D&D 5E SELF-HEALING- zero HP divide?

[5ekyu]

So while pondering another I got off on a tangent.

Just musing but I like the feel.

A simple alteration to the healing rules to put some extra sting or hardship to "going zero" or "whack-a-mole."

If you go thru a combat without even getting knocked to 0 hp, healing is as D&D norm - short rest hour roll HD and long rest 8 hour recover all. None of your wounds were life or death mortal, just painful.

If you go to zero at anytime, that changes and short rests now use the longer 8 hour time while long rests take a week. This persists until you get a long rest week.

This gives a campaign timing feel to zero. Depending on situation, in fight heal can be costly but not tactically unwise.

 

[DND_Reborn]

So while pondering another I got off on a tangent.

Just musing but I like the feel.

A simple alteration to the healing rules to put some extra sting or hardship to "going zero" or "whack-a-mole."

If you go thru a combat without even getting knocked to 0 hp, healing is as D&D norm - short rest hour roll HD and long rest 8 hour recover all. None of your wounds were life or death mortal, just painful.

If you go to zero at anytime, that changes and short rests now use the longer 8 hour time while long rests take a week. This persists until you get a long rest week.

This gives a campaign timing feel to zero. Depending on situation, in fight heal can be costly but not tactically unwise.

I like it. It reminds me of 1E if you go to 0 you need a week of bed rest or whatever it was precisely, but that was the idea.

 

[Krachek]

It will add great pressure for certain mission that depend on time schedule.
there is the spell Catnap in xanathar guide that will find more use.

 

[TwoSix]

That's actually pretty clever.

It's a little too punishing for my personal taste; I might modify it such that the character gains a condition when they hit 0. If they have that condition, they can't take short rests, and their next long rest only gives them the benefit of a short rest. Taking that short rest removes the condition.

 

[DND_Reborn]

FWIW we impose a level of exhaustion when you hit 0 HP. It seems a pretty common house rule IMX and adds more impact to going down.

 

[cbwjm]

This rule could be good for a grittier more deadly game.

I rarely see the whole whack-a-mole thing, most games I've played in or run the PCs tend to try to keep people healed up during combat, otherwise there is a chance that the main damage dealer will miss a turn while waiting for healing so this probably wouldn't be something I'd implement. I did think about implementing something like gaining scars when hitting 0 but hadn't figured out if/how it would have any mechanical impact.

 

[Stormonu]

Yeah, back in 1E/2E (and maybe 3E - been a long time), we played that anyone who went to 0 hp or less in a fight needed some time to recuperate. I think it was at least a day, possibly a day per negative hit point. At the very least, if you went down you got 0 XP for the fight (I could be rough as a DM sometimes).

However, I have seen a lot of fights in 5E where characters get dropped to 0 hp, through no real fault of their own but just because monsters can do some terrifying damage (especially if you're not familiar with them). If I were to do something like this in my game, I'd probably use exhaustion levels, as noted by dnd4vr.

 

[cbwjm]

I'd be worried about using exhaustion levels due to the potential death spiral that could result.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This has the same exact problem as every other take on this:

1) It messes up the ability to play of the entire party, whilst completely ruining the experience of one guy. Unless that guy is a subclass which gains little/nothing from rests.

2) It near-forces the entire party to take a Long Rest, in this case of a week, because, quite likely, of a couple of bad or unlucky rolls.

3) It doesn't really "solve" anything, or particularly make the game more interesting, because hitting 0 HP isn't generally something people are "just fine with" already.

Most of the solutions for watering it down contain the same issues, just to a less-exaggerated degree. This would also have the unfortunate side-effect of making it so that anyone in the party who can cast heals is basically going to forced to "top up" PCs, because they know that if they hit zero, they're basically out for a week. It also means the party will take more frequent Short and Long Rests to "top up" their HP, which is likely to be anti-dramatic.

People never seem to think through the obvious (to me) implications of such changes. It's really weird. I've seen this sort of thing for decades, and people just don't think it through. If you want to push a party into an extremely cautious mode, where they're obsessed with staying at full HP, and to make anyone in the party who can heal, basically have that as their full-time job now (rather than being able to actually cast spells, they need to hold them back to prevent people from hitting 0 HP, and thus being out for a week), this is a great way to achieve that. Somehow I doubt that was the actual goal.

It seems like the actual goal was to make in-combat healing make more sense, but this has effects that go wildly and hilariously beyond that.

 

[Blue]

I would never play in such a game. This is the antithesis of fun.

Going down is usually:

1. A group failure. Front line not stopping foes getting to squishies, healing not happening or prioritized elsewhere, etc. This rule puts an onerous and long term penalty on one character for fault of the group.

2. Some characters, specifically front-liners, assume a lot more risk to go down then other classes. This rule penalizes them for filling a needed niche.

3. Going down can be the result of one bad roll - a crit against them, a failed save. So an adventure-long (likely) penalty comes form a bad die roll. 5e specifically removed "save or suck" spell, this not only puts back one roll but does it even bigger than affecting a single scene.

So the rule is both unfair and unfun. Never.