Thinking about non-standard resting

[PhoenixPhyre]

Note: the formal implementation details are described in this Homebrewing post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?617702-Scenic-Resting-(WIP-PEACH). This thread is for more general discussion about the core idea.

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.

How strongly do people feel about the idea that every long/short rest should be the same duration and should be tied to in-game time (ie 1 hour, 8 hours, 8 days, 5 minutes, whatever)?

My basic idea is to instead think about organizing my adventures into scenes, some short and some long. Scenes would be narrative pieces that all "go together" in some sense without significant narrative breaks or fast-forwarding. Basically whenever you drop out of pure narrative time into having people take and resolve actions would be part of a Scene. But with a threshold for significance--if you drop out to resolve a single door unlocking (with no other considerations) or a single trivial combat (for my groups that'd be anything Medium or below) and then go back to a long stretch of narrative time, that wouldn't count towards progress.

In order to take a mechanical rest (and gain any mechanical benefits), you have to make a certain amount of progress, measured in scenes. These rests would fit into the natural narrative break between scenes--if there isn't a break, those two things were part of the same scene already. But their duration would becapped at the normal lengths (1 hour/8 hours). So if a narrative break was 12 hours but they weren't ready for a long rest, they'd take 1 hour as a short rest and then move on. They could narratively rest a bunch of times between mechanical rests--a travel super-scene with three long scenes separated by several days of time would only be one long rest, but multiple overnight sleeping periods. Or they might have two long rests within a few hours, assuming they participated in some epic scenes in the middle.

How do people feel about this general idea? Not the specifics, necessarily, but the idea of using scene transitions/scene progress to gate mechanical benefits.

[Darth Credence]

I like the idea, and have already commented on the other thread that I found first. I think that it works well when the people are out in the field, but I wouldn't want to cap the rest if they can go to an inn or the like and actually rest. That would break immersion for me, and make it seem that the rule is there purely to make later combat harder - a good goal overall, but not in the specific case. Does that make sense?

[Unoriginal]

It would work, mechanically speaking. I personally wouldn't like it due to my tastes.

However, I really, really need to point out:


and instead promote player agency


This wont' happen.

Is the PCs winning the fight against the goons and then pursuing the fleeing BBEG in a chariot chase two scenes, or one? That's up to the DM. Is talking with the priest NPC a significative scene activating a rest or not important? That's up to the DM. It is the DM who decides what constitue a scene, when the scene end, when the scene is worth a rest, etc.

So, while your idea would work mechanically, it would not, and cannot, promote player agency in resting, as it literally remove their choice in the matter.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I like the idea, and have already commented on the other thread that I found first. I think that it works well when the people are out in the field, but I wouldn't want to cap the rest if they can go to an inn or the like and actually rest. That would break immersion for me, and make it seem that the rule is there purely to make later combat harder - a good goal overall, but not in the specific case. Does that make sense?

The idea is that if they're in the middle of their "Adventuring Day", the DM should design it so that simply being at an inn isn't a guarantee of a long period of safety. Bar brawls. Thieves in the night. A fire in town. A hue and cry. Etc. So the players can expect "ok, we just took a long rest and had a major scene. So we should expect more things to happen, we're not done yet".

Of course, the needs of the narrative are paramount. One big way is if they're coming back and expecting a long period of downtime such as between two campaign arcs. If it's going to be in-game weeks or more before the next scene...just go ahead and give them the rest so they start out fresh for the next arc.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It would work, mechanically speaking. I personally wouldn't like it due to my tastes.

However, I really, really need to point out:



This wont' happen.

Is the PCs winning the fight against the goons and then pursuing the fleeing BBEG in a chariot chase two scenes, or one? That's up to the DM. Is talking with the priest NPC a significative scene activating a rest or not important? That's up to the DM. It is the DM who decides what constitue a scene, when the scene end, when the scene is worth a rest, etc.

So, while your idea would work mechanically, it would not, and cannot, promote player agency in resting, as it literally remove their choice in the matter.

Narrative breaks should be pretty obvious. They have been in most of my games, at least. If you'd be tempted to put a Spongebob announcer "Several [minutes|hours|days|weeks] later" into a narrative, that's a narrative break. If they're in the middle of doing a set of connected things, there's no break. The implementation thread has more specifics about what counts as a scene.

So they can (try to) manufacture a break by holing up in a dungeon and barring the door. They can flee (successfully) and break contact for a while. They can bug out of an adventure location and head back to town. Etc. Which gives them agency in two ways--they can choose (to some degree) to force a break, and they know about how long they have left in the adventuring day. So if they've had a long rest and then one big fight, they know that there's more coming. It lets them choose how to use their abilities and resources, knowing roughly (but not exactly) how much is left before they get a reset. That's what I mean about promoting agency with resources and rests.

[Torpin]

I use the meal times as wa y to get my players to short rest, ill ask things like "its not early afternoon, do you continue or break for lunch", "the sun will be down in a few hours, and your stomach has begun to rumble,do you push forward or take this chance to eat dinner"

[Unoriginal]

Narrative breaks should be pretty obvious. They have been in most of my games, at least. If you'd be tempted to put a Spongebob announcer "Several [minutes|hours|days|weeks] later" into a narrative, that's a narrative break. If they're in the middle of doing a set of connected things, there's no break. The implementation thread has more specifics about what counts as a scene.

So they can (try to) manufacture a break by holing up in a dungeon and barring the door. They can flee (successfully) and break contact for a while. They can bug out of an adventure location and head back to town. Etc. Which gives them agency in two ways--they can choose (to some degree) to force a break, and they know about how long they have left in the adventuring day. So if they've had a long rest and then one big fight, they know that there's more coming. It lets them choose how to use their abilities and resources, knowing roughly (but not exactly) how much is left before they get a reset. That's what I mean about promoting agency with resources and rests.

That's still removing the choice from the player, and such you are not promoting agency.

To put it in other terms: if I told you "you get two meals a day, I decide at what time they are, but you can try to convince me to give you a meal when you're hungry", would you consider it promoting your agency?

Also, your system is predicated on the fact there will be an automatic number of "big fights" or similarly important encounters in an "adventuring day". It is not a philosophy that promote agency, either, and it also is ridiculously limiting from a narrative standpoint. What about the times where it makes sense to have 10 dangerous encounters or more, for example? What if the PCs have to escape from a whole palace full of hostile Yuan-ti ?

You are trying to formalize a certain number of events in an amount of time decided by the DM. That is neither in service of the narrative, where such events are not predictable due to not knowing what the PCs will do in advance, and it is certainly not in service of the player agency.


Again, it will work mechanically, but it won't achieve what you want it to achieve.

[Man_Over_Game]

That's still removing the choice from the player, and such you are not promoting agency.

That was my take on it, too. The DM sees a problem with the players' choice, takes action to make sure it doesn't happen, in order to....promote party balance to make them happy? It's just a different style of toxicity.

I think what's important is giving players an expectation, as that means they're allowed to have a real choice. That's one of the benefits about having a strict time limit. But it doesn't also have to be strict. You could just say "Your team quickly assesses your wounds and fortifies your defenses in the enemy's armory. They still don't seem to know you're here after 20 or so minutes, so your team completes your Short Rest, impatient to get to work." Which more-or-less satisfies the same thing that you're describing.

Put another way, only ever break player expectation in their favor. Start with being the too-strict, combat-as-war, "You won't live to see level 5" DM, and then never bring up the fact that none of your monsters ever rolled a crit in 30 sessions...

[PhoenixPhyre]

That's still removing the choice from the player, and such you are not promoting agency.

To put it in other terms: if I told you "you get two meals a day, I decide at what time they are, but you can try to convince me to give you a meal when you're hungry", would you consider it promoting your agency?

Also, your system is predicated on the fact there will be an automatic number of "big fights" or similarly important encounters in an "adventuring day". It is not a philosophy that promote agency, either, and it also is ridiculously limiting from a narrative standpoint. What about the times where it makes sense to have 10 dangerous encounters or more, for example? What if the PCs have to escape from a whole palace full of hostile Yuan-ti ?

You are trying to formalize a certain number of events in an amount of time decided by the DM. That is neither in service of the narrative, where such events are not predictable due to not knowing what the PCs will do in advance, and it is certainly not in service of the player agency.


Again, it will work mechanically, but it won't achieve what you want it to achieve.

Let me take a step back here, because I think I've miscommunicated what I mean by a scene. I'll do that below.


That was my take on it, too. The DM sees a problem with the players' choice, takes action to make sure it doesn't happen, in order to....promote party balance to make them happy? It's just a different style of toxicity.

I think what's important is giving players an expectation, as that means they're allowed to have a real choice. That's one of the benefits about having a strict time limit. But it doesn't also have to be strict. You could just say "Your team quickly assesses your wounds and fortifies your defenses in the enemy's armory. They still don't seem to know you're here after 20 or so minutes, so your team completes your Short Rest, impatient to get to work." Which more-or-less satisfies the same thing that you're describing.

Put another way, only ever break player expectation in their favor. Start with being the too-strict, combat-as-war, "You won't live to see level 5" DM, and then never bring up the fact that none of your monsters ever rolled a crit in 30 sessions...

The idea would be that this is communicated up front to set expectations.

But let me take a conceptual step back here.

I have two basic things I want to happen.

First, I want to be able to run games that, for narrative reasons, have greatly varying internal tempos of action. Stretches of time where not much happens (but not downtime per se), such as traveling between points, occasionally dropping out of narrative time into some form of action to set the scene (whether combat or not). Time when they're researching something and days may go by, but they're actually having to make decisions that may use up resources (and so have to be able to prioritize resources). This means that if I want attrition to actually matter, I should use something like the Gritty Realism resting rules (I hate that name, BTW). But at other times within the same campaign or even adventure, I want to be able to have a dungeon that narratively has no room for a 8-day (or even 8 hour) long rest, but is big enough that there's no way to clear it in one LR-worth of resources. Or sometimes even when they might have a minute or two (narratively) of rest and I want to keep the tempo up but let them rest so that difficulty doesn't go non-linear on me (or on them). Somewhere such that I'd like to use the Heroic resting rules. Which won't work at all in other circumstances. So I'd like to smoothly vary the duration of a mechanical rest between the endpoints, without actually having to jarringly context switch.

Second, I want to enforce a "you have to do something before you can rest" policy. One that encourages taking short rests but discourages the 5-minute working day. In a way that fits the narrative cleanly but doesn't necessarily tie it to arbitrary in-game clocks (such as "only one long rest in 24 hours"). No "ok, we sparred, so I can take another short rest" cheese.

As to the "escaping the yuan-ti" scenario, that sounds like a bunch of running battles, interspersed with times when contact is (or can be) broken. They could just hammer straight through, turning it all into one big long scene. Or they could look for opportunities and ways to break combat and hide for a few minutes, forcing a narrative break so they can take a rest. Each scene may be multiple small encounters, one big encounter, a complex trap, several "ability challenges" (including social stuff) or some mixture. There has to be a threshold for what counts as a scene, but it doesn't have to be very high. And I'm open to putting informal circuit breakers in place, so that one really really long scene can count for several normal ones. I'm not particularly tied to an implementation, but it's the concept that I find interesting.

And every adventure I've ever run or played in naturally fell into a rhythm of bursts of action separated by stretches of narrative time. These bursts were of varying lengths (in in-game time) and so were the narrative sections, and their frequency wasn't constant at all. Which means that if you tie an Adventuring Day (the mechanical concept) to the elapsed rest time, you got huge swings, often in unpredictable and un-fun ways. Times when you couldn't take a short rest (despite desperately needing to) because there was only 35 minutes available. Or times when the bursts of action came infrequently enough that there really was no point in conserving resources because you'd get them all back before the next one. It makes planning a pain and makes it so players really can't control or predict anything and so can't make meaningful decisions about resource burn rates. Which frequently means either burning dry early (because you had no way of predicting that this was going to be the super-max day) or trying to conserve and dragging things out...and going to bed with a full set of wasted spell slots or hit dice. That's just no fun for me.

[Man_Over_Game]

Let me take a step back here, because I think I've miscommunicated what I mean by a scene. I'll do that below.



The idea would be that this is communicated up front to set expectations.

But let me take a conceptual step back here.

I have two basic things I want to happen.

First, I want to be able to run games that, for narrative reasons, have greatly varying internal tempos of action. Stretches of time where not much happens (but not downtime per se), such as traveling between points, occasionally dropping out of narrative time into some form of action to set the scene (whether combat or not). Time when they're researching something and days may go by, but they're actually having to make decisions that may use up resources (and so have to be able to prioritize resources). This means that if I want attrition to actually matter, I should use something like the Gritty Realism resting rules (I hate that name, BTW). But at other times within the same campaign or even adventure, I want to be able to have a dungeon that narratively has no room for a 8-day (or even 8 hour) long rest, but is big enough that there's no way to clear it in one LR-worth of resources. Or sometimes even when they might have a minute or two (narratively) of rest and I want to keep the tempo up but let them rest so that difficulty doesn't go non-linear on me (or on them). Somewhere such that I'd like to use the Heroic resting rules. Which won't work at all in other circumstances. So I'd like to smoothly vary the duration of a mechanical rest between the endpoints, without actually having to jarringly context switch.

Second, I want to enforce a "you have to do something before you can rest" policy. One that encourages taking short rests but discourages the 5-minute working day. In a way that fits the narrative cleanly but doesn't necessarily tie it to arbitrary in-game clocks (such as "only one long rest in 24 hours"). No "ok, we sparred, so I can take another short rest" cheese.

As to the "escaping the yuan-ti" scenario, that sounds like a bunch of running battles, interspersed with times when contact is (or can be) broken. They could just hammer straight through, turning it all into one big long scene. Or they could look for opportunities and ways to break combat and hide for a few minutes, forcing a narrative break so they can take a rest. Each scene may be multiple small encounters, one big encounter, a complex trap, several "ability challenges" (including social stuff) or some mixture. There has to be a threshold for what counts as a scene, but it doesn't have to be very high. And I'm open to putting informal circuit breakers in place, so that one really really long scene can count for several normal ones. I'm not particularly tied to an implementation, but it's the concept that I find interesting.

And every adventure I've ever run or played in naturally fell into a rhythm of bursts of action separated by stretches of narrative time. These bursts were of varying lengths (in in-game time) and so were the narrative sections, and their frequency wasn't constant at all. Which means that if you tie an Adventuring Day (the mechanical concept) to the elapsed rest time, you got huge swings, often in unpredictable and un-fun ways. Times when you couldn't take a short rest (despite desperately needing to) because there was only 35 minutes available. Or times when the bursts of action came infrequently enough that there really was no point in conserving resources because you'd get them all back before the next one. It makes planning a pain and makes it so players really can't control or predict anything and so can't make meaningful decisions about resource burn rates. Which frequently means either burning dry early (because you had no way of predicting that this was going to be the super-max day) or trying to conserve and dragging things out...and going to bed with a full set of wasted spell slots or hit dice. That's just no fun for me.

I don't mean "surprise your players", I just mean that it's taking that decision away from them. They can try, but if one of the perks is that you can veto them, then I'd probably say that's not something they should rely on.



Could try what I do:

Jack up rest times to 6 and 24 hours, then add Short Rests between fights as an AdrenalineRush that costs the Player Exhaustion if they opt into it.

Short Rests generally don't "recharge" as much as "sustain", so players aren't "accidentally" recharging before they choose to when they go to bed, and they can just gather info in town for a day to fully rest, with Adrenaline Rush being an option to maintain the action as-needed.

Really, the only thing a DM needs to throttle is making sure the players don't get too many Long Rests, and that they're able to get in a Short Rest between a bunch of encounters. The players can decide how everything else works, which is what the time limits are for.

The only reason players need Short Rests is because of an expectation that the DM has more in store that day, so it makes sense for the DM to have more control over it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I don't mean "surprise your players", I just mean that it's taking that decision away from them. They can try, but if one of the perks is that you can veto them, then I'd probably say that's not something they should rely on.


The actual implementation is that short rests are automatic. No veto there. And long rests can only be vetoed if they're trying to rest in an unsafe area. Other than that, they just happen. And the contract is that if they're in a reasonably safe[0] area and have reached an appropriate level of scenes, I won't interrupt them. And they can get away with a long rest (under the right fictional circumstances) in a matter of in-game minutes. So you could have a long rest (in the yuan-ti temple scenario) where they manage to elude their pursuers and barricade themselves into a disused storage room for 10 minutes. If they try that right off the bat or try to game it, they'll get guards knocking on the door. So they can push onward if they want, or if they choose to just bull ahead, they'll miss out on rest opportunities.

It's absolutely not designed to be less forgiving than the current one--the reverse in fact. It's all about expectations and clueing the players in on the natural flow of the narrative (which, as I said, already breaks down into these "scenes" pretty naturally, whether designed that way or spontaneously). It's an attempt to take lessons from FATE, which codifies the nature of a "scene" and all stress resets at the end of one (equivalent to a full heal, minus any consequences taken). Basically, an attempt to let the narrative control when things reset, not arbitrary numbers.




Jack up rest times to 6 and 24 hours, then add Short Rests between fights as an AdrenalineRush that costs the Player Exhaustion if they opt into it.



Exhaustion is really powerful. And decays super slow. It's rare that a short rest is worth a level of Exhaustion, and two is basically a death sentence. So this is a choice that isn't really a choice--it's like offering a choice of an obviously poisoned drink to someone who is thirsty. It's the illusion of a choice, but it's almost always the wrong choice. It's basically, as I see it, a trap option that one should rarely, if ever, take.

And I want to be able to take long rests in dungeons when it makes sense. Because I'd love to have a large dungeon, larger than can be cleared in a single Adventuring Day's worth of resources, but the narrative says that there's no chance that there's a spot safe enough to rest for 8 hours including 6 hours of sleep. Even with watches set. So sometimes, I'd like to be using Heroic resting (5 minutes/1 hour). But other times I want to use Gritty Realism (8 hours/7 days). And most of the time, the standard resting rules (1 hour/8 hours) make sense. I could just explicitly switch back and forth between the three, but that's jarring in game play and hard to keep track of for the players. So something that transparently lets them know how much of a rest they can get away with, while basically constantly handwaving the actual in-game time required, seems like just the ticket. Is this the implementation? Probably not.

[Pex]

However you get your scene resting system to work, make sure players do get a Long Rest at no worse than once every other game session. That ratio is key to player fun. Players want to use their stuff and get it back. That's supposed to happen. It doesn't matter if a long rest is after 8 scenes, 8 hours, 8 days, 8 millenia in game world time. It takes players real world time, effort, and energy to play. The fun is in using their stuff along with the roleplay. If it takes forever in real world time to get it back they will be annoyed. The long rest can happen at the end of the second session to start fresh the next game session, but they get one.

[Unoriginal]

I think you're likely to be using a different definition of "narrative" than I. Would you mind defining what you mean by that?

To me combat is just as much part of the narrative as everything else.

[Hytheter]

Have you heard of 13th Age? That game's rest system is pretty blunt; too prescriptive for my tastes but it might be worth a look for you. The gist is that you get a rest after a specific number of encounters, or you can rest early and suffer a "campaign loss" which basically means you give something up in-fiction or the baddies advance their goals.

Personally though I find this to be immersion-breaking, especially when you're contriving reasons to prevent players from resting before they've "earned" it as you describe upthread.

[PhoenixPhyre]

However you get your scene resting system to work, make sure players do get a Long Rest at no worse than once every other game session. That ratio is key to player fun. Players want to use their stuff and get it back. That's supposed to happen. It doesn't matter if a long rest is after 8 scenes, 8 hours, 8 days, 8 millenia in game world time. It takes players real world time, effort, and energy to play. The fun is in using their stuff along with the roleplay. If it takes forever in real world time to get it back they will be annoyed. The long rest can happen at the end of the second session to start fresh the next game session, but they get one.

This I definitely agree with. Since my sessions tend to be a bit shorter than most (2-3 hours instead of 3-4 for raisins), it's often about 1 LR : 2 sessions.


I think you're likely to be using a different definition of "narrative" than I. Would you mind defining what you mean by that?

To me combat is just as much part of the narrative as everything else.

The narrative is what I'd normally call the story, except that some people are allergic to that term. The entire set of events going on. So combat is part of the narrative.

But there are some related terms I may be being sloppy with.

Narrative Time is when the DM is narrating events, not actually tracking details. So "As you walk through the forest for a few days..." kind of narration is working in narrative time, while dealing at the individual Action level is not. If they're researching something and I say "ok, so after a few days of research, you discover that...", it's been in narrative time. Combat is never narrative time, neither are complex traps or most concerted challenges. In my games, there tends to be a pretty clear pattern of bursts of connected action, where the players are doing things and the "DM narrates" part of the basic cycle is very short and things are changing rapidly, connected by stretches of narrative time. Those stretches may be in-game minutes (rarely), hours (frequently), or even days (especially while traveling through safe territory). But what connects them is that there's little of interest going on and the characters are working on some set task that just takes a while to show results. And where the exact details are pretty irrelevant to everyone. Players can always break in and change what they're doing here, even if that means backtracking a bit. It's just my way of skipping over the boring "and nothing happens for another hour on watch" or "it's been 3 days without a random encounter, because you're in totally peaceful territory moving from one interesting place to a different interesting place" bits that inevitably come up.

Narrative Breaks are breaks in the action. Places where we switch from the tight action-resolution loop to the much looser (in terms of in-game time) narrative time.

Does that make my meaning more clear?


Have you heard of 13th Age? That game's rest system is pretty blunt; too prescriptive for my tastes but it might be worth a look for you. The gist is that you get a rest after a specific number of encounters, or you can rest early and suffer a "campaign loss" which basically means you give something up in-fiction or the baddies advance their goals.

Personally though I find this to be immersion-breaking, especially when you're contriving reasons to prevent players from resting before they've "earned" it as you describe upthread.

I don't like tying it specifically to encounters--my current (faulty) implementation ties scenes to any of
* encounters
* complex traps
* ability-check challenges of any kind

with (rough) guidelines for how many of what kind "counts". The floor here is designed to be pretty minimal--I want there to have been a chance for people to use resources (even if they chose not to). So while one Easy encounter isn't enough, a decent complex trap might be. I want to discourage both hoarding resources (especially of the short rest variety) by making it clear that they'll get opportunities to rest and pretty soon, and mag-dumping alpha strikes on the first challenge of the day (because they know that there will be more before they can get a long rest). And enable me to plan my sessions/adventures explicitly in terms of scenes, so that I'm making sure that there are good opportunities for them to rest so that the tempo and flow is right and so that the difficulty is predictable.

That being said, I certainly err on the side of easy and forgiving. Because I'm generally more interested in what happens when they win (and how they win) than if they win. I'm not pushing for challenge here, but trying to find a balance between "can always alpha strike everything" and "things dragging because no one's willing to use any big resources for fear of 27 more combats before a long rest." It's more about predictability than difficulty.

[Man_Over_Game]

The actual implementation is that short rests are automatic. No veto there. And long rests can only be vetoed if they're trying to rest in an unsafe area. Other than that, they just happen. And the contract is that if they're in a reasonably safe[0] area and have reached an appropriate level of scenes, I won't interrupt them. And they can get away with a long rest (under the right fictional circumstances) in a matter of in-game minutes. So you could have a long rest (in the yuan-ti temple scenario) where they manage to elude their pursuers and barricade themselves into a disused storage room for 10 minutes. If they try that right off the bat or try to game it, they'll get guards knocking on the door. So they can push onward if they want, or if they choose to just bull ahead, they'll miss out on rest opportunities.

It's absolutely not designed to be less forgiving than the current one--the reverse in fact. It's all about expectations and clueing the players in on the natural flow of the narrative (which, as I said, already breaks down into these "scenes" pretty naturally, whether designed that way or spontaneously). It's an attempt to take lessons from FATE, which codifies the nature of a "scene" and all stress resets at the end of one (equivalent to a full heal, minus any consequences taken). Basically, an attempt to let the narrative control when things reset, not arbitrary numbers.



Exhaustion is really powerful. And decays super slow. It's rare that a short rest is worth a level of Exhaustion, and two is basically a death sentence. So this is a choice that isn't really a choice--it's like offering a choice of an obviously poisoned drink to someone who is thirsty. It's the illusion of a choice, but it's almost always the wrong choice. It's basically, as I see it, a trap option that one should rarely, if ever, take.

And I want to be able to take long rests in dungeons when it makes sense. Because I'd love to have a large dungeon, larger than can be cleared in a single Adventuring Day's worth of resources, but the narrative says that there's no chance that there's a spot safe enough to rest for 8 hours including 6 hours of sleep. Even with watches set. So sometimes, I'd like to be using Heroic resting (5 minutes/1 hour). But other times I want to use Gritty Realism (8 hours/7 days). And most of the time, the standard resting rules (1 hour/8 hours) make sense. I could just explicitly switch back and forth between the three, but that's jarring in game play and hard to keep track of for the players. So something that transparently lets them know how much of a rest they can get away with, while basically constantly handwaving the actual in-game time required, seems like just the ticket. Is this the implementation? Probably not.

Exhaustion IS powerful, but it goes away after a full night's rest, and the first stack only imposes Disadvantage on Ability Checks (usually skills), with the second only halving Speed (and you rarely need to consistently move more than 15 feet per round).

With this setup, you can afford one "Adrenaline Rush" per day without it stacking. Assuming you have one encounter between each Short Rest, you're looking at a setup of:


Long Rest
Encounter 1
Short Rest (Adrenaline Rush)
Encounter 2
Short Rest (Sleep)
Encounter 3
Short Rest (Adrenaline Rush)
Encounter 4
Long Rest


Which basically equals 4 encounters, 3 Short Rests, 1 Long Rest, over 2 days, and only suffering Exhaustion 1 for the last encounter/third of those days.

Plus, the Adrenaline Rush is something that the player has to opt into. A Rogue, ironically enough, has very little reason to take the Adrenaline Rush, so his skill checks will still stay potent while everyone else's will have more difficulty, which means you can actually implement several options for Adrenaline Rushes through a day, as it's always the players' choice to decide what's more valuable.

Would a 40 speed Monk choose to halve his speed for 3x as many Ki points in a day? I know I would!

And if the players take too much Exhaustion? Well, head to town, rest at night, get your Long Rest in after, and now you just healed away 2 Exhaustion stacks, which is what you'd probably expect a party of heroes to do after a hard day of constant fighting.

If you do feel that players should get a Long Rest in a dungeon, I feel like it'd be important to identify the source. Otherwise, you're tying their resources to the narrative, like a comic book, rather than the players' stories. They don't get to choose when they're weak or how, since you made that decision for the sake of what advances your expectation of the narrative.

And if there was an in-world reason for the players to get the Long Rest (like a healer or a magical fountain or something that's down there), then I feel like the same could be done in almost any rest variant.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If you do feel that players should get a Long Rest in a dungeon, I feel like it'd be important to identify the source. Otherwise, you're tying their resources to the narrative, like a comic book, rather than the players' stories. They don't get to choose when they're weak or how, since you made that decision for the sake of what advances your expectation of the narrative.

And if there was an in-world reason for the players to get the Long Rest (like a healer or a magical fountain or something that's down there), then I feel like the same could be done in almost any rest variant.

Let's take two examples I ran into recently.

First was a high-level assault on an elemental fortress containing a big bad threatening to make a bigger badder. The narrative demands that this fortress be huge and with a bunch of creatures and things-that-have-to-happen to expose the big bad. Things the party had promised to do. So much so that there were roughly 2.5 full adventuring days in there and that was already with finding a narrative reason to have most of the place empty!. And the narrative and history had already demanded that the bbeg be a significant threat, and that killing her would awaken the bigger, badder threat (sacrifice bringing power is a major theme in my setting). So this whole thing was going to be capped off by two back-to-back more-than-deadly fights.

Furthermore, the bbeg had reinforcements. The party had allies to hold them off, but everyone knew (and it was obvious from the fiction) that they'd only be able to hold them off for a few hours at most. But removing the BBEG would also end that threat. So they were tightly time-boxed. Retreat was not an option--as this was a campaign capstone, it was succeed or die.

Second was a very tall tower (it had to be so that the top could stick up above this lake) with an object they were trying to retrieve at the bottom. Long enough that there's no way to fit it all into a single adventuring day, with the top levels having threats from outside (so going back and resting, even if that were an option for other reasons, would mean the top levels reset), and transport being provided by someone else who wasn't going to wait very long. So by its very nature, they needed more than 1 adventuring day worth of resources to do this. And changing any of those facts would mean radical changes in the underlying world--the lake had already been established as being quite deep (so the tower needs to be tall to stick up above water at all) and full of fish-folk and creatures, and the object had to be in the underground vaults (along with other things).

I ended up cheesing both of them by inserting a "boon provider" to give them an instant long rest for doing certain things. Basically putting a plot token they could use to get their resources back for the climactic fights. But it felt both in narrative and in prep like a total kludge. Like an obvious pity point, inserted so they didn't die. Which kicked off this whole thing. And doesn't solve the other side, which is having long stretches of in-game time with only an occasional scene, which makes those scenes have no challenge at all (since they're definitionally at full resources). So I'd like to hybridize the rest variants with a way of smoothly moving the "how long a rest takes" dial based on the tempo of the ongoing events. For me, tying "mechanical rests" into sleeping or other in-narrative actions has always felt a bit awkward. I mean I can make it work by altering the fundamental underpinnings of the world, but it already feels like a gamist break with anything really narrative. And it already causes immersion problems.

And as far as Exhaustion goes...getting disadvantage on all ability checks means that you're useless in anything out of combat unless you can cast a spell which just works. And a lot of things in combat (ie grapples are now either inescapable or pointless, depending on which side you're on). Which means that it reinforces the dichotomy between those who can only fight and those who can do other stuff just gets worse. And halved speed is really really really nasty in most of my fights. I try to avoid "you and him just stand there and hit each other". Ranged attackers, people Disengaging, forced movement, etc. Being stuck at 15'/round means that you're not going to get to the fight before it's over. Yay. Now you can't even fight, let alone do anything else. And only one level goes away on a Long Rest, by default. So those short rests? You're stuck with it until you can take a week off. Unless, of course, you've got Greater Restoration. Again, now the spellcasters are even more important. Yay. IMO, it's a total trap most of the time, with an occasional "if we don't, we lose". Which means that now you have to suck for a while. Like an enforced nerf bat.

[Man_Over_Game]

I ended up cheesing both of them by inserting a "boon provider" to give them an instant long rest for doing certain things. Basically putting a plot token they could use to get their resources back for the climactic fights. But it felt both in narrative and in prep like a total kludge. Like an obvious pity point, inserted so they didn't die. Which kicked off this whole thing. And doesn't solve the other side, which is having long stretches of in-game time with only an occasional scene, which makes those scenes have no challenge at all (since they're definitionally at full resources). So I'd like to hybridize the rest variants with a way of smoothly moving the "how long a rest takes" dial based on the tempo of the ongoing events. For me, tying "mechanical rests" into sleeping or other in-narrative actions has always felt a bit awkward. I mean I can make it work by altering the fundamental underpinnings of the world, but it already feels like a gamist break with anything really narrative. And it already causes immersion problems.

I think that might just be a fundamental weakness of 5e, and the fact that the classes are not balanced for the sake of encounter count or the length of Adventuring Days.


Physical labor is hard. Physical fighting is REALLY HARD. If you've ever watched a fight between two bruisers, they get winded FAST. Most fights are done in a minute or two. After 3, they're usually barely standing without some serious endurance training. Yet Martials have this assumption that because they don't pull from some artificial power, they have an endless energy supply? That seems silly.

And mages seem to pull from an endless energy supply, regardless of the source, who's limitation is...willpower? Mental endurance? Sorry, but being stressed out over a test is more easily recuperated than being so stiff after rest that your body can't move.

The reality is, it's a balance choice. We want people to be able to bend the universe to their will, but we obviously can't allow them to do it all of the time. So we add limitations. Of course, those that can't bend the universe still deserve something, so we make them able to do their stuff all of the time to compensate.

But I don't think that choice was a good one. I think following a similar model to 4e (equal numbers of at-will, Short Rest, and Long Rest powers for all classes) ensures that everyone is an equal at every table, regardless of how many encounters that table prefers, and it doesn't require any narrative gymnastics like "Fighters don't get tired but can still be Exhausted", or "Warlock need a moment to pray to their Patron for power, while Clerics don't for...reasons".



Because it seems like either the DM is messing with the narrative for player mechanics (We just restored all of our HP and spells in this tower after 6 hours of fighting? Why, because of how big the tower is?), or the players are messing with the narrative for their own mechanics (Let's get a Long Rest before we save the princess, she'll be fine for a day and the Paladin's out of slots).

[Unoriginal]

I know this is a post facto call from me, but personally I would have had allies come with the PCs in the dungeons and have them pull repeated "we'll hold those goons off, go for the boss!" moments as they progress, in-between encounters the PCs and allies do have to fight.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I know this is a post facto call from me, but personally I would have had allies come with the PCs in the dungeons and have them pull repeated "we'll hold those goons off, go for the boss!" moments as they progress, in-between encounters the PCs and allies do have to fight.

That's the sort of thing that would work in theory, but would have been a major fun-killer for this particular group. And that's the problem. I could bend the narrative and the rules a bit to help the group have fun, or I could stick with the rules and force something they wouldn't have liked. And it would have felt just as cheap, honestly.

And for the second scenario, they didn't have any allies except the (highly untrustworthy) pirates they hitched a ride with. Who had their own agendas, and couldn't be trusted to even know about the party's real intent.


I think that might just be a fundamental weakness of 5e, and the fact that the classes are not balanced for the sake of encounter count or the length of Adventuring Days.


Physical labor is hard. Physical fighting is REALLY HARD. If you've ever watched a fight between two bruisers, they get winded FAST. Most fights are done in a minute or two. After 3, they're usually barely standing without some serious endurance training. Yet Martials have this assumption that because they don't pull from some artificial power, they have an endless energy supply? That seems silly.

And mages seem to pull from an endless energy supply, regardless of the source, who's limitation is...willpower? Mental endurance? Sorry, but being stressed out over a test is more easily recuperated than being so stiff after rest that your body can't move.

The reality is, it's a balance choice. We want people to be able to bend the universe to their will, but we obviously can't allow them to do it all of the time. So we add limitations. Of course, those that can't bend the universe still deserve something, so we make them able to do their stuff all of the time to compensate.

But I don't think that choice was a good one. I think following a similar model to 4e (equal numbers of at-will, Short Rest, and Long Rest powers for all classes) ensures that everyone is an equal at every table, regardless of how many encounters that table prefers, and it doesn't require any narrative gymnastics like "Fighters don't get tired but can still be Exhausted", or "Warlock need a moment to pray to their Patron for power, while Clerics don't for...reasons".



Because it seems like either the DM is messing with the narrative for player mechanics (We just restored all of our HP and spells in this tower after 6 hours of fighting? Why, because of how big the tower is?), or the players are messing with the narrative for their own mechanics (Let's get a Long Rest before we save the princess, she'll be fine for a day and the Paladin's out of slots).

To be honest, intra-party balance is the least of my concerns here. The standard rules work well enough for my taste (despite some annoyances) for that purpose as long as you don't stagnate one way or another. As long as there's variance, it's good enough to put the balance issues into the noise. Or at least in my games, which do not push the limits whatsoever. It's more that I want to do epic things and epic fights (or other challenges) which will require the party to be full (or nearly full) on resources to survive. Without killing them. I want to be able to put them against harder things than they would otherwise, but still have "regular" adventuring days thrown in to the mix. Or exploring big complexes with no narrative plausibility of even taking an hour, let alone 8, to rest. While also being able to do things during lower-tempo moments that aren't cakewalks.

And as far as your spoiler, that doesn't jibe with my view at all. Magic is just as exhausting as swinging a sword. And for any of them, "basic" stuff should be (physically) draining at all. That's why they're action heroes. Instead, I've carefully built my setting's metaphysics so that the resources of all types are drawing on non-mundane forces. Anyone can try to disarm someone, but for a Battlemaster to do it and deal normal damage requires drawing on a reserve of fantastic energy. It's the same basic force that spells use, but very different implementation. Spells use a packet of internal energy[0] to excite a resonant cascade in the ambient magical field, imposing "aspects" onto the matter in the area. Non-casters use packets of internal energy (from the same source) to fuel their "beyond-the-mundane" powers. Rogues are special in that theirs involves very tiny quantities that can be replenished in real time. Everyone else requires some form of downtime for their souls to draw in energy and replace those reserves.

As a note, this also gives me an in-setting way of explaining why some rests are quicker than others. Having a higher density of anima (whether from ley lines, the presence of a mondo creature, the emotional energy of thousands of human sacrifices, or whatever) means that the souls can replenish their energies faster than in the sparse, lightly-touched wild-lands or in a city where lots of people are drawing on this field as well. Setting-wise, it means that different regions should, by setting constants, have different native "rest rates" in some fashion.

[0] This internal energy, packed into "bundles" or pools of discrete size and tied into specific output patterns (so you can't use a spell slot to use Channel Divinity, for instance), comes from the ambient magical field. But refilling them is not something easily done on the fly. It takes uninterrupted relaxation to fill even the shallow bundles, with the more complex ones taking concerted downtime (or high ambient anima density) to refill.

This same basic explanation is used for every limited, rest-restoring resource. Including magic items--they refill their charges through a sympathetic tap on the wielder's soul. That's the underlying fictional mechanism for attunement (and the limits thereof)--forging that bond with the item's source and sink of power, making it a (temporary) extension of the wielder's soul. Minor items that don't require attunement are effectively "charged" or "empowered" by the aura of the wielder.

[Unoriginal]

Question just for info: could either of the groups have gotten to the final encounter with ressources left?

As in, would they have died if they hadn't used all their ressources on previous encounters?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Question just for info: could either of the groups have gotten to the final encounter with ressources left?

As in, would they have died if they hadn't used all their ressources on previous encounters?

In principle, yes. Would it have been much tighter than I'd have liked? Yes.

The first example (level 14 or 15) had (from what I remember, can't find my notes right now):
* two mandatory/progress-blocking Hard encounters, plus anywhere between 0 and 6 easy/medium ones depending on exactly the route they took. IIRC they hit about 3-4 of them.
* an opportunity for a short rest in that section.
* A super-deadly, but "special" encounter. This one by design used a separate resource pool (basically they had full resources for it but reset to their prior state afterward) as somewhat of a "divine test".
* A Hard/Deadly encounter
* potentially a short rest, but that would be cutting the clock really close. They chose not to take one at this point.
* A Hard encounter with all their magic items disabled, so effectively a Deadly++ encounter.
* BBEG at 2x Deadly
* BiggerBEG at 2x Deadly

The last two were back to back (only about 10 in-game seconds apart). The middle Hard/Deadly one got them the boon to burn for a resource reset right before the BBEG by doing a favor for a major spirit (freeing her children). Technically they could have skipped that one, but they were gung-ho to do it because Giant Fuzzy Wolf Friend.

The total XP came to something like 2.5x a standard day. Something like 3 medium-XP Hards, 3 Mediums, a borderline Deadly, and two 2x Deadlies.

however, they did have significant magic items, so probably more like 1.5x what they could have done. As a side note, they were pretty much all LR classes (rogue, paladin, bard, barbarian). So giving more short rests really didn't do much for them beyond healing.

The second one...maybe. Much lower level party (4th level), no significant magic items and much lower optimization. Plus being underwater for a bunch of it. A ranger, land druid, sorcerer (who was only there for part of the time), and barbarian. So also pretty LR based.

* 2 Medium/borderline Hard encounters (one of which they skipped).
* One Hard encounter.
* A series of ability-check challenges (not much resource draining). Chance for short rest here.
* Three Medium/borderline Hard encounters, no chance to rest, but no risk of cross-pulls as long as they weren't stupid.
* Three Hard encounters back to back (effectively phases of a single boss fight). I did pull my punches a bit here because they were (unexpectedly) down a player.

So careful resource use could have gotten them through most if it, but really the barbarian would have been hurting the most here due to running low on rages or having to not rage for multiple Hard fights. Plus, these were kids so I wanted to play it safe.

[Unoriginal]

So if I understand correctly, the PCs could have succeeded against 2.5 times to 1.5 time the typical XP budget spread over several encounters without special long rest boon, had they rationed their ressources more and/or taken the short rest chances, but you personally thought they were cutting it too close and gave them more ressources?

And your solution is a system where the DM decides to give the PCs rests whenever deemed appropriate?


I have to reiterate that this really doesn't seem to be a question of player agency nor a solution that address player agency.

You obviously want the best for your players, PhoenixPhyre, and I find the amount of imagination, work and care you're putting in your DMing to be pretty awesome, but I really think you're misidentifying what your issue with the situation is.

[Martin Greywolf]

FATE does something similar to what you want here, where some things reset once a scene is finished - and a scene is defined much like a movie scene in narrative terms. Theoretically, you can do this in DnD no problem.

In practice, DnD is just not balanced around it. The relatively strict rules revolving around movement make DnD function more like an XCOM game, a tactical simulation, and this has some pretty deep consequences. Because of its simulationist nature, entire premise of DnD is revolved around some assumptions, and when PC resources refresh is just about the most important one - imagine an XCOM round where you restock some or all of your abilities after you kill every active alien.

The most obvious issue lies in spell duration being tracked more or less in real, actual time - Mage armor lasts for some hours, and many low level adventures, encounters and critters are designed with the assumption that a caster has it on (thus loosing a slot), or has some other source of protection that is roughly equal. Or take Find familiar that can be cast quickly if it's not a ritual, but at a cost of a slot. Play silly buggers with that, and you can get some... odd results. Things like wizards having a few more slots because their long duration buffs are still up.

All that aside, DnD works on the idea that it simulates reality more or less accurately, or with great degree of verisimilitude - a long rest is a long rest because you get to sleep. Take that away and start to lean more on the tropes and narratively defined breakpoints and you may alienate many players.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So if I understand correctly, the PCs could have succeeded against 2.5 times to 1.5 time the typical XP budget spread over several encounters without special long rest boon, had they rationed their ressources more and/or taken the short rest chances, but you personally thought they were cutting it too close and gave them more ressources?

And your solution is a system where the DM decides to give the PCs rests whenever deemed appropriate?


I have to reiterate that this really doesn't seem to be a question of player agency nor a solution that address player agency.

You obviously want the best for your players, PhoenixPhyre, and I find the amount of imagination, work and care you're putting in your DMing to be pretty awesome, but I really think you're misidentifying what your issue with the situation is.

I think you misunderstand. They might, with really lucky rolls and perfect tactics, have been fine. But it'd have been so far into the non-linear zone as it turned out that any roll could have been a TPK. Adding on to that, the monsters throughout the last half of that were entirely homebrew and fundamentally untested (beyond the basics). With mechanics that aren't well defined in normal CR terms.

And they'd have had (and said so when I discussed with them) much less fun if I'd tried to force it through without the rest. Because fundamentally, those big boss fights were opportunities to show off. And intentionally, and openly so. To go all cinematic and do epic things. Not so much to be extreme optimization challenges where every little thing counts. That's a fundamental play-style difference--my particular parties want different things than many do. Raw challenge isn't the issue here. It never has been.

I want people to feel free to use their big guns for things like that. But I also want them to feel that normally, they need to conserve things. And to know when they can and shouldn't (not can't, but shouldn't) go heavy. And, by default, PCs get rests whenever the DM says they do, just like anything else. The conditions appropriate for resting are entirely and almost exclusively in the DM's hand, because he makes the situations. If he puts a rest zone in there, there's one there. If not, there isn't.

For me, information is central to agency. The "standard" model has no agency, because it has no information. You can't know what's coming up, and your choices are "go back and fail your mission" or "press on and hope the DM built a rest opportunity into the flow". That's no choice at all, really. And you can't make informed choices.

Instead, I'm trying to promote (possibly with a poor implementation) information. The scenes are transparent--it's obvious to everyone when a scene is over. They know how much longer (roughly) until they'll be able to take each kind of rest. And can, if they wish, push onward without taking those opportunities. The entire point is that they'll (on average) have more short rest opportunities, and roughly the same number of long rest opportunities. And I can stop worrying about exactly how long my dungeons are and whether they'll be able to get through in one rest or not. They can make it 8 scenes or 3, and they'll generally have the same, stable, balanced flow of resources. It means that they now have the agency to choose how and when they use their resources, instead of a huge chunk of it being completely out of their hands.

[PhoenixPhyre]

FATE does something similar to what you want here, where some things reset once a scene is finished - and a scene is defined much like a movie scene in narrative terms. Theoretically, you can do this in DnD no problem.

In practice, DnD is just not balanced around it. The relatively strict rules revolving around movement make DnD function more like an XCOM game, a tactical simulation, and this has some pretty deep consequences. Because of its simulationist nature, entire premise of DnD is revolved around some assumptions, and when PC resources refresh is just about the most important one - imagine an XCOM round where you restock some or all of your abilities after you kill every active alien.

The most obvious issue lies in spell duration being tracked more or less in real, actual time - Mage armor lasts for some hours, and many low level adventures, encounters and critters are designed with the assumption that a caster has it on (thus loosing a slot), or has some other source of protection that is roughly equal. Or take Find familiar that can be cast quickly if it's not a ritual, but at a cost of a slot. Play silly buggers with that, and you can get some... odd results. Things like wizards having a few more slots because their long duration buffs are still up.

All that aside, DnD works on the idea that it simulates reality more or less accurately, or with great degree of verisimilitude - a long rest is a long rest because you get to sleep. Take that away and start to lean more on the tropes and narratively defined breakpoints and you may alienate many players.

I'm trying to bring in lessons from FATE here. That's the underlying mechanical inspiration.

I really really disagree that 5e (in particular) is trying to simulate anything, let alone reality. It already departs from simulationism so hard as to make that not a thing at all. It's trying to give a feel of being in an action or superhero movie. People doing cool things in cool environments. Reality has nothingvery little to do with it. And my players have a blast.

Since I'm rarely actually tracking time (except in short spurts when seconds count), they're already getting away with "shenanigans" as to durations. Since narrative breaks are rarely measured in seconds (and most often a few minutes), and since 5e durations are so abstracted already (1 round, 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours), you might as well rename those entirely. 1 round. 1 combat. 1 short scene. 1 Long scene. One Adventuring Day. 24 hours you can keep the same--tracking time at the level of days is still a thing, but shorter durations may not be. Is it a bit more powerful for mage armor? Sure. But I wasn't tracking that anyway, so....