Healing Fully With Rest - Is It Really That Big of a Deal?

[The Cardinal]

how about:

"rest" only works if you have at least 1hp when the resting period starts (i.e. if you don't have any "real" injuries)

 

[Mattachine]

I think the playtest rules already require 1 hp to have a "rest", as defined by the game.

I like the rest and heal version of hit points, and it's easy to subtly change the feel of the game without changing the rules much. As others suggested, simply make it difficult to take a good rest. I don't mean contrivances, I mean, just alter definitions a bit:

* Short rest: raise the time from 10 min to 30 min, or an hour. Require food, water, and healing kits.

* Extended rest: require a full 24 hours without strenuous activities, that also requires food and water--that means that resting while in a dungeon will be very tough, and even resting during wilderness trips will often be ineffective for restoring hit points.

With these changes, many possible rest periods won't be effective for healing.

 

[variant]

So, let me know if I have this right or not...
1) With a short rest, you can use one of your mundane healing kits to use existing HD to heal yourself (+Con mod).

Question 1: Is a "short rest" 5 minutes or 10? OR open ended/just shorter than a "Long Rest"? That will play into the narrative/believability of it for many people. "I got back 40 HP in 5 minutes. Let's go!" isn't going to fly for too many.

10 minutes.

2) Is it with a "long rest", which equals a "full night's [8 hours min] sleep" (?), you regain all of your allowed HD and can use them/as many as you want...without a healing kit use...(+Con mod) in the morning? Or with a long rest, you just wake up with full HP AND your allotment of daily HD (to use later in the day)?

The latter.

I think that last bit is what really is sticking in many people's craw. That it's "automatic" without concern for story or any level of "realism"...no matter how you want to interpret the amount of physical v. abstract HP in your games.

That's why there's been a suggestion of rolling your hit dice to determine how many you regain with an 8 hour rest instead of getting them all back.

 

[Guest 85555]

One of the most common complaints I've been seeing about the playtest is that player characters heal completely after an 8 hour rest. I'm just curious why people think this is such a bad thing.

Back in 3rd edition, which I've played more than any other edition, the amount of hit points players recovered from rest was very low. And yet, I can probably count on one hand the number of times that my party didn't end up being fully recovered after resting. Our cleric (or other healer) would just convert his low level spells to cure spells and heal us up, and, if that wasn't enough (it almost always was, except in the most taxing adventures), then our trusty wands of cure light wounds easily made up the difference.

I guess I can understand people's problem with such rapid mundane healing from a narrative standpoint - it does seem to kind of trivialize injury. But I would argue that it is the very nature of hit points to do that. Of course, there have been endless arguments over hit points and verisimilitude, and I'd rather not repeat that here. Instead, I have a more specific query for those who are strongly against healing fully with rest. Is it just the narrative and believability issues, or do you have any gameplay reasons for being against it?

It is both a believability issue and potential gameplay issue for me.

 

[Mallus]

One day or one week. Real injuries would take months to recover from, if they didn't outright kill you.

But real people who suffer realistic injuries don't usually end up as the protagonists in adventure stories.

(and when they do they're always portrayed as being unrealistically lucky!)

On-topic: on a conceptual level, I don't actually like healing to full each morning, but it works fine in play. One can argue it matches genre conventions better than 3e/Pathfinder's healing to full via cheap, plentiful, easily-accessed magic/items.

 

[Guest 85555]

One day or one week. Real injuries would take months to recover from, if they didn't outright kill you.

I am not interested in pure realism. But i do want it to be realistic enough that i dont feel like i am in a cartoon. A day is just too fast for me...i have a lot of trouble picturing my character seriously hurt, then going to sleep andbeing fine in the morning. This just doesn't work for me. At least with a week, there has been some time to heal (it is still short but no where as bad a s a day).

People are not going to agree on this of course. Many are not troubled at all by one day healing (and that is perfectly fine)...i just thinks wotc would be wise to pay attention to complaints about HD. Make it an option, not core. That will please both sides a lot more than making it the default assumption of the game.

 

[the Jester]

how about:

"rest" only works if you have at least 1hp when the resting period starts (i.e. if you don't have any "real" injuries)

If you're below 0 hit points and stable, you recover some hps in a few hours. So this is a meaningless limitation.

 

[Sunseeker]

I am not interested in pure realism. But i do want it to be realistic enough that i dont feel like i am in a cartoon. A day is just too fast for me...i have a lot of trouble picturing my character seriously hurt, then going to sleep andbeing fine in the morning. This just doesn't work for me. At least with a week, there has been some time to heal (it is still short but no where as bad a s a day).

People are not going to agree on this of course. Many are not troubled at all by one day healing (and that is perfectly fine)...i just thinks wotc would be wise to pay attention to complaints about HD. Make it an option, not core. That will please both sides a lot more than making it the default assumption of the game.

To be honest my reaction to folks who say they want realism but don't want real realism strikes me the same way as folks who drink diet coke. It's just funny in this weird ironic way.

Slowing healing down or even speeding it up is easy. You get X hp back per day, X spells back per day, you get X spells back per hour, X hp back per hour, per minute, per second. Going from A to B or B to A really isn't difficult unless the ideology of it is build heavily into the game. Since classically it hasn't been, I don't think making it slower or faster would make a difference.

What I would add however is that "resting" time should not constitute simply laying in bed, it might for serious injuries, but it should also allow for non-strenuous activities. Perhaps you are investigating some strange events around town that don't require fighting. Maybe you're aiding the local militia by being a drill sergeant.

If we're going to make recovery take days, then they need to actually involve something more than what a good rest does in which the DM waves his hand and everything is better. If the DM waves his hand and everything is better, but it took 8 days instead of 8 hours, it didn't really change anything.

But real people who suffer realistic injuries don't usually end up as the protagonists in adventure stories.

(and when they do they're always portrayed as being unrealistically lucky!)

Exactly, you're the protagonist, you get up faster and don't go down as easily. 8 days or 8 hours doesn't make much of a difference, that's still much much much more lucky than normal folks. Normal folks are the guys who took an arrow to the knee and died.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Agree with Firelance: The key issues are tying all resource restoration together on roughly the same schedule, and should there be an intermediate step between short rest and full recovery?


Providing explicit "dial" settings for the time required for each rest period is half the answer. The other half is providing that intermediate setting. I suggest something like this, spring-boarding off of some previous discussion:

• Short rest - as playtest.
• Moderate rest - by default 8 hours, even in rough conditions (e.g. a dungeon, the wild), get back hit points equal to rolling all Hit Dice for free, then restore all Hit Dice (which can then be used immediately with kit or saved). Also make appropriate checks to restore each spell slot (or any other form of "daily" powers).
• Extended rest - as playtest, but require several days to a week in a safe, restful location to get the benefits.

Then besides dialing the time periods of each of these to suit the campaign, you are also encouraged to "switch" off one or two of them, as also fits the campaign. You want something quasi Basic-like? Switch off the short rest. Want something a lot like 4E? Switch off the moderate rest (and dial down the time on the extended rest).

In addition to all of that, I would also suggest a module (but not core) for an abstract "extreme fatigue" system, that is designed to provide a strategic death spiral but not a tactical one. Provide several ways that characters that hit zero hit points, cast major spells, etc. can get -1 (stackable) to future checks, curable only with an extended rest or major magic. For the baseline, something like -1 per every strenuous day, unless a check succeeds, would work. This option is solely to put some bite into "operational play" where that is desired, without getting too draconian on the hit point and spell restoration. As such, it should be ignored for more cinematic games.

 

[Kinak]

The "as well" is the key. But I don't think week long rests should be the baseline.
I play mostly in PbP environment and my expirience is that most people will use the base rule for any game instead of options presented later (this is somewhat different if a setting is specifically tied to an option, like defiling, low treasure and sparse metal in Dark Sun).

So, what should the baseline be?

At the end of the day (when I may or may not regain all my HP), I think the question becomes "what should the default pacing be for a D&D game?" Which isn't a simple question.

Personally, I'd still lean it towards a week. Even, perhaps especially, in PbP games where the pace of play tends to be slower, I like spacing out the narrative so that you're spending months of real time on weeks gametime rather than days.

But if the core rules support an extremely cinematic flavor of play, I think eight hours would be a better fit. If they're closer to "average" fantasy (between cinematic and gritty), a week makes more sense. I doubt we'll see a default gritty D&D, but I'd expect a different healing system entirely if we did.

Cheers!
Kinak