It's ugly, but as far as I see the only orthodox way to run self healing in combat is as an attack. If you succeed in reducing your opponents APs, that is kind of the same thing as increasing your own.
I think allowing a simple contest against a fixed target to heal yourself would be grossly overpowered - a sufficiently competent healer would never lose a fight unless they were killed in a single round.
Under normal combat circumstances (i.e. someone beating on you with an axe), you will definitely take some kind of hefty penalty and/or negative edge to reflect the fact that this has got to count as a pretty high-risk manoeuvre.
One option would be to say if someone uses a feat in this way and does enough AP 'damage' to inflict a wound, they can take an AP gain instead (the opponent doesn't lose APs, just as if the 'wound' option had been taken).
Another would be to track APs for magic and combat separately, allowing meaningful lending between the pools. But that would be a pretty radical change to the whole HW system.
How would a fast regeneration ability (like the werewolves in _American Werewolf in Paris_) work in HW? Add AP automatically each round? Act as a defensive edge against physical attacks?
Richard
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