D&D 5E Those who come from earlier editions, why are you okay with 5E healing (or are you)?

[Big J Money]

In learning 5E for the group I'm running, occasionally I come across a rule that really blows me away for the effect it should have on the Setting (but doesn't). It's like the developers didn't care to think the implications all the way through in their goal to make things more comfortable for PCs.

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations. "I'm sorry, but your character suffered pretty extreme trauma this session; I'm going to say that you without magical healing you'll need a week to recover your hit dice." But it's not like this is even suggested. I've heard that long rest taking a week is a house-rule losted in the DMG, but also that it's a sloppy solution because it doesn't mesh well with other things that require long rest (like spells).

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

 

[StormbringerAUS]

In my campaign a character regains 1 hit point on a long rest (though hit dice can be used as well) and your total hit dice on a long rest - so at 6th level you would regain up to 3 hit dice depending on how many you have used.

I find there is a lot more healing available than I previously remember (mostly Ad&D) some 2e.

But parties still run into problems during combat not so much post combat, if the casters don't save pell slots for healing.

Overall I have no issue with how it works in 5e.

 

[Blue]

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

I started with Red Box Basic back in the 80s. I greatly enjoy the self-healing rules, back when they were introduced in earlier editions than 5e.

In many of the earlier editions of D&D, clerics were manditory. (They were the only healers.) One player needed to dedicate their character and the majority of their resources (spell slots) to healing. But they really were manditory - someone had to bite the bullet and play one even if you didn't want to. I remember a bunch of us getting badly hurt and spending multiple weeks in a cave healing up a [level] HPs per day to try to get up to enough that we could make a 3 day dash for the nearest town across an area that had high wandering monster chances. Made worse when monsters did happen on our disguised cave and beat us down again. It's not a great story to tell people, it was an exercise in bookkeeping.

So when 4e added in lots of self healing, it was as if the skies opened up. Healers (leaders in 4e parlance) were no longer required. It was a great thing.

With having HD to spend during a short rest, topping out when spending eight times as long just makes sense.

I don't play ina gritty game, I play in a heroic game. If you can get critted by a greataxe and keep fighting, or breathed on by a dragon, or fall 100 feet - healing HPs overnight is no stretch of the imagination. Especially with how abstract they are and that they also represent things like fatigue and battle luck and the like.

 

[delphonso]

Yeah, honestly, I see DnD as a heroic game. It's pulp fiction action books. The character can have their leg broken and a chapter later jump from one ship to another - a good player will wince in pain and keep going, but at the end of the day, you're heroes and this is a movie.

I have seen long periods for serious wounds. I think it's reasonable to put a player at a huge disadvantage if they took their entire HP of falling damage. Or if a boss got some good crits on the players, needing several days to recover is thematic and even rewarding. But you can just tell the party it'll take a few days to recover and ignore the rules.

I do think if you want to run DnD as a gritty dark fantasy, healing needs to be restructured. I don't think the week-long-rest is a good solution, but there have been plenty of threads on that topic.

 

[Mistwell]

In learning 5E for the group I'm running, occasionally I come across a rule that really blows me away for the effect it should have on the Setting (but doesn't). It's like the developers didn't care to think the implications all the way through in their goal to make things more comfortable for PCs.

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations. "I'm sorry, but your character suffered pretty extreme trauma this session; I'm going to say that you without magical healing you'll need a week to recover your hit dice." But it's not like this is even suggested. I've heard that long rest taking a week is a house-rule losted in the DMG, but also that it's a sloppy solution because it doesn't mesh well with other things that require long rest (like spells).

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

You don't even need a house rule as the DMG includes numerous officially sanctioned options to adjust healing.

 

[Nebulous]

I don't play ina gritty game, I play in a heroic game. If you can get critted by a greataxe and keep fighting, or breathed on by a dragon, or fall 100 feet - healing HPs overnight is no stretch of the imagination. Especially with how abstract they are and that they also represent things like fatigue and battle luck and the like.

It really amounts to this, in answer to the OP. In a game where you can survive what would normally be instant death from ogres, dragons, cliffs, burning and any of the other horrible things PCs suffer daily (with zero PTSD as well) then healing overnight hardly matters. No one in real life can survive a giant's tree club to the head, and no one in real life can heal injuries with a nap. It's kind of like a video game where you take a beating, heal up, and keep on going. There's lots of ways to tweak the game here and there to suit your campaign, but in no way has D&D ever tried to model the setbacks caused by real life trauma, because that's not fun to roleplay.

Also, you only get back half your HD after a long rest, not all of them.

At the end of a long rest, a character regains all lost hit points. The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice equal to half of the character's total number of them. For example, if a character has eight Hit Dice, he or she can regain four spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest

 

[DND_Reborn]

In learning 5E for the group I'm running, occasionally I come across a rule that really blows me away for the effect it should have on the Setting (but doesn't). It's like the developers didn't care to think the implications all the way through in their goal to make things more comfortable for PCs.

Today's mechanic of choice is healing. In 5E RAW, characters recover all their hit dice and all hit points every night.

Think about the setting implications of this for a minute. No matter what you do, how badly you injure yourself, as long as you are not dead, you will be fully healed the next day as long as you get to bed for 8 hours. You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed. You could fall off a building, go to bed. You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed. Everything is made better if you go to bed.

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations. "I'm sorry, but your character suffered pretty extreme trauma this session; I'm going to say that you without magical healing you'll need a week to recover your hit dice." But it's not like this is even suggested. I've heard that long rest taking a week is a house-rule losted in the DMG, but also that it's a sloppy solution because it doesn't mesh well with other things that require long rest (like spells).

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing? Or if not, do you have your own house-rule?

Well, I am not a big fan of the super-healing in 5E, but when you have a different rationale for what HP represent it isn't a big stretch really.

For example, suppose your character has 31 HP and you are "hit" by an ogre for 15 points. Are you "half dead"? No, not at all. HP is not only physical punishment, but all the other abstract stuff like moving to avoid a lethal hit and turn it into a nick, the gods' favor, simple luck, exhaustion from the fear of death, etc. Was that 15 point "hit" scary? YOU BET! Good thing something saved you from getting completely crushed!

Fortunately, a good night's rest and you'll feel better. You rationalized the danger and can handle those life and death situations again.

Now, when you hit 0 HP, you've run out of skill, luck, favor, etc. and that "hit" really hit you and hurt. You're going down. Yikes!

Anyway, our house-rule is when you hit 0 HP, you gain a level of exhaustion as well. That helps make it feel scarier and if you are healed and go down again, another level of exhaustion, etc.

 

[cmad1977]

The rules of the game only apply to the characters, not everyone in the world.

So yes... heroes ‘heal’ more quickly than the plebs.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The rules of the game only apply to the characters, not everyone in the world.

So yes... heroes ‘heal’ more quickly than the plebs.

This. It would have a tremendous effect on the setting, except theses healing rules should be for "player's characters" not every characters. NPC should in my opinion heal using a combination of gritty realism and slow natural healing from the DMG, therefore most "regular commoners" can spend their single hit die after a week-long rest. Remember that you can't work during a long rest, so if your commoner is injured before the planting season, he will fill the effect at least until the next winter... You can still have a semi-realistic setting and heroes healing overnight, litterally. We rarely read about how Galahad skipped an adventure because he was recovering from a sprained knee.

I don't think it changed that much compared to earlier editions, when clerics would convert all their remaining spells for the day into healing spells, so the party was more or less fully healed when they could afford a long rest.

 

[toucanbuzz]

AD&D Cleric spell list, near mandatory:

1st level: Cure Light Wounds x4
2nd level: Slow Poison x4
3rd level: Dispel Magic x2, Prayer
4th level: Cure Serious Wounds x2
5th level: Raise Dead

In 3rd edition, a Wand of Cure Light Wounds (50 charges) was standard, required equipment.

The game has always been rigged towards keeping the adventure going rather than waiting weeks between adventures. In AD&D, this meant playing a cleric could suck as you're a heal-bot. In 3rd edition, they tried to help clerics out. In all editions, you get beat up by giants, dragons, or simply the local peasants, and there's some mechanism to say you're fine the next day. So, D&D isn't really far off from prior editions in that. They're just more forward about it.

However, D&D is all about letting you make the game the way you want it. If you want gritty realism, there it is. For our group, we're having a lot of fun using a homebrew "vitality" system that replaces death saves with a small pool of vitality points that represent the actual damage the body can take once your luck runs out. This makes hit points abstract (they represent the ability to mitigate actual harm, and you get better at this over time as you get more experienced; it does not mean the human body can survive being stabbed 11 times by a sword or even being hit once by a giant's iron mace). Vitality heals very slowly, making reaching 0hp a real danger if you've been close before. It's my solution to healing and defining hit points.