then the character's racial healing modifier is applied, say .9, for an end result of this injury healing in 9 days. Divide the character's Hits by 9 (rounding however you wish) and each day they get that much back. Of course, things like extraneous activity and the like can push this back, so if the same character was still traveling and that means his healing time is doubled (to 18 days), then you would just divide by 18 to see how many Hits per day they healed.

With this, yes a 1st level character and a 20th level character, with the same injury and healing rate will heal at the same time. The difference is that the 20th level character likely has access to more healing options to heal quicker, if they so choose to do so.

Remember: Youth is a much more important thing in determining healing rates than how many traps you have disarmed or how many orcs you have killed (i.e. experience).

[providence13]

I've wondered about dropping Body Dev altogether. You could just use Co or Co stat + SD bonus.. whatever.

There are some excellent reasons to make certain RR's always be vs 1st lvl. Why not hits?
Wonder if Body Dev isn't just a carry over from the old D&D mindset.

I agree with RandalThor about kids healing faster than adults.
But, old folks can take more of a pounding, so maybe SD stat bonus could be added to hits/age bracket of development.

"Some races heal faster or slower than others. Each race
has a healing “recovery multiplier”—just multiply this
factor by the normal number of healing days to get the
actual number of healing days required." RMSS pg 129.
  Yeah, fractions are better. When I took over as GM for the group, they had it backwards. I said "Read the rules. There's no way elves get faster healing too. Aren't they pimp'd enough?"

On Bleeding.. For me, this is any continuing damage that can lead to shock/death. I believe RAW is "bleeding, ongoing pain.." So I accept a generalized view on continuing damage and not actual hemorrhaging for every "bleeder".

[RandalThor]

I've wondered about dropping Body Dev altogether. You could just use Co or Co stat + SD bonus.. whatever.

There are some excellent reasons to make certain RR's always be vs 1st lvl. Why not hits?
Wonder if Body Dev isn't just a carry over from the old D&D mindset.

Well, I have done something like that for HARP (in my rules for making HARP level and professionless, which is much easier than RM, to be sure), but instead of the attributes setting the base, the race (size) set the base Hits, while the attributes modified this base. Example: Human = base 80 Hits. Then add Str and Con mods to that total. The reason for Strength? Mass/density. If Hits represent actual physical damage and not an abstract idea of being able to "turn at the last second to minimize the hit" (which I think is better served with increase in DB and OB set for DB), then Strength and muscle-mass should play as big a part - if not bigger - than Constitution. (Which is better served as being a health attribute. You know, it helps resist disease and infection.) And before you go, "Holy moly! That's a lot of hits!!!!" Remember: In RM, it is not the Hits that kill you, but the Crits. A huge guy with 200 Hits can be killed from a single hit dealing 20 Hits - but with a "straight to the brain" Crit.

And, yes, I fully believe that Body Development is nothing but a carry over from D&D.

On Bleeding.. For me, this is any continuing damage that can lead to shock/death. I believe RAW is "bleeding, ongoing pain.." So I accept a generalized view on continuing damage and not actual hemorrhaging for every "bleeder".

Either way is fine with me.

As for Self Discipline helping, I think it is better used as a mitigating modifier on shock/stun modifiers. Someone with a high SD (& bonus) would be able to operate a little better (less of a negative) when injured because they can focus through the pain more than someone with a low SD & bonus. And SD does not automatically get better with age.