Logistics of longer rests (8 hours/7 days)

[Yora]

I have to say that I find the option suggested in the DMG to make a short rest 8 hours long and a long rest 7 hours quite intriguing. It sounds like a fascinating idea, but at the same time also like a really stupid one.

The way it influences healing is quite interesting, but the impact on recovering spell slots seems huge, to say the least.

I like having campaigns where the party can have days of adventuring between fights, so having them rationing their spells seems appealing. But with a rest of 7 days needed to recover spells, you pretty much can forget about it while out in the wilderness. It's long rest only back at a safe home base.

Warlocks seem like they would have the easiest time, being able to recover their (two) spell slots on a short rest and the option to learn incantations that don't require slots at all.

Wizards and druids have the ability to recover some slots on a short rest, but that's an ability they can only use once per long rest.

It sounds like an interesting option, but also very extreme. Yet it appears that this is an option that gets suggested with some frequency, so it doesn't seem to have a reputation of being completely unusable.

Does anyone have experiences with how this actually works out in practice?

[Cicciograna]

No experience with this, just notice that you wrote "short rest == 8 hours" and "long rest == 7 hours" :smallwink:

Anyway, I share your opinions on i, it would make for a much grittier experience and definitely change the nature of the game. I might enjoy it.

[clash]

I find the 7 days downtime required for long rest to not really achieve what it sets out to achieve. Usually when I want a grittier game, the characters face less combats per day but dont usually have the opurtunity to rest for an entire week. My suggestion is that every third night counts as a long rest to keep the ratio correct, and it works perfectly for balancing the short/long rest ratio and doesn't require a week of downtime. If you have less frequent combats then 1-2/day then make short rest every third night and long rest say the start of every week.

[strangebloke]

I've used it for about four years now. I think that its great, but it requires a little bit different mindset.

First of all, the important thing to realize is that if you want random encounters on the road to pressure them as far as resources are concerned, then you need to introduce some kind of time-pressure. "Meet us here in a month" type quests, or else "Your Rivals are hunting you" or alternately "The Princess dies on the Summer Solstice."

With that kind of pressure, they won't be able to have their one encounter on the road and then rest in town.

Another factor to consider is that if you want to have a proper dungeon run, you're going to need to give them some kind of opportunity to short rest inside the dungeon. Either given them an easily walled off area in a dungeon with non-reactive monsters (Oozes, for example) or given them a special, one-time-use magic fountain that instantly confers the benefits of a short rest.

Finally, here are my own full rules on the matter:
Resting
-Long rests are 7 days of downtime. Long Rests remove all levels of exhaustion.
-Short rests require eight hours of downtime, and remove 1 level of exhaustion
-Downtime during a long rest can include nonlethal combat (for sport or training), gambling, criminal activities, research, crafting, or shopping, or other useful tasks so long as no (non-ritual, non-cantrip) spells are cast and no damage is taken.
-Long rests require a secure environment in which to rest, like an inn, walled encampment, or cavern.

Spells
-Magic items that regain charges each day, now do so at the start of each week.
-Spells with a duration of 1 hour now have a duration of “Until dawn of the next day”
-Spells with a duration of 8 hours now have a duration of “until the end of the week”
-Spells with a duration of 24 hours (including animate dead) now have a duration of “until the end of the next new moon or full moon” (15 days, roughly)


I also typically allow my players to take a full day's bedrest to recover half their level in spell slots and 1/5 of their hit dice (rounded up) just for those situations where things are a bit bleak. But that's an edge case that I don't encourage them to view as standard practice.

[Keravath]

You could make the nightly rest of 6-8 hours a short rest and then have a 24 hour rest once a week (or however often) as the equivalent of a long rest (basically take a day off to replenish all your resources).

In my opinion a week is just too much downtime in most campaigns for a long rest since things will be happening in the world while you try to recover your resources.

The other thing to be careful of changing these ratios is the effect on balance of long vs short rest classes.

Many folks end up having games with one or two encounters/day then long rest which strongly favours long rest classes since they can drop 1/2 their resources on each encounter. This happens when the long rest class characters say "Well, I am low on resources and need to rest .. we spend the rest of the day at the inn before heading onward the next day".

On the other hand, a week of short rests followed by a week long, long rest would move to a 6:1 short rest to long rest ratio which would strongly favour the short rest classes since they would have all their resources back each day.

I think the intended ratio is something like 2 short rests between long rests depending on how many encounters are involved. So if you go for an alternate resting system then you would probably want to aim for something like 2-3 short rest equivalents/long rest to keep the class balance working.

[Yora]

I was just looking through the abilities that require long rests to recharge and this mostly applies to regaining spell slots and switching prepared spells. So I guess the main long rest classes would be bard, cleric, and sorcerer?

So I got the idea to actually make short rests 8 hours and long rests 7 days, but let all spellcasters use recovery on a short rest, and at every short rest. That still limits some of the higher level special abilities of many classes and the cleric's channel divinity, but nobody would ever fully run out of juice and be limited to cantrips until a long rest. Eventually you will want to make a long rest to regain Hit Dice, prepare different spells, and recharge some of your special abilities, but you can opperate for weeks with just short rests and a cleric or druid using daily recovered cure wounds spells.