During today’s B&C session, we briefly discussed healing of wounds. (Pretty much the entire party has one or another wounds, so it’s pretty important right now.) I suggested trying my proposed quick and easy healing rules, but quickly realized a flaw: Physician skill allowing you to heal that many points per character, per week, would be way too fast. If your Physician skill is 4, you can heal 16 points of damage per week without penalty! That messes a bit with what feels like the appropriate, realistic rate of slowness.

Making it “per month” instead would alleviate the excessive effect of Physician skill, but would make it feel excessively chunky, I think: nothing heals at all for a full 30 days, and then suddenly a wound heals overnight.

Let’s try this rule instead:

Once per week, each character with wounds chooses 1 point of damage to heal. Each character with Physician skill chooses a number of points to heal equal to their Physician skill. They may choose to heal points among any number of characters. Herblore skill may substitute for Physician at a -1 effective rate here.

Example: In your group, Raeh’s END is down by 2; Hivo’s DEX is down by 3, and her AGL is down by 1 point. Those are the only wounds, and it is the beginning of the week, so it’s time to figure healing. Raeh’s END heals by 1 point, so it is now only down by 1 point. Hivo chooses to heal AGL by 1, meaning it is completely healed, and now Hivo’s only damaged characteristic is DEX (which is still down by 3). You have Physician skill 2, so you can choose to either heal Hivo’s DEX by 1 and Raeh’s END by 1 (thereby healing it completely), or to heal Hivo’s DEX by 2 points.

That feels a bit more workable: easy to manage, realistically slow without being too slow, and allowing room for player agency.

As before, if you try this in your game, let me know how it works!