KingsRule77
First Post
Nope.
D&D 5E Hit Point Recovery Too Generous
- Thread starter Erik42
- Start date
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
Like I said - "whether or not the player is okay with that ruling is another story."
Ilbranteloth
Explorer
I've done a lot of thinking and tweaking in my campaign regarding hit points. I find it an interesting subject in game design because it really is about balancing a number of different, and not entirely compatible, goals - fun, game pacing, "realism," etc,
Healing speed itself is interesting because it defines the base hit points in your game. For example, you think that regaining 100% of your hit points each night is too much. So you set that to 50% instead. All you've really accomplished is to halve the PCs hit points. Without magical aid, each day they will start with half of their hit points. So on the first day they are at 100% and OK for monsters with a challenge rating of their level. But after that first day, they now will always start with half their hit points.
So you've basically accomplished the same thing as halving each class's Hit Dice, unless they have magic to make up the second part.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that hit points are a great way to pace the game, but not a great representation of health. I look at hit points as health (1 hp) and skill and stamina (the rest of the hit points). This explains very easily why higher level characters have more hit points.
But this doesn't satisfy the feeling that wounds are "realistic." Rather than try to define that vague term, I looked at more specific goals I wanted to accomplish.
1. I want the system to be able to model the effect of wounds in dramatic scenes from books, movies, TV, etc. such as:
Somebody too injured to join you in your quest
Long term injury that complicates activities (broken bone, injured eye, etc.)
In Lost Mine of Phandelver and HotDQ there are NPCs that are too injured for them to help you. No problem, we've got a cleric right here. A Cure Wounds and you're all set. Oops.
2. I want the system to use existing rules where possible, and look to earlier editions if needed before making up something brand new.
3. Anything that is determined by a random roll will impact the PCs much more than the monsters or NPCs. For example, a critical hit. There's a 5% chance that you'll roll a 20 each time you roll a d20. Chances are very high that at least one PC will be the victim of a critical hit each session. So it needs to happen often enough to make the rule worthwhile, but not so often that at least one PC is always affected.
4. You need a serious effect to make it worthwhile against a monster, because you'll only see them for about 15 minutes. But the same effect will impact the PC on a more regular basis through a campaign.
For example - let's say you want to sever body parts. So your critical hit rule means that you have a 50% chance to sever a body part. If you're successful, that orc is missing a hand, and in the next round you kill it. It has little effect. But it's extremely likely that after 3 or less months of playing that every PC will be missing a body part.
Hit points are far too simplistic to meet these goals. So a separate system is needed. Options include vitality points, Constitution points, but they require more tracking and instituting a new system. But conditions are a good starting point. They already exist, and some of the conditions are probably good choices already.
So to start, here's how I handle critical hits:
Critical Hit (Natural 20)
Automatic hit; roll damage twice
CON save (DC 8 + attack bonus)
Failed save = Staggered;
Failed save by 5+, Staggered plus:
Bludgeoning: Unconscious
Slashing: Incapacitated and bleeding
Piercing: Stunned
Condition Recovery: CON save
Critical Miss (Natural 1)
Automatic miss; suffer opportunity attack
If firing into melee, roll attack to possibly hit an ally in the melee
All of the mechanics already exist in the game. In the 3rd edition there was a second die roll to determine if the critical was in fact critical, so it's similar to that as well. Higher level characters, and those with better Constitutions are better able to avoid the effects. It required the addition of a new condition:
Staggered
Cannot react; can only move, or use action/bonus action for single attack
Spell roll d20; 11+ completes next round
Recovery (one attempt w/healing kit)
DC 15 Con save or worsens to injury
Advantage if Proficient in Medicine
So at this point, anybody struck by a critical hit has a chance of suffering an additional effect that will reduce their effectiveness for this combat, and also has a chance of removing them from the combat altogether without intervention. That's going to help the monsters a bit, but it also allows for some cool opportunities for the players. It also means that they will have to chance strategies on the fly if something serious happens to one of them.
There's also a possibility that the condition can worsen after the combat. We've found the DC 15 to work pretty well, but you can lessen it if it's occurring too often. Having one character proficient in Medicine greatly reduces your chance of a long term injury. But if they fail, then they suffer another new condition:
Injured (1 death save daily)
+1 level of exhaustion
Reduced to dying = permanent effect
Lesser Restoration = extra save (1x day)
Greater Restoration = 1 success (1x day)
As you can see, this is the long term story condition. It lasts days, at the very least. This is irrelevant to monsters, although can be used to simulate the 'NPC to injured to help' situations. I use the basic condition for disease as well, which explains why people (NPCs) actually die from disease instead of finding a 3rd level spellcaster with Lesser Restoration.
I didn't want specific injuries, the abstract nature of the exhaustion track is good enough. If they do very poorly and end up nearly dying, then the player and I work out a permanent effect of the injury.
Although my initial approach was to apply an injury instead of the intermediate step of staggered. This had two problems. First was that imposing disadvantage on ability checks on a monster in a combat was virtually useless. The injury had to reach level 3 to be meaningful, and that just didn't happen. It was also happening too often to PCs, which was also problematic since it was a long-term effect. I needed something with more teeth, but that would usually only last during the current combat.
Overall this has been working very well in the two campaigns I'm running. We even had one situation where the entire party was injured and had to safely negotiate their way back to town (a bad experience with a black dragon that they had no business in antagonizing). But a PC being staggered seems to happen about once every 2-3 sessions, and injured once every 6 sessions or more. The effects are significant enough to impact combat when a monster or NPC suffers one of the effects, but not so debilitating that the players don't like the rule. Instead they look at it as an opportunity if/when they are staggered or injured.
But, the simple existence of the rules has affected how they players look at combat. There are opportunities for suffering 'real damage' even though most don't. And in the end, hit points and the rate of healing is no longer an issue because it's clear that it's not a measure of health or the impact of injuries on the PCs.
Ilbranteloth
Healing speed itself is interesting because it defines the base hit points in your game. For example, you think that regaining 100% of your hit points each night is too much. So you set that to 50% instead. All you've really accomplished is to halve the PCs hit points. Without magical aid, each day they will start with half of their hit points. So on the first day they are at 100% and OK for monsters with a challenge rating of their level. But after that first day, they now will always start with half their hit points.
So you've basically accomplished the same thing as halving each class's Hit Dice, unless they have magic to make up the second part.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that hit points are a great way to pace the game, but not a great representation of health. I look at hit points as health (1 hp) and skill and stamina (the rest of the hit points). This explains very easily why higher level characters have more hit points.
But this doesn't satisfy the feeling that wounds are "realistic." Rather than try to define that vague term, I looked at more specific goals I wanted to accomplish.
1. I want the system to be able to model the effect of wounds in dramatic scenes from books, movies, TV, etc. such as:
Somebody too injured to join you in your quest
Long term injury that complicates activities (broken bone, injured eye, etc.)
In Lost Mine of Phandelver and HotDQ there are NPCs that are too injured for them to help you. No problem, we've got a cleric right here. A Cure Wounds and you're all set. Oops.
2. I want the system to use existing rules where possible, and look to earlier editions if needed before making up something brand new.
3. Anything that is determined by a random roll will impact the PCs much more than the monsters or NPCs. For example, a critical hit. There's a 5% chance that you'll roll a 20 each time you roll a d20. Chances are very high that at least one PC will be the victim of a critical hit each session. So it needs to happen often enough to make the rule worthwhile, but not so often that at least one PC is always affected.
4. You need a serious effect to make it worthwhile against a monster, because you'll only see them for about 15 minutes. But the same effect will impact the PC on a more regular basis through a campaign.
For example - let's say you want to sever body parts. So your critical hit rule means that you have a 50% chance to sever a body part. If you're successful, that orc is missing a hand, and in the next round you kill it. It has little effect. But it's extremely likely that after 3 or less months of playing that every PC will be missing a body part.
Hit points are far too simplistic to meet these goals. So a separate system is needed. Options include vitality points, Constitution points, but they require more tracking and instituting a new system. But conditions are a good starting point. They already exist, and some of the conditions are probably good choices already.
So to start, here's how I handle critical hits:
Critical Hit (Natural 20)
Automatic hit; roll damage twice
CON save (DC 8 + attack bonus)
Failed save = Staggered;
Failed save by 5+, Staggered plus:
Bludgeoning: Unconscious
Slashing: Incapacitated and bleeding
Piercing: Stunned
Condition Recovery: CON save
Critical Miss (Natural 1)
Automatic miss; suffer opportunity attack
If firing into melee, roll attack to possibly hit an ally in the melee
All of the mechanics already exist in the game. In the 3rd edition there was a second die roll to determine if the critical was in fact critical, so it's similar to that as well. Higher level characters, and those with better Constitutions are better able to avoid the effects. It required the addition of a new condition:
Staggered
Cannot react; can only move, or use action/bonus action for single attack
Spell roll d20; 11+ completes next round
Recovery (one attempt w/healing kit)
DC 15 Con save or worsens to injury
Advantage if Proficient in Medicine
So at this point, anybody struck by a critical hit has a chance of suffering an additional effect that will reduce their effectiveness for this combat, and also has a chance of removing them from the combat altogether without intervention. That's going to help the monsters a bit, but it also allows for some cool opportunities for the players. It also means that they will have to chance strategies on the fly if something serious happens to one of them.
There's also a possibility that the condition can worsen after the combat. We've found the DC 15 to work pretty well, but you can lessen it if it's occurring too often. Having one character proficient in Medicine greatly reduces your chance of a long term injury. But if they fail, then they suffer another new condition:
Injured (1 death save daily)
+1 level of exhaustion
Reduced to dying = permanent effect
Lesser Restoration = extra save (1x day)
Greater Restoration = 1 success (1x day)
As you can see, this is the long term story condition. It lasts days, at the very least. This is irrelevant to monsters, although can be used to simulate the 'NPC to injured to help' situations. I use the basic condition for disease as well, which explains why people (NPCs) actually die from disease instead of finding a 3rd level spellcaster with Lesser Restoration.
I didn't want specific injuries, the abstract nature of the exhaustion track is good enough. If they do very poorly and end up nearly dying, then the player and I work out a permanent effect of the injury.
Although my initial approach was to apply an injury instead of the intermediate step of staggered. This had two problems. First was that imposing disadvantage on ability checks on a monster in a combat was virtually useless. The injury had to reach level 3 to be meaningful, and that just didn't happen. It was also happening too often to PCs, which was also problematic since it was a long-term effect. I needed something with more teeth, but that would usually only last during the current combat.
Overall this has been working very well in the two campaigns I'm running. We even had one situation where the entire party was injured and had to safely negotiate their way back to town (a bad experience with a black dragon that they had no business in antagonizing). But a PC being staggered seems to happen about once every 2-3 sessions, and injured once every 6 sessions or more. The effects are significant enough to impact combat when a monster or NPC suffers one of the effects, but not so debilitating that the players don't like the rule. Instead they look at it as an opportunity if/when they are staggered or injured.
But, the simple existence of the rules has affected how they players look at combat. There are opportunities for suffering 'real damage' even though most don't. And in the end, hit points and the rate of healing is no longer an issue because it's clear that it's not a measure of health or the impact of injuries on the PCs.
Ilbranteloth
Tony Vargas
Legend
Lewis and Clark had significantly fewer than 6-8 combat encounters in the course of their expedition. They'd've been fine with years of nothing but short rests. (Which, itself, is hilariously unrealistic, if you conflate long rest with sleep).
Maybe their DM's random encounter dice were cold.
Not just 'fast' recovery, but the total lack of wound penalties. D&D declines to model any wound serious enough to give so much as a -1 to anything. Your leg never takes enough hp damage to reduce your speed, your arm never takes so much damage you can't swing your sword (unless it's outright lopped off by a magical Sword of Sharpness), no wound is serious enough to impact your ability to dodge dragon breath, run a marathon, stay awake on watch, stay up all night pouring through ancient scrolls, or whatever else you might be doing that an even slightly serious wound just might make a good deal more challenging. It only models wounds so trivial that they do not penalize you in the least - not so much as a twisted ankle - or knock you (but d4 hours later you're awake and have absolutely no penalties to any sort of activity) or kill you. Nothing in between.
That's not exactly setting a high bar for realism when it comes to inflicting or recovering from those 'wounds.'
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FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Wait, stop there for a sec. (I apologize for ignoring the rest of your post in my reply, but I think this point is fundamental.) This is only true if all PCs lose all HP every day, which isn't true in my experience and isn't part of my desired playstyle. I have lots of sessions (both as a player and as a DM) where certain characters lose few or zero HP. Even when somebody gets absolutely hammered by monsters, and comes close to death or even dies, there are other PCs who are pretty much okay still (down a few ki points or whatever but not injured). What you'd actually see if healing were slower and no magical healing were available is that uninjured characters would rotate to the front, and injured characters would play more cautiously until they healed. That doesn't seem like an entirely undesirable thing, and it's a far cry from simply halving everyone's HP.
I acknowledge that perhaps in some games, maybe including yours, most or all PCs regularly deplete themselves of all HP in the course of a day.
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The Crimson Binome
Hero
By halving the HP recovery rate, you're not halving the total HP available - you're halving the acceptable number of HP that can be spent each day without incurring future costs. If you can heal 100% of your HP per day, then you can lose 100% of your HP per day, and it won't impact how many you have available tomorrow or the next day. If you can heal 50% of your HP per day, then you can lose half of your HP every day, and you can keep up that rate forever.
Even if you only heal 10% per day, though, you can still recover to full eventually. No matter what you define as the acceptable rate of HP loss, some days you'll lose fewer than that. This was essential to play in older editions, if you didn't have a cleric in your party. You travel from point A to point B, and it will take you three weeks, but you lose half of your HP on day 2 and you're back up to full by the time you get to your destination.
But you are still left with that narrow narrative space for death. That gets tired and boring kind of quickly.
And mine is that narrow narrative space - there don't have to be inconsistencies, so long as you keep to all wounds and death being fairly similar and not terribly dramatic.
Two ways to look at this:
1) There is nothing wrong with the game because the DM frequently narrates mortal injury. There is something wrong with the game in that it forces the GM to *not* narrate mortal (or even particularly severe) injury. There is an argument that not supporting a fairly obvious narration is a weakness.
2) "Is not all things to all people," is not, "something wrong with". We can accept that all games have limitations, things they do well, and things they do not-very-well, without saying there's something majorly wrong with the game. Analogy: There is nothing wrong with pizza, but that doesn't mean it is a great food for those who are lactose intolerant. We should acknowledge and accept limitations, rather than say, "If you just do this thing that isn't what you want to do, there is no issue."
Ilbranteloth
Explorer
That's a very valid point, the exact results will vary from campaign to campaign, but the general effect is there even if it's not exposed because your PCs suffer less damage each day.
I guess the proper description would be that by reducing the amount of hit points regained during a long rest that you've set a lower floor for daily starting hit points. In the RAW in the PHB the floor is the same as the ceiling.
In mine, some sessions they are all in sorry shape, and in others only one or even none have suffered damage, so perhaps I'll take a closer look at the DMG alternatives as well. Although we'll still keep the injury rules. I didn't like the DMG option because I don't like a random roll determining that you've lost a limb, etc.
Ilbranteloth
This I am okay with, because I am of the opinion that death spirals kinda suck as game mechanics.
Insert standard point about 'realism' in a game with dragons and fireballs. I don't need it to be realistic. Conan and Grey Mouser don't do realistic things. I prefer that it be narratively interesting. As I noted, I manage it in D&D by largely not really giving a hoot - since there *isn't* a death spiral, there's no mechanical barriers to any narration. The narration is there largely to help keep the players' minds on the severity of the situation. In D&D, after the combat, the situation isn't severe, and the details of the narration from before are quickly back in the mists of memory.
When a cool approach to wounds and wound penalties is a major concern, I'll go to FATE. Now there's a game that does it well. To do that, though, they sacrifice having a long road of character power gain.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I agree. I also find that long alternative healing times, when the game is designed around rapid healing, are a pointless mechanic when the normal mode of healing (spells) is so highly available (renewed every day), and serve only to contract the breadth of campaign types you can run.
But, neither of us can really go for that argument, since the alternative means both death spirals, and undue limitations on what can do damage and what can restore hps.
More hearty agreement. If the DMs up to narrating almost melodrama-like brushes with death (rather than clinically accurate tissue destruction) and reversals of fortune, I could see managing it with the more open interpretations of D&D hps. Better than most games that use smaller and more static tallies for that purpose, like Storyteller HLs, for instance.
FATE's 'consequences' are intriguing and cinematic. The group I'm playing Dresden Files with - including the GM - are really having trouble wrapping our heads around the mechanics of it though. We puzzle it out each time someone gets hurt, but it doesn't stick.
Maybe I'm just used to the advancement in Hero and Storyteller, but a gentler slope on that long road of character power gain doesn't seem to hurt. D&D could even go there - it'd just be a more complete commitment to the ideas behind bounded accuracy.
