Healing Factors in tabletop games.
- Arduin:
- Greater Demons:
- Nagandas, Lord of the Sea Serpents, regenerates six Hit Points of normal damage per melee round. He also regains one point of lost Strength, Constitution or Life Energy level once per minute to a maximum of eighteen points per day.
- The Nameless One (or the Unbeckoned) will heal any damage done to it at a rate of ten Hit Points per melee round.
- Shuggondra the Bloated One is a Blob Monster: a huge white mass of squirming, quivering translucent flesh with various protuberances (pods, nodules, tentacles etc.). Any damage it takes is healed at a rate of 8 Hit Points per melee round.
- Vorcas Hell Jaws can regenerate damage at a rate of six Hit Points per melee round. He can also regain up to twenty lost points each of Strength and Constitution per day at a rate of one point per round.
- Angelic beings (angels, maruts, etc.) heal five Hit Points per melee round.
- Greater Demons:
- Call of Cthulhu: Several monsters and deities regenerate their injuries at high speed: Chthonians (one to five Hit Points per round depending on age) Cthulhu (six Hit Points per round), Hounds of Tindalos (four Hit Points per round) Shoggoths (two Hit Points per round), Shudde M'ell (five Hit Points per round), Star Spawn of Cthulhu (three Hit Points). Tsathoggua regenerates a stunning thirty Hit Points per round.
- Chaosium's supplement All the Worlds' Monsters Volume III:
- The Amphisbaena (a giant snake with A Head at Each End of its body) recovers four lost Hit Points per melee turn.
- Balitorr, King of the Earth Elementals, can regenerate five Hit Points per melee turn.
- Chakarra, Lord of Fire, can heal five Hit Points per melee turn.
- The 6th level Basic Demon can restore one hit point per hit point of damage it inflicts on other creatures.
- The Rainbow Demon is a Giant Spider with nine attacks per melee turn. For each attack it doesn't make during a melee turn it regenerates twenty lost Hit Points.
- Dark Elves regain one hit point of damage per melee round.
- Etheran, Lord of the Air, is King of the Air Elementals. He heals five Hit Points per melee turn.
- A Gnome of Yipuuri spends his time wandering around cleaning up and re-stocking dungeons after PC parties are done with them. If attacked by adventurers he can heal six Hit Points per melee turn.
- Klithgor the Destroyer is the lord of all ghosts, spirits and nightshades. He can regenerate ten Hit Points and one to six lost levels of Life Energy per melee turn.
- A Morq is an android with no facial features and large ears. It gains back three Hit Points per melee turn, starting three melee turns after being damaged.
- The Murkworm is a huge worm that is 60-90 feet long. It recovers one lost hit point per melee turn.
- The None Such is a cross between a blink dog, a Greater Demon and a phase spider. It can heal four Hit Points per melee turn.
- Nunoria, Lord of Water, is the king of the Water Elementals. He can restore five Hit Points of damage per melee turn.
- The Ogron is a large humanoid with an incredibly ugly face. He can regenerate one hit point each ten minutes.
- A Shock Troll heals five Hit Points per melee turn.
- The Great Wraith can regenerate three Hit Points per melee turn.
- The Yarzooyn is a large six-armed humanoid that regains six lost Hit Points per melee turn.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The Regeneration ability changes normal damage into subdual damage and the ability to recover so many Hit Points' worth of subdual damage per round. Thus, if you don't use the attack form that does cause normal damage to the foe, they cannot be killed, merely knocked out for a while.
- There is also Fast Healing, which merely causes the character to heal a certain amount of normal damage per round and thus allows real death to occur much more easily, shutting off the power just as normal healing would be.
- The ultimate example of this ability is the Tarrasque. Its regeneration ability has no damage type exception, meaning that no matter what you do to the monster it'll come back eventually unless you use a magical Wish to wish it stayed dead.
- In previous editions, there were particular forms of regeneration that varied from monster to monster. The D&D troll, arguably the most famous example, can quickly regenerate wounds from swords and axes, and by themselves these weapons can't kill them, although they can knock them out temporarily by reducing their hit points to zero. The only thing that can kill them are fire and acid, which also cause damage that can't be regenerated. Whether you blow them up with a fireball, or knock them out with a weapon and then set them on fire or douse them with acid, you need to burn trolls to kill them if you're using standard tactics. If beat into helplessness, they can then be drowned also if there is water nearby (as there often is as they often inhabit swamps). Trolls being vulnerable to fire is likely originally taken from the novel Three Hearts and Three Lions.
- 4e Lycanthropes (were-creatures) have regeneration instead of damage reduction. It's suppressed by, you guessed it, silver.
- Regeneration is used to create Puzzle Bosses sometimes in the game; However, it occasionally backfires through really counterintuitive or contradictory responses being required, e.g. the Tendriculos, a Man-Eating Plant, regenerates from fire and axes, and is vulnerable to electrical attacks and blunt weapons. Another man eating plant has a sort of healing factor in that it gains health from being hit by electrical attacks (the Shambling Mound).
- Eberron has Healing Factor as a named feat. It allows shifters to regain health whenever they return to their normal form.
- In the fourth edition, regeneration works more like the previous fast healing ability and does not function at 0 Hit Points or less. On the other hand, "special" attacks (fire vs. trolls, silver against lycanthropes) generally only suppress it for one turn before it kicks back in.
- Certain types of Damage Reduction, a defensive ability that reduces the severity of each attack a creature suffers (possibly negating it), are described as wounds closing instantly rather than simply not being as severe as expected.
- Everything has ridiculously fast healing in 4e. For example, a power called "knee breaker" only lasts a few rounds.
- In the second edition of the game, a sufficiently high Constitution score gave you this ability. The highest natural Constitution for the basic races is nineteen note . A minimum Con. score of twenty is required for basic regeneration.
- Forgotten Realms: In the 2nd Edition supplement The Code of the Harpers, if a spellcaster creates a magical construct (golem, gargoyle, etc.) inside a Harper refuge, either the creator or the construct can be given a Chance Element. One possible Chance Element is being able to recover 2 Hit Points every six minutes.
- Elder Evils:
- Father Llymic heals from his injuries extremely rapidly, but only as long as he remains in total darkness; his healing is suppressed when he's exposed to light.
- As long as he has his horn, Zargon can regenerate damage with shocking speed. His regeneration restores a little over a seventh of his health every round, he can regrow any severed body part in about a minute — unless he can just hold the limb against the stump, in which case it reattaches immediately — and he can reform his entire body as long as his horn is intact.
- In Eclipse Phase anyone with basic biomods heals twice as fast as a baseline human (regain HP every 12 hours instead of 24), even slowly regrowing limbs. Medichines can speed that up an additional 12 times (every hour).
- Exalted:
- Lunar Exalts can recover from terrible injuries at an astounding rate whilst in their warform, if not in battle (they must use separate healing powers for that purpose). They can regenerate lost limbs and internal organs (assuming they aren't dead) at a rate of one such organ or limb per hour, good as new and fully functional.
- The Regeneration Wyld mutation allows its holder to heal damage as if it were one category less grievous than it is and to regrow any lost organs and extremities. However, any body part regrown in this manner develops a mutation that, while it doesn't harm the individual or impar the part's use, is highly visible and disfiguring.
- GURPS: Regeneration ranges from slow enough that people would have to hang out with you for a while to notice it all the way to so fast that you heal your total HP every second.
- Hc Svnt Dracones: Reptilian characters can take genetic reclamation surgery to gain the ability to regenerate lost limbs. But it doesn't speed up HP recovery at all and actually requires full HP to work.
- Hero System supplement Fantasy Hero Companion. Demon lords can regenerate 4 Body (Hit Points) per turn (12 seconds).
- Hollow Earth Expedition has several versions of this.
- All creatures inside the Hollow Earth heal at twice the normal rate. People have gone to sleep severely injured and woken up completely healed.
- Anyone with the Quick Healer talent heals at twice the normal rate. This benefit is cumulative with the Hollow Earth healing bonus above, for a total benefit of healing at four times the normal rate.
- Lizardmen can regenerate damaged organs and lost limbs. A finger takes a week, an eye or other small organ in two weeks, and a tail, arm or leg in five weeks. This benefit is cumulative with the above examples.
- Inhabitants of Shangri-La heal at four times the rate of the surface world, and anyone who spends a year there will have lost limbs begin to regenerate and birth defects disappear.
- In Nomine: Jormungandr can regenerate from any injury as long as its head is left intact. It survived being decapitated by Uriel during the Purity Crusade, and has spent the centuries since slowly regrowing its body from where its head was left on the bottom of the North Atlantic.
- Ironclaw: The "Reserves of Vitality" atavism allows a character to remove a "Hurt" status effect once per day, it can't do anything about "Injured" though.
- It Came From The Late Late Show: Monsters with the Regeneration special ability can recover lost Survival Points (Hit Points) at an accelerated rate depending on the type of Monster.
- Magic: The Gathering has various spells and abilities that allow creatures to regenerate instead of going to the graveyard, wiping out all damage they may have suffered in the process (as well as tapping them and taking them out of combat). These usually require some cost to be paid (usually in mana) and there are forms of destruction that explicitly cannot be regenerated from... — Creatures also recover from damage that fails to kill them pretty quickly by default, as 'remove all leftover damage from stuff still in play' is one of the automatic events of the last step of each turn. (Players aren't so lucky.)
- The World of Darkness: Most supernaturals in both Old and New World of Darkness have an ability to heal injuries faster by spending their Mana:
- Werewolves in both Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Werewolf: The Forsaken have an accelerated healing factor: not only can they spend Essence to heal lethal damages, but bashing damages heal each turn for free. The later game, Werewolf: the Forsaken, actually plays up the cancer element; if a werewolf's wounded with silver, there's a chance they could develop a malignant growth not entirely unlike cancer. 2e Forsaken got this ability upgraded; their healing powers mean that they can effectively No-Sell the Chunky Salsa Rule, as they can no longer suffer Aggravated level damage from any source other than silver weapons, supernatural attacks, or completely filling out their health bar with Lethal damage. Also, being in War-Form means they immediately heal all non-Aggravated damage at the start of every turn, making them one of the setting's candidates for being Nigh Invulnerable.
- One of the fomori powers in Werewolf: The Apocalypse provides this, except that every time you regrow something, you get nasty scars and often malignant tumors as well. Being a fomori is completely disgusting, seriously.
- Vampires in both Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem can heal about as quickly as Werewolves, but they must expend blood they've ingested to do so, and the strength of their healing factor depends on the damage type. "Bashing" damage note heals faster than "lethal" damagenote . Damage from fire, sunlight or a supernatural source, "aggravated damage", takes even more blood and time to heal. Depending on game and edition, different kinds of attacks are assigned different levels of lethality — for example, in the original version of Requiem, gunshots were considered to only do bashing damage, while swords and the like still did lethal. Perhaps realizing that this didn't make a lot of sense, "Blood and Smoke"/2e instead made it that all sources of lethal damage are instead downgraded to bashing damage, thus emphasizing how dangerous fighting a vampire with a conventional weapon is.
- Mage: The Awakening: Mages can spend Mana to heal lethal or bashing damages instantly, but it's much more expansive than for werewolves and vampires, requiring three points of mana to heal either one bashing damage or one lethal damage. Interestingly, they can also reverse this ability, inflicting themselves damages in order to acquire Mana.
- Mummy: The Curse: Mummies heal one bashing damage per turn for free, can spend Pillars (the energy of their very soul) to "seal the flesh", allowing them to also heal two lethal per turn for a limited time, and in dire situations can sacrifice part of their raw power to instantly heal one Aggravated damage.
- Beast: The Primordial: Beasts have one of the strongest healing factor with werewolves, as they can spend one point of Satiety to heal all bashing damages, three lethal or one aggravated. As a drawback however, they can only trigger it while inside their Lair.
- Princess: The Hopeful: Downplayed with the titular characters. While they can learn charms that allow them to regenerate damage (to themselves or others), it isn't part of the default Hopeful template. Instead, they get Holy Shield, allowing them to expend a Wisp to downgrade damage from an attack by one step (aggravated damage becomes lethal, lethal becomes bashing, and bashing is cancelled).
- In Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution espers with the biofeedback power can heal themselves from life-threatening wounds in seconds with the Regeneration talent. Espers with a high enough strength score can heal from grievous bodily harm in a matter of days.
- Warhammer: Regeneration is a game effect common enough to be in the main rulebook rather than the army-specific ones, and is cancelled by fire.
- Valten, by reason of being probably the avatar of a god, has a healing factor good enough that there's a five in six chance of him surviving any attack that takes his last wound with no ill effects, hopping back to his feet to fight again. In certain corners he became known as yo-yo Valten.
- Trolls have a chance to recover any wound taken that turn, unless hit by fire. The goblin chieftain Gromm the Paunch got his name by winning an eating competition with raw troll steaks. The flesh perpetually tries to grow, mostly kept in check by his stomach acids. Ever since he's been troubled by huge digestive problems, although on the plus side he eventually gained regenerative abilities.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Necrons get this by way of being sapient machines whose technology is beyond anything humanity can dream of — the living metal that makes them up will put itself back together from most injuries, and even a Necron that was blasted to pieces can still teleport back to its base for repairs.
- To a lesser degree this applies to the Orks, who are capable of healing from any non-fatal wound quite quickly, and when you consider how "tuff" they are, a fatal blow is difficult. In fact, standard Imperial procedure is, after a battle with Orks, to go around and cut the heads off their bodies with entrenching shovels to make sure they stay dead. About the only non-fatal thing that they can't regenerate on their own is severed limbs and they can still stitch the lost limb, or even someone else's limb, back onto the stump and have it heal together pretty quickly. They can even reattach severed heads and walk off like nothing happened! In large part this is because they were genetically engineered as a self-perpetuating species of Super Soldiers by the Old Ones, with their ungodly resilience being designed as part of this role.
- With a bit of help from mutation, Tellos of the Soul Drinkers picks up this ability. It gets to the point where he can run into battle naked from the waist up without suffering meaningful damage. It doesn't help with injuries from before he gained this ability - so he can't regrow his hands — but that's not much of a problem when you have chainsaws attached to your wrists. It takes Exterminatus to kill him in the end.
- The Carnifex is even tougher. One of them survived Exterminatus. On the planet's surface. When they found it, they had to call in a heavy-duty orbital bombardment to finish it off.
- Belisarius Cawl is a mechanical example. While Adeptus Mechanicus around his level can usually spend time to repair themselves, Cawl just outright repairs himself constantly and without his explicit intervention, 1 to 3 wounds every turn out of his 5. Combined with his ridiculous levels of inherent armor, and the fact one of his possible buffs (which attempts to repair every unit in an area for one Wound) affects himself as well (leading to 4-wound regeneration on a lucky turn), he will spend most of the battle repairing himself faster than anyone can hurt him. He has been known to grind down Abaddon the Despoiler to dust simply because not even he, a One-Man Army who can kill even great Tyranid beasts and entire squads of Space Marines in melee without trouble, can slice him apart fast enough.
