Gritty realism variant

[Trandir]

Well this DM uses gritty realism, almost.

A 5-60 min rest allow for short rest features to recharge.
A 8h rest recharges long rest features and allows to consume hit dice to heal.
A week long rest with downtime investment provides all the benefits of a long rest.

And the lingering wounds work as normal per gritty realism.

What do you think? I kind of like this, healing magic seems lot more magical when it can do in a day what you'd have to wait a week for.

[nickl_2000]

So, all spells are regained on a short rest for all Casters? Well there is little point in playing a warlock here.

If it were me I would play a land Druid. They have amazing healing abilities, which helps out in gritty realism. Also they don’t have a huge amount of long rest resources aside from spells. You do lose the feature of regaining a slot on short rest, but getting all slots back makes up for that.

[Trandir]

Changed topic of the thread.

[firelistener]

It punishes playing characters that don't have healing spells, so I wouldn't like running or playing this. The point of hit dice is so you can still function in longer dungeons without magical means of recovery, but this systems will make players feel overly pressured to have a "healbot" in the group.

[Anymage]

It punishes playing characters that don't have healing spells, so I wouldn't like running or playing this. The point of hit dice is so you can still function in longer dungeons without magical means of recovery, but this systems will make players feel overly pressured to have a "healbot" in the group.

So much this.

Recovering spells is a lot more important than recovering HP. Including the fact that spell slots can be converted into HP, but also because spell use provides many ways to prevent HP loss. If I had to chose between recovering HP or recovering spell slots, I'd pick spell slots almost all the time.

Gritty Realism works best in games where you can expect one encounter a day, maybe two at a stretch. It counters the fifteen minute adventuring day by leaning into that instead of letting you burn a whole day's worth of resources on every encounter. If you expect more than that, be very cautious breaking from the more standard rest rules.