I want to get your thoughts on possibly adding a house rule that will help our game here. Over the last several years I have been following the SWSE rules of how often Second Winds, Med Packs, and Full Rests can be benefitted from in a 24 hour period. This carries some interesting side effects in a PbP environment.
At an actual table you can quickly gloss over down time in minutes and have each character back up, the only problems becoming how often the characters need to rest to recover from injuries after they have exhausted all the available methods (which is also problematic). At the virtual table the time it takes becomes longer as well since we wait on posts.
I find I kind of like how 4e handles this and keeps characters in the action for more encounters. So my thought is to model some of those rules here. Allowing for Second Wind to be used once an encounter as long as a short rest occurs between encounters. This would also mean altering some feats and talents out there that give additional second winds per day to allowing them to be used more than once per encounter. I think this would go a long way toward making characters hardier.
As for Med Packs, I am thinking we could lift the once per day rule and allow it more often but increase the difficulty of its use from there. The current state indicates making a DC 15 and for every point over you gain an additional hitpoint (plus what is gained based on character level). There is a couple things we could do here. We could say we make it more difficult each time it is used increasing the DC by 5 each time (much the same way as deflect works for Use the Force). So then the character gains it's level back in hitpoints plus 1 for every point that the new DC is exceeded by. Failure cold mean a persistent condition and falling down the condition track. I would also change the party status where I would start tracking the number of times a med pack was used and we refresh after an extended rest.
I think we could also add the skill use to Treat Injury that would allow the other character to recover without spending the full 3 swift actions. Make this a standard action and a DC 15 and only usable on others. We can call it Assisted Recovery or something.
We can leave the benefit of short rest to once in a 24 hour period, though more rest periods can be taken to be able to refresh the med pack uses this way.
Thoughts?