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

[Leatherhead]

I use the Lingering Injuries optional rule. It more or less covered any hang ups I had with the HP system. I even went as far as to make my own rules for artificial and magical limbs (although now they have official rules for for them) so you don't have to wait around till someone can cast Regenerate to fix you up.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

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

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

I'm pretty sure Monsters and NPCs also recharge all their HP and up to half their Hit Dice after a long rest.

Kind of important if your party has recurring nemeses and/or an encounter with a single enemy spaced out over several in-game days mixing hunting/escaping and combat.

Also kind of important for the Ranger and Artificer's pets, and the Wizard's skeleton minions, and any horses the party might be dragging along to carry their stuff or as combat mounts, and any hirelings or plot-important NPCs attached to the party.

 

[StormbringerAUS]

I use the Lingering Injuries optional rule. It more or less covered any hang ups I had with the HP system. I even went as far as to make my own rules for artificial and magical limbs (although now they have official rules for for them) so you don't have to wait around till someone can cast Regenerate to fix you up.

I also use the lingering injury table, however the player only roles on it if they fail the first death save.
This has had the added benefit of if a character goes down others try to get to them before a death save is made to avoid the risk - adds nicely to the tension. To date several minor scars one lost eye and one leg cut off - that character died very shortly afterwards when having failed that first death save promptly rolled a one on his next.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Played AD&D as my preferred edition from 1981 to 2012. Not a fan of super speed healing in 5e. In fact, one of my chief gripes about it. So we use the alternate rules in the DMG.

 

[Shiroiken]

Initially, I had a major issue with the super-mega healing of 5E. I came from AD&D, where HPs were low, and any fight could be your last. After a major adventure, you usually had to rest up for days or even weeks to recover HP unless you had a living Cleric or Druid. This led to the logic of needing a cleric (or druid) in every party, and they needed to be protected at all cost... irritating the squishy magic users who needed the defense more. In parties that had... less cohesion... than is expected today, this sometimes led to the party healer charging for services, or even outright refusing to heal certain party members. When this was ported over for the 5E HPs, I was already looking into how to house-rule it, but after playing with it for quite some time, I no longer have any problems with it.

I think the biggest issue is that many DMs like to describe the various wounds each hit or source of damage causes. By this logic, most PCs look like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard at the end of each adventuring day. Instead, I started considering HP as being more stamina than "meat" when dealing with the PCs. Most damaging blows are either blunted by armor, forced exertion, or from non-lethal parts of the weapon (like the hilt), until they actually go to 0 HP. Since no one really cares much about how the enemies look after the fight, I often describe the PC's successful attacks as wounds, unless I have plans for the enemy. Full recover of HP means the stamina has returned, but the wounds and bruises remain.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A lot of people have talked about one angle of this. I have used the variant rule of no hp recovered during a long rest, unless you spend HD (HD recovery works like normal) because I do like the idea that multiple days of fighting in a row can wear players down.

However, I want to point out for those who might not have tried it, the other end of the spectrum can be worse in regards to actually playing the game. I've got a friend who likes grittier and more realistic games, so when he published his own game system he made injuries fairly realistic.

So, I'm running a gritty superhero investigation, they are trying to find clues as to the mastermind behind these strange happenings, a session is generally covering a single night's work in uncovering clues and breaking up gangs. Then, one of the players gets caught in an explosion. They survive, but at a minimum they are looking at six months of recovery to even be able to move around and contribute. That is 168 days, potentially 168 sessions where their character is unable to continue. The game would be over. Can't skip ahead, bad guy plot and they've made noise in the underworld. He's sending assassins after them, that can't just go on pause for 6 months. Guy makes a new character? Possible but a) they weren't a known group, they were just a bunch of people who ended up working together and none of them trust each other because the villain is smart and ruthless and b) how is that fun for the player to tell them that all the stories and connections they've made have essentially been erased?

Sure, "that's life, sometimes that happens" but it isn't fun. It isn't entertaining to be told that your character was hit by a car while they were crossing the street to get a coffee, superhero career over. And, while it can lead to drama if the dice just happen to fall in the right way, if you get just close enough to the edge for it to be scary, but stop short, once you cross that line and fall down the canyon... I think you lose more than you can gain.

Like, I don't think I could enjoy a game where if you died in the game, it wiped your saved data and you had to restart from the very beginning. It would be challenging, and getting to the end of it would be an accomplishment you would feel great about, but it would also be so frustrating, especially if there was any random generation of effects or results that could surprise me and negate any strategies and hard work I put in. And gritty health systems can be worse, in a way, because you don't just start over, you have to leave the game run for the next six months as your character recovers. You are stuck in a limbo of not being able to do anything, but also the story could continue, it isn't over after all, just delayed longer than the game can actually handle.

 

[ninjayeti]

In previous editions characters could also pretty much heal up all their HP within 8 hours or so - it just required some in-game justification like the party clerics casting then rememorizing their spells, wands of cure light wounds, etc.

If natural healing bugs you as unrealistic just come up with some justification why it is actually supernatural healing. Maybe there is a cleric cantrip or class ability "Healing Rest" that lets you heal all your woulds while you sleep. Maybe there are easily available Salves of Healing that take 8 hours to work. Maybe Cure Wounds has a residual effect that supercharges your natural healing. Maybe PCs are blessed by the gods to recover from the wounds suffered in righteous battle.

Whatever you choose there is a rationale that is just as plausible and less clunky than clerics casting their spells, resting 4 hours and 45 minutes, repeating until everyone is fine.

 

[Athelstaine]

I also use a homebrew modified dmg version as well. I also use the option where you have to have a medicine kit to use your hit dice. For long rests you just spend hit dice as per short rest. I also have players/creatures regenerate their level/HD + Constitution modifier naturally to solve an issue where no medicine kits are available to use hit dice for healing.

 

[JeffB]

Since I look at Hit Points as almost entirely endurance and luck and not so much chunks of meat, I don't have much issue with it in 5e, 4e, and 13A. I do prefer 13A's term "recovery" vs. " healing". IDK why Gary ever went down the route of "hit points are not really wounds" and then named all the spells "cure X wounds".

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

I think the idea that every rule should be analyzed in terms of setting implications has largely fallen out of favor in modern RPG design, which is much more focused on game impact. The rules by which the game is played need not be treated like physical laws of the setting.

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

Only half your hit dice (and all your hit points) by RAW, actually. Not that that changes anything about the point under discussion, I just thought I should point it out since you mentioned you’re learning 5e.

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.

Not necessarily so. Hit Points only really measure your ability to keep fighting. The are not the only mechanic for representing a character’s wellbeing. For example, it takes multiple weeks of bed rest to recover from a disease without magic or end an effect that is preventing you from regaining hit points (the exact amount of time depends on which version of the Downtime rules you’re using, and the results of your Constitution saves.) Personally, I don’t think hit point loss would be the best way to represent the effects of long-term torture. I would recommend using exhaustion levels and/or lingering injuries from the DMG for the physical effects and Flaws or maybe madness levels for the psychological trauma, although I’m not really a fan of the madness rules myself. If you did want to keep it to hit point loss, I would recommend ruling that the extent of the trauma was so great, it prevents you from regaining hit points, which could be ended via rest during downtime.

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 wouldn’t really call this house ruling. 5e is written with the expectation that the DM will make rulings like these to cover situations the rules don’t. Again, the idea of rules-as-physics-engine has pretty much gone the way of the dodo in modern RPG design. The 5e rules cover what is expected throughout the typical course of play, and provide a strong framework for the DM to make their own rulings when needed. I would argue that this is playing to the medium’s strengths. Computers do a better job of running rules systems that function as comprehensive physics engines. Human DMs do a better job of adjudicating on the fly based on simpler scaffolding.

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).

I think there are places where the longer rest times (and the shorter ones!) in the DMG are appropriate to use, but I agree with you that they are not a good solution to the narrative problems that treating hit points as meat can cause.

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 3e, so not sure if you’d consider that “older editions” or not, but I certainly would. The justification I use is that hit point loss doesn’t necessarily represent physical trauma. It is an abstract representation of one’s ability to stay in a fight, combining a certain degree of physical wellbeing with stamina, skill at avoiding or reducing harm from an attack, luck, and potentially even divine favor. It is also not the only, or even best, way to represent physical wellbeing. There’s also death saving throw successes and failures, exhaustion levels and other conditions, long term injuries, flaws. The rules have all sorts of ways to represent harm besides just HP loss, many of which require more than just a long rest to recover from.