In Old School TTRPGs, natural healing can be excruciatingly slow. Death lurks close by, especially at low levels where the single swing of a sword can reduce a character to zero hit points or less. In order to get your character back in the saddle (or dungeon), reliance on magical healing is almost guaranteed. Raising the dead is an ability assumed to be available (if expensive) at your local church.
Yet in a low fantasy setting, one might want to reserve magical healing for rare occasions, and the use of such magic might seem like nothing less than a miracle. Rather than making it a simple commodity, it can be reserved for the stuff of legend.
I've chosen to work around this by thinking about hit points in a different way. From the beginning, hit points were intended to be an abstraction of fatigue, luck, and physical wounds. I've chosen to put my emphasis on the first two, and limit physical wounds to the last remaining hit points a character has. In this way, regaining hit points is more a matter of recovering than healing. Lets begin with thinking about how many hit points a character might have.
In most TTRPG systems, Player Characters begin at 1st level. These characters typically get a range of 1d4 to 1d10 worth of hit points per level. An average character might have 4 or 5 hit points at 1st level. An average sword swing happens to do about the same amount of damage. This means the average character will be reduced to zero hit points from one successful attack at 1st level. In some systems, death occurs at zero hit points. This does not bode well for groups that like to have story development in their campaigns unless healing magic is easily accessible. Most of the inhabitants of the world in these systems are "zero level". They tend to have 1d4 hit points for an average of 2 or 3. They are likely to lose all their hit points in any successful attack upon them.
I decided I wanted to give the people of my world more hit points, without radically changing the mechanical structure of the system I was using. (The system I have created, The Shewstone Saga, is playable with most OSR Player Characters, and I freely use AD&D, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game as references at my table).
I began with the "Zero Level" NPCs in my world. First, I thought doubling their hit points felt right. It occurred to me that if their average ability score was 10.5 (on a random spread of 3 to 18), that halving their constitution would give me the number I was looking for. This would allow for residents of a typical village to have hit points ranging from 1 to 9, with the outliers being rare. Only about 1 in 200 residents would have a Con of 18. So your average village might have one or two farm boys that could hold their own with a 1st level character.
Next I wondered why 1st level characters could likely have fewer hit points than zero level characters. That is, 1st level magic-users fared no better at hit points than zero level commoners, and thieves only had a 1 point average advantage with their 1d6 hit die. So I decided that "zero level" was in itself a level, and now give all my PCs hit points at zero level equal to half their Constitution (rounded down). I have a liberal method of rolling PC stats, with an average score of 13 on the 3-18 spread, so the average PC would have 6 hit points at zero level. In addition, I give them max on their 1st level hit die, so a 1st level fighter with a 16 Con would get 8 points at zero level, plus 10 +Con modifier at 1st level for a total of 20 HP starting out. The rest of their levels proceed as normal.
Next, I decided that most hit points lost represent luck and fatigue, and that one day's rest should restore all lost hit points, barring serious wounds. I wanted this restoration to be easy not only to thematically minimize reliance on magical healing, but to allow spellcasters more freedom in using their spells creatively without the party depending on their healing spells. So for each hour of true rest, PCs recover one half their missing hit points. That first level fighter with 20 HP, if reduced to 2 HP, would be missing 18 HP. In his first hour of rest, he would recover 9 HP. The next hour 4, then 2, then 2, then 1.
Next comes the question of when serious wounds happen. I consider everything above Zero Level to be luck and fatigue. Yet even at Zero Level, commoners might have a few points of luck and fatigue. I've decided such wounds don't occur until the character reaches 0 HP. Death occurs at negative constitution. So characters are incapacitated at 0 to -Con. They are not bleeding (losing hit points), and they are assumed to be unconscious.
While death occurs at -Con, it need not be an instantaneous death. Game Masters may choose to use a "mortal wounds" ruling in which the character will die in a pre-determined amount of time (from minutes to days) barring magical healing, allowing for one last epic action or a dramatic journey to try to save the character.
Ultimately, if you want to make magical healing uncommon in your TTRPG as well as add drama, you can make natural healing easier and faster, and death much more rare. It is just a matter of shifting perspective.
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| James Archer |
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