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

[Umbran]

And if players goes a bit over their head because GM wasn't clear enough, an encounter adjustment can be made on the fly to downgrade it a bit.

Um, no. I mean, you can, but that's not a game precept, in general - there's a ton of GMs out there who will be, "You chose to over-extend? That's you're problem. Someone's gonna die now!" They may or may not utter a "Bwahahaha!" afterwards.

 

[Helldritch]

Um, no. I mean, you can, but that's not a game precept, in general - there's a ton of GMs out there who will be, "You chose to over-extend? That's you're problem. Someone's gonna die now!" They may or may not utter a "Bwahahaha!" afterwards.

Yep I know. I for one, do not hesitate to kill a player or even to TPK. But generally, I'll try to give a foreboding warning, a sense of dread that something isn't right. If the players then decide to press on, so be it. The game is one of storytelling. The gods are real and do sometimes send a cryptic warning that may or may not be recognized. The decision rests solely on the players' hands.

I sincerly think that It is the GM's job to give a fair warning of the dangers ahead. It is the players' prerogative to act or not to act on the warning.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Some of the most famous DnD adventures ever. Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Barrier Peaks. I'm sure you get the idea. Those narratives are far from believable.

First of all, I'm not sure that they're all that bad. There's still a minimum level of coherence that was required, even if it was on the level of Scooby-Doo rather than Eddings.

Second of all, I'm also of the mind that standards for plausibility have risen somewhat since those days. Notably, those adventures all pre-date second edition, which offered a significant (and lasting) shift in presentation. The concept of role-playing has come a long way since the days of Gygaxian "skilled play".

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm missing something. What are the lies told about older editions?

A "hit" has never actually been a "hit" outside of instances like 3e's Touch AC. But what do you mean by "propaganda?

There you go. Ever since the beginning, Gygax has claimed that a "hit" by the dice is not necessarily a "hit" in the narrative, in spite of the actual rules contradicting that claim. Most obviously, it's not going to take a week to recover from an ogre failing to hit you with a club. There's also zero chance of being poisoned by a dagger that doesn't make contact, as compared to the 50% (or so) chance that the rules give. I could go on.

Gygax knew that his rules were an inconsistent mess, so he tried to weasel out of it by claiming that Hit Points didn't represent what the rules told us they did. Why he didn't change the rules to be more consistent (for example, by allowing all HP to recover overnight), I'll never know.

Do you feel that in 5e, a healer is not valued and that managing the allocation of healing resources (spells, class abilities, HD, potions etc) is not (or maybe just less) important?

In my experience, in the vast majority of cases, a healer is entirely redundant in 5E. Not only is there enough free healing (between hit dice and long rests) to make magical healing superfluous, but for anyone who has healing as an option (cleric, druid, bard), it's almost always more efficient for them to spend their actions and spell slots on killing the enemy faster. After all, killing a goblin prevents up to 5 damage per round.

 

[Chaosmancer]

First of all, I'm not sure that they're all that bad. There's still a minimum level of coherence that was required, even if it was on the level of Scooby-Doo rather than Eddings.

Second of all, I'm also of the mind that standards for plausibility have risen somewhat since those days. Notably, those adventures all pre-date second edition, which offered a significant (and lasting) shift in presentation. The concept of role-playing has come a long way since the days of Gygaxian "skilled play".

So, when you called out that HP in DnD prevented the storytelling of "traditional RPGs" you didn't mean the edition which produced adventures that are the most iconic and have been remade in every edition of the game to date, but instead the edition after them... which also had HP and everything else you are pointing out.

I'm sorry, but you can't defend "this is terrible, unlike the old days" by following it up with "not those old days, we've gotten better since then"

In my experience, in the vast majority of cases, a healer is entirely redundant in 5E. Not only is there enough free healing (between hit dice and long rests) to make magical healing superfluous, but for anyone who has healing as an option (cleric, druid, bard), it's almost always more efficient for them to spend their actions and spell slots on killing the enemy faster. After all, killing a goblin prevents up to 5 damage per round.

My experience is different than yours in a few ways. First, "free healing" has not always been enough in our games. Hit Dice do not always see us through, and that is with a dedicated healer on top of that. Obviously our experiences differ, but we always make sure to have at least one person capable of healing so that we can make it through.

Secondly, while it is generally more effective to kill the enemy than try to out-heal their damage, it isn't quite that simple an exercise. For example, healing the fighter enough that they can survive a round and kill two enemies might be better than only killing one and leaving that fighter to fall and make death saves. In addition to that, healing between combat can be very vital, especially if a short rest is not easy to get. Yeah, it isn't preferred, because the healer can generally do something more awesome with the spell slot if they had the chance, but there is a cost-benefit analysis of saving the slot versus healing you need right now that does not worry about the poor action economy of healing while getting damaged.

There you go. Ever since the beginning, Gygax has claimed that a "hit" by the dice is not necessarily a "hit" in the narrative, in spite of the actual rules contradicting that claim. Most obviously, it's not going to take a week to recover from an ogre failing to hit you with a club. There's also zero chance of being poisoned by a dagger that doesn't make contact, as compared to the 50% (or so) chance that the rules give. I could go on.

Gygax knew that his rules were an inconsistent mess, so he tried to weasel out of it by claiming that Hit Points didn't represent what the rules told us they did. Why he didn't change the rules to be more consistent (for example, by allowing all HP to recover overnight), I'll never know.

What does it mean to get hit by a car?

If you get grazed by the side mirror of a car going 10 mph were you "hit by a car"?
If you get grazed by the side mirror of a car going 80 mph were you "hit by a car"?

Is there a difference in how likely you are to go to the hospital?

If you were standing behind a car that was put in neutral, and it rolled back and struck your shin were you "hit by a car?"
What if the car was going 25 mph?
How about 125 mph?

There is a difference in survival chances if you are hit and get flung over a car as opposed to being hit and being knocked under the wheels.

And we haven't even defined what we mean by a car yet. Could be talking about a tiny plastic efficiency vehicle like the SmartForTwo, which barely weighs over 2,000 lbs or we could be talking about an all steel 1965 Lincoln Continental which weighs over 5,000 lbs. Bet that makes a difference in the type of damage a person hit would suffer.


So, yes. You can't be poisoned by a knife that doesn't break the skin. You don't have to heal up from not being hit. But, a small scratch on your arm is enough to get poison in your system, and an ogre might have hit you on the outswing, and just left a really nasty bruise instead of shattering bone, like it would have if it had hit you in the "sweet spot" of the swing.

"Being hit" is both a binary state (you were either hit or not) and a very fluid and amorphous state (how badly were you hit) which is exactly what we can see in the game. There is a binary answer (did the attack meet or exceed your AC) and then a squishy, amorphous answer (how much damage did you take)

 

[Azzy]

I think the big take away from this thread is that not all us that come in from earlier editions have an issue with the natural healing in 5e. Some of us have different reasons why it isn't a bother, but in the end, it is what it is.

Fortunately for those that don't like the quick pace of 5e's natural healing, the rules can easily be modified to taste. Either by using one of the healing options in the DMG, or by importing your chosen edition's method wholesale. Do what you need to tailor the game to your group's tastes.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm sorry, but you can't defend "this is terrible, unlike the old days" by following it up with "not those old days, we've gotten better since then"

I'm responding honestly to the question asked by the OP. Ever since I started playing (in 2E), the game has worked a certain way, and I'm not happy about the radical departure in more recent years.

I couldn't care one whit about anything that happened prior to 2E. If you say that you never took it seriously, then good for you, but it's also irrelevant. That's not my game, I never played it, and it has absolutely zero bearing on the game I actually care about.

"Being hit" is both a binary state (you were either hit or not) and a very fluid and amorphous state (how badly were you hit) which is exactly what we can see in the game.

As long as everyone is in agreement that the ogre definitely made injurious contact, then that's a start.

If you want to argue about how severe a hit really is, well... you can't reconcile being beaten into unconsciousness and six seconds from bleeding out, with being good as new with zero scratches the next morning. It isn't a nebulous or amorphous state; it's an impossible and self-contradictory state.

 

[Oofta]

I think the big take away from this thread is that not all us that come in from earlier editions have an issue with the natural healing in 5e. Some of us have different reasons why it isn't a bother, but in the end, it is what it is.

Fortunately for those that don't like the quick pace of 5e's natural healing, the rules can easily be modified to taste. Either by using one of the healing options in the DMG, or by importing your chosen edition's method wholesale. Do what you need to tailor the game to your group's tastes.

I agree. This is one of the easiest aspects of the game to modify, if not the easiest.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sorry, long post.

For the record, I'm fine with 5E's way of handling healing. I disagree with @Big J Money's objections, though, mostly due to the issue of framing.

I consider HP to be plot armor, in that it has only circumstantial relation to actual physical damage. To put it in more concrete terms: Swords are sharp (as we're reminded with many katana cutting test videos), and flesh is soft, and you never actually want the two to meet. Same with hammers and watermelons. My barbarian with (currently) ~200 HP has exactly the same physical body as he did at 1st level when he had only 15 HP. Swords will remove arms, and hammers will crush heads, just as easily now as then.

So, the fact that my barbarian's physical body hasn't changed, and that a single sword cut should be deadly to him, implies that that single sword cut should be just as deadly now that he has 200 HP as back when he was fresh off the turnip truck. Thus HP cannot in any way represent actual physical damage, else he'd be a shambling pile of meat chunks by the time he's down in single digits due to all the deadly damage that represents.

You know, I was watching one of many Chinese dramas that you can dig up online last night (my wife is Chinese, she likes them because the sound tracks are in Mandarin, lol). In this particular show a major character tells the main character "This guy is a level 8 killer, you can't beat him, you're only level 7!" and then the fight is on and the two of them fight this guy, one dies, the other one wins. The main observation is there's NOTHING like your "flesh is weak" going on here. People are hurled clean through stone walls, flung 40' into the air, have giant 500lb stone crocks smashed over their heads, etc. Sure, they suffer, in the end one character dies, but there's no sense WHATSOEVER of any of them being anything close to ordinary people in terms of sheer physical toughness.

Now, obviously this is simply one genre of fantasy, but it isn't exactly a corner case. A LOT of popular fantasy, including legendary and mythical stories and such, share this characteristic. So it is really quite common to want to emulate that.

I'd also note that the main character, at the end of the fight, can barely walk, his arm is 'broken', he's dragging one leg behind him. Yet the next day he's fit as a fiddle and out there running around. Heck, IIRC he even spent the night staying up with his GF! Again, this is part and parcel of a LOT of fantasy. Systems like 5e handle this quite well OOTB and IMHO this is what a pretty large segment of the market wants. They aren't looking to pretend to drag themselves around with a lot of wounds, or hole up somewhere for days at a time, they want to imagine being a hero who gets back up, dusts himself off, and rocks on with maybe a brief scene where he limps a bit.

However, some don't like the abstract nature of HP, and want that HP to "mean" something. Jumping off a cliff and walking it off as only some minor HP loss doesn't sit well. Being speared by a trap and never having it account for more than a minor graze (once players are high level enough) is annoying. There's the feeling that there is no real sense of danger because HP comes and goes without any non-abstract risks attached.

The issue of recovering all your HP overnight is related to that, but is not actually the same thing. If dropping from 200 HP to 2 HP has no notable impact on the character, then whether I can recover overnight with a rest, recover overnight with several charges of a Cure Light Wounds wand, or recover over the course of 6 months at 1 HP a day, the only thing that impacts is the pacing of the game and management of resources.

By and large, people prefer fast paced games over slow ones, and most people do not enjoy resource management. (I actually enjoy resource management, but I'm also acutely aware that I'm in a very small minority.) So faster healing with less fiddly hassles will almost always be a better experience for the people playing, with respect to the pacing and management axes.

'zactly

But many people don't like it because it's "not realistic", or other similar reasonings. But it's not the issue of recovering HP quickly that's the actual problem; it's the fact that the abstract nature of HP takes away from the excitement of the gameplay. That's where gritty realism rules and such come into play. The problem is that they're not actually solving the problem, they're just reducing the impact of the simple abstraction of HP so that it feels like something is being done. It's a "theatrical" solution, like security theater, where you make people think you're doing something about the problem without actually doing anything about the problem.

In order to work through what's needed, we first need to go back and understand what HP is. While many people in the thread have provided interesting and creative explanations for what HP represents in-universe, out-of-universe it represents one thing: the ability of the players to engage in longer and more dramatic combat scenes.

With 200 HP, I can fight my way through dozens of swordsmen, or weather the fiery breath of a dragon. With 15 HP, I'd generally be dead in a single round. Further, the HP suggests where I stand in the fight. With more HP, I can be in the middle of everything blowing up. If I were a wizard with half as much HP, I'd be staying on the edges, trying to avoid being noticed.

Now, stop at that point for a moment. Realistically, there is very little difference in the amount of damage it takes to kill a wizard, compared to my barbarian. A sword through the heart will kill both just as dead. But my barbarian can survive vastly greater numbers of hits via the HP mechanic.

What HP is, then, is the opportunity to engage in direct dramatic combat, with the degree to which you can do so being directly correlated with the type of character you are expected to play. The drama a wizard brings to the game is casting spells, so his direct combat opportunity is reduced. The drama the melee fighters bring to the table is directly dependent their exchanges of blows, so they have more HP to increase their dramatic opportunity.

So HP is the opportunity for dramatic flair via combat. However its abstraction also limits its execution of the dramatic. The sprained ankle; the bum leg; the lost fingers; the arrow to the knee; etc.

Going back to the original question: healing all your HP overnight is resetting your character's options. It's saying, you have the opportunity to do something dramatic today, too. Every single day offers you the chance to do something amazing. And that's wonderful.

The problem is that it doesn't provide you with the means to give a commensurate level of risk. Even if injuries only last a single day, and are healed automatically overnight, they are still an important component of the drama of today's events. If you go with gritty realism, you're not improving the drama; you're just taking away the opportunities for being awesome. But without some risk mechanic, your moment of awesome is rather flavorless. By default, the only risk mechanic the game provides is death. The system needs more nuance.

Lingering injuries (from the DMG) do not provide the appropriate level of balance for that. They may provide a sort of character development or change, but they do not work on the same scale of abstraction as HP.

Most of what I see in discussions about HP, that people seem to want, is for HP to represent something actually physical, rather than just 'opportunity for combat'. This is suggested from the common understanding of HP to be correlated to a person's health, and where running out of hit points results in death. The issue is that people need some sort of mechanic to adjudicate and apply this increased risk, and there's not much in the core rules that seems to apply. Thus there are lots of little house rules that try to provide some way to express this desire.

Mostly I am with you, though I would point out that a 15 hit point PC and 200 hit point PC can both share the same degree of drama, they are just at different levels. This is one thing 4e did EXTREMELY well, is establish that the basic mechanical process only varies mostly in degree between levels, but that the narrative it goes with is at a significantly different character. This is why the three tiers were introduced, to clarify that the narrative progresses from 'heroic' to 'paragon', and on to 'epic' (5e sadly fails here, though I was never that fond of the term 'paragon' myself...). Thus the 15 HP level 1 barbarian fights some orcs in a cave, and the 200 HP level 20 barbarian fights an ancient huge red dragon in its lair. The orcs swing swords, the dragon blasts the party with lethal fire. Both situations are dangerous and dramatic, they just evoke a different aesthetic.

I've had ideas of my own, obviously. I'll put together another idea here, based on what I've written above. (Note: Largely written on the fly, with no guarantee of appropriate balance.)

When you take damage (treat multiple attacks separately) greater than (Con modifier + Level/2 + Hit Die size), make a Con save against a DC equal to half the damage done (minimum DC of 10) [same as a Concentration save]. If you fail the check, you take a minor injury.

You cannot have more than two minor injuries at the same time. (IE: Ignore any further minor injury checks if you already have two.) You heal one minor injury (your choice) per long rest.

Example minor injuries:

• Sprained ankle. -10 to speed, and disadvantage on athletics and acrobatics skill checks.
• Rung Your Bell (headache). Disadvantage on Intelligence skill checks and Concentration checks. Requires an extra 2 hours of rest for a long rest.
• Bruised Hand. -1d4 to attacks made with offhand and two-handed weapons.
• Arrow to the Shoulder. Carry capacity reduced. Disadvantage on Strength checks to push, pull, or lift objects. Cannot use an offhand weapon or bow.
• Black Eye. That shiner is pretty noticeable. Disadvantage on perception checks and Charisma skill checks.
• Whiplash. Difficulty moving your head makes fine control difficult. Disadvantage on Dexterity skill checks, and -1d4 to attacks made with dex-based weapons.
• Gut shot. A strike to your gut makes it difficult to move your body with any agility. You can't apply Dexterity to your armor class.
• Cramps. Muscle overuse caused them to cramp up, and the pain is making you short-tempered. Disadvantage on Wisdom skill checks and Concentration checks.

And feel free to make up others appropriate to the attack that caused the injury.

No minor injury is permanent; it only affects things for the current day (or maybe the next day, if you get a second). It works on the same dramatic scale as HP. It's similar to the exhaustion mechanic, but less broad in the penalties, and no risk that it can directly kill you.

It's a way of saying that physical damage is actually a thing, but largely divorced from HP, because HP is not your real body. At the same time, it works on a daily scale, like HP does, and can be caused by things outside of combat.

Some minor injuries might not inconvenience certain characters at all, while others will be much more frustrating. The injury should be selected to be thematic, rather than specifically to hurt the character. If the barbarian gets his bell rung, he'll just power through it; he's not worried about intelligence skill checks. Same for a wizard that took an arrow to the shoulder. It's fine that the injury may not directly penalize them; it's more about the drama that they kept fighting despite this setback, and that the flavor of the setback can be incorporated into play.

I would also consider this to provide the opportunity for more nuanced combat than simple "Victory or death!" It's a reasonable way to get an opponent to back off, similar to first blood duels, rather than simply run through all of an abstract number until the only available risk — death — shows up.


So those are my thoughts on how to deal with the HP abstraction.

I would sort of consider these conditions to be a bit 'mundane', but that is going to depend on the type of narrative you want/need. Also on what sort of levels you are playing at, as I pointed out above. The show I was watching the other day, apparently a broken/dislocated arm is a 'minor injury', as is a broken leg! Obviously this will offend some, but work well for others. The basic concept can be generalized though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, but on the flipside, you can't give every single adventure a time constraint either; that gets repetitive.

But my main point is that my players don't like doing things while they're not at full strength, so they're going to take the time to rest, whatever that time is. Whether it's overnight or a week, it won't change their playstyle.

Beyond that, it is all well and wonderful to say that the GM can control this, but it really isn't feasible for the GM to try to usurp whatever choice the players make in terms of resource recovery. Suppose the GM puts a timeclock on every adventure and tries to cajole the players into pushing on. Likely result is THEY WON'T. Now his bluff is called! Sure, he can drop the narrative punishment boom on the PCs, but how well is that going to go? It might sort of work now and then, but unless the players are really super engaged with the specific narrative, and thus the consequences actually mean something to them beyond just "we are picking a different version of the story that will still work out roughly the same" then punishment is meaningless. Worst case the GM sticks to his guns and nobody ever gets good treasures, he ends the campaign early with some apocalypse they failed to prevent, etc. None of these is win for the GM...

The long and short of it is, none of these pacing mechanisms really has much bite to start with, so the whole set of arguments about daily healing vs some longer time period is mostly meaningless. You have to engage the players, make stories that speak to the characters and tie them really thoroughly into the world. Old school types of D&D HAVE ways to do it, and more recent versions have different ways, so that would be more the distinctions to talk about IMHO.