Can someone confirm that I am understanding harm recovery correctly? The manual is confusing because it talks about “1-3 harm wounds” as if it’s an individual thing and not your total health. The way I’m understanding it is if after an encounter a player has <4 harm, they can rest and they recover 1. "Rest" is not well defined. I'm assuming it means at least an overnight sleep or something like that. If after an encounter you have 4+ you are unstable (meaning the Keeper can make things worse) until stabilized either by a move or proper medical attention. It's not clear how quickly one can recover that. Essentially just 1-harm per rest period? Or is it really a wound-by-wound thing, in which case I'm not sure how to handle it at all.
Can someone confirm that I am understanding harm recovery correctly?
Can someone confirm that I am understanding harm recovery correctly?
I don’t have my book with me, so bear with my potentially off base comments.
The example of what 1 harm looks like as opposed to 2 harm is to help gauge what kinds of things would cause that much harm in a single wallop.
However, you still suffer from the aggregate of the wounds you have taken. Taking two 2 harm wounds or one big 4 harm wound still lands you at unstable and at 4 harm, if you haven’t had a chance to rest between the wounds you suffer.
What the timeframe of a “rest” is going to look like is going to depend on the fiction, meaning, it’s going to depend in part on what your time segments represent.
If the mystery is literally unfolding across a single day, a rest is going to look different than if that mystery represents the progression of a week.
Hours
Let’s say you have a fast paced mystery where two hunters, lets call them Sam and Dean for no reason, need to find a kidnapped teenager that was taken by vamps, before morning.
If Dean takes a two harm wound, and they drive off the vamps and go back to the hotel, in this timeframe, putting your feet up and having a beer while you look up things on a laptop is probably enough to count as a “rest.” You are burning an amount of time that is significant in the fiction not doing anything strenuous.
Days
Now lets say those theoretical hunters survive a few seasons, and are hunting the King of Hell before he can track down a series of tablets that will give him Unlimited Power! Lets call that guy Crowley.
In this case, the mystery might be driving across country to find various places where the tablets might have been hidden. Our timeframe now looks like we’re talking “days” instead of “hours.” In that case, if Sam gets clonked on the head while fighting demons for 3 harm, Sam and Dean stopping for the night to sleep at a hotel is a significant amount of time for a rest, so that’s what it takes for Sam to get back 1 harm.
4 Harm
4 harm means you either took a huge blow in one shot or you got knocked around a lot in one scene, with no time to take a breather.
Its enough harm to make you think twice about if you want to do anything risky for the rest of the scene.
Let’s say you have a character, we’ll call her Jo. She’s been mauled by Hellhounds, and she has more than 4 harm. She can’t just rest to start getting back her wounds. Somebody has to do some magic, or she’s got to get to a hospital.
She’s not out of the scene, but if she doesn’t get the best result possible, the Keeper can make things worse for her.
Normally, everyone standing around talking, and the mystery unfolding over the course of a day, she could rest and get back a point of wounds, but not in the condition she’s in.
It doesn’t matter if Jo got mauled more than once, or just had one big bite taken out of her. She didn’t get to rest between maulings, so she’s at 4+ harm and unstable.
Disclaimer
I don’t have my book with me, and its been a while since I was running my game, so I could be way off base, but I’m pretty sure that’s the understanding of the rules that I’ve always run with.
Thank you for such a detailed response.
Very well put jared
Jared Rascher is on top of things here.