OD&D [BECMI/BX] Natural healing?

[Marc_C]

How do you handle natural healing in your games? Do you use a house rule?

"Healing
Natural: For each full day of complete rest, a character or monster recovers 1d3 hit points. If the rest is interrupted, the character or monster will not heal that day."

So every 24 hours the character regains 1d3hps.

• Do you hand out the maximum (no roll)?
• Do you give +Con HP Bonus?
• Do you give +1 per level?

 

[commandercrud]

I handle it as the book says.

 

[Voadam]

I remember playing by the rules straight, but being frustrated by the B/X AD&D set up of lots of days of downtime for those without clerics or clerical magic takes care of it. I much prefer 3e reserve healing/4e healing surges/5e long rest.

Taking weeks off for nonmagical healing was realistic, but not so great for my tastes on the flow and pace of the game.

 

[cbwjm]

Haven't gone back and played becmi in ages but I would probably change it now, never liked how slow the healing became for high level characters. Would probably change it to base hit die + con modifier + level, so a fighter would roll 1d8 while a magic-user would roll 1d4 before adding in bonuses for constitution and level.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I started with AD&D 2E, and we healed 1hp per day of non-rest, which generally allowed us to heal up to full in the three weeks of travel between locations.

If I was going to go back to Basic, then I would have no problem whatsoever with 1d3 per day of rest, but I would probably just average that out to 2/day if it was going to take more than a week.

 

[ccs]

We just did it per the book. But it was decades ago & I honestly don't remember what that was for BX/BECMi. I don't recall any houserules for it though. So if you say it was d3/day then that's what we'd have done.

 

[Mannahnin]

I believe we played it by the book, back in the day. Nowadays I'd prefer a rule which adjusts proportionally; it doesn't make sense to me that a high level fighter would take much longer to recover from injury than a low level one, that a wizard with a small hit die heals faster (as a percentage of total) than does a fighter, and that a character with a low Constitution heals faster than one with the high Con.

I dig the simple option of healing being on a per-week basis in old school games, such as Dan "Delta" Collins' suggested rule that PCs heal [level + Con bonus] in HP per week of rest. Alternately, the Five Torches Deep system of "1 hp per night's rest in the wilderness or other unsafe zone, 1hp/level per night's rest in town or other safe haven" is quite good for a faster recovery system.

Some great discussion of how the natural healing rules have changed and accelerated though the years:

Healing Through the Ages

Math, history, and design of old-school D&D.

deltasdnd.blogspot.com

 

[Volund]

We play with a house rule that if you make a d20 con check (equal or below con score) you recover d6 hp instead of a d3.

 

[Jack Daniel]

It wasn't too long ago that we covered this on a reddit thread. Holmes and Moldvay give 1d3 hp per full day of rest, Mentzer and Allston neglect to mention natural healing anywhere, and Denning gives 1d4 hp per day of rest (in both the 1070 black box and the 1106 tan box, though it's impossible to tell whether the motive for this change was to make healing faster or just to avoid confusing kids by basing healing on the roll of a die type that didn't come included in the box).

As for house rules, I like to let PCs heal 1 hp per level per day of rest, but then spellcasters can only refresh spells after getting a night of rest once they're already at full hp.

 

[Lanefan]

I believe we played it by the book, back in the day. Nowadays I'd prefer a rule which adjusts proportionally; it doesn't make sense to me that a high level fighter would take much longer to recover from injury than a low level one, that a wizard with a small hit die heals faster (as a percentage of total) than does a fighter, and that a character with a low Constitution heals faster than one with the high Con.

Easy answer is to make the daily healing a set fraction of the character's max h.p. (I use 1/10 rounding any fractions up; and note that rounding them all down instead makes quite a difference, particularly for the poor schlub who has 19 hit points!) instead of a roll. This means a high-h.p. character will take about the same amout of time to recover as a low-h.p. one. Doesn't speak to Con bonus, but Con already has enough going for it I can live with this.

If this is too fast you can always adjust the fraction to 1/15 or 1/20 or whatever. We started with 1/6 and found that was too fast.