Healing

The goal is to allow healing without it overcoming the game completely. I want to break it down into two philosophical concepts:

• Ignoring trauma/wound penalties
• Healing wounds

Ignoring trauma/wound penalties
There will be some magic, class abilities (like rage) and maybe herbs/drugs that allow a character to ignore existing trauma. In essence, the penalty for being wounded (fatigue) is ignored. This is important, as it allows characters to function when they should long ago have succumbed to exhaustion and pain. If a character is ignoring wound trauma, they effectively have a recovery of 1. Any addition to the recovery modifier are against the base value, however, not the effective level. This will allow someone seriously injured to heal on a normal night of rest instead of needing complete bed rest.

Some of this may be accomplished by giving the target "false life" - temporary wound levels that will disappear after the duration. This may be the only way to keep someone dying alive long enough for healing. Note: This can really open some interesting game avenues, with necromancy, bound foci, linked lives, etc. More on this later!

Healing wounds
To determine your Recovery modifier, calculate an ability modifier from your current amount of Wounds. In other words, a character with 2 wounds would have a -4 modifier.

With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 + your Recovery modifier in wounds. If that value is less than one, the character must undergo complete bed rest to heal. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night. Note: I probably should add in a mechanic for getting worse; either that or just make it a narritive challenge for the healer

If you undergo complete bed rest for an entire day and night, you recover twice your normal recovery if positive. For negative values or zero values, fractionalize the gain. A RecMod of 1 would be 2 wounds/complete day of rest (since recovery is doubled), a RecMod of 0 would be 1 wound/complete day of rest, a -1 would be 1 wound/2 complete days, -2 would be 3 complete days, and so on. As wound levels decrease, healing is quicker.

Magical healing in EOM is a number of dice, just like with evocation. We will treat it like evocation and make it a simple bonus of 1 + 1.5/MP. This bonus is added to a character's recovery. Duration will play a part in this. So a +10 healing effect to a dying character (0 wounds, -5 penalty) would give them a +5, effectively a recovery of 6. With a full night's rest, they will have 6 wounds and be out of danger.

Keep in mind, this is still only in the philosophic area right now and is subject to change.

Example of Healing
Paul the Peasant is burninated by Trogdor. He has a constitution of 14 (14 wounds) and is down to 0 and dying quickly. Helpful Harry the Healer is on the scene quickly and applies a +10 healing charm to the rapidly fading Paul.

Paul is stabilized (I need to add a quick mechanic for this, perhaps related to Harry's healing skill - I still want knowledge of healing to be very important) so vitality loss is not an issue at the moment. Paul's base recovery is -4: a base 1 + a recovery mod of -5; With the healing charm, his recovery rockets up to a +6, meaning he'll heal 6 wounds with a full night's rest. He'll be fatigued, maybe exhausted depending on his vitality situation, but should be able to travel the next day and begin the road to recovery.

The second night, Harry puts the same charm on him. This time, Paul's base recovery is only -1 (base 1 + recovery mod of -2 for his 6 wounds), so the healing charm makes his effective recovery +9. He'll completely heal up with a full night's rest. Not bad for someone on death's door less than 48 hours previous.