Suggestions for how to deal Long Rest slow healing

[WinterSoldier7]

Hello all,

My group and I have homebrewed the healing mechanics slightly, for our sessions, to help with balance.

The campaign involves a lot of travelling with mini-battles between points A and B. To prevent people from spamming their most powerful actions and reclaiming them after long rests, our new rules say that you can only short rest on a journey and long rest at any taverns/ beds they find. This has worked really well, with long journeys across the country now requiring skill and health management, or forcing them to seek out nearby taverns which might slow down their progress to wherever they need to be.

As we lean into this, we've been thinking it might be interesting to have the Long Rests not suddenly heal full HP, but possibly heal a fraction - the aim being that when they do find a tavern, they may need to spend more than one day of rest to fully heal. This is important because time is an important factor in the campaign; the decision between a few extra days healing at a tavern or getting back onto the road ASAP is an interesting one.

Therefore, I ask everyone, do you have any suggestions on how we could approach the Long Rest healing? I have some thoughts below, but maybe someone has their own, better, system?

- No heal (only health potions and healers/ Hit Dice)
- I want to avoid a healer healing everyone and then Long Resting their skills back, so negating the whole point of this
- Fractional healing (quarter of their total health per LR?
- Dice roll (D20 per LR?)
- Heal full value of one Hit Dice per LR?

Any other thoughts?

[Ecks]

The Dungeon Master's Guide has a couple ideas you may be interested in on page 267 in Chapter 9, though I've never used any of them so I can't say how they work in practice.

Slow Natural Healing is basically no healing on long rest as you mentioned, instead characters can roll hit dice the same as a short rest.
Rest Variants: Gritty Realism is a variant where a short rest takes 8 hours and a long rest takes 7 days.

If you combined these, then it addresses the issue you mentioned of the healer casting healing spells and then just taking the typical 8 hour long rest to get all of their spells back, but it still gives healers the options of using their spells if they really need to.

Though recovering hit dice with this would be super slow, might need to recover those at a faster interval.

[Zacchaeus]

There are options in options for both healing variants from the DMG.

[WinterSoldier7]

Thanks, both.

I've been thinking about this a few days now and have come up with something suitable for my group, possibly useful for others;

I've turned on the Slow Healing option. PCs will get their skills back on a Long Rest, but not health.
A long rest allows the use of up to half of your total Hit Dice, +1 for sleeping somewhere comfortable, +1 for having a meal/ ration

That way, it encourages PCs who use some of their Hit Dice to think about Long Resting again to fill them up, before setting out on a journey.
This, combined with with Short Rest rules, should make for interesting resource and rest management.


I'm yet to test this out in practise, plus it may be very specific to my group and playstyle, but I'm confident it will work.
If anyone is curious to try this out themselves, get in touch and I can go into more detail!