D&D 5E Resting and Healing in D&D Next
- Thread starter Klaus
- Start date
GX.Sigma
Adventurer
The default system works well enough that I don't feel like messing with it.
The slower recovery variants don't seem slow enough. It seems like even the slowest one would just add 1-2 days of downtime (or infinite downtime, if the character has a negative Con modifier).
Experimental rule 1 seems pointless. PCs aren't going to want to spend hours resting in the dungeon. Not in my game, anyway.
Experimental rule 2 is just not written properly. As written, if you have a positive Con modifier, you can heal up to full in just a few rounds.
The slower recovery variants don't seem slow enough. It seems like even the slowest one would just add 1-2 days of downtime (or infinite downtime, if the character has a negative Con modifier).
Experimental rule 1 seems pointless. PCs aren't going to want to spend hours resting in the dungeon. Not in my game, anyway.
Experimental rule 2 is just not written properly. As written, if you have a positive Con modifier, you can heal up to full in just a few rounds.
I'd like about as slow healing as possible (very slow mundane healing, very expensive consumables, with limited spell based healing being the workhorse). A big advantage that this (which is the 1e/2e system) has is that it opens up a huge amount of adventure design room. If PCs can't even dream of starting every encounter at full HP, they'll break down and accept adventuring while injured, making attrition a real thing. This in turn allows for non set-piece, balls-to-the-walls encounter to be worth playing through.
While you could run on mundane healing, that has the huge problem that damage isn't uniformly distributed. Spells can preferentially targeted at PCs who took unluckily large amounts of damage, keeping all the PCs going concerns even with tightly limited amounts of healing.
The really big advantage? Player failure WITHOUT TPK becomes possible/reasonably straightforward. With fast recovery, winning a fight ugly is just as good as winning it cleanly. The only way to lose is to lose a fight. Given that PCs never surrender*, this means death. Without fast recovery, it costs more resources, and eventually you run out, and say "nope, we don't do another room", while still alive. The existence of consumables (that you don't want to use! expensive!) provides an emergency reserve if a fight starts to go bad when you pushed a bit too far.
*Yes yes, you know of one case where the PCs did, in fact, surrender. That's nice.
While you could run on mundane healing, that has the huge problem that damage isn't uniformly distributed. Spells can preferentially targeted at PCs who took unluckily large amounts of damage, keeping all the PCs going concerns even with tightly limited amounts of healing.
The really big advantage? Player failure WITHOUT TPK becomes possible/reasonably straightforward. With fast recovery, winning a fight ugly is just as good as winning it cleanly. The only way to lose is to lose a fight. Given that PCs never surrender*, this means death. Without fast recovery, it costs more resources, and eventually you run out, and say "nope, we don't do another room", while still alive. The existence of consumables (that you don't want to use! expensive!) provides an emergency reserve if a fight starts to go bad when you pushed a bit too far.
*Yes yes, you know of one case where the PCs did, in fact, surrender. That's nice.
JRRNeiklot
First Post
One hit point per day of rest. Optional module: One hit point per level per day of rest.
Libramarian
Adventurer
Agreed, good post. I want adventuring while injured to be a regular, acceptable thing.
Li Shenron
Legend
I want to add that healing/resting rules have a HUGE impact on gamestyle, but the most important thing for me is that not only I understand that different gaming groups have different gamestyles, but even I want the door open to different gamestyles, because while today I want to run adventures in a certain style, tomorrow I am sure I want to run some in another style.
Sometimes you want a one-shot adventure where the PCs aren't required to survived, because whether they live or die, anyway there likely won't be a continuation story for that party. Hence "investing" in a PC is just nonsense, so you might as well have a real risk of death in such a game.
Other times you want a long campaign with high character "investment", players planning their PC in advance, and therefore PC death might even be ruled out explicitly by the DM. Note that gamers usually don't like that: they want to believe that death risk is real, but still they don't want to die. The DM however knows better that she is handwaving survival if needed.
Going down into the details of in-game explanation of HP and damage, a game with real risk of death for the PC can easily treat HP damage as real wounds and use slow recovery because it feels more realistic. OTOH if your gamestyle implies a very high chance of survival, you're probably better off explaining HP damage as scratches, bruises and even more generically "losing confidence in victory", and this couples well with fast healing or even complete healing after each fight (WoW-style, if you want).
I think it would be so much better if D&D not only supported these 2 extremes and a few options in-between, but more importantly if they explicitly wrote clear explanations in the books... because now we have different healing/resting rules, but some of them have uselessly minor differences, and people are arguing about what are indeed small details. WotC should just be more clear, have ONE option for each gaming style and CLEAR identification/explanation of that in the book, and leave it to each gaming group to tinker with exact number if wanted.
Sometimes you want a one-shot adventure where the PCs aren't required to survived, because whether they live or die, anyway there likely won't be a continuation story for that party. Hence "investing" in a PC is just nonsense, so you might as well have a real risk of death in such a game.
Other times you want a long campaign with high character "investment", players planning their PC in advance, and therefore PC death might even be ruled out explicitly by the DM. Note that gamers usually don't like that: they want to believe that death risk is real, but still they don't want to die. The DM however knows better that she is handwaving survival if needed.
Going down into the details of in-game explanation of HP and damage, a game with real risk of death for the PC can easily treat HP damage as real wounds and use slow recovery because it feels more realistic. OTOH if your gamestyle implies a very high chance of survival, you're probably better off explaining HP damage as scratches, bruises and even more generically "losing confidence in victory", and this couples well with fast healing or even complete healing after each fight (WoW-style, if you want).
I think it would be so much better if D&D not only supported these 2 extremes and a few options in-between, but more importantly if they explicitly wrote clear explanations in the books... because now we have different healing/resting rules, but some of them have uselessly minor differences, and people are arguing about what are indeed small details. WotC should just be more clear, have ONE option for each gaming style and CLEAR identification/explanation of that in the book, and leave it to each gaming group to tinker with exact number if wanted.
I really dont like any of the options for healing in next and find the HD mechanic to be stupid.
I prefer vitality/wounds to HP, and the following is predicated on that. Wounds equal your CON score+STR mod, modified by size. Vitality goes up as HP does now. Wound points come with threshholds equal to 25%,50%,75%,100%. This threshold determines your maximum Vitality points available to your current wounded condition.
My choice would be to heal an amount of wound points per full day (not 8 hours) of rest equal to your CON modifier with a minimum of 1. And all of your VP up to your current threshold.
Short rests heal 1 VP per level. Short rests do nothing at all for WP.
Magical healing heals 1 VP per level of the spell * level of the target (not the caster). Or 1 WP per level of the spell.
I prefer vitality/wounds to HP, and the following is predicated on that. Wounds equal your CON score+STR mod, modified by size. Vitality goes up as HP does now. Wound points come with threshholds equal to 25%,50%,75%,100%. This threshold determines your maximum Vitality points available to your current wounded condition.
My choice would be to heal an amount of wound points per full day (not 8 hours) of rest equal to your CON modifier with a minimum of 1. And all of your VP up to your current threshold.
Short rests heal 1 VP per level. Short rests do nothing at all for WP.
Magical healing heals 1 VP per level of the spell * level of the target (not the caster). Or 1 WP per level of the spell.
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