D&D 5E Island Adventure and Slow Natural Recovery Question

[machineelf]

I used this, but found that in practice it just means more fiddly book-keeping. Having to roll hd on long rest completion and decide how many to use quickly gets tedious. "You get all hp back" on a long rest in practice is a lot more elegant.

I wouldn't call it more elegant. It's simpler to be sure, but that doesn't always equate to elegant. It's a bit less realistic. It's a cudgel approach to healing. Why would players deciding how many HD to use on a long rest be so much more difficult than deciding how many HD to use on a short rest? If your players are using HD on short rests, why does it get tedious for them to use it on a long rest. Am I missing something?

Also, I would let my players use HD at the beginning of a long rest (after the first hour) in the same way they use it on short rests.

 

[S'mon]

I wouldn't call it more elegant. It's simpler to be sure, but that doesn't always equate to elegant. It's a bit less realistic. It's a cudgel approach to healing. Why would players deciding how many HD to use on a long rest be so much more difficult than deciding how many HD to use on a short rest? If your players are using HD on short rests, why does it get tedious for them to use it on a long rest. Am I missing something?

Also, I would let my players use HD at the beginning of a long rest (after the first hour) in the same way they use it on short rests.

In practice it's a surprisingly annoying drag on the action. IME there is none of the tension that comes with spending hd on a short rest, wondering how many to spend and how many to save. It tends to suck up time and energy at the start of the adventuring day.
If you don't want full healing overnight there are better solutions, like 3e 1 hp/level/day.

 

[machineelf]

In practice it's a surprisingly annoying drag on the action. IME there is none of the tension that comes with spending hd on a short rest, wondering how many to spend and how many to save. It tends to suck up time and energy at the start of the adventuring day.
If you don't want full healing overnight there are better solutions, like 3e 1 hp/level/day.

In my game, spending HD always comes on short rests. Now, it may take place before or after a long rest. The long rest simply restores the HD and class abilities, but doesn't grant automatic full health. Here are my house rules for it (and I've taken these rules in part from another poster's suggestions in this forum):

Slow, Natural Healing: Characters don't regain hit points at the end of a long rest. Instead, a character can spend hit dice to heal before or after a long rest, just as with a short rest. A character regains all hit dice at the end of a long rest instead of half.

Healer’s Kit Dependency: A character can't spend any Hit Dice after finishing a rest until someone expends one use of a healer's kit to bandage and treat the character's wounds.
(These first two rules add a level of grittiness and realism to the game. They also make the healer’s kit feat and the bard’s song of rest much more useful.)

The pairing of these two rules help create a world with a little more grit and realism. In order to heal, you have to bandage yourself. It takes resources. Gone is the video game style full health and injury recovery at the start of each day. In practice, usually my characters do achieve full health recovery, but at the cost of HD, which has implications for later in their adventuring day. It also has the visual of applying bandages. Bandages are so cheap that this is more of story-telling sugar than anything else. But it creates the idea that I want in my campaign world.

You say there is none of the tension that you get on a short rest. But as I pointed out, the way I run it is, you only spend HD on short rests. You might do it when characters find a safe spot away from danger to take a short rest and recover some health via HD. What exactly is the difference in tension between that and doing it just before camping for the night? I'm not following.

In fact, I'd argue my way could create more tension, because without the automatic "reset" of all health and abilities after a long rest, characters have to make decisions in terms of resource management. It adds importance to crafting and buying healing potions, the healing kit feat, bards' song of rest, and other things.

In the end this is likely just a difference in preference between you and me. You might find the ease of full recovery on long rests beneficial. I tend to view it as goofy and a little too much over the line of unrealistic for my tastes. My house rules pulls it back ever so slightly back over the line into a bit more realism, which is why I like it. My players seem to also, and they know that they can come to me if they don't like an aspect of the game, and I would consider changing things if it makes it more fun for them. So far, they they haven't had any problems with them.

 

[S'mon]

In the end this is likely just a difference in preference between you and me. You might find the ease of full recovery on long rests beneficial.

I've come to see it that way, after I tried no-hp-recovery-on-rest for a good long time. Not wasting 10 minutes on players rolling hd, some forgetting to roll, etc made for a better game.

Short rest is different, SRs are always player initiated by players seeking to regain hp. Long Rests IME are much more from the GM: "OK, you rest overnight, then..."

 

[machineelf]

I've come to see it that way, after I tried no-hp-recovery-on-rest for a good long time. Not wasting 10 minutes on players rolling hd, some forgetting to roll, etc made for a better game.

Short rest is different, SRs are always player initiated by players seeking to regain hp. Long Rests IME are much more from the GM: "OK, you rest overnight, then..."

In my game, using HD is always player initiated. It is the act of applying bandages. The players choose when to do that, no matter what. So again, I don't see the difference you are pointing out. It's a matter of taking a short rest during one part of the day vs. another part of the day. It's all the same, ultimately.

BTW, 3e's 1 hp/level/day healing rule is extremely similar to how I run things. If you used that rule, then your characters would still have to spend some HD before or after long rests to get back to full health anyway, the way I run it. I don't understand why you are, on the one hand, against the idea of no healing on long rests, but are for minimal healing on long rests. If you used that rule, wouldn't your players still have to take 10 minutes at the start of the day to spend HD to recover any remaining hit points they still lacked?

Edit: On a side note, this discussion has inspired me to add the 1 hp/level/day rule to my house rules, because there does need to be some sort of natural healing. But it won't greatly alter anything we already do since 10 hit points for a 10th level character is a small fraction of their total health.

 

[S'mon]

In my game, using HD is always player initiated. It is the act of applying bandages. The players choose when to do that, no matter what. So again, I don't see the difference you are pointing out. It's a matter of taking a short rest during one part of the day vs. another part of the day. It's all the same, ultimately.

BTW, 3e's 1 hp/level/day healing rule is extremely similar to how I run things. If you used that rule, then your characters would still have to spend some HD before or after long rests to get back to full health anyway, the way I run it. I don't understand why you are, on the one hand, against the idea of no healing on long rests, but are for minimal healing on long rests. If you used that rule, wouldn't your players still have to take 10 minutes at the start of the day to spend HD to recover any remaining hit points they still lacked?

Edit: On a side note, this discussion has inspired me to add the 1 hp/level/day rule to my house rules, because there does need to be some sort of natural healing. But it won't greatly alter anything we already do since 10 hit points for a 10th level character is a small fraction of their total health.

The way you are doing it seems fine for what you are trying to achieve. I particularly like the bandage resource expenditure, and the addition of a bit of natural healing.

 

[aco175]

Something to consider in planning your game is the location of the island. Everyone is thinking a pirate theme is in the jungle, but it can be just about anywhere. Traditional pirates sailed up and down America from the Caribbean to Maine and Canada. A cold island may be more a challenge than a jungle one, or more traditional in terms of thinking. Off Alaska they have the old mining islands with bears and such. Something like this could be a whaling island for a tribe of barbarians. They can come back at infrequent times and don't take kindly to strangers.

 

[Chaosmancer]

With all these limits on natural healing, do you guys find more people turn to magical healing, or do you find that people just rest more often and longer?

That would be my fear with limiting healing to a few hp a day, is that the players would then just decide to rest for multiple days before setting out. That well and good for realism, but it makes the pace of the story wonky if after ever mildly challenging fight they decide to rest for two weeks before trying to move out again. They'd just never get anywhere.

 

[hastur_nz]

I use that optional rule in the DMG (no hp re-gained by rest; you have to spend hit dice, and as usual you only get half back with a long rest), partly because it's how I got my name in the DMG credits, even if I think they modified my suggestions a bit

Anyway, having no 'auto-reset' button makes a lot more sense for me, and it's not a drag on your game as long as the DM makes sure to make it part of the daily routine - confirm details of the watch, who's spending any hit dice, etc. It's a necessary part of wilderness survival, if that's your thing, and at low levels it can work quite nicely, providing ongoing tension as to how to actually survive when there's no obviously safe option, it's all about balancing things. The point being, camping out isn't necessarily safe, either; so if the players decide to just hang tight for a couple of days, there should be ways to help make that a choice that's not 'auto-reset' either. It doesn't have to be the ticking clock, it can also be things like making it easier for predators / natives to find and continually harass them, weather and similar events that might make their 'safe place' uninhabitable...

I ran a one-off game where the PC's were ship-wrecked, it was a fun change of pace and actually most PC's were not what you'd expect they were more like a standard party not all druids, rangers etc.

My current campaign, the PC's went off into the wilderness at level 2, and found travelling through a dangerous forest to be quite challenging 24/7, they were quite glad to survive and find a more traditional dungeon type setup eventually, where they could more easily plan for rests etc. It was especially interesting midway through, when they were a couple of days away from 'home base', and quite beaten up, so going back wasn't really an option, but going forward was an unknown duration, and staying still didn't get them anywhere either (and wasn't safe)...

 

[machineelf]

With all these limits on natural healing, do you guys find more people turn to magical healing, or do you find that people just rest more often and longer?

That would be my fear with limiting healing to a few hp a day, is that the players would then just decide to rest for multiple days before setting out. That well and good for realism, but it makes the pace of the story wonky if after ever mildly challenging fight they decide to rest for two weeks before trying to move out again. They'd just never get anywhere.

A couple of points. In the house rules I use, my characters still typically are able to get to full health by the time they start their next adventuring day if they still have some Hit Dice left over from the day before. But even if they do, they will be using that resource. What it means is, if they have a hard adventuring day and use up all their hit dice, then yes, they may not be able to heal up to full health using that alone. (I do let them regain all their HD after every long rest, so that helps as well). So that means that, yes, they will need to use other sources, such as magical healing, healing potions, the bard's song of rest, the healer's fear, etc.

But to me that's a bonus, not a drawback. I want them to rely on those other means of healing. It makes those things more important, meaning healers and bards, and people who craft healing potions, or those who take the healer's feat, made meaningful choices.

So far I haven't found that it makes my players rest more often. They still only get one long rest per day, as per the rules. They can take as many short rests as they are able to take, given the situation and whether they are able to find a place to rest. But typically three or so in a big dungeon. That's where these rules really make a difference, in big dungeons. Otherwise, the kind of campaign I run my characters may only have one big encounter in a day during urban adventuring, so it's mostly a non-issue and is more of a story-telling element, i.e. you have to bandage yourself to heal up; it doesn't happen magically all at once in the morning.