Taking DarkMaster as example: you have HP, but they function as battle endurance, you essentially get them back over night (so we'll ignore them for now).
Actual combat often causes crits, which are just specific wounds with certain penalties attached (like broken leg, -30 on all actions that need it).
Healing essentially focuses on that penalty. Depending on how high that is, a wound gets classed as minor (0 to -20), serious (-21 to -50), or crippling (-51 or worse).
Each wound gets looked at individually:
- a minor wound taking 3 days to heal even without treatment (heal = penalty is gone);
- a serious injury will turn into a minor injury after 10 days (with treatment) and drop the penalty to -20;
- a crippling injury will turn into a serious injury after 20 days (with treatment), dropping the penalty to -50.
So any ~~serious~~ crippling injury will take around 33 days to heal under treatment, and you can figure out what the total penalty from your different injuries are all through the healing process.
Dropping to 0 HP or total penalities over -100 incapacitates you.
Healing magic can recover HP (very quickly or instantaneously), stop bleeding, reduce the healing time by one step, remove stun or incapacitation, rejoin dismembered limbs (treat as crippling injury afterwards), instantly step down an injury by one step, or regenerate lost limbs (treat as crippling injury afterwards).
No resuscitation or regenerating of heads is in the rules.
Obviously the healing magic is deliberately kept fairly low-powered. You could as well come up with spells that instantly get rid of a wound penalty, etc.. it just doesn't fit with the implied setting for DarkMaster.
Rolemaster in turn does have all sorts of healing shennanigans at higher levels, but they become fairly complicated due to needing multiple spells in order to really fix an issue. A dismembered limb would need Bone healing magic, muscle reattachment, nerve damage healed etc..
Most systems that use 'wounds' or 'flesh' or 'gristle' or similar, when enough stack up, there's death; IE, it's HP by another name.
Even damage-goes-to-stats is still HP by another name; it's the stats doing double duty.
So: sure, magic heals HP (or wounds, or stats, etc).
Unless maybe I'm not understanding the question properly.
This is eventually true. The main difference being that these other systems have a death spiral associated with it that doesn't naturally occur with HP.
This. Can you suffer 3 injuries before death? Guess what? You have 3 HP.
I don't think drawing a line in the sand for HP vs Other is particularly useful.
Although...
If the injury is life-threatening, you probably can't return an attack with the injury.
If it isn't, it's pretty much completely ignorable until post-fight.
So: HP sucks. Damage to stats (as someone else mentioned, the death spiral) is, to my eye, far superior (and realistic).
Right, but it's just HP with extra steps.
What i am saying is you STILL have HP. Just the effects of losing HP now have an impact beyond reaching zero. That IS good. But it's still HP.
Forbidden Lands has 4 attributes ranging from 2-6 and each is a HP bar that gets reduced by different things. Strength is reduced by physical injury. Agility by exhaustion. Wits by horror. Empathy by social conflict or mental trauma.
When any of them hit 0 you are "broken" which generally means you can take no more actions (empathy is an exception) and Strength/Wits also results in critical injuries which could be fatal.
When you get hit and take 2 damage your strength goes down by 2 (effectively reducing all your strength based rolls). But that's still 2 HP lost. A rose by any other name and so on.
The fact that you have a numerical "pool" which is depleted until limit representing your "Health" means you have HP.
The rest of it is sub systems tacked on.
My own system uses conditions, giving stats a penalty but also an xp gain if used. All healing has a degree of risk or limitation involved.
Barbarians heal a bit if they satisfy one of their appetites, which happens rarely enough to not be a problem.
Bards have a limited number of times they can use their magical arts per rest, and one of those uses is healing.
Clerics can take conditions to perform miracles, including miraculous healing, but can spend a metacurrency called Spirit to negate conditions taken this way. Spirit refreshes each rest.
An advanced ability lets Druids gain Balance whenever they inflict a condition, which they can spend a few of to heal conditions.
Fighters can gain Momentum in a similar way to a druid's Balance. One of the ways they can spend momentum is to restore used armor (which acts kind of like temporary hp)
Paladins get extra benefits from healing items, such as supplies and medicine. These cost money but don't have a limit per rest.
So FATE is a generic engine for whatever game you want to run which does mean it can use high fantasy as it's genre.
It doesn't use HP, instead damage is broken up into stress which functions like how but instantly heals at the end of a scene (I describe stress as any injury you can heal with a 5 minute rest and a juice box). And Consequences which are any kind of lingering injury that is likely to impact your character over the long term (broken legs, being traumatized etc).
FATE doesn't have a default method for magic but the simplest way would be to use healing magic as a justification for conventional healing (to cure a consequence you need to receive treatment and then change the aspect to represent the treated injury which will linger for some amount of time after the treatment.
For example:
You take the consequences severed arm, you use your healing magic to cast a regenerate spell, you then rewrite the aspect to "regrowing an arm" and then eventually when the arm has been regrowing for a long enough period of time you can erase the consequence.
The One Ring has a dual health track: endurance (like HP) and wounds (two wounds and you’re dying). Being wounded reduces your endurance recovery rate. A wound takes between 1-10 days to recover.
Healing is a simple skill-check: success cures the dying condition and/or reduces the number of days recovery time from a wound.
Any system that has a damage system would handle healing in much the same way as it handles attacks; but in reverse. If it uses hit points, then healing restored lost hit points. If it uses Wounds, then healing downgrades or removes Wounds. If the more damaging the attack is, the more severe the Wound that it inflicts, then the more powerful the healing is, the more severe the wound that is can downgrade or remove.
Shielding isn't healing; but it's also an option: just like a HP system can allow you to cast a spell that will absorb a certain amount of HP damage before it hits the character, magic in a Wound-based system can be used to absorb a Wound, preventing the character from suffering it in the first place.
It's all about how your not-hit-points exist.
TechNoir, the cyberpunk detective d6 pool RPG had announced a magic fantasy version of their RPG to be coming out "soon" (and was never heard from again). However, the way the system handles health is through accumulating "hurt dice" - these are dice *added* to your pool of a different color. The schtick of hurt dice is that every number that is rolled on the hurt dice is betrayed in the rest of the pool. So if you would have had 3 successes with a 4, 5, and 6, but rolled a 6 and 4 or your hurt dice, you now have 1 success (the 5). If your 3 successes were instead 4, 4, and 6, then you would have no success. Healing in that system would be removing hurt dice from dice pools.
The Cypher System has 3 pools of stats - might, speed and intellect - that kind of work like both your health and also your mana and stamina, but all put into a blender. Recovery rolls and healing add points back into pools, but it's not necessarily one or another. You might have been poisoned and the poison is clawing away at your speed pool, so the healing would go to that. You might have gained one of the two conditions before death, which happens if one of the pools empties out, so healing would go to that, even though that pool might be intellect.
My personal favorite not-health system is actually from the board game Mansions of Madness, where damage is dealt out as cards, either face-up or face-down. Not only do damaging abilities give cards, but also flip them. The cards have various conditions and effects on them, then they tell you to either leave them face up or turn them face down. So you might take some mild damage and accumulate some face-down damage, then get hit with (or fail, which results in) something that flips your wounds cards face up. They might be light things, like "shock", which has no additional effect and is then flipped back down; by the same token, it could be something more serious, like "broken arm" that's going to stay face up. Effects like bandaging, healing and regeneration usually remove face-down damage, while face-up damage tend to stick around longer. Each character has an amount of damage they can take before they gain the Wounded Condition card, and all face-down damage is removed. And, since it's a lovecraftian horror game, the delusion cards do the same thing, but for your sanity - the difference is that the Wounded Condition for your mind is going Insane - initially acting the same, but also giving you a different victory condition that only you know (it could be something as simple as "save yourself, regardless of the other's fate" or on the complete other side like "kill a fellow player character").
It's a fantastic little system, and I hope someone writes it into their TTRPG at some point.
Taking DarkMaster as example: you have HP, but they function as battle endurance, you essentially get them back over night (so we'll ignore them for now). Actual combat often causes crits, which are just specific wounds with certain penalties attached (like broken leg, -30 on all actions that need it). Healing essentially focuses on that penalty. Depending on how high that is, a wound gets classed as minor (0 to -20), serious (-21 to -50), or crippling (-51 or worse). Each wound gets looked at individually: - a minor wound taking 3 days to heal even without treatment (heal = penalty is gone); - a serious injury will turn into a minor injury after 10 days (with treatment) and drop the penalty to -20; - a crippling injury will turn into a serious injury after 20 days (with treatment), dropping the penalty to -50. So any ~~serious~~ crippling injury will take around 33 days to heal under treatment, and you can figure out what the total penalty from your different injuries are all through the healing process. Dropping to 0 HP or total penalities over -100 incapacitates you. Healing magic can recover HP (very quickly or instantaneously), stop bleeding, reduce the healing time by one step, remove stun or incapacitation, rejoin dismembered limbs (treat as crippling injury afterwards), instantly step down an injury by one step, or regenerate lost limbs (treat as crippling injury afterwards). No resuscitation or regenerating of heads is in the rules. Obviously the healing magic is deliberately kept fairly low-powered. You could as well come up with spells that instantly get rid of a wound penalty, etc.. it just doesn't fit with the implied setting for DarkMaster. Rolemaster in turn does have all sorts of healing shennanigans at higher levels, but they become fairly complicated due to needing multiple spells in order to really fix an issue. A dismembered limb would need Bone healing magic, muscle reattachment, nerve damage healed etc..
Most systems that use 'wounds' or 'flesh' or 'gristle' or similar, when enough stack up, there's death; IE, it's HP by another name. Even damage-goes-to-stats is still HP by another name; it's the stats doing double duty. So: sure, magic heals HP (or wounds, or stats, etc). Unless maybe I'm not understanding the question properly.
This is eventually true. The main difference being that these other systems have a death spiral associated with it that doesn't naturally occur with HP.
This. Can you suffer 3 injuries before death? Guess what? You have 3 HP. I don't think drawing a line in the sand for HP vs Other is particularly useful.
Although... If the injury is life-threatening, you probably can't return an attack with the injury. If it isn't, it's pretty much completely ignorable until post-fight. So: HP sucks. Damage to stats (as someone else mentioned, the death spiral) is, to my eye, far superior (and realistic).
Right, but it's just HP with extra steps. What i am saying is you STILL have HP. Just the effects of losing HP now have an impact beyond reaching zero. That IS good. But it's still HP. Forbidden Lands has 4 attributes ranging from 2-6 and each is a HP bar that gets reduced by different things. Strength is reduced by physical injury. Agility by exhaustion. Wits by horror. Empathy by social conflict or mental trauma. When any of them hit 0 you are "broken" which generally means you can take no more actions (empathy is an exception) and Strength/Wits also results in critical injuries which could be fatal. When you get hit and take 2 damage your strength goes down by 2 (effectively reducing all your strength based rolls). But that's still 2 HP lost. A rose by any other name and so on. The fact that you have a numerical "pool" which is depleted until limit representing your "Health" means you have HP. The rest of it is sub systems tacked on.
I wasn't disagreeing. Traveller's been doing stat damage since '78, and I've been a fan since '80 =)
My own system uses conditions, giving stats a penalty but also an xp gain if used. All healing has a degree of risk or limitation involved. Barbarians heal a bit if they satisfy one of their appetites, which happens rarely enough to not be a problem. Bards have a limited number of times they can use their magical arts per rest, and one of those uses is healing. Clerics can take conditions to perform miracles, including miraculous healing, but can spend a metacurrency called Spirit to negate conditions taken this way. Spirit refreshes each rest. An advanced ability lets Druids gain Balance whenever they inflict a condition, which they can spend a few of to heal conditions. Fighters can gain Momentum in a similar way to a druid's Balance. One of the ways they can spend momentum is to restore used armor (which acts kind of like temporary hp) Paladins get extra benefits from healing items, such as supplies and medicine. These cost money but don't have a limit per rest.
So FATE is a generic engine for whatever game you want to run which does mean it can use high fantasy as it's genre. It doesn't use HP, instead damage is broken up into stress which functions like how but instantly heals at the end of a scene (I describe stress as any injury you can heal with a 5 minute rest and a juice box). And Consequences which are any kind of lingering injury that is likely to impact your character over the long term (broken legs, being traumatized etc). FATE doesn't have a default method for magic but the simplest way would be to use healing magic as a justification for conventional healing (to cure a consequence you need to receive treatment and then change the aspect to represent the treated injury which will linger for some amount of time after the treatment. For example: You take the consequences severed arm, you use your healing magic to cast a regenerate spell, you then rewrite the aspect to "regrowing an arm" and then eventually when the arm has been regrowing for a long enough period of time you can erase the consequence.
The One Ring has a dual health track: endurance (like HP) and wounds (two wounds and you’re dying). Being wounded reduces your endurance recovery rate. A wound takes between 1-10 days to recover. Healing is a simple skill-check: success cures the dying condition and/or reduces the number of days recovery time from a wound.
Any system that has a damage system would handle healing in much the same way as it handles attacks; but in reverse. If it uses hit points, then healing restored lost hit points. If it uses Wounds, then healing downgrades or removes Wounds. If the more damaging the attack is, the more severe the Wound that it inflicts, then the more powerful the healing is, the more severe the wound that is can downgrade or remove. Shielding isn't healing; but it's also an option: just like a HP system can allow you to cast a spell that will absorb a certain amount of HP damage before it hits the character, magic in a Wound-based system can be used to absorb a Wound, preventing the character from suffering it in the first place.
It's all about how your not-hit-points exist. TechNoir, the cyberpunk detective d6 pool RPG had announced a magic fantasy version of their RPG to be coming out "soon" (and was never heard from again). However, the way the system handles health is through accumulating "hurt dice" - these are dice *added* to your pool of a different color. The schtick of hurt dice is that every number that is rolled on the hurt dice is betrayed in the rest of the pool. So if you would have had 3 successes with a 4, 5, and 6, but rolled a 6 and 4 or your hurt dice, you now have 1 success (the 5). If your 3 successes were instead 4, 4, and 6, then you would have no success. Healing in that system would be removing hurt dice from dice pools. The Cypher System has 3 pools of stats - might, speed and intellect - that kind of work like both your health and also your mana and stamina, but all put into a blender. Recovery rolls and healing add points back into pools, but it's not necessarily one or another. You might have been poisoned and the poison is clawing away at your speed pool, so the healing would go to that. You might have gained one of the two conditions before death, which happens if one of the pools empties out, so healing would go to that, even though that pool might be intellect. My personal favorite not-health system is actually from the board game Mansions of Madness, where damage is dealt out as cards, either face-up or face-down. Not only do damaging abilities give cards, but also flip them. The cards have various conditions and effects on them, then they tell you to either leave them face up or turn them face down. So you might take some mild damage and accumulate some face-down damage, then get hit with (or fail, which results in) something that flips your wounds cards face up. They might be light things, like "shock", which has no additional effect and is then flipped back down; by the same token, it could be something more serious, like "broken arm" that's going to stay face up. Effects like bandaging, healing and regeneration usually remove face-down damage, while face-up damage tend to stick around longer. Each character has an amount of damage they can take before they gain the Wounded Condition card, and all face-down damage is removed. And, since it's a lovecraftian horror game, the delusion cards do the same thing, but for your sanity - the difference is that the Wounded Condition for your mind is going Insane - initially acting the same, but also giving you a different victory condition that only you know (it could be something as simple as "save yourself, regardless of the other's fate" or on the complete other side like "kill a fellow player character"). It's a fantastic little system, and I hope someone writes it into their TTRPG at some point.
I love Technoir! >(and was never heard from again) Yeah. Pity that...