How do you cast Mending on a clockwork character?

Question

I'm playing a DnD campaign (my first real one). My DM is pretty new to it as well and we are unsure of the following rules and how they work together.

I am playing a custom race: Clockwork. I realise this might not be the best idea since we're new to DnD but here we are...

Anyway, my character is also an artificer with a mending cantrip.

The clockwork race has a trait called Made to Mend which stops you from dying if someone casts mending on you.

But how does healing work if I want to heal after a battle? How much does it heal and how many times do I need to cast it?

I'm made purely out of mechanical components so I should obviously be able to use any means that normally fix mechanical components to heal, right?

We can assume that the damage in quesion is all to non magical faculties of my player (i.e. I don't have to wory about Mending's limitation on restoring magical properties).

Answer 1

Given that this is a homebrew race, it seems unlikely (and, in fact, completely impossible) that the game is actually designed to take it into account, and homebrew content frequently has issues with things that would come up in play-testing. As far as the content present only in the class, there is no way to answer this question; whoever created this race didn't seem to make provisions for healing.

However, per Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron, warforged can be healed via all the same methods as an organic adventurer (healing magic, healers kits, and resting). Warforged are humanoid constructs, as are the clockworks, so I believe it's reasonable to extrapolate between the two.

(I would also suggest that you just play a warforged with clockwork flavor, for the sake of simplicity and balance, especially as a newer player, but that's not the question you asked.)

Answer 2

The Made to Mend feature just doesn't make sense.

The Made to Mend feature states:

Made to Mend. When a creature casts the mending cantrip on you, you instead become stable if you are dying.

The mending cantrip has a casting time of 1 minute. It takes ten rounds of combat to cast mending. If you go down, and someone starts casting mending, you will either be dead or stabilized through saving throws before mending can finish casting - your fate is decided in at most five rounds (3 success, two failure, or vice-versa).

I would highly recommend just playing one of the officially published races for your first campaign. Good homebrew is rare, and good homebrew from dandwiki is non-existent.

Answer 3

Per the rules you linked, by default, you're a construct, and therefore, per the rules for most (all?) of the healing spells provided so far, you can't be magically healed. Mending only stabilizes, it doesn't heal, so that doesn't help.

Seems like the only way to be magically healed is if you selected the Alchemical Blood trait as one of your Maker's Marks:

Alchemical Blood: You have an alchemical mixture that keeps you running. Despite your construct nature, you are considered humanoid when a creature casts a spell to grant you hit points.

In practice, being healable is basically necessary to function in most D&D campaigns, so almost all playable Clockworks would take Alchemical Blood. Which sounds like a limitation, but most of the other Maker's Marks are so bad/useless that you're not missing out on much.

I'll second the suggestion from others that you avoid homebrew for your first campaign. If you want to play a living construct, play a Warforged, which isn't nearly so complicated/poorly thought out.

Answer 4

Homebrew and Rules

I'll start by saying that any time you use homebrew you run into the large grey void of rules that may or may not work depending on what your homebrew says. In this case, just apply the idea that specific beats general and that your homebrew override rules as they are written. Now for the questions at hand.

How much does mending heal?

Quite simply, it heals nothing at all. The trait states that Mending can be used to stabilize a dying clockwork character. While stable, you regain 1 hp after 1d4 hours and return to consciousness. However, you can't heal by being mended. This is outside the scope of both the spell and the trait in this homebrew.

A note about Clockwork

Clockwork have the interesting trait of being Constructs. Normally this doesn't mean much. However, this prevents most magical healing. I would implore you and your dm talk about this since adventurers often need magical healing in some form.

Answer 5

Healing is not the same as treating injuries

Healing in DnD 5e is the recovery of lost hit-points. Hit-points do not necessarily represent your physical condition, but rather

a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck

So when you say

I'm made purely out of mechanical components so I should obviously be able to use any means that normally fix mechanical components to heal, right?

I would point out that physically fixing your mechanical components does not necessarily restore your physical and mental durability, will to live, and luck.

Let's look at some other precedence to show that in regular (organic) characters, healing and physically "fixing" someone are not the same:

• Not every physical ailment reduces hit-points. Diseases, like sight rot, damage your body but don't reduce hit-points. Being petrified (which sounds pretty damaging to one's body) doesn't reduce hit-points either.
• Not every remedy to physical ailments restores hit-points. A Healer's kit contains bandages, salves, and splints. You use them to mend physical injuries such that a character is stabilized, but it does not restore any hit-points. Greater Restoration can remove statuses like petrified. But it doesn't restore hit-points
• Not every damage to your hit-points is physical. Psychic damage reduces hit-points just like any other damage, but does not cause any physical damage that could be fixed. So, if loss of hit-points are not necessarily caused by physical damage, then physical restoration does not necessarily restore lost hit-points.
• Not every healing restores all physical ailments. If a character lost a leg, a simple Cure Wounds will not make the leg reappear, even if it happens to heal you all the way back to max HP. You need specialized spells, like Regenerate to repair the limb.

Of course you can homebrew that it does

All of the above is just to say that fixing yourself does not obviously also heal you. However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with homebrewing a race where it does. Whether or not that is balanced is another topic. Due to its casting time (1min) it's probably not very useful in-combat. Seeing how it is a cantrip, though, I think it would be severely overpowered out-of-combat. You'd essentially have unlimited out-of-combat heal, something that (to the best of my knowledge) is not available to any other race or class.

Answer 6

By the description you linked, Mending does nothing if you are stable.

From this discussion we see that

The Nimblewright from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is a construct that has the repairable feature, which allows for mending to heal one hit point.

Your race does not have this feature, so as it is written it does not work for you. Of course you and your DM may decide your character does now have it, homebrew problems usually require homebrew solutions.

Also, nothing in the description of the race you are playing seems to prevent most ways of healing available for other player races, like Potions of Healing or spending HD during rest, or long rest benefits.

Spells that explicitly don't work on constructs won't work though, as the The Heart of Steel makes you a full construct, not a Humanoid (living construct) for example.