Kamikaze Midget said:
But real life human soldiers aren't D&D characters any more than you or I am, any more than real-life scholars can cast magic. D&D has never accurately modeled real anythings.
Players have to be able to identify with their characters. At their core, their usually human or close to human.
So they'd be magic items, then? Or 24-hour duration cleric spells? Either way, so that it's reliable than a party has them and doesn't have to worry about ending and re-starting durations? There are ways to ensure parties have access to this in the system, it just isn't integrated quite that way -- regeneration, fast healing, and DR are very valuable by the RAW, and amusingly common on monsters. If you can be sure the barbarian is going to have a +1 weapon, why shouldn't you be sure the fighter can regenerate (even if it's from an item or a spell)?
That would be good, but...
Ok, I don't think a magic item that gave DR would be broken or even hard to use. But I would draw the line at FH or regeneration. (I would argue regeneration should be kept as far from the PCs as possible.)
You only apply fast healing once and you don't remove it. You just apply it every round.
That's not "once". That's "once per six seconds".
The heroes fought in room C. They're under time pressure, so they wait in room C for a minute for people to heal (so now that's 10 * fast healing, ridiculously easy math). Now they move hurriedly to room D, which is up a twisted corridor and has various features players might want to stop and check out. ("I spend three rounds looking at the painting with
detect magic", etc.) Now the GM has to figure out how long it will take them to get there, taking into account steps, the twists and turns, the darkness, etc. If they're ambushed on the way via secret doors, there's even more math to deal with. "Okay, I calculate it would take 4 minutes and another 12 seconds to get to the ambush spot..." uh oh, here comes the whining and accusations of cheating (this is a big deal when someone gets dropped to -11 during the last round of combat, when an extra two hit points would have saved them), or the critical math assessments, etc. I think a lot of DMs aren't so sharp on the timing. It's rarely necessary to count out rounds out of combat. I certainly don't think it adds to the game to measure distances so precisely out of combat.
So they just regenerate or gain fast healing instead. Why would it be simpler for the monsters to have it, but at the same time, more complicated for the PC's to have it? That dog won't hunt, monsignior.
Because the DM does not have to take great care of the monsters out of combat, and whatever he does with the monsters is invisible to the players. If he makes a mistake and gives them too much or too little fast healing, none of the players are going to notice. It's not going to look like cheating or cause arguments.
A PC fast healing rate of something like one hit point per minute would, IMO, be a lot more reasonable. (Counting by minutes is a lot easier than counting by rounds out of combat.) Even so, you could get PCs just sitting around for half and hour and waiting to heal up - while time pressure is common, it's not always there.
. Healing is tough to find examples, Lancelot in Camelot saves the knight he almost killed in a joust, but that would be covered by a paladin laying on hands or healing skill.
