Healing

Although Warhammer is a fantasy game, it is about a grim world of perilous adventure. And that's an amazing thing, for it's system works real well to get the players exactly the right feeling about it all, being integrated with scenario description and thus making rules and system-works combine with the narration and concept play. It all add together very well indeed, resulting in one of the most consistent system and scenario interactions I ever seen.

But as it is brought in the Miracles chapter of the Tome of Salvation book, Healing can diminish the grim and perilous feel of the game. Of course in the cited chapter they are talking about healing spells. But I got the feeling that the official healing mechanics do this in general.

Think this: a heavily wounded character with 0 Wounds will need four days of medical attention until being able to heal more rapidly (each day Heal Test would give him 1 Wound back, and on the fourth day he would be finally considered lightly injured). After that, he would probably need just two or three more days till being completely cured. But if someone had two Healing Poultices, thus making heavily injured treatment the same as lightly injured treatment, then the same character would be as good as new in a three of four days maximum (assuming that the healer rolls just 3 or 4 on his D10).

So I just propose that all healing work the same way (for example, some healing that will only work in lightly injured characters, such as the Healing Draught of the official rules, still works only that way, and if another works in every circumstance, it still does), but when there is a dice to roll, this dice is halved (rounded up). When successfully treating a lightly injured character a healer would roll 1D10/2.

All cures that heal 1 Wound point still do so. Healing spells work on heavily wounded as much as on lightly wounded characters (as the original rule; so we are not using the “Restricted Healing Optional Rule” of the Tome of Salvation). My point is that a miracle would work even on the direst of circumstances.

Healing Draught is a problem, then. It automatically heals a lightly wounded character 4 Wounds, so having it's relative efficiency increased (think with proportions: with our rule, the Draught heals automatically as much as a roll of 7 or 8 on the D10, so the 30% top medical treatments). Ok, that doesn't say much to a player looking at his character sheet and only seeing the numbers, but we are trying to perceive the scenario reality that the system rules are implying. (Of course, we are also looking at our reality and trying hard to get as much fun as we can!)

So, the Healing Draught gives a lightly wounded character 3 Wound points automatically. It also gives 1 Wound back to a heavily wounded one (to counterbalance). But it's effectiveness is diminished by one point for every extra Draught that the same character drinks in a 24 hour period.

And that's what we are testing so far. What do you think?