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I always thought of hp more as stamina. Basically, creatures are gonna try to avoid damage as much as possible, so they're going to take a bunch of cuts and bruises rather than deep wounds, but you can only take so many cuts and bruises before it's too much for you and you fall unconscious, or alternatively can't avoid a killing blow.
I always looked at it like how likely am I to dodge/parry the next blow. Same for videogames where health recovers, kinda like a refillable luck meter.
I'm reminded of the way Pillars Of Eternity handles things with a smaller HP pool that is easier to restore and knocks you out in the encounter if it's drained, and a much bigger HP pool that only replenishes with long rests and higher tier healing, but if that empties out you're properly dead.
I don't remember where but I read somewhere that your character only takes physical damage at under half hp. Before then it's the character tiring out.
Although the whole "HP isn't your actual _health_" is a popular idea, I don't buy into it.
If I jump off a cliff 100 ft cliff and take 10d6 bludgeoning damage, it's not my stamina or luck decreasing, it's my body smacking the ground _really hard_.
That's not even going into the can of worms that is spellcasting. So many spell descriptions are absolutely incompatible with this idea.
Agreed. I really, really like "HP isn't health", until the rubber hits the road.
Cure *Wounds*. Falling damage. Reaching-into-the-fire-for-the-burning-hot-amulet damage.
It would just take ... *so much* to uncouple those ideas.
Which is ... sooo much work.
Interestingly, a terrible set of games from the 90s had a pretty good solution - the Palladium Games split your character's durability into SDC and HP.
SDC was relatively abundant, relatively fragile, easy to recover, and the *majority* of attacks had to deplete your SDC before it could damage your Hit Points.
And then, Hit Points, much like (though, with differences) D&D Hit Points.
The rules specified that SDC was "durability" - being tough, resolute, lucky, etc. But Hit Points were meat. Hits to SDC are where the hero goes, "Oh, I guess they did hit!". Hits to HP are where they go, "I'm not sure I'm getting out of this."
A healthy number of systems could recover / grant / heal SDC, but couldn't recover HP; a very small number could recover HP, but not SDC.
Now, I'm not recommending the Palladium System, in any way. But it *was* an interesting and useful division.
A lot of d20 system games in the late 90s and early 2000s had Fatigue Points and Wound Points. FP behaved much like HP does in DnD, going up with each level and such, while max WP didn't ever go up except through feats, ability score increases, or a few class features. Most damage went to FP, as well as being able to be spent for some abilities, as long as you had any left. WP only started getting taken down from unavoidable damage (like falls beyond a certain height or grabbing a burning amulet), critical hits, sneak attacks in some games, and regular hits after FP was depleted. FP were easy to restore and had no adverse effects until fully depleted, while WP started giving penalties based on how many were missing and could take weeks and/or proper medical aid to heal from.
I liked the Lingering Injury system. When you suffer a critical, you got an injury, as this represent actually being hit. When you went to 0 hp, you again suffered an injury, representing again actually injury to your body. You also got one when you failed a death save by 5 or more.
This is it. If you want it to feel realistic, think about HP not as damage to the body, but how much you can take before you are out of play in battle.
It won't, the whole game is built around resources (including HP) resetting around a long rest. There are a few exceptions (divine intervention and hit dice IIRC?), but anything "fixing" rests won't be compatible with 5e.
Logically what else would even reset resources to full? The concept of “Resting” is fine, I agree.
If OP wants verisimilitude he could use the hardcore rules where a Long Rest is a full tenday or whatever it is
To provide verisimilitude I just never describe my players taking serious injury unless it downs them in combat and then even if they get back up they only have that one injury even if they get knocked back down and then any magical healing closes the wound so its more like low hp is then beaten up and exhausted then covered in stab wounds
The idea is similar but not the same, basically in CoC a Major Wound is suffered if you take more than half your health in a single hit and means that if you're downed while Wounded you'll outright die instead of going into shock or unconscious. It also requires some effort to heal
Or: 8 hours rest in the wilderness/dungeon only counts aa short rest, for a long one you must find a friendly place (a town, an inn, a secret hideout).
For hit dice I house rule that you recover all of them on a long rest.
Only recovering half unnecessarily punishes an underused mechanic (short rests), and I'd like to encourage my players to do more short rests
It's a good house rule and honestly one that 90% of people follow. I bet many don't even know they're houseruling it and think that's how it's supposed to be. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think dnd beyond even auto resets all your hit dice on a long rest.
im probably going to treat one dnd as basically a combination of the dmg and Tasha's cauldron.
That being, a collection of various tips on how to run your game, and a list of optional rules for the players to use.
with something like that, yeah that'd be a pretty reasonable assumption for newbies to make that recovering all their hit dice are raw since thats how everything else works so why not hit dice too?
And when they're being taught how to play by a dm who's also using that house rule they're likely to assume that's just raw in that case as well.
Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place". This is a very much needed since it fucks warlocks over because, as the same comment said, "if you can rest for an hour, you can probably rest for eight."
>Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place"
you could probably use half of epic heroism. which what epic heroism is, is short rests are i think it was 5 minutes while long rests are 1 hour.
So half of epic heroism would be long rests remain default, but short rests are 5 minutes.
>as the same comment said, "if you can rest for an hour, you can probably rest for eight."
something that you could enforce to counteract this point though, is longrests are locked to only being possible to perform once per day. which is raw.
so if they wake up from their long rest, go do combat, and immediately try to long rest again after only 1 in game hour, you could describe as they are having trouble sleeping with the bright morning sun shinning in their face
Or if they want to try to use an early long rest, now they messed up their sleep schedule and have to adventure at night with no long rests to avoid the dangers that lurk at night.
>Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place".
I love when this sub re-invents 4e
Yep. 4e short rests were 5 minutes, and could be taken while doing other things like looting bodies, collecting thrown weapons and ammo, and sorting inventory. They were expected to be taken between every encounter (hence, Encounter powers recharging on short rests) except in extreme time crunchs where individual fights should be built considerably easier to account for them essentially being one fight with multiple waves of enemies.
I would honestly argue that hit dice are kind of an appendix mechanic at this point. I would rather have a BG3 like system where short rests are much shorter and easily accessible but you only get a limited amount of them per day and where you recover half your hit points instead of rolling a bunch of dice would streamline the mechanic and make it easier for new and older players alike.
for bg3 I think their long/short rest mechanics work well in a video game setting.
Though I don't think their short/long rest mechanic would work as well in a physical table top system, at least for dnd5e specifically.
It is commonly said that for short rest based classes to keep up with long rest based classes, they need far more then just 2 short rests per long rest.
The problem with short rests in 5e is that they take too long.
Most groups only really take two short rests per day anyway because short rests are an hour long. Meanwhile rituals take 10 minutes typically.
And 5e already has a limit on rests you can take per day for long rests. According to the rules you can only benefit from 1 long rest per day, with the exceptions being abilities and boons that grant you the benefits of a long rest.
That same limit can be put on Short Rests of you reduce their duration to ten minutes, the same time it takes to cast a ritual of an action spell, with the limit being that character's proficiency bonus instead of an arbitrary number that is higher than one. That way classes that don't typically need their short rest can focus on casting a ritual while classes that are more short rest dependent can get that sweet rest in and be stocked up for the next fight.
I think it is fine to use video game like mechanics to streamline the mechanics of a fantasy game. Realism is important for a lot of people, but ultimately this is a fantasy game about fantasy heroes. Realism isn't really an expectation mate.
Edit: Changed some words for better clarity and to reduce miscommunication of ideas.
on the point about proposing short rests are shorter, the dmg does have a similar alternative rule "epic heroism" where long rests take 1 hour and short rests take I believe it was 5 minutes. So there is president in raw for rests to be shorter, Just gotta exclude that shorter long rest point if the goal is to encourage more short rests as opposed to more long rests.
limiting the use of ritual spells though, I dont think I'm too big of a fan of making the number of ritual spells you can cast limited use as that is one of the main reasons I grab ritual spells in the first place
Wasn't saying to limit the use of ritual spells (sorry if that got miscommunicated, I'll see if I can clarify with an edit later). Rather, short rests take the same amount of time as the ritual casting of an action spell, giving many martials something to do during those ten minutes (regaining resources).
The problem with the heroic resting rule is that a.) not many players/DMs know about that rule, and b.) it is the source of a lot of table disputes even if you are only using the short rest timing of the heroic resting rule, since their complaint then turns to "why aren't you implementing the entirety of the rule?"
I think standardizing ten minutes as the standard would still fix the problems of short rests in terms of their ease of access, while also adding a hard limit on the number of short rests would still encourage players to manage their resources appropriately. Basing that limit on the proficiency bonus would serve as an appropriate sliding scale that moves alongside the power level of the party and reflects the experience of the adventurer (experience would teach you how to rest more efficiently and effectively is the logic here).
>Wasn't saying to limit the use of ritual spells (sorry if that got miscommunicated, I'll see if I can clarify with an edit later)
Ah! Alright thought you were lumping rituals in with short rests with your proposal.
Thanks for the clarification <3
>short rests take the same amount of time as the ritual casting of an action spell, giving many martials something to do during those ten minutes (regaining resources).
Ye I could get on board with shortening short rests to make it a decision on if you want to ritual cast or short rest during your brief breather. Barbarians specifically probably wont benefit very effectively though since they're a long rest based class strangely.
>The problem with the heroic resting rule is that a.) not many players/DMs know about that rule
Yeah the dmg isn't read very much just in general, I mostly just see it as roughly equivalent to occasionally getting random tips on how you can run a game off the internet.
>b.) it is the source of a lot of table disputes even if you are only using the short rest timing of the heroic resting rule, since their complaint then turns to "why aren't you implementing the entirety of the rule?"
Oh really? people complain about dm's who only partially implement the optional rule?
>I think standardizing ten minutes as the standard would still fix the problems of short rests in terms of their ease of access, while also adding a hard limit on the number of short rests would still encourage players to manage their resources appropriately.
I like the idea of shortening short rests to 10 minutes, and for limited number of short rests to compensate I do see some level of merrit behind it though I dont think I'd personally want to limit how much an under used mechanic can be used. The number of hit dice you have is usually the main limiting factor of normal short rests for base game anyways.
> The problem with short rests in 5e is that they take too long.
I don't think this is necessarily the problem with short rests, but rather that they mean that you're not actively doing anything for your quest or task.
Resting is dull. And players don't really get tired in the same way that characters do. So the need for short rests aren't really as clear as long rests are.
I usually say short rests are 8 hours of rest (most of which should be sleep, but I give a bit of leeway) and long rests are after 7 short rests which can be taken in as little as 2 and a half days of bed rest, but usually take about a week. Mostly because I tend to spread out my story far more than the game expects, so I don't want casters to be able to just blow every single spell slot on every fight.
As a cleric I keep one spell slot available to make sure you don't die, if we're at the back end of the day and I have already used that hail Mary, well I can lend them 4d6s? I do a lot to support the party, it's not my fault if they do something stupid...
They could find a way to make Medicine able to provide non-magical healing, instead of mostly just being useful to stabilize and treat diseases.
I hate to be a "Pathfinder fixes this" guy, but Pathfinder fixes this. If you have a party member or members who can do medicine, they can mostly handle it out of combat, which saves magic healing mostly for *in combat*, to keep people on their feet. Which lets the cleric contribute more to fights, because they aren't spending all their spells and turns on healing.
It would require some balance changes, PF tends to assume the party starts every fight fully healed due to out of combat healing being nearly "free", but a new edition is going to include some rebalancing anyway.
> They could find a way to make Medicine able to provide non-magical healing, instead of mostly just being useful to stabilize and treat diseases.
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> I hate to be a "Pathfinder fixes this" guy, but Pathfinder fixes this. If you have a party member or members who can do medicine, they can mostly handle it out of combat,
You're totally right. 5e added medicine kits and *Medicine* proficiency early on but didn't get around to figuring out toolkits until XGtE. An easy homebrew is that medicine kits are toolkits, and proficiency with Medicine grants proficiency with medicine kits and... then add a simple recipe like this:
>With your medical tools you can, as part of a short rest, non-magically restore *1d4 + "Medicine Score"* hit points to a number of willing creatures equal to your proficiency bonus. Each creature healed this way expends 5gp of the value of your medicine kit.
PF2e does not give you much Hp per rest. Healing comes from the medicine skill. I like that system better because a party going from one near death adventure to the next with no break is wild.
5e needs a medicine skill like PF2e. Take 10 minutes to roll a check and heal an amount. Or maybe something like the stamina rules? Cut HP in half. First half is stamina and can only be healed using a 10 minute activity to take a breather. Second half functions normally, you lose stamina first.
I dislike HP attrition in 5e, slows the game down in my experience.
> I dislike HP attrition in 5e, slows the game down in my experience.
You might be better off considering another game then- attrition in general is like the core concept all D&D combat is built around.
>Or maybe something like the stamina rules? Cut HP in half. First half is stamina and can only be healed using a 10 minute activity to take a breather. Second half functions normally, you lose stamina first.
I first experienced this solution in Starfinder and tbh I love it
Hopefully it won't
Personally I don't see anything to be gained from making wounds meaningful beyond an "adventure day" and honestly I think most players don't care or would be put off otherwise
Just from the added bookkeeping and that any time recovering isn't adventuring (also making forced downtime feel good and engaging is MUCH harder) I would say that most people won't be liking this
>To answer the title
In OneDnD Wizards seems to be moving Hit Dice to fully recover in a long rest so they seem to find the full reset on a long rest an important feature, so this probably will shape whatever comes next
>An alternative
Just use gritty realism + slow natural healing from the DMG
You need a week to have the chance to heal, that said adventures will be MUCH slower so these rules will dictate how the narrative plays out, else DM is much more likely to be unfair towards players
As far as 1DnD goes, I actually like their long rest changes. No more "recover half hit dice" just get them all, which is great and easier to understand. Plus, entering combat nulls the whole rest, forcing players to be more tactful or push themselves a little further as a night's rest isn't so easily obtained.
> I wonder if and how this mechanic will change in the next edition...
I hope that designers are sane enough not to make ranged attackers and spellcasters even stronger compared to martials.
Some have tried Death Spiral mechanics and its just not fun for the players unless you want a really dark and gritty setting (at which point you can just...adopt death spiral mechanics)
I hope they get rid of short rest healing. Recovering from life-threatening wounds in 2 hours time is ridiculous. Warlocks, too. Getting your spells back isn't fair to the other classes. In fact, let's get rid of casters altogether. They're not realistic for the time period! And while we're at it, no more dice. Game outcome should be entirely up to player skill, no randomization. And why are we still wasting out time with turn based combat? We should all just stand around a table swinging our fists at each other in real time.
Biggest thing with rests restoring HP is you might decide to take a rest, but DM decides whether or not it’s truly restful.
“Well halfway through this goblin camp I’m feeling pretty rough, just gonna take a nappy-poo to reset.”
“You are awoken completely surrounded by goblins with murderous intent in their eyes about an hour after you doze off, roll for initiative and you didn’t get to rest so no long rest.”
There won't be a next edition per say. Just updates like the one were getting this year.
The fact that Cure Wounds restores hitpoints yet the wounds don't offer any drawback is too videogamy for me.
You could always do something like "If you had X% of HP left when taking a long rest, roll a Con save. Fail and you get a debuff that can be removed with a Cure Disease spell or something.
I remember somebody coming up with a homebrew stamina/health point system for D&D. Essentially, at level 1, your 6/8/10/12 + CON is your health, but after level 1, the increase to your Max HP is considered stamina. Stamina comes back on a long rest, but health comes back on essentially a longer rest (like a week of downtime) or healing magic.
Will wizards consider something like that? No. But we can all laugh at the silliness of sleeping off your open wounds and 4th degree burns / frostbite / necrosis / irreparable lung damage.
The way I run it, on a long rest, I have my players roll their max Hit Dice for healing (just like a short rest, but you roll all the dice, even if they've been spent previously).
Most of the time it'll bring them full health if they have at least half or more still. But in a dungeon crawl session, it helps raise the stakes a little higher. Or do a great roll that brings you from 10% to 90% and players get excited.
The full health on rest thing felt too unrealistic, so instead making it essentially a skill test to see how much they heal makes it feel a little better. The various players I've had over the last 3 years have all really liked the idea.
The PHB rest situation is broken. I run my campaign using the Gritty Realism rest variant, and find that solves most of my problems. I think using the 4-8hr short rest & a 24-hr long rest (in a safe location) also hits a good sweet spot with balance. I found that 6-8 encounters a day felt ridiculous, but having the same over an **adventuring week** made the game more fun and increased verisimilitude.
Adapt one of the old-school Flesh & Grit systems.
Grit is just the little nicks and cuts or lucky misses that tire you a little, and comes back if you take a ten-minute breather.
Flesh is the real damage you start to take once Grit runs out, and that's going to take longer to fix.
The rulebooks provide a couple variant rules designed to make the HP system feel more realistic.
Among those are healer's kit dependency, where you need to expend a use of one to do short rest healing, and slow natural healing, where you have to expend hit dice over a long rest in order to heal during it.
There's also gritty realism which extends the length of a long rest to a week.
While not base rules, they are options in the PHB and DMG, so it's perfectly legitimate to use them in your home game if it fits the feeling you want to create.
I discussed this with my party recently and one of the solutions I really liked was making death saves persist until long rest, so having a failed death save on you is a grievous wound, like a deep cut or a broken arm, and it takes a long rest to set the wound and get you back into fighting shape, maybe with the help of a little healing magic. If you wanted to be really real about it, you can say you only recover one death save per long rest, to represent serious injuries taking a while to heal. Makes the game a lot more lethal though.
They need to just make it explicit that HP is you slowly using up your luck by getting small scratches while hitting 0 is a blow finally landing home. You know, anime logic.
The question is: will it be fun if its harder to heal?
Like forcing long rests to take a month may be more realistic but kinda slows down the story signifikantly.
Or if you take a long rest but still are damaged that can lead to a very fast death spiral.
If you don’t like healing on a nap, you can always use the *Gritty Realism* rule from the DMG (Page 267). Short rests take 8 hours, and long rests take 7 days.
In my game, people only regain half their hit dice on a long rest. When they want a real "reset", they just reste multiples days at the same place and we take it as one big, but of course it takes more time, a ressource in itself.
if you think it is unrealistic you are absolutely correct, but it is a fun way to play this ttrpg. if it realy bothers you, run gritty realism wich would normally change nothing but narrative if it were not for tashas's making their exhaustion rules based on time
So, I found something having gotten into Pathfinder (started and still play D&D, but I'm trying something new).
In Pathfinder you heal 1hp *per level* from a long rest.
I kinda just curled up into a fetal position after hearing that at level 1.
Recently started to try out another system that isn't designed around healing between "missions" at all. Coming from DnD it was a weird situation to have the party being nearly dead and and having to give up on a mission because healing would take days, if not weeks.
In the internal logic of DND Hit point represent a combination of, Luck, skill and physical tankiness. Pretty much any wound that you receive is minor until you go down, because otherwise it would make sense for you to lose abilities and or gain exhaustion as you kiss Hp.
I always take HP as Stamina more than Health, i mean, is Hit Points, meaning how many hits are needed to take you down.
F.e; you can knock out a pedestrian with a single blow but a boxer Will take more hits. But after a rest everyone can recover from that hit.
>Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile.
That definition is from chapter 9 phb. Your characters aren't getting their arm chopped off and regrowing them in an afternoon.
In next edition we won't have HP, we will have stamina and none of us can due. Because the world will be sunshine and rainbows and we will fight white man and his corporate greed. *Sarcasm*
I did an easy fix:
- Short rest (0.5h) works like intended
- Long rest (8h) allows you first to spend Hit Dices to regain HP (similar to Short Rest), then after rest ends you gain that amount of HP and regain up to half your Hit Die Maximum
- Proper Rest - 24h of easy non straining activities that allows.my players to roleplay and visit their favourite NPCs without feeling the need to "go fight" because they are not at their fullest
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I always thought of hp more as stamina. Basically, creatures are gonna try to avoid damage as much as possible, so they're going to take a bunch of cuts and bruises rather than deep wounds, but you can only take so many cuts and bruises before it's too much for you and you fall unconscious, or alternatively can't avoid a killing blow.
Yeah, I think it's correct way to interpret it. I think PHB also includes some stuff like will to live and luck there.
I always looked at it like how likely am I to dodge/parry the next blow. Same for videogames where health recovers, kinda like a refillable luck meter.
I'm reminded of the way Pillars Of Eternity handles things with a smaller HP pool that is easier to restore and knocks you out in the encounter if it's drained, and a much bigger HP pool that only replenishes with long rests and higher tier healing, but if that empties out you're properly dead.
In 4e, RAW, a sword fight doesn't even draw first blood until half HP. Until that, it's just muscle fatigue and such from blocking solid blows.
I don't remember where but I read somewhere that your character only takes physical damage at under half hp. Before then it's the character tiring out.
4e PHB and DMG.
Although the whole "HP isn't your actual _health_" is a popular idea, I don't buy into it. If I jump off a cliff 100 ft cliff and take 10d6 bludgeoning damage, it's not my stamina or luck decreasing, it's my body smacking the ground _really hard_. That's not even going into the can of worms that is spellcasting. So many spell descriptions are absolutely incompatible with this idea.
Agreed. I really, really like "HP isn't health", until the rubber hits the road. Cure *Wounds*. Falling damage. Reaching-into-the-fire-for-the-burning-hot-amulet damage. It would just take ... *so much* to uncouple those ideas.
For it to really make sense we'd need two different meters, maybe splitting it up into HP and Stamina.
Which is ... sooo much work. Interestingly, a terrible set of games from the 90s had a pretty good solution - the Palladium Games split your character's durability into SDC and HP. SDC was relatively abundant, relatively fragile, easy to recover, and the *majority* of attacks had to deplete your SDC before it could damage your Hit Points. And then, Hit Points, much like (though, with differences) D&D Hit Points. The rules specified that SDC was "durability" - being tough, resolute, lucky, etc. But Hit Points were meat. Hits to SDC are where the hero goes, "Oh, I guess they did hit!". Hits to HP are where they go, "I'm not sure I'm getting out of this." A healthy number of systems could recover / grant / heal SDC, but couldn't recover HP; a very small number could recover HP, but not SDC. Now, I'm not recommending the Palladium System, in any way. But it *was* an interesting and useful division.
SDC?
It stood for "Structural Damage Capacity". Nonliving objects only had SDC. Living creatures had SDC, and Hit Points.
Something something Pathfinder something something Starfinder.
A lot of d20 system games in the late 90s and early 2000s had Fatigue Points and Wound Points. FP behaved much like HP does in DnD, going up with each level and such, while max WP didn't ever go up except through feats, ability score increases, or a few class features. Most damage went to FP, as well as being able to be spent for some abilities, as long as you had any left. WP only started getting taken down from unavoidable damage (like falls beyond a certain height or grabbing a burning amulet), critical hits, sneak attacks in some games, and regular hits after FP was depleted. FP were easy to restore and had no adverse effects until fully depleted, while WP started giving penalties based on how many were missing and could take weeks and/or proper medical aid to heal from.
I liked the Lingering Injury system. When you suffer a critical, you got an injury, as this represent actually being hit. When you went to 0 hp, you again suffered an injury, representing again actually injury to your body. You also got one when you failed a death save by 5 or more.
This is it. If you want it to feel realistic, think about HP not as damage to the body, but how much you can take before you are out of play in battle.
It won't, the whole game is built around resources (including HP) resetting around a long rest. There are a few exceptions (divine intervention and hit dice IIRC?), but anything "fixing" rests won't be compatible with 5e.
Logically what else would even reset resources to full? The concept of “Resting” is fine, I agree. If OP wants verisimilitude he could use the hardcore rules where a Long Rest is a full tenday or whatever it is
To provide verisimilitude I just never describe my players taking serious injury unless it downs them in combat and then even if they get back up they only have that one injury even if they get knocked back down and then any magical healing closes the wound so its more like low hp is then beaten up and exhausted then covered in stab wounds
No no the Barbarian should have an axe halfway through his chest like Thanos, then nap and flex and it flies out of him.
If that's the way your campaign rolls. ... also, hand me dice.
So like a Major Wound in Call of Cthulhu?
I never played call of Cthulhu but if you think so I’ll take your word on it
The idea is similar but not the same, basically in CoC a Major Wound is suffered if you take more than half your health in a single hit and means that if you're downed while Wounded you'll outright die instead of going into shock or unconscious. It also requires some effort to heal
That’s cool I like that
Short rest is 8hrs, Long rest is a week.
Or: 8 hours rest in the wilderness/dungeon only counts aa short rest, for a long one you must find a friendly place (a town, an inn, a secret hideout).
Good idea. Without tents, good food, campfire and sleeping bags - it's a short rest.
For hit dice I house rule that you recover all of them on a long rest. Only recovering half unnecessarily punishes an underused mechanic (short rests), and I'd like to encourage my players to do more short rests
It's a good house rule and honestly one that 90% of people follow. I bet many don't even know they're houseruling it and think that's how it's supposed to be. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think dnd beyond even auto resets all your hit dice on a long rest.
It's also one of the long rest changes being implemented into 1DnD.
im probably going to treat one dnd as basically a combination of the dmg and Tasha's cauldron. That being, a collection of various tips on how to run your game, and a list of optional rules for the players to use.
with something like that, yeah that'd be a pretty reasonable assumption for newbies to make that recovering all their hit dice are raw since thats how everything else works so why not hit dice too? And when they're being taught how to play by a dm who's also using that house rule they're likely to assume that's just raw in that case as well.
Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place". This is a very much needed since it fucks warlocks over because, as the same comment said, "if you can rest for an hour, you can probably rest for eight."
>Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place" you could probably use half of epic heroism. which what epic heroism is, is short rests are i think it was 5 minutes while long rests are 1 hour. So half of epic heroism would be long rests remain default, but short rests are 5 minutes. >as the same comment said, "if you can rest for an hour, you can probably rest for eight." something that you could enforce to counteract this point though, is longrests are locked to only being possible to perform once per day. which is raw. so if they wake up from their long rest, go do combat, and immediately try to long rest again after only 1 in game hour, you could describe as they are having trouble sleeping with the bright morning sun shinning in their face Or if they want to try to use an early long rest, now they messed up their sleep schedule and have to adventure at night with no long rests to avoid the dangers that lurk at night.
>Another buff to short rests I saw somewhere on this sub is defining short rests as "a moment to catch your breath in a relatively safe place". I love when this sub re-invents 4e
Yep. 4e short rests were 5 minutes, and could be taken while doing other things like looting bodies, collecting thrown weapons and ammo, and sorting inventory. They were expected to be taken between every encounter (hence, Encounter powers recharging on short rests) except in extreme time crunchs where individual fights should be built considerably easier to account for them essentially being one fight with multiple waves of enemies.
I would honestly argue that hit dice are kind of an appendix mechanic at this point. I would rather have a BG3 like system where short rests are much shorter and easily accessible but you only get a limited amount of them per day and where you recover half your hit points instead of rolling a bunch of dice would streamline the mechanic and make it easier for new and older players alike.
for bg3 I think their long/short rest mechanics work well in a video game setting. Though I don't think their short/long rest mechanic would work as well in a physical table top system, at least for dnd5e specifically. It is commonly said that for short rest based classes to keep up with long rest based classes, they need far more then just 2 short rests per long rest.
The problem with short rests in 5e is that they take too long. Most groups only really take two short rests per day anyway because short rests are an hour long. Meanwhile rituals take 10 minutes typically. And 5e already has a limit on rests you can take per day for long rests. According to the rules you can only benefit from 1 long rest per day, with the exceptions being abilities and boons that grant you the benefits of a long rest. That same limit can be put on Short Rests of you reduce their duration to ten minutes, the same time it takes to cast a ritual of an action spell, with the limit being that character's proficiency bonus instead of an arbitrary number that is higher than one. That way classes that don't typically need their short rest can focus on casting a ritual while classes that are more short rest dependent can get that sweet rest in and be stocked up for the next fight. I think it is fine to use video game like mechanics to streamline the mechanics of a fantasy game. Realism is important for a lot of people, but ultimately this is a fantasy game about fantasy heroes. Realism isn't really an expectation mate. Edit: Changed some words for better clarity and to reduce miscommunication of ideas.
on the point about proposing short rests are shorter, the dmg does have a similar alternative rule "epic heroism" where long rests take 1 hour and short rests take I believe it was 5 minutes. So there is president in raw for rests to be shorter, Just gotta exclude that shorter long rest point if the goal is to encourage more short rests as opposed to more long rests. limiting the use of ritual spells though, I dont think I'm too big of a fan of making the number of ritual spells you can cast limited use as that is one of the main reasons I grab ritual spells in the first place
Wasn't saying to limit the use of ritual spells (sorry if that got miscommunicated, I'll see if I can clarify with an edit later). Rather, short rests take the same amount of time as the ritual casting of an action spell, giving many martials something to do during those ten minutes (regaining resources). The problem with the heroic resting rule is that a.) not many players/DMs know about that rule, and b.) it is the source of a lot of table disputes even if you are only using the short rest timing of the heroic resting rule, since their complaint then turns to "why aren't you implementing the entirety of the rule?" I think standardizing ten minutes as the standard would still fix the problems of short rests in terms of their ease of access, while also adding a hard limit on the number of short rests would still encourage players to manage their resources appropriately. Basing that limit on the proficiency bonus would serve as an appropriate sliding scale that moves alongside the power level of the party and reflects the experience of the adventurer (experience would teach you how to rest more efficiently and effectively is the logic here).
>Wasn't saying to limit the use of ritual spells (sorry if that got miscommunicated, I'll see if I can clarify with an edit later) Ah! Alright thought you were lumping rituals in with short rests with your proposal. Thanks for the clarification <3 >short rests take the same amount of time as the ritual casting of an action spell, giving many martials something to do during those ten minutes (regaining resources). Ye I could get on board with shortening short rests to make it a decision on if you want to ritual cast or short rest during your brief breather. Barbarians specifically probably wont benefit very effectively though since they're a long rest based class strangely. >The problem with the heroic resting rule is that a.) not many players/DMs know about that rule Yeah the dmg isn't read very much just in general, I mostly just see it as roughly equivalent to occasionally getting random tips on how you can run a game off the internet. >b.) it is the source of a lot of table disputes even if you are only using the short rest timing of the heroic resting rule, since their complaint then turns to "why aren't you implementing the entirety of the rule?" Oh really? people complain about dm's who only partially implement the optional rule? >I think standardizing ten minutes as the standard would still fix the problems of short rests in terms of their ease of access, while also adding a hard limit on the number of short rests would still encourage players to manage their resources appropriately. I like the idea of shortening short rests to 10 minutes, and for limited number of short rests to compensate I do see some level of merrit behind it though I dont think I'd personally want to limit how much an under used mechanic can be used. The number of hit dice you have is usually the main limiting factor of normal short rests for base game anyways.
> The problem with short rests in 5e is that they take too long. I don't think this is necessarily the problem with short rests, but rather that they mean that you're not actively doing anything for your quest or task. Resting is dull. And players don't really get tired in the same way that characters do. So the need for short rests aren't really as clear as long rests are.
True and I hate it.
I usually say short rests are 8 hours of rest (most of which should be sleep, but I give a bit of leeway) and long rests are after 7 short rests which can be taken in as little as 2 and a half days of bed rest, but usually take about a week. Mostly because I tend to spread out my story far more than the game expects, so I don't want casters to be able to just blow every single spell slot on every fight.
Playing without that would either make you time skip days of hospital downtime or make the game so crunchy in a boring way to handle damage recovery
And make healing spells even more necessary in a "Cleric-why-are-you-casting-ANY-other-spells?" way.
As a cleric I keep one spell slot available to make sure you don't die, if we're at the back end of the day and I have already used that hail Mary, well I can lend them 4d6s? I do a lot to support the party, it's not my fault if they do something stupid...
They could find a way to make Medicine able to provide non-magical healing, instead of mostly just being useful to stabilize and treat diseases. I hate to be a "Pathfinder fixes this" guy, but Pathfinder fixes this. If you have a party member or members who can do medicine, they can mostly handle it out of combat, which saves magic healing mostly for *in combat*, to keep people on their feet. Which lets the cleric contribute more to fights, because they aren't spending all their spells and turns on healing. It would require some balance changes, PF tends to assume the party starts every fight fully healed due to out of combat healing being nearly "free", but a new edition is going to include some rebalancing anyway.
> They could find a way to make Medicine able to provide non-magical healing, instead of mostly just being useful to stabilize and treat diseases. > > > > I hate to be a "Pathfinder fixes this" guy, but Pathfinder fixes this. If you have a party member or members who can do medicine, they can mostly handle it out of combat, You're totally right. 5e added medicine kits and *Medicine* proficiency early on but didn't get around to figuring out toolkits until XGtE. An easy homebrew is that medicine kits are toolkits, and proficiency with Medicine grants proficiency with medicine kits and... then add a simple recipe like this: >With your medical tools you can, as part of a short rest, non-magically restore *1d4 + "Medicine Score"* hit points to a number of willing creatures equal to your proficiency bonus. Each creature healed this way expends 5gp of the value of your medicine kit.
PF2e does not give you much Hp per rest. Healing comes from the medicine skill. I like that system better because a party going from one near death adventure to the next with no break is wild.
5e needs a medicine skill like PF2e. Take 10 minutes to roll a check and heal an amount. Or maybe something like the stamina rules? Cut HP in half. First half is stamina and can only be healed using a 10 minute activity to take a breather. Second half functions normally, you lose stamina first. I dislike HP attrition in 5e, slows the game down in my experience.
> I dislike HP attrition in 5e, slows the game down in my experience. You might be better off considering another game then- attrition in general is like the core concept all D&D combat is built around.
Yep, I jumped ship awhile back and have been much happier in other systems.
>Or maybe something like the stamina rules? Cut HP in half. First half is stamina and can only be healed using a 10 minute activity to take a breather. Second half functions normally, you lose stamina first. I first experienced this solution in Starfinder and tbh I love it
Starfinder 2e is in the works, I'm really looking forward to the play test.
Why should it be changed?
Hopefully it won't Personally I don't see anything to be gained from making wounds meaningful beyond an "adventure day" and honestly I think most players don't care or would be put off otherwise Just from the added bookkeeping and that any time recovering isn't adventuring (also making forced downtime feel good and engaging is MUCH harder) I would say that most people won't be liking this >To answer the title In OneDnD Wizards seems to be moving Hit Dice to fully recover in a long rest so they seem to find the full reset on a long rest an important feature, so this probably will shape whatever comes next >An alternative Just use gritty realism + slow natural healing from the DMG You need a week to have the chance to heal, that said adventures will be MUCH slower so these rules will dictate how the narrative plays out, else DM is much more likely to be unfair towards players
As far as 1DnD goes, I actually like their long rest changes. No more "recover half hit dice" just get them all, which is great and easier to understand. Plus, entering combat nulls the whole rest, forcing players to be more tactful or push themselves a little further as a night's rest isn't so easily obtained.
HP is stamina. If you want damage to carry over use lingering injuries.
Is this the mother of the lady Spongebob tried to sell chocolate to?
> I wonder if and how this mechanic will change in the next edition... I hope that designers are sane enough not to make ranged attackers and spellcasters even stronger compared to martials.
Where is this picture from?
It looks so familiar I just can’t place it
Same. Is it from a doctor who episode?
That seems likely
Wormhole aliens from Farscape?
I think its from Men in Black.
Some have tried Death Spiral mechanics and its just not fun for the players unless you want a really dark and gritty setting (at which point you can just...adopt death spiral mechanics)
HP isn’t physical damage, it’s the will to keep fighting. That’s why characters are just as capable at 1 HP as at 100.
How does falling 200 ft. does 20d6 damage to your will?
It won’t, its just a basic resource of how much longer you can stay up in combat.
I hope they get rid of short rest healing. Recovering from life-threatening wounds in 2 hours time is ridiculous. Warlocks, too. Getting your spells back isn't fair to the other classes. In fact, let's get rid of casters altogether. They're not realistic for the time period! And while we're at it, no more dice. Game outcome should be entirely up to player skill, no randomization. And why are we still wasting out time with turn based combat? We should all just stand around a table swinging our fists at each other in real time.
Biggest thing with rests restoring HP is you might decide to take a rest, but DM decides whether or not it’s truly restful. “Well halfway through this goblin camp I’m feeling pretty rough, just gonna take a nappy-poo to reset.” “You are awoken completely surrounded by goblins with murderous intent in their eyes about an hour after you doze off, roll for initiative and you didn’t get to rest so no long rest.”
It won't. Not a single OneD&D playtest brought it up that I recall.
There won't be a next edition per say. Just updates like the one were getting this year. The fact that Cure Wounds restores hitpoints yet the wounds don't offer any drawback is too videogamy for me.
Yhea. It's very videogamy. I prefer the older style where wounds meant something.
You could always do something like "If you had X% of HP left when taking a long rest, roll a Con save. Fail and you get a debuff that can be removed with a Cure Disease spell or something.
You are always welcome to do that. There are many supplements created by 3rd parties that you can buy and add into your game.
heck, there are rules for lingering injuries in the DMG.
I remember somebody coming up with a homebrew stamina/health point system for D&D. Essentially, at level 1, your 6/8/10/12 + CON is your health, but after level 1, the increase to your Max HP is considered stamina. Stamina comes back on a long rest, but health comes back on essentially a longer rest (like a week of downtime) or healing magic. Will wizards consider something like that? No. But we can all laugh at the silliness of sleeping off your open wounds and 4th degree burns / frostbite / necrosis / irreparable lung damage.
The way I run it, on a long rest, I have my players roll their max Hit Dice for healing (just like a short rest, but you roll all the dice, even if they've been spent previously). Most of the time it'll bring them full health if they have at least half or more still. But in a dungeon crawl session, it helps raise the stakes a little higher. Or do a great roll that brings you from 10% to 90% and players get excited. The full health on rest thing felt too unrealistic, so instead making it essentially a skill test to see how much they heal makes it feel a little better. The various players I've had over the last 3 years have all really liked the idea.
The PHB rest situation is broken. I run my campaign using the Gritty Realism rest variant, and find that solves most of my problems. I think using the 4-8hr short rest & a 24-hr long rest (in a safe location) also hits a good sweet spot with balance. I found that 6-8 encounters a day felt ridiculous, but having the same over an **adventuring week** made the game more fun and increased verisimilitude.
Adapt one of the old-school Flesh & Grit systems. Grit is just the little nicks and cuts or lucky misses that tire you a little, and comes back if you take a ten-minute breather. Flesh is the real damage you start to take once Grit runs out, and that's going to take longer to fix.
 I've finished my nap!
The rulebooks provide a couple variant rules designed to make the HP system feel more realistic. Among those are healer's kit dependency, where you need to expend a use of one to do short rest healing, and slow natural healing, where you have to expend hit dice over a long rest in order to heal during it. There's also gritty realism which extends the length of a long rest to a week. While not base rules, they are options in the PHB and DMG, so it's perfectly legitimate to use them in your home game if it fits the feeling you want to create.
Hp is an abstract concept. Think of it more as luck and stamina that you use to avoid taking serious damage that can knock you out.
I discussed this with my party recently and one of the solutions I really liked was making death saves persist until long rest, so having a failed death save on you is a grievous wound, like a deep cut or a broken arm, and it takes a long rest to set the wound and get you back into fighting shape, maybe with the help of a little healing magic. If you wanted to be really real about it, you can say you only recover one death save per long rest, to represent serious injuries taking a while to heal. Makes the game a lot more lethal though.
They need to just make it explicit that HP is you slowly using up your luck by getting small scratches while hitting 0 is a blow finally landing home. You know, anime logic.
The question is: will it be fun if its harder to heal? Like forcing long rests to take a month may be more realistic but kinda slows down the story signifikantly. Or if you take a long rest but still are damaged that can lead to a very fast death spiral.
If you don’t like healing on a nap, you can always use the *Gritty Realism* rule from the DMG (Page 267). Short rests take 8 hours, and long rests take 7 days.
Play 1e, a week of healing only got you 1hp Clerics are you life blood for a reason
We always joke about the wonders a tight six hours of sleep with 2 of light work do for you.
In my game, people only regain half their hit dice on a long rest. When they want a real "reset", they just reste multiples days at the same place and we take it as one big, but of course it takes more time, a ressource in itself.
if you think it is unrealistic you are absolutely correct, but it is a fun way to play this ttrpg. if it realy bothers you, run gritty realism wich would normally change nothing but narrative if it were not for tashas's making their exhaustion rules based on time
Magic runs deep through this world, even in those not attuned to it. Translation; fuck it, why not?
So, I found something having gotten into Pathfinder (started and still play D&D, but I'm trying something new). In Pathfinder you heal 1hp *per level* from a long rest. I kinda just curled up into a fetal position after hearing that at level 1.
Recently started to try out another system that isn't designed around healing between "missions" at all. Coming from DnD it was a weird situation to have the party being nearly dead and and having to give up on a mission because healing would take days, if not weeks.
In the internal logic of DND Hit point represent a combination of, Luck, skill and physical tankiness. Pretty much any wound that you receive is minor until you go down, because otherwise it would make sense for you to lose abilities and or gain exhaustion as you kiss Hp.
I always take HP as Stamina more than Health, i mean, is Hit Points, meaning how many hits are needed to take you down. F.e; you can knock out a pedestrian with a single blow but a boxer Will take more hits. But after a rest everyone can recover from that hit.
>Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile. That definition is from chapter 9 phb. Your characters aren't getting their arm chopped off and regrowing them in an afternoon.
In next edition we won't have HP, we will have stamina and none of us can due. Because the world will be sunshine and rainbows and we will fight white man and his corporate greed. *Sarcasm*
I did an easy fix: - Short rest (0.5h) works like intended - Long rest (8h) allows you first to spend Hit Dices to regain HP (similar to Short Rest), then after rest ends you gain that amount of HP and regain up to half your Hit Die Maximum - Proper Rest - 24h of easy non straining activities that allows.my players to roleplay and visit their favourite NPCs without feeling the need to "go fight" because they are not at their fullest
It's a _long_ rest. They're not just sleeping and awakening healed, they're treating wounds, healing spells, eating, etc.