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

[Oofta]

How other people play may not be any of my concern, but how the game is designed is a concern of everyone who plays it.

But you are in the minority of people that are bothered by this particular issue. Since your concern is far from universal it does not apply to everyone.

 

[Helldritch]

From what I can see. The longer you've been playing. The more upset you are with the full healing on rest rule. I've been playing for almost 40 years now and healing as it is bothers me to no end. Yet, I will not use the gritty realism found in the DMG. I found something that works for me and many others found something else that is working for them. Wheter we like it or not; D&D has a history. How it has been played should reflect how it is played now. I'm not saying that the game should not evolve. That would be a death wish for my game.

All we say is that the healing rule such as it is, isn't doing it right for us.

 

[Oofta]

From what I can see. The longer you've been playing. The more upset you are with the full healing on rest rule. I've been playing for almost 40 years now and healing as it is bothers me to no end. Yet, I will not use the gritty realism found in the DMG. I found something that works for me and many others found something else that is working for them. Wheter we like it or not; D&D has a history. How it has been played should reflect how it is played now. I'm not saying that the game should not evolve. That would be a death wish for my game.

All we say is that the healing rule such as it is, isn't doing it right for us.

But it's also a meta-game rule that is one of the easiest things in the book to modify.

Speaking as someone who's pretty much played the game since it was released I don't have an issue with it. You're entitled to your opinion of course, but all it's done for my game is reduced the need for healing wands, potions, healbots and other forms of magical healing.

 

[Azzy]

From what I can see. The longer you've been playing. The more upset you are with the full healing on rest rule.

I don't think that's true, there's quite a few of us that have been playing for a long time that have no problem with fast healing.

All we say is that the healing rule such as it is, isn't doing it right for us.

Fortunately, that's easy to houserule.

 

[tetrasodium]

5e's instant recovery cranked the dial well past heroic fantasy to some point deep into mythic struggles between The Greek/Roman Gods to an unbelievable scale even for those tales of myth. Yes there are things that you can do to crank the dial back to only ten or eleven, but there are too many subsystems that were overly simplified & complicate any simple fixes because of how deep into mythic fantasy of The Gods that the system is balanced around.

 

[Oofta]

5e's instant recovery cranked the dial well past heroic fantasy to some point deep into mythic struggles between The Greek/Roman Gods to an unbelievable scale even for those tales of myth. Yes there are things that you can do to crank the dial back to only ten or eleven, but there are too many subsystems that were overly simplified & complicate any simple fixes because of how deep into mythic fantasy of The Gods that the system is balanced around.

How hard is it to say "You don't regain HP from resting" if you want to take it to the extreme?

For better or worse, HP have been part of the game since it's inception. The only thing that's changed is how easy they are to recover.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It was a response to that idea where I brought up the "traditional RPG" in the old modules that are the most famous, pointing out that narrative consistency has rarely been a strong point in DnD's past. And now your response is "those modules don't matter, I am only considering my own experience from 2E on and nothing else."

You're the one who said that nobody took 1E seriously, so why should anyone take that into consideration? If you don't care, because you aren't taking it seriously, then your opinion (on what it is that is specifically working against narrative consistency) is irrelevant. Because, as you stated, you don't care.

And that's the running theme, throughout 5E, and especially in its healing rules: It's fine if it doesn't make sense, as long you're only playing with people who don't care.

You also can't reconcile the fact that a person who has lost 149 hp and still has 1 hp left, has suffered no detriments to their fighting ability whatsoever.

Alternatively, the character is suffering from reduced vision and a cracked rib, but those things aren't worth modeling on our binary-success single-roll d20-resolution system.

But, it still seems to be working well enough that people can play, enjoy, and make stories out of the game.

Some people can still have fun with it. Other people come to this thread, to answer the question being asked, about why they can't enjoy it.

 

[Kinematics]

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.

Yeah, Chinese xianxia stories reach truly ludicrous power levels.

I'll note that I wasn't really aiming for that power level when I was considering my idea. It was really more scaled for Three Musketeers levels, with a push towards Conan levels. That is, it fits levels 1-10 easily, 11-16 sorta, and probably doesn't work as well for 17-20. But yeah, the injuries can upscale in flavor (eg: a broken arm rather than a pulled shoulder) and still be considered 'minor' injuries at higher drama levels, so the general idea is probably more scalable than the exact phrasing.

 

[jasper]

I think we can all agree to level out the playing field and I being on the level, most of the gripe sessions would go away if Gynax hired and editor and use ...... what those orange books called.... Oh a" Roget College Thesaurus".
As DM from 1E I love the fast healing in 5E but I have embraced all the strange games rules overriding the verbal/wording/realism rules. And I being real here. (He types while under an alias. )

 

[tetrasodium]

How hard is it to say "You don't regain HP from resting" if you want to take it to the extreme?

For better or worse, HP have been part of the game since it's inception. The only thing that's changed is how easy they are to recover.

It's not just the extremes that are stretched to the point of snapping by 5e. Lets say you do slow natural healing, now martials are at a disadvantage to casters who get everything back & can go full leroy jenkins with their spells tomorrow. If you do the not so gritty "gritty realism" there are a ton of spells that become pointless or just hindered & you have to walk a fine tightrope trying to balance the needs of short rest classes vrs long rest classes... that's all before you factor in how many abilities, magic items, & spells are nonsensically pegged to days rather than rests. Any "simple" fix quickly proves to need more fixes. It's possible to tweak the dial one notch, but not three or four because zeus & ares just don't fit into gritty, survival, horror, mere heroic, etc unless you make them mortals by stripping them of their powers & set them against cosmic horrors.