Curious what your experiences have been, if you have run it (not on theoretical ideas, cause I have plenty of my own :) ).
For the uninformed this is where sleeping gives you a short rest and you get a long rest at the end of the week... or you get 1/7th of a long rest per day in addition to the short rest, depending on GM's ruling
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I have not. It seems like it would be a major slog for both low level characters and classes that require short or long rests to be nominally effective. I would hate to be a low level wizard that blows his spells on a fight on Monday and has to wait for the weekend to get all by the cantrips back.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
I plan in my next campaign to do a bit of my own variant, not quite what is presented in the core books. There's a bit of a survival portion to it, as the players will all be visibly 'malformed' in a way that the people of the world reject, so I'm adding in a few things like this, and mundane weapon/armor degradation to make survival more important.
Short Rest: 10 minutes or more, equates to binding up wounds/taking a breather/etc. You can expend 2 hit dice per 10 minutes of rest. Otherwise, identical mechnically.
Long Rest: 8 hours of light activity which must include: (1) sleeping/trance/etc. (eg. 4 hours as an elf must be spent in trance, 6 hours as a human, etc.). (2) 1 ration/meal and 1 gallon of water expended. // Exhaustion is not lowered, but is staved off. You recover all long rest features and spell slots, 1/2 max HP (if your max is 40, you recover 20, not exceeding your max) and 1/2 your max hit dice (level 4 character recovers 2, not exceeding max).
Full Rest: Three days with no more than 1 hour of combat and travel per day, and no more than 8 hours of labour per day (crafting, etc.) Removes all exhaustion, recovers all HP, hit dice, features, etc.
It might adjust depending on how it goes off the bat, and I wouldn't do it in every campaign, but this particular campaign calls for some adjustments.
Mellie, that sounds almost like vanilla except the short rest is 10 minutes rather than 1 hour, long rest is more complicated, and theres a third rest form too. I'm trying to find a simple way to alter some game mechanics to make healing make sense... bodies don't spontaneously heal...so without magic it will take a long time to recover... and magic becomes more valuable as it is more rare.
I just don't know how much it screws with the campaign to do so.
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Overnight rests = short rest + 1/7 of HP, HD, Spell Levels, etc. back - to a minimum of 1 of each ( HD, HP, Spell Levels ). This extends to metered class abilities - anything that has a check-box track, and regenerates with a long rest.
The 1/7 would work better from a math perspective if it was 1/5.
Spells would work better if using the DMG's spell points variant rule, in this case - but I don't feel like retconning it in.
Between combat healing actually goes OK. A PC can heal 1/7 of their HP + 1 hit die worth, daily, if they're "burning" HD as they get them. Spellcasters can get back 1/7 of their spell levels, which can be used on healing magics over journeys. Potions - or their game-mechanic equivalents - become much more important.
It makes for much more gritty realistic, and thus much more tactical play. Players simply cannot use the "I run into battle screaming, if I go down, someone will stabilize me, and I'll completely heal overnight" level of tactics. Getting hurt has longer term consequences - so it is to be minimized. Maybe it's better if we set up an ambush, and let the Ranger and Assassin soften up the enemies with bow-fire, first; maybe we need to form a skirmishing line so we can support each other ( dibs on a spot next to the Paladin of Protection! ); etc.
It really slows the rate of combat encounters - the ridiculous "book suggested" 5-6 encounters per day can't be maintained ( not that - IMHO - the ability of players to go from level 1 to level 20 in 3 weeks even knows how to pronounce reasonable :P )
It need not slow down game session pacing however - its just that game time passes faster, since the characters need more of it. It also helps that I'm using Milestone leveling - so the rate of pure combat encounters doesn't need to support the XP demands of leveling. Typically, it takes PCs "X" sessions to go from Level "X" to Level "Y".
A critical thing to keep in mind is that if this is the nature of your world, then these restrictions apply to the NPCs as well! No fair having the BBEG getting all his spells back overnight, if the party doesn't.
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I'm trying to find a simple way to alter some game mechanics to make healing make sense... bodies don't spontaneously heal...so without magic it will take a long time to recover... and magic becomes more valuable as it is more rare.
I wanted to do something similar in my own games, but I quickly found that the simplest way was to just change how I framed characters suffer damage. Basically, my characters only suffer significant bodily harm in the narrative when they've been reduced to 0 HP. A character with 1 HP is just as capable as a character with 100 HP, so it makes sense that the character hasn't actually been pierced, bludgeoned, or stabbed until they are actually dying.
I think this is simple because it doesn't actually require any rules changes--just a little change on how things are narrated by the DM.
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I run with an 8 hour short rest and 24 hour long rest, the key to it is that your goal isn't to make things harder, it's to spread your encounters over a larger period of ingame time, your pattern is still 2 Encounters, SR, 2 Encounters, SR, 2 Encounters, LR and repeat- though of course you can and will vary that expectation. It works very well, dungeons are often large complexes that take a multi day expedition to explore, or are 2-3 encounters long to accomodate a short rest. I find it makes it easier to mess with timing for to challenge classes, and lets others shine- you can let long rest classes shine by shifting the danger to more heavily weight one of your 4 day adventuring week, or ket short rest classes shine by dragging it out an extra day or two of adventuring so the long rest classes have to be more jealous about their resources.
It really serves to emphasize the resource management side of the game, and enables you to use the encounter guidelines as written.
I'd say that's about right from what my group is doing: 2-3 encounters per game day seems to be their speed - but they're doing a lot of city/wilderness adventures - not many straight "dungeon crawls".
Using the "gain 1/7th of a long rest per day" makes it hard to determine when they are taking an actual LR, however.
They almost never have taken a full week downtime - but they've done multi-day travel and gotten most of a LR put away.
The only time I can recall they actually took a full 7 day long rest, they did so because they were all in prison :p
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I'm not sure "you don't really take damage until the last hit" is much more realistic.
So that dragon breath didn't do anything ( reduce to 40 )? That fireball just got them hot under the collar ( reduce to 10)?
But man ... falling off that ladder ( reduce to 0 ) - that S%#@ is dangerous.
What are HP supposed to represent under that variant?
Everything I wrote previously is in regards to what the OP asked. In the standard rules short rests and longs rests will make more sense if the characters aren't being described as getting grievously wounded by weapons and magic every single combat encounter. I'm not operating off of a variant, the rules of what HP represent is simple:
Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile. (5E Basic Rules)
The way DMs narrate the loss of HP is up to their own discretion. If you want to narrate your players getting engulfed by fireballs, stabbed through the chest by swords, and shot in the back ten times by goblin arrows then yes an eight-hour rest to heal back up to full HP does not make any sense at all. But if you instead narrate losing HP like the character is losing stamina and concentration by getting tossed around or just scraped up then you can heal back from that kind of damage more quickly, keep adventuring, and it does sound more realistic.
I'm not sure "you don't really take damage until the last hit" is much more realistic.
So that dragon breath didn't do anything ( reduce to 40 )? That fireball just got them hot under the collar ( reduce to 10)?
But man ... falling off that ladder ( reduce to 0 ) - that S%#@ is dangerous.
What are HP supposed to represent under that variant?
Everything I wrote previously is in regards to what the OP asked. In the standard rules short rests and longs rests will make more sense if the characters aren't being described as getting grievously wounded by weapons and magic every single combat encounter. I'm not operating off of a variant, the rules of what HP represent is simple:
Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile. (5E Basic Rules)
The way DMs narrate the loss of HP is up to their own discretion. If you want to narrate your players getting engulfed by fireballs, stabbed through the chest by swords, and shot in the back ten times by goblin arrows then yes an eight-hour rest to heal back up to full HP does not make any sense at all. But if you instead narrate losing HP like the character is losing stamina and concentration by getting tossed around or just scraped up then you can heal back from that kind of damage more quickly, keep adventuring, and it does sound more realistic.
I understood what you meant, but I tend to narrate the bow by blows, being as descriptive as possible, my players seem to really be way more engaged when I do this rather than just, ok you hit him for 10.points of damage.
So to Vedexent’s point, how do YOU narrate this...I mean, the orc hits you for 10 pts of damage with a great axe...if he isn’t really damaging you...how do you play that?
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I understood what you meant, but I tend to narrate the bow by blows, being as descriptive as possible, my players seem to really be way more engaged when I do this rather than just, ok you hit him for 10.points of damage.
So to Vedexent’s point, how do YOU narrate this...I mean, the orc hits you for 10 pts of damage with a great axe...if he isn’t really damaging you...how do you play that?
Well there's a lot of ways I could narrate the scenario of an orc dealing 10 damage to a character with an axe. What's the character wearing? How does the character usually try to avoid damage? Will this damage reduce them to 0 HP? What are others doing around them? I consider these things when narrating how the damage is received.
"The orc rushes you--he swings his axe in a wide arc and it crashes against your sturdy armor. The blow staggers you a bit, but you recover your footing. You take 10 damage from the hit. Now, it's your turn."
"The orc rushes you--he swings his axe in a wide arc and you raise your own weapon to block. But his brute power is too strong, the two weapons collide and you feel your knee buckle bringing you to kneel. You take 10 damage from the hit. Now, it's your turn."
"The orc catches you off guard--you didn't see him there before, but you have just enough time to move--as you do the axe manages to slice a thin gash across your forearm, a small amount of warm blood drips from it. You take 10 damage from the hit. Now, it's your turn."
In all of these narrations I could replace 10 damage with 25 damage or 50 damage. My players see HP like a clock instead of a bucket of draining blood; when time runs out, the knockout blow will come. If they're down to just 1 HP they act like they're severely winded but not severely wounded.
Again, I'm trying to stay on topic--so let's say that the above situation played out and after the fight with the orc the character decided to take a short rest and heal up. The character took 10 damage from the attack that I described. So, they decide to take a short rest and roll a couple of hit dice and they manage to heal their 10 HP back; they're back to normal. Given the narration it makes sense right? The character wasn't ever described as being severely slashed by the great axe, so they could reasonably take an hour to catch their breath and then press onward.
Dragon breath ( 60 points of "HP reduction" ) - not real damage
Fireball ( 45 points of "HP reduction" ) - not real damage
Falling off a ladder ( 5 point of "HP reduction" ) - real damage. Lethal
absurdity likely under your you don't "suffer significant bodily harm" until the final blow variant ( which is what I meant by variant - what do HP represent under your variant approach to HP ).
That is what appeared to be your initial stance; You seem to have softened your position in your follow up post
I think that the above example showed that HP cannot just be mental and spiritual resolve. They have to represent physical damage, at least partially, or you get the above nonsense.
If they represent things other than physical damage as well as physical damage, then it makes some sense how/why HP scale with level.
A level 1 player takes 6 points of slashing damage from a dagger. This is 100% physical damage, and they are seriously hurt!
A level 6 player takes 6 points of slashing damage from a dagger. This is 1 point physical damage, and 5 point "mental durability, the will to live, and luck" - they are barely scratched.
However - even if that's the case, taking 50% of the amount of damage required to kill you as a 1st level character makes no sense to be able to shrug it off in an hour's or day's rest.
You would have to make some sort of explanation as to why low level characters who are taking mostly physical damage are super-healing, and why higher-level characters appear to lose that ability - since they're still only healing the same percentage of their HP and that now represents mostly fatigue.
And sorry - but I don't even heal a minor scratch overnight, much less in an hour.
So:
Any physical component of damage doesn't realistically heal in an hour, or even overnight.
Taking damage only to "mental durability, the will to live, and luck" leads to the above absurdity where your character shrugs off dragon breath and fireballs, only to fall off a ladder and die.
No matter how you slice it, or skin it narratively - RAW resting doesn't have much relation to reality. Period.
However, trying to justify RAW HP/Resting narratively/rationally is pointless.
HP/Resting is written as it is for game mechanic reasons; the game designers wanted heroic characters who can absorb damage like Conan, laugh at death, and be totally healed two scenes later.
That's fun in a high-magic, high-adventure, pulp-fiction setting - so that's how it's written.
A more realistic HP system ( and other systems do this ), has armor/dexterity/experience make you harder to hit, but when you are hit, a low level and high level character take the same damage ( since their HP are directly related to their physicality - which doesn't change level-to-level).
I'm not advocating this in D&D - I'm not sure it would fit here - but it's the realistic version of HP and Damage.
The compromise position between "full realism" and "game-mechanic/Conan-style/high-adventure" HP&Damage rules is the extended long rest.
It's not perfect - but staunching the bleeding of a cut, and getting stitches overnight - and having it mostly heal over a week of rest, makes much more logical sense. And your character was cut, or you have the above absurdity of nigh-invulnerable characters shrugging off dragon breath only to fall out of a tree and die.
Whether you want the high-adventure, or more realistic version, is up to you.
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@LightSpeedI see what you're saying, and I see some of the value of it. Depending on the circumstance it could feel significantly less epic.
"The dragon spews the flames of hell all over you, you fail your save, your hair singes, you take 48 damage."
"Spikes and grasping vines lash out all around you, pinging uselessly against your armor, you take 12 damage"
When you apply that in the opposite direction...
"Zebar The Magnificent, Destroyer of Worlds, you gather the powers of the universe summoning a massively powerful fireball, hurling it toward the orc army, a devastating fireball engulfs 20 of them, they get really mad and some of their hair is singed a bit, 1 hp remaining, it appears you demoralized them but caused no permanent damage "
Yes, I'm being a bit facetious, yes, one could be a bit more fair while attempting to apply the principals you laid out. Despite the facetious retort, I really do see it. I'd just think that you're trying to apply realism to one of the least realistic things about D&D. In GURPS you track everything, pretty realistic-ish and a whole heck of a lot of work and deadly, deadly combat. There are plenty of drawbacks and it doesn't feel as epic as D&D. So I tend to embrace the mechanic, with the following caveats.
I'd say that a portion of the HP regained are just due to recovering from shock, another portion from binding wounds, etc, the final portion is from game mechanics. The first rule of D&D Hit Point Game Mechanics is, we don't talk about those Game Mechanics.
I hope you don't take the above as an attack. Snarky is funny. And hey, if what you're doing works for you and your players, that's really what matters.
However, trying to justify RAW HP/Resting narratively/rationally is pointless.
HP/Resting is written as it is for game mechanic reasons; the game designers wanted heroic characters who can absorb damage like Conan, laugh at death, and be totally healed two scenes later.
That's fun in a high-magic, high-adventure, pulp-fiction setting - so that's how it's written.
A more realistic HP system ( and other systems do this ), has armor/dexterity/experience make you harder to hit, but when you are hit, a low level and high level character take the same damage ( since their HP are directly related to their physicality - which doesn't change level-to-level).
I'm not advocating this in D&D - I'm not sure it would fit here - but it's the realistic version of HP and Damage.
The compromise position between "full realism" and "game-mechanic/Conan-style/high-adventure" HP&Damage rules is the extended long rest.
It's not perfect - but staunching the bleeding of a cut, and getting stitches overnight - and having it mostly heal over a week of rest, makes much more logical sense. And your character was cut, or you have the above absurdity of nigh-invulnerable characters shrugging off dragon breath only to fall out of a tree and die.
Whether you want the high-adventure, or more realistic version, is up to you.
What is truly hilarious is you and I just made almost exactly these same points... at the same time! When I wrote mine you're reply wasn't posted!
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The issue is that I've explained how I play MY game and you've called it absurd. Why do I have to debate you? Are you trying to convince me that I should play my game the way you play? No thanks. I didn't ask. I offered the way I handle this in my own games; it's simple and it works for me and my players, so maybe it'd work for you. There was no need to pick apart my way to try and "prove" I'm wrong and absurd for thinking this way. I didn't come to debate, I came to share and discuss. Cheers.
The issue is that I've explained how I play MY game and you've called it absurd. Why do I have to debate you? Are you trying to convince me that I should play my game the way you play? No thanks. I didn't ask. I offered the way I handle this in my own games; it's simple and it works for me and my players, so maybe it'd work for you. There was no need to pick apart my way to try and "prove" I'm wrong and absurd for thinking this way. I didn't come to debate, I came to share and discuss. Cheers.
Forgive me if I came across that way. I was honestly just trying to explore how and why you chose the method you chose and explain my problems with it as I tried to think through how I'd handle those situations and ask you the same.
Also, in case you missed it I said "And hey, if what you're doing works for you and your players, that's really what matters."
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Curious what your experiences have been, if you have run it (not on theoretical ideas, cause I have plenty of my own :) ).
For the uninformed this is where sleeping gives you a short rest and you get a long rest at the end of the week... or you get 1/7th of a long rest per day in addition to the short rest, depending on GM's ruling
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
I have not. It seems like it would be a major slog for both low level characters and classes that require short or long rests to be nominally effective. I would hate to be a low level wizard that blows his spells on a fight on Monday and has to wait for the weekend to get all by the cantrips back.
I plan in my next campaign to do a bit of my own variant, not quite what is presented in the core books. There's a bit of a survival portion to it, as the players will all be visibly 'malformed' in a way that the people of the world reject, so I'm adding in a few things like this, and mundane weapon/armor degradation to make survival more important.
Short Rest: 10 minutes or more, equates to binding up wounds/taking a breather/etc. You can expend 2 hit dice per 10 minutes of rest. Otherwise, identical mechnically.
Long Rest: 8 hours of light activity which must include: (1) sleeping/trance/etc. (eg. 4 hours as an elf must be spent in trance, 6 hours as a human, etc.). (2) 1 ration/meal and 1 gallon of water expended. // Exhaustion is not lowered, but is staved off. You recover all long rest features and spell slots, 1/2 max HP (if your max is 40, you recover 20, not exceeding your max) and 1/2 your max hit dice (level 4 character recovers 2, not exceeding max).
Full Rest: Three days with no more than 1 hour of combat and travel per day, and no more than 8 hours of labour per day (crafting, etc.) Removes all exhaustion, recovers all HP, hit dice, features, etc.
It might adjust depending on how it goes off the bat, and I wouldn't do it in every campaign, but this particular campaign calls for some adjustments.
Mellie, that sounds almost like vanilla except the short rest is 10 minutes rather than 1 hour, long rest is more complicated, and theres a third rest form too. I'm trying to find a simple way to alter some game mechanics to make healing make sense... bodies don't spontaneously heal...so without magic it will take a long time to recover... and magic becomes more valuable as it is more rare.
I just don't know how much it screws with the campaign to do so.
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
I'm doing this in my current campaign.
Overnight rests = short rest + 1/7 of HP, HD, Spell Levels, etc. back - to a minimum of 1 of each ( HD, HP, Spell Levels ). This extends to metered class abilities - anything that has a check-box track, and regenerates with a long rest.
The 1/7 would work better from a math perspective if it was 1/5.
Spells would work better if using the DMG's spell points variant rule, in this case - but I don't feel like retconning it in.
Between combat healing actually goes OK. A PC can heal 1/7 of their HP + 1 hit die worth, daily, if they're "burning" HD as they get them. Spellcasters can get back 1/7 of their spell levels, which can be used on healing magics over journeys. Potions - or their game-mechanic equivalents - become much more important.
It makes for much more gritty realistic, and thus much more tactical play. Players simply cannot use the "I run into battle screaming, if I go down, someone will stabilize me, and I'll completely heal overnight" level of tactics. Getting hurt has longer term consequences - so it is to be minimized. Maybe it's better if we set up an ambush, and let the Ranger and Assassin soften up the enemies with bow-fire, first; maybe we need to form a skirmishing line so we can support each other ( dibs on a spot next to the Paladin of Protection! ); etc.
It really slows the rate of combat encounters - the ridiculous "book suggested" 5-6 encounters per day can't be maintained ( not that - IMHO - the ability of players to go from level 1 to level 20 in 3 weeks even knows how to pronounce reasonable :P )
It need not slow down game session pacing however - its just that game time passes faster, since the characters need more of it. It also helps that I'm using Milestone leveling - so the rate of pure combat encounters doesn't need to support the XP demands of leveling. Typically, it takes PCs "X" sessions to go from Level "X" to Level "Y".
A critical thing to keep in mind is that if this is the nature of your world, then these restrictions apply to the NPCs as well! No fair having the BBEG getting all his spells back overnight, if the party doesn't.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I'm not sure "you don't really take damage until the last hit" is much more realistic.
So that dragon breath didn't do anything ( reduce to 40 )? That fireball just got them hot under the collar ( reduce to 10)?
But man ... falling off that ladder ( reduce to 0 ) - that S%#@ is dangerous.
What are HP supposed to represent under that variant?
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I run with an 8 hour short rest and 24 hour long rest, the key to it is that your goal isn't to make things harder, it's to spread your encounters over a larger period of ingame time, your pattern is still 2 Encounters, SR, 2 Encounters, SR, 2 Encounters, LR and repeat- though of course you can and will vary that expectation. It works very well, dungeons are often large complexes that take a multi day expedition to explore, or are 2-3 encounters long to accomodate a short rest. I find it makes it easier to mess with timing for to challenge classes, and lets others shine- you can let long rest classes shine by shifting the danger to more heavily weight one of your 4 day adventuring week, or ket short rest classes shine by dragging it out an extra day or two of adventuring so the long rest classes have to be more jealous about their resources.
It really serves to emphasize the resource management side of the game, and enables you to use the encounter guidelines as written.
I'd say that's about right from what my group is doing: 2-3 encounters per game day seems to be their speed - but they're doing a lot of city/wilderness adventures - not many straight "dungeon crawls".
Using the "gain 1/7th of a long rest per day" makes it hard to determine when they are taking an actual LR, however.
They almost never have taken a full week downtime - but they've done multi-day travel and gotten most of a LR put away.
The only time I can recall they actually took a full 7 day long rest, they did so because they were all in prison :p
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
Sorry - this really doesn't address the:
absurdity likely under your you don't "suffer significant bodily harm" until the final blow variant ( which is what I meant by variant - what do HP represent under your variant approach to HP ).
That is what appeared to be your initial stance; You seem to have softened your position in your follow up post
I think that the above example showed that HP cannot just be mental and spiritual resolve. They have to represent physical damage, at least partially, or you get the above nonsense.
If they represent things other than physical damage as well as physical damage, then it makes some sense how/why HP scale with level.
A level 1 player takes 6 points of slashing damage from a dagger. This is 100% physical damage, and they are seriously hurt!
A level 6 player takes 6 points of slashing damage from a dagger. This is 1 point physical damage, and 5 point "mental durability, the will to live, and luck" - they are barely scratched.
However - even if that's the case, taking 50% of the amount of damage required to kill you as a 1st level character makes no sense to be able to shrug it off in an hour's or day's rest.
You would have to make some sort of explanation as to why low level characters who are taking mostly physical damage are super-healing, and why higher-level characters appear to lose that ability - since they're still only healing the same percentage of their HP and that now represents mostly fatigue.
Low level characters = super-healing; High-Level characters = can't even rest properly.
And sorry - but I don't even heal a minor scratch overnight, much less in an hour.
So:
No matter how you slice it, or skin it narratively - RAW resting doesn't have much relation to reality. Period.
However, trying to justify RAW HP/Resting narratively/rationally is pointless.
HP/Resting is written as it is for game mechanic reasons; the game designers wanted heroic characters who can absorb damage like Conan, laugh at death, and be totally healed two scenes later.
That's fun in a high-magic, high-adventure, pulp-fiction setting - so that's how it's written.
A more realistic HP system ( and other systems do this ), has armor/dexterity/experience make you harder to hit, but when you are hit, a low level and high level character take the same damage ( since their HP are directly related to their physicality - which doesn't change level-to-level).
I'm not advocating this in D&D - I'm not sure it would fit here - but it's the realistic version of HP and Damage.
The compromise position between "full realism" and "game-mechanic/Conan-style/high-adventure" HP&Damage rules is the extended long rest.
It's not perfect - but staunching the bleeding of a cut, and getting stitches overnight - and having it mostly heal over a week of rest, makes much more logical sense. And your character was cut, or you have the above absurdity of nigh-invulnerable characters shrugging off dragon breath only to fall out of a tree and die.
Whether you want the high-adventure, or more realistic version, is up to you.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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@LightSpeed I see what you're saying, and I see some of the value of it. Depending on the circumstance it could feel significantly less epic.
"The dragon spews the flames of hell all over you, you fail your save, your hair singes, you take 48 damage."
"Spikes and grasping vines lash out all around you, pinging uselessly against your armor, you take 12 damage"
When you apply that in the opposite direction...
"Zebar The Magnificent, Destroyer of Worlds, you gather the powers of the universe summoning a massively powerful fireball, hurling it toward the orc army, a devastating fireball engulfs 20 of them, they get really mad and some of their hair is singed a bit, 1 hp remaining, it appears you demoralized them but caused no permanent damage "
Yes, I'm being a bit facetious, yes, one could be a bit more fair while attempting to apply the principals you laid out. Despite the facetious retort, I really do see it. I'd just think that you're trying to apply realism to one of the least realistic things about D&D. In GURPS you track everything, pretty realistic-ish and a whole heck of a lot of work and deadly, deadly combat. There are plenty of drawbacks and it doesn't feel as epic as D&D. So I tend to embrace the mechanic, with the following caveats.
I'd say that a portion of the HP regained are just due to recovering from shock, another portion from binding wounds, etc, the final portion is from game mechanics. The first rule of D&D Hit Point Game Mechanics is, we don't talk about those Game Mechanics.
I hope you don't take the above as an attack. Snarky is funny. And hey, if what you're doing works for you and your players, that's really what matters.
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
The issue is that I've explained how I play MY game and you've called it absurd. Why do I have to debate you? Are you trying to convince me that I should play my game the way you play? No thanks. I didn't ask. I offered the way I handle this in my own games; it's simple and it works for me and my players, so maybe it'd work for you. There was no need to pick apart my way to try and "prove" I'm wrong and absurd for thinking this way. I didn't come to debate, I came to share and discuss. Cheers.
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption