LONG REST: let's add some realism.

[pemerton]

Maybe a long rest could be of undetermined length. It's however long the heroes need to heal. If a long rest is just a week, then their wounds were minor. If it's six months until we see our heroes in action again, then maybe they suffered more serious wounds.

Schroedinger's wounds!

 

[Neonchameleon]

Honest question - if you are not fussed about realism why do you want to slow healing down?

Gameplay. The 8 hours and then back in is just bizzarre. And sets a ridiculous timescale on NPC and PC plans.

 

[Sanglorian]

I'm not a fan of overnight-insta-healing. I'm also not a fan of the solutions above. I want to slow healing down, not make it hard to track, nor handwave time. However, I'm not super fussed about actual realism either.
My current theory therefore, is to simply halve the values. You regain half your HP during a long rest. You also regain half your hit dice pool.
Simple. Other values can be chosen at the DM's/group's discretion. e.g. 1/4 3/4 whatever.

Note: I'm also a fan of slowing down spell prep to match.

Another option I like is that a long rest heals you to full hit points, if your current HP is above your Bloodied value. If your HP is below your Bloodied value, you heal up to your Bloodied value.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Another option I like is that a long rest heals you to full hit points, if your current HP is above your Bloodied value. If your HP is below your Bloodied value, you heal up to your Bloodied value.

What Bloodied value? Let's not have to add back another new mechanic if it can be avoided.

 

[Obryn]

Honest question - if you are not fussed about realism why do you want to slow healing down?

There's perfectly good game-play reasons why you might not want overnight healing. It changes the nature of long adventures, and makes a particular difference in a megadungeon or wilderness hexcrawl.

-O

 

[the Jester]

Sorry, too much tracking is a dealbreaker for many of us.

There is not enough gain for the PITA required. Kzach's answer is far better.

 

[Mallus]

The advantage of this system is there's no need to track serious and minor wounds separately.

Here's another approach:

A serious wound is the one brings a PC to zero HP or below.

A PC can heal completely via a Long Rest so long as they weren't brought to zero HP or below.

If they were, then they cannot gain the benefit of a Long Rest until they have been healed to full HP via magic and/or longer-term rest.

As for things like falling damage -- don't model it purely through HP loss. A PC falls off a high cliff? Take a few D6 in damage and roll a Saving Throw. Failure means their Disadvantaged at all physical tasks for 1d6 days (gotta have some random!).

I have now solved the Long Rest Problem. You may proceed to thank and/or praise me .

 

[Sanglorian]

What Bloodied value? Let's not have to add back another new mechanic if it can be avoided.

Oh yeah, if 5E reintroduced the Bloodied condition only for healing during a long rest, I'd prefer they just say 'Heal up to 1/2 HP if you're below 1/2 HP, heal to full HP if you're at or above 1/2 HP'.

But as a side note, I'd like to see Bloodied reintroduced and then used for a number of racial features, class features, spells, etc. After all, the 5E playtest specifies that 'below 1/2 HP' represents 'injured'—why not take advantage of that by having abilities that only kick in if you're 'injured' (i.e., Bloodied).

 

[Sunseeker]

Wounds as an optional module are fine, assuming they are balanced and interesting I might even use them. But simply tacking a wound-system on top of the HP system makes the whole thing more arbitrary, not less. SWSE was nice, but too easily abused, I'd rather see target zones(arms, legs, torso, gut, head) like in Deadlands.

It would be a pretty cool optional module, but would require an entirely new HP system.

Also: I don't play D&D for the realism, otherwise I'd wonder why my 20-something female adventurers in a psuedo-medieval system aren't married and pregnant.

 

[Mark CMG]

For a while I've been running that damage defaults to nonlethal damage unless the attacker specifies otherwise. Animals and unintelligent undead do lethal damage by default. Often truly evil beings will do lethal damage but capturing others for various purposes can outweigh other considerations so nonlethal damage is still is not unusual. Non-evil intelligent beings are usually only trying to win a fight, when that comes up, rather that kill people. Fighting to the death is momentous.