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

[Lanefan]

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.

Where I have it that if a magic-based creature such as an Elf walks into a null magic zone it had better get out quick, as if it stays in it will certainly suffer and, given long enough, die. A Unicorn, being even more magic-based, would die much faster. A Dwarf, being less magic-based, would take longer to die. However a Human, as a non-magical creature, could build a house and live quite happily in there with her horse and dog.

Lan-"the proportion of meat in each of your hit points is inverse to the proportion of your full hit points you currently have"-efan

 

[ruleslawyer]

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.

Saying "a bunch of people agree with me" doesn't really do anything to prove a point.

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.

Um, no. The problem here is that there is no affirmative example of someone, including Conan, getting mightily stabbed up and getting up after three days. He is attacked with lethal weapons in the incident I mentioned as well as a few others, suffers some wounds and is worn down, and is back up pretty fast.

There are plenty of examples in fantasy, BTW, of people suffering genuinely serious wounds and eventually recovering. The key is that "eventually." People in ASoIaF get seriously wounded, but they don't really recover from it or they're down for months. Tolkien's wounded seem to either die or not suffer a bunch of injuries. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (probably the most compelling influence on D&D's original designers) suffer a few cuts, scrapes, and bruises, heroically avoid true damage, and recover relatively quickly; sound familiar?

 

[MoonSong]

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

Not as idiosyncratic as you'd think. Now from your post I get that -for many reasons including your own experience with injuries- your threshold for suspension of disbelief on treating hp as meat is fairly low, as such you very likely got pretty early into hp as a mix of stuff, but in my personal case (and maybe in Saelorn's) that threshold was high, and thus we were eager to suspend even more than you did, and quickly gloss over many things that others found unbelievable, but by teh time 4e showed, then overnight and 5-minutes full healing was what finally broke suspension of disbelief. And then the option was to change how we see HP -something that got more time to uproot and is harder to let go of- or to stick to what we know and the editions that support how we see HP -even if it is just passive support, aka mechanics don't get in the way-.

If you don't believe me, just list the things that bother you about hp to see it as meat and that don't even register for me. It isn't Idiosyncratic, it is just the other side of the spectrum.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Only for mid-to-high level characters (depending upon CON score). For the overwhelming number of people in the gameworld, who are 0-level or have 1 to 3 levels, healing does not take more than a week or two (and for most, who have no more than 4 or 5 hp, not more than a few days).

Unless you take the view that high level fighters suffer more serious injuries than low-level ones, all that extra healing must be healing of "metaphysical" hit points (as Gygax more-or-less acknowledges). The actual physical injuries are all healing much more rapidly.

You can talk about "treating all injuries to non-heroic chumps as fatal" but this is (i) inaccurate - a 2nd level fighter, for instance, is not a non-heroic chump, and (ii) produces comedy (either grim or inane, depending on perspective) as a commoner gets cut on the arm by a knife and immediately falls over dead.

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).

A lot of people have used the disease track to houserule lingering injuries into 4e. It's the sort of thing that would have made for a good optional rule, and it's nice to see that 5e does something of that sort.

This would also give the Remove Affliction ritual more work to do. (In my 4e game, where we don't use lingering wounds, that ritual has generally been used on NPCs rather than PCs.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Saying "a bunch of people agree with me" doesn't really do anything to prove a point.

Agreed, that would prove little, which is why I said that the designers acknowledge that there are many people who play this way. It doesn't matter whether it makes sense to you, as long as it makes sense to them, and the designers care about keeping that portion of the player-base.

Um, no. The problem here is that there is no affirmative example of someone, including Conan, getting mightily stabbed up and getting up after three days. He is attacked with lethal weapons in the incident I mentioned as well as a few others, suffers some wounds and is worn down, and is back up pretty fast.

I haven't read the text in question, but given that he ended up in slavery, it stands to reason that not all of his assailants were attempting to kill him so much as merely subdue him. And there's no saying whether he was perfectly fine when he woke up. Nor is there perfect insistence that this can be modeled exactly using game rules, as long as the general concept is close enough.

If you wanted to represent that situation in AD&D or 3E, the enemies would be attacking him non-lethally.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You can talk about "treating all injuries to non-heroic chumps as fatal" but this is (i) inaccurate - a 2nd level fighter, for instance, is not a non-heroic chump, and (ii) produces comedy (either grim or inane, depending on perspective) as a commoner gets cut on the arm by a knife and immediately falls over dead.

You can say how this stance doesn't make sense to you, but that is only a fact about you and your perception; it is not a fact about this stance in itself. Suffice it to say, it makes plenty of sense to plenty of people.

 

[Hussar]

It's not so much about making sense and more about the lack of actual support in the text.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It's not so much about making sense and more about the lack of actual support in the text.

There's the part where being hit by a sword causes damage, and that damage is removed by curing the wounds. And if you weren't able to heal magically, then it could take weeks to heal. There's the part where golems and undead don't heal, because only living creatures are capable of healing naturally. There's the part where - at least in core 2E and 3E - the only things capable of causing HP damage are those things which are capable of causing physical harm (albeit psycho-somatic-ally in a handful of edge cases), and where everything that influenced luck or skill or divine protections used a game mechanic other than HP.

The only thing which fails to 100% unequivocally support the meat position is the part where Gygax describes what HP are supposed to represent - where he says that meat is merely one component of HP - but the actual mechanics of every edition prior to 4E are consistent with the view that RAW do a better job of describing HP as meat than as mojo (in spite of RAI, whatever that may have been).

You could try to re-define every word in the game to mean something other than its actual definition, of course. You could say that "hit" and "damage" and "wounds" and "healing" are just metaphors for what is actually going on. But to what purpose? To satisfy your desire for realism? Because you can't stand to have a meaningful injury that doesn't cause a mechanical penalty, so you would prefer that you can never have a meaningful injury period? Because it makes no sense to heal that injury over a week or a month, and if it doesn't take months or years of rehabilitation then the model it entirely worthless?

Then again, Gygax was talking about pre-2E. Maybe the oldest editions made a stronger case for non-meat HP. I can't say for certain.

 

[Hussar]

That's the thing Saelorn, it didn't take weeks to heal. It took days. Until you hit fairly high level in 1e and 2e (which had instantaneous non-magical healing per the Healing profiency) it took days to heal. Who says Golems and Undead can't heal? I don't recall reading that anywhere. In fact, I cannot recall any discussion whatsoever of healing rates for non-humanoids. The only thing the healing rates actually cover are PC races. How fast does a Yeti heal? Does a Polar Bear heal faster or slower than a badger? Or, does everything in the world always heal at the same rate?

Moldvay Basic takes it even further. It flat out states that HP have no meaning whatsoever - it's simply a game mechanics to determine whether you are alive or dead. Did they expand on that in later Basic/Expert rules?

There are so many giant glaring holes in the interpretation of HP as meat that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. You have to ignore so much of what's going on to arrive at that conclusion.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Moldvay Basic takes it even further. It flat out states that HP have no meaning whatsoever - it's simply a game mechanics to determine whether you are alive or dead. Did they expand on that in later Basic/Expert rules?

I started with 2E, and mostly played during 3E. If HP were undefined in Basic, then that has zero impact on anyone who didn't play that edition. Both 2E and 3E use the "combination of factors, including meat" definition; 3E specifically stated that it was your ability to turn a serious wound into a lesser wound.

If nothing else, you have to admit that the language points strongly in the direction of meaning what it says it is - that a hit is always a hit, even if sometimes a miss is merely a hit which failed to penetrate armor. I have heard that there was at least one earlier edition which claimed a "hit" with a poisoned dagger could actually be a narrative "miss" if the save was made, but such things were noticeably absent for the better part of twenty years.

Not that supposed definitions are terribly important, in the face of what the game mechanics support. If HP were vague mojo, why was there never a single sentence to suggest that a mechanical "hit" might be a narrative "miss", anywhere in those editions? It seems like a simple thing to say, and yet they avoided saying it, just as they avoided the inclusion of anything that caused HP damage without actually causing bodily harm.