Healing and survival

[Nils_Lindeberg]

I read the very long healing thread that SJ started with his suggestion for a healing spell.

With a few minor modification I think one can reach a decent compromise between the larger than life dungeon crawlers and the "combat should be deadly"-crowd.

First:
Physicker can heal per wound, no matter when you got them. Physicker even without a kit should be able to heal 1 by improvising. And I would suggest an IQ 8 or 9, 1 point Talent; First Aid for a quick 1 healed point with proper equipment. And you can stop bleedings. If you buy Physicker and already have First Aid it will cost one less.

This makes a tank that takes a lot of small hits a real tank that can keep going, but if he gets hit by a severe blow he will be have a slow to heal injury that can last for weeks.

Second:
Instant death is way to common for heroics. I would add a bleeding out rule. You have fST and ST. Once you run out of one you start taking the other. If you go below 4 in either one your get -3, both -6. If one get down to 1 your are out for the count. If ST goes to 0 you start to bleed, 1 fST every turn.

This means that a crit will not usually kill you, but you will be mortally wounded and bleeding out, putting a timer on the combat. And there will still be the possibility of a party wipe, or the survivors getting captured or problems with leaving a friend behind, etc. No instant cure exists that gets them back on their feet in the middle of the fight, so it still feels "deadly" since you will lose, but you can take some risks and dare to be heroic as an individual. General melee combat will not change at all, except people mostly get knocked out rather than dead.

Third:
The wording of the Aid spell is changed so that the ST you get are fST. If they are above your normal maximum, you have two turns to use them. If you are already fatigued, it heals fatigue. This way a wizard can heal an exhausted or bleeding party member or speed up their recovery a little by taking on some of the fST himself.

Fourth:
Healing spells.
IQ8(T): Healing I, cost 1. Heal 1, once per wound, on one wound.
IQ11(T): Healing II, cost 1. Heal 2. Prereq Physicker or Healing I.
IQ14(T): Healing III, cost 1. Heal 3. Prereq Master Physicker or Healing II

The low cost is just a measure that it takes 15 minutes for the wizard to rest it back so the wizards won't be much better in the long run with many injured on a battle field for instance. The advantage for a wizard over a Physicker is that he is quicker, but at the cost of fST instead of time.

So a Physicker and a Wizard (also IQ 11) can heal 2+2 for each wound. So a good hit from a battle axe of 14 hits, minus some decent armor, lets say 5, gives you 9 wounds. Weak or wounded characters will be knocked out and start to bleed to death others will survive, get som healing and soldier on. A tank with 7 points of armor and a Physicker/wizard combo of 5 healing can stay on his feet and tank for a long dungeon. Every hit of 12 or less will be taken care off in between fights. Until he catches a crit, other spike damage or too many small hits in one fight and goes down. And in a long dungeon there will be a lot of rolls and some crits, the triple one will come. Is it from a small weapon he might even survive, but he will be knocked out. Especially if he had already been hurt.

If talents and spells are taken together, one will save a point or two (or 3 to 6 points if you are Hero) on the lower level healing spells that can be ignored if you have the talents.

With these relatively small changes we keep the feeling of TFT. We make tanking something that actually can work. Healing duties can be spread out and existing talents are still worth just as much as before. Wizard can full fill the spot of party healer if need be. And if he is a healer he won't cast only healing spells, because they are a little bit too weak for prolonged combat, unless you want to get someone unconscious back on their feet quickly so you can withdraw.

A lot less people will die if there is a healer in the group that have at least First Aid and som equipment to use it. But people will still go down just as fast. Except for wizards that will cast with fST and still have extra ST to take wounds, but they usually were too squishy for dungeon duty anyways and very boring to play once they got a wound or two.

Practically we used to mark wounds with a circle. Separate them into different groups, one group per wound. If we had a group with 5 wounds and it got physickered, we erased 2 of them and marked the rest with a slash. If we later on got Healed I we erased one more and marked the remaining ones with an X. And those X marked ones were long lasting and could only be healed with potions and rest. fST were kept as a running tally since there were no long term or limitations on healing or resting them back.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Nils_Lindeberg

I read the very long healing thread that SJ started with his suggestion for a healing spell. ...

Hi Nils,
I like these ideas. In my campaign, you can give a wizard any amount of fatigue ST (fST), but raising attributes is limited to +5. (So you can give an archer +5 bonus DX, but not +12 DX for eye shots.)

In real life, people get knocked out quite a bit more often than they die, and many people are mortally wounded and will die without medical treatment.

So I like the idea that you fall unconscious at ST 1 and 0. You are mortally wounded from -1 ST to -3 ST (but can be treated by healing potions, magic or regular healing), and are dead at -4 ST.

Steve Jackson in some other thread seemed not to be eager to add the First Aid talents. I rather like some healing with out having to give people high IQ talents.

Warm regards, Rick.

[Skarg]

We always did healing per wound.

I agree that magic healing should be limited to one casting per wound. Otherwise healing spells create an annoying mini-game of resting, Aid spells, and infinite fast healing.

I wouldn't stack spell healing limits with physicker healing limits, because I would not want 6-point wounds to be made to disappear in five minutes.

I would not restrict what healing potions can heal, because they're a limited expensive fragile resource. (I might make them take a while to actually complete the healing though).

I would use the popular house rule where you need to take full ST damage to be killed. Fatigue can add to injury to limit spellcasting and make you pass out, but I wouldn't have it result in death.

I do like at least a few points more than 1 of distance between unconsciousness and death. I want death to remain fairly easy to occur, but not as easy as 1 point from unconsciousness.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

The popular rule about a full ST hit in order to kill your. How does that work? If I have full ST at 15 and I take one 15 hit I die, and if I have 2ST left due to earlier wounds and get a 14ST hit I am knocked out but not dead? Seem a little strange to me, but I can see it working. D&D5E uses a similar system. You go down on any hit and end up at 0 HP. If you go all the way to negative max HP in one attack, you die. Otherwise you end up at 0 HP. And at 0 HP you roll to survive so no one knows how much time you have.

I am not too fond of the -3 ST before you die. Sure it gives a margin of error which is better than the current rules, but in my opinion it is too small. There is no tension to try to save the dying guy like you have in many other systems that have "bleeding out" or the equivalent. And your actual ST doesn't matter much, once you are knocked out you are just as easily killed as anyone else. -Negative half your max ST would work. I go with fST instead of negative ST for two reasons. Once you start to bleed and get healed you will at least be tired. And if you are exhausted from exposure and what not, everyone will care, since it lessens their ability to survive after unconsciousness. And it also provides a natural step go from exposure fST damage to real damage once you go unconscious. I even allow mages to cast spells that are too big for them and they knock themselves out and take the rest as real wounds. But I realize that might skew the power level too much and might not be for everyone. So it is not part of my suggestion.

Either way. A system that lets you get knocked out of the fight, so the fights doesn't get longer or less "deadly". But at the same time your character might survive to continue the story. Maybe going below 0 put you in a mortally wounded category and you heal naturally at half speed...

Healing 3+3 points might seem like a lot. But it represent the best medical attention you could get. And a 6p wound is a lot, but if you don't die at 0, but at negative ST, etc. 6p is just a half assed hit with a sword. A good hit with a sword will linger, even if you heal half of the wound, the rest will put you in sickbed and might force a retreat. And do you feel that 6 points would be too much to heal from potions as well in a high experience campaign? In a starting group 1+2 would probably be the more common amount of healing available. So healing gets better, people can also take more damage without dying. People can soldier on in a dungeon crawl and so on. More than one parameter changes with the suggested rulings.

My main point is to take them as a whole, or switch some parts with other similar parts, but they should go together. And these are the ones I think leaves the smallest footprint with the biggest positive effects.

But if 3+3 per wound still feels like too much. Increase the IQ needed for the wizard spells. Maybe (9),12,15,18 and use the Aid spell as the first "step" and a poor man's healing. You can heal fST at the cost of fST. And then the three Heal I, II and III spells. Then only the best guilds or healing places can offer that last point. And so, being healed by the king's own physician significantly lowers your recuperation time. And wizardly average IQ is generally higher than a Hero with Physicker skills.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Nils_Lindeberg

The popular rule about a full ST hit in order to kill your. How does that work? If I have full ST at 15 and I take one 15 hit I die, and if I have 2ST left due to earlier wounds and get a 14ST hit I am knocked out but not dead?

No, the oft-mentioned house rule is not about the size of individual wounds.

It's just that you track wounds and fatigue separately. They combine to determine whether you're unconscious or not, and how much ST you can spend casting spells. When wounds + damage reduce you to ST 1 or less, you collapse... (So far, it's the same as described in the published rules in AM and AW.)

The difference is just that if you are reduced to ST 0 by wounds and fatigue, but the wounds (not counting fatigue) do not exceed your ST, then you are unconscious but not dead. The fatigue recovers at 1 per 15 minutes, and when it rises above ST 1, you wake up. If wounds total up to your ST, you die.

(Then there are other ways some people make it harder to die. Either they simply raise the death threshold by a few points (so you die at -4, or negative ST/2, or something), and/or they have some more developed systems for figuring out what happens.)

[Nils_Lindeberg]

Ahh so just regular RAW then.

Thanks for explaining. We have always used separate fST, and it does save some wizards life, but still, the system is very deadly. And I don't really see the point with that.

I like the feeling of suspense that every attack on me can be my last. And I play carefully because even if I don't get a crit for 20+ damage, I will still go down fairly easily and be out of the fight. Not only boring, but potentially a party wipe. I don't need the added problem with people dying all the time as a GM.

As a GM I usually roll almost all rolls openly to increase the tension, but that means you need a plan B when the rolls go against the players. Being able to take fST + ST before you die give you that buffer. While at the same time doesn't increase characters' staying power, they go down just as fast, they just doesn't die from every crit or from a normal hit with a battle axe.

[Skarg]

I ran and played in TFT heavily for about 6 years, with double pole weapon damage, no limit on missile spell damage, no healing magic except potions, etc., and thought the death rate was not in need of a lot of nerfing.

If I follow your description right, I think you are suggesting that death is essentially only at full negative ST (a ST 13 person dies at -13 rather than 0). I think that's far too generous, particularly because then there would be many weapons that will not do enough damage to kill someone without doing double or triple damage, even to a nearly-dead victim, and maybe not even them.

e.g. Bob (ST 12) is wounded down to 3 ST. Zorg comes up to him with a shortsword and attacks! "Oh no, non Bob!" his friends cry out.

Well, even if Zorg rolls max damage (11), that's only going to drop Bob to -8. Not enough to kill him. If Zorg rolls double damage, he'd need to roll a 9 or greater on 2 dice to do enough damage to kill Bob. And Bob was not even wearing any armor.

i.e. you'll go from "most people who fall are dead" to "almost no one who falls is actually dead".

What I'd want is "people who fall may or may not be die - it depends on how badly they were hit, whether they get prompt medical attention, and some luck, but there's a real chance any who falls from weapon hits has a chance of dying.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

No, the oft-mentioned house rule is not about the size of individual wounds.

It's just that you track wounds and fatigue separately. They combine to determine whether you're unconscious or not, and how much ST you can spend casting spells. When wounds + damage reduce you to ST 1 or less, you collapse... (So far, it's the same as described in the published rules in AM and AW.)

The difference is just that if you are reduced to ST 0 by wounds and fatigue, but the wounds (not counting fatigue) do not exceed your ST, then you are unconscious but not dead. The fatigue recovers at 1 per 15 minutes, and when it rises above ST 1, you wake up. If wounds total up to your ST, you die.

(Then there are other ways some people make it harder to die. Either they simply raise the death threshold by a few points (so you die at -4, or negative ST/2, or something), and/or they have some more developed systems for figuring out what happens.)

Originally Posted by Nils_Lindeberg

Ahh so just regular RAW then.

Thanks for explaining. We have always used separate fST, and it does save some wizards life, but still, the system is very deadly. And I don't really see the point with that.

I like the feeling of suspense that every attack on me can be my last. And I play carefully because even if I don't get a crit for 20+ damage, I will still go down fairly easily and be out of the fight. Not only boring, but potentially a party wipe. I don't need the added problem with people dying all the time as a GM.

As a GM I usually roll almost all rolls openly to increase the tension, but that means you need a plan B when the rolls go against the players. Being able to take fST + ST before you die give you that buffer. While at the same time doesn't increase characters' staying power, they go down just as fast, they just doesn't die from every crit or from a normal hit with a battle axe.

It's not the regular RAW, it lets wizards take more damage. With the house rules, at ST 12, no matter how much casting you do, it still takes 12 damage to kill you. In the RAW, if you have ST 12 and you spend 3 points casting, 9 points of damage kills you.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

I ran and played in TFT heavily for about 6 years, with double pole weapon damage, no limit on missile spell damage, no healing magic except potions, etc., and thought the death rate was not in need of a lot of nerfing.

If I follow your description right, I think you are suggesting that death is essentially only at full negative ST (a ST 13 person dies at -13 rather than 0). I think that's far too generous, particularly because then there would be many weapons that will not do enough damage to kill someone without doing double or triple damage, even to a nearly-dead victim, and maybe not even them.

e.g. Bob (ST 12) is wounded down to 3 ST. Zorg comes up to him with a shortsword and attacks! "Oh no, non Bob!" his friends cry out.

Well, even if Zorg rolls max damage (11), that's only going to drop Bob to -8. Not enough to kill him. If Zorg rolls double damage, he'd need to roll a 9 or greater on 2 dice to do enough damage to kill Bob. And Bob was not even wearing any armor.

i.e. you'll go from "most people who fall are dead" to "almost no one who falls is actually dead".

What I'd want is "people who fall may or may not be die - it depends on how badly they were hit, whether they get prompt medical attention, and some luck, but there's a real chance any who falls from weapon hits has a chance of dying.

The rules I've been toying with are potentially more generous than that -- but potentially less generous, depending. Here's what I'm going to try out. It's a bleeding-out / stabilization system ala D&D:

• Use popular house rule about separate damage and fatigue tracking with unconsciousness at ST 0, not ST 1
• When you take a hit that increases total damage past your ST, you start bleeding out and need to be stabilized or else you die
• When you're bleeding out
  • If you take any more damage you die
  • You can be stabilized by a successful action by someone with First Aid (IQ 8, 1 talent point, can heal 1 hit) or better and then you're no longer bleeding out, just unconscious
  • You make one "death save" per turn, starting on the next turn, at 4/ST (a constitution-like talent could reduce dice for this). Three out of five results determine whether you live or die. On your third failure, you die at the end of the turn unless someone stabilizes you. This gives someone a chance to stabilize -- you'll last for at least three turns but you could last 5 turns.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

It's not the regular RAW, it lets wizards take more damage. With the house rules, at ST 12, no matter how much casting you do, it still takes 12 damage to kill you. In the RAW, if you have ST 12 and you spend 3 points casting, 9 points of damage kills you.

Yes, exactly, and worse, if you spend 10 of your 12 ST on spells, a 2-point hit will kill you.