Using short rest rules

[Crow_Nightfeath]

So I played a little bit of 5e a while back, and the number one thing I liked about it, was short rest. There were a number of other things I liked, but short rest seems pretty awesomely useful, and the way it's set up it seems like it would transfer to 3.5 easy enough. What would potential problems be of using it?

Short Rest
A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds.

A character can spend one or more Hit Dice at the end of a short rest, up to the character’s maximum number of Hit Dice, which is equal to the character’s level. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier to it. The character regains hit points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. A character regains some spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest, as explained below.

[Zombimode]

So if I sit down for an hour I can get to full health, while resting for 8 hours restores my Level in HP?

[BowStreetRunner]

Most parties find ways very early in the campaign to pull off lots of healing between encounters, usually being able to get up to full HP without much difficulty. In many instances, when they aren't able to recover to full after a rest they are more likely to head to a convenient base of operations before continuing the adventure. The biggest difference between parties tends to be the balance of consumables (potions, et al), spell slots or special ability uses per day, and reusable abilities that are needed to pull off a full recovery. At lower levels they tend to expend more resources during down time either from consumables (impacting wealth) or limited use abilities (impacting daily resources) and at higher levels they are more likely to have picked up reusable resources like at-will items of healing.

So really the greatest impacts of a change like this are going to be:

They will maintain a slightly higher wealth by level (WBL) as they are not using up as many consumables;
They will have more resources (both consumables and limited use abillites) available to use in combat;
They will be less likely to take as many trips 'back to base' to recover before moving on, making encounters flow more continuously one into the next without significant interruptions.


I honestly don't think any of these is a negative impact. As a DM, if I started to find any of these to be problematic I would simply take a different approach to achieving the same ends, such as:

Using more alternate forms of damage that might require a different type of consumable to heal, such as ability damage;
Employ other types of challenges that use up resources, like presenting monsters with a certain defense that can be overcome with the application of a type of oil to weapons;
Using other types of plot hooks at times when I want to encourage the party to head 'back to base' rather than continue along.


My recommendation is that if you really prefer these rules, go for it!

[retaliation08]

In my experience with 5e, short rests are more often used to regain other resources, such as spell slots, ki points, wildshapes, etc.

Theres no real way to do that in 3.5 without unbalancing things even more.

The HD healing thing is also at odds with the rules for natural healing.

What problem are you looking to solve by adapting this to 3.5?

[heavyfuel]

I don't see the point.

As BowStreetRunner said, it's really easy to heal between encounters. A Cleric, Favored Soul, or a Druid can use wands of lesser vigor (without needing to UMD), and Cure Light Wounds is in so many classes list that I think you'll be hard pressed to have a party without someone who can activate a wand with the spell.

A wand of lesser vigor heals 550 HP and a wand of CLW heals an average of 275 HP. That's more than enough for a low level party, whose highest HP character shouldn't have more than 30HP. Each wand costs 750 gp, so a party of 4 can afford one by level 2 if they pool money, and should have one by level 3 with ease.

[BowStreetRunner]

In my experience with 5e, short rests are more often used to regain other resources, such as spell slots, ki points, wildshapes, etc.
I haven't played 5e so was going solely off what the OP mentioned here, which is healing hp only.


So if I sit down for an hour I can get to full health, while resting for 8 hours restores my Level in HP?
While I have never used the mechanic, the way I read it you spend a HD, so effectively lower your max hp at the same time that you heal. If that is true, you couldn't get to full health - just higher than you were before. Maybe I am reading it wrong, though.

[Zaq]

5e’s short rest mechanics have always struck me as the devs splitting the baby between trying to implement a “per encounter” mechanic (which I view as being very much A Good Thing—I love ToB and 4e and Legend, so mechanics defined by an encounter seem very natural and appropriate to me) but somehow being terrified to actually, you know, have a usable per encounter mechanic, so instead they implement this janky hour-long rest thing to make sure that your ability to refresh occasional resources is utterly at the mercy of the GM, making resource management for classes tied to that mechanic even more precarious. (And then there’s the fact that many of the actual printed 5e mechanics that refresh on a short rest are so timid that if you actually have about one rest per two encounters, as the book gently suggests, you’ll basically never get to feel like you’re using your toys, but that’s pretty common for 5e.)

I admit to being bitter. There are few 5e mechanics that I don’t find to be highly, highly disappointing upon scrutiny, even if they start out seeming semi-reasonable. But this one is no exception.

I think the idea of having a resource refresh that isn’t just “per day” is an excellent one. If for some reason the only such thing that your group can accept is the 5e one, then that’s better than not having one at all. If you’re specifically using it for self-healing rather than for regaining uses of class-granted abilities, you’ll need to implement something akin to 4e’s healing surge mechanic or 5e’s spendable HD mechanic, since basic 3.5 mechanics don’t have a universal “every character has a well of vitality they can draw from while resting” mechanic. (Or else just admit that healing in 3.5 is only as hard as tracking down a wand or two and just let HP refill during the rest, though some GMs get leery of that.)

If you’re experimenting with ways to divide up adventuring (and resources) in ways that are more interesting and flexible than just “per day,” have you ever thought about Legend’s Encounter/Scene/Quest system? It’s kind of what it sounds like, and it’s less arbitrary than a hard time-defined system. The four basic units of time in Legend are Rounds, Encounters, Scenes, and Quests. Rounds work like how you’re familiar with, and so do Encounters. Scenes roughly map to “per day,” but you might have multiple Scenes in a 24 hour day if the adventure happens to have multiple distinct parts, or one Scene might stretch over multiple days if you’re in an extended traveling journey or something. (For an example of the former, if the GM chooses, it could be one Scene fighting through the cultists’ dungeon to get to the ritual chamber and another Scene with a similar number of Encounters to deal with mucking out the alien pocket dimension the cultists opened a wormhole to, or it might be one Scene to break out of a prison compound and one Scene with a similar number of Encounters to navigate the enemy territory that prison compound is in and get back to safety. As an example of the latter, a journey across the desert where the desert isn’t necessarily the final goal might take the characters days or weeks in-universe, but rather than either having a super-populous desert with wandering monsters every 30 minutes or having the characters refresh all their spell slots between fights, all the obstacles you fight while crossing that desert are treated as being one Scene.)

Quests are basically a way of grouping together Scenes to allow for moderately long-term effects that aren’t necessarily permanent. So if you fend off a giant invasion of a dwarven settlement and then agree to take the fight to the giants and rescue some dwarven hostages, the local priests might give you a blessing that lasts for the duration of that Quest; it’s not a permanent blessing that lasts forevermore, but if it takes a few Scenes to resolve that plot arc, you’re still covered.

When translating it into D&D 3.5, assume that resources that refresh on a daily basis instead refresh on a Scene basis. The most work honestly comes when determining duration of spells, which is itself honestly something of a headache when GMing unmodified 3.5; basically, spells that last a number of rounds can still last the same amount, spells that functionally last all day should last for one Scene, spells that only last a few minutes should (depending on context) last until the end of the current Encounter, and spells that have awkward durations like 10 minutes per level can last until the end of the next Encounter unless someone’s obviously trying to game the system. (An involved GM is always necessary when implementing houserules, of course.)