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Greywander
2020-12-29, 05:52 PM
Recall seeing in someone else's homebrew that they had rules for taking a "vacation", essentially the gritty realism variant of a long rest. This gave me an idea for having a three-tiered rest system.

A short rest would become a break. Would there be much of a difference between a break taking 10 minutes vs. an hour?
I'm still debating on what a long rest would be called. I'm thinking either a snooze or just calling it a rest, and making the generic term "relaxing" instead of resting.
The week-long rest is then of course a vacation.

So now an ability could include a phrase such as, "You must finish a break before you may use this ability again." I'm also thinking that under this system, it might be interesting if spell slots of 6th level and higher require a vacation to get back. Also possibly 1st and 2nd level spell slots coming back on a break (though this does create some shenanigans with things like Cure Wounds).

Another thought I has was to create a set of generic resources that any class can use to power their abilities, which then come back at different tiers of rest. Taking the Battle Master's combat maneuvers and mashing it up with the Swords bard's blade flourishes, let's say that these resources take the form of dice. You have several tiers of dice, in differing amounts, that come back with different types of rest. Each ability that can be powered by these dice will specify how that die influences the ability (usually by adding to some roll you make as part of using the ability, or by boosting your save DC).

d4s can be used infinitely. Some abilities might not allow you to use them with d4s in order to prevent certain exploits (e.g. healing abilities).
d6s come back after a break, and you usually have, say, six of them.
d12s come back after a snooze, and you usually have, say, three of them.
d20s come back after a vacation, and you usually have only one of them.

The idea is that by using different dice, you can regulate the power of the ability, as well as how long you need to rest in order to recharge it. The downside is that using a universal resource for all of your abilities means that you'll be encouraged to only use the most optimal abilities. The way things are in the vanilla rules, even suboptimal abilities have their usefulness once your optimal abilities are exhausted.

There's tweaking that could be done to this system. You could mess around with the die sizes, or we could say that you always have three of each (except the infinite one), which makes sense since the length of rest required to refresh them should be sufficient that the number of dice don't need to be different.

It would be tricky to implement this into the existing rules, but I've been thinking about doing a pretty big overhaul and could possibly implement it there if it seems like a good idea. What do people think about this concept?

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-29, 07:43 PM
On creating more granular rests, that might work without too many changes (basically assigning things to recharge/be used on specific types of rests). A lot of little changes, but no huge overall structural changes.

On generic resources, you're looking at completely overhauling how all classes and all abilities within classes (at least those that use resources) work, plus encounter balance and such. It's basically 4e's AEDU system, but different and even more radical.

BerzerkerUnit
2020-12-30, 04:03 PM
My next campaign is going to have a few houserules to facilitate pacing and combat options for martial.

Rest wise:
Rests come in 5 flavors,

5, 15, 1 hour, long rough, long safe.

A 5 minute break is catching your breath, shaking negative conditions, drinking potions and tightening gear. This recovers abilities recovered on a short rest (maneuver dice, Ki, warlock slots etc). You get 1/day.

A 15 is much the same, but more likely to be interrupted, long enough for a ritual if the character doesn’t need a rest. You get 1/day.

1 hour breaks are same as standard rules and allow spending hit dice. You get 2/day if you can squeeze them in.

A long rough rest recovers abilities that recover on a long rest, and heals you up to 1/2 hp max, but does not restore hit dice or remove exhaustion.

A long safe rest recovers everything normally. Requires a haven of some sort, magnificent mansion and guards and wards are the first spells that provide such.

Tvtyrant
2020-12-30, 06:19 PM
I rather like the idea! 7-9 spells and other big effects would feel better as vacation powers. The other classes would probably need some, or casters need more stuff added to the middle rest at high levels, but it's a fun idea.

Kane0
2020-12-30, 10:01 PM
I’d call the really short one a ‘breather’

Deepbluediver
2020-12-31, 04:32 PM
I like where you are going with this, OP. A while back I read a short description of someone who was doing a more "gritty-realism" sort of inspired campaign setting where a "short rest" was overnight (formerly what a long-rest was) and a long-rest became a week. My first knee-jerk reaction as that I hated it, but I couldn't get it out of my mind and the more I thought about it the more it started to grow on me.

My biggest objection was, and still is, that I don't like a hard, multi-day cutoff for restoring a lot of stuff- it feels inorganic and arbitrary to me. And what happens if you get into fight half-way through your vacation? Do all the cooldowns reset? And what if you use different spell-slots on different days- then you have to be tracking lots of different timelines for when you get certain abilities or spellslots refreshed.
I'd rather rejigger things so that everything was keyed to restore or partially recover on an overnight rest, and revise total uses as appropriate.

For HP, it recovers at Level+Con (min 1) per day, like it did in 3.5 (technically, I don't think any group I ever joined stuck to that, especially since at the end of a day the healbot usually burned whatever spellslots they had left anyway). For spells I favor converting to some sort of spell-point system. Whether or not you're using that system for casting, you can say you get Level+CastingStat back per rest, and then convert them into whichever spellslots you prefer. And then we just have to decide how per-rest abilities work. For short-rest stuff recovering it overnight seems fair, and then for anything long-rest linked....that may take some case-by-case work. For anything where you have X uses per long rest, I'd say recover 1 use per night, and then for things that are multi-use per long rest you could have a 25%/33%/50%/whatever% chance to recover them each rest, however people thought it was fair.

Some revision of how many uses you get per day may be required, especially with scaling things as you got into higher levels, but I'd be OK with that.
At the end of the day though, a lot of it will come down to what sort of campaign you are running. If you are dungeon-delving every day, this sort of system may not work out as well. For my current campaign our group tends to spend a single day in frantic, back-to-back fights to the death, interspersed with long, uneventful treks through the wilderness (though of course with the ever-present danger of random encounters or GM-plot-twist :smallwink:), so this sort of system could make certain journeys more interesting.

One more thing that I hadn't considered before that the OP hit on, which I've just decided I really like, is the concept of a "rough rest" compared to a "good rest". Presumably spending a night slumming it in a ditch is not the same as spending a night in a comfy bed at an inn, with a home-cooked meal and possibly the company of the innkeepers comely daughter/son/other, etc. So maybe through in something like how a "good rest" restores double the normal amount of resources, etc, which gives players an incentive to stick around town and shell out the GP for the fantasy equivalent of a Hilton.

Saelethil
2021-01-03, 09:55 PM
The rest system I came up with for the campaign I'm running is effected by the conditions the characters are resting in. A Short Rest always requires 6 hours of sleep. Long rests are were it varies. If the characters are sleeping in safe, dry, beds, they can get a long rest with 2 days of minimal work. If they are safe and dry but they are camping or sleeping on the floor it takes 3 days. If the weather is rough a long rest takes a minimum of 4 days, potentially up to a week, which is 6 day in my homebrew world. I'm pretty sure that 5e was balanced for 4-6 encounters per long rest so it works nicely to give them a rough week and a relatively uneventful weekend as long as they don't get themselves into ridiculous situations.
There are various potions they have acquired which can grant them short or long rests in shorter periods of time but they are very rare so if they absolutely don't have time to rest they can move go without sleep but they don't know when they will find more of these potions and when/if they do, they know they will be extremely expensive.

Greywander
2021-01-04, 03:14 PM
Can anyone come up with a better name for the 8 hour rest? I like "break" (or even "breather") for the 1 hour rest, and "vacation" for the week long rest, but I just don't like the sound of "snooze". It just seems like an out of place name compared to the other two. It's like having a group of three people named Bob, Joe, and Zerezambellion the Destroyer. Or conversely, an adventuring party composed of Rinfandel, Tyruvian, and John.

I do think the three tiered rest system makes a lot of sense, and is part of the reason why why the gritty realism variant is even considered in the first place. Some abilities (notably high level spells) are just too powerful, and it's okay to be powerful, the problem is how freely these abilities can be used. Requiring a week of downtime to recover slots of 6th+ level would make you think a lot more carefully before using them. It would also increase the value of half or partial casters, or caster/noncaster multiclass builds, since high level spells are diminished in value. This could also introduce strategies where you provoke an enemy caster into using a high level spell days before you fight them so they'll still be down that slot.

Also, I kind of like the idea of a potion that gives you the benefits of a rest, but it would be more interesting if there were drawbacks. The simplest I can think of is that the potion does not remove exhaustion levels (but may suppress the effects of exhaustion for a short time, say, 1 hour), and also causes one exhaustion level. This means drinking too many can kill you, and will at least debilitate you for the rest of the day. It also occurs to me that short/long rest abilities are kind of like MP in a JRPG, so you could have the equivalent of an MP restoring potion that just refreshes short or long rest abilities (but doesn't count as a rest otherwise).

Tvtyrant
2021-01-04, 03:17 PM
Can anyone come up with a better name for the 8 hour rest? I like "break" (or even "breather") for the 1 hour rest, and "vacation" for the week long rest, but I just don't like the sound of "snooze". It just seems like an out of place name compared to the other two. It's like having a group of three people named Bob, Joe, and Zerezambellion the Destroyer. Or conversely, an adventuring party composed of Rinfandel, Tyruvian, and John.

I do think the three tiered rest system makes a lot of sense, and is part of the reason why why the gritty realism variant is even considered in the first place. Some abilities (notably high level spells) are just too powerful, and it's okay to be powerful, the problem is how freely these abilities can be used. Requiring a week of downtime to recover slots of 6th+ level would make you think a lot more carefully before using them. It would also increase the value of half or partial casters, or caster/noncaster multiclass builds, since high level spells are diminished in value. This could also introduce strategies where you provoke an enemy caster into using a high level spell days before you fight them so they'll still be down that slot.

Also, I kind of like the idea of a potion that gives you the benefits of a rest, but it would be more interesting if there were drawbacks. The simplest I can think of is that the potion does not remove exhaustion levels (but may suppress the effects of exhaustion for a short time, say, 1 hour), and also causes one exhaustion level. This means drinking too many can kill you, and will at least debilitate you for the rest of the day. It also occurs to me that short/long rest abilities are kind of like MP in a JRPG, so you could have the equivalent of an MP restoring potion that just refreshes short or long rest abilities (but doesn't count as a rest otherwise).

I would probably go Refresh, Rest, and Relax. When you take a Refresh you are essentially drinking something and having a sit, a Rest is something like a meal and a nights sleep, and a Relax is a vacation where you stop thinking about daily issues.