Hello

As many others on this forum I've never played and RPG before, but i'm going to give this one a try as GM.

I think I get every concept, but I'm not sure how the healing works.

When can PC's decide to convert stress into trauma, and when can they decide to recover from the trauma.

Do you insert sections in the story where they can do so? And how do you manage the time: healing for a day, week or month..
Do you play day by day, or can the story take a leap into the future? Because waiting a month looks like a long time to recover.

Thank you in advance

Time is a strange concept is role playing games and, for a new player probably the hardest thing to come to grips with. 90% of the time, time will flow as the narrative allows for it. If the players are camped up in a house with enough food, water and other stuff to last them 3 days then by all means jump through those 3 days. Of course, as the GM you might want to add in a few surprises on the way but you don't need to a strict hour by hour or minute by minute schedule if it doesn't make sense. Time only becomes important in combat basically and then each round is a certain number of seconds....10 I think.

In terms of healing a character needs 5 minutes of downtime to convert stress to a trauma. So they can't do this in the middle of combat really or in other stressful situations. Removing a trauma is a bit different but again comes down to time. You don't have to spend 1 week doing literally nothing whilst you cure a large cut for example you just need to make some effort to cure it and then allow that time to pass. This really is down to GM discretion. You might be nice and start the 1 week clock the moment they stick a bandage on it. You could tell your players to keep track of medical supplies and remind them to change bandages and use disinfectant every day or you'll "restart the clock". That's another thing that is weird when you're new to RPGs is how, as the GM you have the final decision when it comes to rules and really depends on the game you want to play.

For me I've been quite nice and just let players wait out the time before healing. Of course this depends on the severity of the trauma. If one of my players was to get a broken leg then simply adding a cast and acting as normal will not allow the thing to heal but that has yet to happen yet!

Thank you, that's allready helpful.
And how many can they heal each time?

Only one trauma each time?

Otherwise it would be very easy to heal and there will be no thrill in the game, right?

Ease of healing is based on the situation and GM desertion. When you recover stress all is wiped from that track, meaning if the track reached lvl 2 you have a lvl 2 trauma not a lvl1 and lvl 2 trauma etc etc... So in that category you would have only one trauma, unless the player rested and reset that stress track before and now has 2 traumas. Say a lvl 1 trauma and a lvl 2 trauma. Well the players get a chance to rest and the player with 2 traumas needs one day of rest to get rid of the lvl 1 and 1 week for the 2 lvl. If the healing is not disrupted for 1 week than they both are removed as traumas. But that is also when you can have some fun as a GM and make something heal badly for whatever reason and suddenly that player now has a negative feature . For example a badly healed broken leg (had to run from zombies while it was splinted or something along those lines). Now the player has a limp.

I imagine it is something like the below. The human mind is a very powerful thing and it can allow someone to move and act under extreme stress to the point where it would not normally be allowed to.

Stress = unrecognized issue within the body and mind of the player, while under Adrenaline. They may have a fractured tibia, a psychological scar or be so stunned by a bad guys social flaying that the impact of the event is unrecognizable and they continue to operate under adrenaline as if nothing is wrong.

Trauma = the player has had time to recognize the impact of the injury and now the adrenaline dump is coming along and BAM, the full weight of the situation comes crashing in. That fractured tibia means the player needs to splint that leg and they will be walking slow for a week or so. That psychological scar could be VERY deep, and it may take a month of constant ministering with the pastor the group saved to come to grips with the situation. That blow to their ego by the bad guys barbs about how the player couldn't save their dog, that might roll off after a day as the player has time to think back on the situation and realizes there was nothing they could do.

In all, the players should be allowed to lick their wounds and not need a great deal of micro managing the recovery process... PROVIDED that they have the time and resources to do so. If they have a month of supplies, let them sit for a month and nurse that wound. But then when they venture out and the city has been picked clean while they sat around playing cards and eating the last of their canned tuna, they'll recognize the gravity of their situation and their potential mistake as they missed prime looting scavenging opportunities.

Hope that helps.