One of the most contentious topics out of the day-old D&D Next playtest is the rule that resting overnight gets you all your hit points back without fail. There are multiple Wizards and ENWorld threads arguing about it already.
I think it’s a terrible idea.
The common arguments for it and their obvious refutations are:
1. Well, hit points are just luck and near misses and stuff! Why shouldn’t they all come back?
Because there’s no other mechanic for actually getting wounded. If this were a game with “wound points and vitality points” or some other way of having a way to reflect persistent wounds while still regaining your “near miss points” that would be fine. But there’s not. And being wounded, persistently wounded, is not just realistic, it’s a major part of all fantasy fiction from Lancelot to Harry Dresden. Leaving that out is shitty from a storytelling point of view.
Besides, hit points have always been described that way and have always come back slowly, so saying it’s a necessary consequence is ignoring the mechanic’s history.
2. But it sucks to be injured when you’re headed out to adventure!
“I want my videogame character to be at max!” I mean, I understand that from a certain gamist perspective. But this is the kind of player entitlement that leads to the kind of childproofed gaming that 4e got to with its rust monster. If you just want a big “I Win” button or have a 5 minute attention span, there’s other games to play. RPGs allow you to be concerned about resource usage over the long haul, not just the 30 minutes.
3. In 3.x, isn’t it lame that everyone has to spend on wands of cure light wounds that just do this anyway?
No one has actually said this that I’ve seen but me, but this is the one valid argument that does occur to me. Yes, it is lame to just pay thousands of gold to get disposables to do the same thing. But there’s probably a different fix to that problem than “here you go, heal up whenever you want!”.
Geek Related 