Natural healing is a very simple mechanic.

Natural Healing

With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night.

This unfortunately makes little sense and ends up screwing the characters with the most hit points.

See the problem? Dig in to learn more, this is a long one.

The Main Problem

The main issue I have with natural healing is that it’s purely based on character level. Take a 5th level Wizard and a 5th level Fighter that both have max hit points. For the sake of argument, the wizard has a +0 Con modifier and the fighter has a +2 Con modifier. The wizard would have 20 hp and the fighter would have 60 hp.

With a full night’s rest, both will heal 5 hp. For the wizard, that’s a full 25% of his hit point total. For the fighter, that’s only about 8% of his total.

What makes this example worse is that the fighter has a higher Con score than the wizard. Per the rules: “Constitution represents your character’s health and stamina.”

Since a higher Con score gives you more hit points and natural healing is only taking into consideration your character level, this means that a character with a higher Con score will take longer to heal than a character with a lower Con score – even if they took the same wounds. This seems so incredibly counter-intuitive.

If your Constitution is supposed to be a measure of your character’s health, then why doesn’t it have something to do with how well you heal?

Even if the characters had a +0 Con mod, the wizard heals back their 25% of their hit points while the fighter heals back only 10%. There’s no reason there should be such an inconsistency between the two.

These two examples illustrate the “high Con characters take longer to heal” and “higher hit die characters take longer to heal” scenarios.

The only two “good” aspects of the current system is that it scales (sorta-kinda) with level and the formula is super easy to remember.

Finding A Better Way

One way to fix natural healing is to tie your Con score into the rate at which you heal. The downside is that by adopting a new way to calculate the hit points regained each night means we need to throw out the easy formula that’s already used (even though it’s a very poor one).

The question we’re left with is this – is Con or your character’s level a more important factor when determining the hit points gained with rest? Both need to be included and both play an important role.

Alternative #1

The first alternative that gets thrown out when I bring up this subject is, “Why don’t you just multiply the Con modifier by the level and give that each day?” It’s not a bad idea if you’re looking for another easy-to-remember solution. The language needs to be cleaned up a bit to make it a useful rule:

With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover hit points equal to your character level times one plus your Con modifier, if your Con modifier is +1 or greater. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really solve the problem and when you run numbers for different classes with different Con scores you run into very obvious problems at higher levels (such as a 20th level fighter or barbarian with a +5 or greater Con score).

Changing Perspective

One of the things that has always bothered me about the current approach is that it’s based on hit points. Hit points, in and of themselves, are a quasi-real number that represents a great many things. They’re simply not “the raw amount of physical damage you can withstand” as some people think. The PHB is without a clear definition of “what a hit point is” and this is what makes our problem tricky. The other thing that bothers me about the current system is that two people with the same Con should heal at the same rate. This shouldn’t have much, if anything, to do with class or level.

A wizard could have a very high Con and a fighter could have a very low Con. There’s nothing to prevent this. Remember back to 2nd Ed – if you had a high enough Con you gained degrees of regeneration. This is completely in line with what I’m talking about.

So moving away from just adding raw hit points based on level and Con, why not look at this from a perspective of percentages?

Finding A Healthy Person

The main challenge is deciding what an adequate percentage of your total hit points an average person (Con mod +0) should heal in a given day. Unfortunately, we tend to heal very slow. Hit points are returned over weeks, not necessarily days.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that we heal 5% of our total hit points with a full night’s rest. That’s not a big number, but when you consider the amount of time it takes to heal a broken bone, it doesn’t seem that far fetched.

Most of the damage we incur day-to-day in our real lives never equates to a single hit point of damage. At most it may be nonlethal damage.

Bringing This Into The Fantasy World

In D&D, we not only have the player’s Con score to consider, but also character level. Character level is important since your character gains more hit points each level. If the amount healed per night doesn’t scale with your hit points, you’ll effectively never heal completely without the aid of magic. Out of the two, I think your Con score is more important than your level when determining your healing rate.

Let’s start off with the base 5% from above. To this percentage we need to add a factor representative of your character level and a second one representative of your Con score. This means the percentage gained by any two characters with the same level and Con score – regardless of their class – is the same. The raw hit points received will be different because they’ll likely have different hit point totals, but the percentages will be the same.

Based on all the assumptions and assertions I’ve made thus far (and a lot of time in Excel testing out things), I’ve come up with the following (admittedly ugly) formula:

Percentage Gained Per Day = 5 + (level / 4) + (Con modifier / 2)

Then, to find out how many hit points you recover with 8 hours of rest, you multiply your total hit point value by the percentage you just calculated.

I know, I know – it’s ugly. But – I think it gives a better healing scale than the stupid “one point per level per day” formula that’s currently suggested.

So How Do The Numbers Look?

That’s of course the important thing, right?

I created a simple chart that outlines the percentage healed per day based on any character’s level and Con modifier. This simply applies the formula above to every Con modifier from 0 to 10 for each level from 1 to 20.

All you need to do to figure out how many hit points you gain through natural healing is to take the percentage that applies to your level and Con modifier and get that percentage of your hit point total.

Running Some More Numbers

What we want to look at is some examples. Let’s do up another chart.

Avg Hit Points were calculated simply by multiplying the level by the hit die, dividing by two then adding the Con bonus to hit points for the level.

% To Heal came straight from the first chart.

HP Healed is the % To Heal applied to the Avg Hit Points.

Days To Heal are the amount of days needed to heal if you heal only through natural healing if you were brought down to zero.

Important Notes

First, low levels and very low hit points tend to throw the curve off simply because we’re dealing with so few hit points. We’re going to round things up so that you gain at least one hit point per day of natural healing. If you’re a level 1 wizard with 4 hit points, there’s only so much you have to work with. After a few levels, the curve becomes more recognizable.

Second, after you ignore the lower levels you can see in the second chart that as you have a higher Con that your Days To Heal decreases. This is consistent with what your Con score represents – your health.

Third, per the first chart the % to Heal is going to be the same for any characters that have the same character level and Con mod (illustrated in the Excel doc and the chart above). This is important because it means that a fighter that’s down 50% of his hit point total will heal at the same rate as a wizard of the same level with the same Con mod that’s also down 50%. Since we know their health is about the same (their Con mod), we should expect a consistency in the time it takes for them to heal their wounds.

Finally, we see that a higher level character will heal somewhat faster than a lower level character with the same Con modifier from the Days To Heal column. This is a byproduct of the formula and not something I’m uncomfortable with. I quite like the fact that a higher level character can recover from wounds faster than lower level characters. It fits in well with the quasi-real concept of hit points and is representative of a character’s experience throughout their adventuring career.

The Big Wrap Up

I think my proposed formula (and attached graph) shows a natural healing rate that’s considerably more consistent with a character’s Constitution score. It eliminates both the “high Con characters take longer to heal” and “higher hit die characters take longer to heal” scenarios.

The obvious detriment is that the proposed formula is harder to figure out “on the fly”. Luckily, you only need to calculate this when you level or when your Con score has been modified for a period of 8 hours or greater and you’re going to be resting. Something like Bear’s Endurance won’t have an effect on this at all. Curses, poisons and ability drain may, however.

With the chart in hand, recalculating the hit points recovered per day should be easy. A quick second on a calculator will be all you need if you’re not good at percentages or math in general.

Posted by Mike on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 7:17 am.
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