D&D 5E Short Rest Hit Point Recovery

[Huntsman57]

Coming from 2E and 3.5, when I first saw the concept of short rests my knee jerk reaction was "hell no!" I have, however, warmed up to the overall concept of the heroes having the opportunity to take a short respite to patch themselves up. Of course, certain classes depend heavily on short rests and would be quite handicapped without them. I can't help but feel, however, that the amount of hit points that can be recovered during the day through short resting is a bit much IMO. I also like the idea that the PCs are just patching themselves up. Without natural healing or magic, I feel that a short rest shouldn't have the capability to return their hit points to mx.

My thoughts on this is that a short rest should only be possible once per day, and should recover 50% of the missing hit points, rounded down. Thus if a character with 100 hit points short rested with 39 hit points remaining, the act of short resting would gain him 30 hit points, bring his total back up to 69. Magical healing, if available, could of course bring him back the rest of the way to max.

Long resting would pretty much work as short rests do. For each day of inactivity you continue to regain 50% of the remaining missing hit points. Long resting like this can eventually bring us back to max hit points.

Like it? Hate it?

 

[the Jester]

You don't normally regain hit points at all on a short rest- unless you spend Hit Dice.

My suggestion would be to lower the rate at which HD are regained. In my campaign, characters regain half their HD, rounded down, minimum 1, on completing a long rest.

 

[leonardoraele]

My homebrew for recovery is:

1) Players do not fully heals at the end of a long rest
2) Players gain a number of hit dices equal to their proficiency bonus at the end of a long rest (hot half)
3) They can spend hit dice on both short and long rest

They won't feel much difference in the first levels, but slowly they will need more time to heal and later on they will have to take 4-5 days to fully recover, plus some more days to stock hit dices to use inside dungeons.

You could also limit the number of hit dices they could expend each short rest. Like the same amount as their proficiency bonus, for instance. Using proficiency bonus works well because it scales with their level, natually balancing the game, but will feel like a limitation to recovery in any level.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

My thoughts on this is that a short rest should only be possible once per day, and should recover 50% of the missing hit points, rounded down. Thus if a character with 100 hit points short rested with 39 hit points remaining, the act of short resting would gain him 30 hit points, bring his total back up to 69. Magical healing, if available, could of course bring him back the rest of the way to max.

Long resting would pretty much work as short rests do. For each day of inactivity you continue to regain 50% of the remaining missing hit points. Long resting like this can eventually bring us back to max hit points.

The problem with placing a hard limit on short rests is that you might get people not taking a short rest, because they want to save it for later, even though they have the time. If everyone gets kind of beaten up after the first encounter, but the fighter is still mostly okay, then everyone else will be tending their wounds while the fighter just stands there and specifically doesn't rest for an hour, because they might need to rest later. It's an odd situation to put on someone.

The options in the DMG are all terrible, though. They only tweak the rate of HD recovery, but you can still go from nearly dead to up to nearly full after a single short rest; it just changes whether you can do that every other day, or whether you need a few weeks before pulling that stunt. Your method is better than that.

I'm not sure what you're saying about long rests and days of inactivity. If you could recover half of your HP on a non-adventuring day, but you could take a short rest on an adventuring day and recover half of your HP, then I'm not seeing any practical difference. I also don't understand what happens when you go to sleep after an adventuring day, if you've already taken a short rest that day - do you not recover HP overnight? or do you get up to 75% after short rest and then long rest?

 

[Lanefan]

What we've been doing in our 1e game for eons now might be of use here:

Immediately after any combat or situation where you took damage you can take a short rest - usually just a few minutes - where you patch up the nicks, take a drink of water, catch your breath, etc. This gets you back a small dice worth of h.p. (we use d3, 5e might be better suited to d6). If you do anything else after a combat ends other than rest (e.g. keep moving, stop and loot or search, etc.) the opportunity to rest is lost; it is also lost if you receive any other form of healing or curing in the meantime.

We use a body-fatigue point system and to thusly rest you have to still be in fatigues; for 5e purposes and to make it simpler you could just make it that you're able to thusly rest at any h.p. level above 1. (if you're at 1 or 0 you're too badly hurt for this sort of short rest to do you any good, and need more persuasive healing).

Lanefan