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Advanced Healing for D&D
Yes, it’s time for another of my wildly unnecessary mechanical additions to Dungeons & Dragons.
I’ve been writing up some ideas for how to run a specific low fantasy setting using D&D and part of that is the genuine risk of death from deep wounds, unhealed injuries, and disease. None of those things are all that lethal in D&D as written; even without magic, as long as you have a single hit point or more remaining, you are completely healed with a single 8-hour rest. There are poisons and a few diseases, but you won’t get dysentery from drinking unboiled river water, or suffer ongoing internal bleeding.
Maybe you want that? Maybe you want to run a plot where magical healing or divine magic stops working, and the PCs are suddenly at risk from stuff they took for granted before? Maybe they go to a plane of existence that’s just a little less easy to live in?
Before I proceed, let me say: I did not conceive of this system in its earliest form. A friend of mine, new at the time to Pathfinder, endeavoured a build of a dedicated healer class. The class didn’t work out, but we then took those ideas and turned them into an expansion of the Heal skill. Now I am adapting a lot of those ideas (and getting rid of some, and adding new ones) for the Medicine proficiency in 5th Edition. This friend has almost no online presence and certainly no public presence so I…
