D&D 5E Homebrew Hit Point Recovery

[Lanefan]

5e only has "free healing" on a 3+ day time scale (one day to take damage and heal; recovering all of your HD can take another 2 days), and on that time scale pretty much only on HP damage.

For non-HP damage or on shorter time scales, healing in 5e is not "free".

A low level cleric can bring people up from KO. At mid levels, they can patch of fragile characters. At high levels they can actually burn serious resources and keep up with damage for a short period.

And then you throw in all the non-magical healing 5e provides via certain other classes, and the cleric doesn't have nearly so much to do.

That, and in the end the only number that matters is h.p.; which you get back daily in full.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Or, if nobody wants to play a healer but they still need one, they can always go to a local temple and (try to) recruit an adventuring NPC to be the party Cleric.
It truly amazes me how this option never seems to come up.

The idea of henchmen seemed integral to early D&D, but by the time I started getting out of my immediate circle of friends - still just ahead of the height of the fad, maybe '81-82 - and playing with older/more experienced gamers, it seemed like it had fallen by the wayside. I did manage to get one of my PCs a set of henchmen, such that he could go adventuring more or less as a full party, by himself, but he rarely got to do so, nor even bring in a single one of them to round out a party.
But, from the DMG and many references in older Dragon mags and the like, it seemed like the CHA max-henchmen number was very meaningful, with everyone dragging a whole Shakespearean 'train' into the dungeon with them.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

5e only has "free healing" on a 3+ day time scale (one day to take damage and heal; recovering all of your HD can take another 2 days), and on that time scale pretty much only on HP damage.

Any edition of any game has free healing, if the rate of healing does not exceed the rate at which you take damage. Default 5E might offer 100hp of healing per character per day, given a certain set of characters; if you only take 75 damage that day, then it's healed for free.

Older editions give less free healing. Back in 2E, if you take 75 damage in a day, then 1hp is healed for free and the other 74hp require actual resource expenditure to recover. The bulk of your HP are quite expensive to recover, relatively speaking.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Any edition of any game has free healing, if the rate of healing does not exceed the rate at which you take damage.

Well, rate of healing that doesn't use resources. HD and spell slots are both resources. In downtime, if you don't use overnight healing, you can devote all your healing-capable-caster slots, and about half your HD, per day, to healing. That's a lotta healing, and a bit of bookkeeping.

Or, you can just use long-rest heal-up, and not worry about it. That's actually free, and it just means that there's 'free healing' of whatever damage you've sustained come the end of the last encounter. All the healing before that cost some limited resource.

 

[the Jester]

Short rest: You don't recover hps, but can spend Hit Dice as normal.

Long rest: You don't recover hps, but recover half your level, rounded down, minimum one, Hit Dice. Then you can spend Hit Dice to recover your hps.