Combat Hacks about healing

On another forum, i saw something interesting about healing for the werewolves.

I was thinking that it could be shared in here as well.

1-  Aggravated damage are much more worst than lethal.  We all know that.  However, any normal amount of bashing can upgrade, after a seriously long time, into aggravated.

The guy said this: -A human heal a bashing in 15 minutes, an urratha in roughly 3 seconds.  A human heal a lethal in 2 days, an uratha in 15 minutes... or even in 3 seconds if he uses essence.  Then... aggravated are both healed at the rate of one per week... same rate as a mortal.

No logic there... specialy if we consider the fact that those aggravated where maybe, just a serious amount of bashing.

See, regeneration when we take it seriously is the inverse of degeneration.  Degeneration is what happens when we receive damages and when those damages add ups to become worse over time.  Bashing becomes lethal and lethal becomes aggravated.

Regeneration mark the inverse.  Healing up... so aggravated becomes less and less worse to become just letha, and to finaly be in disconfort the same as a bruise just before to go away.  

In that way, aggravated damage are not supernatural in nature. 

Combat hack 1:  Make Aggravated damage heals in one hour by natural regeneration.



Combat hacks 2:  Silvers does the equivalent of aggravated damage in severity, but with the supernatural curse that it does take 1 week to heal... its is simply the way the uratha body and essence react to silver.

A guy who wrote the combat hacks in the armory reload book found those idea pretty interesting, as I am.

---

Something else.  A combat hack about regeneration in armory reload says that an uratha might be albe to regenerate a number of lethal eith a single point of essence, equal to his primal urge rating, as a reflexive action.

Seems to me FAR more too powerfull.

Why not make that a full round action, and then roll Resolves + primal urge ?
Primal urge in this represent the capacity to focus and use the essence.  Resolve represent the capacity to focus one's concentration to the task and activate the body regenerative faculty with a real accelerated process.  The number of successes indicate the number of lethal the character regenerate.  This number cannot be greater than the actual stamina rating of the uratha since it puts the body in overdrive and even if the essence and primal urge have no limits, the physical body still has.

What do you think about that too ?

Huh... anyone, what do you think of those 2 hacks ?

Why do you think that ?

Don't feel shy... we are in the nWoD... you can answer me...

lol

I think the more complicated you make the regeneration system the more it will interfere with game play. 

Creating conditions and multipliers and multiple linked dice pools may seem logical on paper, but in my experience they feel too complex and slow the game down as eveyrone keep asking questions about it to make sure they have it right.

Also for agg regen, thematically it's supposed to be the 'omg I'm almost dead' level of health, and having players go from 1 box away from deaths door to up and about the next morning seems even more 'over the top' than the over the top hacks.  It could be fitting in the right campaign with the right themes, but it's negating a lot of the brutality and lethality of nWoD IMHO.  At most I'd go with 1 agg/day healed, and that would be to help people out before they get rites/gifts/powers to heal their agg so they don't create weeks of downtime just to heal their wounds.

I think that is a bit over-complicating the system a bit more. Especially in a long time laspe, storyteller says, "Now it's night time" or something like that and the characters ask, "how much time has passed, then?" so they can get those nasty aggravated dmg off their charts.

In Armoury Reloaded I think there is a combat hack that helps with werewolf degeneration. I don't own the book, but I remember reading it. So if it is wrong, let me know.

Werewolves reflexively heal one bash every 3 seconds. In the hack, werewolves reflexively heal however many bash they have in Primal Urge. Most characters begin with Primal Urge of 1, so they heal one bash per turn. A character with a Primal Urge of 2 heals two bash per turn. And so on. When a character spends an essence, they heal lethal equal to their Primal Urge. That character with 2 Primal Urge spends an essence to heal two lethal damage!! And once characters can spend more than once essence a turn...aggravated damage is really one of the only things that can kill them.

With this hack, werewolves can get pretty invincible. Luckily, Primal Urge is very expensive and should take a long time to gain points in. This also makes the stat more important. Most players would rather lvl up their stamina to stay in gauru longer, and not even use Primal Urge.

I'm in agreement with the above posters when it comes to the hacks. If they work for your games in a thematic and story serving way, then go for it! Otherwise the easier you make it for any of the supernaturals in the NWoD to the more it seems to me to take away from the horror, terror, and lurking danger that even the Uratha must bow to in a traditional game in the setting.
In my opinion, if you really want to put some nasty crunch behind werewolves, concentrate on hacks that open the power of their Gauru form up. The 9-again strength\damage rolls hack and the invulnerable to bashing damage hack for their war-form seems to me to be more the way to go if you want to make the Uratha a more potent force in the games while at the same time still giving them the feel of mortality in all the rest of their forms, mostly since the Gauru form lasts for a limited time.
Your hacks are interesting and we won't sic the rpg police on you if you decide to use them, but they are a bit clunky in a game mechanic way and give too much of an edge to predators that already have the edges they could ever need.
Hope that's what you were looking for as far as input, i know it's not exactly what you were hoping for, but there it is all the same.
Later.

Ok, it is true that the system becomes a little more complicated, but not that much.  Say silver damage becomes that... silver damage... the same as an aggravated, but the we completly grey the area instead of putting a * to show an agravated.

Besides, if you use the cambat hacks found in Armory Reload, they have a "meat shield" hack that consider a new kind of damage called "Grievous Wounds" wich are more worse than agravated.  On that side (being to complicated) I think im fine.
The roll was inspired by a mage player who is specialized in mage game.  His mage has life magic... so that's where I got the idea.

Aggravated damage are sure death's dorr damage.  But I just find it a little illogical that a silver bullet who is a weakness to a werewolf, can damage the werewolf equaly than a huge series of punch without having him regenerate.  I mean, silver is THE curse.  It is what turns them really mortal... that is what reminds them... that they are mortal.

They heal a bruise in 3 seconds.
They heal a knife cut in less than 15 minutes.
But a huge series of punch, for human and werewolves alike, is just impossible to heal by almost anything except some ritual...
The silver bullet I could more understand...

For the needs to keep time and know how much time has pass... its not much of an issue.  In fact it might be easier than before.  Since aggravated damage heal at the rate of one per week, and with that hack, it would be one a hour, or one a day, it would be easier to track them down... at least in the games im used to be.

In the book Armory Reload there is effectively a rule about werewolf being able to heal bashing equal to their primal urge rating or even lethal, at the same rate, depending if they choose to spend one essence to the task or not.  It was the reason why I came with those rules here.  The rule found in armory reloads seems to me too much powerful.  Also, the guy in the other forum suggesting the difference between Lethal and silver damage was the guy that wrote the werewolf hack in the Armory reload book, so my inspiration was almost imediate.  Having a werewolf being able to heal more than what they are in the actual W:tf, is something I was thinking about.  However, having some players with primal urge 4 running around and watching them being able to heal 8 lethal per turn as a reflexive action is a bit much to me. 

Thinking about the movie Underworld, where Lucian heals his bullet wounds near the elevator, channeling his energy, and seing the bullets being driven out from his body was the image.  It took time, and energy.

Having an uratha heal 8 lethal at once... ok.  Having it heal relfexively... well... too powerful not only for me but for the other players playing werewolves, but specificaly changelings and vampires alike.


Glad you found my hacks interesting.  One of them was actualy mine, not both.  Don't call the rpg rules cops on me yet since im not using them yet.  But I think I will try to use them in a near futur.  I will maybe try to make them more simple... We will see.

I will surely post something back after seing the results.

Thanks for the inputs.  After reading you I was thinking about the 2 hack rules and about everything you said and it had me think much.  A necessary procedure for being, or at least, trying to be constructive.

:)  

Setzer74:

It is what turns them really mortal... that is what reminds them... that they are mortal.

No it doesn't.  It doesn't 'turn them mortal' they are always mortal in the 'can die' sense of the term.  This is something Uratha don't have to be reminded of.

Silver is just the fastest way to kill one.

Setzer74:

Having an uratha heal 8 lethal at once... ok.  Having it heal relfexively... well... too powerful

A powerful enough Uratha can already do this.  Same with a powerful enough vampire.  Vampires have to deal with the same thing.  They can heal bashing and lethal in seconds, but Agg takes them days and a ton of blood.

Heal 8 lethal reflexively can already be done by a powerful uratha, if we do not take into account the combat hacks of Armory reload, by spending 8 essence.

This looks like a REALLY powerful uratha.

I don't have the book near me, but I say that his primal urge must be near 8-9-10 to be able to do this.

Vampire with blood potency has high has that can do great things too.

The Combat hacks of Armory reload make the same... heal 8 lethal, at the cost of only 2 essence, with a primal urge of 4 !  WOW

There is a difference here.  A big one in fact.

This is a HUGE increase in term of regenerative power.  Many felt that uratha in terms of the 3 big players in the nwod (Vampire, werewolves, mage) got the shorter stick.

Others simply felt that some change was needed.

A rpg designer even told me that werewolves where unerpowerd compared to the others big 2.

What I was feeling was right, was an average increase in regenerative power... not a HUGE one like that.

With that rule, that same uratha with a high enough primal urge so he can spend 8 essence , if he did spend his 8 essence, would regenerate like what... assume 8 of primal urge... well, a potential of around 64 lethal.

64 lethal is stupid since no urathat have that much health box anyway, but seing things like this makes me wonder...
All the vampire players that I know, and some mage players that i can still manage to see are all on the same side: -Too much power.

Its like Hulk meets wolverine.  Well, Hulk can already heal fast, but anyway, you see the big picture. 

-The uratha runs into the lava pool, under the rain of fire, while being shot with arrows, and comes out of there, 4 turns later, without a scratch.

Silver is Nasty, with a big "N" and it is a good thing now cause silver is now more than ever, needed, to put an uratha down..

The fact that a game designer took time to talk about a rule about silver/aggravated damage making them regenerate differently and talked about the enormous power of his combat hacks idea in armory reload was to me, an indication that even He, might be thinking that his rule was maybe... a little much.

To me its a debate between:

Actual Uratha vs Godlike uratha.

I just want to find the middle, between those 2.

Thanks for the feedback as always !
peace.

While I don't really see a problem with the rules as written, I quite like the hacks in the original post. They'd suit a fast-paced action chronicle, and wouldn't erode the lethality of silver. I don't think it's complicated at all to implement, either. However, one thing I would give thought to would be how you would deal with healing aggravated damage by spending essence. To maintain in-combat balance, I'd probably make it that one point of essence heals one aggravated wound in 15 minutes.

let it simple: Aggravated damaged caused by non supernatural means heals in 4 days. Aggravated damage caused by silver, supernatural power (disciplines, spells, etc...) heal in 7 days. Got Quick Healer? make it 2 days and 4 days.