D&D 5E Healing Options Poll
Chris_Nightwing
First Post
With the rules as they stand I like HD not HP overnight healing - one of the slower variants.
Kinak
First Post
I'm a fan of "overnight is a short rest, a week in safety is a long rest." It slows down the pace of the game to about where I like it.
The side benefit is that it doesn't really upset the balance between magical and nonmagical healing overall. Since clerics regain their spells with a long rest, you don't need to make any changes there.
This means, just by leaving short/long rest vague, you can dial the pace of your game to wherever you want.
Cheers!
Kinak
The side benefit is that it doesn't really upset the balance between magical and nonmagical healing overall. Since clerics regain their spells with a long rest, you don't need to make any changes there.
This means, just by leaving short/long rest vague, you can dial the pace of your game to wherever you want.
Cheers!
Kinak
Jeff Carlsen
Adventurer
Right now, I prefer only recovering hit dice on a long rest.
That said, I think experimental rule two is a step in a good direction. I've stated it before, but I like the idea that if you're not bloodied, healing is easy and can be done with a short rest to catch your breath. If you are bloodied, healing becomes a much slower process.
That said, I think experimental rule two is a step in a good direction. I've stated it before, but I like the idea that if you're not bloodied, healing is easy and can be done with a short rest to catch your breath. If you are bloodied, healing becomes a much slower process.
I tend to agree but I'll add that the harder it is to heal the more pressure you are putting on heals bots and to some extent on the herbalism feats the more they are necessary. You basically force them to take the level 3 cure light wound bonus, the level 1 herbalism feat or even worse, they would feel force to take the lifegiver feat (and healbot even more if that's possible).
So a healthy dose of balance is needed. 1 week? Heh, the 5 minutes work day is now the 5 minutes work week. Not exactly better.
Li Shenron
Legend
I am undecided... it will depend on each campaign!!
I believe that Resting rules have a major impact on adventure design and more specifically adventure timing (how many encounters per day, how many days in a row...), but otherwise have only a minor impact on rules design: they are important in comparison with Cleric's healing abilities so that you know these are needed out-of-combat or only in-combat.
The latter is up to the designers, but adventure design is up to the DM (I know there are published adventures too, but the DM will change the adventure timing if it doesn't suit the campaign gaming style).
Hence I think that instead of providing many Resting rules variant, with the gaming groups still modifying them or making up their own anyway, the designers should rather provide a small number of ideas and let the DM combine them such as:
a- HD-based off-combat healing requiring healing kits
b- Bloodied threshold and off-combat self-healing
c- Refocus in-combat self-healing
d- Short rest level-based self-healing
e- Long rest level-based OR full self-healing
Each DM picks her favourite combination of the above and then defines how long is a short or long rest in her game.
I believe that Resting rules have a major impact on adventure design and more specifically adventure timing (how many encounters per day, how many days in a row...), but otherwise have only a minor impact on rules design: they are important in comparison with Cleric's healing abilities so that you know these are needed out-of-combat or only in-combat.
The latter is up to the designers, but adventure design is up to the DM (I know there are published adventures too, but the DM will change the adventure timing if it doesn't suit the campaign gaming style).
Hence I think that instead of providing many Resting rules variant, with the gaming groups still modifying them or making up their own anyway, the designers should rather provide a small number of ideas and let the DM combine them such as:
a- HD-based off-combat healing requiring healing kits
b- Bloodied threshold and off-combat self-healing
c- Refocus in-combat self-healing
d- Short rest level-based self-healing
e- Long rest level-based OR full self-healing
Each DM picks her favourite combination of the above and then defines how long is a short or long rest in her game.
I voted other.
What I'd prefer, but don't really expect to actually see, is something along these lines:
Accepting that HP have never succeeded at modelling injury in any satisfactory and internally consistent way (not that they ever actually tried), let's treat them as what they do work as: an almost entirely abstract measure of how far from being knocked unconscious/dead your PC is right now.
HP reset between fights.
You always start a fight at full HP... unless you are subject to some condition that prevents you from being at full HP.
Conditions could include fatigue (insufficient rest, too many combats), various illnesses (Filth Fever! Moon Frenzy! Scurvy! Lycanthropy! ...oh wait, not usually transferable in D&D, but oh well), poisons, and yes, injuries.
Because this system accepts that HP are, as they've always stated, an abstract hodgepodge of luck, fate, skill, meat, and what-have-you, there are no mental gymnastics needed to justify shouting-based HP recovery, or any other inspiration, intimidation, pluckiness, children clapping, or happy-thought-based HP recovery.
By moving injuries over into conditions, and allowing those conditions to be as specific as we want them to be (including having individual natural recovery rates, specific impairments, and specific remedies), we don't have anybody yelling wounds shut, because HP aren't your wounds. Your wounds are your wounds.
We can even categorize wounds. Some of them could be Light. There might even be a spell that removes such wounds. We could call it "Cure Light Wounds" or something. For more serious wounds, maybe "Cure Serious Wounds"?
Then we could include dials for DMs to adjust based on how frequently they want wounds to crop up, and how severe the wounds can be. Maybe in your Care Bear campaign, nobody ever gets injured unless they drop to 0 HP, and the worst injury one can suffer is a sprained ankle (Light Wound [ankle sprain]: -10 ft movement, -3 max HP, lose 2 HP every time you hustle, Recovery: 2 weeks to recover naturally or something along those lines). Heck, maybe you don't have injuries at all.
Maybe in your Fantasy ____ing Viet Nam, any hit that exceeds your AC by say, 3, results in injury. Maybe you use Permanent Wounds, like limb-loss (Permanent Wound [loss of shield arm]: You can't use a shield. Your shirts fit funny. Recovery: None, it's gone and it's not coming back.)
(Other obvious "chance of injury" thresholds one might use are half-HP, any hit worth a quarter of your HP, any hit that does more than your Con score in damage, all criticals, etc.)
But, like I say, I don't actually expect to see this happen. HP-loss as meat-injury even though it really isn't, never was, and never will be, is too much of a sacred cow to be turned into such tasty, tasty, hamburgers. Oh well.
What I'd prefer, but don't really expect to actually see, is something along these lines:
Accepting that HP have never succeeded at modelling injury in any satisfactory and internally consistent way (not that they ever actually tried), let's treat them as what they do work as: an almost entirely abstract measure of how far from being knocked unconscious/dead your PC is right now.
HP reset between fights.
You always start a fight at full HP... unless you are subject to some condition that prevents you from being at full HP.
Conditions could include fatigue (insufficient rest, too many combats), various illnesses (Filth Fever! Moon Frenzy! Scurvy! Lycanthropy! ...oh wait, not usually transferable in D&D, but oh well), poisons, and yes, injuries.
Because this system accepts that HP are, as they've always stated, an abstract hodgepodge of luck, fate, skill, meat, and what-have-you, there are no mental gymnastics needed to justify shouting-based HP recovery, or any other inspiration, intimidation, pluckiness, children clapping, or happy-thought-based HP recovery.
By moving injuries over into conditions, and allowing those conditions to be as specific as we want them to be (including having individual natural recovery rates, specific impairments, and specific remedies), we don't have anybody yelling wounds shut, because HP aren't your wounds. Your wounds are your wounds.
We can even categorize wounds. Some of them could be Light. There might even be a spell that removes such wounds. We could call it "Cure Light Wounds" or something. For more serious wounds, maybe "Cure Serious Wounds"?
Then we could include dials for DMs to adjust based on how frequently they want wounds to crop up, and how severe the wounds can be. Maybe in your Care Bear campaign, nobody ever gets injured unless they drop to 0 HP, and the worst injury one can suffer is a sprained ankle (Light Wound [ankle sprain]: -10 ft movement, -3 max HP, lose 2 HP every time you hustle, Recovery: 2 weeks to recover naturally or something along those lines). Heck, maybe you don't have injuries at all.
Maybe in your Fantasy ____ing Viet Nam, any hit that exceeds your AC by say, 3, results in injury. Maybe you use Permanent Wounds, like limb-loss (Permanent Wound [loss of shield arm]: You can't use a shield. Your shirts fit funny. Recovery: None, it's gone and it's not coming back.)
(Other obvious "chance of injury" thresholds one might use are half-HP, any hit worth a quarter of your HP, any hit that does more than your Con score in damage, all criticals, etc.)
But, like I say, I don't actually expect to see this happen. HP-loss as meat-injury even though it really isn't, never was, and never will be, is too much of a sacred cow to be turned into such tasty, tasty, hamburgers. Oh well.
Last edited:
Mattachine
Adventurer
I like the variant with the slowest natural healing:
spend hit dice during short rest or long rest
regain hit dice only during long rest--but no automatic "up to full"
I want heroic natural healing, but I don't want it as easy as in 4e.
spend hit dice during short rest or long rest
regain hit dice only during long rest--but no automatic "up to full"
I want heroic natural healing, but I don't want it as easy as in 4e.
howandwhy99
Adventurer
None of the above really. I'm glad they have put daily healing back in the game, but it feels like they've simply moved the Horizon of No Consequences back from 5 minutes to 24 hours.
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