I see the gritty realism as flavor as opposed to trudging through trying to play out 7 days at the table. For the standard long rest, those 8 hours are often gone over quickly. You ask who is doing what during the rest, describe that, see if anything happens and then the rest is over. I run it the same way except since it is over the course of a week, players can do downtime activities during their 7 days to recuperate. I find it helps with realism and allowing time to pass by naturally as opposed to time skips.
This is perfect, I was just thinking this. You CAN spend those days to rile play, but they will understandably become boring after a while, so I think this is a great explanation
I actually used the Gritty Realism for an extended campaign that went on for about two years. It worked quite well and the players didn't complain (much) about it. They worked together more tactically and were much more sparing with their various long rest abilities, using them in more desperate moments when they really needed that extra help. The only issue we found we had with it was when they had to level up. They found fewer opportunities to level up and they did find that rather annoying, and when they finally did level up, they would have a ton of new abilities sometimes to the point that some players forgot about them. And I also found that taking a long rest are certain points helped ruin some of the tension in the overarcing plot, but that last part was more on me as a DM not properly accomodating for the week-long rest. So all in all I quite enjoy the Gritty Realism route, so long as your players are having fun with it, and could possibly need some tweaking depending on your DM and setting.
I moved to characters needing to spend HD to recover HP. If someone with proficiency in Medicine treats you then you get extra HP when you spend those HD. No HP reset after a long rest. It helped me get the feel I was looking for.
One thing I do is have a persistent wound feature which works by decreasing your max health every time you fall bellow half health, and to add on to this I added in an additional rest type called a healing rest which is a multiple day resting period where you are allowed to do just about anything that won't cause you damage. A healing rest typically takes a week, but there are ways to reduce the resting period such as if someone has the acolyte background or medicine proficiency.
Geezer here.. Honestly have not played 5e. Lots Chainmail to 3.5, some tables got 1, yes 1 hp per day. We mostly gave con bonus per day and healing kits were sought after. Game on
I play a hybrid , mostly gritty realism where a long rest is 7 days and a short rest is 8 hours , however I tweak the time for a long rest down to 3 days if the players find somewhere comfortable to sleep such as a fine inn, and 7-10 days if they are camping of roughing it ... I also allow casters to prepare new lists of spells after a short rest instead of a long , so the spell slots don’t come back but you are not committed to your original list for weeks ... makes spell casters think before casting spells and I think balances the martial classes with the magic users , also makes taking damage a little more serious . After a long rest players get half their hit dice back but no hit points unless they choose to spend hit die which they can do both before and after they get them back up to the number of days they rested . Since the camping I’m running is time critical and a balance of combat and politics i find it works , would not attempt this for a dungeon crawl style campaign though
I used the slow natural healing method before, and it was great. Players were discouraged to long rest inside the dungeons, because they wouldn't completely heal up, or if they would, then they'd have little or no hit dice if they needed a short rest down the line. Now I'm inclined to combine it with healing kit dependency.
I am running a grittier game. In my game I have the PC's suffer 1 level of exhaustion when they drop to 0 hit points or if they are critically hit. It takes 24 hours of rest to remove 1 level of exhaustion. It makes the world seem more real and forces them out of murder hobo tendencies.
One "easy, not so punishing all the time, but still interesting and fun" way to "nerf" long rests is to add long-term conditions after near-death experiences. Fighter got down to 2 death saving throws but lived. Next day he will be full HP, but his right arm will hurt a lot, so he will get a penalty on attack rols. Or maybe that arrow to the knee will take 5/10 ft of movement for a couple days. Perhaps he got a head trauma and disadvantage on wis savings.
Been using a variation of the "Gritty Realism" variant rule in all the tables i either run or play at for quite some time now. The variation at my table is simply that a long rest only takes 48 hours in relative comfort (meaning no travel, and fairly ok accomodation, either by camping or being in a tavern in a town) instead of the entire week that it usually takes, due to players feeling like it's too much downtime. It means that you can get one a tad easier in more difficult circumstances. The benefits are that exploration and random encounters suddenly become meaningful. If you're in the underdark, you have to decide whether you want to take the fight with the umberhulk, or let try to get around it in another fashion, giving the situation a certain tension that isn't normally present. At the same time, it cuts down on the disparity between casters and non-casters in that casters have to think about where and when to use their spells, instead of blowing their load on every fight. This makes martials really shine in combat encounters and lets those with the skills to do certain things outside combat use them instead of there being a spell that fixes everything as per usual. Concentration spells become vastly more important in such a case, making it important to protect the caster so they can conserve their spellslots. I love it and all the intricacies it brings with it.
The way I usually think of the GR variant, it would be more like throwing the suggested "6-8 encounters per day" at your party a lot slower, like more over the course of a week. In theory, this sounds like casters would have the same number of combats to "[blow] their load on" per long rest, so roughly the same number of expended spell slots not accounting for exploration and social encounters, which would undoubtedly become more numerous in this case. Does it not play like this in practice?
@@corygumminger6349 oh, it definitely does. Combat can be designed in a less swingy way since the PC's won't always be at 100% strength. You actually get to slowly drain their resources which i personally like, both as a player and DM. As to the addition of more exploration and social encounters, yes. There usually is more exploration and social interaction between rests, where casters get to think about if they want to blow a spell on making things easier, in return for them potentially not having that spell ready in case of other complications. It's a great form of decision making that comes naturally with the gritty realism rules. One bonus to this is also that magic feels more... Well... Magical when it's used more sparingly.
As a avid 2nd Ed player. Yeah, I kind of have issues with all easy ways you can heal yourself in 5e. It just seems to really just take away the importance of a cleric. They are such a important class and first and second.
I have a game where we used to use the gritty realism rest variant. But we kept getting into many fights, and it just wasn't for us. *But* we still wanted that realism of not healing from major wounds over 8 hours. So I added a "minor short rest" and a "minor long rest." (I called them Each of which only gave abilities and spell slots back. It added a bit of complexity, but much more realism and allowed for more combats to be survivable. (It's especially good if you only have magical healing between your party, i.e. only having a partial cleric or celestial pact warlock with only cure wounds and/or their healing light ability or the for healing).
Under "Damage & Healing" in the PHB the first couple of lines about hit points says "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." I take this into account in that hit point numbers do not necessarily mean physical damage. I look at it that the majority of hit points numbers are based off of how experienced PCs are in rolling with blows, narrowly avoiding hits and pure luck... that sort of thing and that a small percentage is actual physical, potentially lethal, damage. Taking that into account short/long rests make more sense. Another thing to keep in mind is that hit dice expended to "heal" on short rests is finite, are folks not keeping track of how many hit dice they have and are expending? My players will tend to run out after 2, maybe 3 short rests (not to mention only getting half their HD back after a long rest will reduce the number of short rests they can take the next day). I also use a house rule for when a players are raised from the dead with spells like revivify and raise dead since the process is (in my opinion) extremely taxing on everyone involved. This results in one automatic level of exhaustion given to both the caster and the character being raised. In my opinion this adds a lot more risk the players need to take into account. The caster most of all will need to be very careful due to each additional time they raise someone they accumulate another level of exhaustion and the penalties for that stacking are pretty debilitating.
While it sounds cool and people clearly like it. I have some grips with it mainly to do with penalizing the healer for being the healer. First of all I usually play the cleric/healer in any game I play. Nothing would deter me from playing in your game faster than a rule such as this. We all know the stigma surrounding a healer, ie heal bot, and "not playing the game I am just the healer " comes to mind. And any healer that you do get is kinda forced to take a resurrection spell of some kind. But they are then penalized for doing do? This seems like you don't want a healthy party in your game.
The dragon swipes at you and you roll away making it miss you. Lose 27 HP. The dragon breathes fire you dodge behind a tree hiding yourself from it. Lose 44 HP... that doesn’t make sense to me but to each their own.
@@ryushi17 I see where you're coming from and I most definitely can see where this probably will not work for many. I discussed this with my players during session zero and have reiterated it regularly as we play so everyone is on the same page when they receive damage. Seeing your comment made me realize this and I can definitely see how difficult it would be to have players that have been visualizing damage a certain way suddenly trying to rewire their brains to think of it in a completely different way.
@@abcrasshadow9341 I guess I left out how I actually implement house rules in my games. Typically, I will go over any that I would like to use with all the players during our session zero and I will explain the reasoning behind why I would like to utilize each of them. I then ask each player what they think about it and if they would have any issues with any given house rule. Ultimately, if the majority of the players do not particularly like a given house rule I will just not use it. I also let everyone know that house rules can always be added, changed or removed over the course of the campaign and that this is a collaborative effort everyone should be involved in. Many of the house rules I draw upon were actually ones suggested by players in past games. So with that being said, when I brought up the exhaustion levels for raising players from the dead I gave a bit more weight to the healer of the group to make sure they did not feel like it was penalizing them just because of the role they chose. Out of all my house rules, this is one that all of my players actually like. Many felt like death was a minor inconvenience and trivial once they had access to the various raise dead options. Making this one minor adjustment changed the whole dynamic of how the players approached battles and added some much appreciated tension that made many of their victories and defeats much more memorable.
I acknowledge some extent of HP does represent how much "energy" you have left to deal avoid legal damage, at least in 5e. I don't really _like_ it, because otherwise what does a hit even mean and I think it doesn't have to be this way, but I acknowledge this is the intention in 5e. Even still it definitely represents physical injury too. Even without being brought back from the dead, if you're making death saving throws you're basically in critical condition. The next day taking on a dragon with no issues in any case seems very _high_ fantasy to me. That's fine, just not realistic. Edit: also, I think giving the cleric exhaustion on revive spells is interesting, but the way I see it revivify is basically just a magic defibrillator so I don't think it requires that much more from the caster than a regular healing spell.
Hmm that’d be interesting. Warforged do have some OP abilities. Depending upon the makeup of the party you could require tinker’s tools instead of a healers kit or spells like mending for regaining health. Idk, I’ve always thought of warforged as clockwork devices with magical power sources, so regaining hp on a long rest could be flavored as them disassembling damaged portions and tinkering with it to repair it while the rest of the party sleeps, potentially placing themselves in a vulnerable state similar to but instead of sleeping if they want to regain hp (I’d have to look at their race description as I’m not super familiar with it)
Depending on the play style and focus desired. Not apposed to down time cause of healing if roles play and none combat aspects of the game are more the focus. That would also mean having things that aren’t breakneck speed ‘on to the next thing or the world will be destroyed’ sort of setting. ‘Low stakes’ ‘real stakes’ sort of thing, or more focus on building a region, town, guild up. Imagine you have a character that got really hurt on a mission, and you have to fake them not being injured as not to draw suspension for a few days to a week, or expending enough magic that you won’t get back for a week in order to deal with that problem. I’ll tell you, a henchmen/sidekick healer/doc would really become an important asset then.
Our natural healing system... A healing kit use must be applied, a medicine DC check but succeed (can reapply new kit use until successful), and have a successful rest must occur to earn any number of hitdice hitpoints at the end of the rest. A maximum of 1/2 level, rounded down, can be spent at the end of a successful short rest, and only two short rests can be taken between long rests. All unspent hitdice can be used at the end of a successful long rest, and after all successful long rest benefits are applied, up to 1/2 of the PC's hitdice, rounded up, is returned. The healing kit heals a number of hitpoints equal to the medicine modifier plus bonuses with a homebrew Healer feat, and spent hitdice always heals the average number of hitpoints, rounded up, plus the Constitution modifier. Additionally... healing potions take an action to use but always give the maximum possible hitpoints for the potion, and I allow access to the "Close Wounds" homebrew cantrip on D&D Beyond, which allows for spellslot-free magical healing but puts more pressure on limited hitdice supply.
I have one homebrew that I like. At the end of the long rest, PCs recover half of max hit points and then roll an endurance (constitution) against a DC that measures weather conditions, journey stresses, combats, etc.. If they fail the check, they start the day with 1 or 2 levels of exhaustion depending on how rough the night or day has been. They can heal exhaustion with a long rest, but they might stay exhausted if they fail the roll.
In my campaign, I use a combination of Healer's Kit Dependency, Slow Natural Healing (tweaked even more: 1/4 HD for short rest, 1/2 HD for long rests) and Lingering Injuries (found some tables online with different injuries depending on the type of damage). I find it works and my players like it.
I like how much healers kits change when you go for gritty realism. And I really like healing surges as a bonus action for like a 2 or 3 person hyper heroic game.
I have a campaign set in Westeros, and since it's a more realistic super gritty fantasy I made health in general way lower. Your HP starts as normal, but when you level up your HP only increases by your con modifier. Had to do a lot of other stuff to have this work (and the campaign style to work in general) but it makes combat a lot more intense, and it gives a good incentive for them to not get into combat much. Also use the spend hit dice on long rest thing. It's a fun campaign but wouldn't work well with any other type of campaign
I did elevate the fantasy a little bit so theres more magic and monsters (but not more than people. People is still the main conflict). One is a fighter (level 3) and cleric (level 1), and the other is a sorcerer (level 4). It's a super fun campaign, my version of the big war is nearing its start. I changed the world into an alternate universe wherein Robert died on the Trident instead of Rhaegar, so lots of stuff is different, but the Lannisters and Boltons still hate everyone lol
I use something akin to this in my game but primarily to spice up travel. (Note, I did not use this originally I just gave my players a heads up a few sessions beforehand and they were cool with the shift) Essentially, an 8 hour rest in a warm bed in a safe location gives you everything back. So for players in an inn or something like that it's easy. However, when traveling you can still take short rests as normal, but an 8 hour rest only prevents exhaustion and otherwise functions like a normal short rest. Players can take an extended long rest while traveling (24 hours) to recover everything. I find this system works best up until level 8ish, when you are still using random encounters while traveling. It turns traveling into more of a resource management game and that becomes part of the challenge. It didn't feel right to me that I had to make travel encounters super challenging and potentially life threatening, or they kinda just felt like we were wasting time. Now, a smaller encounter on the road may drain their resources a bit and when they get to the giant stronghold (playing STK), they have to weigh whether to take an extended rest close to danger or go in with slightly depleted resources. I and my players seem to have enjoyed it
Yes, I agree. I'm going to run SKT as well. Recovering exhaustion however, I might just stick to that requiring a long rest. Survival will be more challenging, a bit like the Adventures in Middle Earth game that I played. I will also ditch Zephyros at the start and just let Bryn Shanders happen in Neverwinter xP
Ultimately I think any solution is hurt by the nature of what HP is...its an abstract combination of things that includes health, combat awareness, etc. It isn't just health. I feel the problem arises because we think of it as health, and obviously a sword wound doesn't heal overnight.
honestly i'm pretty drawn to the gritty realism, though i fear it'll make spellslots too expensive. you'll never use a spell for fun because you might not be able to afford it.
Good thing to remember is Wizards are the kings in spellcasting. They get back spells every day. It doesn't require a long rest. So you have a set amount of spells you can safely cast each day with no concerns. The ones that get whacked hardest by the gritty realism are Clerics and Paladins, since their's require a long rest specifically to restore.
@@Mr_Maiq_The_Liar That may be the intention, but that is NOT how it is written in RAW. "You have learned to regain some of your magical energy by studying your spellbook. Once per day when you finish a short rest, you can choose expended spell slots to recover. The spell slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your wizard level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher." Once per *day*. Not Once per *long rest*. Wizards recover spells every *day*, regardless of if they get a long rest. They just don't get their 6th level or higher slots. So I will reiterate. Wizards are the kings in spellcasting for any gritty realism by their RAW rules. Anything else is homebrew.
@@Exile_Sky You’re talking about the Arcane Recovery of the Wizards. Its still recharged on a long rest. The text refering to once pr day on short rest, is that its only valid to chose as an option during short rest. But still won’t get it back until long rest.
@@DanielMyrvang Not it's not. "You have learned to regain some of your magical energy by studying your Spellbook. Once per day when you finish a Short Rest, you can choose expended Spell Slots to recover. The Spell Slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your Wizard level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher. For example, if you’re a 4th-level Wizard, you can recover up to two levels worth of Spell Slots. You can recover either a 2nd-level spell slot or two 1st-level Spell Slots." This is the text. Show me where it mentions "This ability recovers on a long rest." It is *"Once per day"* No long rest required. Once each sun rise (or however you choose to qualify a "day") The Wizard can recover spell slots. Long rest or not. The ONLY qualifier is that they cannot recover spell slots of 6th level or higher. [Correction]. Only qualifiers* is that they cannot recover spell slots of 6th level or higher, and they must complete a short rest. So many people just not reading the damn thing before commenting. Read it here, or go read it in the book, or on the internet. Read it, then come back and talk about it.
I like slow healing not because it introduces some sort of "grittiness" to my game (I can do that in a more exciting way by making my monsters cooler). I like it in conjunction with 24-hour long rests because it guarantees time during my sessions where the players can chill and walk around town, talk with people, buy and sell stuff, gather information and rumors, and the like. "You'll all be resting for 3 days. What do you do to pass the time?" adds a lot to my games.
I've been thinking of going a different route. I like some homebrew rules of things like a player spending time sharpening their sword and for the next 24 hours every 1 rolled counts as a 2, hunting / gathering rules, etc. I'd like to implement those and put stuff in like a healers kit does heal hp but only if they're proficient and having food cooked within the last 24 hours from hunting / gathering gives a bonus to that healing. I would also like to implement stuff like weapons and armor breaking down and maybe a character could spend time tending to their armor to keep them in shape to reduce the chance of them breaking. That would also force the characters to keep backup weapons with them maybe on a pack horse with their spare food because they have to now keep track of food and maybe even force them to use a weapon they're not proficient in which probably almost never happens. I think a simple system like after every encounter they add +1 to a number they're keeping track of and roll a d100. If they roll the number or under the item breaks. Maybe magical items could be harder to break unless maybe there would be an added magical feature of unbreakable. This would also put more value in magical items
Our table uses a variation on the 'Arduous Rally' from the Tal'Dorei Guide. For one, only divine casters of level 5+ can do this ritual after combat. Two, it is optional to be rallied. (Quick explanation: divine caster can spend 10 minutes to rally the troops. Those who want to be rallied, get all benefits from Short Rest, but all healing gained by spending Hit Dice is halved. In addition, all rallying characters suffer 1 point of Exhaustion.) This will not make the game grittier but it's still a choice to take. I like the idea of giving the healing surge ability as a boon/blessing of a life god or a divine scroll. For a more Supernatural/Constatine-esque urban campaign I'm planning, I'd use the slow natural healing and healers' kit dependency (like a First Aid kit). This will be to pick their fights more carefully.
I do a variation of the "Gritty Realism": you can spend half proficiency modifier (round down) in hit die per hour of rest. Recovering hit dice requires full safety, complete relaxation, and a full meal. So you can't just huddle up under a Leomund's hut in a dungeon for 8-hours gnawing on jerky. You had to get to an inn, find a friendly hut in the woods, or kick it around the fire with a caravan. The biggest debate is whether to allow the casters to recover spell slots on an 8-hour rest, or require complete safety.
Gritty realism only works if you remove magic, or at least healing magic. Tbh, that sounds pretty good to me. I'm somewhat tired with magic always solving everything.
I like the way Five Torches Down does healing. You have safe and unsafe healing. If you're in a hospital or in your lair, you heal at a better rate than if you're in the field. Why give away healing if you can give it as a reward (treasure)? I can't figure out HP regardless. If it's a combination of luck and actual damage, then what's magic healing and a healing kit doing? Is it a pep talk by the cleric? Is it a placebo? Is it a god granting life to a non-believer? If that's healing, what is quackery?.
I use the slow healing rule for the same reasons you give. I also allow stabilization after one successful death save and no death from 3 failed saves, but I give a level of exhaustion for every roll made. It allows the threat of death [and near death experiences] to remain strong without actually killing characters off. It seems to be working really well so far. I'm thinking of having lesser restoration remove a level of exhaustion and greater restoration remove all exhaustion levels to compensate for the greater number of exhaustion levels I'm giving my players. Work in progress!
Split HP into two pools, fatigue points (FP) and blood points (BP). You take damage first as fatigue (from FP) and this represents near misses, fresh parry strength to deflect blows, sharpness in senses to dodge, etc. Your hit dice pool heals FP damage 1:1 during short or long rest. Once FP are taken to zero immediately (including access damage) start applying damage to BP. Your hit dice pool heals BP at 6HP:1BP ratio. FP can never be healed higher than BP. I would make magical healing 1:1 for FP and 2:1 for BP if you want some real grit. This will make folks heal up but likely never back to full mid adventure without inefficiently burning through magical healing.
Hit points are very misunderstood. It isn’t meant to be represented as hits a character can sustain. It’s meant to represent a character’s stamina and ability to dodge or take glancing blows. When anyone hits they are unable to block or dodge anymore and take a fatal blow. So recovering all your hitpoints makes more sense with that in mind. Now, if you do drop to zero I can understand wanting to make healing from that take more than a long rest, but otherwise a long rest makes sense with the way the game works
The problem with that is that that's not the view that the mechanics of the game takes all the time. Spells like cure wounds, heal and regeneration take the view that hit points are a representation of physical damage. Other things, the champion's feature "survivor" comes to mind, plays more into hit points being a measure of your stamina et al as you said. Temporary hit points are definitely taking the view that it's about near misses and such.
I think I'm gonna run a campaign in Gritty Realism with Slow Healing and Healers kit rule I think! I fully agree that the 8 hour long rest really makes dropping to 0 HP feel really weird too Good video, keep up the good work!
Our Houserule: You regain ONE roll of your Hit Die type on a Short Rest with a successful Healing Proficiency check (and the expenditure of a use in the Healer's kit). You MUST expend a Hit Die to do this. Thus, a 1st Level character can regain ONE die's worth of HP in a day of adventuring. A 10th Level adventurer COULD do this 10 times (once per hit die) before their hit dice were gone. You can heal by expending up to your CON in Hit Dice on a Long Rest at the rate of 1 Hit Die of Healing rolled per hour of rest in the Long Rest Period (ie 8 HD rolled for an 8-hour rest). This total is also reduced by any Hit Dice used in Short Rests during the day. A CON Save roll or the use of Healing Proficiency (with a Healer's Kit) is required to heal this way. The character can also regain their Hit Dice used in healing during a Long Rest BUT you CANNOT regenerate Hit Dice while you are using them to heal yourself. The regeneration rate is also ONE Hit Die per hour of rest. So a second level character would regain both of their Hit Dice during a Long Rest BUT could NOT do so IF they were using them to heal. A 10th Level character would regain 8 Hit Dice on an 8-hour night and still have 2 Hit Dice to regain upon waking up. That same 10th Level character COULD heal 8 Hit Dice of damage during that 8-hour rest (provided they had enough Hit Dice left to heal).
I run a home brew of slow natural healing. You get all your hit dice at a long rest. You also heal 1 hit dice (+con) free after a long rest. But other than that you don’t heal. I do short rest as 8 hours and long rest at 24 hours but a long rest has to be done in a place of shelter such as an inn or your home or at a sanctuary. Handling exhaustion is a lot bigger deal, characters tend to run with 1-2 levels frequently. When they are at high levels of exhaustion and there speed drops to 0 they need there friends to get them some where to rest before they take another and die.
My slow healing still works on the 1 hr/8 hr rests. You can spend up to your con mod in hit dice on a short rest; on a long rest you get your con score in HP and spend any number of hit dice, and after that you get your con mod hit dice back (minimum of 1). At low levels, where the game is at its most lethal the PCs still bounce back quickly, but as they go up in level they take a lot longer to recover from bad fights.
Yeah man, losing a limb as a fighter is crazy... Wouldn't be able to play that character on low levels anymore. Spellcasters suffer less from it, so no long term thing for games..
This will be a long comment but hope it helps. I ran a campaign that used the healing variant requiring a healers kit to heal, the gritty realism rest that made short rests 8 hours and long rests 7 days, the lingering injuries table, the massive damage rules, and a house rule that the dc for death saves was 15 instead of 10. Honestly it has been one of my favorite games to run and play in (rotating dms) and it made the players think more about combat, stealth and subterfuge became more important, natural spells from race were more important as they effectively gave extra spell slots in a hard to come by game, and camtrips were critical. It was amazing but I understand not for everyone.
To be honest, gritty realism works pretty good. But you need to tailor the Campaign around it. That means "short" dungeons and activities for down time. It gives a slow pacing in a Campaign, and more time for the villains to react/change plans. The most difficult part is on the DM, to balance his encounters. And remember that an easy encounter is ok, it might take up a small amount of rescources. And it will be over Quick.
In my games, long rests restore 1/2 hit dice (round up) and no hit points. When you awaken from going to 0 hit points, you gain a level of exhaustion (unless it's Number 6 - then you stay unconscious until you recover a level of exhaustion).
I think that there should be 2 different rests: ability rest & healing rest. you can get all your class features after a 1h or an 8h rest, but you start beeing healed after an 8h rest & are great after a 1-week rest.
This is so helpful! I’m running a homebrew set in the world of One Piece, where characters (both heroes and villains) rarely actually die & usually bounce back, but I wanted to keep the spirit of that in my game while still having stakes that feel real for my players. Slow healing & long-term injury are probably going to end up being the stakes I build the game on and I’ll definitely be referencing this video while building the campaign.
I used the gritty realism, but with some changes. The rests only apply to healing. A sort rest is 1 day for healing and a long rest is 3 days. I liked this compromise, because the pc's have to use potions and spells, so you're taxing their supplies and they still have to way the risk/reward of combat and the fight or flight aspect. Love your take on the game, keep up the good work.
I actually really love the idea of the extended rest mechanics, but havent been able to try it out yet. I would love to run or play a gritty game like that. Being impaled by a dragon's fang and consequently nearly incinerated by its breath and then just catching some z's to shrug it all off is definitely super-heroic, but I do prefer some seblance of realism in d&d lol.
I've been looking around for ideas on how to simulate serious wounds, and the natural healing variant is really nice. Any lingering damage can be shown visually
I would go for gritty realism but with healing kit, the kit can be used out of rest, and 1 hit dice only...(thinking as I type) maybe I can adjust it with level or something else, oh I know, it depends on the medical ability of the user. Needs some math, but I can find it useable.
My campaign runs in gritty realism and as a DM I love it my players love to hate me for it but I made a change. All magical items that recharged on a long rest now recharge at Dawn, that seemed to resolve most of the problem my players had (high magic world)
Healer's Kit dependancy I like, but not tracking the kit uses, so maybe just use it more like a tool. Healing surges I don't like as I find potions as treasure is a better way to deal with it. Slow natural healing I like and use when DMing as very often it is about 75% of max healed. I don't enjoy the rest variants though, because they change the pace to extremely from what I'm used to.
I think the biggest confusion comes from the miss-concept that hp represents your life. I think it's more something abstract like hero points than health points, a character's resolve to go on and fight on, rather than an actual representation of how much blood someone just lost. If you think of hp more like the abstract, then it is easily justifiable to explain how one good long rest can replenish your resolve.
That's the way it's described in the PHB. A "hit" doesn't mean you wounded someone - it means you pushed them closer to not being able to defend themselves.
@@rich63113 I know that, HP in combination with games traditionally refers to hit points or even health points. So I get the confusion. In a similar way we often describe enemies and monsters as slain, killed or dead when their hp reaches 0. It also doesn't help that in the rules you are described as unconscious and have to make death saves or you die. Another implication that it is somehow tied to your life.
In my last campaign, i gave the party the ability to use one epic long rest using the DMG rules. One for the whole campaign, they all must agree to use it. They never used it till L15 on Session 40
@@fakjbf3129 he is saying that only once when they took a long rest they could use the heroic rules. i.e once per campaign they could recover fully in a single hour instead of 8.
Hit die and healing: one thing I’m thinking to implement requires at least one character with proficiency with the medicine skill who can use a healer’s kit. If this scenario exists instead of using the con modifier I want to allow the character to use the “healer’s” medicine modifier instead. Just give the skill something to do. Also using the Bard’s performance modifier with song of rest. Also long rests would require the use of any remaining hit die, if they don’t have hit die left then they get no HP back. Also they still recover half the hit die after the long rest.
I would like use all of the gritty realism in a combat heavy game but add another kind of rest which is the normal rule short rest and use Healers kit dependency and that triggers the warlock spell slots recovery and wizard/druid recovery and the 8 hour short rest recovers all spell slots like normal but for all hit points it takes 7 days
Healer's kit dependancy is good, a no brainer really. As to me a short rest is just that, time spent bandaging wounds. Therefore lending a resource for that purpose makes sense. Plus it makes people who take the healer feat really feel like it carries enough weight to take it over more powerful feats. Healing surges I'd save for a deities blessing or something similar like the magic of a shrine. Slow natural healing makes sense. Though I might make it so you get all your hit dice back instead of half. Epic heroism is a bit much. Strictly a magic item with charges and/or some sort of divine intervention. Gritty realism again makes sense but for heavily short rest dependant classes like the warlock, I'd have to make adjustments unless the players were cool with the realism. On the plus side it encourage players to really take advantage of downtime activities. I'd say gritty realism be good for a Call of Cthulu style game where you still want the players to feel "weak" even though they can cast fireballs and have a ton of HP.
I used to 100% agree with you on everything in this video. What changed it for me though was you have to remember a few things. We are supposed to be playing heroes. People that have extraordinary abilities including longevity and durability beyond our normal abilities. Dumb people can play hyper intelligent wizards. Autistic people can play the smooth talking rogue that gets all the ladies. The Walmart scooter obese person can be a proxy of Conan and split enemies like banana peels. My point is, the mechanics of the current system allow for us to continue to be heroes and not be bogged down by realism.
my issue with healer's kit dependancy- or any rule where a specific item becomes very important- is that there's always going to be a player hoarding like 10 different healer's kits. I narrate the players having bandages, etc as part of their gear. I ran a gritty realism campaign. I'm not sure if it was a mistake but I would not call it a home-run.
Late comment, but ok. If this was the case, that would be the moment were I would use the rule (that surprisingly exists) for maximum carry weight. Also, I would ask the player to describe how the characters carry so much itens in a small bag, eventually leading to the need of using a horse, or a some kind of storage that don't go magically into the dungeon. That can also be a opportunity to explore parts of the game not commonly used, like a servant and the Noble background companions
I do something similar to the healers kit. If the party wants a long rest they need 2 rations and a gallon of something to drink. a short was 1 ration and half a gallon to drink. implemented this when i ran the dungeon of the mad mage as food and water are easy to find.
Hey Ted! I have recently been combing the Googles for a nice comprehensive list of "gritty" or "grimdark" world rules (even optional ones) that do not "break" the 5e version of the game, or make the players feel like they are not having fun with D&D. I have compiled a couple of different lists, but I almost don't want to alter the Short/Long rest amount because so much of how many character classes function are dependent on getting their abilities and powers back through rest. However, there are a lot of cool optional rules for everything from Insanity to lingering injuries that have random die charts that you can implement. I have also considered making a house rule that requires that all Arcane magic requires a D20 roll, and playing with a critical spell failure table. -- I would mainly do this because your wizard wants to bend the cosmic forces to do his/her bidding, and think that stuff is just going to come out fine every time? I have seen more extreme rules, like getting rid of spell slots, but this feels like if a person feels "lucky" they will just use their spells in every situation rather than be afraid of rolling a 1. The intent would be to limit or make magic special or rare, but not give players a green light to cast spells without limitations given by the game's rules. I just feel too many would abuse the fact that spell slots have been nixed, rather than use prudence when casting a spell, which would be the reason to implement the spell failure table.
I'd like to also see a mechanic that changes failed death saves to be tied to healing and resting. Healing is whatever in 5e, but death saves are such a weirdly dissonant mechanic from how mortality and death feels like it should work...
We set death at CON in negative hit points. When you reach 0 hit points, you must save versus CON or be INCAPACITATED (you cannot act). If you can act, you have DISADVANTAGE on all dice rolls, a 5ft movement (crawl or stagger), and -2 to damage (and no damage bonus too). IF your damage EXCEEDS CON in negative hit points, you must save versus CON or DIE!
I like the idea of the gritty realism game, it makes the time scale of the game feel more realistic. Players at the moment feel like they go from 0 to hero in a week, now it spreads it out
My problems with the gritty realism healing rule are: 1. That since you can't predict when you'll run into a fight, it encourages players to basically do nothing for 7 days (for fear of accidentally resetting the rest timer) and 2. That the ratio of time spent in short to long rest is so different - normally it's a 1 to 8 ratio, but gritty realism is 8 to 168 or 1 to 21. I'd much prefer it to be something like 3 hours for a short rest and 24 hours for a long rest, so you burn a full day to get yourself back up to a fully working condition but the story isn't put on hold for an entire week and the short to long rest ratio remains the same.
I think a key part of the idea is that a short rest is a full night sleep, 8 hours. But I agree with your ratio intuition. So I’d make the long rest be 2-3 days with 8 hour short rest. Then the ratio is 1:6 or 1:9 which is closer to the typical rules in terms of ratios but still keeps that feeling of short rest = full nights sleep.
@@chammy2812 I think you may be right about the intent to make the short rest a full night's sleep and the reason they used a full week's time period for long rest is due to their need of keeping to natural units of time (an hour, a day, a week etc). In that case, I'd probably eyeball 2 days as the time required for a long rest. I'd still be wary of an elf wizard and a druid with a dip in warlock (or a warlock with a dip in druid) camping in the middle of hostile environment, casting tiny hut and goodberry over and over again.
@@donb7519 Really? I don't know much about forgotten realms. I still think my point stands since not everybody play in forgotten realms and even those that do would be incentivised to waste most of their week doing nothing. Also the short to long rest ratio would be even weirder - 1 to 30. I don't know, maybe a better mechanic would be a gradual recovery of HP and spell slots, like 9 levels worth of spells and rolling half your max hit dice for every 8 hours rest, then you'd have to choose between 1 9th level spell or 6 of your 1st and 2nd level. Although at that point, it would probably be easier to just switch to a spell points variant and pick a number of spell points regained after a gritty short rest.
I remember being a sorcerer in gritty realism and had to only use my sorcery points to produce spell slots as I only got them back every week. Wanted to blow my fucking brains out. It made something that should have been fun a chore. It punishes certain play styles and rewards cheesy ones.
I think with my next campaign I’m goi to do the 8hr and 7day rests. I want the tests to be more significant and healing classes as well. To compensate, I’m going to increase the availability of potions, more gold to buy them, and add in mana potions that restore spell slots. Toying with an ‘arcane toxicity’ mechanic to offset over-using mana potions. My idea is that the party really has to prepare to jump into a dangerous situation.
The rule my table uses is this. During a long rest you heal up to 50% of your hit points, then you can spend any hit dice you want to spend to heal, then you gain ½ your level in hit dice.
I like that! Let me ask though, how often does this rule lead to full health? Does it affect how often short rest hit die healing is used at your table?
Greg S most characters have spent ¼ to ½ of their hit dice by the time we get around to a long rest. We take 2 short rests (sometimes) three and we average 8-9 combat encounters a day.
the 5e conversion of Adventures in Middle Earth has a version of alternate rest rules that make it quite a bit grittier where resting can be highly conditional depending the environment, or full recovery from specific statuses like Shadow is done during the Fellowship Phase(downtime).
So in theory I have a modified gritty realism where short rest is over night and long rest is 4 complete short rest or 4 days. As such, in theory, players have to be more strategic when it comes to Spells and when it comes situation that require them to taking damage. My campaign is one where managing resouces: who you know and what you have is a must. Since players only have a select number of spell and hit die untill they get it back on a long rest, I have a food and shelter mechanic where they can cook and based on how good they roll and if they have tool proficincies as well as how good the materals they have can gain more hit die to spend during the short rest. I also have magic items becoming more prevalent and slightly cheaper, with some magic items requiring only a dawn to recharge, it can helps provide magical enhancement to spell casters, which provides a good amount of attack and supportive power in combat. With spells being a comodity, it would hopefully cue the value of magic items and being creative with what you have. And if I'm being optimistic, spells would take the role of filling in gaps to their creativity, as such becoming more utility or someing really combat changing. Since my goal is to have rare but deadly combat and have more intrige and mystery, I think it would raise the stakes when comfronted with a problem words can't solve. It also empasises the value of the social component, the value of a good ally who can connect you with the best deals or has the most reliable information to plan more effectivly. I haven't tested it since I'm worried that the document is long and I'm still flushing it out to get it as simple, fair, and intuitive as possible and I can hope that I'm heading the the right direction.
The rule at my table is after a long rest you recover con mod(minimum 1) times your level. Max HP is (hit die maximum plus hit die times (level -1)) plus (con mod times level) This means you recover those con mod hit points not those dice hit points. And on a short rest you can only spend hit die equal to your con mod. But you can also spend hit die on the long rest. You regain hit die after spending dice not before.
I do short rest = 15 minutes (max 2 per day), long rest = 8 hours (recover 1/4 HP, 1/4 HD and spell recovery of total caster level so a level 3 could recover a level 2 and a level 1 or 3 level 1 spell slots etc)) and a weekend rest (requiring a good, safe environment for true relaxing that just recovers everything. If this weekend long rest is extended to a week, characters with once per level features (like changing your aura as a storm herald barbarian, or switching a spell for another spell as a sorcerer) can do those at that point. If you only limit HP healing of long rests but not the spell healing, healers can simply dump all their remaining spell slots into healing at the end of the day and you're likely to still be up to full heath and spell slots. You have to limit spell slot recovery for limiting HP recovery to really matter. One thing I think players don't appreciate about attrition based fighting is that it actually makes encounters a lot less deadly. If the players are always at 100% capacity, the DM has to throw things at them that can at least threaten them. But something that can threaten the party at 100% can quickly kill them outright if the dice screw the players. When they're already exhausted, level appropriate enemies deal less damage, go down faster, making the tipping point less severe when someone goes down. You'll actually be able to use level appropriate CRs effectively. Individual fights also go by quicker since enemies have less hit points, so they don't feel like they're punching bags of HP nearly as much. You also create a more naturally diverse playstates for the players. They might have to sneak past an enemy they could easily take at full health, or cause a distraction, or bluff their way through. Not because the DM chose this to be the 'sneak by' encounter, but because they naturally ran out of resources for the alternative, or because they know they will need those resources later.
Bard: has the Song of Rest feature PCs proficient with the Healer's kit: can heal X hit dices per short rest short rest free healing: "I'm about to end these mens whole career"
I use Healer's Kit Dependency and Slow Natural Healing in my games. Very recommend, but remember to explain You are using variant rules to everyone. With hit points not returning automatically, it makes everyone more careful and even powerful PCs think twice before picking up fights. It makes question not if they could win combat, but if they should fight in the first place. Also healing abilities are more important in this case, but they are also limited, making players even more cautious about their resources.
I play ultra realism, well as close to it without sucking out the fun. Rules I use. If you are knocked unconscious depending on how and by what or if it is a one shot or accumulative damage. There could be a penalty of losing a hit die and adding it to a temp lose in equal to its roll in hp.(this goes up every 3 levels, so 2 dice at 3rd lvl, and 3 at 6th etc.) Now this can be gained back after 24 hrs provided you have not sustained a serious injury or been knocked unconscious again.(you can also add them making a basic constitution saving throw DC 10) I also use positional damage during combat, this all depends on size variation for melee what type of weapon is used. (It is another thing for spells I won't go into too much detail on this) If it hits your leg,you are down on movement for 24 hours, or if it knocks you unconscious with a (crit. only) you may lose the leg completely. There is also the occasion of being hit multiple times in the same area to accomplish the same thing. An arm could mean attacking with disadvantage for the time, or unable to use two handed strikes, etc.( yes there are saves when they happen to prevent such things, I am not a monster.) Combat is much more involved in my games as attacking and rolling a 1 may mean 1 of 3 things. you lose your grip and the weapon goes flying. You hit something and the weapon gets stuck. you wind up in an awkward position(think baseball and a batter over swings and strikes out) and are left open for an opportunity attack next enemy that targets you.(yes there is a save and depending on the die roll it is one of those 3. if you fail by 5 or more or succeed by 5 or more or roll within the average) Also rolling 1 number under an enemies AC will force them back or to the diagonal or side in a safe area 5 ft. further than your weapons reach essentially giving each side a free disengage if they want.(depending on if the enemy is more armored or strength based vs dexterous they either dodge rolled or jumped back or took the hit and were knocked/shoved. Size matters here also as you can not effect a creature this way, that is 2 sizes bigger than your own.) I could go on and on with all the homebrew rules that I use.( oh and of course these rules apply with enemies as well.) It will slow combat down at first, but once everyone gets them it doesn't change it that much at all.
Ya, I use more realism in almost every edition. I even play the dreaded 4e with 1hr short rest, and limited ability to use those healing surges. I also take great pride in scaring the warden to death when his 15+ healing surges per day run dry. I enjoy the 3.5/ Pathfinder healing mechanics best I would say. 1 hp per 8 hours rest per level unless attended with a healer kit. That makes campaigns like red hand of Doom both heroic AND gritty. Sure you can take 40 goblins in a day, but what about tomorrow? (Evil GM laughter)
at long rest you can choose for each hour: heal some hp or return some hit dice. About mefical kit - it heal many hp, for example 10, but 5 in combat and 5 in short rest.
What I've started doing for my gritty campaign is long rests refill spell slots, hit dice, etc as normal. But now you heal CON mod (minimum of 1) x total level. This means beefier characters will heal more health per day, but nobody will get fully healed overnight, while still allowing class resources to recharge.
Obviously those who wrote the rules have never been run through with a sword. Or they all have superhuman powers of regeneration. It was a different game when I started playing back in '76. Through the years and multiple editions, D&D went from fantasy, to epic fantasy, to epic silliness. I expect a 6E will continue this trend. Maybe what they should do is scrap the whole thing and start over from square one.
I have the opposite impression of when to use these rest variants. One shots that are combat focused anyways do great with Epic Heroism. Whereas the Gritty Realism gives frequent times of non combat downtime, also things like leisure travel or staking out an area for exploration. I am eager to try Lingering Injuries (modified) with GR
I came up with a short/long/full rest. Spells and abilities activate as normal, but hit die and hp recovery are altered to curb players from spending too long out of town. A full rest would be that 7 days in town where you recover all your hit die, hp, and I even give temp hp to show that they are fully ready for adventure. Also, I put a limit to how many cumulative hours they can short rest without long resting, the curb the short rest after every combat. There is a time for urgency, and a time for rest.
Maybe you can combine healing surge WITH gritty realism? But I’d be more concerned about spells when it comes to long rests? I imagine gritty realism or regular rests should be balanced around writing, for whatever makes for a full adventuring day more commonly in your style of writing. Gritty realism when theres 7 ongoing battles around a sieged town, or in a mega dungeon with the BBEG accomplishing a thing at the bottom can be MISERABLE with gritty realism if you get into 4-8 combats without even getting a short rest. But in a noir investigation thing where you would only logically get in that many fights a week, downtime is common, and combat is rare it makes sense. But it’s also great during travel. Getting into more than 1 fight a day in one month travel is stupid. But if there is gritty realism while TRAVELING. Well, people might not nova during travel.
Im not going for gritty realism but Ive found 5e to be remarkably easy on the players. Im not trying to kill my players obviously but I want them to feel the stakes of the game.
TOME OF BEASTS 2 It's live on kickstarter I know this has nothing to do with the posted video, but I'm stoked this is live! TOME OF BEASTS 2 YEEEEEEAAAAAAH!
Honestly, I'm always a huge advocate of grit because to me immersion and realism are part of what makes the world fun and believable. I'm infatuated with the idea of a long and exhaustive shopping list just to prepare for a dungeon that the party might not even make it back from, and when they do come back, they do so bruised and battered. Let's say your party just finished slaying a dragon and half of your party members were nearly incinerated to smithereens. With traditional rules, you're back to 100% after a long rest, and that's not very believable to me. Even with these preferences though, I'm still largely disapprove of Gritty Realism and some of the other mechanics offered the GM's Handbook for improved grit. To me, these systems seem like an after thought and are grossly unbalanced. I'd instead recommend Grit and Glory, a ~120-page rule system for improving grit, danger, realism, and immersion. Although, some of their systems are incredible complex and punishing, so I went with an a la carte of the mechanics. Wounds, open wounds, and bleeding, for instance, are all great. But then they also introduce systems like injuries from specific damage types (e.g. brain injury from bludgeoning) and individual armors comprised of pieces that make up a whole.
Generally I don't care about realism in dnd, and I don't believe added risk of dying will lead to more player investment or better games. Usually when a dm/campaign introduces higher lethality it's one of two options. One, there is a desire for gritty realism and actual risks for characters - often combined with a lot more resource management like needing healers kits, keeping track of exact rations and ammunition etc. Often the result is overcautious players with lots of time spent on planning and resource gathering. Can be fun for a while, but hardly leads to the cinematic action packed adventures. Two, the campaign features one or more of these; adversarial dm, dungeon hack, murder hobos. The end result, often sooner rather than later is that neither players nor dm care about the characters or the story, it's just kill or be killed.
Gritty realism could work in a city based campaign, where the downtime of having to rest could actually be useful to the players in allowing them the opportunity to do something different than just non stop adventure.
WARNING, LONG I've debated using Gritty Realism (GR) in my game, not because I specifically want to slow things down, but due to how spaced out I usually wind up placing my encounters in terms of in-ghame time. In response to casters using a lot more cantrips instead of spells, I have to disagree to an extent with how I believe GR would actually be best used in a standard adventure game. While I would agree that GR would work well in a court-intrigue game and that spellcasters would have to be more discerning about when to cast a spell to influence social situations since they don't come back for such a long amount of time, I think the PHB sets the wrong frame of mind when it talks about using GR for games where combat is more deadly and should be thought about carefully. Rather, if you take the recommend 6-8 medium-hard encounters over the course of a standard adventuring day (the time between each long rest), and stretch them out over the course of a week or two (the time I think would pass between each long rest in GR), you have the same amount of combats that would normally lead into a long rest, so you have the same amount of combats where casters would think about using slots instead of cantrips. Depending on how RP-heavy your game is and how many social pillar-oriented spells your casters take, the difference very well COULD be great and place lots of importance on when and where that fireball is dropped, but it could also be negligible. Mileage will vary table-by-table. So, instead of having all super deadly combats, I have come to view GR as an opportunity to have the characters put their lives at stake at a frequency that seems a bit more believable to me while at the same time maintaining an appropriate level of difficulty for my game by draining resources over time instead of constantly vamping up my One Big Fight every day or two into deadly difficulties since my players are always fresh on resources and ready to go. In conclusion, if you use GR, you shouldn't then continue to throw a possible 6-8 encounters at your players every in-game day and hope that they will defuse with a parley, sneak around, or otherwise avoid most of them in order to budget their resources without being strapped too thin to make it to their long rest at the end of the week. Thank you, for coming to the TED Talk portion of my comment. That said, I said considering. I haven't implemented the rule yet, because it kind of makes classic large dungeons take FOREVER, and I'm not a fan of that. I saw a propsed hybrid variant with GR on reddit once that added a "Rally" mechanic. The TL,DR of it was that for up to 5 days you get the regular resting rules of 1hr/8hrs. I think at the end of a Rally the characters who rallied got a level of exhaustion as well, but without digging through my saved posts to find it I can't be sure. While this would in theory fix the problem, I'm not the biggest fan. It feels somewhat clunky to me. Recently, I've been toying with my own hybrid rest variant where short and long rests are still 1 and 8 hours respectively, BUT creatures and characters can only benefit from one long rest for every week (or whatever your setting equivalent is). The way I think of justifying it, the massive healing burst probably is indicative of slow healing and restoration of connection to the weave that happens over the week. I like the undeveloped idea in theory, because it enables those two-day kind of dungeons and leaves room for having more encounters every once in a while, but it also comes with more questions I have as of yet not answered. Questions like: Do I allow more than 2 or 3 short rests per long rest? If so, do I allow restoration of 1/2 hit dice after a night of sleeping and all hit dice on completion of a long rest? Or maybe I cut it down to 1/4 hit dice per night but all hit dice on long rest? If anyone has any thoughts or pointers for me in trying to figure out a solution, I'm all ears.
I like your idea of the 1 long rest per week (tenday in Forgotten Realms). What I'll probably be going for is long rest = 24h, short rest = 8h, and maybe a SHORT short rest = 1h (in which you can only heal, using hit dice). This way I can spread out my encounters during my travel sessions in SKT. What I will add to that is that 'if you have a comfortable, safe uninterrupted sleep in a bed etc, you can make a long rest in 8 hours'. 24 hour long rests can involve dangers/time pressure as well. I haven't tried it yet, because I'm still sticking to the encounters of the Essentials Kit adventure for now. But I think it might work. This also makes way for the use of exhaustion. And if the players know they travel to a long rest encounter location, they will have to use their abilities sparingly. Cantrips are fine for casters, and the paladin shouldn't smite on every hit. And I dislike the "we used all our spells so let's sleep" mentality. So yeah. More ideas? Maybe I should reddit.
@@jelte3754 I like this, but there are also more questions. IIRC the PHB references spells like mage armor being lengthened to make it through the adventuring week under gritty realism, but does that also mean that spells intended to give a safe long rest like leomund's tiny hit should have their durations extended to match the long rest duration, or should they only provide a single night of safety, thereby being immensely devalued? Also, if you go one long rest per tenday, and leave short rests to 8h without limiting them at all, warlocks, sorcerors, monks and any other class that regains resources on short resting becomes immensely more powerful on a day-to-day basis than the long rest classes. I guess that realization answers one of my original questions.
I do feel that healing everything with a good nights sleep is a problem . I have been thinking that you could still maintain a full heal in 8 hours if you changed it from sleep to ritual magic . You could set up whatever conditions you want to have your players have in place " do you need a healer " " do you have to make an offering to the gods " whatever you like .
I used the system that you get 11 hours of rest on an adventuring day, And for every hour you rest you heal for one hit die worth of healing, This works fine thusfar, But I don't know if at level 15 this still holds up.
I started using Gritty Realism for campaigns a while back, I will never use anything else now. I also have an exhaustion system where if a person hits 0 hit points, level of exhaustion (which gets nasty when people start doing Healing Word Whack-a-Mole) and a weapon durability system (where weapons take damage on a nat 1 instead of a crit fumble spell, making Mending a valuable cantrip).
You could probably also do something with exhaustion to simulate more realism, i feel like that mechanic is really underutilized anyways. Just throwing this out here off the top of my head but maybe something like any time you go below (your total characterlevel) HP you also suffer a point of exhaustion and while exhausted you cannot regain or use hit-dice and all non-magical healing gained is cut in half(exhaustion is then obviously resolved after healing at the end of a long rest). This would at the very least require 2 full nights of rest to heal up and if the party needs to keep going they do so at the risk of even more exhaustion as the character is already pretty close to the threshold. As an added bonus this also puts a cap on the amount of times you can go down as 6 points of exhaustion is insta-death, which is really nice for people who don't like "whack-a-mole"-combat. I would probably rule that you could go on for those last few hitpoints when you gain your 6th point but after the battle you fall down and die.
If hit points are a measure of a creatures skill, luck and stamina then the recovery on a long rest mostly makes sense. But then there isn't anything to account for actual damage. And then the death saving throws are a weird contrivance on top of all that. We use a system that combines hit points (stamina, skill, luck etc). Negative hit points based on Constitution score( physical damage), and wounds which effect the players Constitution, Dexterity and movement. If anyone's interested I'll elaborate.
@@NerdImmersion so we treat hit points using the standard 5e rules. But loss of those hitpoints basically are wearing you down. Any damage is minor cuts, scrapes, bruises etc. When you hit points go below zero you drop into negative hit points. And you can go as far negative as your Constitution score before dying. This is a measure of physically damaging you beyond minor injuries. And then we have wounds. Any time your hitpoints go negative you receive a wound. This is a real injury. The consequence of each wound is that your dexterity and Constitution drop by 1 point each and your speed drops by 5'. You can sustain multiple wounds and they are cumulative. If your Constitution drops to zero you die even if you have hit points remaining. You can also gain wounds from critical hits and fall damage. For every 25 points of damage from a single critical hit or fall you receive a wound. This prevents characters with lots of hit points from jumping off an 80' cliff and walking away with little consequence.
Regular hit points heal up as normal. Negative hitpoints heal up at a rate of 1 per hour of rest naturally or like regular hitpoints with magical healing or the healer feat etc. Wounds take 10 days of long tests to heal up naturally or 10 points of magical healing all at once. And those 10 points only heal the wound and don't give you any hitpoints back.
We use Dndbeyond for our character sheets so I created a "magic" item that imposes the dex, con and movement penalties for a wound when you equip it. And it has "charges" to track each day if you have to go the natural healing route.
So functionally this is how it all works. Player is at 5 hitpoints. He takes 10 points of damage. Under 5e RAW he would be at zero hit points and unconscious. Under our system the player drops to -5 hitpoints and MAY go unconscious. But he is bleeding out and losing 1 hp per round until stabilized. So he has to make a Constitution saving thrown. The DC is 10 + however negative his hitpoints are. So in our example at -5 the DC is 15. If he succeeds then he remains conscious. If he fails then he goes unconscious. If his hitpoints drop below his Constitution then he makes a death saving throw failure means death. Success means he lives another round.
I use and combine Healing kit dependency, Natural Healing and Epic Horiesism for my World. its just for Epic Heroism I now will make them roll hit dice to regain spell points instead of getting half like the book suggested and not getting hit dice for the 1 hour rest and, 8 hours is where you regain all spell points and half your hit dice.
Using a 15 min Short Rest, like a half time in football/basketball. To use a Hit Die during SR must eat and drink. Long Rest is 8 hrs where they get spell slots back but only half Hit Dice back and do not fully heal. Need to expend Hit Dice during the rest, eat, and drink to heal some. Near death might take a few days of resting
I see the gritty realism as flavor as opposed to trudging through trying to play out 7 days at the table. For the standard long rest, those 8 hours are often gone over quickly. You ask who is doing what during the rest, describe that, see if anything happens and then the rest is over. I run it the same way except since it is over the course of a week, players can do downtime activities during their 7 days to recuperate. I find it helps with realism and allowing time to pass by naturally as opposed to time skips.
This is perfect, I was just thinking this. You CAN spend those days to rile play, but they will understandably become boring after a while, so I think this is a great explanation
@@josephb7786 :D
I actually used the Gritty Realism for an extended campaign that went on for about two years. It worked quite well and the players didn't complain (much) about it. They worked together more tactically and were much more sparing with their various long rest abilities, using them in more desperate moments when they really needed that extra help. The only issue we found we had with it was when they had to level up. They found fewer opportunities to level up and they did find that rather annoying, and when they finally did level up, they would have a ton of new abilities sometimes to the point that some players forgot about them. And I also found that taking a long rest are certain points helped ruin some of the tension in the overarcing plot, but that last part was more on me as a DM not properly accomodating for the week-long rest.
So all in all I quite enjoy the Gritty Realism route, so long as your players are having fun with it, and could possibly need some tweaking depending on your DM and setting.
I moved to characters needing to spend HD to recover HP. If someone with proficiency in Medicine treats you then you get extra HP when you spend those HD. No HP reset after a long rest. It helped me get the feel I was looking for.
One thing I do is have a persistent wound feature which works by decreasing your max health every time you fall bellow half health, and to add on to this I added in an additional rest type called a healing rest which is a multiple day resting period where you are allowed to do just about anything that won't cause you damage. A healing rest typically takes a week, but there are ways to reduce the resting period such as if someone has the acolyte background or medicine proficiency.
Geezer here..
Honestly have not played 5e. Lots Chainmail to 3.5, some tables got 1, yes 1 hp per day. We mostly gave con bonus per day and healing kits were sought after.
Game on
I play a hybrid , mostly gritty realism where a long rest is 7 days and a short rest is 8 hours , however I tweak the time for a long rest down to 3 days if the players find somewhere comfortable to sleep such as a fine inn, and 7-10 days if they are camping of roughing it ... I also allow casters to prepare new lists of spells after a short rest instead of a long , so the spell slots don’t come back but you are not committed to your original list for weeks ... makes spell casters think before casting spells and I think balances the martial classes with the magic users , also makes taking damage a little more serious . After a long rest players get half their hit dice back but no hit points unless they choose to spend hit die which they can do both before and after they get them back up to the number of days they rested . Since the camping I’m running is time critical and a balance of combat and politics i find it works , would not attempt this for a dungeon crawl style campaign though
I used the slow natural healing method before, and it was great. Players were discouraged to long rest inside the dungeons, because they wouldn't completely heal up, or if they would, then they'd have little or no hit dice if they needed a short rest down the line. Now I'm inclined to combine it with healing kit dependency.
I am running a grittier game. In my game I have the PC's suffer 1 level of exhaustion when they drop to 0 hit points or if they are critically hit. It takes 24 hours of rest to remove 1 level of exhaustion. It makes the world seem more real and forces them out of murder hobo tendencies.
One "easy, not so punishing all the time, but still interesting and fun" way to "nerf" long rests is to add long-term conditions after near-death experiences. Fighter got down to 2 death saving throws but lived. Next day he will be full HP, but his right arm will hurt a lot, so he will get a penalty on attack rols. Or maybe that arrow to the knee will take 5/10 ft of movement for a couple days. Perhaps he got a head trauma and disadvantage on wis savings.
Been using a variation of the "Gritty Realism" variant rule in all the tables i either run or play at for quite some time now. The variation at my table is simply that a long rest only takes 48 hours in relative comfort (meaning no travel, and fairly ok accomodation, either by camping or being in a tavern in a town) instead of the entire week that it usually takes, due to players feeling like it's too much downtime. It means that you can get one a tad easier in more difficult circumstances.
The benefits are that exploration and random encounters suddenly become meaningful. If you're in the underdark, you have to decide whether you want to take the fight with the umberhulk, or let try to get around it in another fashion, giving the situation a certain tension that isn't normally present. At the same time, it cuts down on the disparity between casters and non-casters in that casters have to think about where and when to use their spells, instead of blowing their load on every fight. This makes martials really shine in combat encounters and lets those with the skills to do certain things outside combat use them instead of there being a spell that fixes everything as per usual. Concentration spells become vastly more important in such a case, making it important to protect the caster so they can conserve their spellslots. I love it and all the intricacies it brings with it.
The way I usually think of the GR variant, it would be more like throwing the suggested "6-8 encounters per day" at your party a lot slower, like more over the course of a week. In theory, this sounds like casters would have the same number of combats to "[blow] their load on" per long rest, so roughly the same number of expended spell slots not accounting for exploration and social encounters, which would undoubtedly become more numerous in this case. Does it not play like this in practice?
@@corygumminger6349 oh, it definitely does. Combat can be designed in a less swingy way since the PC's won't always be at 100% strength. You actually get to slowly drain their resources which i personally like, both as a player and DM. As to the addition of more exploration and social encounters, yes.
There usually is more exploration and social interaction between rests, where casters get to think about if they want to blow a spell on making things easier, in return for them potentially not having that spell ready in case of other complications. It's a great form of decision making that comes naturally with the gritty realism rules.
One bonus to this is also that magic feels more... Well... Magical when it's used more sparingly.
As a avid 2nd Ed player. Yeah, I kind of have issues with all easy ways you can heal yourself in 5e. It just seems to really just take away the importance of a cleric. They are such a important class and first and second.
I have a game where we used to use the gritty realism rest variant. But we kept getting into many fights, and it just wasn't for us. *But* we still wanted that realism of not healing from major wounds over 8 hours. So I added a "minor short rest" and a "minor long rest." (I called them Each of which only gave abilities and spell slots back.
It added a bit of complexity, but much more realism and allowed for more combats to be survivable. (It's especially good if you only have magical healing between your party, i.e. only having a partial cleric or celestial pact warlock with only cure wounds and/or their healing light ability or the for healing).
Under "Damage & Healing" in the PHB the first couple of lines about hit points says "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."
I take this into account in that hit point numbers do not necessarily mean physical damage. I look at it that the majority of hit points numbers are based off of how experienced PCs are in rolling with blows, narrowly avoiding hits and pure luck... that sort of thing and that a small percentage is actual physical, potentially lethal, damage. Taking that into account short/long rests make more sense. Another thing to keep in mind is that hit dice expended to "heal" on short rests is finite, are folks not keeping track of how many hit dice they have and are expending? My players will tend to run out after 2, maybe 3 short rests (not to mention only getting half their HD back after a long rest will reduce the number of short rests they can take the next day).
I also use a house rule for when a players are raised from the dead with spells like revivify and raise dead since the process is (in my opinion) extremely taxing on everyone involved. This results in one automatic level of exhaustion given to both the caster and the character being raised. In my opinion this adds a lot more risk the players need to take into account. The caster most of all will need to be very careful due to each additional time they raise someone they accumulate another level of exhaustion and the penalties for that stacking are pretty debilitating.
While it sounds cool and people clearly like it. I have some grips with it mainly to do with penalizing the healer for being the healer.
First of all I usually play the cleric/healer in any game I play. Nothing would deter me from playing in your game faster than a rule such as this. We all know the stigma surrounding a healer, ie heal bot, and "not playing the game I am just the healer " comes to mind.
And any healer that you do get is kinda forced to take a resurrection spell of some kind. But they are then penalized for doing do? This seems like you don't want a healthy party in your game.
The dragon swipes at you and you roll away making it miss you. Lose 27 HP. The dragon breathes fire you dodge behind a tree hiding yourself from it. Lose 44 HP... that doesn’t make sense to me but to each their own.
@@ryushi17 I see where you're coming from and I most definitely can see where this probably will not work for many. I discussed this with my players during session zero and have reiterated it regularly as we play so everyone is on the same page when they receive damage. Seeing your comment made me realize this and I can definitely see how difficult it would be to have players that have been visualizing damage a certain way suddenly trying to rewire their brains to think of it in a completely different way.
@@abcrasshadow9341 I guess I left out how I actually implement house rules in my games. Typically, I will go over any that I would like to use with all the players during our session zero and I will explain the reasoning behind why I would like to utilize each of them. I then ask each player what they think about it and if they would have any issues with any given house rule. Ultimately, if the majority of the players do not particularly like a given house rule I will just not use it. I also let everyone know that house rules can always be added, changed or removed over the course of the campaign and that this is a collaborative effort everyone should be involved in. Many of the house rules I draw upon were actually ones suggested by players in past games.
So with that being said, when I brought up the exhaustion levels for raising players from the dead I gave a bit more weight to the healer of the group to make sure they did not feel like it was penalizing them just because of the role they chose. Out of all my house rules, this is one that all of my players actually like. Many felt like death was a minor inconvenience and trivial once they had access to the various raise dead options. Making this one minor adjustment changed the whole dynamic of how the players approached battles and added some much appreciated tension that made many of their victories and defeats much more memorable.
I acknowledge some extent of HP does represent how much "energy" you have left to deal avoid legal damage, at least in 5e. I don't really _like_ it, because otherwise what does a hit even mean and I think it doesn't have to be this way, but I acknowledge this is the intention in 5e.
Even still it definitely represents physical injury too. Even without being brought back from the dead, if you're making death saving throws you're basically in critical condition. The next day taking on a dragon with no issues in any case seems very _high_ fantasy to me. That's fine, just not realistic.
Edit: also, I think giving the cleric exhaustion on revive spells is interesting, but the way I see it revivify is basically just a magic defibrillator so I don't think it requires that much more from the caster than a regular healing spell.
How do you feel about how traditional healing works on Warforged in Eberron? Curious!
i think that warforged are capable of repairing themselves (like with nanobots or shit like that) but they need motivation and a strong will
@@Rey99m maybe healing spells just invigorate the nanobot. OR they're more like nano-creatures? idk
Hmm that’d be interesting. Warforged do have some OP abilities. Depending upon the makeup of the party you could require tinker’s tools instead of a healers kit or spells like mending for regaining health. Idk, I’ve always thought of warforged as clockwork devices with magical power sources, so regaining hp on a long rest could be flavored as them disassembling damaged portions and tinkering with it to repair it while the rest of the party sleeps, potentially placing themselves in a vulnerable state similar to but instead of sleeping if they want to regain hp (I’d have to look at their race description as I’m not super familiar with it)
They're in the middle point between magic and technology, so perhaps healing spells affect the magic that power them
Depending on the play style and focus desired.
Not apposed to down time cause of healing if roles play and none combat aspects of the game are more the focus.
That would also mean having things that aren’t breakneck speed ‘on to the next thing or the world will be destroyed’ sort of setting.
‘Low stakes’ ‘real stakes’ sort of thing, or more focus on building a region, town, guild up.
Imagine you have a character that got really hurt on a mission, and you have to fake them not being injured as not to draw suspension for a few days to a week, or expending enough magic that you won’t get back for a week in order to deal with that problem.
I’ll tell you, a henchmen/sidekick healer/doc would really become an important asset then.
Our natural healing system... A healing kit use must be applied, a medicine DC check but succeed (can reapply new kit use until successful), and have a successful rest must occur to earn any number of hitdice hitpoints at the end of the rest. A maximum of 1/2 level, rounded down, can be spent at the end of a successful short rest, and only two short rests can be taken between long rests. All unspent hitdice can be used at the end of a successful long rest, and after all successful long rest benefits are applied, up to 1/2 of the PC's hitdice, rounded up, is returned. The healing kit heals a number of hitpoints equal to the medicine modifier plus bonuses with a homebrew Healer feat, and spent hitdice always heals the average number of hitpoints, rounded up, plus the Constitution modifier. Additionally... healing potions take an action to use but always give the maximum possible hitpoints for the potion, and I allow access to the "Close Wounds" homebrew cantrip on D&D Beyond, which allows for spellslot-free magical healing but puts more pressure on limited hitdice supply.
I have one homebrew that I like. At the end of the long rest, PCs recover half of max hit points and then roll an endurance (constitution) against a DC that measures weather conditions, journey stresses, combats, etc.. If they fail the check, they start the day with 1 or 2 levels of exhaustion depending on how rough the night or day has been. They can heal exhaustion with a long rest, but they might stay exhausted if they fail the roll.
In my campaign, I use a combination of Healer's Kit Dependency, Slow Natural Healing (tweaked even more: 1/4 HD for short rest, 1/2 HD for long rests) and Lingering Injuries (found some tables online with different injuries depending on the type of damage). I find it works and my players like it.
I like how much healers kits change when you go for gritty realism. And I really like healing surges as a bonus action for like a 2 or 3 person hyper heroic game.
I have a campaign set in Westeros, and since it's a more realistic super gritty fantasy I made health in general way lower. Your HP starts as normal, but when you level up your HP only increases by your con modifier. Had to do a lot of other stuff to have this work (and the campaign style to work in general) but it makes combat a lot more intense, and it gives a good incentive for them to not get into combat much. Also use the spend hit dice on long rest thing. It's a fun campaign but wouldn't work well with any other type of campaign
Wow, intense indeed! :P There won't be much casters in the world then. And level 5 barbarians can one shot people. What level are they on?
I did elevate the fantasy a little bit so theres more magic and monsters (but not more than people. People is still the main conflict). One is a fighter (level 3) and cleric (level 1), and the other is a sorcerer (level 4). It's a super fun campaign, my version of the big war is nearing its start. I changed the world into an alternate universe wherein Robert died on the Trident instead of Rhaegar, so lots of stuff is different, but the Lannisters and Boltons still hate everyone lol
I use something akin to this in my game but primarily to spice up travel. (Note, I did not use this originally I just gave my players a heads up a few sessions beforehand and they were cool with the shift)
Essentially, an 8 hour rest in a warm bed in a safe location gives you everything back. So for players in an inn or something like that it's easy.
However, when traveling you can still take short rests as normal, but an 8 hour rest only prevents exhaustion and otherwise functions like a normal short rest.
Players can take an extended long rest while traveling (24 hours) to recover everything.
I find this system works best up until level 8ish, when you are still using random encounters while traveling. It turns traveling into more of a resource management game and that becomes part of the challenge. It didn't feel right to me that I had to make travel encounters super challenging and potentially life threatening, or they kinda just felt like we were wasting time. Now, a smaller encounter on the road may drain their resources a bit and when they get to the giant stronghold (playing STK), they have to weigh whether to take an extended rest close to danger or go in with slightly depleted resources.
I and my players seem to have enjoyed it
Yes, I agree. I'm going to run SKT as well. Recovering exhaustion however, I might just stick to that requiring a long rest. Survival will be more challenging, a bit like the Adventures in Middle Earth game that I played.
I will also ditch Zephyros at the start and just let Bryn Shanders happen in Neverwinter xP
Ultimately I think any solution is hurt by the nature of what HP is...its an abstract combination of things that includes health, combat awareness, etc. It isn't just health. I feel the problem arises because we think of it as health, and obviously a sword wound doesn't heal overnight.
honestly i'm pretty drawn to the gritty realism, though i fear it'll make spellslots too expensive. you'll never use a spell for fun because you might not be able to afford it.
Good thing to remember is Wizards are the kings in spellcasting. They get back spells every day. It doesn't require a long rest. So you have a set amount of spells you can safely cast each day with no concerns. The ones that get whacked hardest by the gritty realism are Clerics and Paladins, since their's require a long rest specifically to restore.
@@Exile_Sky they get spells back on a short rest ONCE per long rest
@@Mr_Maiq_The_Liar That may be the intention, but that is NOT how it is written in RAW.
"You have learned to regain some of your magical energy by studying your spellbook. Once per day when you finish a short rest, you can choose expended spell slots to recover. The spell slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your wizard level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher."
Once per *day*. Not Once per *long rest*. Wizards recover spells every *day*, regardless of if they get a long rest. They just don't get their 6th level or higher slots.
So I will reiterate. Wizards are the kings in spellcasting for any gritty realism by their RAW rules. Anything else is homebrew.
@@Exile_Sky You’re talking about the Arcane Recovery of the Wizards. Its still recharged on a long rest. The text refering to once pr day on short rest, is that its only valid to chose as an option during short rest. But still won’t get it back until long rest.
@@DanielMyrvang Not it's not.
"You have learned to regain some of your magical energy by studying your Spellbook. Once per day when you finish a Short Rest, you can choose expended Spell Slots to recover. The Spell Slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your Wizard level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher.
For example, if you’re a 4th-level Wizard, you can recover up to two levels worth of Spell Slots. You can recover either a 2nd-level spell slot or two 1st-level Spell Slots."
This is the text. Show me where it mentions "This ability recovers on a long rest."
It is *"Once per day"* No long rest required. Once each sun rise (or however you choose to qualify a "day") The Wizard can recover spell slots. Long rest or not. The ONLY qualifier is that they cannot recover spell slots of 6th level or higher. [Correction]. Only qualifiers* is that they cannot recover spell slots of 6th level or higher, and they must complete a short rest.
So many people just not reading the damn thing before commenting. Read it here, or go read it in the book, or on the internet. Read it, then come back and talk about it.
I like slow healing not because it introduces some sort of "grittiness" to my game (I can do that in a more exciting way by making my monsters cooler). I like it in conjunction with 24-hour long rests because it guarantees time during my sessions where the players can chill and walk around town, talk with people, buy and sell stuff, gather information and rumors, and the like. "You'll all be resting for 3 days. What do you do to pass the time?" adds a lot to my games.
I've been thinking of going a different route. I like some homebrew rules of things like a player spending time sharpening their sword and for the next 24 hours every 1 rolled counts as a 2, hunting / gathering rules, etc. I'd like to implement those and put stuff in like a healers kit does heal hp but only if they're proficient and having food cooked within the last 24 hours from hunting / gathering gives a bonus to that healing. I would also like to implement stuff like weapons and armor breaking down and maybe a character could spend time tending to their armor to keep them in shape to reduce the chance of them breaking. That would also force the characters to keep backup weapons with them maybe on a pack horse with their spare food because they have to now keep track of food and maybe even force them to use a weapon they're not proficient in which probably almost never happens. I think a simple system like after every encounter they add +1 to a number they're keeping track of and roll a d100. If they roll the number or under the item breaks. Maybe magical items could be harder to break unless maybe there would be an added magical feature of unbreakable. This would also put more value in magical items
I remember when you healed a hit point a day without magic (2 with a successful herbalism check). That was tough
Our table uses a variation on the 'Arduous Rally' from the Tal'Dorei Guide. For one, only divine casters of level 5+ can do this ritual after combat. Two, it is optional to be rallied. (Quick explanation: divine caster can spend 10 minutes to rally the troops. Those who want to be rallied, get all benefits from Short Rest, but all healing gained by spending Hit Dice is halved. In addition, all rallying characters suffer 1 point of Exhaustion.) This will not make the game grittier but it's still a choice to take.
I like the idea of giving the healing surge ability as a boon/blessing of a life god or a divine scroll.
For a more Supernatural/Constatine-esque urban campaign I'm planning, I'd use the slow natural healing and healers' kit dependency (like a First Aid kit). This will be to pick their fights more carefully.
I do a variation of the "Gritty Realism": you can spend half proficiency modifier (round down) in hit die per hour of rest. Recovering hit dice requires full safety, complete relaxation, and a full meal. So you can't just huddle up under a Leomund's hut in a dungeon for 8-hours gnawing on jerky. You had to get to an inn, find a friendly hut in the woods, or kick it around the fire with a caravan.
The biggest debate is whether to allow the casters to recover spell slots on an 8-hour rest, or require complete safety.
Gritty realism only works if you remove magic, or at least healing magic. Tbh, that sounds pretty good to me. I'm somewhat tired with magic always solving everything.
I like the way Five Torches Down does healing. You have safe and unsafe healing. If you're in a hospital or in your lair, you heal at a better rate than if you're in the field. Why give away healing if you can give it as a reward (treasure)?
I can't figure out HP regardless. If it's a combination of luck and actual damage, then what's magic healing and a healing kit doing? Is it a pep talk by the cleric? Is it a placebo? Is it a god granting life to a non-believer? If that's healing, what is quackery?.
I use the slow healing rule for the same reasons you give. I also allow stabilization after one successful death save and no death from 3 failed saves, but I give a level of exhaustion for every roll made. It allows the threat of death [and near death experiences] to remain strong without actually killing characters off. It seems to be working really well so far. I'm thinking of having lesser restoration remove a level of exhaustion and greater restoration remove all exhaustion levels to compensate for the greater number of exhaustion levels I'm giving my players. Work in progress!
Split HP into two pools, fatigue points (FP) and blood points (BP). You take damage first as fatigue (from FP) and this represents near misses, fresh parry strength to deflect blows, sharpness in senses to dodge, etc. Your hit dice pool heals FP damage 1:1 during short or long rest. Once FP are taken to zero immediately (including access damage) start applying damage to BP. Your hit dice pool heals BP at 6HP:1BP ratio. FP can never be healed higher than BP. I would make magical healing 1:1 for FP and 2:1 for BP if you want some real grit. This will make folks heal up but likely never back to full mid adventure without inefficiently burning through magical healing.
Hit points are very misunderstood. It isn’t meant to be represented as hits a character can sustain. It’s meant to represent a character’s stamina and ability to dodge or take glancing blows. When anyone hits they are unable to block or dodge anymore and take a fatal blow. So recovering all your hitpoints makes more sense with that in mind. Now, if you do drop to zero I can understand wanting to make healing from that take more than a long rest, but otherwise a long rest makes sense with the way the game works
The problem with that is that that's not the view that the mechanics of the game takes all the time. Spells like cure wounds, heal and regeneration take the view that hit points are a representation of physical damage. Other things, the champion's feature "survivor" comes to mind, plays more into hit points being a measure of your stamina et al as you said. Temporary hit points are definitely taking the view that it's about near misses and such.
@@eruantien9932 yeah and that's beside the fact that the name of the mechanic itself is a complete 180 to what it means.
I'm a major fan of the wound point system for this reason
@@XpVersusVista okay buddy
I think I'm gonna run a campaign in Gritty Realism with Slow Healing and Healers kit rule I think!
I fully agree that the 8 hour long rest really makes dropping to 0 HP feel really weird too
Good video, keep up the good work!
Our Houserule:
You regain ONE roll of your Hit Die type on a Short Rest with a successful Healing Proficiency check (and the expenditure of a use in the Healer's kit). You MUST expend a Hit Die to do this. Thus, a 1st Level character can regain ONE die's worth of HP in a day of adventuring. A 10th Level adventurer COULD do this 10 times (once per hit die) before their hit dice were gone.
You can heal by expending up to your CON in Hit Dice on a Long Rest at the rate of 1 Hit Die of Healing rolled per hour of rest in the Long Rest Period (ie 8 HD rolled for an 8-hour rest). This total is also reduced by any Hit Dice used in Short Rests during the day. A CON Save roll or the use of Healing Proficiency (with a Healer's Kit) is required to heal this way.
The character can also regain their Hit Dice used in healing during a Long Rest BUT you CANNOT regenerate Hit Dice while you are using them to heal yourself. The regeneration rate is also ONE Hit Die per hour of rest. So a second level character would regain both of their Hit Dice during a Long Rest BUT could NOT do so IF they were using them to heal. A 10th Level character would regain 8 Hit Dice on an 8-hour night and still have 2 Hit Dice to regain upon waking up. That same 10th Level character COULD heal 8 Hit Dice of damage during that 8-hour rest (provided they had enough Hit Dice left to heal).
I run a home brew of slow natural healing.
You get all your hit dice at a long rest. You also heal 1 hit dice (+con) free after a long rest. But other than that you don’t heal.
I do short rest as 8 hours and long rest at 24 hours but a long rest has to be done in a place of shelter such as an inn or your home or at a sanctuary.
Handling exhaustion is a lot bigger deal, characters tend to run with 1-2 levels frequently. When they are at high levels of exhaustion and there speed drops to 0 they need there friends to get them some where to rest before they take another and die.
My slow healing still works on the 1 hr/8 hr rests. You can spend up to your con mod in hit dice on a short rest; on a long rest you get your con score in HP and spend any number of hit dice, and after that you get your con mod hit dice back (minimum of 1). At low levels, where the game is at its most lethal the PCs still bounce back quickly, but as they go up in level they take a lot longer to recover from bad fights.
I like the idea of using gritty realism with critical injuries. It would make a freaking inTENSE game. I wanna use this for a short game.
Yeah man, losing a limb as a fighter is crazy... Wouldn't be able to play that character on low levels anymore. Spellcasters suffer less from it, so no long term thing for games..
This will be a long comment but hope it helps. I ran a campaign that used the healing variant requiring a healers kit to heal, the gritty realism rest that made short rests 8 hours and long rests 7 days, the lingering injuries table, the massive damage rules, and a house rule that the dc for death saves was 15 instead of 10.
Honestly it has been one of my favorite games to run and play in (rotating dms) and it made the players think more about combat, stealth and subterfuge became more important, natural spells from race were more important as they effectively gave extra spell slots in a hard to come by game, and camtrips were critical.
It was amazing but I understand not for everyone.
To be honest, gritty realism works pretty good. But you need to tailor the Campaign around it. That means "short" dungeons and activities for down time. It gives a slow pacing in a Campaign, and more time for the villains to react/change plans.
The most difficult part is on the DM, to balance his encounters. And remember that an easy encounter is ok, it might take up a small amount of rescources. And it will be over Quick.
In my games, long rests restore 1/2 hit dice (round up) and no hit points. When you awaken from going to 0 hit points, you gain a level of exhaustion (unless it's Number 6 - then you stay unconscious until you recover a level of exhaustion).
I think that there should be 2 different rests: ability rest & healing rest. you can get all your class features after a 1h or an 8h rest, but you start beeing healed after an 8h rest & are great after a 1-week rest.
This is so helpful! I’m running a homebrew set in the world of One Piece, where characters (both heroes and villains) rarely actually die & usually bounce back, but I wanted to keep the spirit of that in my game while still having stakes that feel real for my players. Slow healing & long-term injury are probably going to end up being the stakes I build the game on and I’ll definitely be referencing this video while building the campaign.
I used the gritty realism, but with some changes. The rests only apply to healing. A sort rest is 1 day for healing and a long rest is 3 days. I liked this compromise, because the pc's have to use potions and spells, so you're taxing their supplies and they still have to way the risk/reward of combat and the fight or flight aspect. Love your take on the game, keep up the good work.
I actually really love the idea of the extended rest mechanics, but havent been able to try it out yet. I would love to run or play a gritty game like that. Being impaled by a dragon's fang and consequently nearly incinerated by its breath and then just catching some z's to shrug it all off is definitely super-heroic, but I do prefer some seblance of realism in d&d lol.
I've been looking around for ideas on how to simulate serious wounds, and the natural healing variant is really nice. Any lingering damage can be shown visually
In my opinion the gritty realism rule regarding short/long rests is also a great option for games paced to last over a longer time.
I would go for gritty realism but with healing kit, the kit can be used out of rest, and 1 hit dice only...(thinking as I type) maybe I can adjust it with level or something else, oh I know, it depends on the medical ability of the user. Needs some math, but I can find it useable.
My campaign runs in gritty realism and as a DM I love it my players love to hate me for it but I made a change. All magical items that recharged on a long rest now recharge at Dawn, that seemed to resolve most of the problem my players had (high magic world)
Healer's Kit dependancy I like, but not tracking the kit uses, so maybe just use it more like a tool. Healing surges I don't like as I find potions as treasure is a better way to deal with it. Slow natural healing I like and use when DMing as very often it is about 75% of max healed. I don't enjoy the rest variants though, because they change the pace to extremely from what I'm used to.
I'm gonna implement the healers kit rule in my game, I really like that one!
I think the biggest confusion comes from the miss-concept that hp represents your life.
I think it's more something abstract like hero points than health points, a character's resolve to go on and fight on, rather than an actual representation of how much blood someone just lost.
If you think of hp more like the abstract, then it is easily justifiable to explain how one good long rest can replenish your resolve.
That's the way it's described in the PHB. A "hit" doesn't mean you wounded someone - it means you pushed them closer to not being able to defend themselves.
@@rich63113 I know that, HP in combination with games traditionally refers to hit points or even health points. So I get the confusion.
In a similar way we often describe enemies and monsters as slain, killed or dead when their hp reaches 0.
It also doesn't help that in the rules you are described as unconscious and have to make death saves or you die. Another implication that it is somehow tied to your life.
In my last campaign, i gave the party the ability to use one epic long rest using the DMG rules. One for the whole campaign, they all must agree to use it.
They never used it till L15 on Session 40
They went 15 levels without taking a long rest? Were they all Fighters and Warlocks who got everything back on short rests?
@@fakjbf3129 he is saying that only once when they took a long rest they could use the heroic rules. i.e once per campaign they could recover fully in a single hour instead of 8.
@@CaptinPyroVG oh ok, that makes way more sense
Hit die and healing: one thing I’m thinking to implement requires at least one character with proficiency with the medicine skill who can use a healer’s kit. If this scenario exists instead of using the con modifier I want to allow the character to use the “healer’s” medicine modifier instead. Just give the skill something to do. Also using the Bard’s performance modifier with song of rest.
Also long rests would require the use of any remaining hit die, if they don’t have hit die left then they get no HP back. Also they still recover half the hit die after the long rest.
I would like use all of the gritty realism in a combat heavy game but add another kind of rest which is the normal rule short rest and use Healers kit dependency and that triggers the warlock spell slots recovery and wizard/druid recovery and the 8 hour short rest recovers all spell slots like normal but for all hit points it takes 7 days
Healer's kit dependancy is good, a no brainer really. As to me a short rest is just that, time spent bandaging wounds. Therefore lending a resource for that purpose makes sense. Plus it makes people who take the healer feat really feel like it carries enough weight to take it over more powerful feats.
Healing surges I'd save for a deities blessing or something similar like the magic of a shrine.
Slow natural healing makes sense. Though I might make it so you get all your hit dice back instead of half.
Epic heroism is a bit much. Strictly a magic item with charges and/or some sort of divine intervention.
Gritty realism again makes sense but for heavily short rest dependant classes like the warlock, I'd have to make adjustments unless the players were cool with the realism. On the plus side it encourage players to really take advantage of downtime activities.
I'd say gritty realism be good for a Call of Cthulu style game where you still want the players to feel "weak" even though they can cast fireballs and have a ton of HP.
I used to 100% agree with you on everything in this video. What changed it for me though was you have to remember a few things. We are supposed to be playing heroes. People that have extraordinary abilities including longevity and durability beyond our normal abilities. Dumb people can play hyper intelligent wizards. Autistic people can play the smooth talking rogue that gets all the ladies. The Walmart scooter obese person can be a proxy of Conan and split enemies like banana peels. My point is, the mechanics of the current system allow for us to continue to be heroes and not be bogged down by realism.
my issue with healer's kit dependancy- or any rule where a specific item becomes very important- is that there's always going to be a player hoarding like 10 different healer's kits.
I narrate the players having bandages, etc as part of their gear.
I ran a gritty realism campaign. I'm not sure if it was a mistake but I would not call it a home-run.
Late comment, but ok. If this was the case, that would be the moment were I would use the rule (that surprisingly exists) for maximum carry weight. Also, I would ask the player to describe how the characters carry so much itens in a small bag, eventually leading to the need of using a horse, or a some kind of storage that don't go magically into the dungeon. That can also be a opportunity to explore parts of the game not commonly used, like a servant and the Noble background companions
I do something similar to the healers kit. If the party wants a long rest they need 2 rations and a gallon of something to drink. a short was 1 ration and half a gallon to drink. implemented this when i ran the dungeon of the mad mage as food and water are easy to find.
Hey Ted! I have recently been combing the Googles for a nice comprehensive list of "gritty" or "grimdark" world rules (even optional ones) that do not "break" the 5e version of the game, or make the players feel like they are not having fun with D&D.
I have compiled a couple of different lists, but I almost don't want to alter the Short/Long rest amount because so much of how many character classes function are dependent on getting their abilities and powers back through rest. However, there are a lot of cool optional rules for everything from Insanity to lingering injuries that have random die charts that you can implement.
I have also considered making a house rule that requires that all Arcane magic requires a D20 roll, and playing with a critical spell failure table.
-- I would mainly do this because your wizard wants to bend the cosmic forces to do his/her bidding, and think that stuff is just going to come out fine every time? I have seen more extreme rules, like getting rid of spell slots, but this feels like if a person feels "lucky" they will just use their spells in every situation rather than be afraid of rolling a 1.
The intent would be to limit or make magic special or rare, but not give players a green light to cast spells without limitations given by the game's rules. I just feel too many would abuse the fact that spell slots have been nixed, rather than use prudence when casting a spell, which would be the reason to implement the spell failure table.
I also really like the idea of the Healer's Kit dependency. This would make the Healer feat and the Medicine Skill more useful and desirable.
Also, a character can have the healer feat to help a lot with that, and also the leadership feat for flavor and also extra morale(temp) hp
I'd like to also see a mechanic that changes failed death saves to be tied to healing and resting. Healing is whatever in 5e, but death saves are such a weirdly dissonant mechanic from how mortality and death feels like it should work...
We set death at CON in negative hit points. When you reach 0 hit points, you must save versus CON or be INCAPACITATED (you cannot act). If you can act, you have DISADVANTAGE on all dice rolls, a 5ft movement (crawl or stagger), and -2 to damage (and no damage bonus too). IF your damage EXCEEDS CON in negative hit points, you must save versus CON or DIE!
I like the idea of the gritty realism game, it makes the time scale of the game feel more realistic. Players at the moment feel like they go from 0 to hero in a week, now it spreads it out
My problems with the gritty realism healing rule are: 1. That since you can't predict when you'll run into a fight, it encourages players to basically do nothing for 7 days (for fear of accidentally resetting the rest timer) and 2. That the ratio of time spent in short to long rest is so different - normally it's a 1 to 8 ratio, but gritty realism is 8 to 168 or 1 to 21.
I'd much prefer it to be something like 3 hours for a short rest and 24 hours for a long rest, so you burn a full day to get yourself back up to a fully working condition but the story isn't put on hold for an entire week and the short to long rest ratio remains the same.
I think a key part of the idea is that a short rest is a full night sleep, 8 hours. But I agree with your ratio intuition. So I’d make the long rest be 2-3 days with 8 hour short rest. Then the ratio is 1:6 or 1:9 which is closer to the typical rules in terms of ratios but still keeps that feeling of short rest = full nights sleep.
@@chammy2812 I think you may be right about the intent to make the short rest a full night's sleep and the reason they used a full week's time period for long rest is due to their need of keeping to natural units of time (an hour, a day, a week etc).
In that case, I'd probably eyeball 2 days as the time required for a long rest.
I'd still be wary of an elf wizard and a druid with a dip in warlock (or a warlock with a dip in druid) camping in the middle of hostile environment, casting tiny hut and goodberry over and over again.
@@NRMRKL well if thats the case they shouldnt of even used 7 days since a week in faerrun is 10 days
@@donb7519 Really? I don't know much about forgotten realms. I still think my point stands since not everybody play in forgotten realms and even those that do would be incentivised to waste most of their week doing nothing. Also the short to long rest ratio would be even weirder - 1 to 30.
I don't know, maybe a better mechanic would be a gradual recovery of HP and spell slots, like 9 levels worth of spells and rolling half your max hit dice for every 8 hours rest, then you'd have to choose between 1 9th level spell or 6 of your 1st and 2nd level. Although at that point, it would probably be easier to just switch to a spell points variant and pick a number of spell points regained after a gritty short rest.
@@NRMRKL oh i agree i think gritty realism is dumb and all it tends to do is punish spellcasters while raising martials
I remember being a sorcerer in gritty realism and had to only use my sorcery points to produce spell slots as I only got them back every week.
Wanted to blow my fucking brains out. It made something that should have been fun a chore. It punishes certain play styles and rewards cheesy ones.
I think with my next campaign I’m goi to do the 8hr and 7day rests. I want the tests to be more significant and healing classes as well. To compensate, I’m going to increase the availability of potions, more gold to buy them, and add in mana potions that restore spell slots. Toying with an ‘arcane toxicity’ mechanic to offset over-using mana potions. My idea is that the party really has to prepare to jump into a dangerous situation.
The rule my table uses is this. During a long rest you heal up to 50% of your hit points, then you can spend any hit dice you want to spend to heal, then you gain ½ your level in hit dice.
I like that! Let me ask though, how often does this rule lead to full health? Does it affect how often short rest hit die healing is used at your table?
Greg S most characters have spent ¼ to ½ of their hit dice by the time we get around to a long rest. We take 2 short rests (sometimes) three and we average 8-9 combat encounters a day.
I really want to try a gritty realism game! The whole campaign will take a lot of planning and testing but I think it could be a lot of fun.
the 5e conversion of Adventures in Middle Earth has a version of alternate rest rules that make it quite a bit grittier where resting can be highly conditional depending the environment, or full recovery from specific statuses like Shadow is done during the Fellowship Phase(downtime).
So in theory I have a modified gritty realism where short rest is over night and long rest is 4 complete short rest or 4 days. As such, in theory, players have to be more strategic when it comes to Spells and when it comes situation that require them to taking damage. My campaign is one where managing resouces: who you know and what you have is a must. Since players only have a select number of spell and hit die untill they get it back on a long rest, I have a food and shelter mechanic where they can cook and based on how good they roll and if they have tool proficincies as well as how good the materals they have can gain more hit die to spend during the short rest. I also have magic items becoming more prevalent and slightly cheaper, with some magic items requiring only a dawn to recharge, it can helps provide magical enhancement to spell casters, which provides a good amount of attack and supportive power in combat. With spells being a comodity, it would hopefully cue the value of magic items and being creative with what you have. And if I'm being optimistic, spells would take the role of filling in gaps to their creativity, as such becoming more utility or someing really combat changing. Since my goal is to have rare but deadly combat and have more intrige and mystery, I think it would raise the stakes when comfronted with a problem words can't solve. It also empasises the value of the social component, the value of a good ally who can connect you with the best deals or has the most reliable information to plan more effectivly. I haven't tested it since I'm worried that the document is long and I'm still flushing it out to get it as simple, fair, and intuitive as possible and I can hope that I'm heading the the right direction.
The rule at my table is after a long rest you recover con mod(minimum 1) times your level.
Max HP is (hit die maximum plus hit die times (level -1)) plus (con mod times level)
This means you recover those con mod hit points not those dice hit points. And on a short rest you can only spend hit die equal to your con mod. But you can also spend hit die on the long rest. You regain hit die after spending dice not before.
I do short rest = 15 minutes (max 2 per day), long rest = 8 hours (recover 1/4 HP, 1/4 HD and spell recovery of total caster level so a level 3 could recover a level 2 and a level 1 or 3 level 1 spell slots etc)) and a weekend rest (requiring a good, safe environment for true relaxing that just recovers everything. If this weekend long rest is extended to a week, characters with once per level features (like changing your aura as a storm herald barbarian, or switching a spell for another spell as a sorcerer) can do those at that point.
If you only limit HP healing of long rests but not the spell healing, healers can simply dump all their remaining spell slots into healing at the end of the day and you're likely to still be up to full heath and spell slots. You have to limit spell slot recovery for limiting HP recovery to really matter.
One thing I think players don't appreciate about attrition based fighting is that it actually makes encounters a lot less deadly. If the players are always at 100% capacity, the DM has to throw things at them that can at least threaten them. But something that can threaten the party at 100% can quickly kill them outright if the dice screw the players. When they're already exhausted, level appropriate enemies deal less damage, go down faster, making the tipping point less severe when someone goes down. You'll actually be able to use level appropriate CRs effectively.
Individual fights also go by quicker since enemies have less hit points, so they don't feel like they're punching bags of HP nearly as much. You also create a more naturally diverse playstates for the players. They might have to sneak past an enemy they could easily take at full health, or cause a distraction, or bluff their way through. Not because the DM chose this to be the 'sneak by' encounter, but because they naturally ran out of resources for the alternative, or because they know they will need those resources later.
Bard: has the Song of Rest feature
PCs proficient with the Healer's kit: can heal X hit dices per short rest
short rest free healing: "I'm about to end these mens whole career"
I use Healer's Kit Dependency and Slow Natural Healing in my games. Very recommend, but remember to explain You are using variant rules to everyone. With hit points not returning automatically, it makes everyone more careful and even powerful PCs think twice before picking up fights. It makes question not if they could win combat, but if they should fight in the first place. Also healing abilities are more important in this case, but they are also limited, making players even more cautious about their resources.
I play ultra realism, well as close to it without sucking out the fun.
Rules I use. If you are knocked unconscious depending on how and by what or if it is a one shot or accumulative damage. There could be a penalty of losing a hit die and adding it to a temp lose in equal to its roll in hp.(this goes up every 3 levels, so 2 dice at 3rd lvl, and 3 at 6th etc.)
Now this can be gained back after 24 hrs provided you have not sustained a serious injury or been knocked unconscious again.(you can also add them making a basic constitution saving throw DC 10)
I also use positional damage during combat, this all depends on size variation for melee what type of weapon is used. (It is another thing for spells I won't go into too much detail on this) If it hits your leg,you are down on movement for 24 hours, or if it knocks you unconscious with a (crit. only) you may lose the leg completely. There is also the occasion of being hit multiple times in the same area to accomplish the same thing. An arm could mean attacking with disadvantage for the time, or unable to use two handed strikes, etc.( yes there are saves when they happen to prevent such things, I am not a monster.)
Combat is much more involved in my games as attacking and rolling a 1 may mean 1 of 3 things. you lose your grip and the weapon goes flying. You hit something and the weapon gets stuck. you wind up in an awkward position(think baseball and a batter over swings and strikes out) and are left open for an opportunity attack next enemy that targets you.(yes there is a save and depending on the die roll it is one of those 3. if you fail by 5 or more or succeed by 5 or more or roll within the average)
Also rolling 1 number under an enemies AC will force them back or to the diagonal or side in a safe area 5 ft. further than your weapons reach essentially giving each side a free disengage if they want.(depending on if the enemy is more armored or strength based vs dexterous they either dodge rolled or jumped back or took the hit and were knocked/shoved. Size matters here also as you can not effect a creature this way, that is 2 sizes bigger than your own.)
I could go on and on with all the homebrew rules that I use.( oh and of course these rules apply with enemies as well.)
It will slow combat down at first, but once everyone gets them it doesn't change it that much at all.
Ya, I use more realism in almost every edition. I even play the dreaded 4e with 1hr short rest, and limited ability to use those healing surges. I also take great pride in scaring the warden to death when his 15+ healing surges per day run dry.
I enjoy the 3.5/ Pathfinder healing mechanics best I would say. 1 hp per 8 hours rest per level unless attended with a healer kit. That makes campaigns like red hand of Doom both heroic AND gritty. Sure you can take 40 goblins in a day, but what about tomorrow? (Evil GM laughter)
Pathfinder has 1 hp per 8 hours as well? That's tough, even though I don't hear anyone complaining about that.
Sure does. And a healers kit makes it double that I think. So it can actually be not too bad. But almost dieing requires lots of healing.
I really love the healers kit dependency for healing. I am also a fan of needing longer rest to heal.
at long rest you can choose for each hour: heal some hp or return some hit dice.
About mefical kit - it heal many hp, for example 10, but 5 in combat and 5 in short rest.
What I've started doing for my gritty campaign is long rests refill spell slots, hit dice, etc as normal. But now you heal CON mod (minimum of 1) x total level. This means beefier characters will heal more health per day, but nobody will get fully healed overnight, while still allowing class resources to recharge.
Obviously those who wrote the rules have never been run through with a sword. Or they all have superhuman powers of regeneration.
It was a different game when I started playing back in '76. Through the years and multiple editions, D&D went from fantasy, to epic fantasy, to epic silliness. I expect a 6E will continue this trend. Maybe what they should do is scrap the whole thing and start over from square one.
I have the opposite impression of when to use these rest variants. One shots that are combat focused anyways do great with Epic Heroism. Whereas the Gritty Realism gives frequent times of non combat downtime, also things like leisure travel or staking out an area for exploration.
I am eager to try Lingering Injuries (modified) with GR
I came up with a short/long/full rest. Spells and abilities activate as normal, but hit die and hp recovery are altered to curb players from spending too long out of town. A full rest would be that 7 days in town where you recover all your hit die, hp, and I even give temp hp to show that they are fully ready for adventure. Also, I put a limit to how many cumulative hours they can short rest without long resting, the curb the short rest after every combat. There is a time for urgency, and a time for rest.
Maybe you can combine healing surge WITH gritty realism? But I’d be more concerned about spells when it comes to long rests?
I imagine gritty realism or regular rests should be balanced around writing, for whatever makes for a full adventuring day more commonly in your style of writing.
Gritty realism when theres 7 ongoing battles around a sieged town, or in a mega dungeon with the BBEG accomplishing a thing at the bottom can be MISERABLE with gritty realism if you get into 4-8 combats without even getting a short rest.
But in a noir investigation thing where you would only logically get in that many fights a week, downtime is common, and combat is rare it makes sense. But it’s also great during travel. Getting into more than 1 fight a day in one month travel is stupid. But if there is gritty realism while TRAVELING. Well, people might not nova during travel.
Interresting take, but if I was going for gritty realism, I would play some other game than DnD. Warhammer for instance.
Im not going for gritty realism but Ive found 5e to be remarkably easy on the players. Im not trying to kill my players obviously but I want them to feel the stakes of the game.
TOME OF BEASTS 2 It's live on kickstarter I know this has nothing to do with the posted video, but I'm stoked this is live! TOME OF BEASTS 2 YEEEEEEAAAAAAH!
Honestly, I'm always a huge advocate of grit because to me immersion and realism are part of what makes the world fun and believable. I'm infatuated with the idea of a long and exhaustive shopping list just to prepare for a dungeon that the party might not even make it back from, and when they do come back, they do so bruised and battered. Let's say your party just finished slaying a dragon and half of your party members were nearly incinerated to smithereens. With traditional rules, you're back to 100% after a long rest, and that's not very believable to me.
Even with these preferences though, I'm still largely disapprove of Gritty Realism and some of the other mechanics offered the GM's Handbook for improved grit. To me, these systems seem like an after thought and are grossly unbalanced. I'd instead recommend Grit and Glory, a ~120-page rule system for improving grit, danger, realism, and immersion. Although, some of their systems are incredible complex and punishing, so I went with an a la carte of the mechanics. Wounds, open wounds, and bleeding, for instance, are all great. But then they also introduce systems like injuries from specific damage types (e.g. brain injury from bludgeoning) and individual armors comprised of pieces that make up a whole.
Generally I don't care about realism in dnd, and I don't believe added risk of dying will lead to more player investment or better games.
Usually when a dm/campaign introduces higher lethality it's one of two options.
One, there is a desire for gritty realism and actual risks for characters - often combined with a lot more resource management like needing healers kits, keeping track of exact rations and ammunition etc. Often the result is overcautious players with lots of time spent on planning and resource gathering. Can be fun for a while, but hardly leads to the cinematic action packed adventures.
Two, the campaign features one or more of these; adversarial dm, dungeon hack, murder hobos. The end result, often sooner rather than later is that neither players nor dm care about the characters or the story, it's just kill or be killed.
Gritty realism could work in a city based campaign, where the downtime of having to rest could actually be useful to the players in allowing them the opportunity to do something different than just non stop adventure.
For Gritty Realism… would the Long Rest be a Tenday or a “week” (7 days) as described in XGTE?
So I would include an altered version of the healing surge in a game that doesn't have a healer in order to make up for that fact
I also plan to include the healers kit required for short rests because that will solve a lot of issues
There's also the idea of gaining a level of exhaustion for each failed death save.
WARNING, LONG
I've debated using Gritty Realism (GR) in my game, not because I specifically want to slow things down, but due to how spaced out I usually wind up placing my encounters in terms of in-ghame time. In response to casters using a lot more cantrips instead of spells, I have to disagree to an extent with how I believe GR would actually be best used in a standard adventure game.
While I would agree that GR would work well in a court-intrigue game and that spellcasters would have to be more discerning about when to cast a spell to influence social situations since they don't come back for such a long amount of time, I think the PHB sets the wrong frame of mind when it talks about using GR for games where combat is more deadly and should be thought about carefully. Rather, if you take the recommend 6-8 medium-hard encounters over the course of a standard adventuring day (the time between each long rest), and stretch them out over the course of a week or two (the time I think would pass between each long rest in GR), you have the same amount of combats that would normally lead into a long rest, so you have the same amount of combats where casters would think about using slots instead of cantrips.
Depending on how RP-heavy your game is and how many social pillar-oriented spells your casters take, the difference very well COULD be great and place lots of importance on when and where that fireball is dropped, but it could also be negligible. Mileage will vary table-by-table. So, instead of having all super deadly combats, I have come to view GR as an opportunity to have the characters put their lives at stake at a frequency that seems a bit more believable to me while at the same time maintaining an appropriate level of difficulty for my game by draining resources over time instead of constantly vamping up my One Big Fight every day or two into deadly difficulties since my players are always fresh on resources and ready to go.
In conclusion, if you use GR, you shouldn't then continue to throw a possible 6-8 encounters at your players every in-game day and hope that they will defuse with a parley, sneak around, or otherwise avoid most of them in order to budget their resources without being strapped too thin to make it to their long rest at the end of the week. Thank you, for coming to the TED Talk portion of my comment.
That said, I said considering. I haven't implemented the rule yet, because it kind of makes classic large dungeons take FOREVER, and I'm not a fan of that. I saw a propsed hybrid variant with GR on reddit once that added a "Rally" mechanic. The TL,DR of it was that for up to 5 days you get the regular resting rules of 1hr/8hrs. I think at the end of a Rally the characters who rallied got a level of exhaustion as well, but without digging through my saved posts to find it I can't be sure. While this would in theory fix the problem, I'm not the biggest fan. It feels somewhat clunky to me.
Recently, I've been toying with my own hybrid rest variant where short and long rests are still 1 and 8 hours respectively, BUT creatures and characters can only benefit from one long rest for every week (or whatever your setting equivalent is). The way I think of justifying it, the massive healing burst probably is indicative of slow healing and restoration of connection to the weave that happens over the week. I like the undeveloped idea in theory, because it enables those two-day kind of dungeons and leaves room for having more encounters every once in a while, but it also comes with more questions I have as of yet not answered. Questions like:
Do I allow more than 2 or 3 short rests per long rest?
If so, do I allow restoration of 1/2 hit dice after a night of sleeping and all hit dice on completion of a long rest?
Or maybe I cut it down to 1/4 hit dice per night but all hit dice on long rest?
If anyone has any thoughts or pointers for me in trying to figure out a solution, I'm all ears.
I like your idea of the 1 long rest per week (tenday in Forgotten Realms). What I'll probably be going for is long rest = 24h, short rest = 8h, and maybe a SHORT short rest = 1h (in which you can only heal, using hit dice). This way I can spread out my encounters during my travel sessions in SKT. What I will add to that is that 'if you have a comfortable, safe uninterrupted sleep in a bed etc, you can make a long rest in 8 hours'. 24 hour long rests can involve dangers/time pressure as well.
I haven't tried it yet, because I'm still sticking to the encounters of the Essentials Kit adventure for now. But I think it might work. This also makes way for the use of exhaustion. And if the players know they travel to a long rest encounter location, they will have to use their abilities sparingly. Cantrips are fine for casters, and the paladin shouldn't smite on every hit. And I dislike the "we used all our spells so let's sleep" mentality. So yeah. More ideas? Maybe I should reddit.
@@jelte3754 I like this, but there are also more questions. IIRC the PHB references spells like mage armor being lengthened to make it through the adventuring week under gritty realism, but does that also mean that spells intended to give a safe long rest like leomund's tiny hit should have their durations extended to match the long rest duration, or should they only provide a single night of safety, thereby being immensely devalued?
Also, if you go one long rest per tenday, and leave short rests to 8h without limiting them at all, warlocks, sorcerors, monks and any other class that regains resources on short resting becomes immensely more powerful on a day-to-day basis than the long rest classes. I guess that realization answers one of my original questions.
I do feel that healing everything with a good nights sleep is a problem . I have been thinking that you could still maintain a full heal in 8 hours if you changed it from sleep to ritual magic . You could set up whatever conditions you want to have your players have in place " do you need a healer " " do you have to make an offering to the gods " whatever you like .
I dig it. Looks like the trend is toward more grit. Hirelings... let's go!
I used the system that you get 11 hours of rest on an adventuring day,
And for every hour you rest you heal for one hit die worth of healing,
This works fine thusfar,
But I don't know if at level 15 this still holds up.
It will. See my post above for my take on that.
I started using Gritty Realism for campaigns a while back, I will never use anything else now. I also have an exhaustion system where if a person hits 0 hit points, level of exhaustion (which gets nasty when people start doing Healing Word Whack-a-Mole) and a weapon durability system (where weapons take damage on a nat 1 instead of a crit fumble spell, making Mending a valuable cantrip).
I’ve personally played the gritty realism variant and I decided to play a Warlock instead of a Cleric because of it. It’s a sloooowww burn.
You could probably also do something with exhaustion to simulate more realism, i feel like that mechanic is really underutilized anyways.
Just throwing this out here off the top of my head but maybe something like any time you go below (your total characterlevel) HP you also suffer a point of exhaustion and while exhausted you cannot regain or use hit-dice and all non-magical healing gained is cut in half(exhaustion is then obviously resolved after healing at the end of a long rest). This would at the very least require 2 full nights of rest to heal up and if the party needs to keep going they do so at the risk of even more exhaustion as the character is already pretty close to the threshold.
As an added bonus this also puts a cap on the amount of times you can go down as 6 points of exhaustion is insta-death, which is really nice for people who don't like "whack-a-mole"-combat. I would probably rule that you could go on for those last few hitpoints when you gain your 6th point but after the battle you fall down and die.
If hit points are a measure of a creatures skill, luck and stamina then the recovery on a long rest mostly makes sense. But then there isn't anything to account for actual damage. And then the death saving throws are a weird contrivance on top of all that.
We use a system that combines hit points (stamina, skill, luck etc). Negative hit points based on Constitution score( physical damage), and wounds which effect the players Constitution, Dexterity and movement.
If anyone's interested I'll elaborate.
I am, please elaborate
@@NerdImmersion so we treat hit points using the standard 5e rules. But loss of those hitpoints basically are wearing you down. Any damage is minor cuts, scrapes, bruises etc.
When you hit points go below zero you drop into negative hit points. And you can go as far negative as your Constitution score before dying. This is a measure of physically damaging you beyond minor injuries.
And then we have wounds. Any time your hitpoints go negative you receive a wound. This is a real injury. The consequence of each wound is that your dexterity and Constitution drop by 1 point each and your speed drops by 5'. You can sustain multiple wounds and they are cumulative. If your Constitution drops to zero you die even if you have hit points remaining.
You can also gain wounds from critical hits and fall damage. For every 25 points of damage from a single critical hit or fall you receive a wound. This prevents characters with lots of hit points from jumping off an 80' cliff and walking away with little consequence.
Regular hit points heal up as normal.
Negative hitpoints heal up at a rate of 1 per hour of rest naturally or like regular hitpoints with magical healing or the healer feat etc.
Wounds take 10 days of long tests to heal up naturally or 10 points of magical healing all at once. And those 10 points only heal the wound and don't give you any hitpoints back.
We use Dndbeyond for our character sheets so I created a "magic" item that imposes the dex, con and movement penalties for a wound when you equip it. And it has "charges" to track each day if you have to go the natural healing route.
So functionally this is how it all works.
Player is at 5 hitpoints. He takes 10 points of damage. Under 5e RAW he would be at zero hit points and unconscious. Under our system the player drops to -5 hitpoints and MAY go unconscious. But he is bleeding out and losing 1 hp per round until stabilized. So he has to make a Constitution saving thrown. The DC is 10 + however negative his hitpoints are. So in our example at -5 the DC is 15. If he succeeds then he remains conscious. If he fails then he goes unconscious. If his hitpoints drop below his Constitution then he makes a death saving throw failure means death. Success means he lives another round.
I use and combine Healing kit dependency, Natural Healing and Epic Horiesism for my World.
its just for Epic Heroism I now will make them roll hit dice to regain spell points instead of getting half like the book suggested and not getting hit dice for the 1 hour rest and, 8 hours is where you regain all spell points and half your hit dice.
Using a 15 min Short Rest, like a half time in football/basketball. To use a Hit Die during SR must eat and drink. Long Rest is 8 hrs where they get spell slots back but only half Hit Dice back and do not fully heal. Need to expend Hit Dice during the rest, eat, and drink to heal some. Near death might take a few days of resting
After a 60 hour week, I know I am going to need two-three days to get back to close to 100% -and that's without any fighting.