Experience of playing with Slow Healing and/or Gritty Realism

[Cikomyr2]

I was toying with the idea of doing a Grim Dawn post apocalyptic campaign with no clerics. The whole game would be unplanned, simply players trying to survive in the post apocalypse, finding food, supplies, allies, monsters, etc..

Since surviving with a group, worrying about food levels, etc.. is kind of part of what I want out of the Post Apocalypse experience, I thought implementing the slow heal or Gritty realism might be a good idea to have the player feel there is a constant ticking clock until death, without that clock constantly being 5 minutes to midnight.

Stuff like "we have 3 weeks of food" is trivial when you can adventure every day. But "we have 3 weeks of food" is more relevant when you have to take a week of rest to recover fully your health and your spell slots.

The slow down time would also allow the players to work on their gear, or train, or scrounge supplies in safe environments too.

However, before I implement what I think is a good idea.. I wanted to ask people here what were your experience in playing with Slow heal and/or Gritty realism that slows the whole rest economy.

[KorvinStarmast]

None of the groups I play with have shown any interest in either variant. FWIW, the Tomb of Annihilation published adventure is gritty and survivialist enough without any additional rules.

[Man_Over_Game]

I tried using the variants that slow down resource gains, but it didn't go over too well. Despite how "prepared" my players were, they still felt an expectation of constantly being able to adventure.

Rather, what my players wanted out of gritty survival is more tasks/difficulty, not necessarily slower games. So when they are out of resources, they can take action to change that. So I tried two solutions: One where I just made it so that "rest" was something planned but minimal, and another where "rest" was something that became more necessary for more adventure.

For the first, the time that they are "irrelevant" and resting should be so minimal that it doesn't feel like an arbitrary amount of time, and that it ends just before players start to get bored. Which I estimate is about 1 day. So I turned an 8-hour sleep cycle into Short Rests, and a full day (36 hours) as a Long Rest. I've done this with my more political games, and it's worked out really dang well. I'd recommend this as more of a balancing choice, since casters fare better with fewer encounters than others do.

In normal pacing games (with 1hr SR and 8hr LR) where I wanted more emphasis on high-octane action while imposing greater resource management for the players, I made a variant of the Slow Healing concept (wasn't a fan myself), where:

A Long Rest has you roll all of your current Hit Dice, where you choose which results to expend until you're out of Hit Dice or full on HP.
Then, you regain half of your maximum Hit Dice (rounded up) as normal.
Continue to spend Hit Dice until you're full on HP or out of Hit Dice, which you either keep for later or start the day with no HD.


Which made players consider more healing options, healing between combat, and balancing damage between them. Although I have not tried something like this when healing was unavailable.

I wouldn't recommend doing both, as they both accomplish different goals, where the first artificially slows the game down to account for fewer combats per day, and the second implements more resource management and group interaction.

That is, unless you're aiming to do both.

I would not recommend a solution that has more than 2 days of consistent downtime to become fully charged for more action (as implementing both of these would need 2 days max for recuperation). DnD doesn't have a lot of rules or content for the non-combat elements (outside of magic). Additionally, the "basic" combat actions you can take (cantrips, attacks) are also some of the most dull and least versatile content in the game, so I wouldn't recommend having your players rely on them constantly.

The last thing you want to do is make the game more boring, or reduce how much content is relevant, especially when the intent is making things more "serious". It should be about making harder decisions, not removing your number of choices.

[Anymage]

Gritty Realism, despite the name, isn't particularly gritty. It's mostly a pacing mechanism for people who for whatever reason don't see the DMG's suggested ~6 encounters a day as reasonable, and often fall short of that. It basically counteracts the fifteen minute work day by leaning into it, and redefining "short" and "long" rests so that one big encounter per 24 hour period doesn't let everyone go nuts novaing. As far as resource management goes, though, there isn't much difference between one day's worth off food under normal rest rules and one week's under GR. It's just set dressing.

Slow Healing, I dislike because slowing or stopping individual healing brings back the days when someone was expected to be the healbot. Create or Destroy Water is already a first level cleric spell, with Create Food and Water coming on line at third. If you're essentially telling your players that someone has to play a cleric, but has to devote their spell slots to making sure everybody's HP are topped off and their bellies are full instead of doing actual exciting things with said slots, you're bringing back one of the more annoying elements of D&D history.

[JeffreyGator]

I have played/GM'd with a variant of slow-healing. (no hp and 1/2 HD back on slow-rest)

I thought it would add something to the game and it adds doing unnecessary math. Life clerics get short rest hp generation - plenty of other gimmicks to extend hp generation. So for our next campaign we're sticking to the base rule.

Wilderness travel is the place that the rest mechanic breaks down the most but after a point many of my tables have abandoned wandering monsters all together in favor of moving the story along instead.

[Yakmala]

I played in a game like this once. No magical healing. You could apply bandages to stop the bleeding but then had to take time to heal. Here's how the campaign went.

1: Party was a heck of a lot more cautious about what we were willing to fight. Unless we were certain we had overwhelming advantage, we would hide, run away, negotiate or anything else we needed to do to survive.

2: When we did get hurt, we took the time to shelter in the safest location we could find, even if that took us off of our main objective for a while. We didn't get back into the action until everyone was healthy.

3: While this was not an "evil" party, our decisions were all dictated by our continued survival. Sometimes that meant NPCs that needed help didn't get it.

4: The campaign ended when the party realized that they had accumulated enough gold to live in moderate comfort for the rest of their lives and saw no reason to go out and risk death anymore. They purchased a tavern and went into business together.

[Demonslayer666]

I was toying with the idea of doing a Grim Dawn post apocalyptic campaign with no clerics. The whole game would be unplanned, simply players trying to survive in the post apocalypse, finding food, supplies, allies, monsters, etc..

Since surviving with a group, worrying about food levels, etc.. is kind of part of what I want out of the Post Apocalypse experience, I thought implementing the slow heal or Gritty realism might be a good idea to have the player feel there is a constant ticking clock until death, without that clock constantly being 5 minutes to midnight.

Stuff like "we have 3 weeks of food" is trivial when you can adventure every day. But "we have 3 weeks of food" is more relevant when you have to take a week of rest to recover fully your health and your spell slots.

The slow down time would also allow the players to work on their gear, or train, or scrounge supplies in safe environments too.

However, before I implement what I think is a good idea.. I wanted to ask people here what were your experience in playing with Slow heal and/or Gritty realism that slows the whole rest economy.

I like the idea of slow healing, but I dislike a long rest being a week. In my next game I will slow down healing from resting, a long rest won't fully heal you and you recover hd slower. This will make magical healing more valuable, that's my goal anyway.

[Segev]

None of the groups I play with have shown any interest in either variant. FWIW, the Tomb of Annihilation published adventure is gritty and survivialist enough without any additional rules.

As a warning, the foraging rules are actually quite forgiving, and killing a few big dinos or the like in random encounters can create large amounts of food. I am, perhaps, not tracking spoilage very well, so I maybe should start doing so, but my party hasn't had any trouble feeding themselves. Having a Ranger with "jungle" as favored terrain has been immensely helpful to the party, too.

I'm actually planning to have a bit of fun with this soon. They're 5 days into wastelands, and I will need to remember to tell them there's simply nothing to forage, here. Tracking the food for the hangers-on they're escorting needs to be done, too. Then I get to tell them their food is disappearing faster than they expected.

See, the party recently fought a mimic that was posing as the lid to an altar disguising a treasure hoard. They're escorting that hoard and some Flaming Fist guys (including Shago) who will take it back on a boat to civilization for them while they do more adventuring. What they don't realize is that some of the loot was baby mimics. Which have been eating their food supplies.

One of which, also, has taken a liking to them, and will "fall out" of the sledge they're transporting the loot in. They'll find a bag of silver coins lying on the ground after they ship the rest off. Not sure how exactly I'll use it, as it's staying hidden for a while, but it might be fun and it will eat some of their food. Just not as fast as having its brethren around did.

I'm debating if the mimics will cause ship-endangering troubles or if they'll get back to Fort Belluarian and create an infestation.

[carrdrivesyou]

Gritty Realism, as I have experienced, only serves to slow down the game. It pushes the RP factor of the game to higher importance, and making combat and exploration a grind.

This opens up some interesting world interactions, but they get old, fast. This makes characters feel far less heroic, and can make for a truly teeth-grinding experience at the table.

I'm not a fan, and would not suggest it. Consider the Ranger, the class that is regarded as best suited for this type of campaign by flavor, but one of the worst at dealing with this mechanically. Even things like Primeval Awareness are long rest dependent.

[KorvinStarmast]

Having a Ranger with "jungle" as favored terrain has been immensely helpful to the party, too. My DM considered "forest" to be "jungle" and we did fine. Navigation was another matter.

[Pex]

There are game systems of this genre for those players who like it. D&D is not one of them.

[Cikomyr2]

Gritty Realism, as I have experienced, only serves to slow down the game. It pushes the RP factor of the game to higher importance, and making combat and exploration a grind.

This opens up some interesting world interactions, but they get old, fast. This makes characters feel far less heroic, and can make for a truly teeth-grinding experience at the table.

I'm not a fan, and would not suggest it. Consider the Ranger, the class that is regarded as best suited for this type of campaign by flavor, but one of the worst at dealing with this mechanically. Even things like Primeval Awareness are long rest dependent.

I was thinking it would make terrain traveling more precarious and risky. Under the current system there's a complete resource reset every night. What if the party knew the journey was a big adventure, akin to exploring a dungeons? You'd have 1-2-3 encounters (combat and noncombat) every day. And they hope the journey doesn't take them more than 4-5 days.


There are game systems of this genre for those players who like it. D&D is not one of them.

You mind sharing them?

[Anymage]

I was thinking it would make terrain traveling more precarious and risky. Under the current system there's a complete resource reset every night. What if the party knew the journey was a big adventure, akin to exploring a dungeons? You'd have 1-2-3 encounters (combat and noncombat) every day. And they hope the journey doesn't take them more than 4-5 days.

To repeat something I said upthread. If you expect to have one encounter per day, Gritty Realism can help give a sense of resource depletion instead of letting everybody play long rest classes who nova the hell out of their one daily encounter. If you expect to have multiple encounters per day, making it take forever to top themselves off again will result in utter paranoia. Paranoid D&D winds up being more boring than fun for a lot of people - that's why Gygaxian levels of punitiveness have gone out of fashion - so it probably won't be enjoyable in play as it sounds while planning.

Is your goal to have a game where survival level resource management is a big thing, or where the players are weaker than your average D&D hero and have to be more cautious as a result? It'd help to narrow down what you're really looking for here.

[BarneyBent]

I'm running SKT with gritty realism and so far it's working well, but I'm not using it to increase difficulty. Instead I'm using it to make overland travel much more interesting.

Basically, my ratio of encounters to rests stays the same, but I don't have to have 4-6 encounters (or 2-3 much harder encounters) per day to keep travel interesting. It slows down the narratice but actually speeds the game up as whole days of travel can be uneventful, but the players will still feel challenged by the time they get to the next town.

We haven't used this yet, but when dungeon crawls or similar come up they can choose to go into "hero mode" with normal resting rules, but only for a day.

[Cikomyr2]

We haven't used this yet, but when dungeon crawls or similar come up they can choose to go into "hero mode" with normal resting rules, but only for a day.

Hehe. Good idea.

"what's that?"
"it's a senzu bean. It will give you a Short Rest instantaneously"

Giving my players the occasional power trip to go into HIGH gear is a good idea.

[KyleG]

For the first, the time that they are "irrelevant" and resting should be so minimal that it doesn't feel like an arbitrary amount of time, and that it ends just before players start to get bored. Which I estimate is about 1 day. So I turned an 8-hour sleep cycle into Short Rests, and a full day (36 hours) as a Long Rest. I've done this with my more political games, and it's worked out really dang well. I'd recommend this as more of a balancing choice, since casters fare better with fewer encounters than others do.
.

I want to try a similar idea:
Given the spaces between locations the amount of time spend in towns etc it seems from my experience as a player that 1 significant encounter per day feels about right. So i want to make 1 SR = 1 nights rest.
Then for LR, rather than the gritty realism variant of 1 week, i think i will lean towards 2 evenings of SR and on the 3rd evening this behaves like a long rest. Not sure how or if i would change HD healing but certainly for abilities i think this could work ok.
Alongside this i want to fluff at least some encounters as having taken longer than 30seconds, not sure how exactly yet but it feels odd that that is the extend of the encounter, boom and its done.

[Zhorn]

I'm not fond of Gritty Realism purely for the stretched out time frames. It's a narrative thing mostly, but I just don't enjoy it.

The Slow Natural Healing variant I want to play or DM with, but that will require some group buy-in for me to experience firsthand. The biggest issue I can see with this one though comes down to encounters per day. I can see where JeffreyGator is coming from; as if you are not running enough encounters over consecutive adventuring days, with meaningful resource requirements between short and long rests, there are just some class abilities that will trivialise the whole thing. Like most things, given the right group and campaign setting and it could be really good... or bad if you're unlucky.

[Willie the Duck]

As Anymage stated, Gritty Realism isn't that, and instead is a pacing method for balancing Long Rest- and Short Rest- recharging classes in situation that are not dungeons (or other situations where you might have the expected number of encounters per day. I'm really surprised and a little fascinated by the people who found it slowing down or stretching out the game (how? why? how long did you game with it?), however it also doesn't seem to achieve the OP's goals.


Since surviving with a group, worrying about food levels, etc.. is kind of part of what I want out of the Post Apocalypse experience, I thought implementing the slow heal or Gritty realism might be a good idea to have the player feel there is a constant ticking clock until death, without that clock constantly being 5 minutes to midnight.

Stuff like "we have 3 weeks of food" is trivial when you can adventure every day. But "we have 3 weeks of food" is more relevant when you have to take a week of rest to recover fully your health and your spell slots.

I mean, this is true. You really consider whether you will fight those zombies if getting hurt might mean a week of not contributing to the food-finding. However, what decisions does this make the players make/not make that are interesting? Don't adventure? Don't risk getting into a fight? Focus on finding food? You can accomplish that by making food scarce and gold worthless (or just not achieved through adventuring), and maybe fighting monsters not the way to get xp.

Where 5e fails as far as survival gaming, AFAIC, is the lack of granularity in survival mechanism (you either have food or you don't, starvation is a meter with a half-dozen steps), and a bunch of spells and common magic items designed to trivialize most aspects of it -- Bags of Holding, Driftglobes, Goodberry, Create Food and Water, Light, Prestidigitation, Purify Food and Drink, Alarm etc. Mind you, I get why they have evolved -- most people have drifted away from the 'descend into a hole in the ground and make hard decisions about what you bring in with you vs how much gold you can come out with, which is your primary metric of success' style of gaming, and thus tracking encumbrance and rations and torches went from part of the challenge to an annoying chore.

If I were to try to turn 5e into a survival game, I would first eliminate some of those spells (or at least make them things one acquires as treasure-reward as opposed to something the player just chooses from a list). Then, I would add granularity and nuance to the exhaustion mechanic -- splitting it out into exhaustion, starvation, water, and maybe warmth/coolness-shade (depending on climate) and giving it a lot more steps between fine and dead. Also introduce a 'push' mechanic -- sure you can hike most of the day and forage for food and take a turn as night watch, but you take extra exhaustion points to do so.

I have certainly played games in the genre (mostly homebrewed, a lot of post-apoc games aren't actually good at this kind of thing), but never with 5e. I'd be interested in hearing how it goes for you.

[ImproperJustice]

Slow healing is kinda like being in timeout.


Oh, your the party tank, and w 75% of your health defending the party. That was very nice of you.
Now according to the rules, your character will need to spend the next 3 weeks doing absolutely nothing but sitting in bed, while everyone else gets to keep playing.


It really didn’t work well in the Older versions, and I prefer the faster pace lf the modern games. I have had minimal trouble taxing PC resources by spreading out encounters or having enemies attack in waves.

[Pex]

You mind sharing them?


I know they exist but not first hand as it's not my cup of tea. Games got mentioned in passing in past threads about this. Offhand I'm sure GURPS can do it.


As Anymage stated, Gritty Realism isn't that, and instead is a pacing method for balancing Long Rest- and Short Rest- recharging classes in situation that are not dungeons (or other situations where you might have the expected number of encounters per day. I'm really surprised and a little fascinated by the people who found it slowing down or stretching out the game (how? why? how long did you game with it?), however it also doesn't seem to achieve the OP's goals.



I'm guessing it's because they aren't careful about the ratio of the number of long rests given per game session. It doesn't matter how long a long rest is in game world time. It can be 8 hours, 8 days, 8 million years. If players are on their third game session in a row and have not long rested they will be antsy. Players want to use their stuff. They're supposed to use their stuff then get it back to use again. If they don't get to long rest one of two things happen. They don't use their stuff because they're worried they need it later for something more important so must bog through boring play of doing nothing special until finally they give in and use their stuff already to stop being bored. The other option is while not going nova on the first encounter they are using their stuff but eventually run out then must bog through boring play of doing nothing special until the DM relents and they finally get to long rest. Either way, the feeling of being bored usually starts when it's the third game session in a row of not long resting.

[False God]

I was toying with the idea of doing a Grim Dawn post apocalyptic campaign with no clerics. The whole game would be unplanned, simply players trying to survive in the post apocalypse, finding food, supplies, allies, monsters, etc..

Since surviving with a group, worrying about food levels, etc.. is kind of part of what I want out of the Post Apocalypse experience, I thought implementing the slow heal or Gritty realism might be a good idea to have the player feel there is a constant ticking clock until death, without that clock constantly being 5 minutes to midnight.

Stuff like "we have 3 weeks of food" is trivial when you can adventure every day. But "we have 3 weeks of food" is more relevant when you have to take a week of rest to recover fully your health and your spell slots.

The slow down time would also allow the players to work on their gear, or train, or scrounge supplies in safe environments too.

However, before I implement what I think is a good idea.. I wanted to ask people here what were your experience in playing with Slow heal and/or Gritty realism that slows the whole rest economy.

I've generally had a poor time of it. People aren't really interested. You kinda have to be a jerk about their supplies (food going bad, no modern storage, raiders stealing food), which in turn often encourages the party to be little more than murderhobos. Survivalism is hard with rangers who can keep an entire party from getting lost and always scavenge more food than usual. The "slow healing" is often handwaived if the party is prepared and you're not throwing bandits and stuff at them while they're resting (which feels tedious: Day 3, you're attacked by MORE BANDITS!). And if you attack them with too many then you're basically giving them supplies.

It's just not something me and my group find much fun.

I've had much better success with ability damage. It recovers slowly to start (one point per long rest), and players tend to continue to be adventurous when the damage is low (1-3 points to any score) and start playing it safer as it gets higher, which lets me adjust things on the fly.

[Bigmouth]

Since no one else has mentioned any games...Torchbearer? It is all about granular survival in a fantasy setting. It's pretty grimdark, so not my particular cup of tea, but it has a lot of fans.

It is hard to imagine a hardcore survival version of 5E without major revisions to spell lists and abilities. No clerics, but also no rangers, no druids and no bards stealing from those lists. If you are taking a bunch of spells from classes, are you going to offer anything in return or are those classes/subclasses just going to be gimped?

Another thing to think about is if you are truly meaning food and water to be a constant issue, then monsters wouldn't be a threat. If it is hard for people with survival skill to survive, then it is harder for beasts...and especially for ones that would be big enough to offer any sort of challenge to a party. The obvious way around this would be undead and constructs, but it is something to consider.

[NaughtyTiger]

Gritty Realism didn't work well for me either, but i am still looking for something to address the problem.
For me the problem is that healing and death aren't a big deal.

1Hp of healing bringing someone back to full fighting strength, or
a 3rd level spell bringing someone back from the dead
kills the danger element.

[Willie the Duck]

I'm guessing it's because they aren't careful about the ratio of the number of long rests given per game session. It doesn't matter how long a long rest is in game world time. It can be 8 hours, 8 days, 8 million years. If players are on their third game session in a row and have not long rested they will be antsy. Players want to use their stuff. They're supposed to use their stuff then get it back to use again. If they don't get to long rest one of two things happen. They don't use their stuff because they're worried they need it later for something more important so must bog through boring play of doing nothing special until finally they give in and use their stuff already to stop being bored. The other option is while not going nova on the first encounter they are using their stuff but eventually run out then must bog through boring play of doing nothing special until the DM relents and they finally get to long rest. Either way, the feeling of being bored usually starts when it's the third game session in a row of not long resting.

I do not share the opinion that there's nothing interesting to do if you cannot constantly use rest-recharging resources (and if the long-rest-recharging classes feel that way, then I don't see how rogues or SR-recharging classes can coexist in that gaming group). However, I agree that it sounds like people not getting to recharge for long stretches. Honestly I think the best method is to just say 'you will get to long rest after 7 encounters and making it back to a safe place and it doesn't matter if that's after clearing out a dungeon one afternoon or two weeks on the road (with ~ 1 encounter every other day), and to heck with consistency on the timing.'


Since no one else has mentioned any games...Torchbearer? It is all about granular survival in a fantasy setting. It's pretty grimdark, so not my particular cup of tea, but it has a lot of fans.
Torchbearer plus various incarnations of The One Ring (more travelogue and less grimdark, the combo might be close to what other are looking for). Forbidden Lands also does decent hex-crawling, but goes for deliberately abstract supplies, which I think might not suit the OP's tastes.


Another thing to think about is if you are truly meaning food and water to be a constant issue, then monsters wouldn't be a threat. If it is hard for people with survival skill to survive, then it is harder for beasts...and especially for ones that would be big enough to offer any sort of challenge to a party. The obvious way around this would be undead and constructs, but it is something to consider.
Yes and no. I mean, just because the group wants to play apocalyptic survival game doesn't mean it doesn't still operate under standard D&D handwavy ecology. Carnivores exist IRL, and can survive in places where humans have trouble because they are better at it. Sure, we could point out that such and such beast is a 5 ton carnivore and should sweep clean an area many times larger than a wolfpack or grizzly bear, but that depends on how realistic we want our biology.

[Cikomyr2]

I've generally had a poor time of it. People aren't really interested. You kinda have to be a jerk about their supplies (food going bad, no modern storage, raiders stealing food), which in turn often encourages the party to be little more than murderhobos. Survivalism is hard with rangers who can keep an entire party from getting lost and always scavenge more food than usual. The "slow healing" is often handwaived if the party is prepared and you're not throwing bandits and stuff at them while they're resting (which feels tedious: Day 3, you're attacked by MORE BANDITS!). And if you attack them with too many then you're basically giving them supplies.

It's just not something me and my group find much fun.

I've had much better success with ability damage. It recovers slowly to start (one point per long rest), and players tend to continue to be adventurous when the damage is low (1-3 points to any score) and start playing it safer as it gets higher, which lets me adjust things on the fly.

Heya,

You may have a wrong idea of the concept. The reason I mention Grim dawn is because the game starts off with you being accepted in a community that tries to survive in an abandoned prison. And.. They turn out to be nice people, once they get to know you. There's one traitor, but his impact is minor.

So the game would be about rebuilding with a small population that support them. The crew find scavenging places and go fight the worst threats. During down times, the party can brew potions, forge scrap metal into gear, help with foraging, etc..

Trade skills could suddenly turn very useful.

[Mutazoia]

The issue I see here, is that the rest of the mechanics, specifically the combat mechanics, are built around the idea that there will be a cleric there to cast some healing magic during combat, and short rests to top people off, health wise.

If you slow down healing, you are also going to have to mitigate the average damage output as well to compensate. With out faster healing, it is quite possible for a Cloud Kill spell to TPK a mid level party, for example.

As for systems with slower healing and a more gritty feel, you can try Iron Heroes. Magic is an optional rule in that game, so no magical healing at all. Warhammer FRP also does this kind of game fairly well, although some people find the hit locations and piecemeal armor rules a bit much, not to mention the career path mechanics.

If you don't mind switching genera's, Twilight 2000 can do the gritty, slow healing feel, and has excellent rules for foraging and surviving off the land.

[Trask]

To capture a gritty feel with the 5e mechanics, I think one should focus more on the possibility of resting rather than the length of the rest. Consider snatching a rule from Cubicle 7's Adventures in Middle Earth 5e supplement.

Long Rests can only be done in a "sanctuary". What counts as a sanctuary will invariably be unique to each campaign but its easily done. For instance, if one were adventuring in the Sword Coast, each city (the good parts of one, not pitching a tent in the slums) counts as a sanctuary. A sleepy village or mining town like Phandalin's inn is a sanctuary. The treetop town of some Elves in the forest or the cave of a kindly gold dragon would also be sanctuaries. The idea is that its a sort of "unlocked" location where the characters can rest and recover safely. Its a little gamist, but it accomplishes a lot of what people actually want out of grit, the avoidance of too many long rests that spoil encounter difficulty, and it has the added benefit of highly incentivizing player interaction with NPCs and murderhobo tendencies towards creatures that are not immediately hostile.

[ChildofLuthic]

To capture a gritty feel with the 5e mechanics, I think one should focus more on the possibility of resting rather than the length of the rest. Consider snatching a rule from Cubicle 7's Adventures in Middle Earth 5e supplement.

Long Rests can only be done in a "sanctuary". What counts as a sanctuary will invariably be unique to each campaign but its easily done. For instance, if one were adventuring in the Sword Coast, each city (the good parts of one, not pitching a tent in the slums) counts as a sanctuary. A sleepy village or mining town like Phandalin's inn is a sanctuary. The treetop town of some Elves in the forest or the cave of a kindly gold dragon would also be sanctuaries. The idea is that its a sort of "unlocked" location where the characters can rest and recover safely. Its a little gamist, but it accomplishes a lot of what people actually want out of grit, the avoidance of too many long rests that spoil encounter difficulty, and it has the added benefit of highly incentivizing player interaction with NPCs and murderhobo tendencies towards creatures that are not immediately hostile.

In my current campaign I'm using something between this and the gritty rest rules. Basically, a short rest is about 6 hours and you can keep on your armor, take shifts, etc. A long rest is 24 hours and you have to be willing to completely let your guard down - take off your armor, not worry about taking shifts to sleep, etc. The big difference between my long rest rules and the Middle Earth rules is that I sort of let my players decide where they think a sanctuary is. It's usually pretty clear, but the group has hard arguments about whether or not they trust the Yuan-ti hermit enough to long rest in his abode, and whether they could afford to be paranoid. Makes it feel a little less gamist.

[Trask]

In my current campaign I'm using something between this and the gritty rest rules. Basically, a short rest is about 6 hours and you can keep on your armor, take shifts, etc. A long rest is 24 hours and you have to be willing to completely let your guard down - take off your armor, not worry about taking shifts to sleep, etc. The big difference between my long rest rules and the Middle Earth rules is that I sort of let my players decide where they think a sanctuary is. It's usually pretty clear, but the group has hard arguments about whether or not they trust the Yuan-ti hermit enough to long rest in his abode, and whether they could afford to be paranoid. Makes it feel a little less gamist.

Interesting, can the party decide anywhere is a sanctuary? Or is there requirements that it must meet?

[Pex]

Torchbearer plus various incarnations of The One Ring (more travelogue and less grimdark, the combo might be close to what other are looking for). Forbidden Lands also does decent hex-crawling, but goes for deliberately abstract supplies, which I think might not suit the OP's tastes.



Aha! You reminded me there is a 5E Middle Earth published campaign book that might work for the OP. There are new classes for PCs, none are spellcasters, and it also has environmental encounters. Long rests are based on reaching safe haven locations, not time, though one particular class if you choose the subclass has an ability to allow for a long rest even when not in a safe haven. Obviously you can just use the rules and ignore the flavor text if you don't want to play Middle Earth, but it is definitely a gritty game within 5E.

[RSP]

Savage Worlds probably gets the OP what he wants better than 5e. I prefer 5e but SW isn’t a bad system when done right.

[Arkhios]

None of the groups I play with have shown any interest in either variant. FWIW, the Tomb of Annihilation published adventure is gritty and survivialist enough without any additional rules.

Having run an short campaign with similar premise as OP, starting a reply with "in my experience just don't bother because my experience is X" is not helpful. Just, assume that the OP has a group willing to use those variants, and go from there...

[Tanarii]

There are game systems of this genre for those players who like it. D&D is not one of them.Slightly more accurate would be D&D 5e is not one of them. AD&D 1e and BECM were passable at it as long as you didn't skip rules, making them more like 5e.


You mind sharing them?
Free League has a good modern wilderness crawl post apocalyptic game system.
The post-apocalyptic version is Mutant Year Zero. The fantasy post-apocalyptic one is Forbidden Lands.

[Cikomyr2]

Having run an short campaign with similar premise as OP, starting a reply with "in my experience just don't bother because my experience is X" is not helpful. Just, assume that the OP has a group willing to use those variants, and go from there...

Thank you.

Again, I don't want to run a standard adventuring party pace with Slow Healing. The idea is to make sure that the focus of the game is the slow-ass survival of the community in the face of slowly crawly inevitable doom.

You can't just buy a new sword. You have to find one or make one. That takes time, and giving players that time through the required downtime might be a good idea of balancing things.

I fully understand that full casters might be gimped, and I will propose and experiment alternative ideas to my players for fun new way of playing out spellcasting. Maybe the downtime allows for creation of spell slot wands? Maybe expand the ritual list? I don't want my players to not have fun, and I think there is a fun compromise to be reached between the purpose of my "don't plan too much ahead" post apocalypse game and "players should still have a lot of fun"

[HappyDaze]

I use the slow healing variant, and it works pretty well. Of course, all of our PCs (Bard, Cleric, Druid, and Paladin) have magical healing options, and they have purchased several healing potions when available (in my Eberron game, healing potions are readily available for purchase in many areas).