Topic: Natural healing (rest) by level

So natural healing goes like this, right?

*If at half HP or higher:
---Heals 1 HP for night rest (6 hours);
---Heals 1d3 HP for whole day rest.
*If at lower than half HP:
---Heals nothing for night rest;
---Heals 1 HP for whole day rest.

This is fine, balanced and dictates pace of exploration. Except it makes higher level characters actually harder to recover than lower level characters... I mean, the "half HP" clause manages to add granularity between how much a set damage means to each character based on how it affects them: half or more probably meaning "cuts and bruises" while lower than half probably means "actual wounds"; it makes sense higher level (so higher HP) sees a number of damage differently and it means different tiers of danger.

The "problem" is it seems to me it gets in the way of a thing I look as "sacred" for roleplaying: Hit Point is an abstract concept meaning stamina, will to live, luck, divine intervention, whatever. HP is not "meat points" and I don't roleplay as each hit being an actual stab (or else high level characters would be sieves after each battle). So why would a 30 HP character take longer to heal their half (15 HP) than a 15 HP character would take to heal their half (8 HP)? The way healing/rest is in RAW means 15 damage to a 30 is actually "more hurt" than 8 damage is to the 15 HP character. The way I see a higher HP character can't take more stabs; she would require more fighting from the enemy to actually get stabbed.

Sorry for the ranting - and I don't know if I could make myself actually clean on my point here.

The "solution" for the "problem" I have found was multiplying the RAW resting rules by the character level (number of Hit Dice) so  characters would heal kind of equally on rests but still require more damage to actually require resting.

What do you people think?

Re: Natural healing (rest) by level

tl;dr: healing by rest goes as RAW but multiplied by character level.

Re: Natural healing (rest) by level

As with your other suggestions, I think this is fine, even though it's quite different from what I do smile

I do agree with the idea that hit points represent both physical and mental "damage" and strain, not just wounds.

I have players completely reroll Hit Points each morning, adding half their CON if they had a good night's rest. Their max hit points is level X HD +1/2 CON. They can drink alcohol, eat sweets, and use drugs to add hit points a few times throughout the day.

So there really is no "healing" during the night, just a fresh start the next day (and, they even have a chance to have lower hit points the next day even if they took no damage - they're just having an off day.)

However, when they are reduced to 0 hit points, all damage after that comes from CON, which now lowers their HD. Their CON damage definitely has to be healed through rest and more extreme healing.