Abstract long rests

[JRRNeiklot]

Grognards have been hounding Mearls, here is his last tweet.
Sounds like he had more suggestions, but I missed them.

Mike Mearls ‏[MENTION=32417]MikeM[/MENTION]earls

Final old school suggestion - long rest gives back level + Con mod hit points

Final answer? I suggest he use his phone a friend life line and call me. I suggest long rest restore one hit point, 2 if treated by a healer, 3 with complete bed rest. 5 is right out.

 

[variant]

Really all that has to be done to put me back in the happy camp is let the long rest (one night) allow you to roll your hit dice for the amount of hit points you get back.

So if you are a 6th level cleric and you rest for 8 hours, roll 6d8 back in hit points. Simple to remember and easy to use and it slows down healing just enough to make those of us in that camp happy.

I think that should be the default and then use a module to give the variation of get all your hit points back after a long rest.

I would throw in the Constitution modifier in calculating hit point recover, but otherwise I agree. It just adds some needed randomness into the mix.

Final answer? I suggest he use his phone a friend life line and call me. I suggest long rest restore one hit point, 2 if treated by a healer, 3 with complete bed rest. 5 is right out.

So it takes longer for a level 20 to heal in your campaign than a level 1?

 

[JRRNeiklot]

So it takes longer for a level 20 to heal in your campaign than a level 1?

There are no level 20s in my campaign.

 

[Zephrin the Lost]

I think they need to consider how all healing options tie together.

Any approach that heals less than total HP on a extended rest will have a consequence on healing for the coming day. If a fighter wakes up from an extended rest, rolls his dice, finds he is still 10% hp down from full, why wouldn't the cleric just use some resource- a healing kit or whatever- to bring him back up to full?

If healing outside of an extended rest is limited and using those resources is always an important decision, then how does the rest of the day of combat and exploration progress? Is healing so rare that the 10 minute adventuring day, or even a 20 minute adventuring week, is possible or even expected?

However if healing is available enough that giving the fighter those extra hp in the morning has little or no effect on the healing available for the rest of the day, then the game design has just added extra, fiddly steps - rolling HD, tracking kits, some extra math- to clean up and lingering damage not cured by the extended rest, or in other words, to get to the same place the simpler rule would have.

If lingering effects of injury are important, maybe the results of rolling HD after each extended rest could set your maximum hp total for the day, and no healing apart from an extended rest can raise that higher?

--Z

 

[DEFCON 1]

There are no level 20s in my campaign.

Well, then your suggestion doesn't do the game a whole lot of good, now, does it?

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Well, then your suggestion doesn't do the game a whole lot of good, now, does it?

It's a hell of a lot better than the playtest rules. 5e could be the best rpg ever assembled, but the one thing that will keep me away is the damned healing rules. There are other things I have issues with, but healing overnight plus all your hit dice throughout the day has to go.

 

[Skyscraper]

I find surprising that this discussion almost systematically ignores the starting hit points and number of hit points gained per level. To me, the quantity of HPs that can be healed per long rest (or short rest, but this thread is not about that) should ALWAYS be evaluated relative to your total HP, relative to HPs gained per level, and relative to magical and other resource-limited healing capability. For example, if the wizard starts with 1-4 HPs per AD&D rules, then healing 2 hit points during a night's rest is significant. However, if wizards start with 17 HPs like in the playtest, then healing 2 HPs during the night is not significant. They said that the number of HPs for the playtest characters were (unnaturally?) high because they wanted that for the playtest: will they remain so high in the final version? Also, it all depends on how you interpret hit points at the outset: wounds, or more? D&Dn suggests that HPs are more than just wounds.

Once you've set what HPs represent, how many HPs a creature has, and the balance you want to strike between realism and playability, you can then tackle what you wish the long rests to give back.

Anyway, just a thought that I don't think we should separate the number of hit points healed per night form other HP-related game mechanics for the argument to be valid.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Why should that be the case? Since it's magic, any halfway plausible explanation will do. It's easy to attach some flavor on it: e.g. spell preparation is physically and mentally draining, and any kind of injury prevents you from regaining spells (you can still cast whatever spells you have already prepared).

Totes!

 

[Doug McCrae]

I'm not one to care much about the whole "resting for a night brings you back to full health" thing, but it seems to be at the heart of many debates on these boards.

Yeah, it's one of many things I don't really care about, like square fireballs, 1-2-1 movement, and dragonboobies. The thing is, I do have disbelief suspenders, and they can be snapped, but it's by things ENWorld doesn't seem to mind at all, like dungeons, implausible PC motivation, youthful archmages, and the PCs finding ways to break spells that no one in the rest of the world figured out for 1000 years.

Why not make the "long rest" mechanic of an abstract length? Just mention it as being long enough for one's wounds to heal, long enough to craft such or such object, and so on. Through keeping the long rest abstract, one could have wounds close at the speed they would prefer. And there's no reason why the length of that rest couldn't be fluid (a day for scraps, burns, and study of one's spells, or a month for grievous wounds and so on).

Do you think the rules should leave it vague *and* expect DMs to set a specific value on it for each individual campaign? Or would it be indeterminate in the rules and expected to stay that way in actual play? I think there's quite a big difference between the two in terms of expected play style. The second smacks of narrativism. All that fortune-in-the-middle, 'rules don't really tell us anything until we interpret them' weird stuff!

 

[Doug McCrae]

5e could be the best rpg ever assembled, but the one thing that will keep me away is the damned healing rules.

Wouldn't it be quite easy to houserule it? Or use the old school module, which I'm sure will exist.