I was thinking about the similarities between a character I was making and one from the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, when the idea to make a magic item that replicated the effects of one of the powers in that series, Gold Feruchemy, which allows the user to store their health in pieces of gold, becoming sickly while storing, in order to be able to draw on the stored health later to heal faster. So I made this:
Bracers of Stored Health
Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement)
These ornate golden bracers can store the wearer's health for later use. While wearing the bracers, you can use an action to take one of the following actions:
Store. You store 1 hit die into the bracers. After taking this action, you have disadvantage on Constitution saves for 2 rounds, and take 1 extra damage for each die rolled to deal damage to you in the same time frame. This effect stacks with consecutive uses of this action. A long rest will not restore any hit dice stored up to an hour before starting the rest.
Tap. You can roll up to 5 stored hit dice, healing for that amount. Alternatively, you can spend 1 hit die to cancel the debuff from 1 use of the Store action, or 3 hit dice to cure yourself of 1 disease or condition that is affecting you. The condition can be blinded, deafened, paralyzed, or poisoned.
Some potential balancing options that I thought of are:
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If the Store action is too underpowered, making the Store action a bonus action instead.
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If the Store action is too overpowered, change it so that you instead store over a short or long rest, storing as many hit die as you want. Hit die stored during a long rest are not restored by it. The debuff would last for 10 minutes x the number of hit die stored, starting after the rest ends.
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Increasing/reducing the maximum number of hit die that can be used when taking the Tap action.
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Making it so that the Tap action can't be taken on two consecutive turns.
Does this seem balanced as it is, or does it need changes, either by making one of the listed changes or by doing something else I didn't think of?
Best Answer
This is profoundly unbalanced as written. During downtime days, as written, the item permits the user to pour unlimited numbers of hit dice into the bracers. All you have to do is ensure that you don't end the day with less than half your maximum number of hit dice, and that you finish storing at least an hour before you go to sleep, and you're losing nothing for the next day. You can then tap those whenever you like for major blocks of healing and/or curing the blinded/deafened/paralyzed/poisoned conditions.
The cost of storing is meaningless because no one's going to take the Store action while in combat anyway. There's no reason to, and actions in combat are far too precious to spend unnecessarily. If they're safe enough to store, then the couple of rounds won't matter. Spending a die to cancel the debuff is if anything even more pointless, because then you're burning the die you just stored in order to get rid of the (minimal) side effects of storing it. Between that and the action cost, it means that you're effectively burning a hit die and two actions in order to give yourself a durability penalty for a round while in combat. It's just a terrible idea all around.
In order to have any hope of being balanced, there needs to be a serious limit on how many hit dice can be stored in the thing. Either there's an explicit cap, or the hit dice that are stored in the thing simply don't refresh while stored. The way that gets handled is going to be a significant part of how balanced it is and for what rarity. When the answer is "there is no limit", it breaks the HP economy and therefore cannot be balanced. None of your proposed fixes address that core issue in any meaningful way, and therefore none of them are particularly pertinent here.
For where to put the hit die cap, if you want to go that route? Well, the ring of spell storing is an attuned rare item (a very nice attuned rare item) that can store up to 5 spell levels in a somewhat similar way. Those spell levels could be healing spells (but generally aren't). Figure out how much healing you could reasonably get from packing one of those things full, and that's a floor... because the ring of spell storing is way more flexible than that. For another benchmark, compare it to the max cap of the staff of healing (using only 9 charges rather than 10, because you don't want to risk a 5% chance of it just vanishing). That, too, is an attuned rare item, and its ability to heal others makes it somewhat more flexible, but it's getting closer. The "staff possibly vanishing" and "only cleric/druid/bard" aspects bring it down a bit.
As a sidenote, by my understanding of Brandon Sanderson's work, this sort of thing may be a recurring problem with trying to convert his ideas into magical items for 5e. 5e is pretty careful about not letting things break the system. Sanderson is all about having people take the powers they have access to and figure out ways to use them to break the system. The two philosophies don't mesh particularly well.