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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Scenic Resting (WIP, PEACH)



PhoenixPhyre
2020-08-20, 04:53 PM
Problem to be solved: Equating one in-game day with one Adventuring Day (the time between Long Rests) has narrative problems, and imbalanced Adventuring Days can lead to intra-party balance issues. And the Rest Variants are too set-in-stone for my tastes. I'd like something that could naturally vary (in terms of in-game time) with the narrative flow. As well as something that the party can take charge of, so that they can have a sense of when they're getting close to a good stopping point for a rest, as well as giving incentives to take Short Rests.

Intent: decouple mechanical Rests (Long and Short) from the clock and instead promote player agency in resting and fit it into the narrative better.

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Define Scene: a set of narrative events that all fit tightly together without major narrative breaks in the action. Scenes are separated by significant narrative breaks.

Short scene: Contains one of the following:
• Combat totaling at least a Hard encounter: 1H, 2M, 1M1E, 4E.
• A Moderate or lower complex trap
• Three simple ability challenges or one intricate ability challenge

Long scene: contains one or more of the following:
• Combat totaling at least a Deadly encounter
• One deadly complex trap or two or more moderate complex traps
• Three intricate ability challenges or 5-6 simple ones

Anything less than a short scene between two narrative breaks doesn't count at all toward progress. Short scenes count roughly as half a long scene.

Ability challenges (not part of a combat or complex trap) count as easy encounters unless they're particularly intricate (ie take more than 15 minutes of real time) and/or have severe consequences for failure (such as significant damage or strong narrative penalties) and are thus more likely to consume significant resources. Those should be assigned a difficulty based on the expectation of resource/table-time expenditure, usually no more than medium.

Narrative breaks
These occur when the narrative is "fast forwarded" past boring stuff. Moving between locations in a non-hostile environment. Short downtime breaks. Etc. The party can generate these by holing up in a dungeon (for instance) and barricading the door. The presence of active threats in the immediate vicinity cancels a narrative break.

Resting:
After at least one long scene, during the narrative break before the next scene, the party can choose to take a short rest. The duration of the short rest is the duration of the narrative break or 1 hour, whichever is shorter.

After three long scenes (again, in the narrative break), the party can choose to attempt a long rest. If the party is in a safe location, the attempt automatically succeeds. Otherwise, the DM can choose to impose another scene where narratively fitting, which may disrupt the long rest (especially on failure/fleeing). Examples might include getting ambushed in the night, or other situations arising that require significant attention. The duration of the long rest is the duration of the narrative break or 8 hours, whichever is shorter.

Note that multiple in-game days may pass without a proper long rest (such as when traveling). The party still needs to sleep, but these in-game rests do not grant any particular benefits (except to stave off exhaustion).

Trance still only requires 4 hours of sleep to avoid exhaustion, but no longer speeds up long rests (because that's meaningless). Same with the warforged trait.

Darth Credence
2020-08-20, 05:14 PM
I like the idea, and can see the utility of using it to not let everyone recharge everything all the time. My major concern would be that if the party completes a long rest, has one long scene, then arrives in town and gets a room at an inn, the way it is written they couldn't take another long rest until some more stuff happens. That doesn't seem right in world, so I would try and work in an exception, where a long rest can be taken once a day if the players are in a fixed location with adequate quarters.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-08-20, 05:22 PM
I like the idea, and can see the utility of using it to not let everyone recharge everything all the time. My major concern would be that if the party completes a long rest, has one long scene, then arrives in town and gets a room at an inn, the way it is written they couldn't take another long rest until some more stuff happens. That doesn't seem right in world, so I would try and work in an exception, where a long rest can be taken once a day if the players are in a fixed location with adequate quarters.

They get a room at an inn. Does the narrative have a long break here? Or are there other things happening? So they could check into the inn and end up in a bar brawl or people breaking into their rooms or something. That's another scene.

If they're going into a long period of downtime (ie several days of not doing much) and/or have finished an arc of the campaign, then I might just say that they get the long rest sometime in that downtime.

I'm all for flexibility here. It's more of a design help for the DM in planning scenes (and thinking in terms of scenes) rather than a real rigid mechanical structure. Or at least its supposed to be.

Yakk
2020-08-21, 09:46 AM
First, when talking about short/long rest mechanics, I call the time between short rests "scenes" and the time between long rests "chapters".

Ie, in standard 5e, an adventuring day is a "chapter".

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I've played with various "milestone" like rest systems, and they all seem to fall into the same trap.

They get players thinking about mechanics instead of about narrative.

See, the mechanics of a long rest are extremely powerful. Players whose characters are exhausted attempt to get their characters to recover, as this makes sense in-game narrative.

But now you have this over-arching mechanical system where the characters, in order to rest, have to stir up trouble and generate more scenes (but not too hard, just enough).

It really easily becomes a game of DM-may-I instead of world-may-I.

So I stopped doing it. It seemed elegant in my head, but it ran into implementation issues.

Now maybe your variant fixes it. But, because I wasn't able to detect the problem until I used it in actual play, I'd say you should playtest it before you commit.

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Requiring a full week to get a long rest can work, but it means that a defeatible bad guy's plot has to move at a certain pace, or be defeatible within a certain budget.

A set of 3 easy, 3 medium and 3 hard encounters is a day's work for a baseline 5e party. The same becomes the work of 10-14 days for a gritty rest party.

And any threat that develops over a single day breaks inter-party balance (a pure-daily resource character can pull off 3 easy/medium/hard in a day, while a short-rest character will be starving), much like how any threat that doesn't take hour long coffee breaks breaks inter-party balance in standard 5e.

We could also go with a mid point.

Short Rest: A night's sleep (8 hours, or 4 if you meditate). In addition, once per day you can gain the benefit of a Short Rest in 5 minutes.
Long Rest: 1 week of downtime.

That means a "single day" plotline isn't as resource-starved for short-rest classes. So you can choose to put a chapter -- a full adventuring day -- in a single calendar day.

At the same time, a chapter can be spread out over a week of travel or in-town adventures as a problem develops.

It does mean that if the DM wants to stitch 2 chapters worth of encounter-budget together, you need a week of time between them, or the PCs start becoming resource-starved. OTOH, dual chapters can be about as common as single calendar day chapters, as they stress the "long rest" and "short rest" players in similar ways.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-08-21, 10:03 AM
But the whole point is to divorce "mechanical rests" from in-game time. So that one day a long rest might be the 5-minutes you were able to make by creating a diversion and holing up in a disused room, while another it may happen over most of a week of downtime. So that the mechanical power recovery is disconnected from the actual passage of in-game time and instead adjusts to the tempo of the game (basically smoothly and automatically shifting from Gritty to Heroic and back, including points in the middle, based on the narrative needs).

Because, with the games that I run, I tend to have both stretches where a "chapter" might include a week of travel with an occasional fight or exploration challenge (so Gritty Realism works pretty well) or where it involves a whole bunch of back-to-back stuff in a short time with no (narrative) chance for a week off in the middle. Things like exploring a large tower, where there's several adventuring days worth of challenges, but no good place to rest and no way to go back to town without aborting the whole thing (I just literally finished one of those chapters this week). So I'd like to have both week-long chapters and hour-long chapters.

The idea is to give players some way of tracking how far they are in the "rest cycle" so that they can predict and plan their resource use. Knowing that they'll have a short rest soon means that they won't stint using those resources, while knowing that they've got a while until their next long rest means that they won't just default to an alpha strike (or if they do, they chose that knowingly). The standard, completely opaque model means that you frequently have days where nova-striking is the right thing but you don't know that that's the case and so you go to bed with lots of resources left you could have used to speed things up (boring!), and days where you thought you had one big fight but it turns out you've got a death by a thousand cuts, so you're out of gas early with no way to predict or plan (also no fun). Or you're in a degenerate game where every day is the same exact number of fights (usually one), which has its own major issue.