I'm having an issue with healing from fate points!

Having previously run a Dark Heresy game I found my players always saved their fate points for healing often healing up just as the session was about to end. As a GM this was very frustrating as no matter what I did the players were back to full by the start of the next session. It also had the nasty side effect of having players who were low on fate points more likely to have lower health and so more likely to have to burn the few they have, cycling towards death.

So, starting this Deathwatch campaign I removed the rule allowing healing. One session later a player is rolling on the critical damage table and everyone else is at 50% health max. Now I've reverted back to rules as written but I'm back to the original issue.

Have any other GMs experienced these issues? if so has anyone a suggestion?

Thanks,

B

maybe are you giving too much healing point with the fate point. In DH it was 1d5 point, how your player could be at full life point?

I'm playing a preacher in DH with 18 life point, in the last story i was a 0 from the start to the end and my only fate point give me 4 life point at the end, the IG won 2 point and the assassin ponly one, the psyker was agonising with no more fate point to spend.

Maybe you should hit harder on your player...

To take the extreme example one of my players had 5 fate points, at the end of a session in which he took damage he could heal 5d5 wounds and at the start of the next session he would heal 5d5 fate points of damage assuming an average roll of 2.5 thats 25 health points restored. Another player with only 1 fate point (as it was during the last session) is healing 5 wounds points in the same situation and as such was far more likely to be losing that fate point to prevent death.

In Deathwatch the healing is D10, the party current does not have an Apothecary and as such can only heal through resting not something that they've had a chance to do in the first two sessions of this campaign. Second session the player on the lowest fate points (3) had already burned one and it looks like I could have him dead outright in just a few more sessions, so I'm not sure hitting my players harder is going to help...

B

If they wait till the end of the session, restrict the use of Fate Points towards healing to one FP. Don't let them burn every Fate Point to heal, as that is intentionally breaking the story.

Yes, this game, I believe, is supposed to be epic but its the GM's job to insure that the danger of dying is there or else there is no reward. Remind them of the awesomeness FP can do besides healing....getting to roll a 10 on Initiative....instantly entering Squad Mode....etc. Get them to use their FP for things other than healing, OR make them use the FP for healing more often....especially after one of them gets blown sky high, fudge a roll and let them sweat.

Bazleebub said:

The tweak that I made seemed to have resolved that "hoard and heal" issue nicely - basically, while you can heal yourself with Fate Points, you can only do so when you take damage, you can only spend 1 Fate Point per damaging hit in this way, and you can't regain more wounds than the damaging hit caused you to lose (essentially, the fate point reduces damage, rather than heals it)

Alternatively you can imitate how medicae works, somewhat. You can only use a fatepoint once to "heal" a wound (from an attack, in this case, not a wound point) you've sustained, and not heal for more than how much damage that wound inflicted.

So if a player has sustained two wounds, one for 10 damage and another for 5 damage, he can use at most two fatepoints to heal himself (one for each wound). If he rolls 8 and 6, he heals 8 on that wound which inflicted 10 damage, and 5 on the wound which inflicted 5 damage (as you can't heal more than what it inflicted, 6 being more than 5).

This prevents a player from using 3 fate points to heal up one wound from an attack which did maybe 16 damage, preventing that kind of metagaming. Try it and see if it has any effect.

As was said, give them more things to spend fate points on. I haven't had this problem in my game, but then again, by the end of the session everyone is usually just about tapped out on Fate points anyhow. Hit them with things, assign penalties to rolls when the challenge should be hard. Point out that they can spend a fate point to make that roll actually succeed, or to add a degree of success.

If you need/want to, play dirty. When doing an opposed roll against an NPC and they report 3 degrees of success, make a small face and go "ooh, just missed it. Want to add a degree?".

In other words, fate points are there to be spent. Encourage them to do so