D&D 5E On the healing options in the 5e DMG

[pemerton]

[If] you think that hp damage is primarily physical injury, then healing rates are only "realistic" if you've made the game world radically different from our Earth such that broken bones, ruptured veins etc impose no hindrance to combat or movement AND heal in days rather than months.

Agreed.

It always goes back to healing time. In older editions, it could take a month to heal.

This is not, in general, true.

As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has repeatedly shown, in 3E it cannot take a month to heal. For a character with an average of 10 hp per level (a powerful fighter or barbarian) it can take a little over a week of nothing but decent regular sleep to heal, and if actually resting full-time it will take less than a week to heal even without any medical or nursing care.

To require a month to heal with resting but no care, in 3E, would require an average of 60 hp per level. No character or monster in the game has a CON bonus that big.

With nursing care (rather trivial nursing care, as pointed out - a 1st level trained character with 12 WIS can provide it by taking 10), recovery may take as long as 3 days if a character has an average of 12 hp per level (say, a barbarain with 22 CON).

In AD&D, the only way it can take a month to heal no CON bonus is if you have at least 28 hit points. Assuming average hit point rolls, that means being a magic-user of 11th or 12th level, a monk of 10 or 11th level, thief of 8th level, a cleric of 7th level or a fighter of 5th or 6th level.

If we grant a 16 CON (+2 hp per die, the maximum for a non-fighter) then the character's heal an extra 2 hp per week after the first week, and so to need a month must have at least 34 hit points. Assuming average rolls still, we still need a MU of 8th level, a monk or thief of 7th level, a cleric of 6th level or a fighter of 5th level.

A 0-level mercenary can have a maximum of 7 hp, and hence never takes more than a week to heal from any injury that is not potentially lethal.

[MENTION=1757]ruleslawyer[/MENTION], upthread, made the key point that "There isn't a single word in editions 1-3 about an implied setting feature whereby people heal injuries faster than in the real world." In other words, the injuries these characters are taking, which take mere days to recover from, are not very serious.

4e is an outlier because it is the one edition that enforces one specific interpretation of HP while all others let you interpret it however you wanted.

No.

If people want to play hit points as meat, that's their prerogative. But to claim that 4e forces some different interpretation is nonsense.

In AD&D, a typical peasant has 4 hp. The same is true in 3E. For that person, any injury s/he suffers that is not potentially fatal can be recovered, with no nursing or medical care, in 4 days. In 3E, with rather modest nursing care (a 1st-level Commoner can pretty easily make the DC 15 Heal check), that injury can be recovered in 1 day.

In 4e, if that peasant were statted out s/he would mot likely be a heroic-tier minion. Any non-fatal injury has no noticable efffect on his/her combat performance. Ths is not an outlier compared to 3E or AD&D. It is a neglibile difference. The earlier editions are marginally more fine-grained in respect of their measurement of non-fatal injuries, but not by all that much - the propportion of hits in 3E, especially, that do fewer than 4 hp of damage is rather small. The practical diffrence between being a peasant with 4 hp and being a peasnt with only 1 of 4 hp remaining, in any edition, is neglibile - unless you are lucky you will die in a round or two of combat.

4e doesn't both to model, in mechanical terms, trivial injuries that can be healed with a day of nursing care. That doesn't make it some sort of outlier that forces one particular interpretation of hit points - it's a change that is about on a par with 3E stopping to bother tracking facing. It's dropping a minor point of detail. And because 4e is much more relaxed on the narration-mchanical intersection than earlier editions, nothing at all is stopping a GM from narrating the peasant being unable to work in the field until s/he has a good day's rest with a nurse beside him/her.

Upthread I've been told that the AD&D and 3E healing times are OK because "abstract wounds also heal more quickly, because we don't want to play a game of extended convalescence" (per [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], post 400). The same poster has also suggested that the nursing care that a 1st level character can provide involves minor magic, which helps explain why it can heal any non-fatal injury in a day or three. In other words, to treat hit points a meat I have to adopt these distorted interpretatios of the gameworld. 4e doesn't force anything different - if you're prepared to treat nursing care as "minor magic" that heal a broken bone or a serious sprain in 2 days because "we don't want to play a game of extended convalescence", then treat a healing surge as comparable minor magic that can heal it in five minutes.

Or, as per the 5e DMG, change the short rest time to 8 hours and the extended rest time to a week.

The actual metrics under discussion here are FASTER vs SLOWER, nothing more. If you wanted more simulationist, you would either need to adopt a vitality vs wounds system or make all damage inflict injury penalties, take months to heal, have a chance of NOT healing unless Magic is used, and bring risk of disease (ie infection).

<snip>

honestly I wish the surge system had come along sooner!

In my case, I gave up D&D mechanics for Rolemaster for nearly 20 years - RM does most of the things you describe (but in our games we generally didn't wory about the risk of infection - though the game does have rules for it). I came back to D&D with 4e, precisely because it presented the hit point system in a framework that made sense (proportinate recovery, healing surges as heroic recovery, etc). In light of 4e's treatment I can go back to Gygax's remarks and finally make sense of what he was getting at, but failed to fully achieve with his ultra-long healing times for high level characters and his non-proportionate cure spells.

 

[pemerton]

While I can't claim this is any sort of by-the-book interpretation, my own game use of antimagic field assumes that it shuts off the concentrated magical power of the sort that powers active spells and magic items, but does nothing to affect the low-level baseline magic that suffuses a fantasy world and allows dragons to fly, vampires to live, and high level fighters to survive falls off mountains.

That makes sense.

But in the context of this discussion, can you see why I find it weird to be told that 4e is all force-y, because the most natural way to make sense of its healing rules is to assume that characters don't suffer serious but non-fatal injuries (perhaps because they have luck and skill undergirded by the sort of low-level baselie magic you describe), but 3E and earlier are all accomodating because I can make sense of their hit points as meat as long as I treat the Heal skill as the same sort of low-level baseline magic that allows broken bones and sprained limbs to be nursed back to health in a day or two of care?

 

[pemerton]

My own conjecutre is that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is basically right: pre-4e almost all healing of player characters was magical, and hence most groups never had to grapple in any sustained or serious way with the implications of the natural-healing mechanics. Thus they were free to narrate hit point loss as meatily as they liked, blood and guts everywhere, without having to confront the issue that for most characters those blood and guts can all be healed with a day or two of nursing care (in 3E) or with a week or three of rest (in AD&D).

That makes the real complaint about 4e not be its natural healing time, but the fact that it makes non-magical recovery a standard part of the game.

And you can even see this complaint from some of the posters here (eg [MENTION=6689464]KaiiLurker[/MENTION] ), who feel that this reduction in the relative gameplay importance of magical healing is crowding out their desired character build.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This is not, in general, true.

I said "older editions", and distinguished 3E as a separate thing. In older editions, it could take a month to heal... as you went on to explain, in detail.

In 3E, routine success on that Heal check would require a character that is trained in the skill, or with a significantly high Wisdom, neither of which can be assumed in the world. Joe the Peasant, level 1 Commoner, probably can't do it. Full bed rest under the care of a professional Healer - someone trained in the Heal skill, but without explicit magic - can get you back from near-death in a mere 2-3 days. That's within the realm of standard fantasy (if a bit on the quick end).

 

[Hussar]

The basic conceit of abstract wounds is that it's totally possible to break bones etc, but we choose to not model them in detail because that would be a lot of work (determining the specific injuries and tracking the penalties), and because it makes for unsatisfying gameplay (the downward spiral, where the first injury essentially takes you out of the fight). Abstract wounds also heal more quickly, because we don't want to play a game of extended convalescence.

To make a long story short, those sorts of abstractions don't bother most people in the meat camp. YMMV, obviously.

And this is what I find so baffling to be honest. You have no problems believing six impossible things, but, that seventh one is a bridge too far? You have no problems with wounds never breaking bones, never getting worse, never impacting the abilities of the wounded, but, recovering from those wounds over night is impossible?

As far as buying potions and wands go, I'd point out that in AD&D this was impossible. You couldn't buy magic items in AD&D. They were not for sale. That's a 3e conceit. So, saving your 1st level slots in AD&D by using magic items was very much hit or miss. However, I do agree that clerics were not pure healers in AD&D, simply because 2nd and 3rd level spells contained virtually no healing spells, certainly no HP based ones anyway. So, your 1st level slots get taken up by CLW, but, 2nd and 3rd, you got to pick other stuff.

As far as the 3e healing rates go, you're missing the point. It's not that wounds typically healed at one rate or another, I personally think natural healing rules were almost never used - the overwhelming majority of healing was done by magic - but, that when you try to narrate those wounds, you cannot know the healing rate beforehand. If you narrate that arrow hit as going through someone's leg, because it was a critical hit, but, he's a 5th level wizard and his buddy makes a decent Heal check the next day and he's 100% healed in 24 hours, that narration doesn't make any sense. Extensive trauma like that does not completely heal in 1 day. Or 2 days. It takes weeks, or even months to heal. When you are narrating the attack though, you don't know how long it will take to heal. It becomes Schroedinger's HP all over again.

You admit that abstract wounds heal more quickly because we don't want to play a game of extended convalescence. Since 3e's healing was almost always over night - healing spells/wands/potions, why is 4e such a big jump here?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And this is what I find so baffling to be honest. You have no problems believing six impossible things, but, that seventh one is a bridge too far? You have no problems with wounds never breaking bones, never getting worse, never impacting the abilities of the wounded, but, recovering from those wounds over night is impossible?

Fair enough. Like I said, YMMV. It's a matter of personal preference whether any given point will cross the line.

From my perspective, when Brock Samson catches a couple of bullets or a knife to the torso, he keeps on kicking butt until the bad guys are dead; fighting past the pain is just Heroism 101.
From my perspective, when Conan gets stabbed through the torso, we're not going to worry about infection because (for whatever reason) that's just not a huge likelihood in this world.
From my perspective, no hero (short of Wolverine) can survive being beaten to the point of near-death and then be perfectly fine the next day, ready to do it all over again as though nothing happened...

...but given three days in the hospital, I can buy it.

 

[ruleslawyer]

And you are entitled to your perspective, but you do get that you're working from an extremely idiosyncratic set of assumptions, right?

First off, *in the books,* when Conan gets beaten to within an inch of his life (e.g. when he's set upon in Messantia by a gang of thugs in The Hour of the Dragon) and knocked out, he wakes up (in that case, in a slave galley) the next day and is at full combat readiness. That pretty much describes how most action heroes, whether John McClane or Holger Carlsen, tend to work; they get worn down in a combat, but UNLESS THEY'VE SUFFERED SERIOUS INJURIES, they're good to go the next day.

What's hilarious is that you're trying to posit an actual difference between "next day" and "three days in a hospital" for the purposes of addressing what you conceive of as significant injury. That hypothetical would be impossible for me to narrate to my group because all of us have suffered an injury at some point and/or had hospital stays. Three days *in a modern hospital facility* gets you recovery from an extremely safe and low-invasive procedure (a natural delivery, a tonsilectomy) but that's about it. Three days can't heal a broken bone, a serious laceration, or even a bad bruise or sprain. So for a legendary badass like Conan, the difference between three days and enough time to rest a bit, wash out his wounds with wine, and let his muscles resume fighting fit is irrelevant.

IMO, serious meat damage is best modeled using a condition track or ability damage/drain. Frodo needs the (presumably magical) care of Elrond after he's stabbed by a Morgul-blade, but that's likely translated best into D&D mechanics as ability damage or drain. I do wish that 4e had folded options for these effects into the game (I actually did in my 4e game using versions of the disease condition track).

 

[Lanefan]

4e included proportional healing, other editions did not (meaning that other editions typically took more resources/time to heal a fighter or barbarian than it did to heal a wizard or rogue, even if the fighter was at half HPs while the wizard was at only 1 HP).

Which is, despite all my other dislikes regarding 4e, something it very much got right.

Even in our old-school system we long ago tied the amount of h.p. gained during an overnight rest (known here as one's "heal rate") to the amount you have at full, after which the only question was what proportion; and we've pretty much settled on 10% rounding ALL fractions up.

Curative magic, on the other hand, always works the same no matter what the recipient has going for them; as in a Cure Light Wounds from a Normal Cleric always does d8 worth of curing.

Lan-"ignoring, for these purposes, the body point-fatigue point system we use"-efan

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

If you like Wounds that have meaning, you should use an explicit Wound System where the DM can dial in how lingering effects will be. Hoping that the HP system will give you that as a side effect is foolish -- sometimes this worked out well and sometimes it worked completely terribly. The various 3e drains sort or kinda were like wounds, but it ended being to similar to HP.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And you are entitled to your perspective, but you do get that you're working from an extremely idiosyncratic set of assumptions, right?

Nope. My assumptions are fairly typical of the assumptions made by anyone who likes proportional meat. It is not a small group of people. Healing rate is one of the most divisive issues in the game. This has been acknowledged by the designers, based on feedback from the playtest.

First off, *in the books,* when Conan gets beaten to within an inch of his life (e.g. when he's set upon in Messantia by a gang of thugs in The Hour of the Dragon) and knocked out, he wakes up (in that case, in a slave galley) the next day and is at full combat readiness.

Off the top of my head, I would say that was non-lethal damage. D&D hasn't always done well with that - it was better in 3E than in other editions - but every edition will acknowledge that sometimes you can KO someone in a non-life-threatening manner.

Note, specifically, that several editions make a firm distinction between lethal and non-lethal damage. The kind of damage dealt with a fist or a sap is the kind which will heal overnight, because those weapons do not generally cause lethal wounds.