D&D 5E Slow Natural Healing in actual play

DEFCON 1 said:

I ran two games of Curse of Strahd which ended recently, and ran a much more "gritty" (for lack of a better term) game. Here's some of the things I had:

Healing Word and Cure Wounds did not exist in Barovia.
A Short Rest was 8 hours, a Long Rest was 7 days.
The '3 Death Saves' system was replaced with the Exhaustion chart, and Lingering Injuries occurred when PCs reached Exhaustion Level 4.

I did allow some "healing" to occur... players could still spend Hit Dice, the Healer feat could be taken and used, Paladins could still Lay on Hands, and Potions of Healing existed and herbalists could still create them.

The results were as follows:

A 7-day Long Rest period was too long. The actions of the PCs in both groups in Barovia could not warrant "taking a week off" from both their actions and the results of their actions. Time could not "stand still" as it were to let them regain their health because the plots and stories they got themselves involved in would not let them. As a result, I ended up having to shorten Long Rests down to about 3 days (+ a day or two if a PC was in Exhaustion Levels 4 or below) just to allow forward momentum of the story while still trying to maintain some semblance of "grittiness".

What this told me is that it would be impossible for me to ever create a "realistic" type of recovery via rest situation in D&D, unless I purposely created short adventures that allowed for Downtime between them (and thus could also lay up wounded PCs). Curse of Strahd was definitely not that kind of adventure.

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An interesting alternative is that encounter difficulty should generally be much lower if you use slow healing. If getting wounded with several levels of exhaustion at 10% of your HP takes a week recovery, that's essentially a "failing" scenario. With this in mind, long rests should be seen as more appropriate for between adventures, and any time-sensitive adventure should be able to be completed without a long rest. It would probably take some adjustment, but once the players understand that even minor injuries can lead to them failing, then much less deadly encounters become much more significant.

Since that is so different than typical play, I guess it's an open question whether the players would ever actually adjust.

i_dont_meta said:

I'm currently running a group of 4-5 PC's thru the Sunless Citadel right now from TftYP. Let them roll for Stats so they're all a bit OP. In light of that, we decided to slightly alter healing, mixing ideas from the DMG and our own twisted heads. So now you have to have a Healer's Kit to use HD. Standard Short Rest rules apply but after a Long Rest youre no longer completely healed. You still have to use HD but you now get Max HP out of your HD. No rolling necessary. Standard HD recovery stays the same. I don't think we'll ever go back. It's finally made HD management a strategic venture and since the group lacks a dedicated Healerbot I've noticed a significant uptick in strategic/tactical thinking at the table. We're heading into the "Final Act" as it were and all but one in the group has had to make at least one Death Saving Throw so far. I don't particularly get any thrill out of killing my PC's but the tension at the table now i wouldn't trade for anything! Hope somewhere in my rambling you find a nugget of help...

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What sort of strategic/tactical decisions do you see them making? Based on the rules you have as I understand them and lacking a healer, the optimal tactic so far as I can tell is to bring more healer's kits and take more long rests. Is it possible the choices they're making are due to some other concerns such as the threat level in the dungeon or a time constraint of some kind?

iserith said:

What sort of strategic/tactical decisions do you see them making? Based on the rules you have as I understand them and lacking a healer, the optimal tactic so far as I can tell is to bring more healer's kits and take more long rests. Is it possible the choices they're making are due to some other concerns such as the threat level in the dungeon or a time constraint of some kind?

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I forgot to mention that I also roll all dice rolls openly which has also upped the threat level (in the past, behind the screen, I'd usually fudge a hit or two into misses, esp. where my high AC PC's are concerned). Basically, in the past, this group would just charge headlong into most every battle with 4/5 of them carrying a 20 in their primary attribute. They're a bunch of great role-players but often times very one-dimensional when it comes to problem solving. These small tweaks to Healing have really opened their eyes and the "Let's just stab it" approach has sort of given way to "Wait, let's think about this for a tick"...

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Our group uses the following:

Long Rest: You gain half your hit dice and the benefits of a short rest [you can spend hit dice for healing]. No hit points are recovered naturally.
Short rest: You may only gain the benefits of two of these per day (outside of the long rest).

This system seems to work really well for us, and makes players aware of the consequences of damage.

i_dont_meta said:

I forgot to mention that I also roll all dice rolls openly which has also upped the threat level (in the past, behind the screen, I'd usually fudge a hit or two into misses, esp. where my high AC PC's are concerned). Basically, in the past, this group would just charge headlong into most every battle with 4/5 of them carrying a 20 in their primary attribute. They're a bunch of great role-players but often times very one-dimensional when it comes to problem solving. These small tweaks to Healing have really opened their eyes and the "Let's just stab it" approach has sort of given way to "Wait, let's think about this for a tick"...

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Okay, I take you at your word that they changed their behavior, but I'm not seeing the causal link to your rules changes with regard to healing - unless there is a very limited supply of healer's kits or a time constraint that prevents them from taking more long rests. Knowing you won't fudge in their favor might be having more of an impact than the healing changes. (I also roll in the open and don't fudge.)

i_dont_meta said:

I'm currently running a group of 4-5 PC's thru the Sunless Citadel right now from TftYP. Let them roll for Stats so they're all a bit OP. In light of that, we decided to slightly alter healing, mixing ideas from the DMG and our own twisted heads. So now you have to have a Healer's Kit to use HD. Standard Short Rest rules apply but after a Long Rest youre no longer completely healed. You still have to use HD but you now get Max HP out of your HD. No rolling necessary. Standard HD recovery stays the same. I don't think we'll ever go back. It's finally made HD management a strategic venture and since the group lacks a dedicated Healerbot I've noticed a significant uptick in strategic/tactical thinking at the table. We're heading into the "Final Act" as it were and all but one in the group has had to make at least one Death Saving Throw so far. I don't particularly get any thrill out of killing my PC's but the tension at the table now i wouldn't trade for anything! Hope somewhere in my rambling you find a nugget of help...

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

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To my nust based on what you describe i would suspect the lack of a healer (bot, dedicated, whatever) in and of itself has made significant changes at the table play on its own, both strategically and tactically.

I have seen it also that having multiple healers also shifted choices in big ways.

Net result teasonable players adjust their play based on what their characters can do, strength, weakness.

I am not myself sold that simply shifting around short rest long rest and giving "max long" vs "roll short" would have much practical change to play across a variety of parties. A two claric party is likely not doing as dependent on short rest HD to need to change a thing and "max long" in that case is pretty much "back to full" in many cases.





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Schmoe said:

An interesting alternative is that encounter difficulty should generally be much lower if you use slow healing. If getting wounded with several levels of exhaustion at 10% of your HP takes a week recovery, that's essentially a "failing" scenario. With this in mind, long rests should be seen as more appropriate for between adventures, and any time-sensitive adventure should be able to be completed without a long rest. It would probably take some adjustment, but once the players understand that even minor injuries can lead to them failing, then much less deadly encounters become much more significant.

Since that is so different than typical play, I guess it's an open question whether the players would ever actually adjust.

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Alternatively, encounter difficulty should stay the same, since the current prevailing perception is that they're already too easy.

And it's only different from typical play, compared to default 5E. It actually hews incredibly closely to my experience from 2E, where all we had was slow natural healing because nobody wanted to play a Cleric.

My view on the general subject of the changing rest times is that:

When i have seen more "gritty healing" represented by "slower" it slowed the game down and significantly raised the currency of fast healing. Any clerics feeling pressured in 5e standard to spend "too many" slots on cures will see it even stronger in slower rests.

If your goal is to serious cut back on the party willingness to get near risk and to spend more "table time" away from danger this can serve as an incentive that can lead to fun sessions of "while we spend a week in town recovering from wounds and see other things going on we avoid".

Maybe its the advanced age and health of me and my players but the idea of spending session(s) of face-to-face playtime with our players recovering in serious health risks feels way too much like real life.

I find right now for me that i find the use of multiple rest mechanics so fundamentally dug into so much of the system *AND* having the actual availability of those short and long rests being so very situational and varied between day to day, campaign to campaign is a design FLAW as far as balance is concerned as it really tends to shackle a lot more balance risk to GMs that dont follow the "standard encounter day" model.

I think had it been all based around short rests it would have been more manageable and more flexible.

That leads me to look at exaggerating the short v long spread to a week to be magnifying what i already see as a FLAW.

Gritty should imo be sought thru other means - injuries or wound effects and the like that add flavor not additional downtime.

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iserith said:

The question still remains, what is the goal that is trying to be achieved and what variant rule or house rule could be used to make that happen?

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I answered that earlier, but to state it another way, I would like to encourage players to think more strategically and to feel that being wounded matters. When you can just get through a bunch fights knowing you'll be topped off after a long rest and be fresh as new, being wounded doesn't feel like it matters as much to me.

It's kind of like some modern video games that allow you to auto heal after 10 or 15 seconds. You can just grind through a level taking damage and then hiding until you "heal up" automatically, then go out guns blazing taking more damage and hiding again to heal up. Rinse and repeat. While I've played some great story based games that use that mechanic (the Uncharted series, for example), I prefer games that don't auto-heal me just by sitting around and hiding. It makes me learn to be more skillful, and it adds a feeling that how I approach things matters, and I'm more likely to plan and use strategy while increasing skill instead of constantly just shooting and hiding, knowing there won't be much consequence.

I'm definitely not in favor of adding a bunch of downtime and having characters sit around for days waiting to heal up. I throw random encounters at them or have other consequences if they do that. I like to keep my games at a decent pace, which is why I'm asking for others to share their experiences with this option.

I would be curious how you determine the damage they are taking regarding this. Does every "hit" by an arrow constitute them actually being pierced by an arrow? I've never interpreted it that way.

Maybe instead of slowing down healing in general, you treat hit points as an attrition system with some hits mattering more. They don't get an actual wound every time they get hit, but anytime they get hit with a critical or drop to 0 hit points, something more serious happens that is an actual wound. They don't heal hit points from normal hits any slower then normal, but if they take a crit/fatal blow, those take longer to recover from and represent an actual longer time injury.

Crits/Hits that drop them below 0 could lower their hit point maximum. Regain 1 hit point maximum each long rest. Regain hit point maximum hit points equal to the level of the healing spell cast, max of one spell used this way per day. Level 5 Cure Wounds restores 5 hit point max hit points, for example. Otherwise you keep all the normal healing rules in place.