So in the rules, when you take a long rest you get your full health back plus half of your total hit dice. This always confused us as I assumed using a Hit Dice was the equivalent to taking the time to rest and bandage wounds while taking a long rest was literally sleeping. 

In our campaigns we decided to switch these rules. When you take a long rest you get half of your total health back, implying that getting over a series of wound would take several days rest. But when you take those long rests you get all expended Hit Dice back.

This does allow for the players to use up Hit Dice just before a long rest but it also makes the attrition of playing extended campaigns more interesting for us.

What do you think?

The idea, I believe, is that Hit Dice for healing is limited by dice rolls most of the time and is a limited feature for healing throughout the day such as during a short rest. The long rest should heal maximum without rolling because most campaigns will have an encounter per day, sometimes more than one and in tougher campaigns that lack of an instant max-health will make it much more difficult to face the encounters over periods of time - especially if there's multiple encounters in a single day. The use of Hit Dice during short rests allows your characters to heal some without wasting spells but also not allowing an instant heal, plus characters are forced to think more strategically as Hit Dice are a limited commodity - you can burn all your Hit Dice but you will have less for the next day plus not all campaigns actually allow for "one long rest per day" - if your camp is besieged in the night interrupting your sleep and it's going to be a day or so before you get any chance to long rest then burning your Hit Dice so much will bite you.

The Long Rest should always be the reset - the back to max. And it is essential for good campaigns to use them this way. The Hit Dice, the limited commodity that has uncertain results should only be "if needed" to regain "some" health back for continued fighting and the recovering only half is what represents the effects of a long and harrowing day.

In your campaign, healing has been neutered dangerously. If somebody burns all hit dice and rolls poorly then even with the long rest may end up less than maximum and be more at risk for encounters - this would force the DM to rethink how he manages the challenge level of his encounters, especially if the events result in going 2+ days without a long rest. It's an unnecessary change in my opinion that will only make it more difficult down the road for players and DM.

That's kind of the idea. We're thinking that if a party is out adventurering it becomes harder and harder to keep going. I love the cinematic thought of a party of heroes returning from an adventure, bruised and bandaged, to a well reserved rest in a bed or at least a semblance of safety before they can really get that reset. 

I agree it's an unnecessary change, it's just something we do in our house and I thought I'd share.

Your house, your rules.
Something maybe worth thinking about is that if your heroes are getting battered and requiring time to recover, then a few encounters might be with 'shop damaged' enemies. 
Maybe those bandits took a beating a couple of days ago, and are now desperate enough to take on an adventuring party. (Do they never learn!) 

One advantage of this, is that fights with pre-battered foes will be shorter, and thus PCs should (should) take less damage, so the status quo is not upset too much, while retaining the excitement (terror) of getting low on health. The biggest problem I see though, is that how much damage does an adult red dragon on 25% health do with it's opening breath attack?

 @Cyb3rM1nd "The Long Rest should always be the reset - the back to max. And it is essential for good campaigns to use them this way. "

I hope you are wearing flame retardent undies!  :)

I also use the taking a bit to rest up after adventures however I didn't change that players get full health from a long rest (I presume some bandaging, food and relaxation/sleep is taken), but I have reduced the hit dice recovery.

Characters only recover hit dice as one hit-die per day of "comfortable" rest (all of them for a week).

Now comfortable is intentionally vague, but typically means towns or settlements and not in dungeons and wilderness environments. 
I'm fairly lenient in the respect if characters in the wilderness take time to set up a good camp and have decent bedding (like bed-rolls) and are typically uninterrupted for the night, I let that count as comfortable.

This has also let me add special locations that let characters actually get "comfortable" rest, or other less magical features that let them recover hit-dice (or like hit dice).

If you don't want to be as harsh as me, but still have limitations, you could go with simply doing 1 hit die per long rest, and make comfortable either a bonus hit die, needed to recover all their hit-dice in a week or the half as it is in RAW.

As always, as long as everyone in the game is on board then I don’t see a problem with it. I personally wouldn’t like it, but then again I go for more high fantasy style than grounded realism

I'm actually down with this idea. I will try this in one of my future campaigns. For the realistic aspect, I don't understand how someone, let alone an adventurer who slays dragons, to be back to feeling 100% just by sleeping for 8 hours. If I do a 1-2 hour workout I can be sore for days, no matter if I got 8 hour sleep or not.

I have always been a fan of gritty adventures and not  a fan of high level dnd. I usually keep level progression slow, and restrict rests. Two short rests a day balances character power. Try to have 2-3 encounters between rests to push party.

However, I have back tracked on healing some what. If hit points reflect an amount of skill and ability to avoid injuries etc rather than just being actually mutated to be tougher,  then a level 1 character and a level 10 character should heal in the same time. 

I am in the mind to you DMG slow healing where you roll your hit dice, even on a long rest,  so nearly always healed after Long Rest.  I am thinking that controlling healing in Dungeons etc my adding healing factor due enviroment.

Maybe resting in a dungeon is uncomfortable and players only heal at half rate.[ HD +CON mod/ 2]. If you rest in a comfortable inn with water and food, maybe you max your healing dice.

I've been screwing around with hit dice and healing on rests for my upcoming campaign that'll only go until maybe 6th-7th level. 

You can only spend 1 hit dice on short rest, but you can use as many as you like on a long rest and regain half of your hit dice at the end of a long rest. You can also regain everything (hit points and hit dice) by resting for 24 hours. 
You can improve the healing you receive by having a 'comfortable' camp or resting place. You can add comfort by cooking nice meals, having a nice bed, etc.

This basically means that there will be more lasting consequences after resting on a quest. But when you're in town and chilling, you can get ready for your next quest easily. 

I don't really see how this makes the game more fun for anyone. All it does is slow the PCs down from reaching the next exciting bit of gameplay.

Long rests are effectively a DM tool for resetting the party back to 'factory settings.' This enables you to plan encounters more easily, since you're likely to know where the party will be at when a new day of adventuring begins.

All your players are going to use up their remaining hit dice before taking a long rest, unless they have a big reason not to (and I cannot think of any reason - since the function of both hit dice and long rests is to regain hit points). So the only real effect of what you've described is that long rests take more admin, and don't guarantee full health is restored. It takes 2 days to fully heal, rather than 1 day. Why is this an improvement? The only thing it can do is slow the game down, and where the PCs are fully tapped on both hit points and hit dice, they'll need to spend an additional day somewhere safe before they go off adventuring again.

If you find you are having to scale encounters down so that the PCs can handle them without having been able to rest up, then you're effectively nullifying the point of this rule change anyway.

Quote from RobDavoust >>

That's kind of the idea. We're thinking that if a party is out adventurering it becomes harder and harder to keep going. I love the cinematic thought of a party of heroes returning from an adventure, bruised and bandaged, to a well reserved rest in a bed or at least a semblance of safety before they can really get that reset. 

I agree it's an unnecessary change, it's just something we do in our house and I thought I'd share.

 I know this is a very old thread at this point, but I wanted to add my two cents.

I love seeing more DM's do this! I am a big fan of grit and realism. Any house rules you implement to make that happen make me happy. I mean, you want to keep house rules as slick as possible for ease of use, but I don't see any problem with what you did. Awesome house rule!

Quote from RobDavoust >>

So in the rules, when you take a long rest you get your full health back plus half of your total hit dice. This always confused us as I assumed using a Hit Dice was the equivalent to taking the time to rest and bandage wounds while taking a long rest was literally sleeping. 

In our campaigns we decided to switch these rules. When you take a long rest you get half of your total health back, implying that getting over a series of wound would take several days rest. But when you take those long rests you get all expended Hit Dice back.

This does allow for the players to use up Hit Dice just before a long rest but it also makes the attrition of playing extended campaigns more interesting for us.

What do you think?

 
In addition, it also encourages those PCs who don’t otherwise benefit from a short rest (Rogues, Sorcerers, etc.) to want them almost as much as the Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks do. Not only that, but it make those adventures with a ticking clock even more nail-biting. I wish this was just RAW.

I have run several different healing homebrew ideas.  I am now thinking easier ways to run it and stop dungeon rests becoming a pain.

1  Resting in dungeon,  wilderness,  just HALF the number rolled.  Or Long rest half hP. 

2. Rember only half hitdice recovered after long rest.

3. I make many lairs have aura making long rest not possible and chance of madness etc