D&D 5E Gritty Healing and Survival Rules for 5e

[OptionalRule]

After hearing Matt Coleville talk a bit on the topic during a hangout, I was inspired to jot down my own thoughts on how I've done gritty healing or survival in 5e. This leans into longer natural healing and managing the conditions under which you recover. It also takes the point of view of mitigating for loss rather than adding a benefit in terms of how you set things up. Hope you enjoy.

Gritty Healing & Survival Rules for 5e

 

[Ghost2020]

nice!
thanks for the write up!

 

[el-remmen]

Did someone say Gritty Healing??

 

[NotAYakk]

This natural healing results in much faster recovery than the standard Gritty rules, and makes a cleric or paladin an infinitely better tank than a fighter or barbarian (adding a cleric or paladin adds much more to the damage your party can survive per day than a fighter or barbarian does in almost all circumstances).

In practice, adding an extra cleric (or anyone with decent healing magic really) would make almost all of these additional rules mostly noise, if your cleric was willing to spend resources on healing (or had such resources to spare).


A more direct criticism of mechanics presented:

Your "modifying hd rolls" rules is full of quirky mechanics. "up to skill modifier", "roll twice", "proficiency bonus targets", "increase DC by 2 for each extra target" are used, each one with a different mechanic, for what appears to be no good reason.

Ability score drain isn't impacted by your resting conditions.

You state "DC 13 Constitution", but do not state it if it a saving throw or ability check (or, I suppose, attack roll, heh).

Shelter rules exist, then Sleep mentions Shelter again.

There are a lot of rolls you are making every night. Let's see.

1. You need to find out how many people want to spend HD, and order them by importance.

2. If you have someone with good survival, they roll to provide shelter for the most important. This probably covers everyone unless the party is large. Then weaker people start rolling, so long as they have a positive bonus. (PCs with +0 survival are unable to ever produce shelter it looks like, and negative bonus PCs remove shelter if they try). Advantage from unskilled helpers is likely.

3. Food is unlikely to show up, unless the party runs out of rations. Even then, the impact is going to be relatively small; running out of food is going to be a bigger problem before dropping HD by 1 size is.

4. Sleep you can't do until you check shelter or there is an ambush. Now you do your DC 15 Con(survival) checks (off-attribute skill use) if needed.

5. Finally, you'll do medicine checks. You'll reevaluate how many people need significant healing and decide how many get care.

Problem: There isn't going to be much story generated here, and there is going to be a lot of relatively fiddly mechanics. Failure results in "you heal, just a bit slower".

... For players, I suspect the result will be attempting to engage with these rules as little as they can.

For DMs, I'd have to have them printed out and consult them at each stage I suspect to not get them wrong.

...

It could be cleaned up. Tidy up the requirements.

The survival days thing might be worth looking at.

 

[OptionalRule]

Thanks for the feedback. Cleaned up some of the specific points I could identify, normalized the DCs and a few other things. Thanks. Healing is biggest thing that invalidates this. The Heal-bot and spend all slots at the end of the night but there's a part 2 tomorrow specifically addressing that.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Is there adventure writing guidelines to go along with it? Spending a week to recover is no big deal if you have a year to do something.

 

[Malmuria]

For anyone who has tried making 5e more "gritty," what is your experience? Does it actually make for osr-style gameplay or does it just add bookkeeping and result in more character deaths? Related, I feel death saves are one of the biggest obstacles for making gritty style games.

I would be concerned with all the elements of 5e that just skip aspects of gameplay (the ranger, obviously). Infinite cantrips are actually a huge problem here, like using mage hand to trigger traps or interact with objects, or even things like mending and light. Or, off the top of my head: using familiars for range-less scouting (pact of chain), always having a place to stay (many backgrounds), race abilities giving you actual spells, arcane focus vs spell components, identifying magic items on a short rest. It would seem that trying to address all of these would result in too many houserules and feel like the dm just saying 'no' a lot.

 

[OptionalRule]

Is there adventure writing guidelines to go along with it? Spending a week to recover is no big deal if you have a year to do something.

No specific guidelines other than lean more into module based adventures with a few encounters. I give the example for Dragon of Icespire as an example since it's mostly individual encounters you can take a break between, and whatever wounds during travel would be a bigger factor. Likewise with Rime of the Frostmaiden. A traditional dungeon crawl would be difficult.

 

[Stalker0]

Reading the new version I still think it’s too fiddly.

1) I really don’t like the roll for every HD, that’s a lot of rolls and just very random. It also introduces some weirdness with spells and abilities, can I use a bard inspiration on the check or enhance ability?

I would do it more like your HD roll rules, make it a simple (you get half your hd back, but if you don’t have two or more of the “rest requirements…sleep good food etc”, then you get one quarter hd.

2) instead of making medicine checks, I would just require 2 points of medicine (either through wisdom and\or proficiency) per person needing to heal. It still makes first aid training Useful without the fiddly bits.

My favorite part of this system is the granular hit dice rolling, I like how you can increase or decrease your comfort which affects your healing.

 

[jgsugden]

Nicely done. One comment - removing ASI and requiring only feat selections - as well as forcing dice generated stats - is going to result in some unbalanced character ability scores amongst the party.

When 'gritty' healing has been the goal in the past, I went for a 'keet is simple' approach:

1.) Generally, treat all damage as a reduction of toughness, not a wound. You're wearing out foes, not hurting them, with your attacks.

2.) When you failed a death save, an attack hits by 10, when a critical hit happens, when a 1 is rolled on a saving throw versus damage, or when a save that is related to damage dealt is failed by 10, you drew a 'wound' card from one of my decks. There were decks for each damage type (as well as one for a failed death save). On it was a wound that applied to the PC, as well as a method for recovering from the wound. Each deck had 40 different cards in it. Not all wounds were actually wounds - for example, failed death saves may have given you a vision from beyond the veil.

All the grit came from the wounds. However, for that group, it was enough to create a substantial shift in feel for the game. Although I still have the decks, I have not used them since that game as I did not find the 'grit' was a better experience. Without me mentioning them, and nobody else requesting more grit, we've had no inclination to add them.