Which is the reason that this thread exists: to address the vast disparity between 5E and older editions. The rules of 5E agree with the lies told about older editions, and no longer agree with the reality described by older editions.
Because D&D has always used HP, and people had been using those HP to create meaningful narratives for decades. And then suddenly 4E came along, and you see a huge backlash from people who can't use it to create meaningful narratives anymore; because the rules suddenly agreed with the propaganda that a "hit" is actually "abstract whatever"; rather than the rules saying that a "hit" is actually a "hit" in spite of the propaganda, as they had for decades. And then 5E came along, and copied that aspect from 4E, in spite of every traditional player who hated it.
Okay, I had to look this up, because I thought that 3.5 had the same long rest healing as 4e.
So, in 3,5 you recovered your level in hp after a long rest. Now, 3.5 assumed you would roll instead of taking an average result, but I think their ability scores increased much faster, so I feel confident using the 5e numbers for some rough math.
A 10th level fighter would have about 104 hp max (give or take). With this rule, it takes 10 days to fully recover from a near-death battle (assuming they are only getting the night rest, it is doubled if you rest for a day and a night, so 5 days in town). So, this is much slower, but still highly unrealistic. But, then again, that was rarely how the game worked was it?
Most people didn't want to wait multiple days to recover, so they bought potions, and wands, and the cleric used all their spell slots to heal them. So, in practice, most players probably spent about a day or two "recovering" anyways.
So, we moved on, instead of requiring the cleric to spend all their slots, and having a magic item economy that allowed for purchasing vast quantities of healing, we just cut out the middle man. Heal to full after a long rest.
Now, I won't say it is a perfect solution for all games. It isn't. It has it's problems, but we are five years into the game by this point. Everyone who feels strongly about the issue has found a solution to it. And most of us have barely altered the RAW and are still perfectly capable of creating narratives.
I turned off recovering all hp on a long rest, and instead everyone has to use Hit Dice. I like the extra attrition, but actually the biggest reason was to increase the importance of Hit Dice and make people more likely to take short rests instead of long rests, because whenever anyone lost any amount of hp, they always wanted to take an 8 hour rest. Which bogged the game down. Now, they are looking for hour rests, because they provide the same benefit. But, I never had a problem with the narrative or was unable to make things dramatic. I did it more to make short rests more powerful than long rests weaker,
No, it's a role-playing game, which demands higher standards of integrity than something like Monopoly.
Games don't have to make internal sense as a narrative. Role-playing games do.
Higher standards of Integrity? What is that even supposed to mean? Monopoly can lie to you more than DnD can?
First of all, all games should be held to a high standard. Whether tic-tac-toe or something ultra modern and sleek. Secondly, board and card games can have an internal sense as a narrative. It isn't required, but it isn't required for RPGs either. "Hack and Slash" games can be run with zero narrative and entire focus on a series of challenges that have no greater plot than being the series of challenges the players are overcoming.
Perfectly fine, they have fun. You may hold them to a higher standard, but the game itself is under no obligation to meet your standards. And the fact that many of us still make narratives with internal sense with 5e, means it is doing exactly what you seem to think it cannot do.
I think the problem is that they made the default position into such an extreme of fast healing, that no amount of optional rules can bring it back. Literally, if you adopt the strictest options in the book, you can still go from 1hp to full over an eight hour short rest (by spending all of your Hit Dice). That places a hard limit on how badly someone can get hurt, as long as the possibility exists to heal it completely overnight.
And because the default is so extreme, it makes the old default appear extreme to anyone used to the new method. You would need to have a pre-existing group of old players in order successfully sell them on 3E-style healing, because it would seem so Draconian to a mixed group of newer players.
Yeah, selling an old-school style to a new-school player is going to be hard. I'd expect a lot of confusion if you tried to reintroduce THAC0 or negative levels, or any other old rule from an older edition into a new version of the game.
And... I don't have a problem with that. It is like saying you had to have people who played on the Gamecube to appreciate playing GoldenEye 007.
If you want an older style of game, you might have to work harder to find people who share your desire to go back to that older style of game. A lot of old school players on here seem to not look fondly back on 3.5's healing, so it certainly could not be an objectively better style. You just have to find people who like what you like, just as we all do.
