D&D 5E (2014) Those who come from earlier editions, why are you okay with 5E healing (or are you)?

[5atbu]

DMG variants
or play Pendragon where it can take months to heal up.

Difference?
In Pendragon you only adventure once a year.

 

[dave2008]

In learning 5E for the group I'm running, occasionally I come across a rule that really blows me away for the effect it should have on the Setting (but doesn't). It's like the developers didn't care to think the implications all the way through in their goal to make things more comfortable for PCs.

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations. "I'm sorry, but your character suffered pretty extreme trauma this session; I'm going to say that you without magical healing you'll need a week to recover your hit dice." But it's not like this is even suggested. I've heard that long rest taking a week is a house-rule losted in the DMG, but also that it's a sloppy solution because it doesn't mesh well with other things that require long rest (like spells).

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

There are different options for healing and rest in the DMG, and many house rules as well. However, the obvious reason is that it is not a big world building issue is that hit point and hit dice don't really represent serious damage to your physical body. This has basically been true from the beginning, but it was easier to pretend otherwise in some older editions. That being said, this didn't start with 5e, it was at least present in 4e (I didn't play 3e). Personally, I have no issue playing 5e like we played 1e & D&D.

 

[Garthanos]

Hit points != Wounds


intro long pointless discussion 3 ... 2 ... 1

And so it goes

 

[Gadget]

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Yes. Hit points are an abstraction. This is to circumvent the tiresome "who's going to play the cleric?" routine that was so prevalent in earlier editions, or the stack of cheap 'wand of cure light wounds' that every party seemed to turn to after every battle in 3.x. There is the optional 'Gritty system' in the DMG if you want more of an attrition based game with a more cautious approach. There is also the 'lingering wounds' optional system to give the game an even more gritty feel if one so desires.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Whoa whoa there! As far as I can recall, D&D has never had much in the rules for injuries, impaling and the like beyond the abstraction of hitpoints and perhaps some alternate systems that popped up here and there over the years. As long as you have at least one HP, you can climb a cliff, run a marathon, or whatever physical excretion or activity you desire with no hindrance at all. Gygax even had a couple paragraphs in the original DMG/PHP explaining that hit points were not meat points and did not really represent being able to take more sword blows to the gut as you got better and more experienced at adventuring, but rather you became more skilled at avoiding such and had more luck, mojo and basically plot protection. Your above scenario has always been true in D&D, which gave you, what 1 + con mod hp per rest? Slower, but just as unrealistic, especially with peasants that had 1d4+1 hp (?). No matter what happens, as long as they don't die they get rest a couple of days and be good as new.

The rules in the PHB have never been much of fantasy world physics simulator (that was 3.x's mistake, trying to go too far down that path, IMHO), but rather a manageable way for players to build characters to interact with a fantasy world narrative. There can still be sickness, impaling, starvation, and broken bones in the world, but that is outside the HP rules in the PHB and more the province of the DM's narrative and add on systems previously mentioned: more gritty HP recovery, lingering wounds, etc. The rules as they stand, are more geared to facilitate smooth and enjoyable gameplay that avoids the 'gaming the system' workarounds that had been widely employed in the past, because D&D is a game, after all. The default may not be to everyone's liking, but there are dials to adjust, with varying degrees of success.

 

[billd91]

And so it goes

Welcome to the town of "You are fully capable of ignoring a conversation without threadcrapping in it".
Population: You

 

[dave2008]

As other have pointed out you really seem to have an issue with hp = meat points and less HP healing. Our group had some issue with that so we have been using a pretty simple house rule that allows for the game to run basically RAW with a little bit of "meat" added to address the HP and healing issue. Let me know if your interested.

 

[Laurefindel]

Let me know if your interested.

I am...

 

[Li Shenron]

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

I don't care. All which slow healing did for me in previous editions was to prompt ever party stock up on healing potions and force the Cleric to dump healing spells to be up at full HP next day. If they didn't have enough resources, they'd take a day off and have again the Cleric and whoever else had healing spells prepare only those. You had to be more adversarial to your players, for example force a tight adventure schedule just so that they simply could not do it. I say good riddance, and if I want lingering wounds I'll use exhaustion rules for specific cases.

 

[Coroc]

In learning 5E for the group I'm running, occasionally I come across a rule that really blows me away for the effect it should have on the Setting (but doesn't). It's like the developers didn't care to think the implications all the way through in their goal to make things more comfortable for PCs.

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations. "I'm sorry, but your character suffered pretty extreme trauma this session; I'm going to say that you without magical healing you'll need a week to recover your hit dice." But it's not like this is even suggested. I've heard that long rest taking a week is a house-rule losted in the DMG, but also that it's a sloppy solution because it doesn't mesh well with other things that require long rest (like spells).

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

I will tell you the truth!
Healing was only in so far different in e.g. 2e that it had sometimes big tactical use in combat (like sometimes but more rarely in 5e still).
Whenever needed we (DMs) also handwaved a full healing rest from time to time because:
Micromanagement is fun sometimes, but the DM back then preferred to present some more cool monsters instead of playing out a rest / cure light wounds x27 rest again (roll for wandering monsters that have nothing to do with your main story) routine.

I am fine with 5e healing, because i radically altered my view of HP, being an absolute abstract "combat stamina". To have grisly injuries is not so much fun for most people who want to play a hero.
So death save / stand up in combat mechanic is also just like a beatdown in a boxfight for me until it is not (3 botched death saves), and then i sometimes put in a good amount of narrative gore. (1)
Ok, if the players are high level then they have the means to res and magical heal up too, but that are very high level spells, akin to miracles and costly (5000 zorkmids worth of diamond in my campaigns where zorkmids is the according base coin in my homebrews (mostly silver) but worth approx 1g in RAW)


(1) Side note: If you want more "realism" then think about that mostly it is not a multitude of small injuries like cuts and bruises killing in RL combat, it is that one arrow/stab/etc. which hits something vital.
Check out the faces of some professional boxers after a fight if you do not believe me, and the head is one of the most vulnerable zones of the human body.

 

[cbwjm]

I'm fine with 5e healing. I never liked the 1hp/night of earlier editions since it meant a level 1 warrior would be back to full days before a level 9 warrior. From memory, 3e was better in that it provided 1hp/level/day so higher level characters were healing at the same rate as those lower level ones. I think I would have preferred 5e to have been a combo of 4e and earlier editions, using healing surges to recover instead of hit dice so that lower level characters have a bit more healing to begin with instead of that single hit die, even though that hit die has a chance to bring them up to full healing surges would provide more healing and give finer control over healing during short rests. I'd also have liked to see PCs with some more hit points at level 1 and if I ever start a 1st level game I'm going to double the starting class hit points before constitution modifiers to make them a little more sturdy.