D&D 5E Long Rest is a Problem

[Gadget]

You can rest 8 hours in the midst of a dungeon or wilderness setting under many scenarios. It's much more difficult to do that for a week. As I mentioned above, wandering monsters essentially erase the advantage of natural healing, if you stay too long.

yes, it would require making it to a 'safe' spot to heal up, and would not allow it in the 'middle' of a dungeon, but you could get the benefits of a 'short' rest overnight. Probably a little to 'fantasy Vietnam' for most, but other options are available.

Never done it well is different from abandoning the concept entirely. A wound that requires magical healing or a weeks rest is a lot more believable than a wound that requires 8 hours rest, in that scenario. Neither is perfect, but the later is notably less believable. You didn't hear complaints, because the system did assume magical healing.

My point was a wound that does not hinder you in the least is not a wound at all! I fail to see how that is any more 'believable'. I hear talk of broken bones and such, but I don't see how D&D has ever done that.

 

[keterys]

Every D&D adventure ever has had to assume you're at full hit points after every long rest. The notable difference between, say, 1e adventures and 4e adventures is that 1e assumes it's okay for a combat to be completely nonthreatening, as long as it has a chance to deal some damage (reflecting steady attrition) while 4e assumes that's a bad plan. 3e is in the weirdest state since you had infinite healing between combats after about level 3, it just cost trifling gold, so early adventures could function like 1e and later adventures like 4e.

 

[Dausuul]

My proposal would be this: Keep the current system. But, as an optional rule, every time you go to zero hit points, you get a cumulative penalty on all attacks, saves, and checks. This penalty is slow to heal (maybe each day you get a Con check to reduce it by 1 or 2 points).

This has the following benefits:

• Simple to understand and apply in play.
• Does not increase cleric-dependence. (Perhaps clerical magic can moderately accelerate recovery, but it can't wipe the penalty away with one spell.)
• Long-term injury is a serious thing, but PCs can still quickly regain their "hit point buffer."
• Highly modular. The injury penalty rules can be added or removed without interfering with other systems.
• Going to zero is now a Really Bad Thing that PCs strive to avoid. No more popping up and down like freakin' jack-in-the-boxes.

 

[GSHamster]

Isn't the problem here healing magic?

Let's say a night's rest does not restore full hitpoints, but does restore spells. A party with a cleric pretty much heals to full after 2 nights. A party without a cleric takes a lot longer.

This makes clerics required, especially in any game with any time pressure. I thought we were trying to get away from that.

 

[GSHamster]

My proposal would be this: Keep the current system. But, as an optional rule, every time you go to zero hit points, you get a cumulative penalty on all attacks, saves, and checks. This penalty is slow to heal (maybe each day you get a Con check to reduce it by 1 or 2 points).

I like this. But we should go old-school and make the player roll on a table with options like: Concussion, Broken Leg, Infected Wounds, Ruptured Spleen, etc. And make clerical magic unable to heal these without a long ritual or something.

 

[Sunseeker]

My proposal would be this: Keep the current system. But, as an optional rule, every time you go to zero hit points, you get a cumulative penalty on all attacks, saves, and checks. This penalty is slow to heal (maybe each day you get a Con check to reduce it by 1 or 2 points).

This has the following benefits:

• Simple to understand and apply in play.
• Does not increase cleric-dependence. (Perhaps clerical magic can moderately accelerate recovery, but it can't wipe the penalty away with one spell.)
• Long-term injury is a serious thing, but PCs can still quickly regain their "hit point buffer."
• Highly modular. The injury penalty rules can be added or removed without interfering with other systems.
• Going to zero is now a Really Bad Thing that PCs strive to avoid. No more popping up and down like freakin' jack-in-the-boxes.

Perhaps even tie it to death saving throws. The closer you get to death, the harder it is for you to come back.

Of course as always, such a penalty can be a serious death spiral.

 

[Paraxis]

Over the last decade plus of using 3.X/Pathfinder I am used to having everyone at full hit points after every fight thanks to cheap wands of cure light wounds, infernal healing, lesser vigor, ect.....

In my fantasy heartbreaker system it works a lot like the above. Whenever a character goes below 0 h.p, or whenever they get critically hit they get a wound a -1 to all checks. It takes a week of rest without magic to heal a wound modified by the heal skill check used.

 

[TheRustyOne]

I would encourage people to check out Adventurer, Conqueror,King's "Mortal Wounds" system. When you drop below 0 hit points, you drop unconscious, but until your friends look at you, they don't know exactly what has happened to you. A Heal check, modified by things like your damage taken and how long you laid there bleeding out, gives the result of what happened to you, including injuries. Injuries take a level 5 spell to recover from.
Up until 3rd edition, characters recovered either 1hp/day of rest, or hp=level/day of rest. 3rd killed that with the cheap wands problem, and 4th just heals you up at a full rest. It seems like somewhere in between (and all magic being throttled down a bit) should be the default to equally satisfy, or unsatisfy equally, every party.
One thing about healing 4th edition really got right was proportional healing, where a heal spell healed a made 1d4 hp worth, but a fighter got 1d10 worth. Next should emulate this, but they won't because it's an idea that came from 4th. 4th also restrained magical healing by costing a healing surge of the user, this limiting the number of heals you could get in a day. This is another great idea, in my opinion. That alone keeps wands of CLW from becoming too big an issue.

 

[Klaus]

[Cross Posted from WOTC boards]

Right now, a long rest results in, "At you regain all your hit points and half of your Hit Dice (round up)."

This, for my group, completely breaks the believability line, and takes us entirely out of the adventure. Lingering injuries are a reality. It's not just from hacking off a limb too. Even a torn ACL in your foot [Edit - Knights who say KNEE!] can take months to heal, impairing your ability to move (much less run). And we're talking about a game where PCs get clawed, eaten, char-broiled, acidified, chopped, sliced, spiked, electrified, and all manner of scarily-nasty injuries.

I'm pretty sure lingering wounds will be available as a rules module. Look to recent Unearthed Arcana articles on Dragon mag for lots of 4e variants and tweaks that could be made to work with DDN.

 

[Li Shenron]

As the rules are currently, there is simply no way to emulate any injury other than a relatively minor scratch that is good to go after a single night of sleeping, without a fairly major house rule (major in its variations from the norm as represented by the rules).

This is pure and simply a fact, therefore there is no interpretation of HP that can change this. The current rules, no matter the verbal description, simply don't support lingering wounds from physical combat (although there are lingering effects from spells and special effects, but this is not the point here).

It's a pity, because this clearly invalidates one gaming playstyle. I do not necessarily prefer such playstyle over others, but I wish D&D would support as many playstyles as possible. With regards to lingering wounds, I can at least identify a minimum of 3 playstyles:

- continuous play: HP (and possibly other resources) completely refresh after each encounter
- fixed-window play: HP (and possibly other resources) completely refresh at a specific time, normally 1/day
- moving-window play: HP (and possibly other resources) gradually refresh at a specific time or after an interval (normally complete replenishment takes >1/day)

They're just different playstyles, so it's pointless to argue why one's favourite is better than another's, because it isn't.

If published adventures are written assuming the party is at max hitpoints every day, that will drastically change things for parties using a house rule to alter this.

This is probably what makes it so difficult to support all the above...

Dialling the time window lengths or equivalently the amount of HP regained (or changing the details of what is a "short" or "long" rest), making other variations (e.g. switching between fixed amount regained vs rolling dice) are easy house rules, but unfortunately published adventures are going to assume everybody uses the default.

At this point, the best they can do is probably include a chapter in the DMG "Adventures design" with guidelines about how to change a printed adventure when switching between these playstyles. Unfortunately IMHO it's always easier to increase the power (ie faster healing > more encounters!) than decrease it (slower healing... ehm... less monsters? only to some extent really).

-------------

Another issue is wanting to include a wound system, by which I mean a system with actual temporary penalties replacing HP damage for representing physical lingering wounds.

That is actually quite different, and even more complicated to handle in adventures design.