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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6556574" data-attributes="member: 996">There are multiple classes with Cure..Wounds in the game, and magical healing is indispensable in combat, so you will have one or more in the party.  While you could go to the trouble of heading back to town for a long rest, everyone tracking their 1 hp (or whatever you settle on) for that fist night, then getting healed up by the caster and 'resting' again after 12 hrs so he can get his spells back, relatively little is gained from doing so.  You waste a little extra time bookkeeping and your PCs are 28 hrs older instead of 24, that's about it.  Consider the 'all hps back on long rest' shorthand for rest-cast-rest cycles, unless time pressures demand tracking all the steps. In the extreme case that all the party's magical healers are gone, the natural rate of healing could finally start to matter - but, at that point the party's probably as good as dead, anyway. Take all the realism you want:  Start by banning casters, then elves, then monks...  some time after you stop giving characters hps for leveling up, you can start worrying about how long it should take them to recover from being wounded - if they don't die of gangrene, that is. It's unrealistic that everyone in the party survived early childhood in a medieval setting.  Maybe they're just tough/lucky/divinely favored? There's all sorts of systems out there with charming/gory 'death spiral' wound-tracking systems that you could adapt.  For instance, taking any sort of real wound generally entails a reduction in the ability to move quickly or exert physical force or run marathons, so skipping hps and doing damage directly to STR or DEX or CON can work - or INT/WIS/CHA for those 'knocked out' (concussions are no laughing matter).Sorry if that came off a bit snarky, but, man, have I had this conversation a lot in the last 35 years.  And it never makes any more sense no matter how many times I have it.  You want your /elf/ who was 'wounded' by a /giant cube of acidic jello/ he mistook for an /animated skeleton/ to heal /realistically/?  Unless, of course, a plate-mail-armored cleric of a bronze age pagan deity who uses a mace because the bible contains an obscure injunction against using the /edge/ of a sword, mumbles for 18 seconds and touches him, expending one of the grenade-like 'spells' he /memorized/ that morning, as if he were a magician from the Dying Earth under the sun's red giant phase?  Because the only thing 'unrealistic' in all that would be the elf healing too fast?Dammit, I just got even snarkier.   OK.  Real answer:  5e is designed with the assumption that you will change the rules to suit yourself and your players.  If you find the default healing rates don't mesh with our vision of your campaign world, or the players' collective visions of their characters or whatever, you are absolutely free to change them however you want.  But, if you want to do so in a way that won't have unexpected ripple effects on things like the convenient encounter guidelines, one easy way to do it is to simply re-define the short and long rest.  Since everything - character class abilities, healing, appropriate number of encounters, etc - is more or less in terms of those two time frames, re-defining them can change the pace of the campaign and the rate at which 'natural healing' occurs.  For instance, you could make a short rest overnight, and a long rest a week (or more, if you wanted) of R&R.  Thus, you could recover some hps from HD with a night's sleep, but to actually heal would take a week.  To be /fully/ recovered (all your HD back), would take a second week, since each long rest only restores half your HD.With the same number of spells and other rechargeable abilities available between short and long rests, the party can handle the same number of encounters between them, as well.  If you do find anything important that does reference days or hours, instead, you should probably translate them to long and short rests, respectively, to keep things on an even keel.  For instance, if a magic item says 3/day, instead of 3 chgs, recharges after a long rest, you could 'change' it to 3/week to keep it from being 7x as powerful.   A fairly simple change, and you put your campaign on a more realistic pacing - based on what you consider realistic.</blockquote>

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