House Rules

Every once in a while a fellow gamer asks what house rules I use. I would guess the interest in my house rules comes from interest in the professional rules I write, which is nice but may lead to disappointment. My house rules are designed for my home games, and balanced for the play style of my group. As a result, they may not work for every rpg group out there, and if I do ever publish them in a professional format they may look different. (Not every rule that works for my players, most of whom I have been playing with for more than 25 years and as a result know the play style of quite well, is a good rule for the general RPG audience.)

However, a recent inquiry inspired me to go ahead and post one of my more popular house rules. In addition to what the rules are, I wanted to talk a little about why I created them and what goals they were designed to meet. I'd love to make this a regular thing, but given how busy I am I'm not promising anything. :P

The following rule is used in all my current Pathfinder RPG campaigns, which are set in a homebrew campaign world.

Bruises/Wounds
Once you calculate your total hit points normally, you divide it into two pools, Bruises and Wounds, each equal to one-half your maximum hp total. (If you have an odd number of maximum hit points round your Bruises down, and your Wounds up.) These two sub-sets represent first the minor damage you can easily shrug off, then your more serious injuries. You should keep track of these separately.

Any time you take damage, it comes off your Bruises first. You only take Wound damage if you run out of Bruises. All healing applies to your Wounds first. Any healing left after your Wounds are fully healed goes to your Bruises. All normal rules for regaining hit points (healing spells, long-term care, and so on) apply first to Wounds, then to Bruises.

Because Bruises are minor, temporary damage, they return very quickly out of combat without special healing. An hour of light activity (such as walking or riding, but not running, fighting or climbing), or ten minutes of uninterrupted rest restores Bruises up to your current Wounds total. You cannot have more Bruises than Wounds – the serious injuries Wounds represent prevent you from being able to take as much of the lesser damage of Bruises.

For example, Svara Firehair is a 4th level barbarian. She has a maximum hit point total of 51. This means she has 25 Bruises, and 26 Wounds. During combat she's hit by a giant for 10 points of damage. She takes this off her Bruises, leaving her with 15 Bruises and 26 Wounds. The next round she's hit for 30 points of damage, which comes off her Bruises first, then reduces her Wounds. This leaves her with 0 Bruises and 11 Wounds.

Beric the Cleric casts cure light wounds on Svara, healing her for 8, bringing her to 0 Bruises and 19 Wounds. Then, the fight ends. Since she and her friends are all exhausted, they take ten minutes to rest. Svara can regain Bruises up to her current Wounds, so at the end of the rest she has 19 Bruises and 19 Wounds. (If Meric had any healing left he could have increased her Wounds with it before resting, letting Svara gain more Bruises during her rest.)

Why?
The bruises/wounds rule grew out of a desire to fix two issues. The first is known as the "ten-minute adventuring day," which is a tendency in some style of d20 games for players to want to rest after every one or two encounters. This means characters have their full resources more often, and resource-management classes (such as clerics and wizards) have more relative power compared to constant-output classes (such as rogues and fighters). It's the same reason 4e added milestones.

The second issue is the idea that every group requires a dedicated healing cleric. While clerics get to have some more fun in modern d20 games than old 2e D&D because they can prepare non-healing spells then swap them for cure spells, that doesn't fix the problem that a lot of clerics end up having to cast nothing but cure spells anyway as their friends get badly injured. The problem is even worse for groups without a cleric, as bards and druids, and perhaps even paladins, end up burning a lot of their resources just to restore damage to the party. With Bruises/Wounds, a group can take ten minutes of downtime and recover a considerable amount of damage.

The Bruises/Wounds rule has worked very well for me, because it doesn't make characters any tougher for a given fight. For most monsters I never have to figure their Bruises and Wounds, since they still hit "dead" at the same point. Though if I did have to figure it for an escaped monster, it's easy to divide things by 2.

Parties still love a healer, since you can't get back more Bruises than you have Wounds, but it takes less healing to get a group patched up and ready for the next encounter, which means we spend more time having fun. And finally, my players seem much more willing to venture forth with reduced spell loads and rounds of rage and performance, because they are almost always fully healed, and assume they can cobble together enough healing to at least get most of their Wounds fixed.

And, since this all works with the normal hit point rules, I don't have to worry about unexpected consequences nearly as much as I would with a totally new damage system. There's no need to change how critical hits work, or alter the value of hit dice or healing abilities, but I still get a different feel from the system. I've been running this system for half a year now, and so far it does exactly what I want it to.