D&D 5E Healing after 29 Oct playtest

[gweinel]

Healing seems to be a great issue in DnD Next.
As many have stated (including devs and players) has to do with the pace of the game and the combat mechanics (how easy or not to hit, how strong or weak are the monsters etc.)

What is your feelings of the new - experimental (and old) rules?
I suppose most of you have no problem...

However I am greatly dissapointed. These rules create a game that i cannot enjoy. Imho, as it stands now the healing mechanics in the game have as focus to full your hit points in the course of the day. This is not my style of game. It is not that the pace is faster. It is that healing is too easy. It deprives from the battle the lethality and the sense of danger, since you ll be ok in several hours. Simpy it ruins my immersion while I play the game. The playtest's healing mechanics changes (in comparrison with my preffered game style) the strategy of resources that a player can deploy during the game. So, the strategy of a group/dm is different if you start your day with half of your hit points from a day when you start with full hp.

Are they sure target to gather all the major dnd playing styles? If they do I can't see it. My preffered style was that kind of game that exists from 1st to 3rd edition and i don't see to capture this feeling with DnDnext.

ps. I have playtested the slower healing mechanic and even the more "gritty" mode was really a bad mechanic. The healing was too much and too erratic. One moment the pc was at -6 and the next round he had full hps. This is not what i have in my mind a gritty game btw.

ps2. Since the healing mechanic is tied to combat and monster system, house ruling is not an option. I don't have so much time to invest in this (changing everything) and anyway I tried it to 4e edition and it didn't work.

 

[darjr]

Healing to full during a long rest isn't what I want either. I do like the optional rules, however I think it'll be harder to find 5th ed gamers willing to deviate from the core mechanic.

Worse however, for me, is the way hit points are to be imagined in Next. Not as real wounds at all until your at 0. For me hit points have always been this weird thing that were both a partical and a wave, both true wounds per hit AND fatigue and other things. I think the tradition of the game has this hard wired in, just look at 'cure light wounds' and other fictions within the traditions of the game.

The bulk of the rules in Next will be based upon HP not being what they traditionally have been and I don't really like that. Even with the optional 'gritty' healing, which I like, the rest of the game doesn't quite fit with them.

I also think that this is such a fundamental piece of the game that alone it will turn off a lot of gamers who appreciate a different style of game.

 

[Mattachine]

Of course, hit points were "true wounds" in name only. I played AD&D for 15 years, and characters could go from 1 hp back to 50 hp with a single spell or item. There was no "wound", really. Also, at 1 hp, the character suffered no penalties to move, attack, or anything. No actual "wound".

I see the disconnect coming from the ability to non-magically heal damage easily. Many players simply want very slow natural healing, healing from clerics, and healing from magic items. This is the "wound" aspect of hit points in older versions of the game: without magic, hp recovery is very slow. This is a feature of low-level games, generally, since even without clerics, higher-level characters find other ways to heal magically.

 

[howandwhy99]

"Natural Healing" is still greatly souped up from what it used to be. But I like the 2 Experimental Rules. I think they're trying to offer options for those of us who expect healing to take days every time without miraculous intervention and those who want Bloodied conditions and self-willed healing in the middle of combat. Making healing modular really means optional for different gaming tables. I think what's coming out is lethality really is one of the decisive differences between older and new versions of D&D.

 

[Melkor]

We have been using the "All Around Slower Recovery" in our playtest, and we still feel like it is a little too much healing, so the new experimental systems they just introduced aren't going to be something we want to try/use.

 

[darjr]

I also realize that HP are different for different people. I played AD&D for probably as many years and they were always in this weird dual state for me.

What I worry about is that there are other gamers like me that they want to cater to, and this isn't quite getting there on healing. Also healing is so fundamental to the game that I worry that the default will be a foundation for a lot of rules that are not necessarily optional or listed as such.

for instance the life drain in some monsters. It's based on overnight healing in a non direct way. If I use the optional rule then do I need to edit every instance of 'overnight' as well? When does it become easier to just play a different game?

I guess it goes back to the modularity of the system. I hope it supports the optional slow healing rules enough where the effort to use them isn't a burden.

 

[Cybit]

No offense, if you played 3rd edition past...oh, 5th level, and your party wasn't healing to full, they a) didn't have a cleric and b) didn't have enough money to buy a wand of cure light wounds. Cuz, frankly, there's a spell in 3rd edition called "Heal", and it's "You are at full HP". Done.

I don't know how hit points became a big deal and how "realistic" they were. They've always been the same freaking thing in each edition. The same. damn. thing. Did people just get older and realize how insanely unrealistic the system was now, and didn't care as much when they were younger?

 

[darjr]

No offense, if you played 3rd edition past...oh, 5th level, and your party wasn't healing to full, they a) didn't have a cleric and b) didn't have enough money to buy a wand of cure light wounds. Cuz, frankly, there's a spell in 3rd edition called "Heal", and it's "You are at full HP". Done.

I don't know how hit points became a big deal and how "realistic" they were. They've always been the same freaking thing in each edition. The same. damn. thing. Did people just get older and realize how insanely unrealistic the system was now, and didn't care as much when they were younger?

Sure, but lots of people had issues with spamming of cure light wounds wands, I at least have an issue with them. And no, I think I've always realized that HP wasn't realistic.

hit points were the same thing until overnight healing to full became a part of the game, now they are not, and that is the point.

 

[JustinAlexander]

Pre-4E there were two ways to explain the hit point mechanics:

(1) Getting "hit" didn't mean you'd actually gotten hit or seriously wounded until you reached 0 hit points.

(2) All hit point loss represented a physical wound, but the system also modeled luck, skill, etc. because 1 hp didn't equal 1 hp.

Arguing that one of these was "true" and the other "wasn't true" is a dead end in discussions like these because (a) both of them have their inconsistencies within the abstraction of the system and (b) people have been playing with one or the other for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Starting with 4E, the second explanation (which had actually been the predominant explanation in most previous iterations of the rulebook and, most notably, in the 3E rulebooks) was completely removed from the game. It's a really key example of how the "big tent" WotC was aiming for actually ended up being a really tiny tent that excluded a lot of people.

So when people look at the D&D Next playtest materials and see the exact same, tiny tent being erected in a really obvious and annoyingly persistent section of the rules... yeah. They're going to have problems with it.

On the plus side, although I haven't completely looked over the newest playtest packet, it looks like they're still avoiding the Schrodinger's Hit Point from 4E. ("Oh crap! That sword thrust just dropped my character to 0 hp! Was it because it cut me open like a gutted fish? Or did it miss me entirely and I'm just cowering in hapless terror? There's no way to know until Bob either uses his Boost Morale ability on me or Suzie uses her Heal Fish-Gutting Wounds ability on me!") Those mechanics made it absolutely impossible to describe the game world during 4E combat unless you were comfortable retconning your decisions shortly thereafter.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I'm particularly interested in an element of Experimental Rule 2. Bloodied returns as a healing threshold. Recovering hit points is easy if you aren't bloodied. Otherwise, it's not.

So, as long as you can keep the party from dropping below half hit points, you can rest up to full easily and keep on moving. It's only if you start taking injuries that healing becomes slow.

This may be the start of a good compromise. For example:

Short Rest: If you are not bloodied, you can spend hit dice to recover hit points.

Long Rest: If you are not bloodied, you regain all your hit points and hit dice. If you are bloodied, you recover hit points equal to your level plus your constitution modifier.