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

[werecorpse]

I am 40 years into my d&d career so am your question target audience. When I run I use that long rests recover no hp but half hit dice so it can take a couple of rests without spells to fully heal up. I also play a risk of lingering injury that is triggered by failing death saves or taking critical hits. These injuries are inconvenient but not devastating (-2 max hp per level, -10 movement etc) and take weeks to heal so one can adventure with them but players prefer to get rid of them.

I want to achieve a game where players get to return to the adventure at full strength relatively easily and can also suffer a bit of resource depletion that makes the adventure harder.

When I played 1e once the party retreated and rested we tended to just hand waive a couple of healing days while the clerics burned through their spells. The only big difference would be if the party had no healer, in which case 5e allows much faster recovery, but back then as now we didn’t adventure without some sort of medic. Now we pretty much do the same. It’s not that different ime.

 

[dave2008]

I am...

OK, there are two aspects of the system. One is bloodied hit points (BHP) and the other is armor as Damage Reduction (DR). You can separate them, but for us they go hand in hand. Here is what we do:

• HP and AC are calculated and used per the standard rules. No change.
• Additionally, each player gets bloodied hit points (BHP). BHP = [STR mod + CON mod] x Size (Medium = 1). The only way to increase this is with the Tough feat (1 BHP per 5/levels) or through magic or a charm, blessing, or boon.
• You take damage to BHP after your HP = 0. We have an optional rule to have critical hits apply to BHP, but it was too brutal for our group so we stopped using it.
• When you would take damage to your BHP, and only when you take damage to your BHP, you first reduce the damage by your armor's DR.
  • Armor DR = armor AC-10
• When you are at 0 BHP you die.
• You regain BHP at the rate of 1 BHP per extended rest (which is a week in our game) and the use of a healer's kit (for each point of recovery). With a successful medicine check (DC = 25-remaining BHP) you can gain an extra point of BHP or reduce the rest length to a typical long rest. And of course magic works too.

What I like is that it gives a bit of realism with "meat" points (BHP) without getting to fussy and letting HP do there thing. It also allows us to have armor work normally...and apply DR, but only situationally. For us it is the right balance of abstraction and "realism." Furthermore, this could be further modified with different resting rules, lingering injuries, etc. just like the standard game.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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 wrote an entirely new game, using 5E as a basic framework, in order to fix this problem (and a few other, less important, ones). In my game, you heal 1hp per night (though that's actually closer to 4hp, after you convert the math).

It's just too ridiculous to suggest that all non-fatal injuries will always heal automatically within such a short time period. (And it's too radical to suggest that the rules of the game don't actually reflect how the world works, because if swords don't inflict physical injury, and wounds don't heal overnight, then we have no idea of what's actually going on. It's a deficient model, because we don't get a usable narrative out of it.)

Simply changing the length of a rest is insufficient, because too many things are tied to long rests; and the system math is designed around the assumption that everyone will be hit, and take damage, on a fairly regular basis. You'd have to re-balance the entire system in order to compensate. (Which is what I did, because there's no other way around it.)

 

[Arilyn]

I don't mind. Now you don't need a cleric, which got tiring. We can get away from players buying cure wands in bulk, and the cleric bopping characters over the head several times to get them back to fighting form.

Yes, the overnight healing is silly, but so is the sheer amount of combat D&D characters face daily.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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.

The game actually has rules for what happens when you fall on spikes. You roll dice to determine whether or not they actually hit you, and how much damage is inflicted if they do.

I guess you could argue that a hit isn't really a "hit", and damage isn't really "damage"; but if those words don't mean what they always mean, then we have no idea what's actually going on.

 

[Arilyn]

The game actually has rules for what happens when you fall on spikes. You roll dice to determine whether or not they actually hit you, and how much damage is inflicted if they do.

I guess you could argue that a hit isn't really a "hit", and damage isn't really "damage"; but if those words don't mean what they always mean, then we have no idea what's actually going on.

This pretty much D&D in a nutshell.

 

[Charlaquin]

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

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

Half rounded down, minimum 1.

 

[BryonD]

There are a lot of things about RAW 5E I that find really terrible.
Healing is probably at the top of the list.

And one of the truly AWESOME things about 5E is how readily it embraces changes. That core system can be house ruled so easily. It is really great.

 

[CleverNickName]

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.

I honestly can't think about the implications for a minute. I have to stop thinking about this topic in order to play D&D, because it is jarringly disruptive to my willful suspension of disbelief. The game forces me to somehow believe that hit points represent something besides physical damage, while also representing physical damage sometimes, but not really, but kinda.

All I know is I got shot by an arrow, and that arrow somehow pushed me closer to death, but after 8 hours of sleep it becomes apparent that the arrow never really touched me after all. Sure buddy, whatever you say.

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 just grit my teeth and swallow it. The rules say a number on my character sheet changes, so I erase it and write a new number down. Hit points do not have a real-world analog, and there is no way that anyone can explain hit points to me in a way that makes sense, so I just roll my eyes and try to ignore it.

That fireball either burned my skin or bummed me out, I'm not sure which. Best not to think about it. All I know is, I need to start trying to convince everyone to vote for a long rest after this battle is over.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's just too ridiculous to suggest that all non-fatal injuries will always heal automatically within such a short time period. (And it's too radical to suggest that the rules of the game don't actually reflect how the world works, because if swords don't inflict physical injury, and wounds don't heal overnight, then we have no idea of what's actually going on. It's a deficient model, because we don't get a usable narrative out of it.)

We absolutely get a useful narrative out of the mechanics. When an attack roll beats your armor class, your ability to remain in the fight is reduced, but you are not injured severely enough that a night’s rest won’t be enough to get you back in fighting condition. I think it’s pretty disingenuous to suggest that we have no idea what went on there. Sure, we have to apply a little creative interpretation (did you get slightly nicked? Did you dodge out of the way but doing so was a little tiring? etc.) But we have to do that anyway, because with HP as meat, there’s no reliable scale for what kind of injury resulted from the hit. Maybe if HP never increased we could work out a very precise narrative about how much HP loss represents what kind of injury, but otherwise, the HP mechanic will always involve some degree of abstraction.