It's been a while.
So...
Hit Points! They suck, right? I'm trying to be relevant, here.
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| I mean, really. This is truly commentary ahead of its time. |
This is an attempt to reconcile two types of gameplay in
D&D: Fast Healing, and Slow Healing. In the standard D&D 5e ruleset,
characters heal all of their hit points after a long rest, including damage
that reduces the character’s hit point total. With the standard Slow Healing
method presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, characters can only recover hit
points using Hit Dice (rolling them to heal). The hit dice can recover damage
that reduces the hit point total during a long rest (you can also spend them
during a short rest, but it doesn’t restore this kind of damage).
Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of either of these methods. The “fast
healing” is supposed to represent fatigue recovery. Pulled muscles and worn
endurance. But It unfortunately doesn’t really represent actual wounds very
well. Either you state that they take wounds, in which case they seem to heal
overnight. Or you state that they don’t, in which case the only wound they take
is the final blow that drops them to 0. And while that’s a fine way to do
things, it doesn’t really represent normal cuts, bruises, and punctures that
characters suffer along the way. A gash across the leg might not be
life-threatening (unless it festers), but it definitely affects how you move
and fight.
The “slow healing” method CAN suffer the same issue. I
use it in my home games, and characters are constantly able to heal all their
hit points overnight. However, it’s intended to force HP to represent wounds
more than vitality. It takes longer, and therefore represents wounds closing,
burns healing, etc. Unfortunately, tracking hit dice for every rest can be
annoying, especially when the players are in the middle of a dungeon and they’re
missing HD from the last Long Rest where they had to spend like all of them
because of a nasty fight with some invisible stalkers and they’re standing
outside the dragon’s FREAKING LAIR but they don’t have any hit dice to spend
and they’re in a time crunch because the dragon is going to eat the prince if
they don’t act NOW and their last THREE characters died from this exact same
problem and UGH CAN’T I JUST HEAL YOU BASTARD DM!?
I know there’s an OSR/grodnardy argument about “back in
our day, we only healed ONE HIT POINT a night!” I don’t care. I understand that
some games need you to really focus on the grim’n’grit of old-school AD&D,
but most games don’t tend to follow that model these days. They seek to extend
the adventuring day and allow characters to recover from fatigue in a
somewhat-timely manner so they can keep fighting without going back to town or
camp, where they might run the chance of wandering monsters, inclement weather,
or any number of other evil doo-dads that the DM keeps stored in his Scary Folder
of Doom™.
I think I’ve rambled enough, though, and you’ve probably
skipped over all of this anyway. So, without further ado, HIT POINTS and
Wounds!
NOT! I do want to pay special mention to the newest
Unearthed Arcana, which offers a “vitality” system. Essentially, you have a
separate amount of “vitality” points that deplete if you take 10 damage or more,
slowly lowering your maximum hit point total, and if they hit 0, you start
taking directly from Vitality. I actually like these, but they are WAY more
complicated than I want to deal with. Therefore…
