What if you removed short rests?

[ShadowSandbag]

Apologies if this has been asked before, i searched the forum but didn't come up with anything.

So I've been reading up the rules of 13th age and most of their abilities are either unlimited, one per day or one per combat (plus some more complicated things)

So i was thinking what if we took that same sort of thing and applied it to 5e. Just switching all short rest ability to 1/encounter would make them too strong. Going off the idea that you should be taking 2 shorts rests for every long rest, that averages out to about 1 short rest every 2.5 encounters. My thinking was that all short rest resources would be halved (1 ki point every two levels, Warlock starts with one slot) but in exchange made them once per encounter. I think that could make short rest based classes a lot more attractive to players where short rests aren't common.

For out of combat events, I think that a 1/encounter type system could still work with some DM discretion on what qualifies as a separate encounter.

Do people think this would work or would there be some huge complications I haven't thought about?

[Mr.Spastic]

This would not work. And it would tick off any warlock. 1 spell for fight is AWFUL. You would also make Way of the Four Elements Monks unplayable.

On the flip side, Fighters would become UNSTOPPABLE GODS. Action surge and Second Wind every fight is ridiculous especially at low levels.

The problem is that this would change how certain classes play while leaving others mostly alone. It also wouldn't work with rest recharge abilities. Arcane and Natural Recovery are two I can think of off the top of my head.

[Trustypeaches]

First off, this is a bad idea.

Second off, if you insist on removing Short rests, “Once-per-encounter” mechanics are messy. It rewards splitting combat encounters up into as many mini-encounters as possible which could easily be abused.

You’d be better off just converting everyone to long-rest resources than trying to make “once-per-encounter” work.

[Mr.Spastic]

You’d be better off just converting everyone to long-rest resources than trying to make “once-per-encounter” work.

How would that work with with Warlocks? Assuming 2 short rest per on long would you give them 3x the spell slots?

You would actually have an easier time just leaving the rules alone. Converting resources to recharge on y rather than x fundamentally changes the balance of the game and you end up with unintended consequences.

[Vexacia]

.... short rests are fine and the game was explicitly built and designed around them

you create a thousand more problems than you solve by trying to remove them

[Ganymede]

One interesting way to dump short rests is to replace them with benchmarks. Every adventuring day has two available benchmarks, and the DM can reward them at his or her discretion. A benchmark grants the party the benefits of a short rest and is generally awarded during a lull after a notable achievement, such as overcoming a difficult challenge.

[Gryndle]

Short rests can be removed, but maybe not like the OP suggests. My group doesn't use short rests. Any ability that recharges on a short rest is instead 3/long rest, ki and warlock spell slots are x3 per long rest. It is a small buff to short rest classes at low levels. At higher levels, it is hardly noticeable compared to what primary casters and long rest classes are dropping during an in-game day.

Sure, there is a temptation for the players to nova. But we strictly enforce a 1 long rest per 24 hours rule, and realistic responses from the game world, with harder than average difficulty combats. So the players have to gauge how they spend their resources and ration accordingly.

It might not work for every table. If your players habitually try to abuse rules or "game the system" at every turn, then maybe not. Not unless you are up for the challenge of reigning them in as part of your role as DM. For more cooperative, mature tables it can work just fine.

[LudicSavant]

Apologies if this has been asked before, i searched the forum but didn't come up with anything.

So I've been reading up the rules of 13th age and most of their abilities are either unlimited, one per day or one per combat (plus some more complicated things)

So i was thinking what if we took that same sort of thing and applied it to 5e. Just switching all short rest ability to 1/encounter would make them too strong. Going off the idea that you should be taking 2 shorts rests for every long rest, that averages out to about 1 short rest every 2.5 encounters. My thinking was that all short rest resources would be halved (1 ki point every two levels, Warlock starts with one slot) but in exchange made them once per encounter. I think that could make short rest based classes a lot more attractive to players where short rests aren't common.

For out of combat events, I think that a 1/encounter type system could still work with some DM discretion on what qualifies as a separate encounter.

Do people think this would work or would there be some huge complications I haven't thought about?

While I support the idea of freeing up the pacing structure, this seems like it would be rocky to implement.

For example, one of the things that influences how a Warlock performs at a real table is something I call the "one hour ritual." In other words, you can cast Hex, refresh your spell slot with a short rest, and then still have Hex on for 23 hours. There's almost never going to be a campaign where this cuts into your "normal" short rest opportunities (e.g. the ones between combats).

I also find it very useful for non-combat endeavors, where a Warlock can churn out several short rests a day on their own schedule.

These are the sorts of utilities that disappear if you can't short rest during free time and are only expected to get the "between-combat" rests.

[Trustypeaches]

You would actually have an easier time just leaving the rules alone. Converting resources to recharge on y rather than x fundamentally changes the balance of the game and you end up with unintended consequences.I agree.

But this thread isn’t called “what if we left short rests alone?”, even if it’s what I recommend. If OP insists on removing them, he should steer clear of introducing “once-an-encounter” as a mechanic.

[jdolch]

I suppose you could do it, but you would have to carefully re-balance all short-rest dependent abilities and classes for long rests, find a good solution for when to use hit dice, etc. This might prove difficult to impossible.

[ShadowSandbag]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. It was
never something i was considering implementing myself, more of just a topic for discussion.

I think people brought up some interesting points and overall i agree that removing short rests creates more problems than it solves, but wanted to look at what others thought.

[Nifft]

Short rests can be removed, but maybe not like the OP suggests. My group doesn't use short rests. Any ability that recharges on a short rest is instead 3/long rest, ki and warlock spell slots are x3 per long rest. It is a small buff to short rest classes at low levels. At higher levels, it is hardly noticeable compared to what primary casters and long rest classes are dropping during an in-game day.

Neat.

If I'm at a table where someone objects to short rests, I'll bring this up.

Thanks!

[JellyPooga]

My favourite "fix" the the so-called short rest problem is right there in the DMG; Gritty Realism. It changes nothing about any ability as written, it doesn't introduce any convoluted mechanics or calculations, it doesn't create the problem of nova-ing or splitting encounters. It simply makes Short Rests a thing that happens every day (because what else are you going to do while grabbing 8 hours kip?). It also lessens the "action hero" problem of overly gung-ho adventurers, making players more careful with their resources (including HP and HD), it accentuates time pressures that might be involved in your campaign (because if you've only got 24 hours to save the world, you'll be thinking twice about resting for 8 of them before tackling your third encounter of the day) and encourages down-time (as opposed to whisking from one adventure to the next with little to no rest or respite).

Have a problem with players not doing a thing that they should be? Use a rule that makes them to want to do that thing.

[Dark Schneider]

Not recommended. Many abilites are intended to be recovered at short rests. You do short rest when into dungeons. So it is a way to balance.

[Glorthindel]

If I was going to do it, I would work on attempting to normalise long and short rests to the same mechanic. So rather than find a way to convert just Short Rest mechanics to per encounter, I would look at either converting Short Rest abilities to per Long Rest, convert Long Rest recharges to per Short Rest, or convert both to per encounter.

Of the three, making Short Rest abilities into per Long Rest would be the easiest, as it would just involve finding a number to multiply the uses by, while the other two would involve having to divide the number of Long Rest uses in a way that might be fiddly, or just straight impossible for abilities that have just one use per day (although personally I really dislike these abilities, and consider them a major contributor to the 5 minute adventuring day problem, and I just find myself never using them otherwise I suffer use-remorse, so in a ideal game redesign I would want to see these things phased out and replaced with things with more frequent uses, but that is a bigger proposition than what the OP is looking to achieve).

[Xetheral]

My favourite "fix" the the so-called short rest problem is right there in the DMG; Gritty Realism. It changes nothing about any ability as written, it doesn't introduce any convoluted mechanics or calculations, it doesn't create the problem of nova-ing or splitting encounters. It simply makes Short Rests a thing that happens every day (because what else are you going to do while grabbing 8 hours kip?). It also lessens the "action hero" problem of overly gung-ho adventurers, making players more careful with their resources (including HP and HD), it accentuates time pressures that might be involved in your campaign (because if you've only got 24 hours to save the world, you'll be thinking twice about resting for 8 of them before tackling your third encounter of the day) and encourages down-time (as opposed to whisking from one adventure to the next with little to no rest or respite).

Have a problem with players not doing a thing that they should be? Use a rule that makes them to want to do that thing.

Gritty Realism has a few side effects that may (or may not) be drawbacks at some tables:

Long-duration spells can't be kept up. Mage Armor is the big one here. Normally you can have it last between long rests for the cost of two first-level slots, but with Gritty Realism it would take an impractical number of slots to do so. Other spells with similar/related issues include: Goodberry, Create Food and Water, Nondetection, Hallucinatory Terrain, Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum, Etherealness, Guards and Wards, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, Mindblank, Foresight, Death Ward, Guardian of Faith, Darkvision, Wind Walk, Seeming, Nystul's Magic Aura, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, Telepathy. Certain spells break. For example, the undead created with Animate Dead can't be maintained, and Teleportation Circle can never be made permanent. Harder to rest uninterrupted. Because Gritty Realism doesn't change the threshold for rest interruptions, it's much harder to successfully complete a rest without needing to start over. Adventure design must allow for regular week-long Long Rests. Adventurers are expected to exhaust their resources after 6-8 medium/hard encounters. In practice, with Gritty Realism, this means you can't have urgent plots or time limits that last longer than 6-8 medium/hard encounters, or else the party won't have time to take an entire week off to rest. This limits the DM mainly to episodic campaigns where everything urgent is resolved before each long rest. May change the ratio of long and short rests. Unless you allow the PCs to regularly do a three-day adventuring day followed by a week-long Long Rest (which works out to resting 70% of the time), you're not going to maintain a 2 short-rest-per-long-rest tempo. If you put more short rests between long rests, you may introduce balance issues in favor of classes with short rest recovery. More time-consuming to determine remaining NPC resources. Under the normal rest rules, when the PCs encounter NPCs with limited-use resources, it's somewhat straightforward to figure out how many they have left: if it's early in the day, they have most/all, and if it's late in the day, they have fewer. Under Gritty Realism, everyone isn't on the same Long Rest schedule, so the DM has to determine when each NPC's last (successful, see #3) Long Rest was, and the rate at which they've been spending resources since then. For tables that use CR, this may also require recalculating the CR of NPCs encountered later in their rest cycle than originally expected. Lowers the magic level of the setting. (Applies only to tables that use the same rest rules for PCs and NPCs.) At a minimum, Gritty Rest decreases the availability of spellcasting in the setting by a factor of 8. (Implausibly assuming one day of casting, then 7 days of Long Rest per spellcaster.) In many settings it will be impractical for anyone to spend 7/8 of their days resting. If we assume the practical ratio remains 1/3, as it is with normal resting, that means spellcasters in the setting get a long rest every three weeks. That reduces the available spellcasting in the setting by a factor of 21. That won't work for high-magic settings like (some interpretations of) FR or many homebrew settings carried over from previous editions. Changes geographic distribution of magic in the setting. (Same caveat as above.) In many campaign worlds, frontier and wilderness areas are dangerous and/or strenuous enough to make week-long long rests very difficult. For example, a village Hedge Mage in a subsistence farming community might need to spend too much time farming to be able to take week-long rests. Similarly, a Druid living in the wild might need to build a house or other structure to be able to have a safe enough place with enough stored food and water to take week-long rests (which somewhat defeats the purpose of living in the wild). Spellcasters in (e.g.) orc warbands might never get a chance to refresh their spells given the chaotic and violent environment found in many DMs' interpretations of Orc culture. All of these factors suggest that magic (when available at all, see #7) is concentrated in areas stable enough for spellcasters to take week-long Long Rests, such as cities and towns. As with #7, this won't work in all campaign setting.

[TheHutz]

I'm not overly familiar with 4E besides listening to people play it, but weren't some of these ideas very prevalent there?

Pretty sure I recall daily and encounter powers as opposed to spell slots. Having never played it I'm not the best sourcem but I think 4E is regarded as sort of a forgotten edition for a reason.

[NaughtyTiger]

only one minor quibble


Adventure design must allow for regular week-long Long Rests. Adventurers are expected to exhaust their resources after 6-8 medium/hard encounters. In practice, with Gritty Realism, this means you can't have urgent plots or time limits that last longer than 6-8 medium/hard encounters, or else the party won't have time to take an entire week off to rest. This limits the DM mainly to episodic campaigns where everything urgent is resolved before each long rest.

In practice.... there are 3-4 medium/hard encounters between long rests. It is rare and difficult to reduce party resources by attrition unless you apply an external time constraint.

[Wildarm]

I get the 13th Age simplicity of skill frequency. I love the 1/Encounter skills as well a cyclic spell casting and escalation die in that game system. That being said, 5E skills are not geared to the same type of system.

If you really wanted to eliminate short rests, then perhaps the easiest thing to do is to make short rest skills recharge automatically after every 2nd encounter. It will require a bit of book keeping to keep track of what was used in the previous encounter but it should work game balance wise. Players can recover HD after each encounter as well.

[KorvinStarmast]

.... short rests are fine and the game was explicitly built and designed around them. You create a thousand more problems than you solve by trying to remove them This. It's a feature not a bug.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Flippant answer: You'd get 4th edition? (13th Age is an evolution of D&D 4e by the same lead designer).

For 5e... I think the neatest answer would be to replace short rests with "heroic surges," or some such nomenclature-- twice per long rest, take a minute to gain the benefits of a short rest. That effectively removes short rests from the flow of the game without significantly affecting balance. But if you really want semi-spammable per-encounter powers (which are by no means bad in and of themselves; most short rest abilities are pure combat, though you'd have to watch the Warlock spell list), I think your best bet would be to keep the usual number of uses/interval, but punch up the difficulty of encounters. Instead of 2 encounters of around medium difficulty per short rest, figure one hard/deadly encounter.

[Xetheral]

only one minor quibble


In practice.... there are 3-4 medium/hard encounters between long rests. It is rare and difficult to reduce party resources by attrition unless you apply an external time constraint.

Personally, I have even fewer encounters than that in my games. :)

I was assuming here, however, that the goal of adopting Gritty Realism in the first place was to try to get in the maximum number of encounters per long rest at tables where that doesn't normally happen.

[ChildofLuthic]

Gritty Realism has a few side effects that may (or may not) be drawbacks at some tables:

Long-duration spells can't be kept up. Mage Armor is the big one here. Normally you can have it last between long rests for the cost of two first-level slots, but with Gritty Realism it would take an impractical number of slots to do so. Other spells with similar/related issues include: Goodberry, Create Food and Water, Nondetection, Hallucinatory Terrain, Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum, Etherealness, Guards and Wards, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, Mindblank, Foresight, Death Ward, Guardian of Faith, Darkvision, Wind Walk, Seeming, Nystul's Magic Aura, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, Telepathy. Certain spells break. For example, the undead created with Animate Dead can't be maintained, and Teleportation Circle can never be made permanent. Harder to rest uninterrupted. Because Gritty Realism doesn't change the threshold for rest interruptions, it's much harder to successfully complete a rest without needing to start over. Adventure design must allow for regular week-long Long Rests. Adventurers are expected to exhaust their resources after 6-8 medium/hard encounters. In practice, with Gritty Realism, this means you can't have urgent plots or time limits that last longer than 6-8 medium/hard encounters, or else the party won't have time to take an entire week off to rest. This limits the DM mainly to episodic campaigns where everything urgent is resolved before each long rest. May change the ratio of long and short rests. Unless you allow the PCs to regularly do a three-day adventuring day followed by a week-long Long Rest (which works out to resting 70% of the time), you're not going to maintain a 2 short-rest-per-long-rest tempo. If you put more short rests between long rests, you may introduce balance issues in favor of classes with short rest recovery. More time-consuming to determine remaining NPC resources. Under the normal rest rules, when the PCs encounter NPCs with limited-use resources, it's somewhat straightforward to figure out how many they have left: if it's early in the day, they have most/all, and if it's late in the day, they have fewer. Under Gritty Realism, everyone isn't on the same Long Rest schedule, so the DM has to determine when each NPC's last (successful, see #3) Long Rest was, and the rate at which they've been spending resources since then. For tables that use CR, this may also require recalculating the CR of NPCs encountered later in their rest cycle than originally expected. Lowers the magic level of the setting. (Applies only to tables that use the same rest rules for PCs and NPCs.) At a minimum, Gritty Rest decreases the availability of spellcasting in the setting by a factor of 8. (Implausibly assuming one day of casting, then 7 days of Long Rest per spellcaster.) In many settings it will be impractical for anyone to spend 7/8 of their days resting. If we assume the practical ratio remains 1/3, as it is with normal resting, that means spellcasters in the setting get a long rest every three weeks. That reduces the available spellcasting in the setting by a factor of 21. That won't work for high-magic settings like (some interpretations of) FR or many homebrew settings carried over from previous editions. Changes geographic distribution of magic in the setting. (Same caveat as above.) In many campaign worlds, frontier and wilderness areas are dangerous and/or strenuous enough to make week-long long rests very difficult. For example, a village Hedge Mage in a subsistence farming community might need to spend too much time farming to be able to take week-long rests. Similarly, a Druid living in the wild might need to build a house or other structure to be able to have a safe enough place with enough stored food and water to take week-long rests (which somewhat defeats the purpose of living in the wild). Spellcasters in (e.g.) orc warbands might never get a chance to refresh their spells given the chaotic and violent environment found in many DMs' interpretations of Orc culture. All of these factors suggest that magic (when available at all, see #7) is concentrated in areas stable enough for spellcasters to take week-long Long Rests, such as cities and towns. As with #7, this won't work in all campaign setting.

So some of those spells are definitely going to be hard to rework, although I'd say that mage armor lasts a week, if I ever ran a gritty realism game. Still, good point; as someone who likes martials better I forget about that kind of stuff.

With the pacing, it's going to be different, but it matches up with the pace a lot of people play their games at anyway. With two or so encounters a day, with a few days of encounters between cities, Gritty Realism matches the pacing better.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Yeah, that's a basic 4th edition mechanic, so, if you like that sort of thing, sure, those books are probably cheap these days. Short rests are a fundamental part of 5e. They're completely critical for some classes (Warlock and Monk), and at least semi-critical for a lot of other class features (Action Surge, Channel Divinity, Wild Shape, and loads of others). Getting rid of short rests breaks the balance of the system.

[Nifft]

Flippant answer: You'd get 4th edition? (13th Age is an evolution of D&D 4e by the same lead designer). Just a factual note:

4e short rests were 5 minutes, just like the recharge time for maneuvers in ToB (3.5e).

It was quite possible to have two encounters in a row without 5 minutes of rest in between -- you would NOT get your Encounter powers back for the second one if you didn't have that 5 minute break.

[sambojin]

Don't. But making short rests 10min long is a reasonable alternative. It's just enough time to patch some wounds, divvy up loot, have a quick chat, get your breath back, etc. So rather than a full lunch break, think of it like a smoko break.

If it gets abused, drop rocks.

Otherwise you get weird stuff like druids with 6 WS uses if they like, or 3 AS novas, etc. Ie, removing them and subbing in another system will simply be less balanced. Make them longer or shorter if you want, but it's not worth messing with them too much otherwise.

[GusPorterhouse]

ThinkDM proposed an "Agnostic Adventuring Day", which removes short rests for anything but healing. This way, all classes get full access to the same amount of resources they'd get during a DMG-standard adventuring day, but can nova or conserve as they wish. I haven't tested it yet but I like the idea if nothing else. I would link it but I don't have a high enough post count.

[MaxWilson]

Apologies if this has been asked before, i searched the forum but didn't come up with anything.

So I've been reading up the rules of 13th age and most of their abilities are either unlimited, one per day or one per combat (plus some more complicated things)

So i was thinking what if we took that same sort of thing and applied it to 5e. Just switching all short rest ability to 1/encounter would make them too strong. *Snip*

Do people think this would work or would there be some huge complications I haven't thought about?

Just make it once per encounter and use approximately Deadly encounters, 1-4 per day.

[Jasder]

I have played with a slight tweak to the gritty realism system before, because my party rarely managed to fit in more than 2 encounters in an adventuring day because we didn't like getting slowed down with lots of fights every session.

Now, because I agree that needing 7 days rest to get a long rest makes a lot of stuff unworkable, the solution I used was to have a long rest be 24 hours rest. So a whole day of doing nothing exciting. This had several advantages in my opinion, firstly, one day of full downtime is a lot more realistic to have in an adventure game and doesn't leave players spinning their wheels for a whole week. Secondly, it encouraged some casual exploration and interaction in towns, cities, and other areas in which they were resting. It also fits quite well with a week, one or 2 encounters a day means that you can just about adventure for a week, with a day off to rest, which fits quite nicely. It doesn't quite fix the problems gritty realism has for some spells or other abilities, but it does mitigate them a fair amount.

It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it did help balance things a bit better.

[djreynolds]

You know it is really very easy.

They say we're short resting.

You roll a 10 sided die, right? Or a maybe 6 sided? I forget.
Or you handwave it, unless they didn't get you pizza.

Then you're done, you've short rested.

It could literally 10 seconds to do so IRL.

It can be done after battles? You can suggest it even.

And you can add stuff to that roll?
+2 for wandering monster because of a commotion.
-10 because you're all sitting on a dead Dragon sipping ale, who's gonna mess with them. They just killed a dragon... Miller Time.