Water as healing

Inspired by this post by Arnold K on healing.

 Arnold argues that healing kind of sucks but also is kind of nice. I also think healing is good if it lets players take more risk.

 But how to implement without stacks upon stacks of healing potions making it possible to tank through everything at some point? Here's an idea.

Water as healing 

All players have a waterskin. If you get damaged, you can drink from it to gain 1d6 hp. If you gain 3 or more HP this way, your waterskin is empty. 

This is essentially a free health potion you can use (to good effect) once a day if you get damaged.

(Pouring a bit of water out for other purposes does not drain this, but you can't do it if the skin is empty.)

You can't heal in this manner if: 

• You've emptied a waterskin today.
• This is all the refreshment you can get from hydration; other lost hitpoints represent exhaustion, minor wounds, etc. 
• Your waterskin is empty.
• You need to find water (either outside the dungeon, or some sort of fountain) before you can heal again. 
• You haven't been damaged today.
• The water represents recuperation from immediate harm. Drinking more and more water after the initial harm isn't going to magically get you back to full health.

To keep track of this, write letters next to the waterskin:

• Waterskin == full
• Waterskin E == empty
• Waterskin E T == empty and used today  
• Waterskin T == used today (erase next day, it's full)

Tracking "have I been damaged today" is fiddly, you could write D's next to it or something, but a good rule of thumb is that players can heal with water shortly after suffering damage, and can't heal with water during an uneventful overland travel day. It represents short term bouncing back. It doesn't represent long-term medical care.

PC's can drink from the waterskins of others. But if they've emptied their waterskins that day and/or have not been damaged that day, it does nothing.

It's assumed PC's can refill their waterskin while resting outdoors (unless desert or Mordor or what have you). In dungeons water will have to be found.

 If your waterskin is empty you won't dehydrate if you still have rations (rations are considered to hydrate you, you just can't eat one in combat.)

What I like about it

• It provides an Estus flask-like mechanic of healing that refills when resting at certain area's. It's a controlled resource that players can use once per day, per find, and per damage suffered.
• It's a bit of a gamble to use. You may not get to use it again if you do; but if so, it's because you got healed relatively a lot.
• It somewhat fits in the fiction. Taking a swig of water mid-combat is weird. But HP is the ability to shrug of damage and fighting and suffering is exhausting. You're sweating like a pig. A dungeoneer drinking water while fighting is like a cyclist drinking while sprinting.
• It fits with the low glory low level OSR aesthetic. Desperate poor tomb raiders won't have a magical flask or such shenanigans, but they will have water.
• It puts a limit on potion-like healing. You can't just power through on a stack of potions. I'd probably get rid of healing potions entirely using this system. Or say that healing potions take like an hour or a day to take effect. Reduce their usability to just soak up combat.
• Water is relatively easily available but also easily explained away. If you want players to be able to heal only after they've rested outside a dungeon, simply don't add water to the dungeon or make the water foul (stagnant, poisonous). But if you do want players to be able to heal in a dungeon -- say, when they're really battered, holed up in a barricaded dungeon room -- it's easy and believable to add a trickle of water to a random dungeon room. This allows them to emerge from the room with full waterskins and 1d3 resting HP.

 What I don't like about it

• It might be a bit too much healing. It gives every player a potential max 6 HP healing for basically free. That is A LOT for a system (like OSE) that tells you you heal 1d3 PER FULL DAY of rest! 
• At the same time, I want (limited per day, etc) water to replace health potions in a way. So it should be a lot more useful than resting, and a lot less spammable than health potions. 
• That's why I added "only usable once a day and only if you were damaged since the last time", so that 1d3 per day is still the usual. Drinking water implies second wind in the moment recuperation, you can only do it in response to recent damage, not just whenever. 

Polymorphic dispel

There's this Harry Potter bit where two wizards are fighting each other and at one point a cloud of daggers manifests, flies at the one, and then turns into a swarm of birds, back again into something else, in a back-and-forth of attack and defense. I always thought that was cool shit.

What I'm getting at dovetails with the famous rants by Scrap Princess about shitty spells. "Dispel magic" is something a wizard can do, but it is boring. "Counterspell" is also boring. It's good to have, but turning magic off will never be interesting. 

 So I came up with this instead.

Note how Dumblydore's green fire gets turned into a snake? Now THAT's a way to dispel green fire.

 

 Polymorphic dispel
Range: 200’ whatever      T: magic effect     D: permanent or duration of original spell      reaction
Make an opposed INT check to the caster of the spell you want to dispel. On a success, you may change one word in a spell into any other word as long as it rhymes. The DM will rule if your dispel rhymes and is possible. If it is, the spell is altered in accordance with your wording in some way that changes, lessens, or negates its effect. If it is not, nothing happens and your spell dice are refunded. Rules and restrictions:

• You must invest as many dice as the level of the spell you attempt to dispell
• Components of compounds count as one word ("fire" in fireball is one word)
• You can't use a rhyme dispel that's already been used this session.
• It is not necessary to know the spell’s official name; you may also do this with the description given by the DM.
• The DM decides if a dispel is possible. However if she thinks it's impossible, she may ask "and how do you see that working?" because maybe the players have a better idea.
  
• When cast in combat as a reaction, you can't take too long thinking. You must declare it by saying “Dispel!” immediately after (like, 5 seconds) the DM describing an effect, and from declaring “dispel!” you have 10 seconds to formulate (rhyme) your dispel. (Example: “Fireball, uhh, uhmm, wireball!?”) 

The "dice invested" is of course because I love the GLOG. This is NOT playtested in the slightest.

Effective polymorphic dispels:
Fireball - lyreball    (the fireball turns into a clump of lyres that strike you for 1d6 damage)
Fireball - wireball    (the fireball turns into a clump of wire; roll DEX or be immobilized)
Fireball - briarball    (the fireball turns into a clump of tangled roots, same I guess) 

Wall of Ice - Wall of Mice    (self explanatory)
Wall of Ice - Hall of Ice        (still there but now the opposite of a wall)
Acid Arrow - Aphid Arrow    (you get covered in bugs, maybe they suck your blood a bit for 1d4)
Acid Arrow - Arid Arrow       (you get dehydrated)

Cloud of daggers - Trout of daggers     (daggers clump together in the form of a trout that swims through the air and will fight for you for 1d6 rounds)

What about cloud of naggers? Turn it into faces whining?

Lightning bolt - Lightning colt. A horse made of lightning gallops around the battlefield. Roll reaction to see whose side it's on.

Bad:

Fireball - Higherball (how would that work? Unless it would make you float upward)
Fireball - Shireball (I don't see it)
Fireball - Choirball (Well, maybe. All the examples I wanted to give as "bad" are actually okay).
Wall of Ice - Wall of Thrice (What is this!!! These are all great!!! Projectiles fired into it turn into triples)

Also works in other languages

Vuurbal - glazuurbal - the fireball turns into a glob of cake glazing that smacks you right in the face.
Wolk van messen - Wolk van bessen     (the daggers all turn into berries) 

Why polymorphic dispel?

It allows players to modify magic effects to circumvent or negate them WITHOUT just being an off switch and WITH adding a lot of chaos.

The treasure is behind a forcefield! Ordinarily, you would dispel it. Now you could go uh humm, horsefield? Or would that be worse? Worsefield? No, definitely not. Reimbursefield? And turn the field into a field that gives you 1 GP the first time you walk through it. That doesn't rhyme, actually. Okay, remorsefield. You walk through it and it makes you sad. But you get to walk through it.

This FEELS like magic to me. This is like a cognate to the things we imagine mages to do; study spells, trying to understand them, find a flaw they can exploit. This is Gandalf yelling spells at the Moria door that don't work. This is all MUCH better than just saying "I dispel :) "

ALL of this is more interesting than turning the force field off and it STILL allows you to walk through it.

Why not polymorphic dispel?

There's a couple of spells that definitely would become problematic after a while. Magic missile? Best I can do is Tragic Missile. Cloud of daggers even has only a couple of variations. 

This is why I added "or what the DM said" because that will vary a lot more (as you're not supposed to refer to monsters by name including the spells they cast IMHO). Still, it requires playtesting to figure out if this is viable. Other iterations:

• You get to add one adjective to the spell (it must be a material adjective, not something like "weak" or "ineffective"). So you get fireball - watery fireball. Or heavy fireball, and it falls down. Or slow fireball. It's all not as fun as the unpredictability of the rhymes, but there's more options. However I think a "best" option will soon present itself.
• You get to change (add, remove) one letter in the spell. A lot more limited but not dependent on if a word is good for rhyming.
• You get to change one word into one other word that has some sort of semantic relation to the other (opposite, similar). So fireball - waterball or fireball - firemarble. I kind of like the second one. It's kind of like finding a loophole in a law. Okay, fireball it is, but I get to dictate what kind of ball. Still not as diverse or interesting as the rhyming.
• Alliteration. If it doesn't rhyme, it must start with the same letter and have the same amount of vowels. Fireball - flowerball. Freedomball  (AOE Open). Fishingball. Fragileball. This might actually work to add more variety into the system.

Hopefully it doesn't bog combat down too much. I'm hoping that because it requires spell dice to be invested, players won't be using it all the time.

PS

 It feels weird to post here again. I have a gnome in my brain that makes me intensely interested in DnD about every 2 years for a couple of months. The name of this gnome is secret.

 However he's been pulling at the wires again and here I am again. So.