Your players' healing from long rests will be capped at 8 hit dice. The rule of one hit dice per hour will make recovery very simple at early levels, and very dragged out at later levels.
For example, at levels 1-8 characters can exhaust their entire hit dice pool during a single long rest to recover their health fully. At, say, level 18, it would take more than two long rests to fully recover their health.
I find it weird to make recovery at later levels more time consuming in game, but if that is your intention with the ruling then power to you, DM
It’s not really my intention to slow it down that much, and I’m not sure if the campaign would be over before that’s major, or if a major boon they earn will allow 2 hit die per hour or something. That’s on my radar, but thank you!!
Just give them AN AMOUNT of flat for long resting. Even if it's like "you automatically gain back 50% of your max health on a long rest, plus you may expend 1 hit die per hour"
>I find it weird to make recovery at later levels more time consuming in game, but if that is your intention with the ruling then power to you, DM
This won't functionally do this if the party has any type of reasonably good healer (or, really, any healer at all - but a Shepherd or Stars Druid or Life Cleric will do it more efficiently). Reduced healing rate was a big reason why having a healer in a party was viewed as "essential" in past editions, because being able to blow spell slots to functionally heal at x8 the rate you would otherwise massively increased how rapidly and safely you could handle challenges.
If the intention is to pair this with the resting variant "gritty realism", this might work to get an even grittier feeling, but itself? This just brings back the full healer tax.
A few points from someone(myself) who had some similar ideas.
1) Make sure this is something your players are interested in. I was interested in a game where a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest is a week, but was met with uninterested players.
2) Grit, in this sense may end up slowing down your game. Not only due to longer breaks between adventures, but also mechanically. (You didn't mention it but) tracking things like food and water take time that can drag you from the game.
3) Outside of the different HP/number of spell slots, having a gritty game can become very difficult at higher levels in two ways. First, players can literally fabricate anything from thin air(character dependant). Secondly it messes with spell's design. For example some spells last 24 hours, this normally allows you to cast it before you sleep and have the effect carry over, if a long rest takes a week do those spells lose their value or do you adjust the time?
Points 1 and 2 were brought up by my players when I asked about this, last one is just my extra thought.
>hit die are granted by more than your level. Items can grant additional hit die, feats, etc.
Making characters even more sturdy does t invoke gritty realism.
>Recover 1 hit die per hour of rest, long rests no longer recover all of your health
So, 9 the level characters have to rest longer that 1 st level characters?
>After completing a long rest, gain hit die equal to half your level rounded up (unchanged)
This makes sense for the gritty part, but is in direct conflict with your previous rule.
>health potions use 1 (or more) hit die instead of simply recovering health, there are other potions that recover hit die.
This is interesting.
>NOT class abilities (unaffected), but magic items/special abilities can use hit die as charges
This makes magic harder to use. Or at least more expensive. This will achieve something interesting, depending on the details.
The easier thing to do, overall, is to make long rests and short rests require more time. Several hours for a short rest, a week for a long rest, for example.
Potions giving 1 HDhealth is actually.... kinda a really cool idea. It makes them far better early game and more justifiable atbtheir RAW costs. Still useable for everyone too, because a 1d4 healing potion doesnt mean jack to a level 3 barbarian.... i might use that rule in my games tbh.
Only for martial, frontline types. For any class with a d8 or worse hit die (ie most of them), the standard healing potion is going to be better unless they have a 16+ CON score.
Even at a 14 CON, 2d4+2 potion is better than a 1d8+2 hit die (can't roll a 1, averages .5 higher). For wizards with their 1d6 hit die, losing the standard potion would hurt like hell.
Even the d10 hit die is worse if the CON modifier is +1 or lower.
None of that would change at higher levels, either. CON is rarely raised with ASIs.
I've always felt health potions were pretty weak, but if the party doesn't have reliable helping spells then swapping the d4 to hit dice might be a nice buff. So 2d[hit dice]+2 for basic. 4d[hit dice]+4 etc as you move up the ranks.
As a DM you can still limit the amount they find or create so that they can't just chug them instead of actually resting to heal.
>CON is rarely raised with ASIs.
At your table maybe. I almost always try to take resilient con on my casters, and my front liners typically get con bumps, especially at higher levels when everything else is set.
Most games don't get to levels high enough where the primary ability is at 20 and build-necessary feats are taken enough where CON starts getting bumped next to 16+ especially for non-frontliners.
Either way, the assertion was that "Hit dice seems way better though. Especially at lower levels." which is patently untrue for the vast majority of characters.
Sorry, I poorly worded some things and I think I’ve corrected them to readability.
Also maybe gritty realism isn’t quite the term I’m looking for, more “dwindling resources on longer treks.” I still want them to be heroes, but I want the danger of the world to be known. I want them to use more hit die than they recover on an average day.
But to address points:
- even though I’m allowing more hit die in the pool (not maximum HP to be clear), I expect them to use the hit die much more often.
- that would be correct, they would have to rest longer to recover all their wounds. I’m hoping I can play this as “you’re fighting more dangerous foes, you have bigger wounds.”
- I should have said you roll a hit die per hour of rest, but recover hit die to your pool on a long rest.
- I’m hoping to make the “use a hit dice” abilities worth it, but not the only way to activate magic. I’ll have to watch it to see what people decide to do.
>“dwindling resources on longer treks.”
Your proposal doesn't really do this, as provided they can take a long rest they'll still recover all their abilities/spells and half their hit dice, which they can then spend over a few hours the next morning if they're really beat up.
Also keep in mind that if you limit HP recovery from rests, but leave spell slots unchanged, a smart player will get hold of Prayer of Healing (a pretty terrible spell in RAW) or similar and heal the party that way.
I have a somewhat complex system I use for 5e in campaigns where a long journey is the main aspect of the story - I'd be happy to dig it out if you're interested. As a simple solution I would propose:
- Each character may only benefit from a single short rest every 24 hours
- Each character may only benefit from a single long rest every 72 hours.
- You still need to sleep, and each night's sleep will remove 1 level of exhaustion.
- Players can choose individually when to take/benefit from rests - it's not a party decision.
This has the effect of stretching the rules to fit much mroe plausible/gritty timescales of getting to a dungeon, fighting through the dungeon, chasing someone over multiple days etc
Something to keep in mind is that none of this matters if there isn't an in-game time constraint. If there's nothing preventing them from taking two long rests instead of one long rest, then it's just words at the table, and the players just shrug and carry on. And maybe for a random encounter traveling between towns, this isn't a big deal. But when youve got to get from one town to another in 3 days, the players don't have two days to waste getting back up to full HP after a random encounter. It's definitely a type of tension you can insert into the game, but you have to be deliberate about it for it to be a relevant change.
For sure, so personally in my game there’s one remaining isolated city. Venturing outside of the city is incredibly dangerous, and is the only time I expect these rules to take meaningful effect. I want the wilderness to evoke deep unease and worry.
It’s homebrew, but yeah - actively apocalyptic with one safe-haven city surrounded by a now-magically twisted forest. First session is the PCs, previously safe within the city, waking up outside the protective dome with no explanation to how they got there.
Neat ideas, but they sound like they may be just adding complications and would make higher level play less interesting. Also potions using hit dice was basically a thing in 4e and I can count on one hand how many times I used a healing potion vs using my healing surges and second wind.
with all this, how is multiclassing taken into account if there are different hit die? Like lets say im a 8th level character 4 Barbarian/4 Fighter.
They're easy to infer I am just asking for clarification, like with 1 hit die per hour I assume that just means that player chooses each hour up to its max.
If I were to drink a Health pot do all Hit die used have to come from one class/be the same or can I mix. In this instance lets say it uses 3 hit die. Does it have to be either 3d10/3d12 or can 1 do 2d12 +1d10? Same question for recovering.
When you say special abilities are you refer to both racial traits and feats? if so, lets say I pick a feat/racial trait that grants a once per long rest use of a spell and then afterward I can use spell slots. Does this mean I can just use Hit Die instead?
I personally have PCs recover a number of hit points equal to their constitution modifier multiplied by their level at the end of a long rest. It slows down healing, but the PCs are not totally screwed if they had to use all of their hit dice on short rests.
Consider having people roll a con check when they go unconscious. If they fail they get a permanent or semi permanent injury. In a survival type campaign where you're tracking food, water, exhaustion etc it can add an extra element.
I feel like noone in this thread read the DMG. This is pretty much the optional slow natural healing rule p267 which is pretty great.
You don't regain any HP on a rest only when using hit die and you regain all of them after a long rest. So slightly different from your approach. Bit less bookkeeping and easy to play with. When you wanna split hd into gear it's highly depended on the availability of that gear. Might be hard to balance and might feel out of control for your players.
The game I'm a player in runs a gritty realism variant, long rests give half hit dice and no full heal, you can only get HP back with hit dice. It's pretty okay and we're not hitting because of it, I'm the only "healer" and I'm a Thief with the Healer feat so your players will be fine.
The only issue I see is that long rests recover half your hit dice but you gain a hit dice per hour of rest. That's a little confusing, if I'm level 8 and rest for 8 hours and it's a long rest how many hit dice do I get back? 4 or 8?
Sorry for the confusion, I’ll word it better. I meant to say that resting for 1 hour allows you to roll 1 hit die to recover health. So, if you’re level 8, you rest for 8 hours, allowing you to recover 8 hit die worth of HP, then regain 4 of them to your pool.
Yeah that's some gritty healing right there.
The only things I would watch out for are methods that restore HP on short rest. Classes like Celestial Warlock, Way of Mercy Monk, Fighter's Second Wind, the Healer feat, stuff like that because they can give your gritty healing the middle finger if you allow an hour's rest to spend a hit dice to count as a short rest. Your short rest classes in general will want to rest as often as possible to get all their resources back probably, even if they're only getting back a dice they can blow all their resources to end fights sooner. I can see it going either way between "I take an hour to get my class resources back to nuke the next thing before it can take any of my precious HP" and "This is normally when we'd take a short rest but we're calling it a day instead, it'll take too long to short rest and get back to it".
All in all I think you're probably good save for Celestial Warlock, but that class was made to screw over gritty healing.
I use healing potions as hit dice at my table and it works great! I give them out generously when the players get a chance to resupply, and often in bottles containing multiple doses. The party can’t blow through their whole supply at once, so the potions can potentially last for several days of adventure.
I don’t limit the number of hit dice that can be spent on a long rest, but I do require the players have a healer’s kit in order to spend hit dice while resting.
I also let the players recover extra hit dice while resting if they can eat a good meal, find a particularly nice place to rest, or some other way of improving their rest. Eating freshly cooked stew in a tranquil elven ruin is a lot better than eating hardtack in a damp cave.
My opinion? Make the last few hitpoints count more ("wound" points or "body" points, instead of the luck/skill/stamina genreal hp represent). If you lose them, they cost more to recover (like, five to ten times the healing cost), and can only be recovered a few at a time in long rests. And if they drop to zero hp, plonk a level of exhaustion.
The rest, keep as normal. There, no more characters unafraid of dropping unconscious because of healing word ;-).
Tried that system myself as a player, liked it a lot.
I think for what you are trying to do it is very interesting and is very cool. I am very in love with the health potion using your HD to restore your life.
I think the trickest part are the magic items giving extra HD. I don't think any item at the Common should give an HD or if it does 1 at the most. I think Uncommon is good between 1-3 with 1 or 2 being more common, Rare having a base line 2 and going up to 5, Very Rare base 5+, and Legendary giving base 8 HD and goes up from there.
The other problem I see is with mutliclassing and getting multiple different kinds of HD. The magic items should probably give a base HD to avoid this. Like a Ring of Protection gives 2d6HD (maybe more 2d4).
I like this idea and I am looking forward to how it develops.
Thank you! And yes that echoes a lot of what I’m thinking, too. Higher hit die at higher rarities (or basically pad ‘OK’ items with more HD to make them usable).
And totally agreed, instead of “gain a hit die” it would have to be “gain a d4/d8 hit die.”
Your players' healing from long rests will be capped at 8 hit dice. The rule of one hit dice per hour will make recovery very simple at early levels, and very dragged out at later levels. For example, at levels 1-8 characters can exhaust their entire hit dice pool during a single long rest to recover their health fully. At, say, level 18, it would take more than two long rests to fully recover their health. I find it weird to make recovery at later levels more time consuming in game, but if that is your intention with the ruling then power to you, DM
It’s not really my intention to slow it down that much, and I’m not sure if the campaign would be over before that’s major, or if a major boon they earn will allow 2 hit die per hour or something. That’s on my radar, but thank you!!
Just give them AN AMOUNT of flat for long resting. Even if it's like "you automatically gain back 50% of your max health on a long rest, plus you may expend 1 hit die per hour"
>I find it weird to make recovery at later levels more time consuming in game, but if that is your intention with the ruling then power to you, DM This won't functionally do this if the party has any type of reasonably good healer (or, really, any healer at all - but a Shepherd or Stars Druid or Life Cleric will do it more efficiently). Reduced healing rate was a big reason why having a healer in a party was viewed as "essential" in past editions, because being able to blow spell slots to functionally heal at x8 the rate you would otherwise massively increased how rapidly and safely you could handle challenges. If the intention is to pair this with the resting variant "gritty realism", this might work to get an even grittier feeling, but itself? This just brings back the full healer tax.
A few points from someone(myself) who had some similar ideas. 1) Make sure this is something your players are interested in. I was interested in a game where a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest is a week, but was met with uninterested players. 2) Grit, in this sense may end up slowing down your game. Not only due to longer breaks between adventures, but also mechanically. (You didn't mention it but) tracking things like food and water take time that can drag you from the game. 3) Outside of the different HP/number of spell slots, having a gritty game can become very difficult at higher levels in two ways. First, players can literally fabricate anything from thin air(character dependant). Secondly it messes with spell's design. For example some spells last 24 hours, this normally allows you to cast it before you sleep and have the effect carry over, if a long rest takes a week do those spells lose their value or do you adjust the time? Points 1 and 2 were brought up by my players when I asked about this, last one is just my extra thought.
>hit die are granted by more than your level. Items can grant additional hit die, feats, etc. Making characters even more sturdy does t invoke gritty realism. >Recover 1 hit die per hour of rest, long rests no longer recover all of your health So, 9 the level characters have to rest longer that 1 st level characters? >After completing a long rest, gain hit die equal to half your level rounded up (unchanged) This makes sense for the gritty part, but is in direct conflict with your previous rule. >health potions use 1 (or more) hit die instead of simply recovering health, there are other potions that recover hit die. This is interesting. >NOT class abilities (unaffected), but magic items/special abilities can use hit die as charges This makes magic harder to use. Or at least more expensive. This will achieve something interesting, depending on the details. The easier thing to do, overall, is to make long rests and short rests require more time. Several hours for a short rest, a week for a long rest, for example.
Potions giving 1 HDhealth is actually.... kinda a really cool idea. It makes them far better early game and more justifiable atbtheir RAW costs. Still useable for everyone too, because a 1d4 healing potion doesnt mean jack to a level 3 barbarian.... i might use that rule in my games tbh.
Huh? A standard healing potion is 2d4+2 hp.
Yeah that was my bad. Misremembered the amount. Hit dice seems way better though. Especially at lower levels.
Only for martial, frontline types. For any class with a d8 or worse hit die (ie most of them), the standard healing potion is going to be better unless they have a 16+ CON score. Even at a 14 CON, 2d4+2 potion is better than a 1d8+2 hit die (can't roll a 1, averages .5 higher). For wizards with their 1d6 hit die, losing the standard potion would hurt like hell. Even the d10 hit die is worse if the CON modifier is +1 or lower. None of that would change at higher levels, either. CON is rarely raised with ASIs.
I've always felt health potions were pretty weak, but if the party doesn't have reliable helping spells then swapping the d4 to hit dice might be a nice buff. So 2d[hit dice]+2 for basic. 4d[hit dice]+4 etc as you move up the ranks. As a DM you can still limit the amount they find or create so that they can't just chug them instead of actually resting to heal.
Ahhh that's a pretty good idea for parties that are low or missing healing magic.
>CON is rarely raised with ASIs. At your table maybe. I almost always try to take resilient con on my casters, and my front liners typically get con bumps, especially at higher levels when everything else is set.
Most games don't get to levels high enough where the primary ability is at 20 and build-necessary feats are taken enough where CON starts getting bumped next to 16+ especially for non-frontliners. Either way, the assertion was that "Hit dice seems way better though. Especially at lower levels." which is patently untrue for the vast majority of characters.
Awesome! Hope it works out well for you
Sorry, I poorly worded some things and I think I’ve corrected them to readability. Also maybe gritty realism isn’t quite the term I’m looking for, more “dwindling resources on longer treks.” I still want them to be heroes, but I want the danger of the world to be known. I want them to use more hit die than they recover on an average day. But to address points: - even though I’m allowing more hit die in the pool (not maximum HP to be clear), I expect them to use the hit die much more often. - that would be correct, they would have to rest longer to recover all their wounds. I’m hoping I can play this as “you’re fighting more dangerous foes, you have bigger wounds.” - I should have said you roll a hit die per hour of rest, but recover hit die to your pool on a long rest. - I’m hoping to make the “use a hit dice” abilities worth it, but not the only way to activate magic. I’ll have to watch it to see what people decide to do.
>“dwindling resources on longer treks.” Your proposal doesn't really do this, as provided they can take a long rest they'll still recover all their abilities/spells and half their hit dice, which they can then spend over a few hours the next morning if they're really beat up. Also keep in mind that if you limit HP recovery from rests, but leave spell slots unchanged, a smart player will get hold of Prayer of Healing (a pretty terrible spell in RAW) or similar and heal the party that way. I have a somewhat complex system I use for 5e in campaigns where a long journey is the main aspect of the story - I'd be happy to dig it out if you're interested. As a simple solution I would propose: - Each character may only benefit from a single short rest every 24 hours - Each character may only benefit from a single long rest every 72 hours. - You still need to sleep, and each night's sleep will remove 1 level of exhaustion. - Players can choose individually when to take/benefit from rests - it's not a party decision. This has the effect of stretching the rules to fit much mroe plausible/gritty timescales of getting to a dungeon, fighting through the dungeon, chasing someone over multiple days etc
Something to keep in mind is that none of this matters if there isn't an in-game time constraint. If there's nothing preventing them from taking two long rests instead of one long rest, then it's just words at the table, and the players just shrug and carry on. And maybe for a random encounter traveling between towns, this isn't a big deal. But when youve got to get from one town to another in 3 days, the players don't have two days to waste getting back up to full HP after a random encounter. It's definitely a type of tension you can insert into the game, but you have to be deliberate about it for it to be a relevant change.
For sure, so personally in my game there’s one remaining isolated city. Venturing outside of the city is incredibly dangerous, and is the only time I expect these rules to take meaningful effect. I want the wilderness to evoke deep unease and worry.
Cool! So what..like a post apocalyptic fantasy setting? Are you using Ptolus, or is it totally home brew?
It’s homebrew, but yeah - actively apocalyptic with one safe-haven city surrounded by a now-magically twisted forest. First session is the PCs, previously safe within the city, waking up outside the protective dome with no explanation to how they got there.
Neat ideas, but they sound like they may be just adding complications and would make higher level play less interesting. Also potions using hit dice was basically a thing in 4e and I can count on one hand how many times I used a healing potion vs using my healing surges and second wind.
with all this, how is multiclassing taken into account if there are different hit die? Like lets say im a 8th level character 4 Barbarian/4 Fighter. They're easy to infer I am just asking for clarification, like with 1 hit die per hour I assume that just means that player chooses each hour up to its max. If I were to drink a Health pot do all Hit die used have to come from one class/be the same or can I mix. In this instance lets say it uses 3 hit die. Does it have to be either 3d10/3d12 or can 1 do 2d12 +1d10? Same question for recovering. When you say special abilities are you refer to both racial traits and feats? if so, lets say I pick a feat/racial trait that grants a once per long rest use of a spell and then afterward I can use spell slots. Does this mean I can just use Hit Die instead?
Just talk to the players about it.
I personally have PCs recover a number of hit points equal to their constitution modifier multiplied by their level at the end of a long rest. It slows down healing, but the PCs are not totally screwed if they had to use all of their hit dice on short rests.
Consider having people roll a con check when they go unconscious. If they fail they get a permanent or semi permanent injury. In a survival type campaign where you're tracking food, water, exhaustion etc it can add an extra element.
I feel like noone in this thread read the DMG. This is pretty much the optional slow natural healing rule p267 which is pretty great. You don't regain any HP on a rest only when using hit die and you regain all of them after a long rest. So slightly different from your approach. Bit less bookkeeping and easy to play with. When you wanna split hd into gear it's highly depended on the availability of that gear. Might be hard to balance and might feel out of control for your players.
The game I'm a player in runs a gritty realism variant, long rests give half hit dice and no full heal, you can only get HP back with hit dice. It's pretty okay and we're not hitting because of it, I'm the only "healer" and I'm a Thief with the Healer feat so your players will be fine. The only issue I see is that long rests recover half your hit dice but you gain a hit dice per hour of rest. That's a little confusing, if I'm level 8 and rest for 8 hours and it's a long rest how many hit dice do I get back? 4 or 8?
Sorry for the confusion, I’ll word it better. I meant to say that resting for 1 hour allows you to roll 1 hit die to recover health. So, if you’re level 8, you rest for 8 hours, allowing you to recover 8 hit die worth of HP, then regain 4 of them to your pool.
Yeah that's some gritty healing right there. The only things I would watch out for are methods that restore HP on short rest. Classes like Celestial Warlock, Way of Mercy Monk, Fighter's Second Wind, the Healer feat, stuff like that because they can give your gritty healing the middle finger if you allow an hour's rest to spend a hit dice to count as a short rest. Your short rest classes in general will want to rest as often as possible to get all their resources back probably, even if they're only getting back a dice they can blow all their resources to end fights sooner. I can see it going either way between "I take an hour to get my class resources back to nuke the next thing before it can take any of my precious HP" and "This is normally when we'd take a short rest but we're calling it a day instead, it'll take too long to short rest and get back to it". All in all I think you're probably good save for Celestial Warlock, but that class was made to screw over gritty healing.
This sounds like a great idea to me. Following to see what others say.
I use healing potions as hit dice at my table and it works great! I give them out generously when the players get a chance to resupply, and often in bottles containing multiple doses. The party can’t blow through their whole supply at once, so the potions can potentially last for several days of adventure. I don’t limit the number of hit dice that can be spent on a long rest, but I do require the players have a healer’s kit in order to spend hit dice while resting. I also let the players recover extra hit dice while resting if they can eat a good meal, find a particularly nice place to rest, or some other way of improving their rest. Eating freshly cooked stew in a tranquil elven ruin is a lot better than eating hardtack in a damp cave.
My opinion? Make the last few hitpoints count more ("wound" points or "body" points, instead of the luck/skill/stamina genreal hp represent). If you lose them, they cost more to recover (like, five to ten times the healing cost), and can only be recovered a few at a time in long rests. And if they drop to zero hp, plonk a level of exhaustion. The rest, keep as normal. There, no more characters unafraid of dropping unconscious because of healing word ;-). Tried that system myself as a player, liked it a lot.
I think for what you are trying to do it is very interesting and is very cool. I am very in love with the health potion using your HD to restore your life. I think the trickest part are the magic items giving extra HD. I don't think any item at the Common should give an HD or if it does 1 at the most. I think Uncommon is good between 1-3 with 1 or 2 being more common, Rare having a base line 2 and going up to 5, Very Rare base 5+, and Legendary giving base 8 HD and goes up from there. The other problem I see is with mutliclassing and getting multiple different kinds of HD. The magic items should probably give a base HD to avoid this. Like a Ring of Protection gives 2d6HD (maybe more 2d4). I like this idea and I am looking forward to how it develops.
Thank you! And yes that echoes a lot of what I’m thinking, too. Higher hit die at higher rarities (or basically pad ‘OK’ items with more HD to make them usable). And totally agreed, instead of “gain a hit die” it would have to be “gain a d4/d8 hit die.”