Homebrew rules part III: Lingering injuries and natural healing

Let us dwell further into the homebrew rules for my ongoing Storm King’s Thunder D&D 5e campaign. Last time I wrote about our modified critical hit rules, so it’s only fitting that I’ll write about injuries this time.

Combat is an essential part of any D&D campaign, and is easily the most complex part of the rules presented in 5e (even though this also has been streamlined compared to some previous editions). Each creature has hit point value and when taking damage reduces this score. When you reach 0 you are either dead, dying (in case of PCs and such) or unconscious. Usually damage have no lingering effects, and with a long rest the heroes are back to full health. Personally I find this highly unrealistic, and we have several minor tweaks to this whole damage thing.

Slower natural healing

You can sort of defend the notion that a characters fights as well on 1 hp as on max hp (if you consider dropping to 0 is akin to being truly knocked out), but suddenly and without any magical help being fully fit with just 8 hours of sleep? Well, I don’t like it. This kind of natural healing does whoever have some important benefits you should consider. By effectively letting characters heal themselves with just some rest, you free yourself from the need for a “heal bot” character – a character who mainly works as healing support and not much else. This lets players much more freely come up with an unorthodox adventuring group without the need for magical healing powers.

Taking this into to consideration I’ve come up with something I call slower natural healing. Instead of just getting back to full health with a long rest, players now gain some bonus HD that they can use to regain hits. After a long rest the players roll half their HD (rounded down, minimum 1) and regain that number of hit points. As usual players regain used HD at the normal rate.

Better Healing Potions

This is a very minor change. As we play with more deadly critical hits, the standard healing potions seems a bit underpowered. Instead of rolling dice to determine the number of hp regained, players just gain 10 hp. This also makes using potions in combat a bit more reasonable as players can decide if it’s worth the effort to use your action to quaff a potion. I’ve also introduced another common magical item, the minor healing potion, which cost 30 gp and heals 5 hp.

Broken bones are fine lingering injuries

Lingering Injuries

As mentioned damage in normal D&D have no lingering effects. In the DMG there are a variant rule you can use to give damage a bit more “punch” (page 272) called Lingering Injuries. There are several ways listed in how to implement these injuries and the book also includes a Lingering Injuries table. Firstly, players only suffer such an injury and must roll on a table when the drop to 0 hps and if they fail a death save by 5 or more. We also have a the rule that the DM rolls all death saves, and keeps the results hidden from the players, this prevents players metagaming and taking it slow if they for example know a character already has rolled 2 success and 0 failures.

Secondly, if you are going to use lingering injuries, do not use the table in the DMG. A 10% chance to lose either your arm or leg is way way too hard for players and will only make them hate the rule. You really need to go through the table and decide on bad but not truly horrifying injuries that will in many cases make the character useless (yes, losing arms and legs are pretty crushing!). Breaking bones and such are more realistic and things they can overcome naturally with just enough rest and medical care.

You also need to drop injuries that go away with magical healing. What is the point of suffering a ruptured spleen or broken arm if it goes away with a couple of hp in magical healing? And you shouldn’t just go the opposite way and demand high level magic to heal any such lingering injuries. Again me and my group has landed somewhere in the middle. For most lingering effects the character get rid of them only when they have regained their maximum health and at least some of it has been recovered using magical healing (or by natural healing over a set number of days, weeks or even months). This means the players also need to decide on spending more healing on one character to get them back fit for fight, and can’t just spread their healing across the group to continue the combat with several having lingering injuries holding them back.