Big news from the Johnn Four household. Everyone is officially cancer free! My wife’s final radiation blast was yesterday. My mom also completed her radiation in January.

To celebrate, I thought I’d offer three ideas for giving brittle parties extra healing options.

Having played a few new RPGs in the last while, I’ve noticed some games have bountiful healing and recovery. But other games require PCs to convalesce for days or weeks. And some games even support a strong death spiral, where each wound makes it more likely you’ll get wounded again.

We need to understand the healing pace of our campaigns so we can plan accordingly.

For example, if characters need a week on stretchers between each dungeon visit, then you’ll need to adjust villain plots and looming events accordingly.

And sometimes the healing pace is out of synch with our campaign pace, and the party needs a bump or two to keep going. Thus, today’s brainstorm. Let’s get the iodine, bandages, and Gilligan Island needles out and poke around.

Idea 1. Enhance Your Healing Skill Tree

Skill improvements offer great gameplay. Players engage to show off their character’s talents, solve problems, and help their teammates.

Characters have more usefulness and action options.

And we GMs have another reward for our Treasure Table, plus a new Resource Depletion lever if ingredients or supplies are required.

We also garner a new pressure mechanism to add to our GM Toolbox. By that, I mean we can mete damage strategically to create FUD — Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt because we know the party can recover.

Don’t have a skill tree for battlefield dressing, poison, or disease? A perfect house rule opportunity then. If you don’t have a skills system, make the ability a feat, talent, or knack.

If there’s just one skill and it’s anemic, consider allowing additional tiers: First Aid, Battlefield Barbery, Surgery. Or, First Aid I, First Aid II, First Aid III.

There’s a downside to adding or changing your skills for this purpose, though, and that’s game balance. Unbalanced magic items are a pain, but you can often mitigate with curses, theft, monster design, and so on. However, a skill is permanent. And players can use it as often as they like, without cost.

Rather than bogging down in granular rules to create game balance, it’s easier to iterate. Frame it to players that any changes are a playtest. You’ll be asking for feedback. And you’ll be making tweaks for a bit until tuned just right.

Other than that though, allowing healing skills or creating a deeper tree of them gives you reward and character development options while making campaign play smoother.

Idea 2. Add a Pinch of Troll Blood

Special curative substances offer many boons.

Treat them as one-offs for game balance. Consider them as resources you can deplete to drive exploration and quests to resupply. You also control sources, so you decide what’s common versus rare, and what’s easy to acquire and what’s dangerous.

Players love these too. A bit of world flavour. A way to heal up in a jam. And something characters have control or influence over — at minimum, they have agency over when to take the poultice, unguent, or elixir.

My go-to is blood honey. A homebrew healing substance characters and NPCs can harvest in nature. I treat them like potions of minor healing, offering a few health back and death stabilization.

The tip here with healing medicines and their ingredients — another use case in your skill tree — is you control how effective they are, how long they last, what types of injuries they help, and most importantly, access.

For example, my blood honey comes from some form of dire bees. Sometimes it’s XL Death Hornets, sometimes it’s a swarm of small stingers, and sometimes it’s somewhere in between. Depends on the campaign’s grittiness and how much danger and friction I want to apply to acquiring or crafting blood honey.

Finally, I like healing one-shots as a GM pacing lever. If pace starts to lag from players turning cautious because of party injuries, I can drop some blood honey into the next treasure pile.

Idea 3. Environment Features

Let nature do the healing. This turns locations, times, or events into quest hooks.

For example, radiation from weird cave rocks could kill disease in any who sleep in the cavern for one night.

Add wild magic, chaos, and monster-created healing zones to your sandbox map. You decide when and how they activate.

Also add healing effects to any applicable random tables you have. For example, add blood honey to your random treasure and encounters lists.

Give these healing ideas a try next session. Your players will thank you, and their characters might even survive.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
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