Though you can play CORE20 any way you like, as should be the case with any RPG, the game is written from a baseline perspective of the world as a place where magic is everywhere. As would be expected in a such a milieu, magical healing is everywhere. Restorative potions and spellmarks are available for purchase in the public markets of any town or city, and restorative spellcasting services can be found in healing houses, temples, and spas across the land. Even in villages and hamlets too small for healing magic to be ubiquitous, mills and communal barns might keep a potion of cure light wounds on hand in case of an injury mundane healing can’t deal with quickly enough, and experienced adventurers know that it’s not uncommon to find a healer or midwife in the smallest thorp who can cast lesser restoration in exchange for a favor.
But as players and GMs of every fantasy game with ready access to healing magic understand, too much healing magic can quickly undermine the sense of peril that comes from a life spent fighting evil and monsters. For such characters, the threat of injury and even death needs to feel real. But if healing magic is too easily accessible, that threat can quickly become hollow. As CORE20 underwent its evolution from D&D 3.5 house rules into something bigger, I wrestled with this dilemma for a long while, and eventually hit upon what seemed like a cool idea:
If one wants easy access to healing magic but easy access to healing magic reduces the threat that’s important to the narrative of the game, what happens if you replace that threat with a different threat? And so it is that in CORE20, every character understands that making use of healing magic can eventually kill you.
Life and Magic
Focusing first on the narrative angle — because for me, that’s always the best way to approach game design — magical healing in CORE20 revolves around that idea that magic is… well, supernatural. Which is to say, magic is unnatural. And even though magical healing has the incredible power to reverse injuries in moments that might otherwise take days or weeks to heal, it does so in a way that ever-so-slightly corrupts the natural health and healing ability of the body.
In CORE20, hit points are divided into two different pools of protection — critical points and defense points. I’ve talked about the narrative and design ideas underlying critical points and defense points (and how that system is actually the oldest part of the CORE20 rules). But to precis from the “Hit Points” section of “Chapter 9: Combat” in the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide, critical points measure your capacity to withstand physical injury, while defense points represent your ability to turn potentially lethal damage into minor damage through defensive prowess, innate hardiness, or sheer luck.
Defense points are a buffer that protects your more important critical points from getting knocked down, with damage-dealing attacks wearing down defense points first. Critical hits are a potentially nasty exception to this, so named in CORE20 because they deal damage directly to a creature’s critical points regardless of how many defense points the creature has remaining.
When an injured character takes magical healing, that healing restores critical points first, then defense points, rebuilding your body’s physical vigor and integrity before bringing your defensive acumen back up. But whenever magical healing restores critical points, the creature receiving that healing takes a −1 penalty to their critical point maximum. The unnatural process of magical healing leaves a kind of physical deficit that can add up over time, effectively lowering critical points each time magic is used to bring an injured character back from the brink.
Critical Thinking
In most cases, the downside to magical healing feels minor compared to the benefit. For a character down to their last 3 critical points, restoring 3d8 + 5 hit points from an ally’s cure serious wounds spell is more than worth the −1 critical point penalty that spell imposes. But over time, the regular use of magical healing plays into the campaign story as a thing that characters and players need to think about.
In the short term, the differences between the different healing spells in the game and the potions and spellmarks that channel those spells’ magic take on an unexpected importance. A potion of cure light wounds restores 1d8 + 1 hit points. A potion of cure moderate wounds restores 2d8 + 3 hit points, bestowing about the same amount of healing as taking two potions of cure light wounds. But for a character with a severe critical point deficit, taking two of the cheaper potions of cure light wounds imposes a −2 penalty to critical points, where the more expensive potion of cure moderate wounds incurs only a −1 penalty. (If a character has lost only defense points, they can chug potions or crack spellmarks indiscriminately. Only healing magic that restores critical points imposes a critical point penalty.)
Critical point damage and a critical point penalty can both be restored during a downtime rest — and only during a downtime rest. CORE20 breaks from the increasingly laissez-faire attitude that D&D has taken toward healing up during long rests over successive editions, and the long rest that heals up one hundred percent of a character’s injuries is nowhere to be found in the game. (This is a big part of the reason why magical healing is commonplace in a CORE20 campaign.) As such, anytime a character is badly injured (as represented by taking critical point damage), they get an automatic invitation to take downtime at some point in the near future. The character’s player gets to think about whether it’s best to take magical healing and later restore a critical point penalty during downtime (a relatively slow process) or push on injured and plan to later let natural healing restore those lost critical points during downtime (a faster process).
Injury in CORE20 is thus something a character is always thinking about, with each bout of critical point damage setting up the question of how best to deal with it. Short-term gain in the form of magical healing is easily had. But it comes with the long-term pain of a critical point penalty and the reduction of overall physical hardiness that represents. Critical injuries also allow characters and players to naturally embrace the idea of letting downtime play an important part in every CORE20 campaign, as an alternative to the movement toward breakneck speed-adventuring that’s become the norm in D&D over the last couple of decades. I know it’s tricky to talk about “realism” in a game about dragons and wizards casting fireball, but part of the narrative goal that inspired CORE20’s approach to magical healing was to bring back a degree of verisimilitude around the idea of injury. Characters having been beaten to within an inch of their lives is a big part of the narrative cycle of fantasy games, and having injury be something that isn’t just forgotten about after every long rest serves that narrative well.
Art by Dean Spencer.
