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

[Umbran]

Now I get that any DM can house-rule (and I'm curious who does) special situations.

You don't even have to house rule it - this concept exists in the DMG, iirc.

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?

Okay, so, there's in-game, and out-of-game justifications. The latter is, as far as I am concerned, far more important.

In older editions, playing the healer was, IMHO, not a whole lot of fun. You had to reserve large amounts of your power for healing, just in case. You spent a lot of your time swinging a mace to little effect, and then healing up the folks who had been of great effect.

So, one out-of-game justification - that it allows those with healers to not sit on their hands all the time. Another is that I personally find actually interacting with scenes to be where the fun in a game lies. Making it hard to heal up reduces the average number of scenes we'd get through per session - so, there's another out-of-game justification in that it allows us to actually play more game, with less fiddly hit-point bean-counting.

The last important justification is that... we are playing pretty pulpy fictional heroes. Go watch Die Hard again. Beloved action genre staple, right? But, there's no way that hero should actually be up and about at the end of it. That's okay. It isn't about being realistic, it is about HEROISM and ACTION. Suck it up and deal.

IN-game, we can lay about ourselves with rationalizations about hit points not being meat and all that. But, to be honest, if you can't accept the primacy of the out-of-game reasons for the choice, those won't help you. And if you can accept the metagame rationales, you probably don't need in-game rationalizations.

 

[Laurefindel]

I’m of two minds about it, but I’m mostly ok with it.

On one hand it fully assumes the abstract nature of hp. Your leg does set overnight, because your leg never was broken in the first place. I always liked that, and always wondered why it took a week and more to « catch my breath » after a day of adventure without a cleric. Now it’s baked into the system (however, a lot of the D&D terminology still implies loss of hp as wounds, i.e. « cure wounds » spells. However, none of there spells and effects « heal », they « restore » hp, which keeps it abstract).

On the other hand, that’s too much « free » healing in a short period of time for my taste because I never run the 6-8 encounters per day. Luckily, changing rests fixed the issue, and that of spellcasters too because...

A bigger grippe of mine between AD&D and « modern D&D » is that spellcasters can now recover all their spells overnight, even at high level. When memorizing spells took 10 minutes per spell level per spell, a high-level caster could take days reloading its allegorical arcane gun. Nowadays, 10 minutes of preparation and your 20th level wizard is ready to nova! Again, longer rests fix that.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Yep. And the NPCs that a player might be handling for the PCs. What about henchmen or retainers? Saying they are laid up for weeks while the PCs can go merrily about breaks realism for me.

Yeah, I know, for people who want their super-heroic uber-duber characters play it your way. I find those games lame and boring and pointless because I know I'm going to win. What is the fun in that? It is like playing chess by yourself--some people do it and have fun with it, I think it is silly personally. For the same reason it is why I prefer characters who are more "average" but choose to do heroic things at great personal risk.

If the "good guys" get cheap and easy healing, so do the "bad" guys in my games. You don't want a game that is actually a challenge, don't sit at my table.

IMC, henchmen and mounts also heal at the more generous rate. Although, realistically, unless they are gaining levels it stops mattering fairly quickly, because if they get hit at even mid-levels they're probably dead. And if they're gaining levels then they're proper action heroes, much like the PCs.

In most cases in my games, non-combatants with the party will stay out of the fight and combatants will ignore them until the fight is over. It's not always hyper realistic, but IMO doing otherwise discourages the party from investing in things like henchmen, and that results in a diminished game overall. Once in a blue moon having to scramble to save your people from ghouls is exciting. Doing so all the time is annoying and futile.

Take Joe the Barber. He's just your average barber. If he were stabbed, he'd bleed (and probably die). If he survived being stabbed, he'd likely be laid up for weeks or months. But through a series of misadventures he gets tangled up with the party and through circumstances beyond his control is forced to accompany them on their adventures. When dangerous things happen, he retreats to safety and waits for them to blow over. Eventually, Bob the Rogue shows Joe a thing or two about fighting. He's not very good. Certainly not of the party's calibur. But if he joins a fight and survives, he recovers overnight just like they do. Because whether he realizes it or not, lady luck has smiled upon him and he's now an action hero (or at least the action hero's well meaning sidekick, which is close enough to the real thing).

The recovery rules apply as I (the DM) see fit. If random goblin gets dismembered by the party but survives, he's got a long road to recovery. If the Dark Lord gets knocked to 1 HP by the party, but his mage teleports him out of there, he'll be mostly okay after having a chance to catch his breath, realizing that the party had him on the ropes but not terribly worse for wear.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You could be starved and tortured for months, go to bed.

No, you couldn't, because that would apply tons of other debuffs and effects, particularly Exhaustion levels. Indeed virtually all torture that isn't purely aimed at extracting a meaningless confession so you can say "He confessed, off with his head!", revolves around exhausting the target. Exhaustion levels go down at 1 point per long rest, assuming you get food and so on. Anyone seriously starved and tortured is likely on 3-5 levels of Exhaustion.

You could fall off a building, go to bed.

Yeah, because you evidently didn't land that badly, because you only lost HP, rather than dying. You were able to get up and run off the next round. Just like 1E, 2E, 3E and 4E. How do YOU not have a problem with people being able to leap to their feet and run off after falling off a building, yet you DO have a problem with them getting their HP back? Makes zero sense and undermines your entire point.

You could be impaled on a spike, go to bed.

Nope. Because if you were "impaled on a spike", you'd lose a lot more than HP. If you're just doing HP damage for genuinely being "impaled on a spike", you're doing it wrong. This is the closest to a real problem, but still not really.

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?

My justification is that I actually understand what HP are meant to represent and how they work and don't inaccurately describe things or misuse HP thus the rules work as intended? Is it really so hard to work with? Your whole argument is total "meat points". Played since 1989, I should note.

As other have noted if you do want a more "meat points" approach, there are several alternate healing rules right there in the DMG.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I’m of two minds about it, but I’m mostly ok with it.

On one hand it fully assumes the abstract nature of hp. Your leg does set overnight, because your leg never was broken in the first place. I always liked that, and always wondered why it took a week and more to « catch my breath » after a day of adventure without a cleric.

I look at it like this. Not every lingering wound has to be catastrophic. You don’t have to have amputations or broken limbs to justify healing slower. How long does a bruise have to heal? Or any abrasion? Heck, I bet if you took all the posters here, and made every one of them do a single hour of high intensity anaerobic exercise, the painful limiting effects would last longer than a day (it usually takes me 3 days for the soreness to fully go away), and that’s just exertion; no actual damage taken.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Those of you who are used to older editions, what justification to you use for nightly healing?

I'm still OK with the 1e DMG explanation of hps, c1979, which leaves plenty of room for very rapid recovery of hps.

With D&D having always used spell-casting, including healing spells, that recharge, at worst, overnight, and in some cases in only a few hours, systematically healing a party up via repeated castings had always been far faster than realistic healing of even fairly minor physical wounds.

Overnight healing in 5e is, IMHO, little more than a bookkeeping convenience. Instead of reconciling systematic casting and tracking potions or wand charges, you just recover hps on the same rest basis that recovers the healing spells that'd let you recover them, anyway.

 

[the Jester]

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 use a house rule: a long rest restores half your Hit Dice, rounded down, minimum of one, and no hit points.

Full recovery on rest is one of the worst things in 5e, at least for my playstyle.

 

[Laurefindel]

I use a house rule: a long rest restores half your Hit Dice, rounded down, minimum of one, and no hit points.

Full recovery on rest is one of the worst things in 5e, at least for my playstyle.

That’s the « slow healing » variant from the DMG. I like to use that when I’m not using « gritty realism » (which has little to do with neither grittiness nor realism).

This variant partially addresses @Sacrosanct ´s observations too.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I will start using the Vitality option as seen in an old UA (without the thing were your must recalculate you HP max everytime you lose vitality). Since there is no way to improve your Vitality maximum other than raising Con, even with 100000 HP, higher CR monsters can still threaten character more easily by depleting both resources at the same time. It also gives low level PC more staying power.

It also resolve the question of HP-as-Meat vs HP-as-luck. HP is your stamina/endurance/willpower etc, Vitality is your meat. You can also create 4e-style Minions by using a normal monster, but giving it only 1 Vitality point.

Here's the rule:
''Each character has a pool of vitality in addition to hit points. A character's maximum vitality equals the character's Constitution score. Whenever a character takes 10 or more damage from an attack or effect, the character loses vitality. A character loses 1 vitality (rounded down) for every 10 points of damage dealt by an attack or effect.

If a character suffers a critical hit, double the vitality lost, so that the character loses 2 vitality for every 10 points of damage. If a critical hit deals less than 10 damage, it still reduces vitality by 1.

Losing vitality causes a character's hit point maximum to drop. Calculate the character's current maximum using vitality instead of Constitution. Thus, as vitality drops, a character's Constitution modifier for determining hit points also drops.

A character reduced to 0 vitality is immediately reduced to 0 hit points. If a character is reduced to 0 hit points but his or her vitality remains above 0, any additional damage is applied instead to the character's vitality. A character is not unconscious until both hit points and vitality reach 0.

Completing a long rest increases a character's vitality by 1 + the character's Constitution modifier, up to the character's maximum vitality. Effects that restore hit points have no effect on vitality. However, a character with maximum hit points who receives healing instead restores 1 vitality for every 10 points of healing.''

Then I use the principle of ''Health (is this case hp) is Everything'' stolen from Fantasy Age campaign builder guide: Since hp now represent the characters will to go on, you can now deal Hp damage from sources that would normally only affect the character drive: failed skill challenges (remember, in 4e they drained HS), smoke inhalation, diseases, lack of sleep, sanity threatening sights, heart corrupting situations etc. No longer need for other subsystems since it now has only one effect: damage the characters endurance (hp).

On the other hand, poison could always deal at least 1 point of vitality damage on a hit/failed save, even if the damage isnt enough.

 

[Retreater]

FWIW, you don't recover all your Hit Dice with a long rest.

You recover HALF (rounded up) of your Hit Dice.