Revising Reserve Points

I’m planning on running a Swords & Wizardry game this summer (I’m currently running a sandbox Cybergeneration game) in a setting where opening practice of any religion is illegal and I’m going to encourage the players away from playing clerics. This doesn’t mean that the city of devoid of religion (in fact it’s a hot bed of mystery cults) or that I want players to avoiding this aspect of the setting—removing the cleric as an option allows every character equal opportunity to explore that aspect of the setting.

Removing the cleric also means the party won’t have easy access to magical healing, which is a problem. Here is a house rule I’m considering to deal with this problem. I’m not one hundred percent certain if I’m going to used them yet, but this is the direction I’m leaning towards.

What I’m think of doing is a variation of the Reserve Points rule from the third edition version of Unearthed Arcana which originally appeared in the Omega World minigame, but rather than giving a pool of extra hit points, I want to use dice.

In my version, characters get a pool of reserve hit dice equal to half the character’s level (round up). A turn spent resting lets you roll one reserve hit dice and heal that much, and a turn spent actively treating injury gives you two hit dice. These two options are roughly equivalent to the S&W versions of Cure Light Wounds and Cure Serious Wounds.

When a character with reserve hit dice to spare is taken to 0 hit points (we’re not getting into negative hit points here), that character is out of combat though not necessarily dead. Avoiding death requires a successful saving throw. Normally the saving throw is made after combat, but if an ally tries to treat the character’s wound during combat the character gains an extra saving throw attempt (with a limit of two saves overall). A successful save lets the character use one reserve hit dice.

In some cases, the referee might decide that a particular wound isn’t enough to risk death or too damaging to allow a saving throw.

Reserve hit dice return at a rate of 1 HD per day of uninterrupted rest.

The rule is based around the idea that hit points are an abstraction that includes endurance and luck as well as the character’s capacity to take punishment. I’m using dice because the original Reserve Points rules were a little fiddly for my tastes and players are already used to the idea of rolling for hit point recovery.