[Angel_Heart]

Anyone have a good system for slower healing? I never liked how PCs can naturally heal from gunshots in just a few days. I made combat and its after-effects grittier and forced players to make much more tactical choices when I upped 4th and 5th Ed.'s daily healing tests to weekly tests (physical damage only). As I said, my players started acting more tactically instead of running around the campaign world like they're in GTA when I employed this house rule variant of mine.
However there's always room for improvements. Anyone got any good ideas?

[Michael Chandra]

This probably belongs in the Rules forum, not the SRM one.

There already are penalties for healing including environment. You can expand on those. Combined with healing being an extended test where your dice amount keeps decreasing, that puts on a lot of stress. You're in Low security? Well obviously the racket in the neighborhood prevents you from resting well. How clean is your apartment and do you need to go out to get food into a dusty store?

[Jack_Spade]

Impeding healing almost never benefits a game in my experience. It just makes players waste gaming time with healing up until they feel strong enough to go out again. The system is filled with sufficiently deadly options to make a brush with death a far better education tool to get your runners to be more careful.

That said, if you want to make your characters resort to sending spirits and drones in instead of risking their own hide, you could start handing out negative qualities to simulate badly healed or treated combat wounds - Although I'm not a fan of this approach, as it's essentially a Karma penalty. 

[Kiirnodel]

I also think that making the natural healing rules take longer is probably not the best approach (at least not at every table, it might turn out fine at some).

I would surmise that extending healing times would overall increase methods of quick healing, like first aid and magic. If you want to make healing in general harder, heavily enforcing penalties to make that healing more difficult to accomplish is probably the better way to go. (Like Michael Chandra suggested)

[忍]

Plus its the future! There's a spectacle of advancements in the medical field. Like nanites...

[Tecumseh]

It sounds like you had a positive result from changing the interval length of the healing tests.

One possibility would be to make the interval length dependent on the level of damage that the character is attempting to heal. For example, make the interval equal to (in days) the number of Physical damage boxes the character has.

If you're trying to heal 1P flesh wound, then the interval is one day. It's not bad, so you're fine the next day.

If you're trying to heal a 7P from accidentally falling on some bullets, then your interval is 7 days. If you heal 3 boxes and have 4 left, then your next interval is 4 days.

Compared to your current system, this would let minor wounds heal faster and major wounds (8P+) heal more slowly. A significant wound could lay a character low for a couple weeks, which might be a nice middle ground between a couple days (too short) and a couple months (more realistic, but perhaps too long for what's meant to be a game).

Just some thoughts.

[Sphinx]

One possibility would be to make the interval length dependent on the level of damage that the character is attempting to heal. For example, make the interval equal to (in days) the number of Physical damage boxes the character has.

I like this a lot. Adding it to my house rules.

[HP15BS]

One possibility would be to make the interval length dependent on the level of damage that the character is attempting to heal. For example, make the interval equal to (in days) the number of Physical damage boxes the character has.

I like this a lot.

+1 from me, too