A Wound System and the Mechanics of it

I've been making a homebrew d20 game system that's basically my own clone of D&D give or take.

I've made several changes, with the biggest being my removal of the Class system, and the other being my revamp of the Hitpoints system.

The Hitpoints rule in my homebrew goes something like:

A Character has a number of Hitpoints equal to more or less their Fortitude Defense (So a smaller number).

Along with Hitpoints, one also has Wounds (for lack of a better word). At this time, I am thinking that the PCs should have a total of 5 Wounds they can take. For a PC to take a Wound, they must run out of Hitpoints. When they run out of Hitpoints, their Hitpoint total resets, but they take 1 Wound. When they have a 0 Wound count, they fall unconscious. Then when they take 1 Wound's worth of damage after that, they're dead.

For example, Bob the Fighter has 20 Hitpoints and 5 Wounds remaining. Bob is fighting an Ogre, when the Ogre got a lucky hit and struck Bob for 20 damage! Bob is now reduced to 0 Hitpoints! This means that Bob now subtracts 1 Wound from his total, and is brought back to 20 Hitpoints, but now he has 4 Wounds left.

I have this system in place because I wanted to have At-Will Healing that wouldn't trivialize the game. At-Will Healing heals Hitpoints, but not Wounds.

While I'm treating Wounds as milestones along the Hitpoints loss route, I haven't done much else with Wounds as I have been at a loss of exactly what I can and should do with them.

Have you any ideas fa/tg/uys?

Also, I'm not interested in playing a different system no matter how good it may be, so don't waste your time in advertising your system.

However if there is a rule in a rulebook you like, please cite where I can find this rule, or better yet, post it here for me to see it.

Maybe instead of having 5 wounds, have wounds be determined by total hp?
Divide total hp by 4 and round down, which means that 20 HP Bob has 5 wounds whereas Jim the archer has 12 HP and 3 wounds.

If I have 20HP and I get hit for 25 damage, do you subtract an additional 5 from the next... bar? Is this a way of limiting how much damage you can take at once?

Is it possible for somebody to have only 2 Wound and 100 HP? Or 10 Wound but each one is only 5 HP?

I'm personally not too big on this idea, because if I were to adopt this, the amount of damage a character can take increases exponentially. I want to avoid Hitpoint bloat as much as possible.

My aim with Wounds is as a pacing mechanic that allows for At-Will Healing to be a trivializing factor.

But I'm still not too sure of the number of wounds. I thought of 5, but I've also thought of 3. I think 1 wound is fine for a High Fatality sort of game.

Well the amount of wounds needs to be tied to a stat, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.
A battle hardened fighter has the same number of wounds as the soft skinned wizard?
Maybe getting rid of classes isn't the best idea for implementing this, beforehand you could tie wounds with a class.

A great question, and you are correct about your first question, but I'll illustrate it anyways.

So going back to Bob who is fighting that muckled darn ogre from the last post. Bob had sustained 1 Wound of Damage, such that Bob has 20 Hitpoints, and 1 Wound of damage such that he has 4 Wounds.

While Bob fights against the Ogre, the Ogre hits Bob good! Bob had taken 25 damage! But wait, that's greater than 20! What does that mean?

It means that Bob takes the 20 Hitpoints that would make him take another Wound (Bob now has 3 Wounds). So now, Bob's Hitpoints reset, and the extra 5 Damage is taken by Bob.

This means that Bob now has 15/20 Hitpoints, and 3 Wounds.

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The Damage limit does sound like an interesting idea, and perhaps that can be a Feat taking sort of thing? Thank you!

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Yeah it is possible to have those numbers in theory. At this time, I would say yes, but I prefer to keep Wounds within the number of 5 or 3 assuming PCs here.

The way this is designed is that Wounds are a static thing. Yes, a battle hardened Fighter and a scrawny ass Wizard will both be able to only sustain 5 Wounds worth of damage.

But the Hitpoints one can take is what differentiates the two.

I didn't have space to lay out the Hitpoint formula, but I'll stick it here: A character's Hitpoints are equal to:

Fortitude Defense + Character Level.

Fortitude Defense is equal to: 10 + Constitution Modifier + Miscellaneous Modifiers + Character Level.

You may notice how Character Level is factored in twice? That's intential in order to scale better with Damage (which scales by 1) to keep Hitpoints from bloating too much while still advancing forward.

These Miscellaneous Modifiers will contain Starting Defense Modifiers (Perhaps in the form of a Background?) where one can choose between Reflex, Fortitude, or Will Defense; and perhaps other skills. Racial Bonuses and stuff are in there too.

The Wizard isn't necessarily scrawny in my game, but can be scrawny if made that way. Magic also doesn't function like it does in D&D. I don't want to delve too deep into the magic system as I don't want to sidetrack the thread, but its not Vancian. Instead, it is a skill based system build around Reagents, Catalysts, and Rituals. Spontaneous casting is on par with mundane skills and weapons. To do powerful stuff with Magic in other words, you need a group to help you get the means to do it.

I hope that answered your question and responded to your points.

Well, the natural idea that comes to mind is to have penalties accrue as your Wounds go down. Make it a more serious thing than just "oh, now I only have four healthbars instead of five". But that could potentially unbalance fights towards the lethal, make for the "death spiral" situation where long fights are heavily disincentivized.

The number of wounds that a character may have is equal to their CON modifier.

Ex: A wizard who only has a +2 CON modifier would only be able to have 2 wounds.

However, you are limited to how high your CON can go based on your class's HD. Basically, you take the highest possible value and divide it by 2.

For example

1d4=Limit of +2
1d6=Limit of +3
1d8=Limit of +4
etc. etc.

I don't like spillover damage going into the next bar. Now you're requiring people to divide damage and do a second equation.

Imagine it with less easy numbers:

>Have 7 HP remaining on this... bar
>Take 24 Dmg
>Quick, how much HP do I have on the next bar?

You may be good at mental math, but I'd hate to do those kinds of calculations. Either use HP as a limiting factor (which makes very little sense) or just expand the total HP to what it should be when added together.

You're absolutely spot on with my latest bout of thinking. My thinking at this time is to do this "Death Spiral" about halfway. You'll go down the Death Spiral if you don't take time to recuperate if you're in the heat of the moment. The creeping penalty I'm thinking ought to be something like:

-1 Wound = -1 Penalty to all rolls
-2 Wounds = -2 Penalty to all rolls
-3 Wounds = -5 Penalty to all rolls
-4 Wounds = -10 Penalty to all rolls
-5 Wounds = Unconsciousness.

I should clarify, these "-X Wounds" represent the amount of wounds you lost in a single encounter, not overall.

For example, Bob the Fighter who was fighting that Ogre in the OP initially took 20 Damage. With Bob having only 20 Hitpoints, 20 Damage makes him take a Wound.

With Bob having taken a Wound, Bob now takes a -1 Penalty to all rolls! Bob isn't a wuss though, and chooses to fight despite his wounds. In the process, the Ogre inflicted 25 Damage! That's another Wound!

Now Bob has taken 2 wounds worth of damage in the same encounter, so now he has a -2 penalty on all rolls.

Lucky for Bob, he beat that Ogre and ended the encounter!

Now Bob's penalty disappears, because the heat of the encounter is now gone, and it is assumed that Bob recovers enough to shake it off.

So now, Bob has 3 Wounds left, and no penalty to any of his rolls, unless he takes another Wound or two or three in the next encounter.

Did that make sense?

This does preserve the scrawniness of the Wizard and such, but I am doing away with the class based system, and I do want to keep from falling into a Hitpoint bloat problem.

On that note, getting a +1 Damage in my game I want to be substantial, and not have to resort to getting +1 Dice if I can. It does mean uniform Hitpoints, but I am trying to figure out something to do with the Fortitude Defense and whatnot for Hitpoints.

Nonetheless, I do find your suggested mechanic beautiful and I don't really want to waste it...

Did that make sense?

Maybe it would be easier to re express the system?

Perhaps I can still bring back a Hitpoint Total.

For example, Bob the Fighter, and his 20 Hitpoints, and 5 Wounds.

I can also express this as him having 100 Hitpoints in total, but he instead has a Hit-Threshold of 20. This means that if Bob takes 20 Damage, then he takes 1 Wound. After taking that Wound, Hitpoints cannot be healed beyond that point, until put in an area to rest, or if really advanced healing magic were to come along.

Get what I'm trying to get at?

Yeah, that could work, make the penalties apply to only the individual fight. That fits with the "minor injuries are quickly healed, major ones are lasting damage" thing that the Health/Wounds system starts with. So in a fight you have to worry about getting worn down, but outside of it you can restore yourself to working order well enough that long battles of attrition don't happen.

If you want to avoid HP bloat, simply make it so that each level, you only receive your HD modifier as added health.

So a level 20 wizard with +2 CON would have 40 HP while the barbarian with +6 CON would have over 120 HP.

If you don't like classes though, the easiest way to do so would be to make a collection of skills but tie certain skills to certain archtypes.

Like a Rogue would have skills relating to stealing, sneaking, and assasinations, fighting man would know a lot of weaponry skills, magic man would know spells, etc.

But a character could learn any skill combination they want.

I'll write that down. At this time, I have no further things to say about that. Thank you for your contributions!

No problem

It's not perfect I'm sure, but I can probably play with those mechanics some more. I think it can also simplify the whole "When you're at half of your hitpoints" deal. If you have more ideas though, I'm all ears!

Hm I like this a lot. It allows you to scale the heroic-gritty meter pretty easily across the board. That's nice

Sure. I suggest going that route.

I do have one more question for you if you're still around. It's crazy though.

If you were the one writing this rule, how would you write it in such that way that you would understand it?

"Recovery thresholds."

The number of "wounds" you have don't affect anything mechanically, so really they're just thresholds of how much HP you can recover without getting more serious healing.

I'll write the word "Recovery Threshold" down. It never did occur to me. Thank you!

Do you literally have brain damage? That's kindergarten subtraction.

If Recovery Thresholds are always a nice round number like "10" or "20", players will think of each segment of the HP bar as its own very important thing, and want to avoid taking any damage at all when it's close to the next Recovery Threshold.

It's pretty amazing how bad my mental math is, I agree. I never really progressed in math past basic arithmetic, although I understood algebra better than anyone else in my class and solved the equations with a calculator extremely easily. Subtraction and division are particularly horrible for me.

Substraction is always slower than addition, and you're having to do it twice instead of just once. It's not a big deal, but it does slow down the game just a little bit which is something that should be avoided - within reason, of course.

Yeah, I don't think it's always going to be a nice round number as nice as it would be if it all were that way, but they will be hovering around the 15s or so I expect. It won't all be a nice round number, but will progress at a steady even numbered rate.

I think this is where the way I originally explained it was strong, in that it kept one from having to figure out exactly where on the Hitpoint Total one has reached their "Recovery Threshold".

For example, a Recovery Threshold of 17, multiplied by 5 would make 85 Hitpoints in total. Asking someone to subtract 17 from 85 five separate times can be a bit of a bear I think, unless those threshold marks are specifically labeled for that Hitpoint total.

The more I use the word "Recovery Threshold", the more I like it; because Wound implies a physical wound, while a Recovery Threshold simply implies a point where a character will have a difficult time recovering- whether or not it was because of physical injuries.

What's the logic behind making the Recovery Threshold the basis for multiplication? Shouldn't the HP be calculated first, and then the Recovery Threshold can be a nice round number chopping it up into parts?

Not sure if this will make sense, but if your Wound Threshold is "10" and you have 54 total HP, you display it two ways:

10-10-10-10-10-4
or
10-20-30-40-50-54

The Maximum HP does not need to divide cleanly into the Recovery Threshold. However, once your MaxHP surpasses the next Threshold, you gain that Threshold and start filling up the next one.

oops i meant Recovery Threshold above when I wrote "Wound Threshold"

A Recovery Threshold is a number that is easily found once you have your Fortitude Defense found out, and added your character level to it one additional time.

In a class based system, each class gets a different set of hitpoints. The question of "Which dice should everyone roll in a classless system" is one that leads to nasty balancing issues without pidgeonholing everyone into a quasi-class system which I didn't want either.

The Recovery Threshold is usually a small enough number that if it were hitpoints, it could take some before going down, while also being large enough for healing to be used potentially. What if it were larger? We can multiply those small increments and get the larger numbers we wanted.

In short, you get your HP from the Recovery Threshold, and not the other way around. It also makes the math a lot cleaner for when you have to determine how much damage you can take before reaching your Recovery Threshold. This method gets rid of a lot of the uglier parts of math with a multiplication problem.

If I were to calculate hitpoints first, I would turn this into a division problem. As a whole, people have an easier time with multiplication than division.

It's getting late and I'm losing focus but I hope my post made some sense to you.

Fair enough. Good luck with the rest of the system

>I've been making a homebrew d20 game system that's basically my own clone of D&D give or take.

But why tho

I smell bait, but I'll bite.

Long story short, it started with my playing D&D 3.5 and enjoying it. But then some of the glaring problems started to get to me, so I began to try to fix the problems myself since I didn't want to spend my money on another system.

If you want a job done right, do it yourself, right?

Well, it took me a bit, but I realized soon enough that the problems were at its core which, if addressed, can be tweaked to be a whole lot better- but if done that way, many of the other things won't fit.

Besides, if I fixed the core, I'm not playing 3.5 anymore. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, "To heck with it, I'll make my own!"

I'm not one to back down from what I tell myself I will do. So here I am, making more or less the D&D that has all of the things I like while omitting what I don't like, and in the process hooking the system up with mechanics which I will make work beautifully one way or another.

I enjoy other games too, but they're not my own game you know? I want a game to call my own, and what I'm making here is going to be it.

Anyways fellas, I gotta go to bed. If this thread is alive when I wake up, I'll respond to suggestions and questions.

I want to thank those of you who already gave me a hand in this project one more time in case this 404'd before I come back.

If it's Brothers in Arms they can heal the wound with bandages
Jesus Christ google 15 out of your 16 little squares have the same roadsign

Might I suggest that you take a look at M&M? It, too, takes D&D and removes class and HP systems, so it might give you some good ideas.

How do you handle more damage than is necessary for dropping a wound level? Such as if someone has 5 HP but gets hit for 10. He loses a wound, definitely, but is he then at full health afterward or 5HP less than full?

It would bother me that you could be able to be healed a bunch one moment and then you take 1 damage and now you can't be healed at all, though I don't think you could really get rid of that without some serious messing around.

One thing you may want to look into, there's an MMO I used to play that had your standard health bar setup, but each hit also inflicted a couple points of "wounds" (I think that's what they called it). Basically, wounds were subtracted from your maximum health until you got some proper healing back in town, though there were consumable bandages you could use to get rid of small quantities of them. It also had magic easy enough to pick up (vaguely point buy based character advancement) and mana that regenerated fairly quickly, so it wasn't hard to heal yourself up to full outside of combat, but bandages and proper rests were the only way to remove wounds (I think leveling up would do it too, but that's not really a P&P kind of mechanic).

How many points of wounds a weapon inflicted was an entry in each weapon's statline, same as regular damage and so on. As I recall the general rule of thumb there was that most weapons did about the same amount of wounds, though a couple did more or less as a way of differentiating them (bows did a little more, I don't remember the other weapon types) though you wouldn't necessarily need to stick to that.

They also discouraged in-battle healing by making it so that healing yourself drained your stamina fairly significantly, though that too regenerated over time so out of battle it wasn't really an issue. Also dedicated healer characters weren't really a thing in that game as it was largely designed around the assumption that players would lure enemies into a bunch of 1-on-1 duels.

OP, one thing that raises, the fact that a small amount of damage can take you over the edge with a wound led me to this idea: You can have two Wound-Tracks active at any time, so you have a little bit of wiggle room and can be a bit tactical about it when fighting for example two opponents of widely different damage potential. DMG from one source goes into the same wound, so you can't split the damage between the two active ones except when one wound is full, then you can chose if the overflow goes into the new third track or into the already open second.


To give an in-play example with this mock-up:
Bob is fighting the Leader of the Ogres (low hit chance but high DMG) and his right hand, a Rogue (two weapons with high hit chance but low DMG)
At first the Rogue hits him two rounds in a row, inflicting 5 and 7 DMG with the main hand and 2 and 3 DMG with his off hand while the Leader misses once and hits him once for 24.
Bob choses to put the overflow from W1 into the newly opened W3 because otherwise both Wounds would reach their limit.


This would open up a few interesting feats:
For example, do you want "Hard to kill" who increases the Max of Wound #5 by 5, "First Blood" who increases the Max of Wound #1 by 5 or "Bruiser" who increases all Wounds Max by 1.
Or there could be possibly be something like "Resilient" which reduces Overflow by 1 or maybe even 2, so you can choose to take the Wound but decrease your overall DMG taken.

>DMG from one source goes into the same wound
With "Source" i mean a single Attack / Effect, not a Weapon or Enemy in particular.

Also, i forgot to attach my Mock-Up Visualisation

Have you tried Not Playing D&D?

>hitpoint bloat

That's just a weak criticism that comes from people looking to take pot shots. It's really not an issue unless you are trying to play a game where you want to specifically discourage players from going into combat, and want to essentially punish them by making them unable to survive more than a single encounter.

Have you tried not being a colossal faggot, forcing gay memes?

I could see this working out fairly well.

Is 100 HP the hard cap though or is it one simply for the mockup?

Guess the 3aboos are awake.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.

I might use something like that if wounds had mechanical effects.

Maybe a wound deck/table that applied penalties depending on the injury.

It's just a carry over from the Example OP gave.
[And i think this was supposed to be a mid-level fighter-type with good HP]

Ah, I gotcha.

OP here, and I'm awake! I'll get right to responding to some of these posts.

You have too little a variation there, mate.

With that math, let's say both the Veteran and the Wizard take the same amount of Con, because everyone loves Con. Say the 16 equivalent. Now both have +3 HP. Assuming your example earlier was level 1, both now have 15 HP. The veteran has 20, so his base bonus is +5. If the mage has anything at all, it would mean 16 HP. 16 to 20 is not much, and the wizard has magic to pump it up. Either magic is useless or you have some weaboo-level swordfighting there.

Later in this thread, the term "Wound" has been changed to "Recovery Threshold" due to the latter's not necessarily implying that the damage is purely physical.

But in Brothers in Arms, are Wounds the same sort of mechanic?

I forgot about M&M, but I really ought to add it to my library. I'll comb it for ideas. Thanks for the suggestion!

>Sees a problem with HP
>Doesn't try to solve the HP bloat problem

I think it would be better to cap HP at only a few HD but give players more options for mitigation and control.

If someone has 5 Hitpoints, and gets hit for 10 Damage, then the 5 extra damage they take carries over to the next Recovery Threshold's worth (Recovery Threshold is the new word for Wound which you can find in earlier posts such as these:
In its simplest form, yeah, in one moment, taking 1 Damage can tip you over the recovery threshold which, while I don't see it being broken, I can see it being frustrating at times. I'll leave advice to the DM that any damage that surpasses one's Recovery Threshold ought to be described as being worse looking than others- even if it was only 1 Damage worth. I know just using DM description sounds like a fiat, and a lot of times it is, but a good DM I think can resolve the problem with creativity.

It would be quite the bugbear to fix mechanically, because technically, it's not broken because of that. But man does it suck when it does.

That MMO's mechanics sounds very interesting, but if Hitpoints are in high quantities and if Wounds are more or less inflicted like candy, that in of itself would be a lot to calculate in the grand scheme of tabletop.

Do you remember the name of it?

Also, if you want so badly to prevent HP bloat, how come you start with (10+[abunchofthings])*5 with wounds? Minimum 60 HP at level 1 without any CON and misc bonus is bloated as hell in my book. Your fighter example has 100 HP for fuck's sake.

That's a great idea actually! But I do have one more question if you're still around.

How would you express this rule you suggested if I expressed the Hitpoints/Recovery Threshold system in terms of total Hitpoints as per this description quoted below?

Mostly, I don't want the hitpoints math to soar to such degrees that having +1 Damage isn't so useful as getting +1 Dice of Damage is. Then balancing Dice of Damage next to Hitpoints does lead to hilarious results sometimes, but not results I really want to see in my game.

That one was a mockup, but especially at later levels, I expect that going well into the 30s if you're knowledgable can happen. This Hitpoints system is still on the drawing board, but I think there is something at least worth taking seriously here.

In this thread I did make a proposition for a pseudo "death spiral" found here:

At this time, I still want to keep the mechanical effects to be optional, but still be open to them mechanically.

Your idea sounds interesting though. Do you have an idea of how that would work? Care to go into detail?

This doesn't really seem to be much different than regular hitpoints

Well, with a total the "two-track" system wouldn't really work.

The general question you have to ask yourself upfront is if what level of lethality you want?

But to offer an idea for the Recovery Threshold and against the annoyance might be something like a "Significant Injury" where the Threshold only increases after you have either taken a "Significant Injury" (Say for example half the Threshold) or if you are already taken below the next one.
(Basicly, any damage "unlocks" the threshold but only a "significant injury" or falling below the next one activates it).

Example: Bob (100 HP) is currently at 81 HP. He takes 3 DMG which takes him to 78 and below the first Threshold. The next time he takes 10 =< DMG or if he falls below 60 HP he takes the first Wound Penalty.

To answer that question I'll need to delve a little further.

Hitpoints aren't so much the deciding factor in this game as it is in other D&D versions. In this particular game, Armor doesn't give AC (There is no AC, and is instead rolled against Reflex.), but instead gives Damage Reduction which the front liners are likely to have.

Another thing I think that is important to consider is that I've always enjoyed the "Gish" classes, and I don't want the practice of magic to be limited only to the 90 pounders if they don't want.

Magical Talent is, in short, taken up like a feat. This feat has prerequisites such as DM's permission and/or at Character Creation. The feat only gives you permission to take up Magic Skills which can do magical things that follow Weapons rules (With different stat modifiers) or can resolve the things the Mundane skills can do so long as if it is thematically correct for their school.

So the Fire Magic School can only do things related to fire, etc. To empower it significantly beyond the mundane, you'll need to collect Reagents (Tiered in power from I to V), and Catalysts (Specific objects of power that can ease the process).

All that Wounds are required to do is facilitate the pace. There is only so much of a window where one can recover from with basic healing magic and skills before it gets too serious.

I'll admit, 5 Wounds is a lot of wounds, but 5 is also assuming absolute Heroism. It can be 3 Wounds, or even only 1 Wound if you want to be gritty.

This isn't D&D, but it's something I plan to make work.

The greentext tells me this is bait, but I'll answer it anyways.

I also put in a Damage scale such that you gain +1 damage per level (Hitpoints scale +2 hitpoints per level), so the scaling/treadmill is pretty much matched.

All Wounds do is pace the Hitpoints game by segmenting them into points where you can't easily recover from. 5 Wounds is very forgiving, but if you want to go 1 Wound, or 3, that will be supported as well.

I think you're fine letting wounds be the same (or close) between classes IF you include penalties for wounds. So 20 hp fighter and 12 hp wizard both take 24 damage, fighter gets only one wound and small penalty, wizard gets two and bigger penalty, making him more frail

This system just comes with points where healing past a certain level of Hitpoints will take a lot more out of you (Can't heal past a certain point by basic means). This was originally made to have at-will healing abilities without healing trivializing everything.

...

If you word it like that, I can see a form of your idea being put in play, but I think sticking it in front of each Recovery Threshold is a bit much.

Perhaps if something like that were applied only from the last Wound Threshold to the 0th?

So Bob is at his last leg with only 5/100 Hitpoints left, and his Recovery Threshold is 20. Bob then takes a goblin's arrow for 8 damage! But since Bob that that ability you're talking about, Bob doesn't fall from the attack, because 10 is half of 20, and not 8.

So Bob is fighting on with 1 hitpoint remaining until a more powerful Orc arrow hits him for 13 damage. 13 being greater than 10 makes him drop.

Is that kind of what you have in mind?

The other confounding variable is my insistence on a classless game. I never was fond of character classes, even though I understand why they're there and why they're useful.

Where the "warriorness" will come in is via other means of Damage Reduction amongst other things. It's not Hitpoints exclusive per se. The frail wizards are made that way because their Constitution is weak, and they haven't invested in the means to defend themselves like their beefcake companions.

Thank you GURPS, but I still want my own game for this.

This could work as well.

My reason behind the two-step process would be to easier allow cannon-fodder type enemies. Of course if in the system every fight is supposed to be a significant struggle that's alright, but especially in Fantasy Games i like to err on the side of not-too-deadly.

But here's a different idea: Keep the Threshold levels for Mali, but don't connect them to the healing. Instead have a maximum of healing a Character can receive in the field.
So instead of (for example) falling just below the next threshold and being stuck there, the character can heal up at most Current HP + 1/5 Max HP untill he rests (etc.)

For example:
Bob (100HP Max) is at 56 HP after a fight.
With the current Threshold system he could at most regain 4 HP, which is kind of annoying.
With what i propose he could be healed up to 76 HP.

There's a lot of games that do this,more or less. Bloodborne, dragons dogma, farcry. It's a good system.

This idea also means having to tick down another set of numbers that Hitpoints already does. It's more math that I don't think is necessary to be honest.

I think with the threshold system, yeah, there's only so much of a window for a healer to seize when it comes to saving Bob from ticking down his recovery threshold.

I think this problem can be better resolved by the Healer's own decisions. In an earlier post I talked a little about the Magic System which I will link here: For a healer, they too need to spend Reagents and Catalysts for their spells. I figure that if they pay the right price, they can heal a wound or two.

Of course to get the means for it, the healer will need the group to get the stuff needed.