Healing Advantage House Rule

[Edges]

A common trope in fiction is the wound that is too serious to be able to heal even with magic (or chi/psionics/herbs/etc.). Minor wounds are healed easily even by a novice but one must find a master for a grievous wound.

With the healing advantage or spells from GURPS Magic, you can just keep trying (even if you have to sometimes wait a day) and you can eventually heal anything that wasn't caused by some kind of Cosmic modifier or something.

I was thinking of possible house rules to address this. One could be to dispense with the repeated attempt penalties and only allow a single healing on a given wound. After that, it must recover naturally. Another option I've come up with would be to give a penalty to the healing roll based on the severity of the wound (maybe -1 per 3 HP if tracking individual wounds or -1 per 5 HP if not).

Do you have any thoughts on this approach? Would you make any other changes if you were to use either of these ideas (to cost, rolls, etc.)? Do you have other creative ways of simulating this trope?

Thanks!

[Taneli]

Sounds fine as a house rule.

If you care about "balancing" your house ruled Healing vs unmodified Healing, it would probably get a limitation of some sort, though I'm not sure on the value. One try per wound (when actually tracking wounds) might be something like -20%, can't really justify it, except that it's half of full immunity from increased immunity.

[Rolando]

the magic spells is in a sense a way of saying only a master may heal mayor wounds as one of the spells only heals a few points and then have penalties.

By limiting the magic available only a master will have major healing.

Still, it is a good house rule for the Healing advantage... you may require a physician level minimum as a prerequisite to allow for greater healing or no limit to using the healing, or just a plain unusual background maybe.

[Varyon]

If you have the Pyramid article on Conditional Injury, while I don’t recall it being addressed by the article, I’ve long (since reading lwcamps’ Semi-cumulative Wounding System, which I regard as a predecessor) felt it would be appropriate under such a system to replace the iteration penalties of many GURPS healing abilities with needing to match or exceed the wound’s severity to actually remove it, with lesser healings either doing nothing or being temporary - but you can still attempt to heal as often as you want (and are capable of, given FP costs). Something like that could be an option here.

EDIT: A similar, alternative option would be, since you have to track wounds separately for the houserule anyway (even if you just add them all together to see what sort of shape the character is in), would be instead of marking a wound as "no longer healable" once someone tries to heal it, you instead mark down how many HP were healed. Then, if someone tries to heal again, the next healing of that wound does nothing if equal or inferior to the original healing, or replaces the original healing if superior. That way, you can't heal a severe 10 HP wound 1 HP at a time - you can make it a less-severe wound with lesser healing, but the only way to outright remove it is a 10 HP heal.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Edges

I was thinking of possible house rules to address this. One could be to dispense with the repeated attempt penalties and only allow a single healing on a given wound. After that, it must recover naturally. Another option I've come up with would be to give a penalty to the healing roll based on the severity of the wound (maybe -1 per 3 HP if tracking individual wounds or -1 per 5 HP if not).

I was thinking maybe at certain injury levels we could instate things like Slow Healing, and those time divisors could be applied to external healing as well as the innate kind.

Like essentially unless you have Unkillable most characters gain Unhealing -20 at -5x HP: losing 6xHP on merit of being dead.

You could perceive this as gaining -10 in disadvantages per 3xHP lost, so maybe at -2xHP someone could gain Slow Healing 2 from B155? (ignore for Unkillable or Supernatural Durbility)

Halfway there (1.5x HP loss is being half your HP below 0) you could do Slow Healing 1, and Slow Healing 3 could kick in at 4.5xHP lost: being 3.5xHP below 0 (-35 for HP 10).

For people who already have Slow Healing they could get there faster, while people with Rapid Healing or Very Rapid Healing could get there slower, buying off those advantages before taking on the disads.

On a more micro scale: gaining -5 in limitations per 1.5x HP loss could be seen as gaining -1 in limitations per 0.3xHP lost (30% increments)

I don't know what that would represent though since the slow healing comes on in 5pt multiples... I guess you could apply -20% limitaitons to a "Not Unhealing 1" via stuff like Unreliable or Requires HT roll.

To make this a 0pt feature you could pay for it by giving the character Magic Resistance 5 (Healing Only -80%) [2] (just guessing at this value, T63's Flawed Magic Resistance only goes up to -30% for not working against 5 colleges but I want it to not work against all but one) in matching levels.