GMs: What do YOU do against rest-spamming parties?

[hencook]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

[Willie the Duck]

Yes. It seems to be the #1 issue people have with the edition. Check the DMG for rest rule variants. My basic rule is that outside of the dungeon (so wilderness wandering, city adventures, anywhere where 6-8 combat encounters per day would be problematic), the group cannot just decide that they will rest. This needs to be communicated ahead of time, such that people aren't surprised by it, but the argument for it should be clear -- the game is balanced around having to decide when and whether to use precious resources, if you can just spam your most powerful abilities and then go recharge them without consequences, then there is no reason ever to not pick classes built completely around those limited resource abilities (such as wizards). Then, just let the party know when they are on 'extended rest time' and that their spells and such are going to have to last them 'until you get to the baron's castle' or other specified timeframe.

[Corneel]

The players' opponents don't sit on their butts while they rest and sleep the time away. Let delays in action have consequences. Also, if you're up and about for about an hour you can't just decide to go asleep again, so impose reasonable times between sleeping/long rests and/or impose appropriate rolls to prematurely rest & recover (concentration or meditation).

[CombatBunny]

In my case my group is not very combat oriented, so I have very little problem with this. Combats are very spare, and I mean like one combat each 6 sessions, although sometimes it has been like one combat every 12 or more sessions.

My players are aware of that rate, so they know that when a combat arrives it will be life-threatening, but after it they will have plenty of time to recover.

Sometimes there are other combats in addition to the ones I described above, but those are merely for spice, so the players are also aware that those combats are super-duper-easy and because of the description of the combatants, they already know they aren’t a big menace, so they don’t worry about saving resources.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I have the opposite problem. I often have to encourage them to rest when it makes sense. Because the world doesn't sleep. And they care about what happens to the world. That's key--make sure that they're invested in the world and that there's a realistic amount of time pressure. Doesn't have to be every time. A few days of "encounter on the way to the inn, then sleep" are fine, as long as they're doing other stuff. But if they make a habit of it, start showing the consequences of their inaction. Escalate. Don't throw plot hooks, throw plot grenades (as I heard it put). Things they have to react to, things they can't just ignore (or if they do, BAD THINGS HAPPEN to things they care about).

[Grod_The_Giant]

Yeah, D&D has never really gotten away from the delving-deeper-and-deeper-into-a-dungeon attrition model. Editions like 5e that put different classes on different rest schedules only make it worse. If you want to move away from the basic dungeon crawl, you pretty much need to do something different.

[Tvtyrant]

They get ambushed by the mafia wherever they go next, having killed a bunch of their goons and then left them time to scope them out.

As long as the world acts like a real place resting is rarely a problem. Rest while assaulting a fortress/dungeon? Everyone is either in the next room waiting or just left. Resting before the dragon's room? It used theneight hours to move its stuff. Resting between social interactions? Everyone advanced their own goals by 8 hours during that time.

[Anymage]

The alternate rest models that 5e includes aren't perfect, but their simply existing is nice for reminding you that you can redefine rests.

Ultimately, the answer is that resting after every encounter gives everybody else more time to do stuff while you're recovering. The sorts of time pressures you find reasonable and how common you want encounters to be can inform how long you want your rests to be.

[Shabbazar]

[1]Time limited quests.
[2]Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
[3]The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
[4]The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

I consider 1&2 arbitrary unimaginative techniques. I would never use those because I abhor "I am the DM, I said so" as a tool.

3 is absolutely legitimate. There are sooooo many ways to implement this. The best thing is it's just like the real world and doesn't reek of DM dictatorship.

4 is fine, but you have to be careful not to overdo it.

[Pauly]

I find “the world keeps turning” is a good model.

One variation is for the party to find out that while they were resting a rival group of adventurers came in completed the dungeon and are taking all the loot back to a safe place. When the party catches up with them they are in a civilized city where open fighting is prohibited. The rivals should be a level or 2 higher than the adventurers and slightly better equipped, and as the party advances so do their rivals.
You can play the rivals as either good - a similar group looking for similar things, or evil - a group that follows other adventurers around waiting for other adventurers to soften up the monsters.
Either way the party will find that sleep spamming results in their rivals taking the prize du juor.

[LordEntrails]

...Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry....

IMO, this is your problem. You party doesn't get to decide when they get a rest. They get to decide when they TRY to get a rest.

It's not a very interesting adventure if their is no pacing. So they encounter thugs in an alley. Why? Why have an encounter if it doesn't mean something? So, instead, they have an encounter in an alley with thugs and learn that the thugs are slavers. They can go (try to) rest, but then the slave caravan leaves town and the next day they find that the serving girl at their inn is missing. And now, if they want, they have to leave town and chase down the caravan.

Or, the thugs leader gets word of the defeat and changes defenses, moves or otherwise prepares for the party.

Your world should not be static. You don't have to penalize a party directly for taking rests, but the world, and events in it, keep progressing, whether the party is engaged or taking rest or down-time.

[False God]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

A rest can only be taken once per 24 hour period. Sure, they can fight some goons and immediately run back to their tavern and kick around for the next 16 hours, but that's not "rest". That's them twiddling their thumbs. Some other goons might find them there. Some random drunks might happen to cause a ruckus, or maybe nothing will happen at all.

I don't really have a problem with this. The flaw, in my opinion, is the game treating combat like a slow grind, and being generally terrible at handing resource burst (nova-ing).

I provide downtime activities the party can do, and generally enjoy doing activities that aren't combat. My players (both fellow and when I DM) take points in things like dancing, drawing, singing and various professions, that they can take part in and build up the social elements of their characters. And quite frankly, the local mafia has a lot more trouble "dealing with" with players who are socially and economically invested than random murderhobos, which the town is often more than happy to turn a blind eye to getting beat-up, robbed and kicked out of town.

If the players wake up, walk outside, go look for trouble, and then go home all before brunch, only to tell me (the DM) that they "do nothing" for the rest of the day, the issue isn't resting. I've got a problem with my game as to why my players aren't doing anything else.

This is all talking about more open-world stuff. In a dungeon crawl of course, there's a constant threat of danger jumping on top of them at any moment, with few places to get any kind of rest or safety.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Obligatory reference to the time pool system. (https://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/) The article specifically deals with time-related strategies that are bad for the game, and how to discourage such strategies with a unified mechanic.

[King of Nowhere]

it is inevitable that the players will want to rest if they are not under time pressure. it is the best strategy, and the most realistic. It's akin to an armored division waiting to be restocked of fuel and ammunitions after a battle before going to the next one.

the world keeps moving, and that's the only way of pushing the players that doesn't smell of dm fiat. however, at high levels it is difficult to justify multiple daily ecounters. high level enemies are rare, finding multiple of them in the same day when you're not looking for it is hard to justify.

Myself, I realized it is an inevitable consequence of high level play, and just started planning encounters around that idea. Level-appropriate encounters that are easily defeated but consume some resoources have no room at my table. either they are dangerous fights where the party may not win - or not achieve all objectives - or I don't even roll dice and just say "you defeat them easily"
Unless some external condition makes resting difficult, of course. I made my version of the lower planes where teleportation doesn't work and you get random encounters constantly. in that scenario, the players cannot simply pop back into their base, rest and pop in again the next day, and finding a safe place to sleep requires a survival check, a hide check and some random rolls. in that case I would keep track of resource-draining encounters.

[Jay R]

My players don't do this. They sleep at night.

If they did, they would soon have a rival group of adventurers seeking the same goals.

The only solution against unreasonable game-hurting actions is for the actions to have consequences.

[Talakeal]

There isn't really a good solution, this has been the big problem of RPGs since they left the very early days of simple dungeon crawling and wandering monster tables.

I personally have a short rest after every encounter and a long rest after every adventure, typically about every six encounters. I don't care when the PCs physically sleep, a short rest just requires a moment to catch one's breath and bind one's wounds, and a long rest requires an actual period of rest and recuperation back in town or another secure location.

Now, the trickier problem is how to keep them from just skipping back to town after every encounter, which has been a challenge for me. I think the best solution is to use time based objectives in a story driven game, and to play up living and travel expenses in a more sandbox game; if the supplies for the six week trek into the wilderness to find the lost ruins cost you several thousand GP, you are a lot less likely to head back before you have recouped your investments.

Of course, nobody, including the DM, likes failure, and I am not aware of a good solution when, through poor tactics or poor dice rolls, the players have squandered all of their resources ten minutes into the adventure and you have a whole six hour session left to fill.

[Duff]

If I've understood correctly, you feel this is a problem because it throws off the balance for encounters. You may want to simply increase the level of encounters to compensate - add an extra mook or 2, give the boss a potion or extra trick etc.

But also consider, do you have a very risk adverse group of players? Would the game work more smoothly if you dialed back the power of the encounters? Would they not feel the need to rest as often if you gave them a friend (NPC/GMPC)?

Also, the world *should* keep moving while the PCs rest. That's just how worlds work!

[icefractal]

Nothing. Because I don't really care if they do it. The games I run tend toward fewer, larger fights, with attrition not usually being a factor. And it's hardly unrealistic - even for people whose job is going into dangerous situations (firefighters, swat teams, etc), they don't go straight from one to another unless there's no other option.

But balance? Two things -
1) It's only a problem if some PCs can nova well and others can't. If everyone is able to shine at a 1 fight/day pace, then there's no issue.
2) If you want a fight to be tough, don't put all the foes in LoS at the start. Snipers behind cover, reinforcements that come in after a couple rounds, using disguise or illusions to make a mook look like an important target, etc.

That said, sometimes the PCs are racing against other groups, or trapped somewhere, so endurance is still a good thing to have. It's just not something that always needs to apply.

[Particle_Man]

For my fifth ed games I divorce the mechanical effects of short rest and long rest from the time in the campaign. The party gets the benefits of a short rest after the second and fourth encounters and the benefits of a long rest after the sixth encounter (reset the count after the long rest). The party could spend two weeks travelling between encounter five and encounter six and get nothing: no spells back, no hp back, etc. On the other hand, if they finish encounter two and the next encounter happens ten seconds later they still get short rest benefits.

[Dimers]

I'm overtly gamist; I try to make a good game. If the system makes resource management a part of the fun, I try to get player buy-in on following the intended guidelines even when they don't make sense. That ends up pretty much like what Particle_Man described.

I favor 4e D&D. Right now my setup is, the PCs can short-rest whenever they think they have enough time. The only tilted outcome of that is getting more mileage out of limited healing resources -- but they're still limited. Daily resources usually can't be regained except after a certain number of encounters (or in a few cases, right before or after certain important events). I'm considering a small sop to realism and greater engagement with the world, but haven't decided for sure:

"There will also infrequently be places you can roll a skill to recharge one daily power with an overnight rest (or other long time spent) in an appropriate location. For example, a cave thrumming with psychic energy would give you a chance to recharge one psychic or psionic power while camping if you make an Arcana roll. A bustling military encampment would offer a chance at recharging a martial power with a Warcraft or Athletics roll. You're connecting with what drives you to your peak performance."

It helps that in 4e, milestones give you some benefit from not resting.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

The enemy counterattacks. You just pissed off a gang, and didn't cover your tracks, so they're going to retaliate by attacking the inn. Of course, the innkeeper ain't gonna stand up to some thugs for some out-of town strangers, so some gangers with thompson guns [or whatever] will show up to shoot up the party.


I basically never have problems with players trying to "rest spam" as it were. As a player, in one campaign, our problem is that we've made three consecutive probing attacks against a dragon cult guarding a temple and have depleted literally every one of our resources but are sustaining the third attack on the back of the only martial in the party because we don't want to retreat and pass the initiative, especially because the enemy are trying to conduct an evacuation.

As a GM, when the players stop their attack, the initiative passes to the enemy, who will either decide to counterattack, fortify their position, or retreat. The enemy absolutely notice the disappearance of a road patrol, and most often they chose to counterattack if they can find the party [the party camps in enemy territory]. If the party can't be found, they beef up their defenses or decide to pull back if the position isn't worth it or their objective is completed. Either way, you don't want to stop to rest.

[Drache64]

Lots of great advice in here so no need for me to repeat some things that have already been said.

But I will add to the conversation that as a player I do this, I look for any strategic time to rest so I can manage my abilities. My DMs must be pretty good because I've never noticed an abundance of ample times to take long rests.

As a DM I do some of the strategies above to limit this when they are available such as sleeping in a dungeon or in the wilderness.

But my real question to you is: are they having fun? If your party is enjoying the content you are providing and having a blast then you could upset them by changing things up.

All in all I'm sure the solution is somewhere in the middle, take some advice here but don't over apply it. Don't forget games are supposed to be fun.

[brian 333]

I first encountered this problem under 1st ed. rules. My solution was to have the 90% defeated goblin tribe pack up their treasure and move in the night.

Since then I have used counterattacks by the dungeon dwellers and reinforced and/or trapped access points which demonstrate that the monsters will not be caught by surprise again.

When pulling back for excessive rests becomes a problem, make it a problem for the players to solve.

[MoiMagnus]

I usually try to schedule the game so that there is one long rest between each session. Not always possible, but if you can do so, it works pretty well, and most players don't try to go against that kind of convention.

In other campaigns, I also like to redefine "what is a short/long rest", for example "short rest = night of sleep, long rest = full days of resting" or "short rest = weekend, long rest = end of month". This of course only works for slow paced campaigns where having more than one fight per day is extremely unlikely. But it really helps to keep the realism of the medieval period (where communication and travel are much longer than today) without losing the urgency of the situation.

Lastly, talking with the players is probably the best answer. The best DMing advice I got was "Do not punish the characters for something the players do, if you have a problem with how the players play, talk to them instead of pressuring them trough frustrating game events to play as you want them to play."

[jjordan]

I don't do anything against parties that choose to rest more frequently. That's the game they're playing. Life goes on around them while they rest and I adjust my expectations and move on with the game.

[Lord Torath]

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?


I consider 1&2 arbitrary unimaginative techniques. I would never use those because I abhor "I am the DM, I said so" as a tool.

3 is absolutely legitimate. There are sooooo many ways to implement this. The best thing is it's just like the real world and doesn't reek of DM dictatorship.

4 is fine, but you have to be careful not to overdo it.You know, there's really not a difference between options 1 and 3. Time-limited quests are simply a part of the world keeping on turning. You know, assuming you can give a good reason for needing the quest to be completed in the set time. Telling the party they need to rescue the kidnap-victim from the cultists before the next full moon is a time-limited quest, but with a believable reason. How about telling the PCs you need the rats out of the basement by mid-afternoon, since Quest Giver is hosting a party that night and needs access to the Magic Tablecloth he keeps in storage down there?

Running my kids through the Caves of Chaos, they had mostly defeated the goblins and hobgoblins, but fled before finishing them off. As a result, the survivors fled with all the gear they could carry. The kobold cave was the first one the PCs entered, and they fled almost instantly after suffering a (mostly harmless) barrage of javelins from in front and behind in the entry hall. When they finally ventured back (after clearing out several other caves), the kobolds had seen the writing on the wall and fled.

[J-H]

I felt like my group was long resting (5e) a bit too often. I talked to them about it, and it stopped.
They are in a dungeoncrawl, so there's a narrative reason as well as a metagame reason.

[Jay R]

There is one way is which this action can hurt the game. It makes balance problems worse.

Casters have more power fewer times per day. Casters are at their most powerful for the first encounter of the day, and even more so if they know it's the only one that day.

Ideally, there will be later encounters later in the day when the casters are low on spells, and the non-casters can shine.

[Yora]

I do nothing to stop them. But NPCs and antagonists aren't waiting around for them, whatever they are doing.

[Knaight]

I tend to mostly avoid systems where this is an issue.

[Koo Rehtorb]

The last time I ran a system in which this was a thing I had an invisible mithril golem stalking the party and trying to coup de grace them in their sleep every time they rested while in the dungeon. It wasn't super likely to work, but it only had to get lucky once, so they minimized their resting as much as possible.

[Faily]

It could also depend on the encounters they face?

One of the GMs I've played with really didn't want to or didn't understand how to balance encounters according to the playgroup, so each fight was a life-or-death situation with the casters burning off most of their spells, and everyone losing a lot of Hitpoints. This being a combination of really tough encounters as the GM is one of the best optimizers in that group, and the players not really caring for optimizing that much (with some being practically incapable of optimizing).

So yeah, that group had a lot of "15 minutes adventuring day", because they had spent so much on just making it through the first encounter they were almost always forced to regroup and recover.

[Tvtyrant]

It could also depend on the encounters they face?

One of the GMs I've played with really didn't want to or didn't understand how to balance encounters according to the playgroup, so each fight was a life-or-death situation with the casters burning off most of their spells, and everyone losing a lot of Hitpoints. This being a combination of really tough encounters as the GM is one of the best optimizers in that group, and the players not really caring for optimizing that much (with some being practically incapable of optimizing).

So yeah, that group had a lot of "15 minutes adventuring day", because they had spent so much on just making it through the first encounter they were almost always forced to regroup and recover.

That sounds like fun to me, as long as you actually got to rest. Every fight being a struggle survival makes planning and running away way more enticing.

[Faily]

That sounds like fun to me, as long as you actually got to rest. Every fight being a struggle survival makes planning and running away way more enticing.

It can be fun, certainly, but when it's not what you're looking for as a player it can get tiresome. :smallbiggrin: I personally like to have variations. Some easy fights, some really tough ones, some in-between, some really epic, and some a cakewalk (that is also how I GM myself).

I get way too stressed out if every fight is about being 100% tactical.

[Altheus]

Just because the pcs are resting, doesn't mean the rest of the world is.

If they rest, villains plans go on a step without anyone stopping them, anything hunting them gets closer, their presence gets noticed, the opposition get more resources or numbers, the other adventuring party cleans the dungeon out before them (for extreme cases of resting).

Once in a while they get attacked in mid rest when they took a rest in a place they shouldn't.

[Mastikator]

The last time I ran a system in which this was a thing I had an invisible mithril golem stalking the party and trying to coup de grace them in their sleep every time they rested while in the dungeon. It wasn't super likely to work, but it only had to get lucky once, so they minimized their resting as much as possible.

If they had destroyed the golem how much of a fortune would the mithril "corpse" be worth?

[An Amy]

My issue as a DM isn't so much around the day to day resting, it's the characters getting into a situation and walking away from it in favor of another thing they've decided to do instead. They know there's not a "put that on hold and come back to it later" going on, and they know as well that the world keeps turning and stuff happens when they're not around. I have one player that loves to stir the nest up, step back and watch what happens before jumping back into things. It means most quests are abandoned half-way through and picked back up after wards to find out what happened and if the quest can be completed. With exception of the quests and storylines the other characters/players are invested in. But the defacto leader of the group is utterly chaotic and loves to "see where things go on their own".

[LordCdrMilitant]

It can be fun, certainly, but when it's not what you're looking for as a player it can get tiresome. :smallbiggrin: I personally like to have variations. Some easy fights, some really tough ones, some in-between, some really epic, and some a cakewalk (that is also how I GM myself).

I get way too stressed out if every fight is about being 100% tactical.

As a GM, I believe that fights that are trivial aren't worth the time in the campaign and session to have them [with some exceptions like stuff to build system familiarity].

I assume that as reasonably competent and well armed people you can destroy any off-handed random monster attacks or trivially execute defenseless people who are incapable of fighting back effectively, so we'll only enter combat time if I intend for there to feel like there's a significant chance of failure to complete their objectives in the following engagement.

I also try to run them as ragged as I can, though I don't usually run D&D. That said, in D&D, I do try to have multiple, [and in one case, upwards of 8] encounters per adventuring day all at fairly significant difficulty.

[icefractal]

As a GM, I believe that fights that are trivial aren't worth the time in the campaign and session to have them [with some exceptions like stuff to build system familiarity].

I assume that as reasonably competent and well armed people you can destroy any off-handed random monster attacks or trivially execute defenseless people who are incapable of fighting back effectively, so we'll only enter combat time if I intend for there to feel like there's a significant chance of failure to complete their objectives in the following engagement.

I also try to run them as ragged as I can, though I don't usually run D&D. That said, in D&D, I do try to have multiple, [and in one case, upwards of 8] encounters per adventuring day all at fairly significant difficulty.
To me, this runs into the problem of "informed competence" or "show, don't tell". If in every fight that happens on-screen the PCs are barely scraping by, they're not going to feel like people who can "destroy any off-handed monster attacks." And I don't think that a brief mention of "oh btw, you defeated a bunch of trolls on the way here" is going to substitute.

Also, there's more to combat than an opportunity for a pure tactical exercise. Easy fights offer a different RP situation than tough fights, as do impossible GTFO fights. Most PCs will have some abilities that are interesting, but not quite as efficient as their best ones. If every fight requires maximum effectiveness, those never get a chance to be used.

Finally, from a pacing perspective, always being run ragged isn't ideal for most people. Of course, if it works for your group, go for it. But I, for example, would take a hard pass on a campaign set up that way.

[Faily]

As a GM, I believe that fights that are trivial aren't worth the time in the campaign and session to have them [with some exceptions like stuff to build system familiarity].

I assume that as reasonably competent and well armed people you can destroy any off-handed random monster attacks or trivially execute defenseless people who are incapable of fighting back effectively, so we'll only enter combat time if I intend for there to feel like there's a significant chance of failure to complete their objectives in the following engagement.

I also try to run them as ragged as I can, though I don't usually run D&D. That said, in D&D, I do try to have multiple, [and in one case, upwards of 8] encounters per adventuring day all at fairly significant difficulty.



To me, this runs into the problem of "informed competence" or "show, don't tell". If in every fight that happens on-screen the PCs are barely scraping by, they're not going to feel like people who can "destroy any off-handed monster attacks." And I don't think that a brief mention of "oh btw, you defeated a bunch of trolls on the way here" is going to substitute.

Also, there's more to combat than an opportunity for a pure tactical exercise. Easy fights offer a different RP situation than tough fights, as do impossible GTFO fights. Most PCs will have some abilities that are interesting, but not quite as efficient as their best ones. If every fight requires maximum effectiveness, those never get a chance to be used.

Finally, from a pacing perspective, always being run ragged isn't ideal for most people. Of course, if it works for your group, go for it. But I, for example, would take a hard pass on a campaign set up that way.


Different strokes for different folks.

Running a group ragged has its place in some stories, and I have certainly enjoyed those. Same as I have also enjoyed the occassional fight where you truly feel like an unstoppable force of nature and nothing can stand against you - because it's fun to feel really badass once in a while.

I've certainy hand-waved an encounter or two with "and once you smack down the first wave of goblins, the rest reconsider and flee for their lives", and likewise GMs have done it for me (because when you're a level 17 character in Pathfinder, a bunch of out-of-the-book goblins are not threat to you), but it's not something done often.

There's a difference between running a group ragged because they're on a tight time schedule to hurry back to the town to warn them about the approaching horde of monsters (and thus harry them with advance scouts and troops, making rest difficult, while also having to get to their destination as fast as possible), and forcing each and every encounter in a dungeon to be the most tactically challenging fight, thus creating the "15 minute adventuring day".

As I said before, I prefer things to be a mix. I enjoy a super-challenging fight. I also enjoy an easy stomp. I just don't want it to be one thing every time. I also believe hitting that balance is also how you get players to push throughout a full day rather than stopping to rest all the time.

[Calthropstu]

So they retreated to their inn? Attack the inn. Then have them thrown out of the inn for being a menace to the business. (how many inns are going to accomodate someone the local gang wants dead?)
the gang brings bigger and stronger resources. This new batch, upon defeat, proclaims "we'll get you tomorrow for sure when our boss finishes researching hjs new planar binding spell!" Kf they wait til the next day, things will be more lroblematic.

[Koo Rehtorb]

If they had destroyed the golem how much of a fortune would the mithril "corpse" be worth?

Quite a bit, as I recall. It was years ago so I don't remember the exact numbers. Hauling the thing out of the dungeon would have been quite a hassle, though. And there was plenty of more portable loot in there too anyway.

[Tvtyrant]

Reminds me of the old Adamantium Door issue, where it was worth 100X whatever was in the dungeon.

[Themrys]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?


I like rpgs to be as realistic as can be, and I think the players in this scenario are acting perfectly reasonable. It is what any sane person would do if they really were in such a situation.

If you view the players as problem, you won't make the game very fun for them.

So ... why not just create an environment where normal, reasonable people would not take a rest?

Outside in the wilderness where they'd have to take turns at keeping watch, reasonable people would likely decide that they ought to get to the nearest village as fast as possible. They can encounter more villains on their way there.

In a city, they would go to the nearest inn to tend to their wounds, because that's reasonable. However, if they encountered a gang attacking an innocent-looking person on their way there, they would (if they are heroes) probably interfere.

There's no need to pull sleep diseases out of a hat, or have them be attacked in locations that can reasonably be assumed to be safe. Don't punish people for roleplaying well.

If you want a "there is no safe way to rest" scenario, then make one. Don't put them into a city where there's perfectly nice, safe inns to rest in and then get annoyed when they use this to their advantage. Give them a shady place where they are sure they'll be robbed the moment they fall asleep and they'll change their priorities accordingly.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I like rpgs to be as realistic as can be, and I think the players in this scenario are acting perfectly reasonable. It is what any sane person would do if they really were in such a situation.

If you view the players as problem, you won't make the game very fun for them.

So ... why not just create an environment where normal, reasonable people would not take a rest?

Outside in the wilderness where they'd have to take turns at keeping watch, reasonable people would likely decide that they ought to get to the nearest village as fast as possible. They can encounter more villains on their way there.

In a city, they would go to the nearest inn to tend to their wounds, because that's reasonable. However, if they encountered a gang attacking an innocent-looking person on their way there, they would (if they are heroes) probably interfere.

There's no need to pull sleep diseases out of a hat, or have them be attacked in locations that can reasonably be assumed to be safe. Don't punish people for roleplaying well.

If you want a "there is no safe way to rest" scenario, then make one. Don't put them into a city where there's perfectly nice, safe inns to rest in and then get annoyed when they use this to their advantage. Give them a shady place where they are sure they'll be robbed the moment they fall asleep and they'll change their priorities accordingly.

What makes you think an Inn is safe, especially if they just attacked a gang?

A gang wouldn't let that slide, and I find it doubtful than an inkeeper in nearby territory would go against the gang for the sake of a couple of random travellers. After all, he has to stay here and presumably feel the effects of the gang for his business and livelihood, while the players will be gone in a few days.

Alternatively, if he is willing to stand up to them [maybe he's got protection from a rival gang or the police station is down the block and they like to hang out in his bar area], nothing rules out a drive by, incendiary bottles, or simply knocking the door down and shooting up anybody who doesn't stick 'em up.


The GM could let them rest, maybe the gang doesn't want to pick this fight, or is planning a more nefarious revenge, this bar happens to be neutral ground agreed upon by multiple gangs and they're not willing to violate that, etc. but if the GM doesn't want to there's valid reasons for why there'd be a counterattack.



I, as a self-declared sane person, don't buy hotel rooms or hang out in bars on the bad side of town when I'm not on the bad side of any gang; I'm certain that if I was on the bad side of a gang I'd stay even further away from the bad side of town, and sure as hell wouldn't go to a nearby in.

[Gallowglass]

I like rpgs to be as realistic as can be, and I think the players in this scenario are acting perfectly reasonable. It is what any sane person would do if they really were in such a situation.

If you view the players as problem, you won't make the game very fun for them.

So ... why not just create an environment where normal, reasonable people would not take a rest?

Outside in the wilderness where they'd have to take turns at keeping watch, reasonable people would likely decide that they ought to get to the nearest village as fast as possible. They can encounter more villains on their way there.

In a city, they would go to the nearest inn to tend to their wounds, because that's reasonable. However, if they encountered a gang attacking an innocent-looking person on their way there, they would (if they are heroes) probably interfere.

There's no need to pull sleep diseases out of a hat, or have them be attacked in locations that can reasonably be assumed to be safe. Don't punish people for roleplaying well.

If you want a "there is no safe way to rest" scenario, then make one. Don't put them into a city where there's perfectly nice, safe inns to rest in and then get annoyed when they use this to their advantage. Give them a shady place where they are sure they'll be robbed the moment they fall asleep and they'll change their priorities accordingly.


Except, its NOT realistic and its not immersive.

We aren't talking about telling someone "well after a hard day of work, you go home to rest"

We are talking about a group of adventures getting up, travelling two miles, exhausting their spells in a 30 second battle (but being otherwise pristine) and deciding "whelp, back to sleep everybody, our day is done."

In town we're talking about a group of adventures, getting up, going to breakfast, beginning their mission. Having another 30 second battle (but being otherwise pristine) and deciding "whelp, I'm done for the day" and going back to their headquarters at 9 AM and hanging out playing poker all day because they are low on spells.

This is NOT roleplaying well. Its the exact opposite. This is resource management that breaks immersion and benefits some classes at the expense of others.

Those fighters and theives and other classes that are not built on a limited resource system, or those casters that don't NOVA every spell on every encounter are now hobbled by the other characters/players. Because now they can either say "okay I guess I wait for Tim" or they can say "Well Tim, if you don't want to go, we'll go on without you." which is both bad in game (splitting the party) and bad out game (telling the player to sit out the rest of the evening)

Your example is NOT what the OP is talking about.

[Calthropstu]

Except, its NOT realistic and its not immersive.

We aren't talking about telling someone "well after a hard day of work, you go home to rest"

We are talking about a group of adventures getting up, travelling two miles, exhausting their spells in a 30 second battle (but being otherwise pristine) and deciding "whelp, back to sleep everybody, our day is done."

In town we're talking about a group of adventures, getting up, going to breakfast, beginning their mission. Having another 30 second battle (but being otherwise pristine) and deciding "whelp, I'm done for the day" and going back to their headquarters at 9 AM and hanging out playing poker all day because they are low on spells.

This is NOT roleplaying well. Its the exact opposite. This is resource management that breaks immersion and benefits some classes at the expense of others.

Those fighters and theives and other classes that are not built on a limited resource system, or those casters that don't NOVA every spell on every encounter are now hobbled by the other characters/players. Because now they can either say "okay I guess I wait for Tim" or they can say "Well Tim, if you don't want to go, we'll go on without you." which is both bad in game (splitting the party) and bad out game (telling the player to sit out the rest of the evening)

Your example is NOT what the OP is talking about.

Yeah, I have to agree here. It annoys the crap out of me both as a player and a gm. I like to play sorcerers, oracles and other caster types. I dislike wizards and clerics. My sorcerers virtually NEVER run out of spells.. And when I do I whip out special abilities, wands and scrolls. Worse comes to worst, I can whip out my crossbow.

I played a nova psion recenty, and even then I usually had powerpoints at the end of the day. This group has a wizard that has no clue how to play a wizard. A wizard should be hanging back, studying the situation and letting the melee characters handle defense. When things look dangerous, drop a support or attack spell. Otherwise, fire your crossbow or shoot a wand.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Yeah, I have to agree here. It annoys the crap out of me both as a player and a gm. I like to play sorcerers, oracles and other caster types. I dislike wizards and clerics. My sorcerers virtually NEVER run out of spells.. And when I do I whip out special abilities, wands and scrolls. Worse comes to worst, I can whip out my crossbow.

I played a nova psion recenty, and even then I usually had powerpoints at the end of the day. This group has a wizard that has no clue how to play a wizard. A wizard should be hanging back, studying the situation and letting the melee characters handle defense. When things look dangerous, drop a support or attack spell. Otherwise, fire your crossbow or shoot a wand.

A Wizard doesn't have to hang back. In one game I play in, our wizard is our frontliner, and our martial stays back giving fire support.

We usually default to our spells first until they're all expended, with a brace of wands I [sorceress] carry for burst damage when things need to not have another turn. Also, my belief is that you should employ all your resources as often as you can and feel safe doing. You don't use spells only when you need them, you reserve them only if you think you need them later before you get them back. I'd rather spend a quickened fireball and 6 charges from one of my wands to eliminate half an encounter and a serious threat character than spend all my 1's and 2's, and a bunch of HP between the party members engaging over time which give time for them rout, reinforcements to arrive, or future enemies to prepare their positions.


As a GM's opinion, if my players have spells left [because they didn't need them; if they reserved them to repel a night attack that's a strategic decision on their part which may or may not prove necessary] and are succeeding by having their caster shoot a crossbow every turn, then the day's engagements were too easy. Casters cast things and should be using their features rather than being a discount ranger.

[Safety Sword]

My solution to this my be situational because I am running a long term campaign with 7 regular players and sometimes up to 9 at the table, but here goes.

Try to kill them every fight. Every combat is a combat worth resting after. I don't have any trash encounters to drain resources, I just try to blow them up and they try to survive. They use all of their most powerful abilities every fight because we're probably only having one fight (sometimes two) that session and we're at the fighting giants and dragons stage.

Try it. You'll probably enjoy unleashing your inner savage DM :smallamused:

[opaopajr]

Nothing. I don't worry how players make their meaningful choices, because my world still goes on (yes, just like Celine Dion's heart). :smallcool:

That may mean some opportunities end, other opportunities begin, and PC-poked critters will use their time to prepare responses. :smallsmile: That's it!

If players wanna sleep all day in their room, that's their choice. If they want to use their Rests for some low-key Explore and Social "in the lobby," awesome! Either way there will be too much going on for them to handle everything, and Rests are not a "Pause" button. :smalltongue:

[diplomancer]

First consideration is if it's actually a problem. It will depend on party composition. A Paladin/Wizard/Cleric party won't have this problem, a Rogue/Cleric/Sorcerer/Warlock party will.

I would imagine also that a Rogue/Fighter/Monk/Caster party won't have the problem, because the caster will receive social pressure from the other players not to Nova.

So, assuming that it IS a problem (you have a bunch of nova characters and only 1 or 2 non-nova characters), you have to come up with a balance.

I like the gamist solution (rests happen after X number of encounters, no matter the time between them), and, though I like the "real-world happens" solution, it does involve more preparation time for the DM, which not everyone can afford.

If you are a DM pressed for time, and the gamist solution does not appeal to your tastes, I suggest you talk to the players. Explain how the classes are balanced around a certain number of encounters between short rests and long rests (many casual players probably don't even know that, I believe that this information is in the DMG, not the PHB), and that this balance is necessary for all the players to feel useful. If that does not do the trick, tell them that if they try to have a 5-minute workday, they won't have it, as it WILL be interrupted by wandering monster encounters that take up valuable table time, and that it's best for everyone if they actually spend their resources toward reaching their goals and not fighting off wandering monsters. If the players don't believe you at first, as long as you follow on your word, they will eventually.

[Shabbazar]

Nothing. I don't worry how players make their meaningful choices, because my world still goes on (yes, just like Celine Dion's heart). :smallcool:

That may mean some opportunities end, other opportunities begin, and PC-poked critters will use their time to prepare responses. :smallsmile: That's it!

If players wanna sleep all day in their room, that's their choice. If they want to use their Rests for some low-key Explore and Social "in the lobby," awesome! Either way there will be too much going on for them to handle everything, and Rests are not a "Pause" button. :smalltongue:

Yeah, so the board rules prohibit simply adding +1,000 below this post. I will ramble on a bit to be in compliance:smallsmile:.

This doesn't seem that complicated. The thing that differentiates paper & pencil gaming from World of Warcraft is the idea that there is a fully fleshed out world that you can do anything in and that exists outside of your character. If you are just going to run a hack and slash campaign against a superficial backdrop then everyone in your gaming group should make a guild on WOW and just hack things up online. As bad as they are, the graphics on WOW are better than the verbal descriptions that most DMs throw out.

The whole point of D&D, GURPS, etc. is you get an interactive environment. The DM just needs to do their job.

Of course I'm a grumpy old school AD&D preferring dude, so there's that...

[Contrast]

I consider 1&2 arbitrary unimaginative techniques. I would never use those because I abhor "I am the DM, I said so" as a tool.

3 is absolutely legitimate. There are sooooo many ways to implement this. The best thing is it's just like the real world and doesn't reek of DM dictatorship.

4 is fine, but you have to be careful not to overdo it.

I'm interested why you consider 1 unacceptable but 3 appropriate - they just seem like 2 sides of the same coin to me.

[stoutstien]

Rest spamming is a good tactic from the players and character prospective. Why wouldn't you do it as often as possible. The best solution is to make time a relevant factor all the time so taking a rest is always something to consider as a meaningful choice. The world doesn't stop ever time the party takes an eight hour break.

[SodaQueen]

"Hey guys, please don't rest spam"

[Shabbazar]

I'm interested why you consider 1 unacceptable but 3 appropriate - they just seem like 2 sides of the same coin to me.

Hencook put these out as 1 & 3.

1. Time limited quests.

3. The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.

My assumption was that these were intended as different things, otherwise Hencook could have listed 3 instead of 4 solutions. With that in mind, I viewed "time limited quests" as an artificial imposition instead of an organic imposition created by world events. I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that #1 was the DM simply saying "you have X hours to rescue the maiden." Whereas #3 is "in X hours the slave boat arrives, complete with sufficient resources to completely crush the PCs, and if she isn't rescued before then she is gone to points unknown on the slave ship."

In the second situation it's all part of a living breathing world. If the PCs demand to rest they can, but rescuing the maiden is going to be a long drawn out affair if they have to track the slavers over an ocean.

It was just an interpretive call on my part. But I see your point.



"Hey guys, please don't rest spam"

Doesn't this seem artificial and superficial to you? It just seems shallow and something that would break the immersion of the players. Both my examples above create time pressure for the characters and discourage spamming rest, or even resting at all. The second helps with immersion and is hardly taxing for a DM. It's not like you need "Creativity 20" to come up with it.

[Sparky McDibben]

Where are you seeing this, OP? I've never seen this in play. Ever. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's probably less common than the fora might have you think.

If your players are resting too much, try talking to them. If they're new, they might not understand how tough they are. If you explain it to them, they'll probably adjust their behavior. Also, you might be the problem. If they feel like every combat is lethal, then of course they'll turtle up every chance they get.

Change your game up. Instead of 1 super-deadly encounter every rest, hit them with a super easy encounter...but that was a diversion for the bad guys top thief to pickpocket some of the PCs magic items. Now the encounter's a chase, and there are multiple teams of bad guys trying to slow down the party. If they stop to take them out, the thief night get away, but if they blow past them, the villains harry the PCs all the way to the thieves' guild HQ.

Another idea is to have the villains start countering PC tactics. Got a GWM fighter? The kobolds figure out glue traps so he can't close to melee range. The kobolds use "split move and fire" tactics to take advantage of cover. Got a caster with an AoE? The kobolds try to nullify the effects with balms of fire resistance (for fireball) or they lure out a venom troll from the swamps (for cloudkill).

Don't use more than one counter on each trip into the dungeon. The idea is that the bad guys learn, change and adapt if the PCs give them the chance. And if those don't work, the kobolds abandon their lair and burn the village which hired the PCs. Now you're not getting paid. :)

[Lunali]

If you are having problems with players resting too often, interrupting rest is the worst way to fix it as it indicates to them that they also have to save resources for the fight(s) they need to be able to get a decent rest.

[Damon_Tor]

Resting requires a constitution (survival) check. The DC varies based on the comfort of the environment.

[Throne12]

Here is another way to look at this. Why is it a problem? What are trying to accomplish by making them have more encounters in a day? What's wrong with the party kicking down the door busting in popping all there powerful spells and abilities and just ****ing up the enemy's and feeling like powerful bad asses. Not everyone wants to John McCain and get beat up then get beat up again and again just to come out tattered and bruised.

Try having really big and drawn out encounters. Where the party cant just bust with there highest damage spells. Have it where they need to spend resources on the environment and other obstacles while in combat or getting to or from combat. Remember just because the kill the encounter boss doesnt mean they can just walk away. Take a page from action movies you killed the bbeg but now the building is falling down around them.

Just remember you are the one letting the players go back an rest.

[Waterdeep Merch]

Just try and logic out how living creatures in a world that operates on the same principles would act.

Intelligent creatures ought to know how dangerous attrition warfare is with a force that can replenish themselves to full fighting strength. They ought to try to prevent it from their opponents, or even utilize tactics that involve the exact same principles. This is the equivalent of managing and attacking the supply lines of an enemy force in an actual war. You do hit-and-run tactics from a safe distance with plenty of scouting, plan lots of ambushes that play to your strengths, and rotate out combatants to maintain effective fighting strength.

Weirdly? This means no sensible group would EVER inhabit your average, linear dungeon. They're indefensible. You'd want ample space, multiple pathways and choke points, and some way to rapidly advance troops where they need to be. You do your damage, slow them down, tire them out bit by bit, then try and ambush them when their resources are spent and they're looking for a rest. So a smart enemy will be keeping an eye out for when the party tries to rest, because that's the best time to attack. Meanwhile, they'll be trying to give their best troops ample time to recover between ambushes. If there are casters (and any moderately successful group in your average D&D world really ought to have a few), their safety and recovery is a number one priority. And they'll probably use the same cheesy tricks any players would to try and recover their strength- rope trick, leomund's tiny hut, etc. And if they fight that way, expect them to have things like dispel magic to deal with their opponents trying the same tactic.

That handles intelligent creatures that actually like living. Less intelligent beasts and monsters will probably have a specific goal in mind that won't necessarily mean run up, hit a guy, run away. They should ALWAYS be dangerous due to their particular goals. Territorial beasts might fight to a (boring, easily dealt) death, but anything that's hungry will be fine going after the squishiest thing and dragging it off for a snack. Probably from ambush, because that's the usual MO of a predator. This makes them so lethal that it frankly doesn't matter if the players want to play attrition, because bad tactics WILL result in a death. Possibly one that is unrecoverable.

[sithlordnergal]

I take a slightly different approach. Parties only gain the benefits of a rest, be it short or long, after I say they do. I make sure my players know this in advance, so they aren't caught off guard, and I tend to give out two to three short rests per long rest.

It prevents the party from abusing Long or Short rests. And pretty much all the classes are well balanced around 2 to 3 short rests per long rest, with the exception of the Warlock. But I fix that by giving them one extra spell slot at level 5 .

I also tend to be a bit loose with how long things take. So the party could start at 10am, do a ton of stuff and fight a few encounters, and it'll only be 1pm.

[Envyus]

How are they taking rests so often when they can only take a long rest once every 24 hours.

[Carlobrand]

Rest-"spamming"? I have to say, if I were in a game in which the game master started throwing arbitrary diseases and such around just to keep us from resting when we chose, I'd be out of that group and hunting for a new one. I want to immerse myself in the milieu, not feel the heavy hand of the DM trying to coerce us to do what he thinks we should do. A living world has natural consequences. If we're resting too much in town, we're spending more for food and lodging, and eventually winter will come and we'll be faced with a choice between going out in freezing weather or spending even more in town at a time when food and lodging prices are likely to be higher. A farmer might show up in mid-rest, begging us to rescue his daughter who was just kidnapped by ne'er-do-wells - quickly, as they had tortured him with accounts of how they planned to burn her in sacrifice to their deity. In cities, we might get hints from the tavern-keeper that powerful groups that spend too many days there risk attracting the notice of some shady noble or underworld figure who might try to draw us into the local politics by offering a deal we can't refuse - to go take down one of his rivals - or, worse, find ourselves dealing with the consequences if we do refuse that deal. If we're resting too much in the wilderness - well, nature has its own way of taking care of that. Some of our most fun encounters occurred when some wandering refugee from a mad wizard's experiment triggered the alarms around our camp - the pair on watch are dashing about trying to wake people, the spellcasters don't have new spells ready, our visibility may be limited, it gets pretty exciting. Dungeon crawls, same - few things raise the heartbeat quite like having the door we'd spiked shivering in its mounts as some massive unknown pounds at it to get to us. These are random encounters; most times we rest without incident, sometimes we don't, just enough to remind us that resting doesn't come without some small natural risk.

[Keravath]

There is one way is which this action can hurt the game. It makes balance problems worse.

Casters have more power fewer times per day. Casters are at their most powerful for the first encounter of the day, and even more so if they know it's the only one that day.

Ideally, there will be later encounters later in the day when the casters are low on spells, and the non-casters can shine.

I think the bolded element is a key idea.

The players/characters should NEVER feel confident that their day is done. If they decide to use all their resources in a fight then it should have consequences from time to time. Sufficient consequences and the characters should learn that they need to keep something in reserve most of the time.

Having consequences is the same as the world keeps on moving around them. The players/characters need to feel that their decisions will have an impact whether that decision is to fight or to take a break and spend a day at the tavern playing cards. Probably not every time they make such a choice but often enough that it is always a consideration.

Rest schedules are entirely under the DMs control. The party may suggest when and where they would like to rest (subject to the limits in the PHB/DMG - no more than 1 long rest/24 hour period) but the DM determines how the world reacts and whether the rest is even possible.

A party that jumps into a dungeon/tomb/city exploration, has a fight, decides that their pinky finger is bruised and needs to rest, needs to understand that there is a cost to resting. Yes the party may get their resources back, but consider that their opponents also know this. Their opponents know that the party needs to get some uninterrupted rest. What is the best way to wear down the party from a competent enemy? Constantly wake them up. Constantly stage little attacks and retreats. Prevent the party from actually resting. This makes complete sense from both a tactical and strategic point of view for an intelligent opponent. Players will not be happy to find themselves in such a bind and it might make them think a bit about keeping some resources to help them through a rest period the next time around.

Consequences :). The DM sets up the world, the logic of how the environment reacts to player decisions and choosing to rest is one of the decisions that give opponents and other world plot elements time to prepare and advance.

[Lunali]

How are they taking rests so often when they can only take a long rest once every 24 hours.

Take a longer rest and it becomes 24hrs later.

[ad_hoc]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

Sounds like there shouldn't have been a battle in the first place.

If the PCs aren't trying to do something then why are you spending table time on it?

If they are trying to do something then they can't just go rest because then they won't be doing what they were trying to do.

I think random encounters are great, but they should only be used when they matter.

The one area, pacing-wise, that I find 5e has trouble with is overland travel. It doesn't make any sense to have random encounters along the road. There is no drama or tension to them.

In that case I do 1 of 2 things:

- Have them occur just before or after the PCs are pressed into doing the thing so they matter.
- Have them be so frequent that the PCs can't get a proper long rest until they're somewhere safe.

[Shabbazar]

I take a slightly different approach. Parties only gain the benefits of a rest, be it short or long, after I say they do. I make sure my players know this in advance, so they aren't caught off guard, and I tend to give out two to three short rests per long rest.

It prevents the party from abusing Long or Short rests. And pretty much all the classes are well balanced around 2 to 3 short rests per long rest, with the exception of the Warlock. But I fix that by giving them one extra spell slot at level 5 .

I also tend to be a bit loose with how long things take. So the party could start at 10am, do a ton of stuff and fight a few encounters, and it'll only be 1pm.

So much for player agency...

[ProsecutorGodot]

Doesn't this seem artificial and superficial to you? It just seems shallow and something that would break the immersion of the players. Both my examples above create time pressure for the characters and discourage spamming rest, or even resting at all. The second helps with immersion and is hardly taxing for a DM. It's not like you need "Creativity 20" to come up with it.

You're allowed to ask your players not to do something. Whether it's phrased as a DM to player request along the lines of "Hey, I know the issue doesn't seem pressing but I would appreciate it if you guys didn't dawdle too long" or from DM to character common sense "Your character gets the feeling that despite the quest givers assurance that time isn't too tight that spending an extra few days in the town might, in fact, be too long to fulfill his request."

A DM asking for you not to do something with the reasoning "I would prefer if you didn't" is perfectly valid. If the DM isn't be actively malicious with their requests I would say it's good form to at least try to follow them.

To be clear, it think it could be a better experience for everyone if the DM had strong narrative reasons for constant resting to be a bad idea, but to say that they must have them and that not having them is somehow an offense to the players good time is quite a hostile stance from my point of view.


So much for player agency...
Player's don't have the right to declare and resolve their own actions. By the rules, players declare intent and the DM resolves those actions.

You have all the agency you need to decide that you will attempt a long rest but the DM tells you when and how that resolves.

EDIT: I should really remember to share my own take on it. In our home game, I'm usually the one being most critical about our resting. After having DM'd a campaign where players didn't feel much "struggle" because of their frequent rests I felt necessary to remind both myself and the other players how resting rules work.

We play as close to the books as we can (except when we find a rule to be of poor quality as a group) so resting is something we agreed is fine as is, as long as we manage it properly. We trust the DM to tell us how long we've been adventuring. Some days we burn through a particularly challenging encounter and struggle a bit afterwards, some days we're a bit too frugal and we end up struggling through most encounters by lowballing our resources in an attempt to save them for later. Some days we breeze through like the literal godlike heroes that we are and feel quite accomplished going home for a rest at the end of it. No matter what happens though, we always try to make our adventuring days a fulfilling experience on our own. It's not exciting to us as players if we just play on our DM's good faith that we're serious adventurer types who won't spend the day drinking and making merry because they broke a nail at the first encounter and decide that it really smarts, we'll try again tomorrow.'

If simply asking the players to treat it as a real world where such behavior would end in a villains success or branding them as "lazy adventurers" (nothing motivates players to do more like having the world make a mockery of them) isn't pushing them enough then don't feel bad about slapping them in the face with that villain's plan coming to fruition or just not having work come in their direction. Just make it clear that things happen in the background and that they're aware of that from the start. Villains don't wait for you and people aren't in a hurry for the help of lazy people.

[Bjarkmundur]

1. Give downtime before or after a session, let each player play out his specific fantasies. I have examples for these between-session downtimes in my houserule document. This let's players do their own thing and ease into their characters before a session. Even if we take a downtime at the end of a session, the next one will start with "what did you do in your last downtime?"
2. Each session has a beginning, middle and an end. There's a story, and the narrative starts and ends within the same session. This means the middle and end are action-packed, players usually take a small break after the first act. Just like in a movie. How would the movie go if John McClane would've taken a nap in the middle of the movie? But there was that time where he was just smoking and talking to the cop.
3. Limit short rest to 2 per day, but complement it with a new option '10-minute rest' which allows characters to use hit dice, but not recharge any abilities.
4. Make sure there's a narrative weight to a short rest; usually revolving around a peaceful meal.

[diplomancer]

So much for player agency...

There is no more robbing of player agency in saying "you have so many spell slots per x encounters" than in saying "you have so many spell slots per day", they are both arbitrary limits to the number of resources a player has at his disposal. Telling him his resources will last for a precise number of encounters, if anything, increases his agency, by letting him know in advance how much he can afford to spend in a particular encounter.

[GorogIrongut]

I take a slightly different approach. Parties only gain the benefits of a rest, be it short or long, after I say they do. I make sure my players know this in advance, so they aren't caught off guard, and I tend to give out two to three short rests per long rest.

It prevents the party from abusing Long or Short rests. And pretty much all the classes are well balanced around 2 to 3 short rests per long rest, with the exception of the Warlock. But I fix that by giving them one extra spell slot at level 5 .

I also tend to be a bit loose with how long things take. So the party could start at 10am, do a ton of stuff and fight a few encounters, and it'll only be 1pm.

Whenever I DM, I have a chat regarding this with the party, that way they know what is expected. 1 Long Rest and 2 Short Rests per day. Depending on my mood, I might give them a 3rd short rest if they've earned it. This is essentially what the game is balanced for.

All of that said, I do make changes. So when I DM, Short rests only take 5 mins and a long rest takes an hour. The whole sleeping or not sleeping thing is completely irrelevant in the way that I DM things. By shortening long and short rests, they become much easier to do while adventuring, and thus encourages the party to be out and doing things. When they suddenly need a quick breather to recharge, bam! It takes a little bit of time before they're up and ready to continue the story.

A good example, would be where my guys were on a massive chain stretched over an abyss fighting flying clockwork creatures. It stretched all resources to their limits, but when they found a small resting spot they were able to duck in and set up a watch. Everyone had a quick drink/snack, patched up some wounds and spent whatever resources they needed to, to be able to continue farther down the chain.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I take a slightly different approach. Parties only gain the benefits of a rest, be it short or long, after I say they do. I make sure my players know this in advance, so they aren't caught off guard, and I tend to give out two to three short rests per long rest.

It prevents the party from abusing Long or Short rests. And pretty much all the classes are well balanced around 2 to 3 short rests per long rest, with the exception of the Warlock. But I fix that by giving them one extra spell slot at level 5 .

I also tend to be a bit loose with how long things take. So the party could start at 10am, do a ton of stuff and fight a few encounters, and it'll only be 1pm.


I consider choosing when, where, and how long to rest to be an important element of the strategy of the game though; so I disagree with the idea of the having it be governed by the GM. There are a large number of important [and frequently game changing] strategic choices and decisions to be made over when to rest, and I want my players to make [and agonize over] those.

[Sigreid]

This isn't going to be that helpful, I play with people that don't want a 1 encounter adventuring day.

Beyond that, the world doesn't stop because the party is tired. Resting isn't guaranteed to be safe.

[Shabbazar]

To be clear, it think it could be a better experience for everyone if the DM had strong narrative reasons for constant resting to be a bad idea, but to say that they must have them and that not having them is somehow an offense to the players good time is quite a hostile stance from my point of view.

Yup. I'm hostile. I think it's important to call out dictatorial DM maneuvers. I'm not a fan of playing by DM decree.

[sithlordnergal]

Yup. I'm hostile. I think it's important to call out dictatorial DM maneuvers. I'm not a fan of playing by DM decree.

Normally I feel the same, but I've had too many experiences where players like to abuse resting and there was no real way of punishing it. It didn't help that it was an AL game with no timer, so I wasn't really allowed to say "Ok, you took too long so you lose out on rewards". Instead players were able to take all the time they wanted and were free to essentially rest every encounter. It only stopped when I had to step in and artificially restrict resting. Resting is the only time I play by DM decree.

And hey, players can still sit around and do nothing for an hour or more in game, they just won't gain the benefits of the rest.

[stoutstien]

Normally I feel the same, but I've had too many experiences where players like to abuse resting and there was no real way of punishing it. It didn't help that it was an AL game with no timer, so I wasn't really allowed to say "Ok, you took too long so you lose out on rewards". Instead players were able to take all the time they wanted and were free to essentially rest every encounter. It only stopped when I had to step in and artificially restrict resting. Resting is the only time I play by DM decree.

And hey, players can still sit around and do nothing for an hour or more in game, they just won't gain the benefits of the rest.

This is more of a showing of how bad published modules are at being complete adventures past a chain of combats with some story Arc. They are almost written with the players other than the DM in mind.
S9 further rewards cautious style of play is Telling that most AL games have shifted over to less but more dangerous encounters to try to present a meaningful challenge vs adopting a structure of play to reward pushing on past the single encounter per rest.

[Zman]

My primary strategies for mitigating rest abuse is using time sensitive quests and living story arcs where thing still happening while the party is lounging around.

Hard to feel heroic when you had a five minute adventuring day yesterday and another half dozen peasants were horribly eviscerated by some monstrosity you've delayed tracking down.

One distinct memory I have involved a mining community further to the north. Due to a communication delay they were always getting news a day or two after it happened. I kept giving them updates with just enough personal details to make the victims feel real, and then you give them followup news the next day.

An Example:
"28th day of the Setting Sun: Baker's wife found torn to shreds. Child missing..... 29th day of the Setting Sun: Pieces of child found, no new victims, thank the gods. Morale is failing, I'm worried.... 30th day of the Setting Sun: Please, please send help. I beg you... 32nd day of the Setting Sun: Our apologies on failing to send an update yesterday, the town clerk and his family were the latest victims and I have assumed the role, gods help me. We implore you, send aid post haste. We won't be able to finish the harvest on time. People will starve and our economy cannot survive."

Just throw that kind guilt trip at a group of "Heroes" that are just milking five minute work days. And when they finally do get there to take care of the threat, have it already taken care of by a local lord who hired his own cutthroat heroes and has now annexed the town and imposed stiff levies. Even bring up the other heroes when they are looking for work, give their reputation a hit.

[ad_hoc]

This is more of a showing of how bad published modules are at being complete adventures past a chain of combats with some story Arc. They are almost written with the players other than the DM in mind.
S9 further rewards cautious style of play is Telling that most AL games have shifted over to less but more dangerous encounters to try to present a meaningful challenge vs adopting a structure of play to reward pushing on past the single encounter per rest.

I haven't played in AL modules but the big books are all pretty good about resting. Every chapter/adventure site has reasons why the party needs to push along quickly.

The only time I see this messed up is with overland travel. PotA is particularly bad here. We're supposed to have many encounters between towns but none of them mean anything. Played by the book it would take months just to get through the random encounters.

That's an exception though. I've played a bunch of them and they're all very good about pacing.

[sithlordnergal]

This is more of a showing of how bad published modules are at being complete adventures past a chain of combats with some story Arc. They are almost written with the players other than the DM in mind.
S9 further rewards cautious style of play is Telling that most AL games have shifted over to less but more dangerous encounters to try to present a meaningful challenge vs adopting a structure of play to reward pushing on past the single encounter per rest.

While I do agree, the players in question who did abuse it are the kind of players who would try to abuse it in a homebrew, and wouldn't be too concerned if the world burned around them as they rested. Its kinda funny, they bring in meaningful timers at tier 4 in most modules...but the timers prevent any resting at all. So Warlocks get screwed over as they don't get to have any short rests.

[stoutstien]

I haven't played in AL modules but the big books are all pretty good about resting. Every chapter/adventure site has reasons why the party needs to push along quickly.

The only time I see this messed up is with overland travel. PotA is particularly bad here. We're supposed to have many encounters between towns but none of them mean anything. Played by the book it would take months just to get through the random encounters.

That's an exception though. I've played a bunch of them and they're all very good about pacing.

They all use the same pacing tool. The doom clock gets old and as you said treat overland travel as, " hey kiddos! Y'all want some xp?"

Zman has a good example above of a good plot element to push a party forward without feeling like the DM is making up something to just prevent the party from resting.

[ad_hoc]

They all use the same pacing tool. The doom clock gets old and as you said treat overland travel as, " hey kiddos! Y'all want some xp?"

Zman has a good example above of a good plot element to push a party forward without feeling like the DM is making up something to just prevent the party from resting.

They don't though.

There are a variety of narrative reasons depending on the adventure/chapter.

Unless by 'doom clocks' you just mean 'a reason'. Every action movie, and thriller for that matter, has enforced pacing - Some reason that things must be done in a timely fashion. Otherwise there is no excitement and tension. This is basic storytelling.

I would not watch the movie of a band of heroes who laze about and go fight some creatures when they felt like it. This isn't a problem that the game has. It's a problem of boring stories. Don't have boring stories.

[stoutstien]

They don't though.

There are a variety of narrative reasons depending on the adventure/chapter.

Unless by 'doom clocks' you just mean 'a reason'. Every action movie, and thriller for that matter, has enforced pacing - Some reason that things must be done in a timely fashion. Otherwise there is no excitement and tension. This is basic storytelling.

I would not watch the movie of a band of heroes who laze about and go fight some creatures when they felt like it. This isn't a problem that the game has. It's a problem of boring stories. Don't have boring stories.

I think what you are describing is what call the story Arc and the critical path. Published adventures do ok in that area. It's fails at pacing because they always use the same consequences for the overall campaign but little between the individual scenes or encounters.
That's why I call them doom clocks. It sets a limit of time for the players for the whole campaign or maybe a section of one with little regard for the flow of said campaign.

[BW022]

Imagine your party in a city...
Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

My thoughts... I don't worry about it too much. It's part of the game, it makes sense as a city is generally a safe place. Things I can recommend...


Don't sweat it. There are lots of combats, if players rest that it fine. Not every combat or encounter needs to be epic and allowing them to rest most of the time prevents the sense of railroading.
Track time. Get players used to this. Also remember that they can't benefit from more than one long rest per 24 hours. Thus, if they get attacked at 11am, they likely can't benefit from a long rest before 9pm that night (assuming they last rested at night).
Vary the difficulty of encounters. Knowing that players will rest... put in some big and overpowered combats. You can still have an challenging combat even if they are going to use most of their resources.
Vary the setting. City is part of the issue (since it is easy to rest), so do put in some dungeons, wilderness, and other encounters.
Put in more non-combat encounters or combat ones which don't necessarily use a lot of resources -- a bar fight, a chase, someone who is counter-spelling (so PCs stop casting big spells), one-on-one challenges, etc.
Include setups with obvious time limits. They beat the thugs but find a time sensitive clue "I'll met you at 7pm at the Rockshore."
Have things happening which the PCs want to be part of. A festival, an mid-night magic swap, they are meeting the Duke later that day, etc. Make it clear they would be missing out on things when resting.
Have some clearly time critical missions -- find a missing person before they are smuggled out of the city at high-tide, find a ladies missing ring before her husband arrives back in town, etc.
Occasionally go after them while resting. Don't over-do it, but even in a city someone can easily toss a lantern (or magic missiles) into your room through a window. You can also have mundane things preventing rests such as the noise of the city during the day, the town watch wanting you to answer questions about the attack, someone sending you a message to meet, etc.

[Talionis]

Nothing. Honestly the party is doing exactly what a reasonable party would do. On rare occasion we push the party. The party knows when it’s being pushed. They know when they aren’t being pushed.

[hencook]

Rest-"spamming"? I have to say, if I were in a game in which the game master started throwing arbitrary diseases and such around just to keep us from resting when we chose, I'd be out of that group and hunting for a new one. I want to immerse myself in the milieu, not feel the heavy hand of the DM trying to coerce us to do what he thinks we should do. A living world has natural consequences. If we're resting too much in town, we're spending more for food and lodging, and eventually winter will come and we'll be faced with a choice between going out in freezing weather or spending even more in town at a time when food and lodging prices are likely to be higher. A farmer might show up in mid-rest, begging us to rescue his daughter who was just kidnapped by ne'er-do-wells - quickly, as they had tortured him with accounts of how they planned to burn her in sacrifice to their deity. In cities, we might get hints from the tavern-keeper that powerful groups that spend too many days there risk attracting the notice of some shady noble or underworld figure who might try to draw us into the local politics by offering a deal we can't refuse - to go take down one of his rivals - or, worse, find ourselves dealing with the consequences if we do refuse that deal. If we're resting too much in the wilderness - well, nature has its own way of taking care of that. Some of our most fun encounters occurred when some wandering refugee from a mad wizard's experiment triggered the alarms around our camp - the pair on watch are dashing about trying to wake people, the spellcasters don't have new spells ready, our visibility may be limited, it gets pretty exciting. Dungeon crawls, same - few things raise the heartbeat quite like having the door we'd spiked shivering in its mounts as some massive unknown pounds at it to get to us. These are random encounters; most times we rest without incident, sometimes we don't, just enough to remind us that resting doesn't come without some small natural risk.

I don't know why you bother to say you wouldn't play in my group. It's stupid to treat a random person on the internet as someone you'd theoretically choose to outcast. If i said "i hope you're never in my game either" how would that make you feel?

So the sleep disease was induced by an aboleth of psionic power. I told the party "you can't sleep a full night's rest until you counteract the effects of the disease", which led to a trip to the library, a ritual casting, and ultimately killing the aboleth.

It's not mechanically different than your excuse for keeping your players up (innkeeper warning about shady thugs), except mine is admittedly a bit more railroady. And it is a one time thing per campaign, per player party.

I don't agree with your stance on attrition of mundane resources either. Any party over level 5 will have more than enough gold to indefinitely sleep at an inn. The only way to hike up the prices so steep to challenge the players would be to do so arbitrarily, which you yourself feel is out of line, so this feels contradictory

[Mordaedil]

I mean, this is only really a problem as long as you approach the pen and paper game as if it was a video game. Did they take on the gang during day time? Tell them, it is still daylight outside and ask them what other things they want to accomplish before they go to rest. Roll some dice. Ask them what their passive perception is. Ask them if they are doing alternating guards or if they trust that the inn is safe. Have the antagonists do stuff in the time they spend resting, whether it is kidnap someone the PC's care about in town or board up the inn they are resting it and are about to launch an ambush on the resting PC's.

It doesn't have to be a dangerous encounter, just enough to remind them that they were the ones that rustled the bee's nest.

Just don't be super aggressive about these things and I'd also say don't punish short rests as much as long rests. And for gods sake, don't overdo it either. If they've had two short rests this day and then decide to go for a long one, they should probably be allowed to. If they need to take a break between every encounter, consider if maybe your encounters are a bit too challenging and do some lower difficulty challenges before your CR appropriate encounter. You might end up getting a better flow that way.

[Demonslayer666]

Imagine your party in a city. They have a single encounter against a gang in an alley. Immediately, they rest and heal for the night. They could probably take another encounter, but better to be safe than sorry.

I view this scenario as problematic in D&D. Many RPG systems have mechanics that revolve around the party's finite daily resources, be it daily spells or healing surges. If you're not fighting and worrying about saving these resources, battles become less tense, and less fun. Here are different ways I've dealt with it over the years:


Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


Do you guys have any problem with rest-spamming? Do you build your scenarios to counter it? Do you even care if it happens?

Yes, in my last campaign, the party rested way too frequently. They would spend ridiculous amounts of spell slots on easy encounters and then get mad at me when I reminded them that resting was costing lives of the town they were trying to save. It was very frustrating for me, because the encounters were not designed to be difficult.

In my upcoming campaign, I explained that D&D is a resource management game. You are expected to have 6-8 encounters per day before taking a long rest. I also told them to rely more on their unlimited resources (like cantrips and AC), and to use short rests to heal.

I also warned them that they can only rest where it is safe to do so. Resting in a dangerous place will get them attacked, bolster defenses, or get ambushed.

I kinda doubt it will do any good, but we'll see how they handle it. At least I have ideas on how to discourage it.

[darknite]

It's really not hard to do when it's appropriate for you, as the DM, to do so. If the PCs are spelunking an undead-infested barrow with no imminent danger there's certainly no reason to do so all in one go. You don't see mountain climbers taking on Everest from foot to summit in a day, after all. They should be able to take their time. If you want to add some time pressure, perhaps another adventuring group shows up and competes with them to make it to the Grand Hall of McGuffin to get the Scroll of Plot to open the Tomb of Goodies.

Living dungeons can often launch coordinated responses to an invasion and resting can become quite perilous or result in losing opportunities that a more aggressive push would of provided. Outside forces may be compelling your group to hustle, too, so it becomes a race about what the PCs are doing, with the results depending on of how long it takes them to achieve their goal.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

My expectation is that the players will at least take a short rest after every encounter. That's what they're there for, after all. I'll use time pressures when appropriate, but generally I don't mind too much if we play on a 1 encounter/long rest schedule. We all prefer smaller numbers of harder encounters to more easier ones, so it works out.

[Phoenix042]

Time limited quests.
Sleep Disease. They can't rest or they recover very little from resting, until they cure themselves, which coincidentally leads them closer down the quest line.
The world around them keeps turning. There are multiple evil factions scheming, and their plots succeed if the party isn't fast enough.
The rarest one that I utilize is the random enemy encounter while they're resting.


I'm going to break these down a little to explain how I use them, then explain my other methods.

[list]
Time limited quests:
I prefer to use a mix of soft and hard time limits for quests, and some non-limited ones.
For example, at any given time, my party might have several quest options available to them, like this:
1) The Borgun tribe is fortifying an abandoned fortress nearby, making it stronger every day. The fortress controls a critical bridge for supplies. (Soft deadline; each day this fortress' defenses get stronger)
2) In three days, the Lord Blackfin will return and take command of the village defenses. If the Borgun tribe remains a threat at that time, he will spread the word that you failed to defend the village in his absence and as a result, you will likely be denied the audience with the queen that you are seeking. (Hard deadline; you fail the quest if the Borgun main camp hasn't been found and defeated in three days. The player's know the general location of the camp)
3) Five village guards were captured this morning and are being tortured in a shack on the outskirts of the Borgun camp. Every hour they remain un-rescued, the odds increase that one of them has died or given up valuable tactical knowledge (Soft but pressing deadline)
4) Norma the witch was driven from her hut in the woods by the Borgun tribe. She is furious with them and has shared with your party the location of a well-hidden stash of potions, scrolls, and other goodies that, if recovered, can help with defeating the Borgun tribe. (No time pressure, really)
5) Scouts have found the location of the Borgun bomb-rat lab, where Borgun alchemists equip their Dire Rat pets with explosive vests. If this lab is destroyed or captured, the Borgun tribe will lose access to their bomb-rats. (No direct time pressure).
6) Dum Angun, brother to the Borgun's chief, is leading nightly raids of the surrounding countryside for food, slaves, and supplies. If he and his raiders are stopped, the Borgun will be significantly weakened. If he could be captured alive, he might be useful as leverage against the chief. (No direct time pressure).


This is an example of an actual adventure I created. The players were given all of this information, very early on, allowing them to freely assign priorities and try to accomplish as much as possible at one time.

Each quest involved a small handful (2 - 4) small encounters, so that the party could reasonably only be expected to complete two in any given day, or maybe three if they were lucky, clever, or judicious with resources. Each morning, two new quest options were presented, so that they constantly had new problems or opportunities to respond to or factor into their plans, with the obvious final goal being a main assault on the Borgun tribe.

The main quest, that of marching into the camp and assaulting it head-on, is available pretty much from the start, but I make it clear to the players that that will be beyond a deadly encounter if they don't work on at least some other objectives first. Because they have three days, I figure it's likely that they'll spend at least two full days (and maybe part of the third, actually) completing other quests first, stocking up and weakening the tribe before striking. Each side-quest has a direct effect on the final encounter. If the rat lab is destroyed, bomb rats don't appear in the encounter. If the fortress is taken, the enemy is low on arms, armor, and ammo. If the raiders are slain the army is hungry and some of the fighters have reduced hit points or are two sick to fight as a result of hunger, etc.


Sleep disease: I don't like this one. I try not to directly restrict the player's ability to rest.
The world keeps turning. I roll this into item one. The time limits I used are related to the activity of the other factions and non-player characters in the game world. New problems and opportunities related to an adventure crop up constantly, and new adventures are always rolling in and out as the days roll on.
Random encounters: I'm very clear about this one; there are places where the party can't safely rest. In those places, if the party tries to risk taking a rest anyway, they'll likely be attacked by something. They will know this in advance. For example, you can't safely rest while in hostile territory. Rests are for secured camps / rooms, and / or a retreat to safe ground. Sometimes there are specific threats the party can deal with, or steps they can take to enable a rest where they normally couldn't safely take one.

In general, the party should retreat to take rests only when they need to for the sake of resources or they've completed their pressing objectives. They should never be able to rest "for free" during a well-designed adventure, but should instead feel that every rest is, itself, a precious resource to be carefully spent.

They should also feel like their goals aren't always all-or-nothing. Maybe taking a rest won't stop them from eventually defeating the Borgun tribe, but it will mean the death of an innocent prisoner they might otherwise have saved, or the loss of some treasure or some other smaller side objective. Maybe if they ignore a sub-quest for too long they lose access to that quests boons and rewards, but that doesn't mean they fail the adventure.

I usually expect that only about 20% - 60% of sub-quest options should be required for completing the main quest goal. Others provide additional rewards or alternative routes for completing the party's objectives.

[opaopajr]

Yeah, so the board rules prohibit simply adding +1,000 below this post. I will ramble on a bit to be in compliance:smallsmile:.

This doesn't seem that complicated. The thing that differentiates paper & pencil gaming from World of Warcraft is the idea that there is a fully fleshed out world that you can do anything in and that exists outside of your character. If you are just going to run a hack and slash campaign against a superficial backdrop then everyone in your gaming group should make a guild on WOW and just hack things up online. As bad as they are, the graphics on WOW are better than the verbal descriptions that most DMs throw out.

The whole point of D&D, GURPS, etc. is you get an interactive environment. The DM just needs to do their job.

Of course I'm a grumpy old school AD&D preferring dude, so there's that...

Yay! Another Great Old One like me! :smallcool:

Grumpy old skoolers unite in form of: pristine, untrampled lawn! :smalltongue:

You bring up another point I want to emphasize. We GMs are ALL the senses of the players. :smallsmile: Yes, the mind's imagination's special effects budget is unlimited!... but it also needs fuel, fire, and oxygen to explode in a mind (like a Michael Bay film). We need GMs to stop playing "guess what I'm thinking?" with players and give them feedback that speaks to the imagination of their senses.

Describe, add line, color, and shadow! Breathe life into nouns with verbs, such as desires, purposes, and motivations! Put in interactable things, so players' characters can verb at the nouns, and the world's nouns can verb them right back! :smallbiggrin:

WoW can be organized, structured fun, but D&D can be messy and wondrous like life. :smallamused: Outside of coherency to its own world logic, NPCs in a Setting are only constrained by a GM's Creativity and their capacity to convey that Dynamism to their Players. :smallwink: Dream a little dream, kids! (And get the hell off us lawns! :smallmad:)

[Bjarkmundur]

Describe, add line, color, and shadow! Breathe life into nouns with verbs, such as desires, purposes, and motivations! Put in interactable things, so players' characters can verb at the nouns, and the world's nouns can verb them right back! :smallbiggrin:

on the top margin on my notes I always write in large (friendly) letters "DESCRIBE IT" just to keep me reminded of this. Very good point to make.

[Pelle]

Yes, in my last campaign, the party rested way too frequently. They would spend ridiculous amounts of spell slots on easy encounters and then get mad at me when I reminded them that resting was costing lives of the town they were trying to save. It was very frustrating for me, because the encounters were not designed to be difficult.
[...]
I kinda doubt it will do any good, but we'll see how they handle it. At least I have ideas on how to discourage it.

Yeah, D&D is a resource management game where the resources are replenished with regular time intervals. So for D&D (and the resource management aspect of it) to be fun, there has to be time pressure. Make sure to get buy-in and have it make sense in the fiction that dawdling has bad consequences.

Maybe your players don't like playing a resource management game, and would be better served with a game with at-will abilities instead?

[Aergentum]

Some players in my group tend to "rest-spam". I made clear that they can make two short rests per day (2/3 hours) and one long rest; but only if they can find an appropriate place to rest and only if they have spent enough time doing something after the last rest.

[Adar]

First of all, I want to express my gratitude for this thread. I'm an old-timer, but very new to 5e and it's been a long gap since I played 3/3.5e. And now I'm DMing a game with a bunch of other neophytes (some young, some old).

In the first couple of sessions I've run, this issue has already come up. People are acting in good faith, but there is a genuine lack of experience and the younger players have all this video game experience that has really automated their min-max tendencies. I was unaware of AngryGM's "Time Pool" concept (I'm still learning my way around the gaming social media landscape) and his concept was intriguing, but too bulky, over-clocked and arbitrary for what I'm looking for. But it did get me thinking because, at its core, it's a great idea. Yeah sure, you can wing this without a consistent system... but for someone like me, a DM without a lot of experience, it can feel a whole lot like railroading to the rest of the party. A built in mechanic would be awesome.

I wrote a blog post about it this morning, wherein I say:


I'm looking for a simple mechanic that has some flexibility for DM discretion, but still feels fair and easy to apply. I'm looking for a way to remind people that time passes, and the passage of time has consequences. That is all. ...If nothing else, in the couple of sessions I've already run, a lot of questions have come up about when they can rest, what it means in-game if a lot of OOC haggling is going on, etc. Everyone - players and DM alike - would like a little guidance on this. A mechanic that provides some guidance would be helpful.

I came up with my own simplified mechanic. I'm calling it The Simple d12 Time Management System (https://itsadar.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-d12-time-management-system-virtual.html). It uses one d12 as a "clock die", and that's it. That link goes to the blog post where I discuss it. The basic mechanics are really simple, and I'll reproduce them below. But I feel like this post is overlong already, so if you are interested in the nuances that come with it, you can click through.


Designate a d12 in the center of the table as the "clock die". A d12 is pretty ideal seeing as the number 12 is so closely associated with clocks, and divides 60 minutes evenly into 5 minute intervals. To start, put it '12' side up, which actually means 'reset' in this system.
In non-combat situations, every activity that could be reasonably expected to take 5 minutes advances the clock die one pip. Let people work on different tasks simultaneously if they wish.
When the die gets all the way back around to 12 again... it's time to roll. If the die comes up a 1, Something Bad happens.
Once you roll, the dice is 'reset' at 12 to start all over again.

[GlenSmash!]

Sorry for coming in late a maybe repeating an idea.

Since the party can only gain the benefits of a long rest once within a 24 hour period, what I do is make the world move forward as far as the amount of time party is doing nothing will allow for, ie. 8 hours for the long rest and up to 16 hours more for waiting until they can gain the benefit of a long rest again becomes 8-24 hours of stuff the antagonists are getting done.

It's worked pretty well so far.

[strangebloke]

The core problem is that, conventionally, short and long rests are predicated on assumptions about how long certain challenges are going to take. IE, unless there's an encounter immediately coming your way, you can always take a short rest without risk, but you probably can't take a long rest. So if you're doing a dungeon crawl, this works fine. You can't take a short rest until you clear the floor and you can't take a long rest until you clear the dungeon because otherwise all the monsters will gather together and ambush you.

Easy Peesy

But in a game with intrigue and exploration and whatever, the timing of things is different. Only rarely do you get combat encounters directly after combat encounters, meaning that you can always take a short rest between encounters, which screws the timing. Furthermore, if there's ever a bit of slack in the schedule, you can fall back to long rests. This makes the whole process too leisurely and favors the casters too heavily. This is the problem with "rest spamming." In the first place I think that a lot of DMs are unwilling to have their be consequences for being slow; I think that such requirements are basically a necessity. You're on a quest to rescue the princess. If you take a month to do it, sorry, she died weeks ago.

But you also have to adjust rest time. Short rests are 8 hours, and can be squeezed in whenever there's slack. Long rests are a week and can only be fit in when you're done.

"But then Dungeons are impossible!"

Nah, not really. For one thing, a party can survive tons of encounters before needing a long rest. Here's the encounter schedule my 5-person, level 4 party pushed through in their last adventuring "day."


1 doppleganger (CR 4 when accounting for additional legendary actions, Easy)
1 necromancer(Equivalent to 5th level wizard) + 4 skeletons. (CR 6, Hard)
prison break (social/exploration challenge, ended with minor combat against a few guards)
sleuthing challenge
3 bearded devils (Deadly encounter resulting from failing sleuthing challenge CR 8)
2 complex traps (CR 1 and 4, respectively)
1 barbed devil + 3 imps (CR 8)


It's been a challenge! But despite this being a fairly unskilled party (the shadow monk cast darkness over the whole party "to protect from the devils") they've come through just fine. I wouldn't have any problem making a mini-dungeon with that many enemies. I'm even more brutal to my skilled players.

If you're concerned that the pacing doesn't really allow for a short rest, you can always offer up a "short rest in a can" usually in the form of some sort of spirit or other that will bless them for clearing out an area of the dungeon.

For another, if you really want to do a multi-floor dungeon that required long rests between each floor... any contrivance that would allow the party to rest for 8 hours between floors would also let them rest for a week. My usual conceit is that each floor of the dungeon has a magical seal that the party can break to advance.

...in the rare instance where I do a multilevel dungeon, anyway.

Personally, once you adapt to it, I think the attrition-based gameplay is a huge part of what can make 5e fun. The fighter gets to be constantly effective and reliable, the sorcerer gets to nuke a select subset of the encounters, and going into the boss fight things are tense because there's that hanging question of "Do we have enough gas left to take this guy?"

[Demonslayer666]

Yeah, D&D is a resource management game where the resources are replenished with regular time intervals. So for D&D (and the resource management aspect of it) to be fun, there has to be time pressure. Make sure to get buy-in and have it make sense in the fiction that dawdling has bad consequences.

Maybe your players don't like playing a resource management game, and would be better served with a game with at-will abilities instead?

That could be part of it. They prefer story over mechanics, but I'm not changing my game after I already bought the book and all this prep time. Tomb of Annihilation does have a clock on it, so they will have time pressure.