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12-27-2022, 07:35 AM | #1 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
Rapid Healing [5 or 15] is a mundane physical advantage. You recover from injury (as opposed to stunning, knockout, and other short-term effects) more rapidly than most people, but still more or less within the boundaries of normal human capability. The first version of this advantage appeared in GURPS 1e. It’s extremely common on templates for combatants, and “tough guys” in general.
Recovery [10] is an exotic physical advantage. You recover from short-term effects of injury extraordinarily quickly. This first appeared in GURPS Aliens for 3e. As a stand-alone advantage, it’s kind of specific to genres where getting knocked out happens a lot, but it combines well with the other advantages in this posting and is less exotic than the following: Regeneration [10 to 150] is another exotic physical advantage. You recover from injury much faster than normal humans, depending on how much you’ve paid for the advantage. It won’t, however, let you regrow parts that have been chopped off and lost or destroyed. This also first appeared in Aliens. Regrowth [40] is a third exotic physical advantage, which lets you regrow missing body parts, provided there’s enough of you left to remain alive. It, too, first appeared in Aliens. If you have Rapid Healing [5], which requires that you have HT 10 or better, you get +5 to rolls to recover either hit points, or from crippling injuries. If you have Very Rapid Healing [15], requiring HT 12 or better, a successful roll to recover HP also means you recover two HP, rather than one. This combines very well with the “High HP and Healing” rule on p. B424: if you have 20 HP and VRH, you’ll recover four HP on each successful roll, and you only fail on a 17+. Recovery reduces the time you remain unconscious for any reason by a factor of 60. This can be quite spectacular: at 0 HP or worse, but above -1×HP, you get a HT roll to come round each minute, rather than each hour. Regeneration means you recover HP automatically, without having to make HT rolls. You do get natural healing as well, and the effects of Rapid Healing [5] come free with Regeneration. You can regain a hit point every 12 hours for [10], every hour for [25], every minute for [50], every second for [100] and 10 HP/second for [150]. And yes, “High HP and Healing” applies to this, that’s explicit on p. B424. You can’t have Regeneration if you have the Slow Healing or Unhealing disadvantages. You can if you have Draining, but damage from that disadvantage won’t regenerate and can eventually kill you. There’s a specific +40% enhancement to let you regenerate radiation damage, and a ‑60% limitation that means radiation damage is the only kind you can regenerate. The Regeneration spell does approximately the same thing as Regrowth. Powers adds several things: Regeneration that affects FP as well as HP (+100%), or only FP, not HP, ‑0%, or an Energy Reserve at the same price as FP. You can also modify Regeneration to repair an advantage, such as DR, but this is complicated enough that you should look in Powers. Regrowth means you regrow lost body parts, provided you can stay alive without them. An extremity, such as an ear or finger, comes back in weeks, a hand or foot in a few months, and an eye or limb in more months. If you have Regeneration, this happens very fast: all your body parts regrow in the time you need to recover all your HP. There’s a specific -‑50% limitation that only lets you regrow minor parts of your body. Powers lets you regrow multiple copies of lost body parts, although you have to pay points for them, reattach severed-but-intact body parts, or limit yourself to not re-growing from specific sources of damage (fire is always popular) or only being able to reattach parts, not regrow them. There’s an interesting demonstration in the GURPS corpus of the realism levels of these advantages: Action only allows Rapid Healing for characters, while AtE adds Recovery, even without mutant abilities. Banestorm, as a fantasy setting, has no realism limitations, and the write-up of the Hydra is a good demonstration of Regeneration enhancements. Bio-Tech can add all of these advantages except Recovery, although some of them require high TLs, and Horror has a lot of creatures with Accessibility limitations on these advantages. Locations: Hellsgate has a Regeneration potion to aid in torture, and that’s as bad as it sounds. Monster Hunters 3 uses Regeneration (Instant), but this is an error: it should be (Very Fast). Monster Hunters Power-Ups has an optional rule for Very Rapid Healing that makes it multiply healing from any source, and allows it to become a levelled trait, increasing the multiplier. I’ve used Regeneration in play, as an Alternate Ability of Healing, since self-affecting Healing is expensive. I’ve never had Recovery or Regrowth; I’ve GM’ed a 3e werewolf who had Rapid Healing, and worried TL6 doctors who didn’t know what was going on. How have these advantages played in your games?
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12-27-2022, 07:58 AM | #2 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
There is a fairly prominent houserule pricing regrowth at [10] points. I use that when it comes up.
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12-27-2022, 08:53 AM | #3 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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I know AotW threads normally aren't about houserules, but when perhaps the most infamously-overpriced Advantage (Regrowth) is involved, that's kind of inevitable.
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GURPS Overhaul |
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12-27-2022, 09:16 AM | #4 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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To stay topical - I use Regeneration a *lot* for my personal builds, with Regrowth and Recovery seeing some (but less frequent) use. The players in my old games used Regen a few times, but I can't recall any instances of the other traits. Rapid Healing never seemed to get used at all :/ |
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12-27-2022, 11:54 AM | #5 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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It's only really useful if the characters are relying on natural healing. If something better is available via magic, psi, ultra-tech or whatever, it isn't great value.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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12-27-2022, 12:30 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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Rapid Healing and Very Rapid Healing are Advantages that are good in theory, but I don't think they do much for a character in practice, outside of maybe a long-term survival campaign where no exotic traits are available (and thus needing to take care of an immobile wounded ally for only 3 days instead of 10 days actually helps a good deal). If normal healing allowed for a roll at -5 to recovery HP on a day that you don't spend the whole day resting (instead of just not allowing a roll), then Rapid Healing and Very Rapid Healing would probably be more worthwhile (as they would mean the character could recover while still doing adventuring things), although in a campaign where Slow Regeneration was available, Very Rapid Healing would be useless (unless you let it double the rate of regeneration as well as natural recovery, in which case you'd have the option of adding [10] to the value of any level of Regeneration to double it, which may be worthwhile).
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12-27-2022, 12:52 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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I had a character who was a genetically engineered warrior/accountant and even though he had HT14 and Very Fit I believe he had VRH too just for the self-sufficiency.
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Fred Brackin |
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12-27-2022, 01:06 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
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12-27-2022, 04:28 PM | #9 |
Join Date: Mar 2016
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
DFRPG explicitly expands the effects of Very Rapid Healing to give a +1 to "healing rate" in all situations, not just when rolling for natural healing. It probably wouldn't break anything to have it work that way in GURPS as well.
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12-27-2022, 04:51 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
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Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth
A simple house rule I have that increases the benefit of Rapid Healing is that I do daily healing rolls, but they have a penalty based on how strenuous of a day you have had, rather than requiring complete rest for the day.
This can be as much as a -5 penalty for strenuous physical activity while injured. I've found that once this is known, the bonus from rapid healing starts looking very nice, especially in settings where supernatural healing is not common place.
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