A Straightforward & Scaleable Method for Hit Point Recovery

I've analysed and critiqued the concept of Hit Points in the past. The gist of the critique is that whilst hit points conceptually are mostly "hero points", mechanically they are treated entirely as "wound points". And that grates.

The 10th level fighter with 60 Hit points who loses 80% of his hit points will need seven weeks to recover those 48 hp lost, assuming a basic 1 hp/day of recovery. Meanwhile, the 1st level fighter with 5 hit points who loses 80% of his hit points (and was near death with just 1 hp left) will need just four days to make a full recovery.

Besides the incongruence of this, it also has the mechanical downside of necessitating magical healing at higher levels for the game to be at all functional.

Art for the entry is from the old Swedish "Drakar och Demoner" supplement Torshem.

I've seen various elegant and less elegant attempt to remedy this, from healing HP equal to level per day (as 3e faultily suggested) to each added day of healing increasing the amount of HP recovered, to 5e's full "There are no wounds points in hit points" approach. But none of them really scale well to capture the blend of hit points as wound+hero points.

Fear not, this entry is short, because it doesn't actually require much to remedy the situation.

Recovery time: 2-70 days.

All that is needed is to introduce the concept of a "Recovery Die" to jot down on the character sheet and a method for calculating it that will scale to the total of one's HP. Here's the write-up: 

Every two days of full rest allows a Recovery Roll, using one’s Recovery Die [RD], to recover lost HP. To determine the size of one’s Recovery Die: 

Divide Total HP by 5 and round up.

I.e. 47 total HP = 1d10 RD (47/5 ≈ 10 = 1d10).

Round odd-numbered dice down to the nearest even number to reach a rollable die. I.e. a 'd7' result would yield a 1d6 recovery die.

Treat every two full increments above 12 as a +1 to 1d12. I.e.  93 HP total would give a 1d12+3 Recovery Die (93/5 ≈ 19 = 1d12+3).

Characters with 1-5 HP recover at a flat rate of 1 HP every other day.

On average, this means characters will make a full recovery from 1 hp to max hp in 14-19 days, though at lower levels (6-17 HP) the spectrum is more like 7-14 days (at hp 2-5, the math is self-evident). 

If this is too fast for you, simply increase the amounts rest days needed to be allowed to roll the recovery die, until you have a period of time to full recovery that suits the needs of your campaign.

Setting it to a recovery die roll every three days of rest will fit Gygax' original conception of 4 weeks = full recovery fairly well. Setting it to five days of rest per recovery roll will perhaps begin to approximate something non-cinematic.

Some may say that it is not straightforward but complex to calculate, but as I've argued in the past: Whatever can be put on a character sheet as a single number is not complex. You only need to calculate your Recovery Die whenever your hit point total changes. And rounding up your HP total to the nearest 5 or 10 and then dividing that by 5 is not really a complex calculation to do whenever you gain a level.

Yes, there are "quack-fu" ducks in Torshem. 

The Recovery Die can be used elsewhere as well. Maybe that's what you roll for healing potions and healing spells as well. And it's easy to tinker and adjust with, lowering or increasing the die in special circumstances, etc.