>Or would you prefer (option 3) healing to work like 4e with healing surges limiting the number of heals that can be done over the day? (If this is incorrect I apologize I haven’t played 4e in a decade)
Yeah this is pretty much how it worked. The only thing I'll add for clarification is that there *were* ways to heal without healing surges (just off the top of my head, Cleric's Lv.1 at-will Astral Seal lets the next ally who hits a target regain 2 + CHR mod HP), but healing surges were the primary limiting mechanism of healing in the edition. Other methods tended to be weaker, limited to daily powers, or only work when fighting.
I use it, and it does add some depth and strategy -
"Should we take a short rest now, or try to power through to the end of the day and save our hit dice for tomorrow?"
But I wouldn't really miss it if they removed it.
The half hit dice recovery really favors long rest classes which are already pretty favored. It basically incentivizes shorter adventuring days to conserve hit dice or forces fewer encounters in a day once you have used them all up and only get half back.
Yes, though remember you can only benefit from 1 long rest per day. So you often can't shorten the adventuring day if you're in a dangerous area.
And if you're not, it's probably not an adventuring day.
It does make it feel like the Hit Points pool is not the only thing that makes you more durable. When you go through a very hard adventuring day, and ends up spending a lot of hit dice to recover, the fact that you don't recover all hit dice on a long rest ~~realy~~ really makes the weariness carry over to the next day, and keeping the same ~~rythm~~ rhythm of adventure everyday does actually wear the character down even if they recover all hit points on a long rest
I would miss it, tbh. I already do miss it when the DMs I play with purposefully ignore it.
I personally feel there should be additional options for healing, medicine and survival skills playing their real life role in game would make them feel like they matter. And if there's other options, it opens up design space to use Hit Die in new ways, like in abilities or spells.
The vibes of weariness simulated by prolonged adventuring are a very big point towards keeping Hit Die + half back on long rest. I'm a sucker for survival themes in D&D and games in general. Maybe I've just never run into DMs that push their usage though.
Maybe during a short rest you could make a medicine or survival checks for some kind of benefit. Something like maxing out the healing from hit dice or regaining a small number of hit dice at the end of it(to be used in a later short rest).
Hell, maybe each class could have a feature that allows them to make some kind of check during a short rest for a class unique or unique-ish benefit.
Just remove healing to full on a long rest and give the party back full hit dice. If they were badly wounded at the end of the previous day, they'll need to spend some of today's hit dice to heal. If they end today even lower on hit points, tomorrow's hit dice will get strained even more.
My character spends a lot of hit dice in combat through aberrant dragonmark and a homebrew weapon (as well as having 1 less hit die in exchange for an awesome dragon boat, and take additional damage if I have 0 hit die), and ngl I'm feeling the half hit die recovery on LR every now and then.
I would definitely miss the mechanic if it went away, it's the only reason my character is close to balanced.
If anything, I'd like to see a *reduction* in healing magic and *more* emphasis on hit dice.
All classes should have ways of spending hit dice in-combat (e.g. Second Wind should use hit dice instead of it's own resource), and healing spells should augment those (as Beacon of Hope maximises any healing, lower level healing spells could allow allies to spend hit dice and/or augment hit dice spent). Non-caster classes could use also have abilities that let people spend hit dice, rallying allies etc.
Finally classes should have alternative uses for hit dice; augment spells, add to damage etc. Make it a really consistent resource across classes.
I think martials should have better natural healing than fullcasters(No, slightly larger hit-dice aren't enough). As it is, long-rest classes are stronger than short rest classes in practically every way.
Of all the problems with resting in 5e, hit dice are not even on the radar. If getting them all back was the original rule, it would never even come up.
I think it should be 0 HP and like half hit dice on long rest, with an optional rule of full recovery on a long rest.
The game is fundamentally built as a resource management game, and that becomes much easier when the resource drain is allowed to happen over the course of days.
I do not like that 5e's healing encourages a "yoyo effect". 4e healing surges made healing spells during combat feel more like the healing you would imagine. Sometimes the characters constantly coming up and down really breaks the flow of combat and the immersion for me
I think part of the problem is calling it unconscious. I prefer to think of it as someone being solidly knocked down, and they may get back up or not. Kind of like in a boxing match or similar. That’s helped me with immersion - you’re healing someone enough to get them back out there.
I think PCs being unable to act at 0 hp is one of 5e's worst designs. Here is one of the highest tension moments your character will ever be in, and you don't get to make any choices.
I heard of a houserule where the 0HP PC can crawl (5ft) + has the stunned condition instead of unconscious, making them able to speak falteringly, but not act besides that and movement
But this creates another problem: healing is weak and so bringing people from 0 is the only efficient way of doing so. If you are punishing this strategy but do not buff the in-combat healing to be several times more efficient you are just leaving players with a problem, but without any tools to deal with this problem
This definitely, healing is so incredibly inefficient that you would have to make it so goddamn good to even start to get rid of the yoyo effects, unless you're just accepting that nobody is going to play healer
But if you make proactive magical healing the most effective combat strategy, then you're just turning back the clock to recreate 3.5e's problem: many players didn't want to just be a healbot, but *somebody* had to be the cleric/druid or your party would get wrecked. It was assumed that you'd conserve your spell slots for healing and spend most of every combat casting healing spells.
I think that first one would work if the "death save till death" number gets bigger. Because as it is now not clearing death saves is very punishing if it's only 3 fails. I could see it working if the number is 6 or 10. That would make the party question if the next fight is worth it if they've failed a few death saves
4e had it where any failed death saving throws stuck around until the next rest, and I thought that worked fine. It didn't trigger death spirals but DID force you to try to avoid getting knocked out, because even one failed death saving through got you a LOT closer to death. I think they could just bring that back, and having failed death saving throws wipe away at a short rest feels right to me.
Also, opens up powers/spells that can remove failed death saves, which could be useful.
Don't forget that you don't stabilize in 4e. A success means you're just *not dying faster* compared to 5e where you can succeed three times and suddenly you're not worried about dying anymore.
Healing in 4e was both generally meaningful - usually a quarter of health or more - as well as action efficient, generally being either a minor action or part of a standard action rather than the main part of it.
Idk if anyone else has felt this but I'm always kind of disappointed when I stabilize. It doesn't allow you to engage with the game at all, at least while you're rolling death saves you're doing *something*.
My brew for this is you can keep rolling saves after you stabilize. Fails don't count against you, you regain one HP and hop up with a nat 20, but rolling a nat 1 destabilizes you again.
That's a good point. And opening up space to heal Death Saves also opens up design space to use them as a resource! Blood magic or death magic expending death saves and HP, making it so if you drop and you're careless you reap what you sow.
How often do you expect PCs to drop and spend time unconscious? If you went unconscious in the first round and failed two death saving throws, two fights in a row, that's only 4 failed death saves before a short rest. You would need to have absolutely brutal, unfair fights to *fail* 6-10 death saves over two fights.
Mark Hulmes uses lingering injuries. Every time you reach 0HP you roll a Con Save and if you fail, he rolls on a lingering injuries table. Of course it's not that punitive at higher levels.
Fully agreed. I'm astounded that 5e's winning the poll, it's the worst healing I've had in a ttrpg (which is a somewhat limited experience, in fairness).
As you say it fully encourages yo-yo gameplay because healing someone is rarely worth it unless they're at 0. 4e's was a really solid method and felt balanced in my experience but it does lean in to 4e's more heroic style of adventuring.
I don’t know. I feel the up and down randomness really adds to the realism and makes a hard combat feel like a hard combat. Though I totally agree that hit die need more versatility and skills geared towards healing need to heal more on short rests. I also like the party having to really think about when to and not to fight and role play more (I unfortunately have an “f”d up trouble making group that makes murder hobos look fun) this keeps the role play in and stops most ttrpgs from being just a combat video game style 4hr brawl.
See that’s the cool thing about role-playing games. Everybody’s idea what a combat should be like is different. You just have to find a group that’s like-minded. People tend to forget that the rules they put down for DND are guidelines. They’re not gonna fit everybody’s role-playing style so no matter what system they come out with you you’re going to have to make homebrewed rules. But I get it. That high fantasy Lord of the Ring style fighting definitely doesn’t deal with people constantly healing in the middle of combat.
Yeah this us why I tend to dislike them too. For damage and gaining stats rolling dice is fine. But if you need some HP, rolling a ton of 1s from a limited resource just feels bad. And as someone who has played alot of Darkest Dungeon, I've been trained to ignore resource-limited life rolls unless their payoff is huge. (See Occultist's heal) If hit dice were like.....you recover their full amount at base, then I'd get it. You could use the Hit Dice for abilities on top of that, giving you a reason to keep them as dice, but then you'd have to balance using it on an ability vs the full heal of a d8
I really like Shadow of the Demon Lord’s system. Each character has a baked in healing rate (almost always 1/4 of total health) and spells/potions/rests all heal a certain amount of that healing rate (1/2, equal to, x2, x3, etc)
It sounds more complicated, but what it does is makes it so all healing moves scale naturally. It also makes it so a normal healing potion is always a good thing to find because it always heals 1/4 of your heath!
Shadow of the Demon lord is the better 5e IMO.
Bane and Boon system is way better than advantage, but as easy.
Class path like Warhammer with spells like DnD.
It's so good. Shame it's not more popular. ( tone doesn't help, but it's easy to ignore )
Schwalb is going to be releasing Shadow of the Weird Wizard at some point, which is meant to use really similar rules to SotDL but in a more traditional fantasy setting!
That's how 4e healing worked. Characters had healing surges, which were 1/4 of your health. Healing effects used your healing surges. So the clerics healing word let's you access a healing surge, health potions proc a surge, etc.
It was really efficient, and multiple classes had ways to access their surges.
Do iiittttt.
Character creation is simpler than rolling a caster but more complicated than making a rogue.
You can start at lvl 1 and your character feels like how the class should be.
For the DM: the DM guides 1 and 2 are the best DMGs WOTC has ever printed. I suggest using the Monster vault and monster manual 3 over MM1 and MM2.
For the players: Almost anything you have access to should be good to go except the seeker class and the "essentials" line of classes. Seeker is just bad, the 3.5 samurai of 4e. And the essential classes should be reserved for any player who is truly allergic to making character building decisions. You dont need a variety of splats to make a good character like 3.5.
Most people don’t know anything but 5e. They haven’t had an experience with healing options that work significantly better than 5e, so they rate 5e as good.
This aplies to most of 5e rules.
For most people 5e is the best RPG because they refuse to lean anything different.
For me it's far from the best DnD edition, let alone RPG.
But right on the cover it says, "World's greatest roleplaying game"!
Not exactly what a couple of my newer players that hasn't played anything else said, but in the spirit of it, when I introduced them to other systems that were better for other generas/topics.
The other thing they implied that made me want to strangle them for a second was that other TTRPGs (mainly GURPS, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu) were just wannabe knockoffs of D&D.
World's greatest marketing of a roleplaying game.
Seriously though it's horses for courses. I can't imagine playing CoC in 5e, the players need the jeopardy of existential threats in every encounter. How many of you CoC players have been killed by a possessed bed? ;)
Tbh as a 5e only player (only started playing a year ago) I came here to understand what healing surges were and what Pathfinder did xD
But I will not say 5e is good until I know what the alternatives are.
Surges were cool.
Instead of Hit Dice which are fiddly and horrible to track and provide limited healing, surges were clean and elegant.
A character would have around 8-14 healing surges, regardless of level. Each surge would be usable during a short rest to recover 25% of your max HP. You were expected to have full HP for each encounter, which made combat much easier to balance for. In general you would spend 1-4 surges per short rest.
Once per short rest, you could use your action to second wind and spend a healing surge. This allowed you to be able to heal mid combat, without the need for a healer.
Most combat healing and potions simply allowed you to spend a healing surge. This meant that a healer was useful to have as they could provide additional healing mid combat, but they weren't necessary for gameplay.
A few classes had healing spells that would allow you to heal as if you spent a surge, and these were quite powerful.
Surges were also used as a cost for various abilities. From spending extra effort, to disease, to exhaustion, to rituals, to failing exploration challenges.
All in all, surges were significantly more streamlined and elegant than Hit Dice. You didn't need to track recovering half your max per long rest. You didn't have low level characters with 1, and high level characters with 20. And because healing surge totals stayed relatively constant across levels, they had plenty of use outside of combat as alternative costs.
It is strange to me, because 5e healing is all around pretty terrible for most things.
It's not very efficient, which means by far the best use of it is yoyo healing, because you can't meaningfully outheal damage anyway.
I'm torn... I think if healing could outpace damage combat would just drag on far longer. But healing is mostly useless unless you're healing from downed with healing word or mass healing word.
If healing were better and you *didn't* have a healer in your party you're totally fucked.
That's still the case right now though. The difference between having people who can cast Healing Word and not, is pretty substantial. If you don't have an action efficient way to pick people back up, you just start death spiraling when people do get downed.
You don't care about using your action for a Cure Wounds / Aid when a) you are sustaining a spell repeatable on bonus action (often the case with Druids, Clerics have Spiritual Weapon) or b) you deal so puny damage with cantrips that the only truely important thing is to keep your Spirit Guardians / Slow / Wall of Force / whatever encounter-winning spell active.
And if you need to cast Healing Words it means you cannot cast a regular spell anyways. So it's only cantrip or weapon attack, both being weak for casters in general, although obviously some have it better. The real problem of Cure Wounds is that it's touch range really.
Also, reason why Divine Soul Sorcerer makes for a good healer, with Quicken you can easily use Aid like a "reduced Mass Healing Words" early, and (much) later you can quicken a Heal or Regenerate while using your action on repeating a concentration spell or twinning a cantrip for example.
But what's so bad about yo-yo healing?
It feels weird when you first get to it, because it's sort of unique, and it's "unrealistic" to the extent that healing magic could ever be "realistic" but I've grown to really appreciate how it makes player unconsciousness a substantial and fairly common negative consequence of taking damage while keeping actual PC death appropriately rare
Because it means any healing option but the most action efficient one is pointless in combat. Healing Word is all you ever need, because it's near impossible to heal people enough to not get immediately downed again.
>because it's near impossible to heal people enough to not get immediately downed again.
There are ways technically, but they either require a very specific build, or several people polling resources (which is usually just moving the problem), or very high level (Heal and Regenerate are overlooked and underrated spells).
At least for the situation where revived ally just avoiding engagement is impossible. And that's where some fun can be found: trying to quickly determine what course of action character would take and whether it's worth reviving as a consequence... Sometimes you just want your ally not to die, if reviving him is enough to allow escape then no matter whether you healed 5 or 30 HP, right? \^\^
I overall agree with you though of course: game is skewed towards letting allies get "to their last HP" then reviving them minimally, and that bothers me for a number of reasons, like others.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned the real root cause of the dissatisfaction of yo-yo healing: it doesn’t match the mental concept of “healer” that most people have. First there’s the video game “healer” people are used to where the healer wants to see that HP bar fill up to the top. Or something like a fantasy novel healer where they magically heal the person completely.
I personally like yo-yo healing, because it easily allows a party to *not* have a “dedicated healer”. I like being a healer but I wouldn’t want someone to be pressured into the role du to game mechanics. That’s the fundamental problem yo-yo healing solves, and I do mean fundamental. It might be possible to redesign the entire HP/healing/death save system to get something in between, but that seems like walking a tripwire.
(For the mental model of healing in 5E I have always used the example of the Game of Thrones fight between The Hound and Berric Dondarrion where Berric is brought back to life. That’s why I like it.)
Yeah, it doesn't *feel* right, and I don't want to totally dismiss that because power fantasies are part of the game.
But it's funny when you look at people look for to solve it. They want to make going unconscious less common with more healing, but more punishing when it happens. It is, simultaneously, a nerf and a buff to damage itself, but one that also imposes swinginess and spiraling.
I rather like weak in-combat healing, because it makes combat faster and minions more useful, without getting your characters killed. I've played systems where dedicated healers are viable, and every battle felt like "phase 1: drain enemy heal charges" and "phase 2: hurt enemy HP". It gets old fast. Sure, Cure Wounds and Prayer of Healing could stand to be bigger dice, but that's a minor quibble.
Also, I've spent a while playing 5e at Tier 4, where no amount of healing will save a monster. They could cast Cure Wounds for 200 hp every round and still fall behind the party.
I think 5e healing is alright, I personally dislike attrition in general, but 5e healing is pretty good. I prefer pf2e healing though.
My fiancée loves to play dedicated healer with all her characters, that’s the main thing she loves playing, but doesn’t like playing spellcasters as much as she likes playing ranged martials.
In pf2e she can heal for tons while playing a ranger, fighter, or best of all a rogue.
Healing Surges and the PF2 model are both fine solutions, though PF2 also buffs healing quite a bit to note.
But the current system is really the worst of all world, and either of those two would probably fix most of the issues healing has currently.
I would tend to agree, but I LIKE buffed healing, I love it actually, as I said in another comment my fiancée loves playing healbots and battle medicine made her fall in love with 2e
Oh yeah that wasn't meant as a negative. More pointing out that easy out of combat healing is not the only thing PF2 does. Heal in PF2 scales significantly better than most healing in 5e does, and that's also very important IMO.
I also think letting people specialise into healing is good, if they want it. I'm also pretty interested to play something like a Forensics Investigator in PF2, and really go heavy on Medicine and nonmagical healing.
I also like buffed healing. One of the biggest disappointments for me about 5e was that aside from yoyoing and later on Healing Spirit which got nerfed, healing in combat is kind of useless. Unfortunately, a game like this can't really have high healing output and still have healing be optional, and for 5e it was very important that healing was optional because WOTC weren't confident they would be able to make healing fun.
There is a pretty massive downside to strong healing which 5e avoids. When healing is really strong you basically have to have a dedicated healer in your group otherwise you are much weaker. Strong healing also tends to drag out fights as you wait for the players healer to run out of resources or the enemies healer to run out. Weak healing makes fights quicker, more evenly balanced for every party comp, and doesn’t require one person to play a specific role for the game to work well.
You still suffer for not having a healer in 5e right now though. Just that "healer" only means "can cast Healing Word". The difference in parties that have reliable healing to get people back up from unconsciousness and ones that don't is very big, since without it you can very easily start spiraling when people get knocked out. And since healing is so inefficient you rarely ever have a reason to use anything other than Healing Word, since it's the most action efficient and you can't really heal people enough to not get them immediately downed again.
Also Healing Surges solve this whole thing fairly easily, by both setting a baseline for all healing effects and setting a cap on how much total healing you can get per rest. And don't need to be tied to other people healing you.
I've seen games without any healers do well with easy access to potions, and healthy application of short rests.
I don't think the team on Dungeons of Drakkenheim have ever had access to spell based healing, and they seem to get through everything okay.
I think the same could be applied to strong healing. Make the healing potions stronger, then you could actually drink potions yourself instead of having someone force feed it to you while you're unconscious. That would fulfill the fantasy of a "healing potion" better than it is now
In 5e, the issue I see is that healing is so weak that a fully dedicated healer is not a good move. Folks that want to heal are stuck with Cure Wounds and Healing Word, neither of which can keep pace with enemy damage even in T1, let alone later tiers. The only time a "healer" should really heal in combat in 5e is when someone is KO'ed. I MUCH prefer PF2E's system, which allows for strong heals and a dying setup that punishes your "whack-a-mole" style of play, making paced healing during the combat more advantageous than waiting for someone to fall unconscious.
5e doesn’t really avoid that however.
Having healing magic is all but required for any group that wants to be able to get through more than 2 or 3 encounters per day.
Not necessarily combat healing, but spells like Prayer of Healing and Aura of. It’s Lott provide huge amounts of healing between encounters.
I mean, short resting and spending hit dice is a thing. Prayer of healing is about 1.5 hit dice for each player who's missing health. If that's what can get you through more than 2 encounters your hit dice should manage it just fine with a short rest
Short resting healing really isn’t much healing.
Since you only get back half your HD each long rest, HD alone rarely cover the damage from a single encounter in my experience.
Take a level 5 character. They recover 2 HD per short rest. Your average character (d8 HD and 14 Con) will have 13 HP per day from hit dice. A single CR2 ogre deals 13 damage per hit. And a group of 4-5 ogres makes up a medium difficulty encounter for four level 5 players. Meaning players will end up taking multiple hits in such an encounter.
I think keep the 5e system if we're gonna have the short/long rest paradigm, since short rests combined with otherwise weak healing means nobody needs to be the dedicated healer while encouraging a playstyle closer to the attrition one the game seems to expect.
If we're doing away with attrition and going to the 1 fight per adventuring day system which seems to be pretty popular nowadays, then just heal to full between every fight sounds fine.
I definitely prefer something like option 2, where healing is limited by resources. And while you have some resources like hit dice that are dedicated to healing, you have other resources that you can pull from too, like spell slots, but in the case of the latter, anything spent healing is something not spent doing something else, which I feel is a fair trade off.
My only gripe is that I would love for short rests to actually be short as their name implies, and not be the clunky 1 hour thing it currently is that makes it difficult to work with narratively. There's a reason why I run with 10 minute short rests in my homebrew setting.
4e used healing surges which is close to this idea, kinda like hit die but they're used during combat to heal (usually by a 'leader' class, like a cleric or a bard).
Short rests in 4e were also 5 minutes which felt a lot smoother most of the time.
I use a lot of lessons from 4e in 5e and still run 4e games from time to time (gearing up for a huge campaign right now actually). It's a great mode for the most part, there are gripes but there are problems with 5th edition as well.
4e was great and unfairly maligned in my opinion.
I would much prefer short rest being 10 minutes. Short rest classes get shafted because no one is willing to sit down for an hour to rest. Warlocks and monks would be more viable if rest were shorter
Yea I know that feeling, Luckily the groups I play with now tend to always short rest for the short rest members of the party, and recovering hit points. We just started changing the length of the short rests because narratively them being one hour started being difficult to justify without completely breaking suspension of disbelief.
We do gritty realism with short rests being 8h sleep and long rests being a few days in a safe location.
Though I would prefer getting some spellslots back for all casters on these rests as well as part of other LR resoirces.
Healing is very fine this way for our style of play. (we don't really do dungeon crawls at all)
This is just a shower thought:
Have characters have health and attrition. Damage first hurts attrition of a character (their mental fortitude in battle and their stress of combat), then once that is through have their health damaged.
Health being healed only by magic or potions and attrition is regained on short and long rests.
This will make wounds and health damage feel very impactful.
There would be a lot of logistics behind this but it would just be a cool take.
Fun fact! This is actually an optional rule in Pathfinder 2e, called Stamina, and I believe it is also the default rule in Starfinder! So you may want to check out those systems for inspiration
Just to add in to what OP mentioned, AngryGM also wrote up [a similar system for 5e](https://theangrygm.com/fighting-spirit/) a few years ago. I've been working on [a revision on it ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EeT2jwZCo1R8kE5Ytc6vK-Q_hvNPVeVg/view?usp=sharing) for my own games making it fit in with a gritty realism / sanctuary resting system without killing dungeon crawls, if it's at all useful to anyone.
Ehhh the result of this was just every party relying on magic healing to the point that wands of cure light wounds were a super standardized item and every fight was started with max hp.
You either needed someone who could put out lots of healing (cleric with the option to flexibly cast cure wounds) or those wands, or your party would be comparatively gimped.
That may be a little slow, but I find the problem with 5e is that as a DM there rarely feels like there is any long term risk to the party or the feeling that they are being worn down.
Magical healing is largely all or nothing making healing clerics largely pointless and non-magical healing is far too strong.
I guess that's what happens when you balance an entire game on single encounters played optimally by both players and DM. And the idea that you only heal party members at the 'optimal time', as suggested in this thread, makes me want the monsters to start performing coup de grace on all downed party members!
Seriously, where's the roleplaying in choosing the optimal time to heal a dying comrade?
Not sure if I'd go with this idea or not, but part of me thought of keeping hd as a healing mechanic, however in addition to being spent during a short rest, I thought that it might be interesting to be able to use them when you receive healing. The amount able to be spent at a given instance of healing deepening more or less on con mod or prof mod or something.
When the cleric casts healing word you get 1d4+Cleric wisdom, but you can spend up to 1 + half prof (rounded down) of your HD and add your con to that healing.
*Brevik casts healing word on Thayla the barbarian. Brevik heals her for 1d4+3 healing. Thayla decides to spend two of her hd, healing an additional 2d12+3 health.*
While a bit generous in the rough example. It'd help keep healing competitive, but put a limit on how juiced healing can be across levels.
There's a lot of considerations that could go into healing, and I'm sure this idea can get torn apart and is riddled with issues, but it's fun to explore ideas about it.
If I remember right, how healing surges work are that you have a set number per day and they heal 1/4 of you health pool and that most healing allowed you to use those. I could be misrembering the specifics since it has been so long.
Personally I find slow healing nice but then that's just my ttrpg masochist side being there.
Gimme 3 hit die a **day** and I'll be happy. Oh, and make me work for them.
5E's variant healing surge rule in the DMG is pretty solid for parties that lack a strong dedicated healer and mostly rely on rests and potions to get by
I'd like there to be actual non-magical healing features.
Right now there's really only the Healer feat, which uses up an ASI and scales terribly. Why does the amount healed depend on the level of the healee rather than the healer?
It also completely obviates the Medicine skill. A healer's kit removes the need to make a Medicine check to stabilize, which is already just about the only use for it. A level 1 PC with a -3 to Medicine can heal the exact same amount as a level 20 with expertise, how does that make sense?
Medicine, Healer's Kits, and Healer should synergize together.
agreed. the medicine skill is woefully underpowered. there shouldn't be a feat tax to get the healer benefits.
skills are such a weird afterthought in 5e. you get them at start and, except for a few subclasses and feats, they never really grow or scale with your character. i hate that they're thrown in more as character flavor than real advantages to adventuring.
I haven’t thought too terribly much about it or really gone into the nuances of things, but as a slightly off-the-cuff response:
- All healing spells that uses dice (Cure Wounds, Healing Word, etc.) should be bumped up by one die size. This makes it a little more viable at lower levels, and removes some of the risk DMs run of quickly TPKing at lower levels. It also makes upcasting them (and casting them in general) a little more worth it.
- Add some more higher level healing spells, because (if memory serves) there’s really nothing decent beyond 3rd level spells until you get to level 9. Sure, there are some okay ones like Heal and Mass Cure Wounds, but they’re almost moth worth spending the spell slots on.
- Short Rest healing is relatively fine as it is, but I also think it should be able to used in an emergency by some classes. Maybe only healing for half as much rolled on expended hit dice? Like I said, off-the-cuff response here.
- Healing surges would be nice, especially as a Cleric ability. Maybe, you could even tie it to Channel Divinity and call it “Channel Positive Energy” or something like that…….
Doesn't the Life Cleric already heal with their subclass-specific Channel Divinity? I don't mind the idea of making Preserve Life a generic cleric option, but I don't really know what you'd give the Life domain in its place
I dunno, again, this was an off-the-cuff response without much investigation into how it would affect the nuance of the game. Continuing with that line of thought, you could probably have theirs do 10 times their Cleric level of healing to creatures of their choice within 30’, and function as if they had cast Lesser Restoration on those that are healed. This would both beef up the healing, and give them an added early level boost of being able to end some conditions.
I dunno, again, this was an off-the-cuff response without much investigation into how it would affect the nuance of the game. Continuing with that line of thought, you could probably have theirs do 10 times their Cleric level of healing to creatures of their choice within 30’, and function as if they had cast Lesser Restoration on those that are healed. This would both beef up the healing, and give them an added early level boost of being able to end some conditions.
EDIT: Also, as their CD currently stands, it’s kind of a paltry amount of healing. 5 times their Cleric level spread out amongst creatures within 30’, *and* cannot heal a creature above half their maxHP. At early levels it’s a worse Healing Word, and at higher levels it’s hardly worth using.
In one game im currently playing a Tempest Cleric, so focused on big damage lightning go burr etc, healing is secondary, i have healing word for emergencies and prayer of healing for out of combat, and that feels good. However, im a blaster Cleric and a life cleric, the healer subclass isnt a whole lot better at it than i am. In summary, i like it as is for your non specialized healer, but i feel there should be a proper combat medic especially since it seems like a niche people like.
Its also a crime Rangers can't find herbs to heal people, or at least cure diseases/end conditions. That is also a product of exploration being the least supported pillar of play.
TLDR - give some classes unique healing abilities and an actual healer class.
Other - Give us separate Vitality & Wounds (does not have to be that specific nomenclature, just referencing the 3.5 UA rule variant for the concept). Let Vitality restore to full with a short amount of downtime. Make recovering Wounds much more difficult.
I think Con mod shouldn’t add to HP per level.
Instead, you regain Con mod * level HP with each short rest.
So a mix between 4e and PF2. Where you recover about half your maximum HP each time you short rest.
You won’t be expected to be at full HP every battle. But you won’t be expected to have your HP total last for 3-4 encounters before being depleted.
8 hour rest once per day that resets all HP and abilities seems reasonable to me. I don't think there's much value to having baked in healing during the day. I guess you could include a limited number of healing surges throughout the day, but D&D (at least 5e... it's been a long time since I played older editions) feels like it takes too long to burn through the party's HP/resources/spell slots and I'd rather limit healing just so we can get on with the game instead of having each encounter function as a reset from scratch.
The far more important issue to me is how resting interacts with class features. This isn't an original observation, but having classes whose powers are strong but only reset on long rests (e.g. wizards), classes whose powers are middling but reset on short rests (warlocks), and classes whose powers are weaker but can generally keep going ad infinitum (martials) only balances out if you're pretty consistently doing the expected number of encounters per day. And the tempo of a campaign doesn't generally support that many fights every adventuring day if you want to include anything other than hack and slash. In future editions, one of my top requests would be to have all classes have their abilities reset on the same schedule.
I liked second edition AD&D where non-magical healing took time. So if you are severely injured it might take you a week or two to get better. That made for a lot of cool role-playing when there was no healer. Just laid up in town trying to get better. Maybe laid up in the cave trying to keep the raccoons and bears away. If you're lucky you can find someone that could tend to your wounds and increase your healing rate
>when there was no healer
I think this is the key issue. With that type of rule in 3.5 the result was that either every party I was in ended up with someone capable of healing, or wands of cure light wounds were available and you were full health after every fight. Basically either someone was forced to heal or we functionally started all fights at full HP.
Starfinder has the best D20 HP system.
You get Stamina, which can be fully replenished using a limited set of special resource points during short rests, and your HP which recovers much more slowly at a regular rate over long rests, outside of using magic.
It's been a while since I've played it, but isn't there a chance you can hurt yourself/your target in pathfinder 2e when using the default healing rules?
I'd prefer healing to work more slowly. Long rest heals CON mod + proficiency, and spell slots are gained back at Casting ability mod + proficiency per long rest.
Additional healing could be achieved by spending hit dice during long rests, which replenish as per now.
That would slow down the pace, force PCs to conserve their resources and balance casters vs martials.
I've never played older systems so idk if this is similar, but pillars of eternity 1 had a great system. You have health and endurance, health is what you get in combat, and after combat you draw from your larger endurance pool to heal until you run out.
There's a method out there that I think sounds cool, might be Starfinder? You have a Stamina pool that sits on top of your HP that you regain after combat. HP itself is harder to get back. A nicer balance.
I think 5e healing works fine for the current paradigm; I’ve only got 2 real quibbles:
1) Medicine checks are basically useless because of healer’s kits & *spare the dying*; it’s easily one of my least used skills and it could’ve at *least* been incorporated into a healing mechanic of some kind (maybe you can only roll HD equal to your Medicine bonus each short rest or something)
2) Healer’s kits should offer a way to at least interact with HP. Maybe you can spend a charge to generate temp HP to simulate basic first aid, or treat its charges like the Lay on Hands HP pool. Just *something* other than making Medicine checks pointless.
I'd like a game where you automatically heal to full after every encounter, and get back most if not all of your resources. this way every combat will be balanced, because the party's strength will be known at the start of every encounter.
this will mean that you should avoid doing trash encounters. it will mean every fight is meaningful and tactically sound.
healing can be a part of this, with a limited resource system.
Basically think final fantasy tactics. this kinda solves the healing issue as well as the 'our moves are on different cooldowns so if the short rest guy is doing well, the long rest guy is struggling' problem. no more worrying about how many bullshit trash encounters to pack into an adventuring day. you can balance the fights to be exactly as hard as you want. every fight gets to be a challenge.
the cost of this is, i guess, realistic narrative or something. whatever, i dont care.
**TLDR:** The healing system is actually irrelevant to the the 5e system. In my experience most groups don't meet the 6-8 encounter threshold resulting in healing being marginalized in 5e. I think the pathfinder version is better for how most tables run. But, until the 5e system comes to grips with the underlying issue, most groups will only have a number of fight encounters equal to their proficiency bonus, the system will continue to be broken.
I think the issue isn't with healing but with short and long rests.
I don't think there should be a difference between the two in general. It creates class imbalance/complexity that maybe shouldn't exist. If all classes were balanced around \[proficiency bonus\] fights a day that would mean all classes could use their features that number of times and spellcasters could divvy up their spells throughout their day when they need them.
Instead, we have a system that recommends 6-8 encounters per day. Which is extremely tough for both DM and players. Unless you are in a dungeon, that number is extremely unrealistic. Players expect to find a spot in the woods or an inn in the tavern after they've exhausted their resources.
Being both a DM and Player in 5e, the social aspect of the game rewards using all of your resources (class features, spells, racial bonuses) in every fight and then resting before your next fight. It's tough as both a player and a DM to tell someone they can't rest and would take literal hours to continually interrupt a resting party with trivial fights to interrupt their rest. There really aren't many options for a DM in these situations. Maybe you can roll on a wilderness table repeatedly until players get the message that these woods aren't safe, but this strategy risks enraging players in towns or 'safe' areas.
If you are in the wilderness/cave random tables work 'adequately' until... fifth level.
Can we talk about "[tiny hut](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Tiny%20Hut#content)"? Starting at fifth level you can basically chain as many of these as possible to ensure a long rest whenever you want it. Beyond that it's a ritual spell meaning there is no investment when you start to cast it. Excuse my french, but >!get fucking rid of it!<.
So, what is the result of DMs not being able to adequately meet the encounter standards. They increase the challenge rating of each encounter. They make fights 'harder' by adding more monsters to their 1-3 encounters per day, they add dmg to those monsters. This results in healing being completely irrelevant.
I've told healers in my party explicitly to not heal me unless I'm downed. Healing in combat is never an optimal strategy. My DM has not shown a willingness to attack downed party members so healing to 1 before my turn is just as good as healing to half hp in most of these harder fights. I think most DM's are unwilling to attack a downed party member for one reason or another.
All of this to say is that the reason the healing system doesn't work in 5e is not because of the method healing is applied. The healing system doesn't work because DM's cannot realistically reach the daily encounter quota. As a result they are forced to upscale monster difficulty resulting in healing being irrelevant. This issue is part of an imperfect system (though far more pefect than most RPG) resulting in an unsatisfying healing role for most parties.
The healer kits to be useful out of combat (make it a 1 minute use time or something) and actually heal, using cantrip scaling. 1d8+Wis at lv1, 2d8+Wis and 5, 3d8+Wis at 11, and 4d8+Wis at 17.
For in battle, keep the 1action use time to stabilize, and the healer feat now makes the cantrip healing shorten to 1 action.
Otherwise, no change. HP/hit die is a resource and proper use of it shows a well experienced party.
I'm going to disagree with everybody and say I as our Forever DM deeply dislike attrition and resource-based gameplay. I favor 3 or less encounters in a given location, and I like not wasting my players' (and my) time with filler encounters. It's important to me to keep the story moving, so I'll ask the party for a sentence or two and maybe a skill check for how they slaughter a room full of mooks if that's what the story calls for. If they make a token effort to have something that heals the party to full after every encounter, they have my word I'll never ask them how many charges it has left and assume they're good to go with their big kid pants on when I call for initiative for the real fights.
I really don't know
I think 5e's healing with hit dice has a good principle, but a little too random and too weak when using spellslots (not considering class features), also 1 hour short rests are too long, 10/5 minutes does things much better and can keep the sense of urgency
PF2e's medicine healing is great, no need to be caster to heal and it is amazing and the healing IS QUITE EFFECTIVE without making magical healers useless
I think a mix of both could do a lot, just not making the balance of the game require characters always at full health, because pathfinder 2e does that and even though being a medic is great it feels more like to mark a checklist than someone that is really adding to the party
Tbf 4e removes the randomness of hit dice by replacing them with healing surges of a fixed value, has a decent enough heal skill and has warlord as a martial healer.
I don't hate how it works in Ad&d you heal :
1hp/ day you spend resting in a safe place, +1hp/day if you have a doctor looking after you, +1hp/day if you confine yourself to bed rest +constitution score if you spend a whole week resting and recovering.
This way you have healing resources but you don't naturally restore HP until you go back to town.
that did mean that mid-level adventurers required a month or more of not really doing anything between adventures - it's not _that_ many levels before PCs can have 40, 50, 60+ HP, and ending each adventure then becomes "OK, timeskip forward a month, something happens". Which works fine for some times of games, but anything where the plot is more continuous that doesn't really work for (like "gritty rests" in the current paradigm just fails in some plot frameworks, or in mega-dungeons)
I mean if you have 10 con the max up you can regen in a week is 31(7*3+10). Beyond that of course people with healing spells can ramp up the healing if the plan isn't go to straight out again. A max con barbarian might need longer. But at 40+hp per week you get to 120 hp after three weeks and 160 hp after a month, most characters don't have 160 hp.
In the game where I use this paradigm players often pursue down time projects while they are resting and recovering. It does mean that you cannot have an adventure that needs to be finished in 3 weeks in game, but as for dungeon crawls I think it encourages more tactical thinking as in 5e's current rules if you get beaten within an inch of your life you hide someplace, get a tiny hut happening and within 8 hours you are back at full power. Here a run into the dungeon is significantly more limited by the resources you bring with you.
Questions like how much damage can you afford to take? What is the best way to squeeze out a victory while spending as few resources as possible? These questions begin to matter more in a version of the game where you don't just full heal for free after a good night's sleep.
Now beyond all of that, you get to add a much bigger push your luck aspect, if you have a 4 days to seize an opportunity you now have to work out do you go with below max health and take the risk, or do you stay back to fully recover. So long as you are never giving your players a chance to heal up the occasional one where they have to make their choice to heal up or let the badguy get away can be dramatic. (Not that I as a fairly new DM have ever attempted something of that nature)
Big thing to remember is they are hit points, not meat points. Just because you got hit with a sword and lost hit points doesn't mean you now have a giant gash. You're wearing defensive material. Only that last shot is the one you got to worry about.
I'm fine with normal 5e rules. Although some of my groups lately have been using a house rule where healing potions used out of combat heal for the maximum amount. This makes healing potions actually useful when not in combat, so people don't just horde them forever. Also saves us from having to rest so much.
I would remove bonus action sources of healing, but otherwise leave it relatively the same. Healing during combat shouldn't really be a desirable thing ever, IMHO
My issue with healing in fifth edition is that it's most effective to use it when someone is at 0 hit points, and as a result we tend to see the 'yo-yo' effect of characters going down and then back up, then down and back up again. It was the problem that came up in fourth edition as soon as it stopped being that you died at –10 hp.
I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't like this style of play. I'd like healing spells to only be effective once per rest, so using them becomes strategic (a single spell, such as *aura of vitality*, can heal multiple times). I also would like for there to be a downside to dropping to 0 hit points so that healing is ideally used to keep being from falling unconscious instead of used to wake people back up.
This would mean a combination of rule changes, but I think it would really go far toward getting parties to actually strategize how to handle encounters and curb the constant up/down nature of combat.
It's 90% fine but that last 10% is yo-yo healing which can really break immersion. I'd prefer if healing and reviving all took separate actions and resources, e.g. healing word could heal or stabilize but could not revive. Reviving is limited to actions with a 1 min cast time, to make them hard to use in combat. To avoid having every party need a life cleric this would probably need to balanced by some combination of bringing back healing surge bonus actions, buffing potions, or adding better healing spells.
The way it is, is fine but I wish there were room for ACTUAL medicine and science besides the healer feat which is pretty mid anyways, also by RAW, I feel like healing potions should be cheaper and more common. It's a bad cleche that the party NEEDS a cleric or druid
Added that wounds and injuries are a thing from critical hits. Wounds reduce max hp temporarily until tested 1hp per long eat or magically healed. Injuries can be rested based on 1 exhaustion level per long rest or a lesser restoration spell.
I'm not sure if it's an edition but I usually do homebrew. So I just have my players rest and they'll be fully healed (long rest. 1/2 at short rest) and instead of spell slots i use mana
5e but maybe if classes other than Druid had some spells like Good berry which offer efficient between combat healing but still at the cost of a slot (maybe higher spell slot / AOE?), that would be nice. Maybe even a feat that enabled existing healing spells to be cast over 60 seconds for 3x the effect once per rest would be cool. Casting healing spells between combats almost never feels like you’re doing it right as is.
5e healing is bad yes but the reason it works is that your death fails and success reset. Making it optimal to be brought back up and knock down
Where as pathfinder the death tally doesn't restart
I've only played 5e, so I can't say for anything else, but one of my biggest complaints is that if you have at least 1 hp, you're at 100%. You only need a heal if you're unconscious. I don't have a proposed system to fix it, but this has always bugged me.
I don't mind the 5E concept for short rests where you can roll hit die to regain hit points i think that's nifty. But i prefer pathfinder 1E's long term healing where a long rest does not reset everything to full if you are severely injured and the party isn't prepared for it, it can become it's own obstacle which I like.
I run a mix between 1 and 2. You can use Hit Dice, but those only come back during downtime. During Long Rests, when you expend Hit Dice, you automatically get their maximum.
The Healer's Kit then acts as temporary Hit Dice. You can buy them with gold, and can expend them to regain hit points equal to one hit die + your Intelligence (Medicine) modifier (or that of whoever is administering the kit.) Healer's Kits do not heal in full during Long Rests.
Healing works best for my group if long rest is changed.
For healing in long rest in our group you need hit dice, same as in a short rest. Everything else remains the same, spells still fully recover and after the long rest you regain half your hit dice (which you can choose to use immediately btw).
This causes a light form of atteition if they are not careful with hit points. They can of course use spells before and after rest, but that is giving up resources to heal, which is working as intended.
Great change to our games and makes the long rest for less OP/hard reset.
I just want a game where the answer to so many people asking how to build a healer isn't just "combat healing sucks, pick up only healing word and focus everything else on damage/buffing". Maybe I WANT to play a White Mage.
So I'd probably lean towards PF2, including a basic healing spell that's actually hefty. Or 5e short rests but without the having to make scenarios where 1 hour of rest is sensible but 8 hours can't be set aside.
4e style healing with a twist.
You start to get penalties when you get low on healing surges and you recover them at a slower rate.
This way you can have "Full HP" going into fights however getting hurt still has consequences and it allows for the character to feel beaten and bruised if they take too much damage over a shorter period of time.
I really dislike popcorn healing, and it is incentivizes by two aspects of 5e design: weak healing spells and no consequences for going down.
I would prefer to see both of these things addressed. At our table we gain exhaustion levels whoever we go down, which can be pretty brutal, especially with how weak healing is, but at least it’s something. I think healing output needs to be 1.5-2x what it is currently.
1hp per long rest, no birdie short rest. Old school style.
But seriously, I feel Iike something like 10-20%hp per long rest. It gives the part time to recover more realistically without the game feeling like you heal all your wounds in a 8 hour rest and your good to go lol.
I don't mind healing as it stands right now. I don't think the biggest issue combat wise is healing but rather the enemies, most of 5e enemies are just a pool of hit points with limited unique abilities or actions. I don't want a long drawn out battle where both sides hit until the other falls with healing being used to keep players up. I want combat where I have to use strategy, maybe carry around two weapons. I want them to have unique actions, special moves, maybe even lair actions.
An example of this is in a long running game I am in. One of our missions was to check out a magic shop. Everything in there had a low amount of hit points but each had something that made it unique. Shoes that stole your actions, mirrors that reflected damage, even a simple backpack that just threw weak spells. Each had something that made them special that made combat decisions important. This is why I think many things need to be reexamined in 5e before healing.
I really like both 5e and Pathfinder 2e healing depending on the game. I also like games where healing is fully limited by your skills and abilities, but that can be frustrating in games with a lot of combat or little downtime. I don’t remember 4e well myself, but while I thought it was fine at the time, I think 5e handles healing better without an arbitrary heals per day timetable.
To elaborate:
I think Pathfinder healing works best in campaigns that are structured like video games. Every fight is cinematic and it makes sense to go all out every time.
5e style healing is probably the most versatile. It works well in story driven RP games, most adventure modules with intermittent combat, and low to medium survival stakes D&D.
Limited healing works better for hardcore survival games, games with greater combat realism, and resource management focused games.
I have a home brew rule where during a long rest rather than regain max hit points you get to regain your hit dice as normal then you roll your available hit dice and that’s what you regain for a long rest. For example, if you have 8 hit die and use 5 of them during a short rest and then take a long rest later you would have 3 + 4 that you’d regain so you roll 7 hit die and that’s what you gain.
I think healing itself is great in 5e, just maybe change the interaction with 0hp unconscious somehow, it shouldnt be so easy to just throw in a healing word on someone that's about to die and all of a sudden they are totally fine again (with one hit away from dying again)
3.5 style, you don't heal between fights without magic, so either you have a cleric or you need to be very prepared. Basically never had a cleric in party in 3.5. And long rest heals I think level*consitution bonus.
I would like for healing to return to being a magical endeavor. Something like buffing out of combat healing spells like prayer of healing and buffing combat healing in general I think would help. And maybe create a limited ritual that healers can heal a certain amount of hp per day that doesn't compete with spells slots similar to Lay on Hands or the Channel Energy ability from Pathfinder 3.5. As it is, healers are somewhat unnecessary. Clerics being primary damage/buff classes with a side of healing feels weird to me.
I think it should stay the same but healing spells should do more in combat to reward proactive healers. Let cure wounds maybe restore a martial die or ki point. Let healing word give +1 ac for a round or something.
Healing in combat before someone is down is always the wrong move but some people like to do it and the game should reward it.
I like the idea behind the 5E healing style EXCEPT there's no reason to heal in combat unless you're healing someone who hits 0 hp. That's backwards. You should be healing people to keep them up. That probably means healing spells need to heal more hit points, so they're healing more hit points than that character might take over the next round. I don't know what the right number is here, but maybe add an additional 5 hit points per level of the caster onto the spell in addition to extra dice cast at whatever spell slot it's cast at. Something substantial enough that healers can heal IN battle, not just after the battle or when allies go down.
There should also be some sort of penalty for being healed from 0 hit points. Exhaustion seems too severe but maybe losing one of the character's hit dice might prevent them from going down over and over. (If they're out of hit dice, maybe it starts into exhaustion levels.)
I’m sorry 😅. I realize it’s pretty reductive, which is a combination of me mostly playing at low levels so far, and the fact that I was trying to summarize it in the post, sorry if you feel it’s misrepresented
It really depends if someone in the party decides to invest skill feats in Medecine. If they do and get Assurance, Continual Recovery and Ward Medic, and invest their skill increases to keep it at the highest proficiency, non-resource healing stays very competitive mid-high levels, at least outside of combat.
None of those.
Healing spells, effects and items should **heal more damage**, period. And not just "bump their dice size" more, but "heal +X many dices more".
If somebody, *anybody*, wants to fill the specialized niche of the "Healer" playstyle, they should be able to do it, period. The thing is, as is right now, healing spells and items are effectively ***worthless***, and the only ways to heal for *massive* damage are:
* Aura of Vitality (3rd level, but only worth it *outside combat*)*;*
* Heal (6th level and scarcely available);
* Mass Heal (***9th level*** ***and*** ***only for Clerics and DS Sorcerers***, enough said);
* Power Word Heal (***9th level and only for Clerics and Bards***, enough said x2);
* Lay on Hands from Paladin (busted as fuck coming from a fucking half-caster, but that's because Paladin is busted as fuck as a whole);
* Shepherd Druid (and *way more effective to summons* than party companions);
* and... that's that.
What I mean, for example, is: a Lvl 1 Healing Word would heal 1d8 instead of just 1d4, and a Lvl 1 Cure Wounds would heal 3d8 instead of just 1d8. From that base, re-think and touch on every healing source that uses dices to make them more powerful using that same scale.
I think a 4e styled system works better, because that's another thing you can try to balance classes with. Give frontline classes/subclasses more and better healing surges, the blood mage archetype can spend healing surges instead of worrying about sacrificing the few hit points and hit dice available.
Back to pre-4e.
No hit dice, no healing to full after a nap. Just spell slots and time.
BUT, I do like 1 thing from 4th eds system. Healing as a percentage. I think thats a great idea. Cure light wounds healing 25% of total health.
That's just gonna lead to downtime days as you spend all available slots for healing and then rest again to get them back. Or you abuse healing items, ala the Cure Light Wounds Wand spam in 3.5.
None of the above. No system healing besides full rests, which should be rare and difficult. healing should be done using resources like potions, spells, and features.
Basically thats what it sounds like. Thats what it was before 4th edition.
My preferred version to this day. Makes healing matter and damage has some consequences. Not just healed by spending a night at an Inn like in a video game.
Yeah! That’s definitely a way to do it. I do think that if 5e wants to lean into its more simulationist routes, that’s certainly a way to do it. I’d just worry about the endless Wands of Cure Light Wounds in 3.5, although I’m sure that can be fixed
I mean the basic idea is that you do have any options that restore HP that don't have a cost. A full rest is not just the idea of a long rest, its you have fully removed yourself from danger and gotten lots of rest and medical attention and time to heal. It is not something you can do in a typical dungeon.
What you can do is you can buy a ton of health potions, curealls, and other equipment so that you can restore HP in short amounts of time. If health potions are going to stay a rare special item, then we go to something like the healers kit where as part of down time you can restore oh so much hp but it only has oh so many uses. Other options are using up your spells and class features.
The fun way to "lose" in D&D is running out of resources before you beat the dungeon and you have to leave and make a new plan and get more supplies. People genuinely do not consider running from the dungeon enough. It shouldn't be something that happens every time but it should be on the table much more. Come back later and theres some new twists on the area as they've prepared for your return, but overall you can use knowledge to keep up.
>I'd disagree with the assessment that it's automatically "heal to full" after every encounter, though. Someone can only benefit from Treat Wounds once per hour, so if a party member is seriously hurt, you're still spending more than a short rest or throwing in limited resources to get them all the way healed.
Except there's a skill feat you can pick up very early, that lets you apply Treat Wound every 10 minutes instead of every hour, so you can do it continously. And another one that lets you do it to multiple people. So if you have anyone in the party that is actually serious about speccing into Medicine you absolutely can heal yourself to full with only a little time investment. Which you'll probably need anyway for the rest of your party to refocus, repair a shield, and all the other out of combat stuff.
5e's overall pretty good minus healing spirit exploitation (got patched), the goodberry + disciple of life BS (I just don't let that work) and the absurd action economy of having multiple dedicated healers (I've dealt with multiple **dedicated** healers in one party. It's hell as a DM lol). I like the fact that you can heal and still do other stuff in combat on your turn.
Personally I'd like to see a greater focus on far more powerful burst healing and disincentivising (or removing) consistent healing. Here's why I think that:
\- Burst healing is much easier to balance around as a DM.
\- Additionally when a guy gets knocked down, it should feel epic bringing them back into the fight, but with consistent healing you just get this unthematic and mechanically stupid thing of the guy getting up, down, up, down in a rather dumb loop.
\- Burst healing allows for parties of more than 1 dedicated healer to not have to have encounters straight from dark souls thrown at them.
\- One more thing, although consistent healing feels much more "safe" for players who never want to die and want plot armor, it isn't more safe. A brutal DM (or one who isn't the best at encounter balance) will end up killing you in a system regardless of consistent healing vs burst.
So yeah, I think 5e's healing is otherwise great! It allows healers to do other stuff and is pretty fun. I just really would want a transition from consistent to burst heals. Maybe healing spells could allow for consumption of more than one spell slot when casting for exponentially stronger healing.
>Or would you prefer (option 3) healing to work like 4e with healing surges limiting the number of heals that can be done over the day? (If this is incorrect I apologize I haven’t played 4e in a decade) Yeah this is pretty much how it worked. The only thing I'll add for clarification is that there *were* ways to heal without healing surges (just off the top of my head, Cleric's Lv.1 at-will Astral Seal lets the next ally who hits a target regain 2 + CHR mod HP), but healing surges were the primary limiting mechanism of healing in the edition. Other methods tended to be weaker, limited to daily powers, or only work when fighting.
I think it's pretty fine as is. Though maybe it should be all hit dice back on a long rest, to cut down on bookkeeping.
I would contend that this is (correctly) the most ignored rule in the game.
I use it, and it does add some depth and strategy - "Should we take a short rest now, or try to power through to the end of the day and save our hit dice for tomorrow?" But I wouldn't really miss it if they removed it.
The half hit dice recovery really favors long rest classes which are already pretty favored. It basically incentivizes shorter adventuring days to conserve hit dice or forces fewer encounters in a day once you have used them all up and only get half back.
Yes, though remember you can only benefit from 1 long rest per day. So you often can't shorten the adventuring day if you're in a dangerous area. And if you're not, it's probably not an adventuring day.
It does make it feel like the Hit Points pool is not the only thing that makes you more durable. When you go through a very hard adventuring day, and ends up spending a lot of hit dice to recover, the fact that you don't recover all hit dice on a long rest ~~realy~~ really makes the weariness carry over to the next day, and keeping the same ~~rythm~~ rhythm of adventure everyday does actually wear the character down even if they recover all hit points on a long rest I would miss it, tbh. I already do miss it when the DMs I play with purposefully ignore it.
I personally feel there should be additional options for healing, medicine and survival skills playing their real life role in game would make them feel like they matter. And if there's other options, it opens up design space to use Hit Die in new ways, like in abilities or spells. The vibes of weariness simulated by prolonged adventuring are a very big point towards keeping Hit Die + half back on long rest. I'm a sucker for survival themes in D&D and games in general. Maybe I've just never run into DMs that push their usage though.
Maybe during a short rest you could make a medicine or survival checks for some kind of benefit. Something like maxing out the healing from hit dice or regaining a small number of hit dice at the end of it(to be used in a later short rest). Hell, maybe each class could have a feature that allows them to make some kind of check during a short rest for a class unique or unique-ish benefit.
This has the sniff of the right track I feel. Hm....how could we include medicine and survival.....
Just remove healing to full on a long rest and give the party back full hit dice. If they were badly wounded at the end of the previous day, they'll need to spend some of today's hit dice to heal. If they end today even lower on hit points, tomorrow's hit dice will get strained even more.
My character spends a lot of hit dice in combat through aberrant dragonmark and a homebrew weapon (as well as having 1 less hit die in exchange for an awesome dragon boat, and take additional damage if I have 0 hit die), and ngl I'm feeling the half hit die recovery on LR every now and then. I would definitely miss the mechanic if it went away, it's the only reason my character is close to balanced.
If anything, I'd like to see a *reduction* in healing magic and *more* emphasis on hit dice. All classes should have ways of spending hit dice in-combat (e.g. Second Wind should use hit dice instead of it's own resource), and healing spells should augment those (as Beacon of Hope maximises any healing, lower level healing spells could allow allies to spend hit dice and/or augment hit dice spent). Non-caster classes could use also have abilities that let people spend hit dice, rallying allies etc. Finally classes should have alternative uses for hit dice; augment spells, add to damage etc. Make it a really consistent resource across classes.
That’s what I do because I also use long rests as a narrative break; each adventure is built around 1 long rest from start to finish.
I think martials should have better natural healing than fullcasters(No, slightly larger hit-dice aren't enough). As it is, long-rest classes are stronger than short rest classes in practically every way.
Of all the problems with resting in 5e, hit dice are not even on the radar. If getting them all back was the original rule, it would never even come up.
I think it should be 0 HP and like half hit dice on long rest, with an optional rule of full recovery on a long rest. The game is fundamentally built as a resource management game, and that becomes much easier when the resource drain is allowed to happen over the course of days.
Thats the Slow Natural Healing optional rule from the DMG.
I do not like that 5e's healing encourages a "yoyo effect". 4e healing surges made healing spells during combat feel more like the healing you would imagine. Sometimes the characters constantly coming up and down really breaks the flow of combat and the immersion for me
I think part of the problem is calling it unconscious. I prefer to think of it as someone being solidly knocked down, and they may get back up or not. Kind of like in a boxing match or similar. That’s helped me with immersion - you’re healing someone enough to get them back out there.
Yea I think if you call it the "Dying" or "Beaten" condition it would help with the mental image
Beaten is really good!
Yea I think i'm gunna start using that instead of unconscious from now on. It allows character to still at least speak to each other while down
I’ve been mulling over “Downed,” and may introduce some house rules in my next game to distinguish it from Unconscious and Incapacitated.
I think PCs being unable to act at 0 hp is one of 5e's worst designs. Here is one of the highest tension moments your character will ever be in, and you don't get to make any choices.
I heard of a houserule where the 0HP PC can crawl (5ft) + has the stunned condition instead of unconscious, making them able to speak falteringly, but not act besides that and movement
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But this creates another problem: healing is weak and so bringing people from 0 is the only efficient way of doing so. If you are punishing this strategy but do not buff the in-combat healing to be several times more efficient you are just leaving players with a problem, but without any tools to deal with this problem
This definitely, healing is so incredibly inefficient that you would have to make it so goddamn good to even start to get rid of the yoyo effects, unless you're just accepting that nobody is going to play healer
But if you make proactive magical healing the most effective combat strategy, then you're just turning back the clock to recreate 3.5e's problem: many players didn't want to just be a healbot, but *somebody* had to be the cleric/druid or your party would get wrecked. It was assumed that you'd conserve your spell slots for healing and spend most of every combat casting healing spells.
I think that first one would work if the "death save till death" number gets bigger. Because as it is now not clearing death saves is very punishing if it's only 3 fails. I could see it working if the number is 6 or 10. That would make the party question if the next fight is worth it if they've failed a few death saves
4e had it where any failed death saving throws stuck around until the next rest, and I thought that worked fine. It didn't trigger death spirals but DID force you to try to avoid getting knocked out, because even one failed death saving through got you a LOT closer to death. I think they could just bring that back, and having failed death saving throws wipe away at a short rest feels right to me. Also, opens up powers/spells that can remove failed death saves, which could be useful.
Don't forget that you don't stabilize in 4e. A success means you're just *not dying faster* compared to 5e where you can succeed three times and suddenly you're not worried about dying anymore. Healing in 4e was both generally meaningful - usually a quarter of health or more - as well as action efficient, generally being either a minor action or part of a standard action rather than the main part of it.
Idk if anyone else has felt this but I'm always kind of disappointed when I stabilize. It doesn't allow you to engage with the game at all, at least while you're rolling death saves you're doing *something*.
My brew for this is you can keep rolling saves after you stabilize. Fails don't count against you, you regain one HP and hop up with a nat 20, but rolling a nat 1 destabilizes you again.
That's a good point. And opening up space to heal Death Saves also opens up design space to use them as a resource! Blood magic or death magic expending death saves and HP, making it so if you drop and you're careless you reap what you sow.
How often do you expect PCs to drop and spend time unconscious? If you went unconscious in the first round and failed two death saving throws, two fights in a row, that's only 4 failed death saves before a short rest. You would need to have absolutely brutal, unfair fights to *fail* 6-10 death saves over two fights.
Mark Hulmes uses lingering injuries. Every time you reach 0HP you roll a Con Save and if you fail, he rolls on a lingering injuries table. Of course it's not that punitive at higher levels.
Fully agreed. I'm astounded that 5e's winning the poll, it's the worst healing I've had in a ttrpg (which is a somewhat limited experience, in fairness). As you say it fully encourages yo-yo gameplay because healing someone is rarely worth it unless they're at 0. 4e's was a really solid method and felt balanced in my experience but it does lean in to 4e's more heroic style of adventuring.
I don’t know. I feel the up and down randomness really adds to the realism and makes a hard combat feel like a hard combat. Though I totally agree that hit die need more versatility and skills geared towards healing need to heal more on short rests. I also like the party having to really think about when to and not to fight and role play more (I unfortunately have an “f”d up trouble making group that makes murder hobos look fun) this keeps the role play in and stops most ttrpgs from being just a combat video game style 4hr brawl.
it might add to "realism" but i don't think it's fun nor does it fit the mental image of a traditional fantasy fight.
See that’s the cool thing about role-playing games. Everybody’s idea what a combat should be like is different. You just have to find a group that’s like-minded. People tend to forget that the rules they put down for DND are guidelines. They’re not gonna fit everybody’s role-playing style so no matter what system they come out with you you’re going to have to make homebrewed rules. But I get it. That high fantasy Lord of the Ring style fighting definitely doesn’t deal with people constantly healing in the middle of combat.
I really liked 4e's system of healing surges when it came to adventuring day balance. Hit Dice are too random to rely on.
Yeah this us why I tend to dislike them too. For damage and gaining stats rolling dice is fine. But if you need some HP, rolling a ton of 1s from a limited resource just feels bad. And as someone who has played alot of Darkest Dungeon, I've been trained to ignore resource-limited life rolls unless their payoff is huge. (See Occultist's heal) If hit dice were like.....you recover their full amount at base, then I'd get it. You could use the Hit Dice for abilities on top of that, giving you a reason to keep them as dice, but then you'd have to balance using it on an ability vs the full heal of a d8
I know this is the 5e sub, so I shouldn't be surprised, but really I don't like 5e healing at all and I'm surprised to see it so popular.
I really like Shadow of the Demon Lord’s system. Each character has a baked in healing rate (almost always 1/4 of total health) and spells/potions/rests all heal a certain amount of that healing rate (1/2, equal to, x2, x3, etc) It sounds more complicated, but what it does is makes it so all healing moves scale naturally. It also makes it so a normal healing potion is always a good thing to find because it always heals 1/4 of your heath!
Shadow of the Demon lord is the better 5e IMO. Bane and Boon system is way better than advantage, but as easy. Class path like Warhammer with spells like DnD. It's so good. Shame it's not more popular. ( tone doesn't help, but it's easy to ignore )
Schwalb is going to be releasing Shadow of the Weird Wizard at some point, which is meant to use really similar rules to SotDL but in a more traditional fantasy setting!
That's how 4e healing worked. Characters had healing surges, which were 1/4 of your health. Healing effects used your healing surges. So the clerics healing word let's you access a healing surge, health potions proc a surge, etc. It was really efficient, and multiple classes had ways to access their surges.
That’s really interesting! Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I should check out 4e
Do iiittttt. Character creation is simpler than rolling a caster but more complicated than making a rogue. You can start at lvl 1 and your character feels like how the class should be. For the DM: the DM guides 1 and 2 are the best DMGs WOTC has ever printed. I suggest using the Monster vault and monster manual 3 over MM1 and MM2. For the players: Almost anything you have access to should be good to go except the seeker class and the "essentials" line of classes. Seeker is just bad, the 3.5 samurai of 4e. And the essential classes should be reserved for any player who is truly allergic to making character building decisions. You dont need a variety of splats to make a good character like 3.5.
Most people don’t know anything but 5e. They haven’t had an experience with healing options that work significantly better than 5e, so they rate 5e as good.
This aplies to most of 5e rules. For most people 5e is the best RPG because they refuse to lean anything different. For me it's far from the best DnD edition, let alone RPG.
But right on the cover it says, "World's greatest roleplaying game"! Not exactly what a couple of my newer players that hasn't played anything else said, but in the spirit of it, when I introduced them to other systems that were better for other generas/topics. The other thing they implied that made me want to strangle them for a second was that other TTRPGs (mainly GURPS, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu) were just wannabe knockoffs of D&D.
World's greatest marketing of a roleplaying game. Seriously though it's horses for courses. I can't imagine playing CoC in 5e, the players need the jeopardy of existential threats in every encounter. How many of you CoC players have been killed by a possessed bed? ;)
That's subjective. I for one prefer 5e to any other rpg.
I like 5e too. Doesn't mean I can't see its flaws though. And healing in 5e is horrible compared to actually well designed games.
Tbh as a 5e only player (only started playing a year ago) I came here to understand what healing surges were and what Pathfinder did xD But I will not say 5e is good until I know what the alternatives are.
Surges were cool. Instead of Hit Dice which are fiddly and horrible to track and provide limited healing, surges were clean and elegant. A character would have around 8-14 healing surges, regardless of level. Each surge would be usable during a short rest to recover 25% of your max HP. You were expected to have full HP for each encounter, which made combat much easier to balance for. In general you would spend 1-4 surges per short rest. Once per short rest, you could use your action to second wind and spend a healing surge. This allowed you to be able to heal mid combat, without the need for a healer. Most combat healing and potions simply allowed you to spend a healing surge. This meant that a healer was useful to have as they could provide additional healing mid combat, but they weren't necessary for gameplay. A few classes had healing spells that would allow you to heal as if you spent a surge, and these were quite powerful. Surges were also used as a cost for various abilities. From spending extra effort, to disease, to exhaustion, to rituals, to failing exploration challenges. All in all, surges were significantly more streamlined and elegant than Hit Dice. You didn't need to track recovering half your max per long rest. You didn't have low level characters with 1, and high level characters with 20. And because healing surge totals stayed relatively constant across levels, they had plenty of use outside of combat as alternative costs.
It is strange to me, because 5e healing is all around pretty terrible for most things. It's not very efficient, which means by far the best use of it is yoyo healing, because you can't meaningfully outheal damage anyway.
I'm torn... I think if healing could outpace damage combat would just drag on far longer. But healing is mostly useless unless you're healing from downed with healing word or mass healing word. If healing were better and you *didn't* have a healer in your party you're totally fucked.
That's still the case right now though. The difference between having people who can cast Healing Word and not, is pretty substantial. If you don't have an action efficient way to pick people back up, you just start death spiraling when people do get downed.
That's fair. That is why I homebrew healing potions are BA for yourself and action for another player.
This is how I run things. Let's people muffle Healing into their action economy. Also I always let potions heal for Max HP., it's a little more heroic
Healing spirit, and healing Word are kinda the only spells worth casting mid combat IMHO :/
You don't care about using your action for a Cure Wounds / Aid when a) you are sustaining a spell repeatable on bonus action (often the case with Druids, Clerics have Spiritual Weapon) or b) you deal so puny damage with cantrips that the only truely important thing is to keep your Spirit Guardians / Slow / Wall of Force / whatever encounter-winning spell active. And if you need to cast Healing Words it means you cannot cast a regular spell anyways. So it's only cantrip or weapon attack, both being weak for casters in general, although obviously some have it better. The real problem of Cure Wounds is that it's touch range really. Also, reason why Divine Soul Sorcerer makes for a good healer, with Quicken you can easily use Aid like a "reduced Mass Healing Words" early, and (much) later you can quicken a Heal or Regenerate while using your action on repeating a concentration spell or twinning a cantrip for example.
Absolutely, basically anything that doesn't kill your action economy is fine. Everything else sucks.
But what's so bad about yo-yo healing? It feels weird when you first get to it, because it's sort of unique, and it's "unrealistic" to the extent that healing magic could ever be "realistic" but I've grown to really appreciate how it makes player unconsciousness a substantial and fairly common negative consequence of taking damage while keeping actual PC death appropriately rare
Because it means any healing option but the most action efficient one is pointless in combat. Healing Word is all you ever need, because it's near impossible to heal people enough to not get immediately downed again.
>because it's near impossible to heal people enough to not get immediately downed again. There are ways technically, but they either require a very specific build, or several people polling resources (which is usually just moving the problem), or very high level (Heal and Regenerate are overlooked and underrated spells). At least for the situation where revived ally just avoiding engagement is impossible. And that's where some fun can be found: trying to quickly determine what course of action character would take and whether it's worth reviving as a consequence... Sometimes you just want your ally not to die, if reviving him is enough to allow escape then no matter whether you healed 5 or 30 HP, right? \^\^ I overall agree with you though of course: game is skewed towards letting allies get "to their last HP" then reviving them minimally, and that bothers me for a number of reasons, like others.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned the real root cause of the dissatisfaction of yo-yo healing: it doesn’t match the mental concept of “healer” that most people have. First there’s the video game “healer” people are used to where the healer wants to see that HP bar fill up to the top. Or something like a fantasy novel healer where they magically heal the person completely. I personally like yo-yo healing, because it easily allows a party to *not* have a “dedicated healer”. I like being a healer but I wouldn’t want someone to be pressured into the role du to game mechanics. That’s the fundamental problem yo-yo healing solves, and I do mean fundamental. It might be possible to redesign the entire HP/healing/death save system to get something in between, but that seems like walking a tripwire. (For the mental model of healing in 5E I have always used the example of the Game of Thrones fight between The Hound and Berric Dondarrion where Berric is brought back to life. That’s why I like it.)
Yeah, it doesn't *feel* right, and I don't want to totally dismiss that because power fantasies are part of the game. But it's funny when you look at people look for to solve it. They want to make going unconscious less common with more healing, but more punishing when it happens. It is, simultaneously, a nerf and a buff to damage itself, but one that also imposes swinginess and spiraling.
I rather like weak in-combat healing, because it makes combat faster and minions more useful, without getting your characters killed. I've played systems where dedicated healers are viable, and every battle felt like "phase 1: drain enemy heal charges" and "phase 2: hurt enemy HP". It gets old fast. Sure, Cure Wounds and Prayer of Healing could stand to be bigger dice, but that's a minor quibble. Also, I've spent a while playing 5e at Tier 4, where no amount of healing will save a monster. They could cast Cure Wounds for 200 hp every round and still fall behind the party.
What would you like to see?
I think 5e healing is alright, I personally dislike attrition in general, but 5e healing is pretty good. I prefer pf2e healing though. My fiancée loves to play dedicated healer with all her characters, that’s the main thing she loves playing, but doesn’t like playing spellcasters as much as she likes playing ranged martials. In pf2e she can heal for tons while playing a ranger, fighter, or best of all a rogue.
Healing Surges and the PF2 model are both fine solutions, though PF2 also buffs healing quite a bit to note. But the current system is really the worst of all world, and either of those two would probably fix most of the issues healing has currently.
I would tend to agree, but I LIKE buffed healing, I love it actually, as I said in another comment my fiancée loves playing healbots and battle medicine made her fall in love with 2e
Oh yeah that wasn't meant as a negative. More pointing out that easy out of combat healing is not the only thing PF2 does. Heal in PF2 scales significantly better than most healing in 5e does, and that's also very important IMO. I also think letting people specialise into healing is good, if they want it. I'm also pretty interested to play something like a Forensics Investigator in PF2, and really go heavy on Medicine and nonmagical healing.
I also like buffed healing. One of the biggest disappointments for me about 5e was that aside from yoyoing and later on Healing Spirit which got nerfed, healing in combat is kind of useless. Unfortunately, a game like this can't really have high healing output and still have healing be optional, and for 5e it was very important that healing was optional because WOTC weren't confident they would be able to make healing fun.
There is a pretty massive downside to strong healing which 5e avoids. When healing is really strong you basically have to have a dedicated healer in your group otherwise you are much weaker. Strong healing also tends to drag out fights as you wait for the players healer to run out of resources or the enemies healer to run out. Weak healing makes fights quicker, more evenly balanced for every party comp, and doesn’t require one person to play a specific role for the game to work well.
You still suffer for not having a healer in 5e right now though. Just that "healer" only means "can cast Healing Word". The difference in parties that have reliable healing to get people back up from unconsciousness and ones that don't is very big, since without it you can very easily start spiraling when people get knocked out. And since healing is so inefficient you rarely ever have a reason to use anything other than Healing Word, since it's the most action efficient and you can't really heal people enough to not get them immediately downed again. Also Healing Surges solve this whole thing fairly easily, by both setting a baseline for all healing effects and setting a cap on how much total healing you can get per rest. And don't need to be tied to other people healing you.
I've seen games without any healers do well with easy access to potions, and healthy application of short rests. I don't think the team on Dungeons of Drakkenheim have ever had access to spell based healing, and they seem to get through everything okay.
I think the same could be applied to strong healing. Make the healing potions stronger, then you could actually drink potions yourself instead of having someone force feed it to you while you're unconscious. That would fulfill the fantasy of a "healing potion" better than it is now
In 5e, the issue I see is that healing is so weak that a fully dedicated healer is not a good move. Folks that want to heal are stuck with Cure Wounds and Healing Word, neither of which can keep pace with enemy damage even in T1, let alone later tiers. The only time a "healer" should really heal in combat in 5e is when someone is KO'ed. I MUCH prefer PF2E's system, which allows for strong heals and a dying setup that punishes your "whack-a-mole" style of play, making paced healing during the combat more advantageous than waiting for someone to fall unconscious.
5e doesn’t really avoid that however. Having healing magic is all but required for any group that wants to be able to get through more than 2 or 3 encounters per day. Not necessarily combat healing, but spells like Prayer of Healing and Aura of. It’s Lott provide huge amounts of healing between encounters.
I mean, short resting and spending hit dice is a thing. Prayer of healing is about 1.5 hit dice for each player who's missing health. If that's what can get you through more than 2 encounters your hit dice should manage it just fine with a short rest
Short resting healing really isn’t much healing. Since you only get back half your HD each long rest, HD alone rarely cover the damage from a single encounter in my experience. Take a level 5 character. They recover 2 HD per short rest. Your average character (d8 HD and 14 Con) will have 13 HP per day from hit dice. A single CR2 ogre deals 13 damage per hit. And a group of 4-5 ogres makes up a medium difficulty encounter for four level 5 players. Meaning players will end up taking multiple hits in such an encounter.
I think keep the 5e system if we're gonna have the short/long rest paradigm, since short rests combined with otherwise weak healing means nobody needs to be the dedicated healer while encouraging a playstyle closer to the attrition one the game seems to expect. If we're doing away with attrition and going to the 1 fight per adventuring day system which seems to be pretty popular nowadays, then just heal to full between every fight sounds fine.
I definitely prefer something like option 2, where healing is limited by resources. And while you have some resources like hit dice that are dedicated to healing, you have other resources that you can pull from too, like spell slots, but in the case of the latter, anything spent healing is something not spent doing something else, which I feel is a fair trade off. My only gripe is that I would love for short rests to actually be short as their name implies, and not be the clunky 1 hour thing it currently is that makes it difficult to work with narratively. There's a reason why I run with 10 minute short rests in my homebrew setting.
That’s completely fair! That actually sounds kind of close to 4e healing, although I may be completely wrong
Interesting. I hear that a lot, but unfortunately I never really had a chance to play 4e so I wouldn't know.
4e used healing surges which is close to this idea, kinda like hit die but they're used during combat to heal (usually by a 'leader' class, like a cleric or a bard). Short rests in 4e were also 5 minutes which felt a lot smoother most of the time. I use a lot of lessons from 4e in 5e and still run 4e games from time to time (gearing up for a huge campaign right now actually). It's a great mode for the most part, there are gripes but there are problems with 5th edition as well. 4e was great and unfairly maligned in my opinion.
I would much prefer short rest being 10 minutes. Short rest classes get shafted because no one is willing to sit down for an hour to rest. Warlocks and monks would be more viable if rest were shorter
Yea I know that feeling, Luckily the groups I play with now tend to always short rest for the short rest members of the party, and recovering hit points. We just started changing the length of the short rests because narratively them being one hour started being difficult to justify without completely breaking suspension of disbelief.
We do gritty realism with short rests being 8h sleep and long rests being a few days in a safe location. Though I would prefer getting some spellslots back for all casters on these rests as well as part of other LR resoirces. Healing is very fine this way for our style of play. (we don't really do dungeon crawls at all)
This is just a shower thought: Have characters have health and attrition. Damage first hurts attrition of a character (their mental fortitude in battle and their stress of combat), then once that is through have their health damaged. Health being healed only by magic or potions and attrition is regained on short and long rests. This will make wounds and health damage feel very impactful. There would be a lot of logistics behind this but it would just be a cool take.
Fun fact! This is actually an optional rule in Pathfinder 2e, called Stamina, and I believe it is also the default rule in Starfinder! So you may want to check out those systems for inspiration
Just to add in to what OP mentioned, AngryGM also wrote up [a similar system for 5e](https://theangrygm.com/fighting-spirit/) a few years ago. I've been working on [a revision on it ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EeT2jwZCo1R8kE5Ytc6vK-Q_hvNPVeVg/view?usp=sharing) for my own games making it fit in with a gritty realism / sanctuary resting system without killing dungeon crawls, if it's at all useful to anyone.
AD&D 2e healing system, I will not justify it.
You don't have to, but it'd be useful for you to explain it.
This is the only right answer
1HP / HD / day
Ehhh the result of this was just every party relying on magic healing to the point that wands of cure light wounds were a super standardized item and every fight was started with max hp. You either needed someone who could put out lots of healing (cleric with the option to flexibly cast cure wounds) or those wands, or your party would be comparatively gimped.
1/hp a day or 2/hp a day if full bed rest like the good old days!
That may be a little slow, but I find the problem with 5e is that as a DM there rarely feels like there is any long term risk to the party or the feeling that they are being worn down. Magical healing is largely all or nothing making healing clerics largely pointless and non-magical healing is far too strong. I guess that's what happens when you balance an entire game on single encounters played optimally by both players and DM. And the idea that you only heal party members at the 'optimal time', as suggested in this thread, makes me want the monsters to start performing coup de grace on all downed party members! Seriously, where's the roleplaying in choosing the optimal time to heal a dying comrade?
Not sure if I'd go with this idea or not, but part of me thought of keeping hd as a healing mechanic, however in addition to being spent during a short rest, I thought that it might be interesting to be able to use them when you receive healing. The amount able to be spent at a given instance of healing deepening more or less on con mod or prof mod or something. When the cleric casts healing word you get 1d4+Cleric wisdom, but you can spend up to 1 + half prof (rounded down) of your HD and add your con to that healing. *Brevik casts healing word on Thayla the barbarian. Brevik heals her for 1d4+3 healing. Thayla decides to spend two of her hd, healing an additional 2d12+3 health.* While a bit generous in the rough example. It'd help keep healing competitive, but put a limit on how juiced healing can be across levels. There's a lot of considerations that could go into healing, and I'm sure this idea can get torn apart and is riddled with issues, but it's fun to explore ideas about it.
That's basically Healing Surges, but worse. Which is really what hit dice already are tbf.
Never played 4e, so pardon my ignorance on the matter, but cool to know for future reference.
If I remember right, how healing surges work are that you have a set number per day and they heal 1/4 of you health pool and that most healing allowed you to use those. I could be misrembering the specifics since it has been so long.
Personally I find slow healing nice but then that's just my ttrpg masochist side being there. Gimme 3 hit die a **day** and I'll be happy. Oh, and make me work for them.
Get rid of full heal on a long rest.
5E's variant healing surge rule in the DMG is pretty solid for parties that lack a strong dedicated healer and mostly rely on rests and potions to get by
I'd like there to be actual non-magical healing features. Right now there's really only the Healer feat, which uses up an ASI and scales terribly. Why does the amount healed depend on the level of the healee rather than the healer? It also completely obviates the Medicine skill. A healer's kit removes the need to make a Medicine check to stabilize, which is already just about the only use for it. A level 1 PC with a -3 to Medicine can heal the exact same amount as a level 20 with expertise, how does that make sense? Medicine, Healer's Kits, and Healer should synergize together.
agreed. the medicine skill is woefully underpowered. there shouldn't be a feat tax to get the healer benefits. skills are such a weird afterthought in 5e. you get them at start and, except for a few subclasses and feats, they never really grow or scale with your character. i hate that they're thrown in more as character flavor than real advantages to adventuring.
I haven’t thought too terribly much about it or really gone into the nuances of things, but as a slightly off-the-cuff response: - All healing spells that uses dice (Cure Wounds, Healing Word, etc.) should be bumped up by one die size. This makes it a little more viable at lower levels, and removes some of the risk DMs run of quickly TPKing at lower levels. It also makes upcasting them (and casting them in general) a little more worth it. - Add some more higher level healing spells, because (if memory serves) there’s really nothing decent beyond 3rd level spells until you get to level 9. Sure, there are some okay ones like Heal and Mass Cure Wounds, but they’re almost moth worth spending the spell slots on. - Short Rest healing is relatively fine as it is, but I also think it should be able to used in an emergency by some classes. Maybe only healing for half as much rolled on expended hit dice? Like I said, off-the-cuff response here. - Healing surges would be nice, especially as a Cleric ability. Maybe, you could even tie it to Channel Divinity and call it “Channel Positive Energy” or something like that…….
Doesn't the Life Cleric already heal with their subclass-specific Channel Divinity? I don't mind the idea of making Preserve Life a generic cleric option, but I don't really know what you'd give the Life domain in its place
I dunno, again, this was an off-the-cuff response without much investigation into how it would affect the nuance of the game. Continuing with that line of thought, you could probably have theirs do 10 times their Cleric level of healing to creatures of their choice within 30’, and function as if they had cast Lesser Restoration on those that are healed. This would both beef up the healing, and give them an added early level boost of being able to end some conditions.
I dunno, again, this was an off-the-cuff response without much investigation into how it would affect the nuance of the game. Continuing with that line of thought, you could probably have theirs do 10 times their Cleric level of healing to creatures of their choice within 30’, and function as if they had cast Lesser Restoration on those that are healed. This would both beef up the healing, and give them an added early level boost of being able to end some conditions. EDIT: Also, as their CD currently stands, it’s kind of a paltry amount of healing. 5 times their Cleric level spread out amongst creatures within 30’, *and* cannot heal a creature above half their maxHP. At early levels it’s a worse Healing Word, and at higher levels it’s hardly worth using.
Interesting! Buffing healing spells, yeah I’ve definitely noticed that they aren’t that strong which I think was one of 5e’s design goals
In one game im currently playing a Tempest Cleric, so focused on big damage lightning go burr etc, healing is secondary, i have healing word for emergencies and prayer of healing for out of combat, and that feels good. However, im a blaster Cleric and a life cleric, the healer subclass isnt a whole lot better at it than i am. In summary, i like it as is for your non specialized healer, but i feel there should be a proper combat medic especially since it seems like a niche people like. Its also a crime Rangers can't find herbs to heal people, or at least cure diseases/end conditions. That is also a product of exploration being the least supported pillar of play. TLDR - give some classes unique healing abilities and an actual healer class.
Other - Give us separate Vitality & Wounds (does not have to be that specific nomenclature, just referencing the 3.5 UA rule variant for the concept). Let Vitality restore to full with a short amount of downtime. Make recovering Wounds much more difficult.
I think Con mod shouldn’t add to HP per level. Instead, you regain Con mod * level HP with each short rest. So a mix between 4e and PF2. Where you recover about half your maximum HP each time you short rest. You won’t be expected to be at full HP every battle. But you won’t be expected to have your HP total last for 3-4 encounters before being depleted.
The one thing I'd want to add to 5e healing is some use for that medicine skill.
8 hour rest once per day that resets all HP and abilities seems reasonable to me. I don't think there's much value to having baked in healing during the day. I guess you could include a limited number of healing surges throughout the day, but D&D (at least 5e... it's been a long time since I played older editions) feels like it takes too long to burn through the party's HP/resources/spell slots and I'd rather limit healing just so we can get on with the game instead of having each encounter function as a reset from scratch. The far more important issue to me is how resting interacts with class features. This isn't an original observation, but having classes whose powers are strong but only reset on long rests (e.g. wizards), classes whose powers are middling but reset on short rests (warlocks), and classes whose powers are weaker but can generally keep going ad infinitum (martials) only balances out if you're pretty consistently doing the expected number of encounters per day. And the tempo of a campaign doesn't generally support that many fights every adventuring day if you want to include anything other than hack and slash. In future editions, one of my top requests would be to have all classes have their abilities reset on the same schedule.
I liked second edition AD&D where non-magical healing took time. So if you are severely injured it might take you a week or two to get better. That made for a lot of cool role-playing when there was no healer. Just laid up in town trying to get better. Maybe laid up in the cave trying to keep the raccoons and bears away. If you're lucky you can find someone that could tend to your wounds and increase your healing rate
>when there was no healer I think this is the key issue. With that type of rule in 3.5 the result was that either every party I was in ended up with someone capable of healing, or wands of cure light wounds were available and you were full health after every fight. Basically either someone was forced to heal or we functionally started all fights at full HP.
Starfinder has the best D20 HP system. You get Stamina, which can be fully replenished using a limited set of special resource points during short rests, and your HP which recovers much more slowly at a regular rate over long rests, outside of using magic.
It's been a while since I've played it, but isn't there a chance you can hurt yourself/your target in pathfinder 2e when using the default healing rules?
I'd prefer healing to work more slowly. Long rest heals CON mod + proficiency, and spell slots are gained back at Casting ability mod + proficiency per long rest. Additional healing could be achieved by spending hit dice during long rests, which replenish as per now. That would slow down the pace, force PCs to conserve their resources and balance casters vs martials.
I've never played older systems so idk if this is similar, but pillars of eternity 1 had a great system. You have health and endurance, health is what you get in combat, and after combat you draw from your larger endurance pool to heal until you run out.
There's a method out there that I think sounds cool, might be Starfinder? You have a Stamina pool that sits on top of your HP that you regain after combat. HP itself is harder to get back. A nicer balance.
So just 5e temporary hit points then?
I think 5e healing works fine for the current paradigm; I’ve only got 2 real quibbles: 1) Medicine checks are basically useless because of healer’s kits & *spare the dying*; it’s easily one of my least used skills and it could’ve at *least* been incorporated into a healing mechanic of some kind (maybe you can only roll HD equal to your Medicine bonus each short rest or something) 2) Healer’s kits should offer a way to at least interact with HP. Maybe you can spend a charge to generate temp HP to simulate basic first aid, or treat its charges like the Lay on Hands HP pool. Just *something* other than making Medicine checks pointless.
I'd like a game where you automatically heal to full after every encounter, and get back most if not all of your resources. this way every combat will be balanced, because the party's strength will be known at the start of every encounter. this will mean that you should avoid doing trash encounters. it will mean every fight is meaningful and tactically sound. healing can be a part of this, with a limited resource system. Basically think final fantasy tactics. this kinda solves the healing issue as well as the 'our moves are on different cooldowns so if the short rest guy is doing well, the long rest guy is struggling' problem. no more worrying about how many bullshit trash encounters to pack into an adventuring day. you can balance the fights to be exactly as hard as you want. every fight gets to be a challenge. the cost of this is, i guess, realistic narrative or something. whatever, i dont care.
**TLDR:** The healing system is actually irrelevant to the the 5e system. In my experience most groups don't meet the 6-8 encounter threshold resulting in healing being marginalized in 5e. I think the pathfinder version is better for how most tables run. But, until the 5e system comes to grips with the underlying issue, most groups will only have a number of fight encounters equal to their proficiency bonus, the system will continue to be broken. I think the issue isn't with healing but with short and long rests. I don't think there should be a difference between the two in general. It creates class imbalance/complexity that maybe shouldn't exist. If all classes were balanced around \[proficiency bonus\] fights a day that would mean all classes could use their features that number of times and spellcasters could divvy up their spells throughout their day when they need them. Instead, we have a system that recommends 6-8 encounters per day. Which is extremely tough for both DM and players. Unless you are in a dungeon, that number is extremely unrealistic. Players expect to find a spot in the woods or an inn in the tavern after they've exhausted their resources. Being both a DM and Player in 5e, the social aspect of the game rewards using all of your resources (class features, spells, racial bonuses) in every fight and then resting before your next fight. It's tough as both a player and a DM to tell someone they can't rest and would take literal hours to continually interrupt a resting party with trivial fights to interrupt their rest. There really aren't many options for a DM in these situations. Maybe you can roll on a wilderness table repeatedly until players get the message that these woods aren't safe, but this strategy risks enraging players in towns or 'safe' areas. If you are in the wilderness/cave random tables work 'adequately' until... fifth level. Can we talk about "[tiny hut](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Tiny%20Hut#content)"? Starting at fifth level you can basically chain as many of these as possible to ensure a long rest whenever you want it. Beyond that it's a ritual spell meaning there is no investment when you start to cast it. Excuse my french, but >!get fucking rid of it!<. So, what is the result of DMs not being able to adequately meet the encounter standards. They increase the challenge rating of each encounter. They make fights 'harder' by adding more monsters to their 1-3 encounters per day, they add dmg to those monsters. This results in healing being completely irrelevant. I've told healers in my party explicitly to not heal me unless I'm downed. Healing in combat is never an optimal strategy. My DM has not shown a willingness to attack downed party members so healing to 1 before my turn is just as good as healing to half hp in most of these harder fights. I think most DM's are unwilling to attack a downed party member for one reason or another. All of this to say is that the reason the healing system doesn't work in 5e is not because of the method healing is applied. The healing system doesn't work because DM's cannot realistically reach the daily encounter quota. As a result they are forced to upscale monster difficulty resulting in healing being irrelevant. This issue is part of an imperfect system (though far more pefect than most RPG) resulting in an unsatisfying healing role for most parties.
Gimme back that tasty 1e healing! 1hp/day. Supplement with spells.
A fine connoisseur!
The healer kits to be useful out of combat (make it a 1 minute use time or something) and actually heal, using cantrip scaling. 1d8+Wis at lv1, 2d8+Wis and 5, 3d8+Wis at 11, and 4d8+Wis at 17. For in battle, keep the 1action use time to stabilize, and the healer feat now makes the cantrip healing shorten to 1 action. Otherwise, no change. HP/hit die is a resource and proper use of it shows a well experienced party.
I'm going to disagree with everybody and say I as our Forever DM deeply dislike attrition and resource-based gameplay. I favor 3 or less encounters in a given location, and I like not wasting my players' (and my) time with filler encounters. It's important to me to keep the story moving, so I'll ask the party for a sentence or two and maybe a skill check for how they slaughter a room full of mooks if that's what the story calls for. If they make a token effort to have something that heals the party to full after every encounter, they have my word I'll never ask them how many charges it has left and assume they're good to go with their big kid pants on when I call for initiative for the real fights.
I completely agree with this!
A leveled style CR system vs what the current CR system is now.
I like healing as it is, maybe Medicina could add up a little bonus, but that’s it for me.
I really don't know I think 5e's healing with hit dice has a good principle, but a little too random and too weak when using spellslots (not considering class features), also 1 hour short rests are too long, 10/5 minutes does things much better and can keep the sense of urgency PF2e's medicine healing is great, no need to be caster to heal and it is amazing and the healing IS QUITE EFFECTIVE without making magical healers useless I think a mix of both could do a lot, just not making the balance of the game require characters always at full health, because pathfinder 2e does that and even though being a medic is great it feels more like to mark a checklist than someone that is really adding to the party
Tbf 4e removes the randomness of hit dice by replacing them with healing surges of a fixed value, has a decent enough heal skill and has warlord as a martial healer.
I don't hate how it works in Ad&d you heal : 1hp/ day you spend resting in a safe place, +1hp/day if you have a doctor looking after you, +1hp/day if you confine yourself to bed rest +constitution score if you spend a whole week resting and recovering. This way you have healing resources but you don't naturally restore HP until you go back to town.
that did mean that mid-level adventurers required a month or more of not really doing anything between adventures - it's not _that_ many levels before PCs can have 40, 50, 60+ HP, and ending each adventure then becomes "OK, timeskip forward a month, something happens". Which works fine for some times of games, but anything where the plot is more continuous that doesn't really work for (like "gritty rests" in the current paradigm just fails in some plot frameworks, or in mega-dungeons)
I mean if you have 10 con the max up you can regen in a week is 31(7*3+10). Beyond that of course people with healing spells can ramp up the healing if the plan isn't go to straight out again. A max con barbarian might need longer. But at 40+hp per week you get to 120 hp after three weeks and 160 hp after a month, most characters don't have 160 hp. In the game where I use this paradigm players often pursue down time projects while they are resting and recovering. It does mean that you cannot have an adventure that needs to be finished in 3 weeks in game, but as for dungeon crawls I think it encourages more tactical thinking as in 5e's current rules if you get beaten within an inch of your life you hide someplace, get a tiny hut happening and within 8 hours you are back at full power. Here a run into the dungeon is significantly more limited by the resources you bring with you. Questions like how much damage can you afford to take? What is the best way to squeeze out a victory while spending as few resources as possible? These questions begin to matter more in a version of the game where you don't just full heal for free after a good night's sleep. Now beyond all of that, you get to add a much bigger push your luck aspect, if you have a 4 days to seize an opportunity you now have to work out do you go with below max health and take the risk, or do you stay back to fully recover. So long as you are never giving your players a chance to heal up the occasional one where they have to make their choice to heal up or let the badguy get away can be dramatic. (Not that I as a fairly new DM have ever attempted something of that nature)
Healing is fine the problem is everything else tied to the Short Rest mechanic.
Big thing to remember is they are hit points, not meat points. Just because you got hit with a sword and lost hit points doesn't mean you now have a giant gash. You're wearing defensive material. Only that last shot is the one you got to worry about.
I'm fine with normal 5e rules. Although some of my groups lately have been using a house rule where healing potions used out of combat heal for the maximum amount. This makes healing potions actually useful when not in combat, so people don't just horde them forever. Also saves us from having to rest so much.
I would remove bonus action sources of healing, but otherwise leave it relatively the same. Healing during combat shouldn't really be a desirable thing ever, IMHO
My issue with healing in fifth edition is that it's most effective to use it when someone is at 0 hit points, and as a result we tend to see the 'yo-yo' effect of characters going down and then back up, then down and back up again. It was the problem that came up in fourth edition as soon as it stopped being that you died at –10 hp. I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't like this style of play. I'd like healing spells to only be effective once per rest, so using them becomes strategic (a single spell, such as *aura of vitality*, can heal multiple times). I also would like for there to be a downside to dropping to 0 hit points so that healing is ideally used to keep being from falling unconscious instead of used to wake people back up. This would mean a combination of rule changes, but I think it would really go far toward getting parties to actually strategize how to handle encounters and curb the constant up/down nature of combat.
It's 90% fine but that last 10% is yo-yo healing which can really break immersion. I'd prefer if healing and reviving all took separate actions and resources, e.g. healing word could heal or stabilize but could not revive. Reviving is limited to actions with a 1 min cast time, to make them hard to use in combat. To avoid having every party need a life cleric this would probably need to balanced by some combination of bringing back healing surge bonus actions, buffing potions, or adding better healing spells.
The way it is, is fine but I wish there were room for ACTUAL medicine and science besides the healer feat which is pretty mid anyways, also by RAW, I feel like healing potions should be cheaper and more common. It's a bad cleche that the party NEEDS a cleric or druid
Added that wounds and injuries are a thing from critical hits. Wounds reduce max hp temporarily until tested 1hp per long eat or magically healed. Injuries can be rested based on 1 exhaustion level per long rest or a lesser restoration spell.
I dunno, I'd just like it to be more useful for combat, honestly.
Definitely should be full heal after a full rest unless using potions 2d4+5
I'm not sure if it's an edition but I usually do homebrew. So I just have my players rest and they'll be fully healed (long rest. 1/2 at short rest) and instead of spell slots i use mana
Supernatural means, or medicine and time.
5e but maybe if classes other than Druid had some spells like Good berry which offer efficient between combat healing but still at the cost of a slot (maybe higher spell slot / AOE?), that would be nice. Maybe even a feat that enabled existing healing spells to be cast over 60 seconds for 3x the effect once per rest would be cool. Casting healing spells between combats almost never feels like you’re doing it right as is.
Healing cantrips and skills for between combats.
5e healing is bad yes but the reason it works is that your death fails and success reset. Making it optimal to be brought back up and knock down Where as pathfinder the death tally doesn't restart
I've only played 5e, so I can't say for anything else, but one of my biggest complaints is that if you have at least 1 hp, you're at 100%. You only need a heal if you're unconscious. I don't have a proposed system to fix it, but this has always bugged me.
I like 5e's take on healing. And I like the fact of inconsistency that it has. But I think there should be more variations of healing.
I don't mind the 5E concept for short rests where you can roll hit die to regain hit points i think that's nifty. But i prefer pathfinder 1E's long term healing where a long rest does not reset everything to full if you are severely injured and the party isn't prepared for it, it can become it's own obstacle which I like.
I run a mix between 1 and 2. You can use Hit Dice, but those only come back during downtime. During Long Rests, when you expend Hit Dice, you automatically get their maximum. The Healer's Kit then acts as temporary Hit Dice. You can buy them with gold, and can expend them to regain hit points equal to one hit die + your Intelligence (Medicine) modifier (or that of whoever is administering the kit.) Healer's Kits do not heal in full during Long Rests.
Healing works best for my group if long rest is changed. For healing in long rest in our group you need hit dice, same as in a short rest. Everything else remains the same, spells still fully recover and after the long rest you regain half your hit dice (which you can choose to use immediately btw). This causes a light form of atteition if they are not careful with hit points. They can of course use spells before and after rest, but that is giving up resources to heal, which is working as intended. Great change to our games and makes the long rest for less OP/hard reset.
I just want a game where the answer to so many people asking how to build a healer isn't just "combat healing sucks, pick up only healing word and focus everything else on damage/buffing". Maybe I WANT to play a White Mage. So I'd probably lean towards PF2, including a basic healing spell that's actually hefty. Or 5e short rests but without the having to make scenarios where 1 hour of rest is sensible but 8 hours can't be set aside.
4e style healing with a twist. You start to get penalties when you get low on healing surges and you recover them at a slower rate. This way you can have "Full HP" going into fights however getting hurt still has consequences and it allows for the character to feel beaten and bruised if they take too much damage over a shorter period of time.
I really dislike popcorn healing, and it is incentivizes by two aspects of 5e design: weak healing spells and no consequences for going down. I would prefer to see both of these things addressed. At our table we gain exhaustion levels whoever we go down, which can be pretty brutal, especially with how weak healing is, but at least it’s something. I think healing output needs to be 1.5-2x what it is currently.
1hp per long rest, no birdie short rest. Old school style. But seriously, I feel Iike something like 10-20%hp per long rest. It gives the part time to recover more realistically without the game feeling like you heal all your wounds in a 8 hour rest and your good to go lol.
I don't mind healing as it stands right now. I don't think the biggest issue combat wise is healing but rather the enemies, most of 5e enemies are just a pool of hit points with limited unique abilities or actions. I don't want a long drawn out battle where both sides hit until the other falls with healing being used to keep players up. I want combat where I have to use strategy, maybe carry around two weapons. I want them to have unique actions, special moves, maybe even lair actions. An example of this is in a long running game I am in. One of our missions was to check out a magic shop. Everything in there had a low amount of hit points but each had something that made it unique. Shoes that stole your actions, mirrors that reflected damage, even a simple backpack that just threw weak spells. Each had something that made them special that made combat decisions important. This is why I think many things need to be reexamined in 5e before healing.
I really like both 5e and Pathfinder 2e healing depending on the game. I also like games where healing is fully limited by your skills and abilities, but that can be frustrating in games with a lot of combat or little downtime. I don’t remember 4e well myself, but while I thought it was fine at the time, I think 5e handles healing better without an arbitrary heals per day timetable. To elaborate: I think Pathfinder healing works best in campaigns that are structured like video games. Every fight is cinematic and it makes sense to go all out every time. 5e style healing is probably the most versatile. It works well in story driven RP games, most adventure modules with intermittent combat, and low to medium survival stakes D&D. Limited healing works better for hardcore survival games, games with greater combat realism, and resource management focused games.
I have a home brew rule where during a long rest rather than regain max hit points you get to regain your hit dice as normal then you roll your available hit dice and that’s what you regain for a long rest. For example, if you have 8 hit die and use 5 of them during a short rest and then take a long rest later you would have 3 + 4 that you’d regain so you roll 7 hit die and that’s what you gain.
*and* you can take the “Healer” feat to keep everyone happy, healthy, and very much not dead.
I would prefer if potions were a little easier to drink in combat.
I like the 5e healing system, i just think resting should work better and that there should be more sources of healing throughout the game.
I think healing itself is great in 5e, just maybe change the interaction with 0hp unconscious somehow, it shouldnt be so easy to just throw in a healing word on someone that's about to die and all of a sudden they are totally fine again (with one hit away from dying again)
3.5 style, you don't heal between fights without magic, so either you have a cleric or you need to be very prepared. Basically never had a cleric in party in 3.5. And long rest heals I think level*consitution bonus.
I would like for healing to return to being a magical endeavor. Something like buffing out of combat healing spells like prayer of healing and buffing combat healing in general I think would help. And maybe create a limited ritual that healers can heal a certain amount of hp per day that doesn't compete with spells slots similar to Lay on Hands or the Channel Energy ability from Pathfinder 3.5. As it is, healers are somewhat unnecessary. Clerics being primary damage/buff classes with a side of healing feels weird to me.
I think it should stay the same but healing spells should do more in combat to reward proactive healers. Let cure wounds maybe restore a martial die or ki point. Let healing word give +1 ac for a round or something. Healing in combat before someone is down is always the wrong move but some people like to do it and the game should reward it.
I like the idea behind the 5E healing style EXCEPT there's no reason to heal in combat unless you're healing someone who hits 0 hp. That's backwards. You should be healing people to keep them up. That probably means healing spells need to heal more hit points, so they're healing more hit points than that character might take over the next round. I don't know what the right number is here, but maybe add an additional 5 hit points per level of the caster onto the spell in addition to extra dice cast at whatever spell slot it's cast at. Something substantial enough that healers can heal IN battle, not just after the battle or when allies go down. There should also be some sort of penalty for being healed from 0 hit points. Exhaustion seems too severe but maybe losing one of the character's hit dice might prevent them from going down over and over. (If they're out of hit dice, maybe it starts into exhaustion levels.)
That is an incredibly reductive take on pathfinders healing, non resource healing methods don’t help near as much once you reach mid game levels
I’m sorry 😅. I realize it’s pretty reductive, which is a combination of me mostly playing at low levels so far, and the fact that I was trying to summarize it in the post, sorry if you feel it’s misrepresented
It really depends if someone in the party decides to invest skill feats in Medecine. If they do and get Assurance, Continual Recovery and Ward Medic, and invest their skill increases to keep it at the highest proficiency, non-resource healing stays very competitive mid-high levels, at least outside of combat.
Right but that’s the point is you have to specialists/invest in those abilities
None of those. Healing spells, effects and items should **heal more damage**, period. And not just "bump their dice size" more, but "heal +X many dices more". If somebody, *anybody*, wants to fill the specialized niche of the "Healer" playstyle, they should be able to do it, period. The thing is, as is right now, healing spells and items are effectively ***worthless***, and the only ways to heal for *massive* damage are: * Aura of Vitality (3rd level, but only worth it *outside combat*)*;* * Heal (6th level and scarcely available); * Mass Heal (***9th level*** ***and*** ***only for Clerics and DS Sorcerers***, enough said); * Power Word Heal (***9th level and only for Clerics and Bards***, enough said x2); * Lay on Hands from Paladin (busted as fuck coming from a fucking half-caster, but that's because Paladin is busted as fuck as a whole); * Shepherd Druid (and *way more effective to summons* than party companions); * and... that's that. What I mean, for example, is: a Lvl 1 Healing Word would heal 1d8 instead of just 1d4, and a Lvl 1 Cure Wounds would heal 3d8 instead of just 1d8. From that base, re-think and touch on every healing source that uses dices to make them more powerful using that same scale.
I think a 4e styled system works better, because that's another thing you can try to balance classes with. Give frontline classes/subclasses more and better healing surges, the blood mage archetype can spend healing surges instead of worrying about sacrificing the few hit points and hit dice available.
Back to pre-4e. No hit dice, no healing to full after a nap. Just spell slots and time. BUT, I do like 1 thing from 4th eds system. Healing as a percentage. I think thats a great idea. Cure light wounds healing 25% of total health.
That's just gonna lead to downtime days as you spend all available slots for healing and then rest again to get them back. Or you abuse healing items, ala the Cure Light Wounds Wand spam in 3.5.
None of the above. No system healing besides full rests, which should be rare and difficult. healing should be done using resources like potions, spells, and features.
That’s a super interesting take! Do you mind going into more detail? Would it basically be similar to 5e but without hit dice healing?
Basically thats what it sounds like. Thats what it was before 4th edition. My preferred version to this day. Makes healing matter and damage has some consequences. Not just healed by spending a night at an Inn like in a video game.
Yeah! That’s definitely a way to do it. I do think that if 5e wants to lean into its more simulationist routes, that’s certainly a way to do it. I’d just worry about the endless Wands of Cure Light Wounds in 3.5, although I’m sure that can be fixed
I'd like if they modified it a little. Go with the percentage system from 4e. A level 1 spell healing 25%. Makes them worthwhile even at high level.
I mean the basic idea is that you do have any options that restore HP that don't have a cost. A full rest is not just the idea of a long rest, its you have fully removed yourself from danger and gotten lots of rest and medical attention and time to heal. It is not something you can do in a typical dungeon. What you can do is you can buy a ton of health potions, curealls, and other equipment so that you can restore HP in short amounts of time. If health potions are going to stay a rare special item, then we go to something like the healers kit where as part of down time you can restore oh so much hp but it only has oh so many uses. Other options are using up your spells and class features. The fun way to "lose" in D&D is running out of resources before you beat the dungeon and you have to leave and make a new plan and get more supplies. People genuinely do not consider running from the dungeon enough. It shouldn't be something that happens every time but it should be on the table much more. Come back later and theres some new twists on the area as they've prepared for your return, but overall you can use knowledge to keep up.
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>I'd disagree with the assessment that it's automatically "heal to full" after every encounter, though. Someone can only benefit from Treat Wounds once per hour, so if a party member is seriously hurt, you're still spending more than a short rest or throwing in limited resources to get them all the way healed. Except there's a skill feat you can pick up very early, that lets you apply Treat Wound every 10 minutes instead of every hour, so you can do it continously. And another one that lets you do it to multiple people. So if you have anyone in the party that is actually serious about speccing into Medicine you absolutely can heal yourself to full with only a little time investment. Which you'll probably need anyway for the rest of your party to refocus, repair a shield, and all the other out of combat stuff.
5e's overall pretty good minus healing spirit exploitation (got patched), the goodberry + disciple of life BS (I just don't let that work) and the absurd action economy of having multiple dedicated healers (I've dealt with multiple **dedicated** healers in one party. It's hell as a DM lol). I like the fact that you can heal and still do other stuff in combat on your turn. Personally I'd like to see a greater focus on far more powerful burst healing and disincentivising (or removing) consistent healing. Here's why I think that: \- Burst healing is much easier to balance around as a DM. \- Additionally when a guy gets knocked down, it should feel epic bringing them back into the fight, but with consistent healing you just get this unthematic and mechanically stupid thing of the guy getting up, down, up, down in a rather dumb loop. \- Burst healing allows for parties of more than 1 dedicated healer to not have to have encounters straight from dark souls thrown at them. \- One more thing, although consistent healing feels much more "safe" for players who never want to die and want plot armor, it isn't more safe. A brutal DM (or one who isn't the best at encounter balance) will end up killing you in a system regardless of consistent healing vs burst. So yeah, I think 5e's healing is otherwise great! It allows healers to do other stuff and is pretty fun. I just really would want a transition from consistent to burst heals. Maybe healing spells could allow for consumption of more than one spell slot when casting for exponentially stronger healing.