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The problem is the four day thing doesn't mean anything and if it is intended to discourage characters from adventuring while wounded, its a bad way to do it. A penalty to healing rate when doing so makes more sense.
The four day rule has worked for me for a very long time now. It is (as far as I know) unique to DW and I retain it because my players understand it (and its limitations). There is nothing to stop individual GMs from using different rules in their games, of course.
You could use a variant on the
Pendragon healing rate (which I detailed above). You could, for example, have (STR + HP)/10 = Healing Rate (HR). The HR would then apply after every few days of rest (you could have it as every week or, to be more heroic, every 3 days).
Note that I'm thinking of the character's maximum, rather than current,
Health Points to obtain the HR.
I've literally just thought that up, so feel free to come up with something else (or a different time period for the natural HR)!
Regarding the "penalty to healing rate", you could instead use something akin to the
Pendragon rules for Aggravation. For those not familiar with that game, I'll quote part of the Aggravation rules here:
"Gamemasters inevitably face situations where knights who should be resting insist on activity – perhaps "to travel just for a few hours" or for "just one good fight." In other cases during a scenario, an injured character may be forced to leave his sickbed for several days, then rest, then ride many miles, then rest again. The rules for aggravation take care of this...
...Aggravation means making a condition worse by undertaking excessive activity while ill or injured. Each incident of aggravation causes 1 or more points of damage directly to current hit points; no wound is recorded. Aggravation damage occurs immediately after the activity is completed unless the Gamemaster decides otherwise. The extra damage may cause a character to become unconscious immediately after his rash action."
(Aggravation should not be confused with Deterioration - which is the loss of
Health Points through blood loss, dehydration, infection, illness, and more.)
HR is not affected by either Aggravation or Deterioration. It just means the
Health Points you end up are less than they would have been had the character continued to rest.
So, in DW, you could have it where characters have a constant, unchanging HR based on their physical attributes (I used
Strength and normal
Health Points, but you might disagree); but they can cause themselves further loss of
Health Points by not resting, and might even lose further
Health Points through illness, &c.
I'll leave that there as a suggestion for you to consider.
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Just because you can get by with one system is no reason not to switch to something better.
This presumes that what you're switching to is, indeed, better...