Healing, Hit Points and Assassinations

Minor Healing Spells - Cure Wounds and Healing Word

Under the model laid out yesterday in my post on magic points it's pretty clear, if it wasn't already, that healing in 5e is underpowered. Cure Wounds and Healing Word, at least in their current first level forms would look more or less like cantrips if ported over directly. The +Wis modifier to their healing actually lifts them to cost 4MP and 5MP respectively, which, with the "spells that cost less than your casting modifier to cast" makes them free to most casters in the 5e paradigm by 4th and either 8th or 12th level depending on whether you take a feat or or not. 

In a world with a functioning magic item economy, where buying either a Pearl of Wisdom +2 or an Ioun Stone of Wisdom is also a reasonable goal, you might sensibly expect a cleric, druid or bard around 6th level to be casting first level Cure Wounds free, and from 4th level Healing Word would be free. 

I am, however, not particularly a fan of this, and I am not a fan of cure spells where you can roll a 1 either. In combat, rolling a 1 on your damage dice reflects a glancing blow, stuff like that happens. When a divine force heals you, the energy sometimes misses? That doesn't feel right to me.

I'm going to propose changing Healing Word to a d10 healing, Cure Wounds to 2d6, they upcast as normal. The tweak to the text? Any roll lower than your casting stat modifier is automatically treated as if you rolled your modifier instead. So a first level cleric, Wisdom 16, casts Healing Word. Their results are 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. This is slightly better on average at first level (average 5.8 compared to 5.5) but upcasts nicely. If you cast it as a 4th level cleric with 18 wisdom at 2nd level, you'd get an average of 12.2 rather than 9 for example. With Cure Wounds you get an average of 8 at first level (slightly better than 7.5 under the current system) but with 4d6, minimum 4 on each at 4th caster level, casting a second level spell, you get an average of 18 rather than 13. That feeling of "Oh, crap, rolled a 1" feels better knowing you can replace it with your Wis modifier (or your casting modifier in general). 

The Mass Cure Wounds and Mass Healing Word, and the bigger cure spells like Heal basically have to be reworked to come into line with this. Mass Healing Word casts a first level Healing Word on up to six creatures, that's easy enough. Mass Cure Wounds casts a third level Cure Wounds on up to six creatures, also each enough. Heal as a sixth level spell heals for 70hp. Although, as I mentioned yesterday, I'm probably moving away from that every other level paradigm, it's reasonable to think that in 6e someone casting sixth level spells has maxed out their casting stat, maybe even has it to 22 or higher. Lets say 22. So, if they cast Cure Wounds at level six, they'd do 12d6, automatically roll 6 on everything for 72HP worth of healing. Heal cleans up blindness, deafness and diseases automatically too, but they're just not that common. Heal probably needs to heal more like 100 HP to keep its edge. Given we're looking at, in 5e terms, 11th level characters, and an 11th level fighter can easily have tough, 18-20 Con, and 10+10*6HP for a total of 136, a barbarian even more, healing for 100 at a time is not out of place. That might not be the case in my 6e, see below. Remember too, a paladin with 22 Charisma could be healing for 66 by laying on hands. 

Short and Long Rests

The short rest system for regaining HP in 5e makes sense, but, in all honesty, it's a mess. Even if you're a rules lawyer, it's a mess. If you're not, it's over-complicated, and short-rests are over-long. Anyone who has had a snack and made tea over an open fire can tell you it really doesn't take an hour if you know what you're doing. The long rest system, on the other hand is over simple.

Having made healing magic a bit more potent, especially at higher levels, I'm going to tinker, heavily, in the opposite direction here. 

In 6e, a short rest will last 15 minutes. You can take longer, but that's the minimum time. This makes it much more achievable during a chase, a dungeon and so forth. During that period, you can regain 1 HP per character level. Someone can attempt a medicine roll to allow you to add a bonus to this. I think the bonus should be d10, with a minimum of your Con modifier, but I'm willing to negotiate for something like 2HP per character level. You can benefit from regaining HP this way a maximum number of times equal to your Con modifier. If you have other things, like Monk's Ki points, Bardic Inspirations, Warlock Magic Points etc. that replenish during a short rest, they replenish even if you take more short rests than your Con modifier (optionally they might be limited to something else, like Wis for Ki points, Cha for inspiration and warlock MPs). 

During a long rest, the counter for the number of short rests you can take resets. In addition you regain your Con modifier x your level HP back. So a first level fighter with 16 Con - 3HP. A 12th level fighter with 18 Con, 48 HP. 

In all these calculations for short and long rests, there needs to be (minimum 1) every time it says Con modifier, and the other modifiers. You can always benefit from at least 1 short rest per day, you always get some HP back for a night's rest and so on.

EDIT: Following feedback in this post I reworked short and long rests a little, plus some stuff from HP below. Short rests regain 1HP/level, 2HP/level on a successful Medicine check. Long rests regain 2HP+Con modifier (min 1) HP/level. If you've dipped below AHP limit, your short rests get you 0HP, or 1HP/level on a successful medicine check, long rests work as normal and reset your short rests. If you dip below BHP, you can't regain HP from a short rest, your long rest works like a short rest with AHP (0 or 1HP/level with a medicine check) but the long rest resets you to the AHP state. All your other resources still recover normally with short and long rests regardless of how wounded you are.

Hit Points

It has been established, not just in D&D, that as you get better, rise in levels, you get more HP. There are games that buck this trend. In RuneQuest for example, before third edition anyway, it was rare to get more HP, you would get a bit more armour, but what increased your survivability was better parries, along with a chunk of "doing unto others what they would do unto you, but doing it first."

The problem with more HP as you level up is that a dagger to the heart, or the throat, or through the eye, ought to kill you, however tough you are. In RuneQuest, a critical hit when you miss your parry, and you're probably dead, almost certainly missing a limb. If you're caught asleep and out of armour, you're in real trouble. In D&D, your AC might fall, for some characters through the floor, but you just have the HP to weather the storm.

Although I expect actual 6e to look quite like everything since 3e, I'm going to propose a fairly radical shift.

The human body is such that, unarmored and untrained, a good hit from a sword kills you. That's what swords are designed to do after all. I'm going to say everyone, regardless of class, has base hit points BHP = 1+ Con modifier (minimum 1)+1 if they're a martial class (monk, paladin, ranger, fighter, barbarian). 

If you're caught asleep, you're possessed and instructed to kill yourself, something like that, this is what it takes to kill you. 

Before you scream TOO hard.

If you're active, you get active hit points AHP, which you add to your BHP, from your species, your background. These will be quite small amount, probably 2-6 each. But, lets say dwarves are tough, elves are wimpy, humans are in the middles. So dwarves get 6, humans 5, elves 4 for species. Goblins are even worse, they only get 3. If you're an elven warrior, you still get warrior training, that's worth 6, a dwarf wizard's apprentice only gets 2. As you level, you will also get a small amount from your level, but that will probably be 1 or 2 per level, nothing more.

In combat, you get a third chunk, combat hit points CHP. These can come from multiple sources, your dex, your wisdom or con (for monks and barbarians), magic (shield, mage armour, warding bond etc.) your worn armour etc but also your level. This looks most like your 5e HP. So you'd keep your d10 for a fighter, d12 for a barbarian, d6 for a wizard etc. and you'd be limited to 1 dice at first level, 2 at second and so on. But rather than having an unlimited number of them, the amount you could get would be limited by what you're wearing and other things. If you're in studded leather armour (AC12+Dex modifier) you'd have an extra bit of calculation to do: you'd get 2 HD from the armour, Dex modifier from your Dex, after that, you'd only get your Con modifier extra CHP. If you get +3 Studded Leather and your Dex to 26, you could count 5 HD for your armour, 8 for your armour, and then anything else, it's just your Con modifier. Someone in +3 Plate and +3 Shield could get 8+3 for their plate, 2+3 for their shield for a total of 16 HD. 

Bookkeeping this might seem confusing at first, you have these three pools, but once you get used to it, it's not too bad. Your BHP always apply. Your AHP apply if you're up and moving, whether that's on guard in camp, marching, shopping or whatever. Your CHP only apply when the DM tells you to roll for initiative and you're not surprised. 

If your CHP are damaged in one fight, and not healed, although they "go away" when the fight is over, they come back, still damaged in the next fight. You've got scrapes and bruises that weren't tended to and you still feel them the next time you try to fight. If you run out of CHP into AHP, you've got bigger cuts and things and if you run out of AHP into BHP you've got serious injuries. Optionally that can be rolled into the rules for healing, although I'm inclined not to go there.

This approach, although it's not necessarily obvious, gives first level characters some more HP, while capping out higher level characters, or at least slowing the increase. The sword and board builds get a tasty infusion of extra HP, to raise their tanking potential, and while this requires balancing for AC and CHP hit dice, you're not suddenly getting first level characters with 100HP which one approach could give, nor are you getting everyone hitting 20 hit dice at the top end. For those of your with long memories, this might harken back to 2e where most (not quite all) character classes capped out, fighters, for example, had a d10 hit dice still, but once they hit 9th level, they got 3 HP per level after that. Magic-users got a d4 hit dice, all the way to 11, then 1HP per level after that. Monks started with 2d4, then d4 per level, but that went all the way to the top. 

Assassination

These three hit point pools mean you don't really need complicated rules for adjudicating assassinations. If you find someone asleep, they're on BHP. If you sneak up on them, they're on AHP+BHP only, and they're surprised. They're far easier to kill and, sadly, that's suddenly more realistic. You can still give the assassin subclass some love, letting them do automatic critical hits for example, and some other things, but more people can take out their sleeping foe without a horrible bit of flanging from the DM.

Fudge D&D and HP, healing etc.

Unless Fudge D&D goes full on level-free, this basically just ports over. 

If you have stat pools rather than stat modifiers, it becomes a little bit different, but you could replace a lot of the things like short rests to regain HP limited to your Con modifier (min 1) with limited to your Max Con Pool (min 1) and have a very similar impact.