D&D 5E On the healing options in the 5e DMG

Celtavian · Dec 11, 2014

Emerikol said:
When I use the term rapid, I mean turning wounds into something other than injuries so that you can recover them after a short rest.

I don't want non-magical healing to go beyond what was normal prior to 4e for narrative / versimilitude reasons. Nothing to do with functionality.

I don't mind myself. I'm not looking for realism and D&D isn't real and shouldn't be heavily interested in realism either. Some verisimilitude is nice. But I want it to feel like a fantasy story. It is very rare that lasting wounds limit the heroes in fantasy stories. It is very hard to write a story realistically with a person with serious wounds being effective. If your wounds are of a serious or debilitating nature, you would be laid up for long time were the game to focus on realism.

I was pleasantly surprised with the long and short rest mechanic. Unless I'm trying to play in a gritty, realistic system, anything but death is minor and should be recovered from quickly. You don't see Gandalf, Aragorn, Conan, or the Arthurian Knights permanently crippled in standard combats. The only time they suffer serious hurts is if the story calls for it and usually from unusual means. D&D is high fantasy and not meant for gritty realism. Plenty of other games do that part of wounds better.

Hussar · Dec 11, 2014

Emerikol said:
When I use the term rapid, I mean turning wounds into something other than injuries so that you can recover them after a short rest.

I don't want non-magical healing to go beyond what was normal prior to 4e for narrative / versimilitude reasons. Nothing to do with functionality.

So, one day to fully heal any wound is perfectly acceptable then? Because that's what 3e did. I'm still baffled why 4e seems to be the breaking point for you. In 3e you healed 4 HP/level/day. A 5th wizard could never, at any level, take more than about three days to fully heal. The longest you could take to heal in 3e was 9 days. That's the absolute longest, and typically it was two or three days.

In AD&D it was considerably longer, with healing taking weeks if you dropped below zero HP and there was the possibility of permanent injury.

It would really, really help if you could be a LOT more specific about what you want. Pre-4e healing ran a huge variation.

Hussar · Dec 11, 2014

Saelorn said:
I don't know how common it was, but my current DM tells stories of "the good old days" where they had a pure-healer NPC because nobody wanted to play the priest. With two fighters, two mages, and a rogue in the party, it would just stand back and heal as needed.

I seem to recall hearing similar stories around the boards.

To be fair, the "healer NPC" was a pretty common thing. But, that's because it was an NPC, not because of the rules. The DM didn't want to up the power of the group, but, also didn't want to futz about with healing rates either. It was a fairly easy compromise.

Ranes · Dec 11, 2014

Hussar said:
So, one day to fully heal any wound is perfectly acceptable then? Because that's what 3e did.

I don't understand this. How does a character fully heal any wound in one day in 3e?

Frankie1969 · Dec 11, 2014

Emerikol said:
For me I need to be able to play without rapid non-magical healing. I want to play more in the tradition of 1e,2e, and 3e when it comes to healing. I don't mind the requirement that a group have a healing class. I do not want to non-magically recover hit points over night or during short rests.

Good news! You have that option in 5E! (Also 4E, 3E, etc)

CapnZapp said:
I want an option where a "long rest" is what you gain once you "turn the page" as it were, in the story.
That is, if you join a caravan trekking across a desert for a month, then you will not expect to be able to make a long rest until you reach the other side of the desert.

Good news! You have that option in 5E! (Also 4E, 3E, etc)

SigmaOne said:
In my mind it all comes down to the difference between an RPG and a board game.

So much of the complaining about the design philosophy of 5e is from people who either didn't get exactly the game they were hoping for from 5e or would be happier playing board games or video games anyway.

QFT about 5E. (Also 4E, 3E, etc) Even back in the caveman days, when I was a teenager playing Basic & 1E, it was immediately obvious that IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WAY AN RPG RULE WORKS, CHANGE IT. For example, my group chopped out Vancian magic and replaced it with linear mana points. It was surprisingly easy.

IMO, the only worthwhile reasons to like or dislike an RPG are the deepest core rules that permeate the entire system. For most incarnations of D&D, that's Stats, Levels, Classes, HP, AC, TH/AB, Saves and Combat Rounds. Healing rules are a minor detail that can be modified easily (although less so in 4E).

Saelorn said:
I never knew that there was such a controversy over what a healer was. I mean, everyone's played Final Fantasy and stuff, right? You always get the character who heals and buffs and doesn't attack anyone.

FF was a SINGLE PLAYER video game. If FF were a P&P RPG, I certainly would not have enjoyed playing that as my PC. If you're saying that every party should have an NPC healer following them around, perhaps it'd be better to modify the healing rules so the NPC isn't needed.

SkidAce · Dec 11, 2014

Anecdotal (as usual).

After 26 years playing with various groups in the military (changing station every 3 or 4 years or less), I only ran into the "nobody wants to play the cleric" a couple of times.

It certainly wasn't (IMHO) a common thing. And the one time we ran a thieves guild campaign with only rogues, we just adapted. No NPC cleric.

Experiences vary.

seebs · Dec 11, 2014

Ranes said:
I don't understand this. How does a character fully heal any wound in one day in 3e?

Wands of cure light wounds are pretty cheap and provide ridiculous amounts of healing.

GameOgre · Dec 11, 2014

I never describe pc wounds as a bloody long gash or actual cutting. I normally just describe it as a "stinging blow or you feel the trolls teeth bite down on your hand and suddenly it grows numb.

I have found 4E and to a lesser extent 5E healing without magic only has issues if I describe the wounds as actual bloody wounds.

Of course people will have issues with taking long bloody gashes across their chest in one minute and buying that they heal naturally just a short while later. So don't describe them as such!

Ranes · Dec 11, 2014

seebs said:
Wands of cure light wounds are pretty cheap and provide ridiculous amounts of healing.

Indeed. I thought the reference was to non-magical healing. In any event, with wands most PCs would require a UMD check, so not a given.

The Crimson Binome · Dec 11, 2014

Frankie1969 said:
Good news! You have that option in 5E! (Also 4E, 3E, etc)

Not so much, no. Of the listed healing options in the DMG, that they thought people might actually want to use, the absolute slowest setting is that you regain no Hit Points and one Hit Die per long rest. The game doesn't support language for healing less than that, unless you omit the concept of Hit Dice entirely (and where they also interact with a number of class features). Much like in 4E, if you wanted to implement the old healing rate, you basically had to scrap that entire sub-system and start from scratch.

Hussar said:
In 3e you healed 4 HP/level/day. A 5th wizard could never, at any level, take more than about three days to fully heal. The longest you could take to heal in 3e was 9 days. That's the absolute longest, and typically it was two or three days.

Actually, it was half that - 2 HP/level/day if you had nothing but bed rest, with the standard rate being 1 HP/level/day. On average, anyone would heal from beaten-nearly-to-death, up to full, in a number of days equal to their average Hit Points per level (so 2.5 + Con mod, for a wizard).

Which, considering the genre, isn't terribly unreasonable. Sometimes, it might take Conan a week or two to recover from the sort of injury that would have killed a weaker person. It's a significant gap between "nobody survives the kind of catastrophic injury that is impossible to heal within a few weeks," and "nobody suffers any sort of wound that can't recover naturally over-night." For something that's ultimately a matter of preference, it makes sense that a lot of people would have a preference somewhere in that range.

D&D 5E On the healing options in the 5e DMG

Celtavian

Dragon Lord

Hussar

Legend

Hussar

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Ranes

Adventurer

Frankie1969

Adventurer

SkidAce

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seebs

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GameOgre

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Ranes

Adventurer

The Crimson Binome

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