D&D 5E Slow Natural Healing in actual play

[Dioltach]

I'm not sure whether it was grittier or not, but natural healing in 2E just added to my general sense of frustration with the edition. 1hp per day, or 2hp per day with full rest, wasn't it? Another frustration was how healing spells worked. "I'm an 8th level Cleric, but my 1d8 Cure Light Wounds sometimes only cures 1hp, and after I've thrown six of them at a party member they might have recovered 15hp." (I changed the effect to "1d8 + 2/level.")

 

[clearstream]

Here's my take on that reasonable reply......
What does full hit points represent? Full health.
What does negative 1 hp represent? Death.
How does your model account for the slope?
It doesn't. Just because you choose to be in denial that the model represents those two extremes doesn't displace the facts.

That isn't quite right so far as the standard version of D&D goes (PHB 197).

Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability. the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile.

When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum. you typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you direetly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious.

The picture given modifies what you have said to something like this

• What does full hit points represent? Full physical health and full will to live and luck.
• What does half hit points represent? Full physical health, but out of will and luck.
• There is no negative 1 hp in 5e, but 0 hit points represents unconsciousness.
• What do three failed death saves represent? Death.

It's true that hit points are a game construct or abstract model that as much as anything is a measure of how long I get to keep saying what my character does; and the environment's ability to impose silence... at least for a time. Also worth noting that I would prefer GR (slightly modified) and SNH as the game baseline. In part for reasons your earlier post covers.

Taking that into account, how a group choose to grasp and narrate hit points can enhance the linkage between their system and fiction.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

We have used medium slow healing combined with gaining hd over night.

1 day of light activity for a long rest. Searching rooms in a dungeon with a few fights in between and a good place to rest is overall light activity. Travelling four hours and sleeping in a makeshift camp is not.

This naturally allows dungeons to go fast and journeys to still be dangerous by having some small encounters along the way.

A night's sleep regenerates half as much HD as a long rest.

We imolemented this rule when we noticed, that long rest based casters could just nova all day when travelling over land, which made any encounter meaningless and made spells like fireball and shield way too powerful compared to what a fighter/warlock can do.

After implementing that rule, the powerlevel of all characters became a lot more homogeneous.

Long rest based classes could still nova if needed, but because they now have to conserve some resources for the possible next fights until the next long rest made them think twice about throwing fireballs for everything.

 

[FrogReaver]

Here's my take on that reasonable reply......
What does full hit points represent? Full health.
What does negative 1 hp represent? Death.
How does your model account for the slope?
It doesn't. Just because you choose to be in denial that the model represents those two extremes doesn't displace the facts.

HP doesn’t just represent full physical health. It’s an abstraction taking into account things like luck, willingness to fight, etc. As such it’s up to your narration to make its meaning align for the rest of the system.

If you narrate greivious wounds that can’t naturally recover overnight for major hp loss when the system allows full overnight hp recovery, it’s not the system causing that problem, it’s your choice of narration.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I find it works just fine & dandy if you're doing something kind of episodic or if your campaign can tolerate blocks of downtime.

If you are using it with a WotC adventure, something episodic like your Keys from the Golden Vault or Journeys through the Radiant Citadel or Candlekeep Mysteries works fine. Something that's more linked and epic and has many moving pieces and deadlines might not work out of the box. For something like that, you'll want to carefully break out a timeline and see where longer gaps might make sense, which can be hard for some of 'em. That might be more work than it's worth, especially since the official adventures that rock that accelerated timeline aren't really going for a "grittier" vibe.

For my homebrews it works OK, but my homebrews are usually built with a more rugged, longer-term, grounded kind of vibe in mind. And it's not always necessary - I'm running a Spelljammer game right now that's very episodic, but I'm not changing the natural healing rules, in part 'cuz it's a new group and there's some newbies around and the Astral Sea is timeless and you're never hungry there, so really long-term survival isn't one of the big challenges there.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

You know what's gritty? It's not sitting around waiting for your HP to return, or relying on magic to keep adventuring. It's going adventuring in spite of the risks, and there's nothing that makes a player not want to take risks than their PC being low on HP.

So... think of it this way: HIT POINTS ARE GRIT. When you wake up in the morning with full HP, it's not saying that you're not injured. It's saying that you're gonna go adventuring today IN SPITE of any pesky injuries. Whatever "healing" you received - be it bandages, magic, or whatever, was enough to make it so that you feel well enough to adventure. When you take damage later, it may just be that you opened yesterday's wounds, rather than getting new ones. Now that's GRIT.

If that's not good enough for you, I recommend doing that anyway, but add a wound condition track, or a chart, or just use the exhaustion mechanic. That way you can have full HP (enough to make a cautious player still, y'know, play) but with a penalty that they can live with. (The OneD&D exhausted condition is simple for this: You have "Exausted X" (where x is accumulative, and represents a -1 to all "d20 Tests" (aka d20 rolls). It's not as bad as disadvantage, so it's less likely to result in player-timidity.)

Heck, I might just write this up in a fuller post and flesh it out.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I have always been someone who plays that damage is an injury, however light. If a snake poisons you, it's not poisoning you because it hit your Grit or your Luck or your Stamina or your Plot Armor or or your Skill whatever, it bit you, it hurt, and now you have poison in your blood and a wound where it bit you. If a dragon bit you and you lived, it's not because it didn't actually manage to bite you, it's because the bite wasn't fatal. It still broke skin. You were still bitten by a dragon.

Yeah, it might all be nicks and bruises and flesh wounds until you hit 0 hp. That snakebite isn't a grievous wound, but it IS still a wound. The dragon teeth cut your arm enough to draw blood, good thing you had the skill to avoid a worse fate.

When I use longer-term healing, it's not a statement about what hit points represent. It's a statement about the pacing I want for my games. How much I want to use downtime and how slow I want this story to develop. I want an adventure that takes seasons, not one where Tiamat rises and is smote back down in a week. That's not relevant for every story, of course. ESPECIALLY every WotC story. Sometimes you have a Very Eventful Week.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I have always been someone who plays that damage is an injury, however light. If a snake poisons you, it's not poisoning you because it hit your Grit or your Luck or your Stamina or your Plot Armor or or your Skill whatever, it bit you, it hurt, and now you have poison in your blood and a wound where it bit you.

Nearly everyone who thinks of HP as Grit or Luck or Stamina or Plot Armor or whatever agrees with you that when you get bit you get bit.

The only disconnect between the two approaches is that you're suggesting that there is a direct connection between the value of your HP and how injured you are, rather than an indirect one.

When I say that HP is grit - I'm absolutely not saying that the dragon bites you "in the grit". (How very strange). No, you indeed get bit by a dragon. The grit is that you keep going afterward (assuming you have any HP left!)

I mean, do it however you want, but don't try to convince anyone that it's somehow more "realistic".

 

[Blue]

Here's my take on that reasonable reply......
What does full hit points represent? Full health.
What does negative 1 hp represent? Death.
How does your model account for the slope?
It doesn't. Just because you choose to be in denial that the model represents those two extremes doesn't displace the facts.

So, can half HPs represent full health, but fatigued, out of mojo, and having used up all of your battle luck?

It can, in some situations or tables.

So it need not be a linear slope - in this case full HP and half HP are exactly the same amount of actual "health" - no slope at all. So any attempt to say that they is a linear slope is inherently false.

Let's look at "low health" in real life. Are you doing as well at physical actives as you would be at full health? No. At 1 HP, are there any mechanical detriments to your physical activities? No? So mechanically, 1 HP is also "full health".

It seems you are in denial that HP reduction has no mechanical relationship to health reduction until the last one. And even when described, it need not be linear. It's pretty trivial to show full HP to 0 HP is not a slope in terms of healthiness.

 

[Blue]

I have always been someone who plays that damage is an injury, however light.

That's a fine table rule. But it's not the rules of the game. PHB, pg 196.

HIT POINTS
Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability. the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile.

 

[I'm A Banana]

That's a fine table rule. But it's not the rules of the game. PHB, pg 196.

HIT POINTS
Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability. the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile.

How it works in D&D, RAW, today is that a poisonous snake who bites you pierces you and poisons you when it does so. Which is why when you summon one and tell it to attack a skeleton, it's less effective than hitting it with your hammer - the skeleton isn't affected by poison and takes more damage when you bludgeon it.

If a snake bites you, or you hit a skeleton with a hammer, something related to "physical durability" happens. In the narrative, it's not just a near-miss or a drop in morale or a dodge that fatigued you. The skeleton isn't taking more damage because your warhammer makes it unluckier than your spear.

It ain't pure physical durability, but it involves physical durability, no "table rule" required. The blow also reduces the mental durability (it didn't like being hit), will to live (maybe it disrupted some necrotic bindings) and luck (the skeleton took a blow on the ribs instead of on its spine) of the skeleton, sure. But physical durability is a part of that damage, too.

I mean, do it however you want, but don't try to convince anyone that it's somehow more "realistic".

If anyone accuses my game of magical elf make-believe of being "realistic," I want them found and silenced, hahaha.

That's part of why I made the point that the "grittier" rules are more about campaign pacing for me. I often like a slower, seasonal pace to my grand storylines, where weeks can pass in convalescence and downtime. Not always, but often enough that I'll use rules to help get that vibe. Part of the fiction that happens when I do that is that the wounds take longer to heal, but that's all just part of the aesthetic I'm getting at. Ultimately, that aesthetic is more about integration with the world than it is about being "realistic" or "gritty." I like it when PC's have to ask questions like "Where can we lie low for a week?" and these rules encourage that.

 

[clearstream]

How it works in D&D, RAW, today is that a poisonous snake who bites you pierces you and poisons you when it does so. Which is why when you summon one and tell it to attack a skeleton, it's less effective than hitting it with your hammer - the skeleton isn't affected by poison and takes more damage when you bludgeon it.

If a snake bites you, or you hit a skeleton with a hammer, something related to "physical durability" happens. In the narrative, it's not just a near-miss or a drop in morale or a dodge that fatigued you. The skeleton isn't taking more damage because your warhammer makes it unluckier than your spear.

It ain't pure physical durability, but it involves physical durability, no "table rule" required. The blow also reduces the mental durability (it didn't like being hit), will to live (maybe it disrupted some necrotic bindings) and luck (the skeleton took a blow on the ribs instead of on its spine) of the skeleton, sure. But physical durability is a part of that damage, too.

If anyone accuses my game of magical elf make-believe of being "realistic," I want them found and silenced, hahaha.

For me, your last sentence makes an important point. The model is incomplete (well, technically all models are incomplete) and contains contradictions. On the other hand, play is a symbolic and analogic activity: for many purposes it has to pass-off-as rather than be realistic.

Poison attacks are an example of on-hit effects. Here's the poisoning on-hit effect from Giant Spider:

the target must make a DC 11 Constitution saving throw, taking 9 (2d8) poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. If the poison damage reduces the target to 0 hit points, the target is stable but poisoned for 1 hour, even after regaining hit points, and is paralyzed while poisoned in this way.

A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks. A paralyzed creature has additional problems. Strangely, the poison spray spell does not bestow the poisoned condition. As an aside, I like the use of poisoned and charmed in 5e to chain to other effects.

My general view is that at all times when playing RPG we're dealing with impressions of a non-existent situation. Each person at the table will have different impressions. Hopefully only slightly different, but probably - were it interrogated - containing both substantial differences and outright contradictions. We continually revise our picture in the direction of our interests and to match that of others. The impression - sometimes called shared imagined space - always, under every RPG system - contains a myriad of omissions and contradictions that we constructively fail to notice so long as they're not important to our play. On-hit effects are one of the known contradictions with D&D hit points. That's not new to 5e.

In this light, what counts as gritty realism or slow natural healing? It's not especially realistic. The healing isn't natural. In my home campaigns I have recently been sticking with an additional tweak - characters gain a maximum of six hit dice. One die per level up to level 6. Hit points aren't gained past that (not from Con, not from Tough). I've added a wounded condition, that like poisoned and charmed will chain to other effects (e.g. healing word can't benefit wounded creatures.)

My concern isn't that the game feel more or less grittily realistic, it's that fights are palpably risky. I want players to not be too keen to get into one, and to know when they've been in one. If you've ever played the Bushido RPG, you might have a sense of what this can feel like. I'm also aiming for something you summarise quite well:

That's part of why I made the point that the "grittier" rules are more about campaign pacing for me. I often like a slower, seasonal pace to my grand storylines, where weeks can pass in convalescence and downtime. Not always, but often enough that I'll use rules to help get that vibe.

The DMG and XGE provide a range of examples of what might be done in downtime, and I'm also interested in far more social interaction. Bearing a few wounds is unlikely to hinder a character making their way through social circles. Those wounds might even form a good conversation starter. It's all about purposes. Going back to the OP, "grittier" perhaps isn't a well-defined purpose. It helps to have in mind what grittier means. It might not mean realistic. So far as GR and SNH go, it readily leads to something more aligned with a more leisurely campaign arc, with more going on in downtime from adventuring.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

But physical durability is a part of that damage, too.

I don't think anyone disputes that. Certainly not very many. The usual discourse has to do with how much and the usual consensus (when there IS any) is "however much you want it to be".

Ultimately, the best (IMO) way to think of damage (and have it be consistent with the game's rules) is "However much injury a person can sustain from the given narrative without being actually impaired by it." (Assuming that you still have HP and have not been granted a condition.)

Heck, the poisoned condition itself models injury better than HP loss does. At least it makes your character actually feel like there's something wrong with them.

If anyone accuses my game of magical elf make-believe of being "realistic," I want them found and silenced, hahaha.

Haw! That's good!

That's part of why I made the point that the "grittier" rules are more about campaign pacing for me. I often like a slower, seasonal pace to my grand storylines, where weeks can pass in convalescence and downtime. Not always, but often enough that I'll use rules to help get that vibe. Part of the fiction that happens when I do that is that the wounds take longer to heal, but that's all just part of the aesthetic I'm getting at. Ultimately, that aesthetic is more about integration with the world than it is about being "realistic" or "gritty." I like it when PC's have to ask questions like "Where can we lie low for a week?" and these rules encourage that.

That's cool. I'd enjoy that if it doesn't slow play down. I assume you've got that handled.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks. A paralyzed creature has additional problems. Strangely, the poison spray spell does not bestow the poisoned condition. As an aside, I like the use of poisoned and charmed in 5e to chain to other effects.

Yeah, it's a bit strange when you get poisoned, but all it does is damage. As long as you still have HP, do you even feel sick? (I would say yes, but only because I like to RP injury more than the base rules of the game enforce on me).

My general view is that at all times when playing RPG we're dealing with impressions of a non-existent situation. Each person at the table will have different impressions. Hopefully only slightly different, but probably - were it interrogated - containing both substantial differences and outright contradictions. We continually revise our picture in the direction of our interests and to match that of others. The impression - sometimes called shared imagined space - always, under every RPG system - contains a myriad of omissions and contradictions that we constructively fail to notice so long as they're not important to our play. On-hit effects are one of the known contradictions with D&D hit points. That's not new to 5e.

That's a great point.

In this light, what counts as gritty realism or slow natural healing? It's not especially realistic. The healing isn't natural. In my home campaigns I have recently been sticking with an additional tweak - characters gain a maximum of six hit dice. One die per level up to level 6. Hit points aren't gained past that (not from Con, not from Tough). I've added a wounded condition, that like poisoned and charmed will chain to other effects (e.g. healing word can't benefit wounded creatures.)

Sounds interesting. So they dish out as much as a high-level above L6, but they can't take it. That would certainly make powerful monsters more scary!

The DMG and XGE provide a range of examples of what might be done in downtime, and I'm also interested in far more social interaction. Bearing a few wounds is unlikely to hinder a character making their way through social circles. Those wounds might even form a good conversation starter. It's all about purposes. Going back to the OP, "grittier" perhaps isn't a well-defined purpose. It helps to have in mind what grittier means. It might not mean realistic. So far as GR and SNH go, it readily leads to something more aligned with a more leisurely campaign arc, with more going on in downtime from adventuring.

I honestly wish there was generally more downtime allowed for in adventures, now that I only run published ones (I spent the first 25 years of playing only running my own stories, which is backwards I am told, to how most people do it). Most 5e adventures, in spite of running you L1-15 (at least, potentially) take place over 2-6 months of in-world time. If it took any longer, the big threat would finish without the PCs involvement!