A character cast Sleep on a severely wounded creature, rendering it unconscious. The creature had a hitpoint regeneration feature, which my DM ruled as "negative damage", and so the creature woke up at the end of its next turn.
I thought that was a pretty clever way of thinking about hitpoint recovery, even though I don't think it's supported explicitly in the rules. I'm taking over DMing from him in a few sessions and I'd like to stay consistent with his ruling, unless there's a good reason not to. Any side effects to thinking about healing as negative damage that anyone can see?
The sleep spell defines, "the sleeper takes damage" as one of the end conditions for the spell.
It's an interesting interpretation from your DM, but regenerating is not taking damage, in the same way that being struck with a sword isn't negative healing. :)
There's a really good rule of thumb with 5th edition D&D, which is, if it doesn't state it then it's not a rule. If you find yourself extrapolating a rule from what is written, then it's most likely not what was meant.
Being the DM, it's their call though and they are entirely at privilege to make decisions as they see fit to make the game fun. I don't always stick to the rules myself, if I feel that they get in the way of the story.
Besides the already stated lack of explicit, or even implicit, support of considering regaining hit points to be damage with a negative value, there is another reason not to use this same ruling when you are DMing:
It reduces the effectiveness of a character without appropriate cause to do so (read: the sleep spell isn't over-powered, so nerfing it is not appropriate).
As to the larger issues that could arise by treating restoration of hit points as damage with a negative value, there are a number of spells that have their effects ended early if damage is done to the target of the spell. Having healing also count as an end condition would lead to situations like the following being possible:
a creature fails a save against a spell like dominate person
the targeted creature gets hit points restored, and receives a saving throw to end the dominate effect because the spell states that to be the case every time it takes damage.
So the ruling of negative damage being a thing turns a situation from "I guess we could attack our dominated ally, because while the damage might not be great it will potentially help us" to "there is no reason for us not to throwing healing at our dominated ally because it keeps them alive and also potentially ends the spell".
Here's the scenario:
A character cast Sleep on a severely wounded creature, rendering it unconscious. The creature had a hitpoint regeneration feature, which my DM ruled as "negative damage", and so the creature woke up at the end of its next turn.
I thought that was a pretty clever way of thinking about hitpoint recovery, even though I don't think it's supported explicitly in the rules. I'm taking over DMing from him in a few sessions and I'd like to stay consistent with his ruling, unless there's a good reason not to. Any side effects to thinking about healing as negative damage that anyone can see?
The sleep spell defines, "the sleeper takes damage" as one of the end conditions for the spell.
It's an interesting interpretation from your DM, but regenerating is not taking damage, in the same way that being struck with a sword isn't negative healing. :)
There's a really good rule of thumb with 5th edition D&D, which is, if it doesn't state it then it's not a rule. If you find yourself extrapolating a rule from what is written, then it's most likely not what was meant.
Being the DM, it's their call though and they are entirely at privilege to make decisions as they see fit to make the game fun. I don't always stick to the rules myself, if I feel that they get in the way of the story.
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Besides the already stated lack of explicit, or even implicit, support of considering regaining hit points to be damage with a negative value, there is another reason not to use this same ruling when you are DMing:
It reduces the effectiveness of a character without appropriate cause to do so (read: the sleep spell isn't over-powered, so nerfing it is not appropriate).
As to the larger issues that could arise by treating restoration of hit points as damage with a negative value, there are a number of spells that have their effects ended early if damage is done to the target of the spell. Having healing also count as an end condition would lead to situations like the following being possible:
So the ruling of negative damage being a thing turns a situation from "I guess we could attack our dominated ally, because while the damage might not be great it will potentially help us" to "there is no reason for us not to throwing healing at our dominated ally because it keeps them alive and also potentially ends the spell".
That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, Aaron.
Thanks for the input everyone!