Healing House Rule?

[blacksheepcannibal]

I was worried about this, when I started playing. Basically with a mage in the group, every single encounter your players will be full vitality, full wounds; resource management will more or less be nil - maybe have to manage rations and ammo?

I looked at three different ways of solving this, and these are the three that popped up:

Remove spell points per scene, change it to spell points per hour.
Pros: Well, there goes the magical auto-healing. Also, there goes the slightly worrisome aspect of mages with universal magic - the ability to marginalize other class abilities or skills, ala knock and other utility spells.
Cons: There goes the fun of being a mage; casting a limited number of spells per day will make magic items and scrolls far more important than they really are.

Insert Healing Surges. For those unfamiliar with the system, a "healing surge" is about a quarter of a character's hit points in value, and they have a limited number of healing surges per day. When they are all gone, that person can get (almost) no healing done to them AT ALL. This makes higher power healing spells more valuable, as opposed to more economic healing spells that heal more-per-spell-point. The number of healing surges a character would get would vary based upon intended role or constitution, or both, with some new feats to help.
Pros: This seems to solve "how often can you get healed in a day" and could also be spread out to include meals or potions as well, to balance those out. It also makes healing somebody with more hit points more powerful than healing somebody with fewer hit points, making healing spell balance work out well, and further rewarding people that really want to stack on the vitality. You could easily alter Cure Wounds I-IV to heal 1-4 surge values worth of hit points, effectively allowing heal IV to heal to full; you could also do "surge plus 10/20/30/40" or whatever arbitrary value you felt would work.
Cons: Pushing in a whole new system into the game can have unintended consequences. I really thought this might work, but it seems like adding yet another full layer to an already multi-layer cake. It's also more or less ripped straight from another different game that I am leaving for a reason.

What I finally decided on:
Campaign Property: Fragile Heroes (although some classes I rounded up, some classes I rounded down). Altered Campaign property, basically every character at the end of a scene heals to full vitality, with no healing of wounds. To make things a little more interesting, a character heals his Wis score in stress and his Con score in subdual after every fight, as well as lops off one tier of fatigued or shaken.
Pros: The pool of resources-per-combat is reduced dramatically, making defending yourself a more viable option, as opposed to just "kill them as fast as you can before they kill you". This makes combat more dramatic and tactical - it's not about dishing out max damage. It also makes in-combat healing much more powerful, which in my mind is a good thing compared to as-is. However, seeings as how all vitality is returned at the end of a fight, a healer isn't an absolute requirement. Healing just 1 wounds a day makes any critical hit or ever dropping to 0 vitality absolutely disastrous.
Cons: It makes keeping track of things a bit more cumbersome, but not overwhelmingly so. It does make players a bit more cautious, willing to run away from a fight if it's not going their way, and afterwards being able to heal up and go back into it. Since your con mod can be half your vitality value or more, it makes constitution an even more valuable asset. Critical Hits can become game-enders very quickly.

Things I did in addition to this:
Touch of Light spell now removes one condition, or lowers it by one grade.
Paladin's Lay on Hands now does the same as Touch of light, only once-per-scene, as a half-action, and without a spellcasting check.
Cure Wounds spells now heal fewer wounds: I-IV heal 0, 1, 3, and 5 wounds per cast respectively.

I'm strongly considering allowing a Mend check to heal 1d6 wounds OR remove/lower a condition, with the usual limit of mend-checks-per-day. I might allow it to heal subdual instead.

[Krensky]

My players tend to be full vitality, but not full wounds.

Part of this is a GM style thing, and careful management of scene transitions. If I want PCs to have to manage healing resources, then a single scene is not a single battle. Heck, I've on the fly decided to extend a scene without warning to shake one player of his habit of dropping every spellpoint in a single fight.

Part of it is that if the mage burns his spell points after a fight (when the scene ended) he doesn't necessarily have them back at the beginning of the next encounter.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Is there a specific style of PC behavior you're trying to get?

I'm currently having a hard time because I want to encourage running away when it's funny but not screwing over the PCs because they decide to be bold sometimes.