How should D&D handle healing?

[Minigiant]

I am in the "mostly scratches and bruises into you hit 0 HP" camp.

My idea system would have Second Wind, Inspirational healing, and First Aid as limited per day whereas magic healing is infinite. When you drop to 0HP, a PC rolls to see if they are knocked unconscious or if they toke a lethal wound and are dying. Second Wind and Inspirational Healing would each be once a day and only when not dying. First aid would be limited per day and would be very weak healing or stabilize a dying person.

Rest heals you to full in 1-3 days since you are only "scratched up and bruised" until you hit 0HP. People who hit 0HP and are/were dying need magic or actual doctors to return to adventuring shape.

Basically you don't need a cleric. You'd have resources to heal yourself without them. Clerical healing is for emergencies and for when people drop.

EDIT: So

Basically once a character hits 0 HP they roll a saving throw. Failure means they are "flagged" as wounded. "Flagged" characters can only be healed by doctors, long term rest, and magic. First aid, inspiration, and a night's rest no longer works on "flagged" characters because you have a hole in your gut.

 

[Derren]

- No Second Wind or Shout Healing please. Magical healing or slow natural healing only.
- No regeneration after resting.

 

[Grydan]

Mark me down as another in favour of "Multiple Options", including "Write your own".

See, I fall on pretty near the opposite side of the spectrum from Kamikaze Midget here. Were I to have my druthers, rather than he his, you'd see something more along these lines:

1. Restoring HP should be largely (if not entirely) separate from healing wounds: HP have never represented physical injury in any meaningful way, so I'd just as soon stop pretending that they do. HP are an abstract measure of how far you are from defeat (be it unconsciousness or death), and therefore morale is certainly a significant factor.
2. HP should be an encounter resource, not an adventure one: As physical meat makes up very little of what HP represent, once you've had a momentary break in fighting for your life, they should pretty much all be restored to you, free of cost. Being at low HP in a fight creates a sense of urgency, while being at low HP outside of a fight encourages excessive resting or heavy reliance on magical HP restoration.
3. Wounds should be a consequence of HP loss, rather than an entirely abstract portion of the point loss: Whether it's a result of being reduced to 0, or whether one introduces various thresholds like bloodied or SWSE's Fortitude Defence–based Damage Threshold, or simply tying them to critical hits, wounds should be a potential result of HP loss, and should have some meaningful impact upon your character's performance. Someone with an injured sword arm should really be having more trouble swinging their sword. Someone with an injured leg should really be moving slower. There's all sorts of room here for varying degrees of abstractness, but even a very simplistic system would represent wounds in a much more convincing way than HP ever could. In addition, a component of wounds could be a persistent penalty to max-HP, retaining the element of HP as an adventure resource that KM likes: get too injured, and not only are you hampered in various ways by your injuries, but you have less of a buffer from death. Yes, this can lead into the dreaded Death Spiral, but there's no reason it has to be a rapid one.
4. As HP represent an amalgamation of luck, morale, and various other factors, of course all characters should have ways of restoring them: Now, in my approach, there's not much need for out of combat ways (other than the persistent penalties associated with actual injuries) to restore them. But there's plenty of design space for a variety of in-combat restorations. Your cleric need not resort to actual divine magic to restore someone's fighting spirit: perhaps they simply appeal to their religious fervour. Perhaps a charismatic PC of any stripe is able to give his allies a bit of an HP boost through an impromptu battlefield speech. Perhaps even certain feats of daring, taking greater risk upon one's self, could inspire one's allies and restore a bit of HP.
5. Healing wounds faster than mundane treatment is where magic's dramatic edge should be, not HP restoration: Magical healing making wounds heal faster is A-OK with me. I'd stick wounds on a track something like 4E's approach to diseases, and have each stage have conditions for when it gets worse and when it gets better. Proper treatment would make wounds heal faster than the baseline, and some wounds would get worse if not treated (bed rest is never the appropriate prescription for an untreated severed artery, regardless of D&D's long-standing "rest heals everything in time" approach). The appropriate healing magic would either accelerate healing, avoid negative consequences, or skip you stages of recovery. Cure Light Wounds should actually cure your light wounds, no more, no less (though I suppose if we want to get technical, it should be Heal Light Wounds, as you cure a disease—or a ham, etc.—not a wound).

Anyways, yeah, it's blatantly obvious that no one HP/healing/injury/what-have-you approach is going to be broad enough to capture what'd make me happiest and what would make Kamikaze Midget happiest. So options, options, options … and nothing so tightly integrated into the system that it can't be readily swapped out as needed.

 

[billd91]

I am in the "mostly scratches and bruises into you hit 0 HP" camp.

My idea system would have Second Wind, Inspirational healing, and First Aid as limited per day whereas magic healing is infinite. When you drop to 0HP, a PC rolls to see if they are knocked unconscious or if they toke a lethal wound and are dying. Second Wind and Inspirational Healing would each be once a day and only when not dying. First aid would be limited per day and would be very weak healing or stabilize a dying person.

Rest heals you to full in 1-3 days since you are only "scratched up and bruised" until you hit 0HP. People who hit 0HP and are/were dying need magic or actual doctors to return to adventuring shape.

That's probably about the closest fit to my preferences as well, though I'd not be much in favor of full healing in just one day without the application of magic. I like second wind style mechanics in a limited capacity. They should be fairly dramatic.

The 4e subsystem's worst aspect, in my opinion, was limiting the amount of healing you could receive in one day and driving substantial numbers of externally provided healing effects on the character's own internal healing surges. Either it's internal or external - don't mix the two.

 

[howandwhy99]

Wikipedia says "Healing (literally meaning to make whole[1]) is the process of the restoration of health to an unbalanced, diseased or damaged organism."

That's good for me. Healing is a living body regrowing itself as whole as the system supports. Sometimes that means regeneration of lost limbs, more often it means regrowth of muscle, skin, blood vessels and the like. Certain things don't grow back like cut ligaments in either case, but plenty does.

Hit Points in D&D I see as a resource with a basement threshold of cessation rather than a resource of degrees tied to abilities. Meaning, you aren't at your best as an attacker and defender if you have full HP and worse if you're down any HPs. Rather your body sustains itself until it fails to.

Hit Points are a portion of structural integrity, but not all of it. "Meat" isn't what is accounted for in whole, but rather how much the design of that "meat" must stay intact to maintain ongoing Life functions.

Like a computer can take a beating and still function perfectly normal, some of us can take some major hits and keep on trucking. But one hit can end all that, for computers or us. Some areas are more vulnerable, some less. And protection can be used in both cases.

Healing in videogames is often very fast in order to maintain near constant combat. In D&D I suggest it is the whole game which is important. It is a huge game mostly played on the strategic scale. players judge when to back out of the dungeon or find safe places to rest based in part on their PCs hit point totals. They might spend two sessions sneaking out of a dungeon because they are so low on HP they fear running into any monsters.

I believe healing should restore a self-restoring system like people, but I think it should take about as long as it takes for humans when playing a human. This could be faster or longer with other creatures and perhaps not at all with non-self-restoring systems. IOW, HPs are only regained by outside action to repair the character.

How long different healing types take is about balancing playable races, which means relative to whatever baseline for race is being used. D&D is all about the human as the baseline for everything, So other races, whether they be robots or water elementals, generally conform to within the certain span of abilities humans have to promote cooperation as a group. Near or demi-humans are both similar and different enough to make them unique yet playable with humans. Other options can seriously affect the game and require different settings or setting support for cooperation. (Think of air-breathing characters and water-breathing ones adventuring together).

 

[Grogg of the North]

I sorta waffle back and forth on this. I wouldn't mind seeing more options available, such as the Ranger using his knowledge of herbs and plants to create a salve. Or a rogue using his contacts to get some . . . substances that can allow a character to ignore damage for a short time. They don't need to be as effective as a CLW but more options are welcome. There really isn't anything stopping a DM from adding things like that to their campaign. HP is a resource just like spells, arrows, and everything else you take adventuring.

I don't like the idea, though, of the fighter stopping a great axe with his chest, taking a cigarette break, and gaining back all that HP he lost.

 

[Kinak]

I think 4e was on the right track by tying natural healing to the same refresh cycle as magical healing.

My main issue with D&D healing has been on the logistical level, where an adventuring party with a cleric can heal to full every day, but one without can only heal to full over the course of a week or more. Either of those time scales is fine on it's own, I just really don't like it flipping back and forth based on party composition.

The most important thing after that is to choose one option and run with it. I want a healing system that's functional out of the box and works properly with all of their adventures. I'd honestly rather they didn't have any other options, but it's not a big deal as long as everything works well with the default.

I'm pretty flexible on the exact design, but the less bookkeeping the better. My perfect world would have spells and HP fully recovered after several days in a safe location and few or no forms of other healing, but there are plenty of other options that hit my main two points.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Derren]

My main issue with D&D healing has been on the logistical level, where an adventuring party with a cleric can heal to full every day, but one without can only heal to full over the course of a week or more. Either of those time scales is fine on it's own, I just really don't like it flipping back and forth based on party composition.

Whats the problem with that? In a class based system party composition affects a lot of things, why not also healing times?

 

[the Jester]

It has become pretty clear that healing is the single are where players of the game have the widest variety of tastes, so I hope the game has multiple ways to do healing- options for the dm to select between.

For myself? Dislike surges, dislike HD. I would rather healing work somewhere between the 1e model and the 3e model. No matter what, it is essential to me- if it is going to satisfy my style- that some injuries linger. The whole "fully healed and restored after a long rest!" approach rubs me so very wrong.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

- No Second Wind or Shout Healing please. Magical healing or slow natural healing only.
- No regeneration after resting.

I don't want regeneration after rest, but the ability to push on... and I don't get why no second wind... isn't beign weak and beat then taking a second to come back strong a going troup of adventurers?