How do you want 5.5 to address the long-rest/short-rest balance?

[Elric VIII]

There's a thread on overall 5.5e changes, but I'd like to specifically talk about the rest mechanic. I see it as one of the most fundamental issues in class balance when you look at practical play. I'd really like to see something that addresses the reality that the 3x short rests per day assumption is not something that works in many games. But, they would need to make a system whereby the base mechanics of the classes wouldn't need a complete overhaul and people still could play games with that narrative assumption if they so choose.

The gritty realism option can almost do this, but my one experience with it was that we would just take a week off instead of a day off and it put a lot more pressure on the DM to create a constant ticking clock. There's a problem with the assumption that every DM is willing to do this and that every group has the type of dynamic that facilitates the creation of their own rule system. Looking at feats, we see that the optional rule tends to be the default assumption, but that's only because the option is a straight yes-or-no on feats. I imagine we'd see a bit more variety if there were multiple feat/ASI systems that balanced them differently, such as a feat/ASI alternation option or a 1-feat per character option, etc. Similarly, at least presenting a rules template with options to balance your short and long rest resources could go a long way towards creating levels of balance that fit each table.

I'm sure a lot of the posters here have invested enough time and effort in understanding the system to be able to create such house rules, but I doubt that's the norm. Having played 3.5 for years, I am experienced with the phenomenon of new players enjoying the system and simply assuming that the parts they do not enjoy are set in stone. Then, there's the knee-jerk reaction that having a personal list of house rules and tweaks is overly restrictive, especially with new groups or transient groups at your LGS; something printed by WotC will always have more weight than a house rule, regardless of its objective merit. Taking some of the onus of balancing off the shoulders of the DM is a good thing in my opinion.



I actually used a system in my games where instead of a normal short rest, I gave my players 3 "tokens" that they could cash in during any non-dangerous situation that gave them a short rest equivalent (and removed normal short rests). This let us play a more fast-paced game that was both easier to balance around the 5-minute adventuring day and had less narrative stress over the course of one long dungeon delve by not requiring them to just chill out in the enemy lair for an hour. Having an optional rule like this would smooth things out really nicely without requiring a fundamental shift in the baseline class mechanics.

How do others feel about the rest system and its derivative resources?

[MoiMagnus]

1. Put in the DMG some options on how to play without short rests (e.g. multiply by 3 the "resources per short rest" to obtain resources per long rests, and allow to convert one hit dice into HP at any moment for an action). Also put some more guidance for the GM so that they can determine when their playstyle is too "degenerate" and they should get rid of short rests.

2. Rename "Gritty Realism" to "Slower pace campaign" or something like that. This variant is also well-suited for campaigns full of political intrigues with one assassination attempt every few days. It's not about being gritty (though it can be used for it), it's just about the timescale being the week rather than the day.

3. Acknowledge in the DMG that some classes will be stronger than others depending on the pacing of the campaign, and give guidance on how to handle it.

[Segev]

I've been tinkering privately with a system that justifies "gritty realism" (not that I find it gritty or realistic, but it's a name that identifies a system) for long-term exploration type stuff, and the more standard rules for dungeon-crawling.

Essentially, getting a long rest requires some measure of controlled civilization. At a minimum, a "base camp." Such things take roughly one week to establish, possibly with a skill check or a kit or the like.

Without that, your overnight rests are "short rests." If you can find a village to stay in, an inn to rent a room from, or have an established "base camp" site you've set up for at least medium-term lodgings, you can get a long rest from an overnight sleep.

I'm toying with two ideas for 1-hour short rests: one is that you can enjoy their benefits if you've had a long rest within 24 hours. Simple enough: first day out from your last truly good night's sleep, you refresh easily. After that, you're going to need all night just to recover as much as you used to with a 1-hour rest, at least until you can find civilization.

The other idea is to tie it to food: short resting with a half day's worth of rations gets you 1 hour short rests. This adds a price tag in rations to your short rests, but nothing you weren't already spending, in theory. I've got some rudimentary "fullness" rules that essentially make eating more than a day's rations in one day risk making you sick and not get any short rest benefits from it.

New racial traits for being able to handle more food, with or without a price of NEEDING more food, special food items that provide better benefits or are less filling but still grant a short rest in an hour, or even magical (or just exceptional) potions, drinks, or the like that give a short rest in 10 minutes all become possibilities to consider adding to this pile.

[Saelethil]

2. Rename "Gritty Realism" to "Slower pace campaign" or something like that. This variant is also well-suited for campaigns full of political intrigues with one assassination attempt every few days. It's not about being gritty (though it can be used for it), it's just about the timescale being the week rather than the day.

This. I use a variant of GR and I feel like it is a much better fit for more narrative focused games. It also has the benefit of reigning in some of the more powerful LR classes while giving a boost to SR classes.

[Zhorn]

I'm favouring Slow Natural Healing for my current game. The timing shift of Gritty Realism bothered me, but just cutting out the full heal on long rests worked fine for my games.
From full resources, doing a dungeon crawl, long adventuring day, or whatnot with multiple short rests works as is in a vanilla game, but as you don't heal to full on long rests and the long rest only recovers half your hit dice; multiple days adventuring becomes successively more dangerous or taxing on resources to top up to full as you'll generally burn through hit dice faster than you recover them.

Additionally I've got a house rule that a short rest requires the expenditure of a least one hit dice (just to eliminate the cheese of unlimited short rests).

Like Segev I've played about with food as a mechanic. Currently rations when eaten as part of at least one hour's rest recover 1d4 hp.
Similarly using a healers kit as part of at least one hour's rest recovers your medicine modifier in hp.

My players are currently being very proactive in making sure they have food for journeys and everyone has a healer's kits before dungeon delving.

[Dienekes]

Make Short Rests 10 minutes, with the expectation that this is usually happens (but not necessarily will in situations like trying flee) after every fight. Rebalance resource distribution accordingly.

Have the calculations that Short Rest classes should roughly run out of a differing resource such as hit points at about the time Long Rest classes run out of spells.

[Intregus182]

Make Short Rests 10 minutes, with the expectation that this is usually happens (but not necessarily will in situations like trying flee) after every fight. Rebalance resource distribution accordingly.

Have the calculations that Short Rest classes should roughly run out of a differing resource such as hit points at about the time Long Rest classes run out of spells.

This is how my table has been doing rests for years and we like it!

[Lokishade]

They should just throw away the concept of Hit Points representing luck in avoiding fatal blows or being some kind of silly "dodge energy". In every RPG ever, nobody ever batted an eye when they saw you shrugging off a sword to the face. There never was a problem with gaining superhuman strength in an RPG because nobody ever complained getting what they paid for.

Those who want realism play DnD at lower levels and those who want reality warping superheroes play it at high levels. There's something for everybody here.

So, with that out of the way, I think all healing based on 5e's hit dice should be justified with a use of the healer's kit, which should require downtime. You're not supposed to run a trauma ward with spit and dirty fingers. And when you run out of Hit Dice, healing gives you levels of exhaustion because you can't take it anymore.

Long rests should let you choose between healing one level of exhaustion or your Hit Dice. Because being completely refreshed with only one good night's sleep is just absurd. Injuries require medical attention and weeks of recovery. Again, you shouldn't escape the need of a healer's kit. If left untreated, your wounds should close down at the rate of 1 HP per unspent Hit Die during a long rest.

I would create a use for herbology. Like cataplasms that restore one Hit Die of healing and herbal teas that make you more resilient towards diseases.

And if you want to know what to do with diseases, make them give you levels of exhaustion based on their severity. At the beginning of a long rest (or the end of the day if no rest it taken), make a constitution saving throw and suffer the consequences upon failure. You could stat many diseases, with varying DCs and durations. They could be contagious or not. A mild one should be shrugged off with a missed night's sleep. A severe one should be life threatening.

There could be poisons that work that way too and many assassination attempts could be disguised as unfortunate illnesses.

[Kuulvheysoon]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.

[Christew]

The other idea is to tie it to food: short resting with a half day's worth of rations gets you 1 hour short rests. This adds a price tag in rations to your short rests, but nothing you weren't already spending, in theory. I've got some rudimentary "fullness" rules that essentially make eating more than a day's rations in one day risk making you sick and not get any short rest benefits from it.

New racial traits for being able to handle more food, with or without a price of NEEDING more food, special food items that provide better benefits or are less filling but still grant a short rest in an hour, or even magical (or just exceptional) potions, drinks, or the like that give a short rest in 10 minutes all become possibilities to consider adding to this pile.
I used a version of this to play up wilderness survival in RotF. Layered in some exhaustion stuff too.

Tough Heals
Going from dying to conscious without being stabilized incurs one level of exhaustion

Tough Meals
- Normal: SR requires ½ ration, LR requires 1 ration: PHB resting applies
- Subsistence: SR requires ¼ ration, LR requires ½ ration: SR can only heal 1 HD, LR does not restore HD or remove exhaustion
- Starving: No rations: No healing, LR incurs one level of exhaustion

[JonBeowulf]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.

Yep, this. My players and I really liked that mechanic, and you're right, it will take a lot of rebalancing of SR abilities. I have no idea how they'd sort out ki or sorcery points or maneuver dice.

[Elric VIII]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.


Yep, this. My players and I really liked that mechanic, and you're right, it will take a lot of rebalancing of SR abilities. I have no idea how they'd sort out ki or sorcery points or maneuver dice.


Make Short Rests 10 minutes, with the expectation that this is usually happens (but not necessarily will in situations like trying flee) after every fight. Rebalance resource distribution accordingly.

Have the calculations that Short Rest classes should roughly run out of a differing resource such as hit points at about the time Long Rest classes run out of spells.

Minimizing the amount of rewriting/retooling class abilities is the main reason behind the token option. It prevents the crazy nova ability of just multiplying them by 3, and it becomes close enough to per-encounter while still having some scarcity.




I really like the idea of tying healing and resources to food and basic survival routine. Although it would need some consideration of city-based or civilization heavy campaigns.

[Atranen]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.

I got the feeling that this was what they wanted, but were afraid of porting anything from 4E due to the bad reception it had.

[Stangler]

I think short rest abilities should be per combat and proficiency times per day.

Short rest use of HP dice should require time with each hour allowing prof bonus worth of HP being used.

[Segev]

I really like the idea of tying healing and resources to food and basic survival routine. Although it would need some consideration of city-based or civilization heavy campaigns.

My personal solution would be to consider city-based campaigns will happen on the "dungeon" time scale. And you may not need rations, but still need to stop at the tavern for lunch, for example.

[strangebloke]

There's enough guidance on how to work around this in the DMG itself (and even more elsewhere) that IMO if you haven't figured out a way at your own table already you probably don't really care.

But sure. Just make 10 minute SRs and 8 hour LRs the norm. Works fine.

Alternately Long Rests can only happen in between adventures. "You can only rest when there are no enemies about" seems pretty easy as a plain-language rule.

[Segev]

There's enough guidance on how to work around this in the DMG itself (and even more elsewhere) that IMO if you haven't figured out a way at your own table already you probably don't really care.

But sure. Just make 10 minute SRs and 8 hour LRs the norm. Works fine.

Alternately Long Rests can only happen in between adventures. "You can only rest when there are no enemies about" seems pretty easy as a plain-language rule.

Er, I think you're being a bit unfair when you say "you don't care if you've not found a solution." There actually isn't one in the DMG that alleviates the "long-term exploration" vs "dungeon-scale" timing needs.

[Hael]

I dont think they can change too much here, given that a lot of classes and class powers depend on the current implementation. For instance a Genie warlock feature provides a 10 min SR. Spell like catnap would need to be changed. Etc

I do think they could provide an alternate ruleset and some sort of scaling options for a DM to use. Like you can take a SR characters resources and multiply them by 3 for a campaign that only does one or two fights per LR.

Currently i’ve been playing at a new table that does a lot of fight, SR, fight, SR, fight etc.. But i’ve also been at tables that do one or two combats per day with no SR at all. My usual table tends to follow the DMG more closely, so yea theres a pretty big class power shift that takes place.

[Aimeryan]

I would just lose Short Rests altogether.

Long Rests can be tied to natural sleep and the daily cycle, and a lot can be expected to change day to day (goblins discover the results of your previous excursion and flee, taking the treasure/captives/whatever with them), so managing abuse here is a lot easier and it is more obvious to both players and DMs on when a Long Rest should be taken.

Short Rests are roughly meant to occur two times between Long Rests, however, there is nothing to tie this to. It becomes very frustrating to both players and DM for this to occur as the balance suggests.

Furthermore, the resources Short Rests are meant to recover I would much rather recovered between and in encounters, Tome Of Battle style. I would change Warlock to using Spell-Like Abilities, and I would give maneuvers to martials. Balance as appropriate.

[strangebloke]

Er, I think you're being a bit unfair when you say "you don't care if you've not found a solution." There actually isn't one in the DMG that alleviates the "long-term exploration" vs "dungeon-scale" timing needs.

These problems only show up when there's a consistent pattern of every adventuring day being way on one extreme side. Sometimes there is just one boss fight in the day, and everyone has full resources for it. The Paladin does well there, good for him. Sometimes you have a deep dark dungeon that goes on for like 7 encounters in a single day, and the druid does really well there. Good for her. Sometimes you have a wartime narrative where the characters are getting in multiple skirmishes a day with the enemy, and the monk does really well there. Good for her.

Under Gritty rules, a string of one-encounter days looks like the wartime narrative. The long dark dungeon is impossible but not everyone runs those. You can still do shorter dungeons without deviating from gritty rest rules. Four encounters without a short rest is perfectly achievable.

Then if you REALLY want to do dungeon crawling, you go heroic and just go-go-go-go all day.

So you just pick whichever of the three describes your average day, and run with that.

It works pretty well.

[ProsecutorGodot]

There's enough guidance on how to work around this in the DMG itself (and even more elsewhere) that IMO if you haven't figured out a way at your own table already you probably don't really care.

But sure. Just make 10 minute SRs and 8 hour LRs the norm. Works fine.

Alternately Long Rests can only happen in between adventures. "You can only rest when there are no enemies about" seems pretty easy as a plain-language rule.

I think we've had enough recent discussion to thoroughly disprove the idea that "if I can fix it, it isn't broken" is any good. Just because we can adjust resting on a table to table basis doesn't undercut the fact that frequency of rests is a major factor in several classes being seen as "weak" or "strong".

My vote would be on shorter short rests though, the only reason they go so underutilized in my own experience is that 1 hour is at just the sweet spot for a player to feel like time is being wasted whether they feel it can be extended to an 8 hour long rest or ignored until it is time to long rest.

The other part - which should be front, center, bolded and screamed at the DM - is that you only benefit from one long rest in a 24 hour period. This restriction is an important incentive for short rest resources and healing. Of course this doesn't help the resting disparity in other aspects of the game, for example in travel based random encounters where the character with the most powerful long rest resources is going to shine brightest as each encounter is typically contained in a single day.

[Suichimo]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.


Yep, this. My players and I really liked that mechanic, and you're right, it will take a lot of rebalancing of SR abilities. I have no idea how they'd sort out ki or sorcery points or maneuver dice.


I got the feeling that this was what they wanted, but were afraid of porting anything from 4E due to the bad reception it had.

This. Absolutely.

So much good stuff from 4e was thrown out with the bath water when they went crawling back to 3.5 players with 5e. This is one of those many things.

[ATHATH]

Making short rests take 10 minutes seems like the best solution. Maybe make short resting (unlike long resting?) break concentration or something to keep Warlocks from doing silly things. I guess casting Armor of Agathys before you short rest would be a thing, but eh, single-classed Warlocks probably deserve to be thrown a bone.

Turning them into once per encounter abilities would also be nice, although you'd then get into weird scenarios with utility or long-duration abilities. You'd probably need to rework how Warlock spells work entirely to get that to work, especially with multiclassing in play ("How many times per day can I cast Animate Dead using my Warlock slots as a Cleric 5/Warlock 5? Do I have to intentionally get myself into 'danger' to keep my undead army loyal?").

[loki_ragnarock]

The length of a short rest should be variable.

1st Short Rest: 5 mins.
2nd Short Rest: 20 mins.
3rd - Xst short rest: 1 hour.

Short rest time resets after long rest.

[strangebloke]

I think we've had enough recent discussion to thoroughly disprove the idea that "if I can fix it, it isn't broken" is any good. Just because we can adjust resting on a table to table basis doesn't undercut the fact that frequency of rests is a major factor in several classes being seen as "weak" or "strong".

In most every case I'd agree here, I'm just salty at how bad people are at implementing what I subjectively feel is a very very basic aspect of the game, even calling it "the game's biggest flaw" or some crap like that. It's so obvious and easy to work around that I've basically only run GR campaigns because I know I don't like running huge dungeons that much.


My vote would be on shorter short rests though, the only reason they go so underutilized in my own experience is that 1 hour is at just the sweet spot for a player to feel like time is being wasted whether they feel it can be extended to an 8 hour long rest or ignored until it is time to long rest.

The other part - which should be front, center, bolded and screamed at the DM - is that you only benefit from one long rest in a 24 hour period. This restriction is an important incentive for short rest resources and healing. Of course this doesn't help the resting disparity in other aspects of the game, for example in travel based random encounters where the character with the most powerful long rest resources is going to shine brightest as each encounter is typically contained in a single day.
yeah agreed. I think something like 10 minute SRs and 8 hour LRs pretty much nails it. The only problems I'm aware of come from pact magic shenanigans but those are an issue anyway.

[Segev]

These problems only show up when there's a consistent pattern of every adventuring day being way on one extreme side. Sometimes there is just one boss fight in the day, and everyone has full resources for it. The Paladin does well there, good for him. Sometimes you have a deep dark dungeon that goes on for like 7 encounters in a single day, and the druid does really well there. Good for her. Sometimes you have a wartime narrative where the characters are getting in multiple skirmishes a day with the enemy, and the monk does really well there. Good for her.

Under Gritty rules, a string of one-encounter days looks like the wartime narrative. The long dark dungeon is impossible but not everyone runs those. You can still do shorter dungeons without deviating from gritty rest rules. Four encounters without a short rest is perfectly achievable.

Then if you REALLY want to do dungeon crawling, you go heroic and just go-go-go-go all day.

So you just pick whichever of the three describes your average day, and run with that.

It works pretty well.
It worked rather poorly in Tomb of Annihilation.

[Morty]

Honestly, one thing that I wished that 5E had kept from 4th Edition (in more than the barest vestigial sense) was encounter powers. Tie the "SR" resources to encounters instead, maybe trim them a bit. Would take a bit of rebalancing, absolutely, but that way you'd manage to keep the feel that they were looking for, I feel.

4E's encounter powers were, as far as I remember, effectively short rest powers. Because they recharged on short rest. It's just that short rests took five minutes instead of an hour, so you were expected to take one after every encounter.

[strangebloke]

It worked rather poorly in Tomb of Annihilation.

Look generally I try not to be that kind of guy who disses on the devs constantly, but ToA is far from the only example of the module writers not having a single clue how their game is balanced. I realize I'm being kind of a jerk here but I'm genuinely tired of how bad everyone seems to be at working with a system that I personally feel works pretty well.

[Felhammer]

4E's encounter powers were, as far as I remember, effectively short rest powers. Because they recharged on short rest. It's just that short rests took five minutes instead of an hour, so you were expected to take one after every encounter.

Yeah, 4E's short rest was basically sitting down and eating a sandwich. 5E's short rest is sitting down and eating dinner. :smallbiggrin:

[Segev]

Look generally I try not to be that kind of guy who disses on the devs constantly, but ToA is far from the only example of the module writers not having a single clue how their game is balanced. I realize I'm being kind of a jerk here but I'm genuinely tired of how bad everyone seems to be at working with a system that I personally feel works pretty well.

My point is more that ToA is actually a pretty good module. But would be better if the exploration phase used "gritty realism" rests while the city and dungeon encounters used "standard" rests. I think this is generally true for 5e. A mechanic that ties into verisimilitude to allow the transition would be ideal.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Like most things that depend heavily on campaign and table style, I don't want them to address it directly (ie by changing how the rests work globally). Sure, they could add more guidance on the various interests at play as well as suggestions for adjusting the system to your table's needs. But the talk about "it's not broken if I can fix it" ignores the core fact that D&D 5e is not designed to be "out of the box" for every table. Per-table adjustment is expected and considered a feature, especially if you depart from the other guidance.

Any particular global "fix" will break the flow for a significant fraction of the player base. Which tells me that it's not a problem that can be fixed at global scope; instead they should focus on information. Making the "baseline" expectations more clear[1] and providing lots of guidance for variations.

As to specifics--I've found great success in...just not caring. I don't police the adventuring day at all, beyond generally having some sort of "time matters" "clock"[2] and enforcing the "you can't LR twice in 24 hours" and "the world will move along without you" understandings. And that's with a current group of
a) bard
b) sorcerer (with a few warlock levels, mainly used to fuel SP)
c) paladin
d) warlock/fighter

In the past I've given out doses of Apprentice's Friend (basically a potion of catnap, except 1 minute). Those tend to get hoarded and handed to the SR dependent classes for those pressing cases. And the party's pretty good about regulating themselves and they control their own pacing. The other concern is just designing in natural places for SRs.

As for switching paradigms--I think that's a totally supported thing, as long as you're talking to the group about it. Let them know that exploration will be in GR and dungeons will be regular (or whatever) and you'll be good to go.

[1] which, AFAIK, revolve more around variety than any given adventuring day being particularly balanced. The pathology only sets in if
a) you're generally using up most or all your resources in any given day
b) you're generally always facing the same type of adventuring day--eg one big encounter per day, 2 fights, SR, fight, SR, 2 fights, or whatever.
And the real answer is just being more varied. The possibility of facing a longer day without warning will go a long way toward encouraging proper pacing.

[2] More just "X will happen in Y days whether you're ready or not" than "you fail the quest if you're not done now"

[Man_Over_Game]

How do others feel about the rest system and its derivative resources?

I think that having different recharge rates is pretty arbitrary.

Keeping the classes on a relatively similar rate of recharge per rest type cuts out a lot of extra work on the DM. A Warlock wouldn't care if you only had one encounter a day, a Sorcerer wouldn't be scrounging for spell slots if you had five.

It solves a lot of problems, and the only one it adds is that the classes are slightly less unique. Personally, I feel that if the uniqueness between each class is dependent on whether it recharges faster or slower than another in order to feel 'special', you probably messed up. Whether or not Warlocks recharge faster or slower is not the reason players play Warlocks.

If they're going for a big overhaul, they might add more Short Rest powers to classes that don't have them, and more Long Rest powers for the same reason, so that each class gets roughly the same value from any rest.

If they're not, they'll probably suggest DM solutions that solve the problem without interacting with the classes themselves. Like inserting a 'cutscene' midfight that allows players to take a Short Rest at the cost of Exhaustion just before the 'second half' of the boss fight (so that the DM is essentially converting one long encounter into two shorter ones that are much more balanced).

[strangebloke]

My point is more that ToA is actually a pretty good module. But would be better if the exploration phase used "gritty realism" rests while the city and dungeon encounters used "standard" rests. I think this is generally true for 5e. A mechanic that ties into verisimilitude to allow the transition would be ideal.

and my point is that no resource-refresh mechanic is going to accommodate all possible styles of campaigns unless you go full 4e and have the refresh tied to specific narrative beats. You can't have a pure floor-by-floor megadungeon next to a "one encounter a day if that" in the same system with the same resource refresh mechanic and have the refresh mechanic tied to anything real. So they gave us three different systems, with the tradeoff being that "heroic" and "gritty realism" don't really allow you to simulate certain things that might be normal to the genre.

I haven't played ToA so I wasn't aware of the point you were trying to make. I thought you were saying that ToA did make you use Gritty Realism, which was very surprising to me. The idea of running the "big dungeon" module with the "no big dungeons" rest system is pretty obviously a bad idea.

The problem is entirely that people run slow-paced adventures with 1 encounter per day and then cry that the game is wildly imbalanced.


I think that having different recharge rates is pretty arbitrary.

the recharge rate isn't even the issue. The issue is the comparative ability of classes to use resources quickly/efficiently.

Take the druid. Nominally this is a Long Rest class with a short rest minor resource. Just like Paladin! But if you compare these classes, it becomes pretty clear that they behave wildly different over the course of an adventuring day. The Druid's spell list is geared toward high-efficiency concentration spells and utility. Their short rest resource is wildshape, which gives them loads of extra survivability and ensures that even over an incredibly long adventuring day they'll almost never run out of HP. Even in a very long day with 10+ encounters, its unlikely the Druid will be out of fuel despite being a "Long Rest" class. Contrariwise a short day will see them never getting a chance to use more than a fraction of their full power.

For contrast, the Paladin is basically yelling "Gas, gas, gas I'm gonna step on the gas." They can blow all their LoH in a single action. They can easily blow through three spell slots a round. A lot of their CD's are pre-combat buffs. Overall, though the paladin can be played more conservatively and it isn't a bad idea, they excel in relatively short adventuring days not because they're a LR class, but because they can absolutely blow through resources in a stunning fashion. Conversely with a few exceptions (magic weapon, aura of vitality) most of their stuff doesn't last that long or provide that much value in absolute terms. If you don't play somewhat carefully, they can totally run out of gas.

TL;DR, It's not just the refresh rate on abilities, its how fast they get spent. And I think changing that would be a bridge too far as far as making the classes too homogenous.

[Garfunion]

I agree with one of the posts above.

I think short rests should be removed and replaced with a “token” recovery system, that is based on your proficiency bonus.

[Elric VIII]

I think that having different recharge rates is pretty arbitrary.

Keeping the classes on a relatively similar rate of recharge per rest type cuts out a lot of extra work on the DM. A Warlock wouldn't care if you only had one encounter a day, a Sorcerer wouldn't be scrounging for spell slots if you had five.

It solves a lot of problems, and the only one it adds is that the classes are slightly less unique. Personally, I feel that if the uniqueness between each class is dependent on whether it recharges faster or slower than another in order to feel 'special', you probably messed up. Whether or not Warlocks recharge faster or slower is not the reason players play Warlocks.

If they're going for a big overhaul, they might add more Short Rest powers to classes that don't have them, and more Long Rest powers for the same reason, so that each class gets roughly the same value from any rest.

If they're not, they'll probably suggest DM solutions that solve the problem without interacting with the classes themselves. Like inserting a 'cutscene' midfight that allows players to take a Short Rest at the cost of Exhaustion just before the 'second half' of the boss fight (so that the DM is essentially converting one long encounter into two shorter ones that are much more balanced).

This is a disingenuous take on the matter and your assumptions seem to be based on foreknowledge of the adventuring day. Almost the entire system of classes, levels, health, etc is predicated on the idea of resource management. And you are 100% wrong if you think method of resource management is not part of the decision making process of at least some players.

Further, you're missing the entire point about how availability of resources directly influences the mechanics that can be applied to them, creating uniqueness. That's why classes can have extra attack, but there's no extra spell feature that just freely doubles your spells at a certain level. A warlock is different from a sorcerer precisely because its method of resource management has an effect on the way they interact with the game world; compare shield and hex when cast by a sorcerer vs a warlock. In fact, why do you think sorlock is a popular multiclass rather than just magic initiate for EB on a sorcerer? The warlock's unique resource management opens up design space for other unique things like invocations.

[Zhorn]

The biggest takeaway from threads like this I tend to get is there's no real consensus on what the resting problem is.

Some folks complain rest recovery is too fast and easy, opting to slow it down with Gritty Realism or Slow Natural Healing.

Others complain it is too slow, speeding it up using Epic Heroism and/or Healing Surges.

While I do expect there will be adjustments such as going 'per encounter' / 'per short rest' / 'per long rest', I'd imagine the 1 hour short rest and 8 hour long rest timeframe will remain with the optional rules to dial it up or down to each tables individual taste.

[animewatcha]

I'm hoping for some way to spend your hit dice for other people. If you weren't so banged up, you could maybe patch up other folks? Without needing healer feat, though maybe healer's kit.

[clash]

Probably a contentious opinion but I think the real issue is long rest resources. I say get rid of them and work entirely off short rests. It limits the nova capabilities of every class and really works for any length of adventuring day. Basically assume everyone had all of their resources every other encounter and design around that.

[Aimeryan]

the recharge rate isn't even the issue. The issue is the comparative ability of classes to use resources quickly/efficiently.

Take the druid. Nominally this is a Long Rest class with a short rest minor resource. Just like Paladin! But if you compare these classes, it becomes pretty clear that they behave wildly different over the course of an adventuring day. The Druid's spell list is geared toward high-efficiency concentration spells and utility. Their short rest resource is wildshape, which gives them loads of extra survivability and ensures that even over an incredibly long adventuring day they'll almost never run out of HP. Even in a very long day with 10+ encounters, its unlikely the Druid will be out of fuel despite being a "Long Rest" class. Contrariwise a short day will see them never getting a chance to use more than a fraction of their full power.

For contrast, the Paladin is basically yelling "Gas, gas, gas I'm gonna step on the gas." They can blow all their LoH in a single action. They can easily blow through three spell slots a round. A lot of their CD's are pre-combat buffs. Overall, though the paladin can be played more conservatively and it isn't a bad idea, they excel in relatively short adventuring days not because they're a LR class, but because they can absolutely blow through resources in a stunning fashion. Conversely with a few exceptions (magic weapon, aura of vitality) most of their stuff doesn't last that long or provide that much value in absolute terms. If you don't play somewhat carefully, they can totally run out of gas.

TL;DR, It's not just the refresh rate on abilities, its how fast they get spent. And I think changing that would be a bridge too far as far as making the classes too homogenous.


Probably a contentious opinion but I think the real issue is long rest resources. I say get rid of them and work entirely off short rests. It limits the nova capabilities of every class and really works for any length of adventuring day. Basically assume everyone had all of their resources every other encounter and design around that.


How fast the resources get used is a player choice. It allows for efficiency when practical to power big offensive use when warranted. As long as the class provides enough resources over the recharge rate there is no problem from a mechanical point of view.

The problem with Short Rests is the nature of an hour's rest is either too punishing (its an escape scene or something) or not punishing at all (the goblin raid is expected tomorrow) - it is difficult to get to the point that two Short Rests is definitely fine, but three is definitely out of the question. With a Long Rest this issue is avoided because the whole chapter (Dungeon/Encampment/etc.) can be planned to be done between Long Rests, with the players having the knowledge that choosing to fall back and take a Long Rest because they blew their load rather than play efficiently will have consequences. Yeah, you can just say to your players that because of the mechanics they can only have two Short Rests and no more are allowed, but that comes of as very difficult to justify in-game.

As mentioned previously, I would rather have Tome Of Battle style refresh of sooner-than-Long-Rest-resources. Not only does this make martials far more interesting, it is a lot easier to justify and balance.

[Oramac]

Honestly, I don't think I've ever paid any attention to the short/long rest mechanics from a challenge perspective. I just let my players take whatever rest they want when they want. Outside of wacky situations like being in a hostile dungeon still full of bad guys or something.

I'd wager well over 2/3 of the combat encounters I run start with my players at full strength. Probably more than that. I find it easier to plan fights for full-strength characters, and it allows me to throw stronger monsters at them as well.

Truth be told, I'd be fine with them removing the short/long rest mechanic entirely. Though of course that would really screw over warlocks, monks, and battlemasters. I don't honestly expect anything so drastic though.

[Sneak Dog]

The biggest takeaway from threads like this I tend to get is there's no real consensus on what the resting problem is.

Some folks complain rest recovery is too fast and easy, opting to slow it down with Gritty Realism or Slow Natural Healing.

Others complain it is too slow, speeding it up using Epic Heroism and/or Healing Surges.

While I do expect there will be adjustments such as going 'per encounter' / 'per short rest' / 'per long rest', I'd imagine the 1 hour short rest and 8 hour long rest timeframe will remain with the optional rules to dial it up or down to each tables individual taste.

Hm, is there no consensus? 1 hour short rest seems to be an issue, and generally is made to be either shorter or longer, depending on whether the GM stuffs the long rest quota of encounters in one day or in a week or even in one wilderness venture.

And 1 hour is awkward in my opinion too. It's tempting to just go for the full 8 hours when you've 1 hour spare anyway. A 1~5~10 minute rest is a lot easier to fit in. That's roughly the time to search a room carefully, and fits into the dungeoneering timetable. Spending a whole hour resting when the rest of the dungeon delve takes about 1~2 hours is a lot harder to fit in.

[Zhorn]

Hm, is there no consensus?Yes, and you are highlighting it. Not everyone agrees WHAT the problem about resting is, and the solutions offered are moving in opposite directions.
It is also worth noting that while some folks change the timing of rests to be longer or shorter, there are also those that use the rules as is without changing them.
Longer. Shorter. Fine as is. Three different takes and two of them each with a range of solutions.
ie: No consensus.


And 1 hour is awkward in my opinion too. It's tempting to just go for the full 8 hours when you've 1 hour spare anyway. A 1~5~10 minute rest is a lot easier to fit in. That's roughly the time to search a room carefully, and fits into the dungeoneering timetable. Spending a whole hour resting when the rest of the dungeon delve takes about 1~2 hours is a lot harder to fit in.
That's all down to playstyle.

If a 1 hour rest in a dungeon seems like enough time for an 8 hour rest, all that tells me is you're in a pretty safe dungeon, or the DM is too lazy to run wandering monsters and random encounters.
And saying 1-5-10 min rests are easier to fit in would be more accurately presented as 1-5-10 are for easier games.
And that's fine. Plenty of people like their nova abilities in every fight.
But that's not universally seen as better for the game. It's just better for a type of taste.

Others like a harder game style, where a hit from an enemy still matters the next minute / hour / day, and how fast you chew up your resources will impact how easy/hard other encounters will be.

Neither style is undisputedly better than the other. They are just different as they cater to different tastes.

[Segev]

and my point is that no resource-refresh mechanic is going to accommodate all possible styles of campaigns unless you go full 4e and have the refresh tied to specific narrative beats. You can't have a pure floor-by-floor megadungeon next to a "one encounter a day if that" in the same system with the same resource refresh mechanic and have the refresh mechanic tied to anything real. So they gave us three different systems, with the tradeoff being that "heroic" and "gritty realism" don't really allow you to simulate certain things that might be normal to the genre.

I actually outlined, earlier in this thread, a basic system for achieving a shift from "gritty realism" to "standard rests" with in-setting justification and reasoning. I just didn't come up with it until after my ToA game had ended, sadly. The shift is achieved by requiring a stable and established resting place for a "long rest," which takes at least 1 week to set up. Otherwise, an overnight rest is a short rest. You can take away hour-long short rests during "gritty realism" segments by making them only work for 24 hours after a successful long rest. Day 1 of traipsing through the jungle, then, you can short rest normally, but after that, you're short resting only overnight, and you're celebrating when you find civilization (even a small tribal village that's friendly enough to let you stay with them) or you're stopping for a week to set up a proper base camp if you need a long rest.

Since you'd set up a base camp outside a dungeon under most circumstances, you'll get your standard rest periods for dungeon crawling. But since stopping to spend a week "every night" isn't feasible, you'll be relying on short rests for long-term travel, leading to 1-encounter-a-day-at-most being 1 encounter per short rest.

[strangebloke]

I actually outlined, earlier in this thread, a basic system for achieving a shift from "gritty realism" to "standard rests" with in-setting justification and reasoning. I just didn't come up with it until after my ToA game had ended, sadly. The shift is achieved by requiring a stable and established resting place for a "long rest," which takes at least 1 week to set up. Otherwise, an overnight rest is a short rest. You can take away hour-long short rests during "gritty realism" segments by making them only work for 24 hours after a successful long rest. Day 1 of traipsing through the jungle, then, you can short rest normally, but after that, you're short resting only overnight, and you're celebrating when you find civilization (even a small tribal village that's friendly enough to let you stay with them) or you're stopping for a week to set up a proper base camp if you need a long rest.

Since you'd set up a base camp outside a dungeon under most circumstances, you'll get your standard rest periods for dungeon crawling. But since stopping to spend a week "every night" isn't feasible, you'll be relying on short rests for long-term travel, leading to 1-encounter-a-day-at-most being 1 encounter per short rest.

Yeah this is reasonable and pretty similar to what I was planning to use in my next game. "Only rest in town" works pretty well, although I think it does run into the problem of how urban adventures are supposed to work. Needs a bit more thought imo.

[LibraryOgre]

A few ideas:

1) Make short rests easier. I've put up "10 minutes for the 1st, 30 minutes for the 2nd, 1 hour for all later ones", which makes short rests less expensive to begin with, so short rests are more likely to be taken.

2) Make long rests harder. Require more than just a night's sleep, but a night's sleep in relative safety. Pitoning yourself inside a room in a dungeon isn't safety; a stay at an inn is.

3) Make Long Rests less useful. My suggestion would be to allow long rests to not recover all HP, but instead to allow them to roll as many HD as they want, and recover 1 spent HD. So, if I'm down 30 HP as a fighter, I can roll HD until I heal up... but if I've been using HD throughout the day, I'm only going to get 1 HD back. This means that healing magic has a strategic benefit, dedicated healing abilities (life cleric, bardic music) get a bit more important, since they either improve my HD ROI, but also limits some of the ability to just dive into a dungeon and not come out until everyone is dead, because my long rests will only go so far to keep me healed. If we take a week off, well, we're going to get all our HD back, too.

4) If you're doing this, you need some level of "Medium Rest"... something that lets long rest people recover resources, but not necessarily HD. Basically, a Long Rest not in safety. Thus, the wizard on the deep dive doesn't run out of spells completely, even if they are using up HD.

[Segev]

Yeah this is reasonable and pretty similar to what I was planning to use in my next game. "Only rest in town" works pretty well, although I think it does run into the problem of how urban adventures are supposed to work. Needs a bit more thought imo.

I am not sure why this is a problem for urban adventures. The "dungeon" is a series of encounters possibly scattered around the city, but events typically happen at "dungeon" time scales anyway, don't they? Why would you need to force the "gritty realism" rules in an urban adventure if you didn't just want them all the time?

[Man_Over_Game]

Yes, and you are highlighting it. Not everyone agrees WHAT the problem about resting is, and the solutions offered are moving in opposite directions.
It is also worth noting that while some folks change the timing of rests to be longer or shorter, there are also those that use the rules as is without changing them.
Longer. Shorter. Fine as is. Three different takes and two of them each with a range of solutions.
ie: No consensus.

I think there's not much consensus on the solutions, but I think the problems can be refined into very distinct pieces.

What's happening in the thread is that one person is describing what they don't like about the rest system and then applying a solution that solves what they don't like, and then we're looking at their solutions and saying "Well, we've gathered exactly no data from this".

But just like when you throw a ball with a few degrees difference, and it lands somewhere completely irrelevant, it doesn't mean the original prediction was wrong. Sometimes, just a few, tiny degrees' worth of difference at the start is enough to completely change the end result, because those differences in execution are exaggerated at the end result.

What I'm trying to say is, we can't build a consensus off of looking at solutions, but we build one off of describing what we don't like, refining the problem, and then building a solution that addresses those key problems that folks can agree with.


My current frustration with Rests is that each class gets different value from different rates of rest. And because rests are usually dictated by what's going on with the story, you're essentially caught between shoehorning a balance solution into your story when it doesn't always fit, or you're ignoring gameplay so that your story fits better. With good design, mechanics and roleplaying don't have to be mutually exclusive.

My suggested solution was to just have each class rely on each rest relatively evenly, so it doesn't matter if you have more-or-less Short Rests per day, each class functions just as well regardless of what kind of adventure you're having so everyone is always having the most amount of fun. Essentially, it takes away a lot of work on the DM so that they don't have to care about the 'fairness' of rests or how action-packed their adventuring days are, they can just focus on telling a good story.

But my solution isn't for everyone, so let's not focus on that. How do folks feel about the problem?

[loki_ragnarock]

If a 1 hour rest in a dungeon seems like enough time for an 8 hour rest, all that tells me is you're in a pretty safe dungeon, or the DM is too lazy to run wandering monsters and random encounters.
That's a takeaway.

One I disagree with. If you're safe enough to avoid the security of the place in question for an entire hour, you're pretty secure. A DM that runs wandering monsters only every couple of hours? That's a safe dungeon.


Cypher does a pretty good job with their recovery system; 1st is an action, 2nd 10 minutes, 3rd is something I forget, and 4th is 10 hours.


Short rests following a similar pattern lets short rest resource classes be fairly sure that they're going to get that first rest; it's easy. Subsequent resting requires increasingly complicated cost benefit decisions. Can I get five minutes? Sure. Can I get an hour? Probably only in a safe dungeon.

[Zhorn]

Which is why I think the timing on rests isn't going to be changed.
People cannot agree on what direction to move them (if move them at all), but Man_Over_Game is right in pointing out what the true issue is; the values of rests vary greatly between classes, and depending on the style of game, it'll shift the balance between the classes in one way or another.

The more likely scenario will be default rest times will remain as is, but as I was poorly getting at in #36 there'll be attention on what features will be 'per encounter' / 'per short rest' / 'per long rest', with the optional rules for 'heroic' / 'gritty' / 'slow' / 'surges' maintained as they are.
It won't be a fix for changing rests, it'll be a class balance fix.

[Man_Over_Game]

Which is why I think the timing on rests isn't going to be changed.
People cannot agree on what direction to move them (if move them at all), but Man_Over_Game is right in pointing out what the true issue is; the values of rests vary greatly between classes, and depending on the style of game, it'll shift the balance between the classes in one way or another.

The more likely scenario will be default rest times will remain as is, but as I was poorly getting at in #36 there'll be attention on what features will be 'per encounter' / 'per short rest' / 'per long rest', with the optional rules for 'heroic' / 'gritty' / 'slow' / 'surges' maintained as they are.
It won't be a fix for changing rests, it'll be a class balance fix.

I could see that. I think 3.5 did more of the "Per Encounter" design the more refined they got, and I don't remember too much discussion about people complaining about that (although I think they had bigger things to complain about, like difference in power creep in levels or feat taxes).

My concern is with all of the folks who said they didn't like that about 4e. A lot of people complained that the classes all looked the same, due to having similar power recharging rates. While I think most of the people who complained about that stuff aren't people who actually tried to enjoy 4e (and probably don't have enough experience to give a fair review of it), that doesn't necessarily stop '5.5e' from having the same complaints from the same kinds of people.

But maybe I'm wrong. Now that everyone's already playing and enjoying 5e, dramatic changes aren't going to be a problem since they're all optional, backwards compatible, and understandable. I'm not saying we get too hopeful that they're willing to take big risks to make the game possibly more enjoyable, but it does mean that doing so would be less risky than when 4e did it. Worst-case scenario, folks ignore the 5.5e rules and continue enjoying the game they always did, and a fallback plan was something 4e never had.

[Atranen]

Yes, and you are highlighting it. Not everyone agrees WHAT the problem about resting is, and the solutions offered are moving in opposite directions.
It is also worth noting that while some folks change the timing of rests to be longer or shorter, there are also those that use the rules as is without changing them.
Longer. Shorter. Fine as is. Three different takes and two of them each with a range of solutions.
ie: No consensus.


That's all down to playstyle.

If a 1 hour rest in a dungeon seems like enough time for an 8 hour rest, all that tells me is you're in a pretty safe dungeon, or the DM is too lazy to run wandering monsters and random encounters.
And saying 1-5-10 min rests are easier to fit in would be more accurately presented as 1-5-10 are for easier games.
And that's fine. Plenty of people like their nova abilities in every fight.
But that's not universally seen as better for the game. It's just better for a type of taste.

Others like a harder game style, where a hit from an enemy still matters the next minute / hour / day, and how fast you chew up your resources will impact how easy/hard other encounters will be.

Neither style is undisputedly better than the other. They are just different as they cater to different tastes.

I think this false division into "hard" or "easy" playstyles is not helpful. You can have plenty of rests because you have very hard encounters. Or you can have few rests because all the encounters are pretty easy.

And I think we have consensus. The rest mechanics in 5e put narrative and balance into conflict with each other. Certain narrative structures are difficult and ruin game balance with the default assumptions. It requires a good deal of system mastery to keep the competing demands straight, and the rules may need to be modified as the narrative style of the campaign changes.

There's no easy solution, and I don't expect a backward-compatible edition to make any profound changes, so the same problem will exist. The best thing WOTC could do is to make the shortcomings of their system clear. There should be a section in the revised DMG discussing frankly why they made the design choice they did, when it fails, and how to improve it. They could include optional rules, like the "rest token" idea and a discussion of game balance. So far, the designers have been reluctant to take on this task in a way that would help newer GMs; they should fix that.

[Segev]

What I'm trying to say is, we can't build a consensus off of looking at solutions, but we build one off of describing what we don't like, refining the problem, and then building a solution that addresses those key problems that folks can agree with.Okay, sounds like a good approach.


My current frustration with Rests is that each class gets different value from different rates of rest. And because rests are usually dictated by what's going on with the story, you're essentially caught between shoehorning a balance solution into your story when it doesn't always fit, or you're ignoring gameplay so that your story fits better. With good design, mechanics and roleplaying don't have to be mutually exclusive.

(...)

How do folks feel about the problem?

My problem with rests is actually not that people get different things from them. That's part of the design, I believe, and part of the super-strategy of character design. You want some PCs with high nova capability, some with lots of staying power, and some with a good burst capability in a given fight or two but which recovers quickly.

The problem I have - and which my proposed solutions attempt to address - is that the attrition rate varies significantly between two modes of play: overworld travel/exploration vs dungeon-crawling. (I have also seen "urban adventures" mentioned, but I think they work best with "dungeon-crawling" timescales, as you'll typically be having multiple encounters per day in much the same way.)

Closer to your "people get different things from them" concern is a lack of regularity. Short rests are, I am pretty sure, balanced around having 2-3 of them between long rests. There is, however, limited incentive to restrict your short rests without some strongly DM-leveraged pressures, which can make it feel like short resting is less a strategic decision than a "mother, may I?" game.

I would like to see it both made a little bit more in players' hands when they take a short rest - though not fully handed over (e.g. by simply letting them take a short rest with no time pressure at all) - but having some limit to how many they easily can take. My "food" solutions are kind-of pointed towards that, but there might be other ways to address it.

Ideally, the rest system would have long rests happen every 2-3 short rests, and short rests happen every 1-3 encounters, with it being fine if there are fewer short rests or short rests that happen with no encounters between them. The attrition rate needs to be such that 3-8 encounters between long rests is the norm. (I am flexible on these numbers, but D&D is balanced around a certain amount of attrition per long and short rest, and the rules need to enable fluid application of short and long rests to support that. The ability to "break" it should exist, but should take effort and investment.)

[Thunderous Mojo]

Seems like divorcing Short Rests and Long Rests from being defined as taking a specific amount of time, might solve the Narrative issues some describe.

A Short Rest, while taking a long overland journey might be an hour long, with an 8 hour Long Rest.

A Short Rest in the magical Caverns of Calamity might be 10 minutes, and in a third scenario where the PC group is involved in a running battle involving Magical Gates leading to other Prime Material worlds, maybe a SR just takes a single action.

Treating the Rests categories as relational...( a SR will be less than a LR) allows the group to have the rules cater to their Narrative Needs.

Other features, such as Long Resting only in an Inn, etc....while cool...should be rules modules, but not the default rule setting.

The game has to be robust enough to tell many types of stories, and not just work for emulating the Darkest Dungeon on the most difficult setting. 😉

Also, do people not place Mana Potions (spell slot recovery ), Ki Potions, or Potions of Catnap in their game? Place some in a Treasure Hoard and let the players figure out how to best use them, and keep up the pace on active Adventuring Days with limited resting potential.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Seems like divorcing Short Rests and Long Rests from being defined as taking a specific amount of time, might solve the Narrative issues some describe.

A Short Rest, while taking a long overland journey might be an hour long, with an 8 hour Long Rest.

A Short Rest in the magical Caverns of Calamity might be 10 minutes, and in a third scenario where the PC group is involved in a running battle involving Magical Gates leading to other Prime Material worlds, maybe a SR just takes a single action.

Treating the Rests categories as relational...( a SR will be less than a LR) allows the group to have the rules cater to their Narrative Needs.

Other features, such as Long Resting only in an Inn, etc....while cool...should be rules modules, but not the default rule setting.

The game has to be robust enough to tell many types of stories, and not just work for emulating the Darkest Dungeon on the most difficult setting. 😉

Also, do people not place Mana Potions (spell slot recovery ), Ki Potions, or Potions of Catnap in their game? Place some in a Treasure Hoard and let the players figure out how to best use them, and keep up the pace on active Adventuring Days with limited resting potential.

I'd be fine with this. And especially the part about being robust enough to tell many types of stories (which I'd maybe rephrase as "robust enough to handle playing under many types of narrative tempos"). One addendum to that point--all the best campaigns I've been in had a significant variation in tempos within themselves. So it's not just a campaign-level setting, but a situation by situation setting.

Of course, that does put more stress on the DMs/scenario designers to create verisimilitude with whatever setting is in play right then. Because "it took me 3 weeks of universe time to heal last time, and now it takes 1 minute??!?" is a real fear in a bunch of people IMX.

[Man_Over_Game]

I'd be fine with this. And especially the part about being robust enough to tell many types of stories (which I'd maybe rephrase as "robust enough to handle playing under many types of narrative tempos"). One addendum to that point--all the best campaigns I've been in had a significant variation in tempos within themselves. So it's not just a campaign-level setting, but a situation by situation setting.

Of course, that does put more stress on the DMs/scenario designers to create verisimilitude with whatever setting is in play right then. Because "it took me 3 weeks of universe time to heal last time, and now it takes 1 minute??!?" is a real fear in a bunch of people IMX.

One thing I like doing is stopping a big fight halfway through when something dramatic happens, offer each player the option of a Short Rest at the cost of Exhaustion, and then continue with the scene as reinforcements come in or the boss changes tactics.

That way, builds that are more reliant on Short Rests get a lot of value, it's only ever available when players ask for it, the DM doesn't have to perfectly plan everything beforehand, the day is a lot easier to balance when you're calculating two encounters instead of one, and the only thing that prevents it from being a regular solution is that the characters will need extra rest after adventuring.

Characters that are the most dependent on skill checks (Rogues, Rangers) are coincidentally the classes that benefit the least from Short Rests, so most of the folks who would suffer disadvantage on Ability Checks are the ones who probably aren't invested into them in the first place (and so they have good reason to not take the Short Rest).

Worst-case scenario, someone has a hard time in the second encounter, but even that's easier for the DM to account for than having one big encounter that's balanced perfectly enough to not have even bigger problems while still challenging the players.

It's been a solid solution for my tables. It'd be cool if they did something similar with the upcoming changes.

[jas61292]

Personally, I think a lot of focus gets put on the short rest when it is the long rest that is the much bigger issue. Getting all resources and 100% of HP back is a big deal. And I'm not necessarily saying that that is a bad thing, but I think it is always risky design to balance overly powerful features by saying you only get them a certain number of times per day, and then have an expected day length that has a larger number of encounters. I've never been the biggest fan of nova style play, and I think that the biggest imbalances in 5e are largely because unless the DM heavily pushes against it, nova-ing is highly rewarded.

While I know a lot of people do think that there should be a better balance between short and long rest resources on all classes, this is often described by talking about turning short rest resources into long rest ones on guys like Monk or Fighter. But I think the important thing is to actually shift more resources to short rest. Imagine if Paladin had only a small handful of smites per short rest, for example. Not only would the paladins now be clamoring for more short rests and not trying to make the monks push on, but it would also reign in their insane nova power, and make them more manageable. Smiting would still be great for a damage spike, and for taking out a priority enemy fast. But its not going to burn a super powerful mega boss in two turns because you wouldn't have 6 smites to use all at once. And I think that would be a good thing.

Ultimately I just don't think that trying to balance abilities by making them more difficult to use is a good thing, and a long rest cooldown is one form of making something difficult to use. Players will always go out of their way to be able to use their abilities to the best of their ability, so if you are not comfortable with someone using every single one of their abilities, or at least as many as are physically possible, in a single fight, you should not give them the ability to do so. Balancing around them saving their resources is just a fools errand.

Now, this is not to say that there should not be any long rest resources, but those should largely be saved for things such as healing, which directly effects how long you can adventure in a day, or utility and non-combat features. Of course, this is to say that the basic mechanics of spellcasting are bad, and yes that is what I think. I also think there is no chance that spellcasting gets overhauled in 5.5. But that doesn't mean I don't hope that they take more of the non spell features of casters and make them short rest dependent. The more reason everyone has to short rest, the more likely a party is to do so, and the more they do so, the longer the adventuring day, meaning that they are more encouraged to save their long rest resources. Will it work for everyone, no, absolutely not. But it will work for some groups, and that would be a step in the right direction.

[Thunderous Mojo]

Of course, that does put more stress on the DMs/scenario designers to create verisimilitude with whatever setting is in play right then. Because "it took me 3 weeks of universe time to heal last time, and now it takes 1 minute??!?" is a real fear in a bunch of people IMX.

If 'verisimilitude' matters more to a game, that game can of course use Rests as they currently stand, with preset durations.

More importantly, it is not that much strain to establish location based exceptions to general rules. As a player, discovering that the forboding forest of Mirkwood uses the Gritty Realism rules module, when most places don't...that is part of the job. 😉

[Segev]

I actually think making rest periods arbitrarily different lengths based solely on narrative need is bad. It harms verisimilitude by constantly reminding the players that it is just a pacing mechanic. It undermines RP because PCs have to be kept from noticing it and yet have to take rests strategically based on it. And it exacerbates rather than mitigates the "mother, may I?" nature of resting.

[Tanarii]

The 2024 release that's du jour to speculate about is supposed to be backwards compatible.

That means it can't change things like long rests or short rests.

[Sorinth]

Seems like divorcing Short Rests and Long Rests from being defined as taking a specific amount of time, might solve the Narrative issues some describe.

A Short Rest, while taking a long overland journey might be an hour long, with an 8 hour Long Rest.

A Short Rest in the magical Caverns of Calamity might be 10 minutes, and in a third scenario where the PC group is involved in a running battle involving Magical Gates leading to other Prime Material worlds, maybe a SR just takes a single action.

Treating the Rests categories as relational...( a SR will be less than a LR) allows the group to have the rules cater to their Narrative Needs.

Other features, such as Long Resting only in an Inn, etc....while cool...should be rules modules, but not the default rule setting.

The game has to be robust enough to tell many types of stories, and not just work for emulating the Darkest Dungeon on the most difficult setting. 😉

Also, do people not place Mana Potions (spell slot recovery ), Ki Potions, or Potions of Catnap in their game? Place some in a Treasure Hoard and let the players figure out how to best use them, and keep up the pace on active Adventuring Days with limited resting potential.

If there are going to be a multitude of rest variants what difference does it make if the default rule setting has LR only in comfortable spots?

There's maybe an argument for not defining a default. The PHB just says the LR/SR duration are decided on by the DM, and in the DMG it just present 3-4 options without specifying which is the standard, instead it discusses a little about which options are best suited for the different playstyles/campaign themes and what if any balance things to be aware of.


My personal preference is to have some sort of quality of rest mechanic. It helps bring importance to the Survival skill but more importantly it adds interesting decision points. For example, if 6hrs into your travel you come across a spot where you can get a full LR, but you are on a time crunch do you pack it in early and recover your resources or do you press on and risk not getting a proper LR. That's a type of decision point that makes wilderness survival/travel much more interesting as there are actual consequences to weigh. Or what if the spot is a creepy cottage in the forest. Do you want to risk the potential trouble of staying at what is likely a Hag's lair but get that precious LR or keep going so as not to get into a fight but potentially not getting that LR.

[Man_Over_Game]

The 2024 release that's du jour to speculate about is supposed to be backwards compatible.

That means it can't change things like long rests or short rests.

It could add to them, tho.

[Christew]

It could add to them, tho.
Yeah. Rereleased PHB would remain standard, but you could add some additional variants in rereleased DMG.

[Segev]

The 2024 release that's du jour to speculate about is supposed to be backwards compatible.

That means it can't change things like long rests or short rests.

I'm not actually sure that's true. No, it can't eliminate them as concepts, but it could do anything from making short rests 1 minute and long rests 1 hour to completely revamping how you determine how long each rest is. As long as short and long rests still exist, it is backwards compatible. Ideally, of course, any changes would also be done with an eye towards balance and fun, but backwards compatibility alone doesn't require that.

[Zhorn]

I've never understood this desire to push the game towards constant nova fights and rocket tag that some folks repeatedly go for...

Shorten short rests to such a time increment that you might as well have have short rest abilities always on.

Players are encouraged to use builds that maximize this benefit and burn resources on every fight since it'll be extraneous circumstances for then to not have 1min break between fights.

DM's only way of challenging the party becomes to restrict themselves to higher CR monsters with nova potential in order to have anything they do in combat actually matter 1min later.

...

step 4: profit?

Sure, I get some folks really love their power fantasy, but this is all just runaway powercreep.

[Tanarii]

It could add to them, tho.


Yeah. Rereleased PHB would remain standard, but you could add some additional variants in rereleased DMG.


I'm not actually sure that's true. No, it can't eliminate them as concepts, but it could do anything from making short rests 1 minute and long rests 1 hour to completely revamping how you determine how long each rest is. As long as short and long rests still exist, it is backwards compatible. Ideally, of course, any changes would also be done with an eye towards balance and fun, but backwards compatibility alone doesn't require that.
Not if the change significantly changes the expected ratio of 2 short rests and 1 long rest per adventuring day.

Otherwise you end up with things being busted per the already existing DMG variants, unless they're run with a specific way of running a game in mind (encounters and 'scenes'). For example, Gritty really doesn't work if you run encounters as normal on every day. Because the expected ratio is a 3 day workweek and then a week of downtime. But it's usually fine for people if those three days are spread across say 3 weeks.

Some people have the exact same issue with the current system of course. They have a 2 hour and 3-6 minute workday, then a 8 hour rest. :smallamused:

[noob]

The 2024 release that's du jour to speculate about is supposed to be backwards compatible.

That means it can't change things like long rests or short rests.

It actually can: it would be more backwards compatible than redoing any class feature or starting to rewrite the spells.
Here it is just a change of some rules most people did not even necessarily read and which is rarely written anywhere else than in the core manuals.
If you change the abilities of the barbarian literally all the barbarian character sheets will need to be thrown in the garbage bin while this change will affect nothing else than the rules of the game.

[Christew]

It actually can: it would be more backwards compatible than redoing any class feature or starting to rewrite the spells.
Here it is just a change of some rules most people did not even necessarily read and which is rarely written anywhere else than in the core manuals.
If you change the abilities of the barbarian literally all the barbarian character sheets will need to be thrown in the garbage bin while this change will affect nothing else than the rules of the game.
I take "backwards compatible" to mean that nothing in 5.5e will preclude you from bringing a 5e barbarian to the table. Doesn't mean they can't tweak 5.5e barbarian, just that they won't change the surrounding mechanics in such a way that 5e characters will no longer work.

[Kuulvheysoon]

It actually can: it would be more backwards compatible than redoing any class feature or starting to rewrite the spells.
Here it is just a change of some rules most people did not even necessarily read and which is rarely written anywhere else than in the core manuals.
If you change the abilities of the barbarian literally all the barbarian character sheets will need to be thrown in the garbage bin while this change will affect nothing else than the rules of the game.

Redoing the length of a short or long rest would change a lot about the power levels of characters who rely on them, depending on what the exact changes are. If they keep LRs the same but change SRs to a quick 5 minute breather, then the real change would be monks and warlocks are suddenly far, far more attractive (in addition to catnap suddenly becoming useless).

It'd require the least amount of changing the previous rules, though, so that's something to consider.

[Morty]

Messing around with long and short rests would alter the balance of classes that depend on them. That is, in fact, the whole point. Or a major part of it. Because right now classes that rely on short rests suffer from its awkward placement in the game's pacing.

[Tanarii]

I take "backwards compatible" to mean that nothing in 5.5e will preclude you from bringing a 5e barbarian to the table. Doesn't mean they can't tweak 5.5e barbarian, just that they won't change the surrounding mechanics in such a way that 5e characters will no longer work.
Exactly. That's why they can't significantly change the way short and long rests work, at least in terms of the expected ratio across an adventuring day of content.

There's some flexibility. But having run a campaign where there were regularly 3-4 short rests and 1 long rest for 1.5 days of adventuring content in a session, I can tell you it makes short rest classes very attractive and long rest ones not very attractive. And the opposite is also regularly complained as well, where folks try to run a no short rest (and low encounter) adventuring day per long rest.

[Aimeryan]

You could literally just remove them and then have a backwards compatibility section that explains what Short Rests are. Alternatively, still have it and just not use it.

[schm0]

the reality that the 3x short rests per day assumption is not something that works in many games

There's nothing wrong with the rests themselves. There is a problem with the availability of rests and the way DMs run their tables. It doesn't help that the balancing guidelines frame things in terms of an adventuring "day".

The bottom line is the adventuring day guidelines, especially their resting counterparts, work flawlessly because it forces the party to manage their resources. If you run fewer encounters or provide less resources, you'll find your game unraveling. Instead of throwing your hands in the air, you simple need to address the problems where they exist.

The problem is the availability of long rests. This is especially true where there are infinite opportunities to long rest, such as wilderness travel. Other DMs allow their players to long rest wherever or whenever they like without consequence. Some DMs complain they feel like they are "forced" to place some sort of ticking clock in their games. The symptom most frequently seen is when you let your long rest classes stomp encounters because they have near infinite resources that they can replenish whenever they like, but also short rest classes are left unable to do the things their classes were designed to do.

The solution is simple. Remove the availability of long rests where it doesn't make sense. The adventuring "day" can last as long as you need it to, narratively speaking. An easy way to do this is simply make it impossible for the PCs to long rest anywhere that isn't a bastion of civilization. This extends the adventuring "day" to include not just the dungeon itself, but the journey to the dungeon and back. (In the case of a megadungeon, you may make exceptions for long resting where it makes sense.)

This is the change I'd like to see in 5.5e.

[Segev]

There's nothing wrong with the rests themselves. There is a problem with the availability of rests and the way DMs run their tables. It doesn't help that the balancing guidelines frame things in terms of an adventuring "day".

The bottom line is the adventuring day guidelines, especially their resting counterparts, work flawlessly because it forces the party to manage their resources. If you run fewer encounters or provide less resources, you'll find your game unraveling. Instead of throwing your hands in the air, you simple need to address the problems where they exist.

The problem is the availability of long rests. This is especially true where there are infinite opportunities to long rest, such as wilderness travel. Other DMs allow their players to long rest wherever or whenever they like without consequence. Some DMs complain they feel like they are "forced" to place some sort of ticking clock in their games. The symptom most frequently seen is when you let your long rest classes stomp encounters because they have near infinite resources that they can replenish whenever they like, but also short rest classes are left unable to do the things their classes were designed to do.

The solution is simple. Remove the availability of long rests where it doesn't make sense. The adventuring "day" can last as long as you need it to, narratively speaking. An easy way to do this is simply make it impossible for the PCs to long rest anywhere that isn't a bastion of civilization. This extends the adventuring "day" to include not just the dungeon itself, but the journey to the dungeon and back. (In the case of a megadungeon, you may make exceptions for long resting where it makes sense.)

This is the change I'd like to see in 5.5e.
This needs to be done in a way that leaves it narratively explicable. Why can you only long rest sometimes, but not others? If it becomes a pure game of "mother, may I?" then it loses any sense of tactical responsibility for the players in managing tueir resources. Instead, it is just the DM decidin arbitrarily when they replenish, and the players' sense is that they are running low because the DM is refusing to let them rest, rather than as any consequence of their own choices.

[schm0]

This needs to be done in a way that leaves it narratively explicable. Why can you only long rest sometimes, but not others? If it becomes a pure game of "mother, may I?" then it loses any sense of tactical responsibility for the players in managing tueir resources. Instead, it is just the DM decidin arbitrarily when they replenish, and the players' sense is that they are running low because the DM is refusing to let them rest, rather than as any consequence of their own choices.

I disagree that it "needs" to be "narratively explicable." Balance is enough of a reason. Then again, nobody bats an eye when the DM says "yeah, you can't long rest in the dungeon". And if they do, the reasons should be obvious: it's too dangerous to do so without extreme precautions. So unless the players can explain how they plan to keep all of their previous mayhem and their current presence undetected for 8 hours from whatever unknown creatures, it should not require a narrative explanation.

I've been running modified long resting as I described above for years without a single issue. I'm not sure where you are getting the sort of straw man idea that the players somehow don't decide when they want to rest. The idea is that the players know precisely what kind of rests are currently available at all times, and they plan accordingly, just as they currently do.

It's actually quite elegant how perfectly the system works when you modify it to meet the intended design goals. I can't tell you how many times I've read about other DMs running into problems of encounter balance that could have been solved simply by running a standard adventuring day. A recent poll on Reddit had to add majority of DMs running 1 or 2 encounters between long rests, and there are hundreds of posts where DMs say things like "CR is crap" or how they struggle to challenge their players. It's really remarkable how many people are playing at imbalanced tables.

So yeah, that's what I'm looking for in 5.5e... a resting variant that fixes the "too many long rests" issue, and double down on the balancing guidelines.

[Dienekes]

I've never understood this desire to push the game towards constant nova fights and rocket tag that some folks repeatedly go for...

Shorten short rests to such a time increment that you might as well have have short rest abilities always on.

Players are encouraged to use builds that maximize this benefit and burn resources on every fight since it'll be extraneous circumstances for then to not have 1min break between fights.

DM's only way of challenging the party becomes to restrict themselves to higher CR monsters with nova potential in order to have anything they do in combat actually matter 1min later.

...

step 4: profit?

Sure, I get some folks really love their power fantasy, but this is all just runaway powercreep.

It's not as difficult to understand as I think you think it is. It actually is pretty simple: People like using their abilities.

That's it. It's fun to cast your big spell. It's fun to use your Superiority Die. It's fun to Smite. It's fun to Rage. For a lot of people the benefit of getting to use their cool new ability is all they actually care about.

And that makes sense, it's kind of how the game is set up. You level up, you get your cool new thing. So you face harder challenges, so you can level up, so you can use your next cool new thing. And sometimes, in the process of leveling up you uncover an item that gives you an additional cool new thing that you can use.

But the game as set up is essentially in conflict with that base desire. If you're using the full 6-8 encounters with resource depletion you can't use your cool new thing. You have to hold on to your cool thing until the perfect moment or you will run out of the cool thing.

On the positive side, this limitation on getting to use your cool thing allows them to be stronger. Which is great for spells, but not great for some other things. The obvious example is the Barbarian, who, if you're using the suggested encounters per day, spends half the game and most the levels that people actually play at getting to Rage for maybe half of all encounters. And a good majority of their abilities basically require Rage, so in half of their encounters they're just not doing any of their cool things. And yeah, for some it's not as much fun as it could be.

That's really it.

[LibraryOgre]

The more I think about it, the more I like a structure like this:

Short Rest: 10/30/60 minutes. Recharges short rest abilities and allows spending 1 HD... you're taking a breather.
Long Rest: ~8 Hours. A night's sleep. Allows spending all HD, recovers 1 HD (maybe 2 at level 6, 3 at level 11, 4 at level 16), recovers all short rest and some long rest abilities (needs fine tuning).
Secure Rest: ~8 hours in a safe place. All HD spent, all HD recovered, All Short and Long rest abilities.

I also support things like the Wizard's Recovery ability... something long-rests can recover on a short rest.

[Zhorn]

It's not as difficult to understand as I think you think it is. It actually is pretty simple: People like using their abilities.

That's it. It's fun to cast your big spell. It's fun to use your Superiority Die. It's fun to Smite. It's fun to Rage. For a lot of people the benefit of getting to use their cool new ability is all they actually care about.

And that makes sense, it's kind of how the game is set up. You level up, you get your cool new thing. So you face harder challenges, so you can level up, so you can use your next cool new thing. And sometimes, in the process of leveling up you uncover an item that gives you an additional cool new thing that you can use.

But the game as set up is essentially in conflict with that base desire. If you're using the full 6-8 encounters with resource depletion you can't use your cool new thing. You have to hold on to your cool thing until the perfect moment or you will run out of the cool thing.

On the positive side, this limitation on getting to use your cool thing allows them to be stronger. Which is great for spells, but not great for some other things. The obvious example is the Barbarian, who, if you're using the suggested encounters per day, spends half the game and most the levels that people actually play at getting to Rage for maybe half of all encounters. And a good majority of their abilities basically require Rage, so in half of their encounters they're just not doing any of their cool things. And yeah, for some it's not as much fun as it could be.

That's really it.
I'm talking about the longer term effects and the runaway constant 1+up'ing of the arms race to keep pace with it though.

Nova builds using their big burst on every fight. If that end the fight in the first round, then those without nova builds are being made to feel redundant EVERY fight.

If the tiers of monsters stay in that lower (level appropriate) range, all the fights become without challenge as you've entered into One Punch Man territory (for those unfamiliar with the story, it deals with the boredom of an all-powerful character struggling with never being challenged because he's just too strong).

If the monsters are being pushed into higher HP ranges, you've just doubled the problem as now the nova builds are still going off every round leaving the damage output of non-nova players in the dirt, while the nova players are finding the super-charged blasts are still taking the ~4 rounds to finish a fight essentially neutering the purpose of the nova.

Then on the HP recovery side, the amount of damage you are taking and recovering is also getting skewed further and further out.

If the pace and easy of resting is so simple that HP recovery and hit dice recovery are essentially guaranteed between fights, then any fight that doesn't pose an immediate risk to a character's life is a pointless time waster. You cannot have any form of combat attrition is recovery is easy and ensured.

So to combat this, DMs are then forced into increasing the damage of the monsters they use and ignoring low CR opponents to even challenge their parties.

Need town guards to enforce basic laws? they've all been swapped out for solars.
That common clerk running the basic goods store? High level sorcerer.
since anything less will be brushed aside as there's no reason the party would ever pay for anything in town otherwise since they are strong enough to lay waste to anything below some high CR value.

It's a whole mess I've seen and read about unravelling too many campaigns.
Players like to use their special abilities, but having those abilities have reasonable limits keeps them feeling special for longer.
Like having ice-cream (or any desert of your preference). Very nice as an after dinner treat, but looses its appeal fast if you have it every day at every meal.

And with those limits kept in place, players who run out of their special abilities for the day, or ration them out, are still contributing since the game hasn't needed to devolve into a state of ridiculously inflated numbers where only special abilities hold sway.
That I think is a good metric to go by: if a normal weapon hit (say 1d8+3) doesn't mean anything anymore in terms of value/risk, you've probably gone too far.

[strangebloke]

It's a whole mess I've seen and read about unravelling too many campaigns.
Players like to use their special abilities, but having those abilities have reasonable limits keeps them feeling special for longer.
Like having ice-cream (or any desert of your preference). Very nice as an after dinner treat, but looses its appeal fast if you have it every day at every meal.

And with those limits kept in place, players who run out of their special abilities for the day, or ration them out, are still contributing since the game hasn't needed to devolve into a state of ridiculously inflated numbers where only special abilities hold sway.
That I think is a good metric to go by: if a normal weapon hit (say 1d8+3) doesn't mean anything anymore in terms of value/risk, you've probably gone too far.

Pretty much. In the words of syndrome: if every round is a special round, none of them are.

As a button, fireball is fun in large part because its limited-use. If you can fireball every turn, it just becomes your attack action. So you make it a resource, you limit the number of fireballs, and you make the number of rounds per day greater than the number of fireballs.

If you extend this outward, you develop an entire matrix of very special buttons that can only be pressed 1-2 times a day (8th level spells, frenzy) and reasonably special buttons that can be used pretty frequently (flurry of blows, superiority dice).

Having a mechanic like the SR has been pretty common in DND since 3rd edition at least, they've just handled the "fast refresh" abilities differently each time. IMO having a SR be literally a 1 minute ordeal while Long rests are "8 hours in a safe location that has been set up ahead of time" works pretty well without defaulting to narrative restrictions. The only class that can exploit long rests is the warlock, sorta, and even then not without serious cheese that probably deserves its own fix

[Segev]

I disagree that it "needs" to be "narratively explicable." Balance is enough of a reason. Then again, nobody bats an eye when the DM says "yeah, you can't long rest in the dungeon". And if they do, the reasons should be obvious: it's too dangerous to do so without extreme precautions. So unless the players can explain how they plan to keep all of their previous mayhem and their current presence undetected for 8 hours from whatever unknown creatures, it should not require a narrative explanation.

I've been running modified long resting as I described above for years without a single issue. I'm not sure where you are getting the sort of straw man idea that the players somehow don't decide when they want to rest. The idea is that the players know precisely what kind of rests are currently available at all times, and they plan accordingly, just as they currently do.

It's actually quite elegant how perfectly the system works when you modify it to meet the intended design goals. I can't tell you how many times I've read about other DMs running into problems of encounter balance that could have been solved simply by running a standard adventuring day. A recent poll on Reddit had to add majority of DMs running 1 or 2 encounters between long rests, and there are hundreds of posts where DMs say things like "CR is crap" or how they struggle to challenge their players. It's really remarkable how many people are playing at imbalanced tables.

So yeah, that's what I'm looking for in 5.5e... a resting variant that fixes the "too many long rests" issue, and double down on the balancing guidelines.

Okay... so when the players cast Leomund's tiny hut and you're in a "long adventuring day - really multiple days of travel" period, how do you explain that they can't actually get a long rest each day?

[Felhammer]

Okay... so when the players cast Leomund's tiny hut and you're in a "long adventuring day - really multiple days of travel" period, how do you explain that they can't actually get a long rest each day?

You frame the narrative around the idea that the entire journey is an string of extended encounters.

[Zhorn]

Or you just keep it simple
A Short Rests is X amount of time.
A Long Rest is Y amount of time.

In a dungeon? In a field? In a town? On Tuesday? On the solstice? Doesn't matter, rest lengths are unchanged.
How many Short Rests has the party taken today? Doesn't matter, rest lengths are unchanged.
How many hours have they been traversing the wilderness? Doesn't matter, rest lengths are unchanged.
Under a magic tree or in a magic cave? Doesn't matter, rest lengths are unchanged.
Is there a ticking clock? Doesn't matter, rest lengths are unchanged.

Don't try and make it any more complex than it needs to be.

[Witty Username]

The solution is simple. Remove the availability of long rests where it doesn't make sense. The adventuring "day" can last as long as you need it to, narratively speaking. An easy way to do this is simply make it impossible for the PCs to long rest anywhere that isn't a bastion of civilization. This extends the adventuring "day" to include not just the dungeon itself, but the journey to the dungeon and back. (In the case of a megadungeon, you may make exceptions for long resting where it makes sense.)

This is the change I'd like to see in 5.5e.

Why don't you just enforce food and water tracking? From what I can tell it has the same effect. you have two weeks to the dungeon, two weeks back, now you only have your food and water minus four weeks. It cuts into the taking a day off between combats real good.

[Sindeloke]

Why don't you just enforce food and water tracking? From what I can tell it has the same effect. you have two weeks to the dungeon, two weeks back, now you only have your food and water minus four weeks. It cuts into the taking a day off between combats real good.

Or one of your players could take one feat, one level of druid or two of ranger, or 5 of cleric and make food and water completely irrelevant forever.

[Kane0]

1) Give every character a reason to want both short and long rests
2) Give every DM the ability to tailor the length of long and short rests to suit their game and playstyle
3) Provide good, helpful information about both of the above as well as regarding challenging characters at the start of a day compared to at the end. Better DMG guidance basically

Corollary, this also includes the number of short rests per long rest.

5e already does most of this, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Once that is done then tackle any remaining problem of 5-minute and/or single-encounter adventuring days, not the other way around.

[Zhorn]

1) Give every character a reason to want both short and long rests
2) Give every DM the ability to tailor the length of long and short rests to suit their game and playstyle
3) Provide good, helpful information about both of the above as well as regarding challenging characters at the start of a day compared to at the end. Better DMG guidance basically

Corollary, this also includes the number of short rests per long rest.

5e already does most of this, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Once that is done then tackle any remaining problem of 5-minute and/or single-encounter adventuring days, not the other way around.
Very well said.
There are a lot of things I wish were in the DMG that either aren't or are just done briefly/poorly.
It's generally something that a lot of game mechanics could benefit from, a run down of the intent behind design choices, and how to go about adjusting them to suit differing formats.
Timing and number of encounters per day is pretty high on that list.

I regularly run long adventuring days, so I've got a pretty good grasp on how to pace them for my players, but even then not every adventuring day is a long one. Sometimes the players spend a good chunk of time on RP and downtime activities that I don't feel like it would be beneficial to interrupt with 'Orcs Attack!'. This is one of those situations that led me to using Slow Natural Healing. Day to day adventuring formats and dungeon crawls still operating on a long adventuring day format as per the vanilla rules, but doing that a few days in a row is taxing enough to need a rest day. Rather than monkey with the timing via Gritty Realism, I leave that aspect alone and Use Slow Natural healing to incorporate those non-adventuring aspects into the narrative as a mechanical need. The tactically inclined players are given a mechanical reason to give the roleplayers their shopping episode, and to run with the intown antics of non-violently getting the rogue and bard out of jail, and give the wizard their downtime to scribe new spells.
These types of design choices are not things I got from the books but arrived at to suit the needs of my table. And I imagine I could have saved a lot of trial and error if the DMG had as Kane0 suggests and detailed what adjustments serve what purposes in better detail than what we have now.

For others it could be of monster adjustments to better suit the 5min adventuring day, or reasonable balancing philosophies for 5min short rests; "enemies are treated as having max rolled hp" or '"don' use X class using this rules variant".

But yeah, advice and insight into the vanilla ruleset and the design principles on why those numbers were settled on.

[Tanarii]

I regularly run long adventuring days, so I've got a pretty good grasp on how to pace them for my players, but even then not every adventuring day is a long one. Sometimes the players spend a good chunk of time on RP and downtime activities that I don't feel like it would be beneficial to interrupt with 'Orcs Attack!'.
I always find this kind of statement funny. Even if I get what it's supposed to mean. :smallamused:

Downtime by definition means not table time. Or, at the most, recap and very quick resolution at the beginning of end of a session.

RP should be part of every encounter. Even if you mean "talky-time" instead of "combat time", that should still be a social encounter. Unless you mean "faffing about time" with no meaningful encounter, in which case I always wonder why is it part of table time?

Despite that, there is an issue that by DMG definitions many social and exploration and other non-combat encounters end up being Easy encounters that have few to no resources expected to be expended. And these encounters can take up a disproportionate amount of table time for the expected difficulty / resource expenditure. So if you're running a 1 session = 1 adventuring day format, it's definitely possible to end up with a low resource expenditure adventuring day despite having a session chock full of encounters ... but only one or two combat encounter.

[Zhorn]

I always find this kind of statement funny. Even if I get what it's supposed to mean. :smallamused:

Downtime by definition means not table time. Or, at the most, recap and very quick resolution at the beginning of end of a session.
Maybe it was exclusively meant as non-table time in past editions, but for 5e we have long lists of activities in the books under downtime.
Some of it is fast-forward montage stuff, others are done as RP because the players doing it want to RP.


RP should be part of every encounter. Even if you mean "talky-time" instead of "combat time", that should still be a social encounter. Unless you mean "faffing about time" with no meaningful encounter, in which case I always wonder why is it part of table time?
If the players have gotten into town, and they are not here to crack immediate skulls, then they are in downtime.
It is included in table time because that's when it has aligned in session and when people are together and can coordinate what they want to do. If it happened at the end of the session then there's time to sort things out before launching into next week's game, but generally it's being done when player characters are in a position to do it.
For some players they want their downtime as just some moments to declare "before we leave town, I want to spend X hours scribing spells / crafting scrolls/potions"
Other are tracking down plot leads, gathering information, and generally setting up what quests the party will be pursuing next.
And then some just want to have their faff about time carousing, pickpocketing, or throwing me curveballs to rule on the fly.

For some it translates to bathroom break time, but most of the party has stuff then want to do between dungeons/wilderness/adventuring time, and since I'm not strong-arming them to finish session only in town, it just happens when it happens. Even the wargamers will let their hair down and do some stuff now and then because they enjoy the antics of of the other players.

Some sessions will just action action action, but sometimes they players are just wanting time to not be adventuring but still playing. Downtime gives them that.

It was happening in all other resting variants I've tried in the past. Using Slow Natural Healing just lined up the need for a downtime day frequently enough, but not too long a stretch of time, that it both served the mechanical and social needs of the players in a way that suited how I ran my games.
Gritty Realism is too much downtime for both my players and my DM style.
Heroic Resting is too fast and doesn't give some of the more RP focused players time without causing issues with wasting the wargamers' time.

[Elric VIII]

I'm talking about the longer term effects and the runaway constant 1+up'ing of the arms race to keep pace with it though.

Nova builds using their big burst on every fight. If that end the fight in the first round, then those without nova builds are being made to feel redundant EVERY fight.

If the tiers of monsters stay in that lower (level appropriate) range, all the fights become without challenge as you've entered into One Punch Man territory (for those unfamiliar with the story, it deals with the boredom of an all-powerful character struggling with never being challenged because he's just too strong).

If the monsters are being pushed into higher HP ranges, you've just doubled the problem as now the nova builds are still going off every round leaving the damage output of non-nova players in the dirt, while the nova players are finding the super-charged blasts are still taking the ~4 rounds to finish a fight essentially neutering the purpose of the nova.

Then on the HP recovery side, the amount of damage you are taking and recovering is also getting skewed further and further out.

If the pace and easy of resting is so simple that HP recovery and hit dice recovery are essentially guaranteed between fights, then any fight that doesn't pose an immediate risk to a character's life is a pointless time waster. You cannot have any form of combat attrition is recovery is easy and ensured.

So to combat this, DMs are then forced into increasing the damage of the monsters they use and ignoring low CR opponents to even challenge their parties.

Need town guards to enforce basic laws? they've all been swapped out for solars.
That common clerk running the basic goods store? High level sorcerer.
since anything less will be brushed aside as there's no reason the party would ever pay for anything in town otherwise since they are strong enough to lay waste to anything below some high CR value.

It's a whole mess I've seen and read about unravelling too many campaigns.
Players like to use their special abilities, but having those abilities have reasonable limits keeps them feeling special for longer.
Like having ice-cream (or any desert of your preference). Very nice as an after dinner treat, but looses its appeal fast if you have it every day at every meal.

And with those limits kept in place, players who run out of their special abilities for the day, or ration them out, are still contributing since the game hasn't needed to devolve into a state of ridiculously inflated numbers where only special abilities hold sway.
That I think is a good metric to go by: if a normal weapon hit (say 1d8+3) doesn't mean anything anymore in terms of value/risk, you've probably gone too far.


Pretty much. In the words of syndrome: if every round is a special round, none of them are.

As a button, fireball is fun in large part because its limited-use. If you can fireball every turn, it just becomes your attack action. So you make it a resource, you limit the number of fireballs, and you make the number of rounds per day greater than the number of fireballs.

If you extend this outward, you develop an entire matrix of very special buttons that can only be pressed 1-2 times a day (8th level spells, frenzy) and reasonably special buttons that can be used pretty frequently (flurry of blows, superiority dice).

Having a mechanic like the SR has been pretty common in DND since 3rd edition at least, they've just handled the "fast refresh" abilities differently each time. IMO having a SR be literally a 1 minute ordeal while Long rests are "8 hours in a safe location that has been set up ahead of time" works pretty well without defaulting to narrative restrictions. The only class that can exploit long rests is the warlock, sorta, and even then not without serious cheese that probably deserves its own fix


Good points here, but there is more to encounter structure than just big vs. small. Just from my experience, pacing can have wild effects on the usefulness of rests, regardless of the aggregate enemies. You can pace a day in a number of ways that either deny short rests completely, allow some short rests, or allow effectively unlimited short rests. Long rest class power remains constant, but short rest class power is highly variable.

For example, imagine a day where you want your party to fight 25 mooks and 1 BBEG:

I set up an encounter where the party fights a group of 5 thugs at a tavern to find the location of the bandit hideout. They take short rest #1 after this fight and proceed to the local hideout in the city. They encounter 4 bandits outside in one fight and another 6 inside where they find info about the location of the bandit camp with the BBEG outside the city. They take short rest #2 here. They proceed to the camp, located in a cave, where they fight 6 bandits in one fight and the BBEG with 4 of them in another fight. They take short rest #3 here before heading back to town, just in case. They long rest for the night.


With only a small amount of narrative urgency by the DM and some cooperation between players, the expected balance of the system is achieved. Even if the players want to take extra short rests between encounters, they have no additional effect. Setting up sequential encounters at some locations give the DM the ability to interrupt short rests, such as if the party tried to short rest right after fighting the first set of bandits in the cave.

The party is given 5 safehouse locations by the first set of thugs. Each one has another 4-6 bandits (up to the daily limit of 25) and one has the BBEG. The party decides they want to take a short rest after every safehouse, meaning each encounters gives short rest classes 100% of their resources to spend.

This is a reasonably realistic scenario, even spending an hour between fights means you're only taking 6 hours, plus a few minutes for each fight and looting/RP. This puts the DM in a situation of having an exceptionally urgent clock or making contrived in-game decisions if he wants to limit the short rests.

Instead of fighting thugs in the tavern, the barkeep tells the party a rumor about a bandit camp outside the city. The party then goes in and sequentially fights the 25 bandits and BBEG over the course of 4-6 encounters. If they try to short rest, the bandits further up in the hideout will wander in and interrupt them.

While the DM can allow the short rests to occur within the hideout, it stretches suspension of disbelief to assume that the bandits are just waiting in the next room T-posing until the party decides to move on. This scenario has the most potential to cause issues that players/DMs have difficulty resolving, while just happening to be the easiest adventure to set up because it doesn't consider pacing at all.

So there are a number of ways to pace encounters that aren't just a room with 25 mooks and 1 BBEG. Making short rests take no time has the same issue as scenario 2, where short rest classes can nova for every encounter without worrying. So I don't think the solution can be achieved by simply tweaking the timing/permissions of rests. I think short rests have to be codified into their own limited resource, balanced against long rests. That's why I use the tokens as a solution. You can surely hand out for 5 hours per day resting, but you're only getting 3 short rests of resources no matter what.

Of course, all of these solutions assume you're not just doing a 5-minute adventuring day. That is its own issue that has existed since day 3e.

[noob]

I've never understood this desire to push the game towards constant nova fights and rocket tag that some folks repeatedly go for...

Shorten short rests to such a time increment that you might as well have have short rest abilities always on.

Players are encouraged to use builds that maximize this benefit and burn resources on every fight since it'll be extraneous circumstances for then to not have 1min break between fights.

DM's only way of challenging the party becomes to restrict themselves to higher CR monsters with nova potential in order to have anything they do in combat actually matter 1min later.

...

step 4: profit?

Sure, I get some folks really love their power fantasy, but this is all just runaway powercreep.

Imagine if short rests were easier to take.
Short rest based classes would be relevant.
We can not have that: only long rest based classes should exist.
I suggest transforming all short rest based classes in long rest ones instead.

[Tanarii]

If the players have gotten into town, and they are not here to crack immediate skulls, then they are in downtime.
It is included in table time because that's when it has aligned in session and when people are together and can coordinate what they want to do. If it happened at the end of the session then there's time to sort things out before launching into next week's game, but generally it's being done when player characters are in a position to do it.
For some players they want their downtime as just some moments to declare "before we leave town, I want to spend X hours scribing spells / crafting scrolls/potions"
Other are tracking down plot leads, gathering information, and generally setting up what quests the party will be pursuing next.
And then some just want to have their faff about time carousing, pickpocketing, or throwing me curveballs to rule on the fly.

For some it translates to bathroom break time, but most of the party has stuff then want to do between dungeons/wilderness/adventuring time, and since I'm not strong-arming them to finish session only in town, it just happens when it happens. Even the wargamers will let their hair down and do some stuff now and then because they enjoy the antics of of the other players.

Some sessions will just action action action, but sometimes they players are just wanting time to not be adventuring but still playing. Downtime gives them that.
I find it interesting because I haven't seen a game like that in decades, since college years. And 5e isn't built around that idea.

But it does seem orthogonal to the point of the thread. If you wanted to double (or whatever) the amount of session time to incorporate downtime / back in town time / shopping trips / talking to NPCs / describing getting drunk at the tavern and flirting with wenches*, and you are not lining up adventuring days with a session time anyway, all that should mean is they're taking a long rest every other session instead of every session. E.g. something like spend half a session in town, half adventuring, end session, continue half an adventure, half a session in town.

When the designed game conceit of 5e, that you're running adventures and they include encounters and that's what you're using a session for, gets a little tricky is when you're doing something where you're intentionally spreading the adventuring day out over more than a in-universe day. Most commonly this is wilderness trekking adventures, but also something like urban investigations (or heists) can turn into this quite easily. Merely taking session time to do stuff between adventures shouldn't impact that.

*I don't think I've ever been part of a "we all meet at a tavern" campaign kickoff where one of the boys playing didn't take time to describe how they were flirting with the wenches.

[Segev]

You frame the narrative around the idea that the entire journey is an string of extended encounters.

By this, are you saying that there is no explanation for why they can't get a long rest overnight at this time, but can when they reach the dungeon?

If that is not what you are saying, please be more expansive on what you mean. It seems to me I was told that was not the way it worked, that there was a perfectly rational explanation for the PCs, but I do not see how that lines up with what I quoted.

[Tanarii]

By this, are you saying that there is no explanation for why they can't get a long rest overnight at this time, but can when they reach the dungeon?

If that is not what you are saying, please be more expansive on what you mean. It seems to me I was told that was not the way it worked, that there was a perfectly rational explanation for the PCs, but I do not see how that lines up with what I quoted.
You seem to assuming that LTH is a Safe Haven (to use 5e middle earth terminology).

[YoungestGruff]

My first instinct was to do away with SR/LR entirely, but this thread has made me consider making the system more robust, if anything, for one reason alone: The Ranger becomes an integral part of the team. Ranger might need some tweaking to make them more interesting in the Exploration pillar, but a robust SR/LR system almost invariably fills that need. Having a PC who can forage is super valuable when Goodberry still carries the opportunity cost of losing a spell slot that it can't restore, and having a PC who can move you overland in fewer days to reach your destination becomes a massive boon. Adding in a little bit to make them better at establishing camp makes them into vital support characters for any party that leaves a city. Hell, with an Urban Ranger of some sort, that could include a hostile city too.

[Segev]

You seem to assuming that LTH is a Safe Haven (to use 5e middle earth terminology).

Please explain how it isn't.

And, if this long series of encounters that takes many days is "one adventuring day," are they permitted short rests, and how long do short rests take during this "long adventuring day?"


I don't think I'm asking unreasonable questions, here; I do not wish to cast aspersions on others, but getting these kinds of answers that don't actually answer the questions always gets my hackles up.

[Tanarii]

Please explain how it isn't.
A Safe Haven is a comfortable unthreatened town like Rivendell or the Shire or Minas Tirith.

LTH is a dome of force in the middle of a dangerous area that your enemies can call up reinforcements around and set up a series of ambushes when you leave it. Assuming they can't find a way to get rid of it. It's camping in hostile territory, in a tiny area, and you have to keep a watch.

If the rule is effectively Safe Haven is required for a Long Rest, which is what it sounds like as it was presented, it's not entirely unreasonable that LTH might also be ruled to not qualify.



I don't think I'm asking unreasonable questions, here; I do not wish to cast aspersions on others, but getting these kinds of answers that don't actually answer the questions always gets my hackles up.They're not unreasonable, they just mean you don't understand the answer given and need further explanation. Conversely, that doesn't make them not an answer to the question.

[strangebloke]

A Safe Haven is a comfortable unthreatened town like Rivendell or the Shire or Minas Tirith.

LTH is a dome of force in the middle of a dangerous area that your enemies can call up reinforcements around and set up a series of ambushes when you leave it. Assuming they can't find a way to get rid of it. It's camping in hostile territory, in a tiny area, and you have to keep a watch.

If the rule is effectively Safe Haven is required for a Long Rest, which is what it sounds like as it was presented, it's entirely unreasonable that LTH might also be ruled to not qualify.

They're not unreasonable, they just mean you don't understand the answer given and need further explanation. Conversely, that doesn't make them not an answer to the question.

LTH also doesn't have a floor, which, lol. The party doesn't forget the first time that happens.

[Zhorn]

But it does seem orthogonal to the point of the thread. If you wanted to double (or whatever) the amount of session time to incorporate downtime / back in town time / shopping trips / talking to NPCs / describing getting drunk at the tavern and flirting with wenches*, and you are not lining up adventuring days with a session time anyway, all that should mean is they're taking a long rest every other session instead of every session. E.g. something like spend half a session in town, half adventuring, end session, continue half an adventure, half a session in town.

When the designed game conceit of 5e, that you're running adventures and they include encounters and that's what you're using a session for, gets a little tricky is when you're doing something where you're intentionally spreading the adventuring day out over more than a in-universe day. Most commonly this is wilderness trekking adventures, but also something like urban investigations (or heists) can turn into this quite easily. Merely taking session time to do stuff between adventures shouldn't impact that.

I think there may have been a miscommunication or misunderstanding.
I'm still running an adventuring day as an in-universe day.
On an adventuring day, the party is in a hostile environment with random and planned encounters spread throughout, usually 5-6, sometimes can be in the 7+ range when they are at the big dungeons and set pieces.
end long rest > 1-3 encounters > short rest > 1-3 encounters > short rest > 1-3 encounters > find a place to long rest > roll for chances at night encounters > back to start
that's an adventuring day as I run them.

What's happening with Slow Natural Healing is they are not healed to full on a long rest and so hit dice dependency has increased. Only getting back half of their hit dice at the end of a long rest means if the adventuring days are having them spend more than half of their total hit dice then they'll only be able to stay out in hostile territory for a finite number of days till they'll need to either play it safe and avoid solving all encounters with violence, or get back to town for some downtime.
Whether they are in hostile territory or in town, the resting rules are the same. They just need to have some area that's less taxing on their hit dice usage to allow them to stock back up.
This is what I meant when I said not every day is an adventuring day, but still run long adventuring days. Visits to town are not every session, and they could be out in the wilds for 3-4 sessions / 3-4 adventuring days, but getting to town for downtime is incentivized mechanically, giving the players that want their in-town RP and faffing about their time.
Still, time in town has rarely been more than 1 hour out of a 4 hour session, and is normally resolved in 30min before they're back on the road again. Once in a blue moon there might be a whole session in town, but those are so rare to be outliers.

Also with Slow Natural Healing, a fight with a low CR pack of goblins is still a big deal thanks to bounded accuracy, since each hit the characters take could represent a hit dice if they don't have other resources to spare (spell slots, potions, etc). Sure they'll handily win the fight, but those resource expenditures are slowing wearing down how long they can stay out in hostile territory.

[Tanarii]

Okay that makes much more sense. It's certainly a way to encourage returning to an area where they won't be fighting and losing about 1/2 maxHD worth of damage in an adventuring day, to heal to full and then recharge their HD to full.

[Zhorn]

I've certainly been finding a lot of success with that model in multiple areas.
I especially like that for an area to be deadly I don't have to restrict myself to only high CR opponents, or be as cruel and abusive as Tuckers Kobolds.
Just removing the heal to full from long rests (plus the house rule of needing to spend at least 1 hit dice to get the benefit of a short rest, just to avoid unlimited short rest abuse).
Damage is damage, no matter the source, no matter the threat, big damage, small damage, it all adds up. I don't have to panic if the BBEG of the dungeon gets nuked in single round since damage from minions and traps to get to that point still counts and will likely carry over some impact on the next day or so.
Even slow sessions travelling can pose a risk with minor/easy encounters wearing the party down if they recklessly wander about into ambushes instead of scouting or negotiating.
Just in general I've found it to be the more versatile of the rest variants.

[Tanarii]

My theory has always been that long rests healing to full and returning half HD was to support episodic play. Like AL. I'm surprised they didn't have it return HD to full really.

[Kane0]

Re slow natural healing, wont the players just use the rest of their spell slots to achieve much the same effect?

[Zhorn]

Re slow natural healing, wont the players just use the rest of their spell slots to achieve much the same effect?
They can if they have them. But any resources they spend on healing is a resource they don't have for later when it might have been more vital. So if they burn through their spell slots early and a random encounter pops up later (I roll openly so players know these aren't being fudged), there's an increased risk of taking more damage in the prolonged fight that might have been resolved faster if they had those spell slots to spare.
Or it could have been a worth while gamble as they saved on spending hit dice and gained back some ground that they might have otherwise lost on the attrition front.

It's like using healing in combat to top someone off vs using it to get someone back up from 0. Or spells spent on direct damage vs those used on control and lockdown. Pros and cons to each compared to the other.

It's all up to the players on how they want to allocate their resources.

[Sorinth]

They can if they have them. But any resources they spend on healing is a resource they don't have for later when it might have been more vital. So if they burn through their spell slots early and a random encounter pops up later (I roll openly so players know these aren't being fudged), there's an increased risk of taking more damage in the prolonged fight that might have been resolved faster if they had those spell slots to spare.
Or it could have been a worth while gamble as they saved on spending hit dice and gained back some ground that they might have otherwise lost on the attrition front.

It's like using healing in combat to top someone off vs using it to get someone back up from 0. Or spells spent on direct damage vs those used on control and lockdown. Pros and cons to each compared to the other.

It's all up to the players on how they want to allocate their resources.

I believe it's more left over slots at the end of the day that are used to heal up before resting.

But really the biggest problem with slow healing is that it forces a group to have a dedicated healer, and that healer has to save most of their spell slots for healing. Having clerics be able to participate fully in fights and use their cool spells instead of having to conserve slots to heal the party back up is a big improvement, as does being able to make a party that doesn't have a dedicated healer.

[Zhorn]

I believe it's more left over slots at the end of the day that are used to heal up before resting.

But really the biggest problem with slow healing is that it forces a group to have a dedicated healer, and that healer has to save most of their spell slots for healing. Having clerics be able to participate fully in fights and use their cool spells instead of having to conserve slots to heal the party back up is a big improvement, as does being able to make a party that doesn't have a dedicated healer.
my current party has no healer, or anyone with healing spells

[Sorinth]

my current party has no healer, or anyone with healing spells

And how does the typical adventuring day look, if they are only healing with Hit Dice thanks to slow healing rules do they handle multiple long adventuring days in a row?

[Zhorn]

scouting, traps, ambushes, hit'n'run tactics, utilizing cover, chokepoints, non-combat resolutions like negotiating, bartering. They're a good bunch of players knowing to not get pinned down in open field combat when there are options to swing the odds in their favour before rolling initiative. There's no reason to waltz into a 'fair fight', as those odds will get you killed 50% of the time.
A hunting trap and burning oil can be remarkedly effective. As are caltrops.

[P. G. Macer]

LTH also doesn't have a floor, which, lol. The party doesn't forget the first time that happens.

Actually, LTH does have a floor, as it is described in the range section as creating a hemisphere rather than a dome. If you give it any credence, Jeremy Crawford on Twitter also eventually realized this, overruling his prior ruling with the comment “Read your own spell, Crawford!”

[Tanarii]

Actually, LTH does have a floor, as it is described in the range section as creating a hemisphere rather than a dome. If you give it any credence, Jeremy Crawford on Twitter also eventually realized this, overruling his prior ruling with the comment “Read your own spell, Crawford!”
Hemispheres don't include a "floor". They're only an outset shell. Crawford reread the spell then made an error.

[Sception]

I'd be ok if they just made sure that every class and subclass has meaningful limited use resources that refresh on both short and long rests. They don't have to be the same resources, but just some. My go to example of what variation might look like is the 4e executioner assassin, from the more experimental period of class design towards the end of 4e's life cycle. Somehow the most interesting design of an edition always seems to come at the end.

Like all 4e classes, the executioner had at will, encounter (short rest), and daily use abilities, but their short rest ability was one big damage strike rather than a set of encounter powers, while their daily abilities were poisons that they could brew from a list each day, with higher level executioners learning additional and stronger poison formulas. These poisons generally had multiple uses - most had some sort of encounter long damage buff when applied to a weapon, but they also typically had additional stronger or more esoteric uses if you could get an enemy to ingest them, encouraging creativity outside of typical combat encounters. Both of these abilities worked radically differently from the typical 4e set of encounter and daily powers, and honestly they weren't perfectly balanced with typical powers either, but they were ~close enough~ to par that you didn't feel you were holding your party back as an executioner (something you might feel as the similarly experimental but not as elegantly implemented 4e vampire class), and while you had different amounts of encounter and daily abilities which worked in different ways, you still had encounter & daily abilities and thus were still effected by especially long or short adventuring days in similar ways.


Which is the biggest problem for me with 5e class design vs. rest schedule. Some classes have long rest resources but no short rest resources to speak of. Others are the exact opposite. Still others are almost all at-will, and interact minimally with short or long rests apart from refreshing HP. Because short rest and long rest resources are so inconsistently distributed, shorter or longer days affect different party members in radically different ways, which causes interparty conflict over whether and how long to rest AND balance problems for the DM because if you have fewer encounters in a day you can't just ramp up this difficulty of those encoutners, because half your party members aren't meaningfully stronger in that situation while the other half might be godly or might hold back expecting more encounters than they're getting. Likewise, you can necessarily just make encounters weaker for long adventuring days because half the party doesn't /get/ meaningfully weaker as the day goes on, because all their limited use abilities keep coming back every time they have time to stop for a snack.

if every party member had meaningful encounter AND daily abilities, even if they didn't look the same, even if they weren't particularly well balanced, you'd still have party members agreeing more on when to rest, and as a DM you'd still be able to account for shorter or longer adventuring days in your own encounter design, since at least the whole party would be affected by them in similar ways, if not to the same degree.

[Sorinth]

Which is the biggest problem for me with 5e class design vs. rest schedule. Some classes have long rest resources but no short rest resources to speak of. Others are the exact opposite. Still others are almost all at-will, and interact minimally with short or long rests apart from refreshing HP. Because short rest and long rest resources are so inconsistently distributed, shorter or longer days affect different party members in radically different ways, which causes interparty conflict over whether and how long to rest AND balance problems for the DM because if you have fewer encounters in a day you can't just ramp up this difficulty of those encoutners, because half your party members aren't meaningfully stronger in that situation while the other half might be godly or might hold back expecting more encounters than they're getting. Likewise, you can necessarily just make encounters weaker for long adventuring days because half the party doesn't /get/ meaningfully weaker as the day goes on, because all their limited use abilities keep coming back every time they have time to stop for a snack.

if every party member had meaningful encounter or daily abilities, even if they didn't look the same, even if they weren't particularly well balanced, you'd still have party members agreeing more on when to rest, and as a DM you'd still be able to account for shorter or longer adventuring days in your own encounter design, since at least the whole party would be affected by them in similar ways, if not to the same degree.

Is inter party conflict about resting inherently bad?

[Psyren]

Make Short Rests 10 minutes, with the expectation that this is usually happens (but not necessarily will in situations like trying flee) after every fight. Rebalance resource distribution accordingly.

Have the calculations that Short Rest classes should roughly run out of a differing resource such as hit points at about the time Long Rest classes run out of spells.

This. When I first started, we played the 10-minute short rest for weeks before the GM realized it was technically supposed to be an hour, and didn't bother changing it.

I would make it something like "a short rest lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, and you need at least 30 minutes to spend a hit die. You may spend up to two hit dice during a short rest." All the other short rest resources like ki and wild shape and warlock spells only need the minimum 10.

[Sorinth]

scouting, traps, ambushes, hit'n'run tactics, utilizing cover, chokepoints, non-combat resolutions like negotiating, bartering. They're a good bunch of players knowing to not get pinned down in open field combat when there are options to swing the odds in their favour before rolling initiative. There's no reason to waltz into a 'fair fight', as those odds will get you killed 50% of the time.
A hunting trap and burning oil can be remarkedly effective. As are caltrops.

Sounds like a fun game. Do you have tips for keeping for keeping the party moving forward rather then stopping early to more fully recover?

I've been toying with a way to make Random Encounters more frequent based on slow moving, and other attention getting actions. So for example taking rests starts lowers the number needed for a "random" encounter making them more frequent. With the knowledge that there are encounters out there that you can't handle my hope is that it provides that extra incentive to push beyond the 5min adventuring day. But I haven't finished playing around with the rules or tested it out yet.

[Psyren]

^ I think the better solution than attacking them more when they stop frequently, is to have a plot/objective that makes them not want to stop frequently.

[Segev]

Actually, LTH does have a floor, as it is described in the range section as creating a hemisphere rather than a dome. If you give it any credence, Jeremy Crawford on Twitter also eventually realized this, overruling his prior ruling with the comment “Read your own spell, Crawford!”


Hemispheres don't include a "floor". They're only an outset shell. Crawford reread the spell then made an error.

According to the srd (https://5e.d20srd.org/srd/spells/tinyHut.htm): "A 10-foot-radius immobile dome of force springs into existence around and above you and remains stationary for the duration," so it is "a dome."

"Creatures and objects within the dome when you cast this spell can move through it freely. All other creatures and objects are barred from passing through it. Spells and other magical effects can’t extend through the dome or be cast through it. The atmosphere inside the space is comfortable and dry, regardless of the weather outside."

The wording repeatedly refers to barring things from "passing through" the dome, except where it says "the atmosphere inside the space is comfortable and dry," which means that there is, by RAW, distinction between passing through the dome and merely entering the space inside the dome. We could quibble over what "inside" means, but though I used to be of the opinion that the entire space was protected from intrusion, if we go by the RAW, the dome is a dome and not a tent. Weirdly, however, while nothing prevents water from entering through the bottom, it would prevent sufficient water from entering to cause the atmosphere from being anything but "comfortable and dry," which means you can cast it underwater and it will expel (or destroy, or convert to air) water that is "part of the atmosphere" in order to dry the space.

Honestly, it's going to be up to the DM whether things can burrow up beneath it, anyway. It is, ultimately, a fancy tent. The fact that it's so hard to get into from the outside is really a massive increase in its power over prior editions.

[Man_Over_Game]

if every party member had meaningful encounter AND daily abilities, even if they didn't look the same, even if they weren't particularly well balanced, you'd still have party members agreeing more on when to rest, and as a DM you'd still be able to account for shorter or longer adventuring days in your own encounter design, since at least the whole party would be affected by them in similar ways, if not to the same degree.

I do think that Slow Natural Healing does help with this quite a bit.

The folks who rely most on Hit Dice (and recharging them) are Martials, as they're more likely to get hit, have higher Constitution scores, and have larger Hit Dice. Casters want to avoid getting hit to maintain Concentration, so they're unlikely to use up their Hit Dice too frequently to notice.

That way, Martials have a reason to want to Long Rest (even if it's not the same reason Casters do), and Casters have a reason to want to Long Rest (even if it's not the same reason Martials do). The only classes that don't really care about Short Rests are Barbarians, Rangers, and Rogues, everyone else gets something of value. Even then, though, a well-organized party with those characters could take that into account and balance their Hit Dice around their ability to avoid/absorb damage to maximize efficiency (so a Rogue does more melee if he has a lot of Hit Dice, and keeps at range when he doesn't).

The perfect goal is that everyone wakes up from a Long Rest with 100% of their resources, and that requires everyone to adjust their playstyle for the sake of the group. It's a pretty cool solution, as long as you got players that know what they're doing. Otherwise, it'll get frustrating when your Martial keeps trying to get himself killed by not taking damage or combat seriously.

[strangebloke]

According to the srd (https://5e.d20srd.org/srd/spells/tinyHut.htm): "A 10-foot-radius immobile dome of force springs into existence around and above you and remains stationary for the duration," so it is "a dome."

"Creatures and objects within the dome when you cast this spell can move through it freely. All other creatures and objects are barred from passing through it. Spells and other magical effects can’t extend through the dome or be cast through it. The atmosphere inside the space is comfortable and dry, regardless of the weather outside."

The wording repeatedly refers to barring things from "passing through" the dome, except where it says "the atmosphere inside the space is comfortable and dry," which means that there is, by RAW, distinction between passing through the dome and merely entering the space inside the dome. We could quibble over what "inside" means, but though I used to be of the opinion that the entire space was protected from intrusion, if we go by the RAW, the dome is a dome and not a tent. Weirdly, however, while nothing prevents water from entering through the bottom, it would prevent sufficient water from entering to cause the atmosphere from being anything but "comfortable and dry," which means you can cast it underwater and it will expel (or destroy, or convert to air) water that is "part of the atmosphere" in order to dry the space.

Honestly, it's going to be up to the DM whether things can burrow up beneath it, anyway. It is, ultimately, a fancy tent. The fact that it's so hard to get into from the outside is really a massive increase in its power over prior editions.

pretty much.

The larger problem is that camping in the enemy base is a great way to face every enemy in the whole dungeon in one encounter.

[truemane]

Sounds like a fun game. Do you have tips for keeping for keeping the party moving forward rather then stopping early to more fully recover?

I've been toying with a way to make Random Encounters more frequent based on slow moving, and other attention getting actions. So for example taking rests starts lowers the number needed for a "random" encounter making them more frequent. With the knowledge that there are encounters out there that you can't handle my hope is that it provides that extra incentive to push beyond the 5min adventuring day. But I haven't finished playing around with the rules or tested it out yet.

The solution that's worked the best for me is: I just ask my players not to.

"I know the rules allow it. Even encourage it. But it increases my prep time and hurts my immersion. So please don't do it."

Depending on the table, I might also appeal to genre conventions. But that's secondary. The key point here is that tabletop roleplaying isn't a passively generated video game and so to some degree the players owe me a good experience as much as I owe them one. And the 5 minute adventuring day makes me not want to run the game anymore.

And if a group still wants to run a 5 minute day after that, then I know I'm at the wrong table.

[Sception]

Is inter party conflict about resting inherently bad?

If the players are stopping the game once or more per session to debate for 5 minutes over whether / how long to rest, then yeah, that's not great. IMO that's not a particularly compelling dilemma. What to do with the enemy captive, whether to free the imprisoned genie offering them a wish, whether to trust the king's viseer or the exiled knight, how to go after the dragon slumbering on death peak, whether to attack the cult hideout to stop whatever they're planning or infiltrate it in the hopes of learning whether they're part of a wider organization, and how to go about whichever they choose - there's lots of interesting things for characters to debate over. Heck, even small game decisions like 'should the wizard cast web while the enemies are bunched up, or hold off until after the sorcerer has cast fireball' can be interesting little decision points.

But, with few exceptions, 'do we rest and how long' is often simultaneously more acrimonious and less interesting ime. More disrupting ooc distraction than fun in character decision point.

[Sorinth]

^ I think the better solution than attacking them more when they stop frequently, is to have a plot/objective that makes them not want to stop frequently.

Sure and when applicable it's great, but many times it's not a good option and trying to shoehorn something in feels contrived, and can get repetitive.

If the adventure is to find and loot the lost city deep in the jungle, the only time based plot objective might be to get there before some other adventuring group gets all the good loot. But it's also fake leverage since even if the players move slow and should show up too late, having all the monsters defeated, puzzles solved, and loot taken is simply not fun for the DM or players.

Or being hired to deal with giants attacking trade caravans, it's really not going to matter much whether the players push through and arrive at the lair in 3 days, or if they spend a week getting there. Worst case a few more caravans get attacked, or more likely the caravans are just don't leave until after the issue has been resolved which isn't that much incentive. So you have to have whoever is doing the hiring put in some sort of time based reward schedule which often has weak reasoning.

[Psyren]

The solution that's worked the best for me is: I just ask my players not to.

"I know the rules allow it. Even encourage it. But it increases my prep time and hurts my immersion. So please don't do it."

Depending on the table, I might also appeal to genre conventions. But that's secondary. The key point here is that tabletop roleplaying isn't a passively generated video game and so to some degree the players owe me a good experience as much as I owe them one. And the 5 minute adventuring day makes me not want to run the game anymore.

And if a group still wants to run a 5 minute day after that, then I know I'm at the wrong table.

I honestly thought 5e did much better at eliding that phenomenon than other editions have. With various resources and even some healing recoverable on a short rest without needing specific items made available to the group, they're encouraged to push forward much longer into the adventuring day before stopping for the night.


Sure and when applicable it's great, but many times it's not a good option and trying to shoehorn something in feels contrived, and can get repetitive.

If the adventure is to find and loot the lost city deep in the jungle, the only time based plot objective might be to get there before some other adventuring group gets all the good loot. But it's also fake leverage since even if the players move slow and should show up too late, having all the monsters defeated, puzzles solved, and loot taken is simply not fun for the DM or players.

The solution to a contrived plot is for it not to be contrived. "Find the lost city because there's money there" are not good stakes for an adventuring party; they can get money doing all kinds of things, so missing that one doesn't carry any weight. Especially in an edition like 5e where there is much less shopping to do anyway.

Similarly "protect the caravans and get paid, but get paid less if you dawdle" is not much incentive either. A little more creativity is necessary :smallsmile:

[Morty]

If the players are stopping the game once or more per session to debate for 5 minutes over whether / how long to rest, then yeah, that's not great. IMO that's not a particularly compelling dilemma. What to do with the enemy captive, whether to free the imprisoned genie offering them a wish, whether to trust the king's viseer or the exiled knight, how to go after the dragon slumbering on death peak, whether to attack the cult hideout to stop whatever they're planning or infiltrate it in the hopes of learning whether they're part of a wider organization, and how to go about whichever they choose - there's lots of interesting things for characters to debate over. Heck, even small game decisions like 'should the wizard cast web while the enemies are bunched up, or hold off until after the sorcerer has cast fireball' can be interesting little decision points.

But, with few exceptions, 'do we rest and how long' is often simultaneously more acrimonious and less interesting ime. More disrupting ooc distraction than fun in character decision point.

And in my experience, when the players of long rest classes need to rest, the other players might agree simply because they need those classes' spells for the party to operate at full capacity - so everyone operates on their timetable anyway. Of course, the longest 5E campaign I've played was Storm King's Thunder, which regularly has one combat between long rests. I quit it when I was level 6. Possibly because of how awful my rogue felt to play when I didn't even have "can do it all day" to fall back on. So that's a case of games, including published adventures, just not lining up with the expectation of throwing multiple encounters at the party to wear them down.

[Kane0]

My current resting setup is:

Short rest:
A breather of about 15 minutes. When taking a short rest you can choose to expend Hit Dice (adding your Constitution bonus to each roll) in order to recover lost HP, plus any other features and abilities that require a short rest to recover.
Eating, tending to wounds, leisure activities and light travel are common features of a short rest.

Long Rest:
A break of about 8 hours. At the end of a long rest you gain all the benefits of a short rest plus any features and abilities that require a long rest to recharge, and you regain a number of expended Hit Dice equal to your Proficiency Bonus.
Making camp, sleeping, studying and other activities are common features of a long rest.

So pretty similar to Zhorn it appears. It's worked out alright so far.

[Psyren]

My current resting setup is:

Short rest:
A breather of about 15 minutes. When taking a short rest you can choose to expend Hit Dice (adding your Constitution bonus to each roll) in order to recover lost HP, plus any other features and abilities that require a short rest to recover.
Eating, tending to wounds, leisure activities and light travel are common features of a short rest.

Long Rest:
A break of about 8 hours. At the end of a long rest you gain all the benefits of a short rest plus any features and abilities that require a long rest to recharge, and you regain a number of expended Hit Dice equal to your Proficiency Bonus.
Making camp, sleeping, studying and other activities are common features of a long rest.

So pretty similar to Zhorn it appears. It's worked out alright so far.

I agree with this. The only difference is that I would require a longer Short Rest if they are expending a bunch of hit dice. (maybe up to 2 for the first 15 min, 15 more for each hit die past that to a maximum of 5 at 1 hour.)

[Zhorn]

Sounds like a fun game. Do you have tips for keeping for keeping the party moving forward rather then stopping early to more fully recover?

I've been toying with a way to make Random Encounters more frequent based on slow moving, and other attention getting actions. So for example taking rests starts lowers the number needed for a "random" encounter making them more frequent. With the knowledge that there are encounters out there that you can't handle my hope is that it provides that extra incentive to push beyond the 5min adventuring day. But I haven't finished playing around with the rules or tested it out yet.
Sounds like you are most of the way there. There's no one perfect solution as how you manage it effectively will also come down to the types of players you have, how they think, and what type of adventure you are running, but I'm fond of the advice by Matt Colville;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31IAzJO-BEA
Don't be too literal with it being both orcs and them attacking immediately, it's just the name of the concept.
What you want is the players to understand that your job is to make there be content whenever there is none. If the players are actively engaging in content, solving problem, making decisions (not stuck at the discussion phase), executing plans, then the content they have on the table is the content they will be contending with. If they are going to hunker down for a short rest, they players will first be setting up their own content so to avoid a lull in content from happening. This in my post on trapping and scouting. Setting up their own little skill challenges, and if they are bringing the right tool for the job and enacting plans that make sense within their knowledge and skill sets then they usually just go by their passives and assume success (don't make them roll to set up the hunting trap).

Random encounters occur randomly, but they are guaranteed to happen when the game reaches an "it's quiet... to quiet" moment. Players stopping to rest and not doing anything in that moment of time is too quiet.
Pressing on is active engagement
Fortifying a location is active engagement
Scouting for dangerous threats is active engagement
"Orcs Attack" when they get passive (again not literally 'orcs', and not literally 'attack').
If my players want to take a short rest, I don't stop them unless it is unreasonable to rest there. But if they are attempting to be passive in hostile territory and nothing happens, then it wasn't hostile territory.

"We want to take a rest. Here's the things we are doing to ensure that this area is safe enough to rest, or that if there is trouble, here's what we've set up as to not get attacked/ambushed or divert attention away from where we are hunkered down"
If what they did looks good, I reward the effort by making it work and the random encounter (the rolled one, not the "Orcs Attack" one) interacts with their preparations first, or sometimes the preparation interacts with them first, and treat the resolution in a way that makes sense. If actual effort/resources were spent by the party doing this, congratulations to getting another encounter ticked off for the day, award XP accordingly. If it was a token effort, but still made sense to work, the party avoided an encounter but still got their rest, so it's still a win for them.

If they are just going to be passive and declare they are resting, "Orcs Attack" and an encounter will happen at either the start/end or interrupt that attempt at a rest, since as far as I'm aware as the DM based on the information present, the party has just plopped down out in the open of hostile territory and started waiting. Hostile territory is hostile, adventuring is dangerous, and passive npcs don't have plot armor.

In any case though, that time spend on resting is time that the rest of the game has moved ahead by. There's another thread up now on ticking clocks for handling that (which I'll read and input in on later).

[heavyfuel]

I'm not about to read 5 pages of thread, so I'm going to assume someone has said it, and I'm just reiterating:

I hope they keep Long Rests as is, and make Short Rests very very short, like 1 or 5 minutes. Basically meaning that "per Short Rest" abilities are now "per Encounter" in combat, and "at will" out of combat.

I would take some rebalancing, of course, but that's what a new edition is for.

[RandomPeasant]

And in my experience, when the players of long rest classes need to rest, the other players might agree simply because they need those classes' spells for the party to operate at full capacity - so everyone operates on their timetable anyway.

Problems like this leave me unconvinced that it is possible or even desirable to balance things around different characters needing different types of rest. There are just so many unnecessary failure points. If you don't have time pressure (and the iconic D&D adventure of "there is a dungeon with some monsters in it" does not), there's no reason not to long rest as often as you want to. Time pressure has to be precisely tuned so that you can make it under the wire if you push, but won't if you don't. If you tune limited resource-based characters too highly, you can get more done by rationing your limited abilities strictly and resting anyway, so bringing anyone who can go all day along makes you a sucker. Conversely, if you tune the all-day characters to highly, you can ignore the time pressure by running the adventure through in one go, so bringing anyone with limited resources along makes you a sucker. Far better to just balance things at a level close to the individual encounter (and far easier for individual DMs to tweak in response to the needs of the campaign, and far less restrictive in terms of campaign style or class design). Limited resources should be saved for things that are flashy and high-impact, and individual characters should not be excluded from flashy, high-impact abilities by virtue of class choice.

[Sception]

I'd like to see explicit rest limitations. At the very least, no more than one long rest per 24 hours. You can't double the benefit of a full night's sleep by taking two in a row.

Maybe an explicit limit on short rests per long rest as well, with advice to the gm on adjusting that limit based on the kind of campaign they run. IME players actually take more short rests if they're limited this way since they don't want to 'waste' a limited resource by skipping them.

[Zhorn]

Maybe an explicit limit on short rests per long rest as well, with advice to the gm on adjusting that limit based on the kind of campaign they run. IME players actually take more short rests if they're limited this way since they don't want to 'waste' a limited resource by skipping them.
As I've mentioned earlier in this, I'm fond of the house rule of "you must spend at least one hit dice to benefit from a short rest".
It gives a limit on the about of resting a character could possibly benefit from in a day with a narrative justification. There's only so much natural recovering your body can do in a given timeframe (ie: the number of hit dice you have), but it's not a hard-limit of some arbitrary number. As you level up you have more hit dice players have the agency to ration out over more rests, but with the higher tiers of play they'll also want to spend more hit dice on a single rest.

No shade against those going with the common two-per-day house rule. That one is common for a reason.
I just find the hit dice limiter comes across fairer to the players to say "you can spend these resources over the day in any distribution you want" rather than than the DM just declaring 'no more rests for you regardless of how safe the area is".

[Segev]

As I've mentioned earlier in this, I'm fond of the house rule of "you must spend at least one hit dice to benefit from a short rest".
It gives a limit on the about of resting a character could possibly benefit from in a day with a narrative justification. There's only so much natural recovering your body can do in a given timeframe (ie: the number of hit dice you have), but it's not a hard-limit of some arbitrary number. As you level up you have more hit dice players have the agency to ration out over more rests, but with the higher tiers of play they'll also want to spend more hit dice on a single rest.

No shade against those going with the common two-per-day house rule. That one is common for a reason.
I just find the hit dice limiter comes across fairer to the players to say "you can spend these resources over the day in any distribution you want" rather than than the DM just declaring 'no more rests for you regardless of how safe the area is".

While I understand where you're coming from, limiting it by "spend at least 1 hit die" only creates a pinch on low-level characters, unless you have a ton more encounters per day than is usually recommended. By level 5, you could have 7 encounters in a day with a short rest between each of them under your suggested rule. This isn't to say that having that many short rests in a day is a problem - nor that it isn't a problem - but rather just to say that by level 5, you're hard-pressed for the rule to matter.

I think the primary impact it would have is limiting how much healing the players are willing to spend HD on in a given short rest, because they don't want to spend more than 1 HD per short rest if they can avoid it since they need to reserve them to HAVE more short rests.

[Zhorn]

While I understand where you're coming from, limiting it by "spend at least 1 hit die" only creates a pinch on low-level characters, unless you have a ton more encounters per day than is usually recommended. By level 5, you could have 7 encounters in a day with a short rest between each of them under your suggested rule. This isn't to say that having that many short rests in a day is a problem - nor that it isn't a problem - but rather just to say that by level 5, you're hard-pressed for the rule to matter.

I think the primary impact it would have is limiting how much healing the players are willing to spend HD on in a given short rest, because they don't want to spend more than 1 HD per short rest if they can avoid it since they need to reserve them to HAVE more short rests.
Perhaps. It would be greatly effected by the number of combats (or at least damaging encounters) you have in a day, and the amount of hp the characters are looking to recover with hit dice specifically.

Assuming baseline rules for discussion purposes (no variants, optional, nor house rules), a character is regaining half their level in hit dice per long rest ('rounding down' is the default for general rules), so a character spending over half of them in one day will have less than their full amount available on the next, and can only every guarantee to have half their available hit dice on a day after spending everything on a previous day.

So if we were to take you level 5 example, assuming on day 1 they have all 5 hit dice, hey could potentially take up to 5 short rests on that first day (if only ever spending the 1 hit dice per short rest), but would only recover 2 hit dice after the next long rest, so on day 2 they only have 2 short rests available due to only having 2 hit dice recovered.

Then with how many they are spending on any given rest, if we assume on average 1 spent hit dice will undo 1 standard weapon attack worth of damage, a character that gets hit more than once in a given combat will want to spend an equivalent amount of hit dice during a short rest. With to-hit bonuses outpacing AC as characters level up, and multiattack also coming into play, an increase in level would naturally be balanced with a demand for more hit dice being spent per short rest.

Supplementing their hit point recovery with spells is option to conserve hit dice, but that's spending a more versatile resource to just save a less versatile one whose only role is hit point recovery. It's a choice the players have, but it is chewing up their day's resources anyway, which for DM's still achieves our goals for encounters requiring resource expenditure and getting characters to have lower resources towards the end of an adventuring day.

Ultimately my favouring of this method comes down to it just being a more narratively reasonable limitation versus the arbitrary 2-per-day limit, since it is still a finite number of short rests but the players have some control over.
Secondly is that it ties the need of long rests into the game in a way that reigns in infinite-short-rest builds like the coffeelock. I don't need to ban such builds so the players can enjoy a little bit of the cheese, but is restrained from getting out of hand.

[Segev]

Perhaps. It would be greatly effected by the number of combats (or at least damaging encounters) you have in a day, and the amount of hp the characters are looking to recover with hit dice specifically.

Assuming baseline rules for discussion purposes (no variants, optional, nor house rules), a character is regaining half their level in hit dice per long rest ('rounding down' is the default for general rules), so a character spending over half of them in one day will have less than their full amount available on the next, and can only every guarantee to have half their available hit dice on a day after spending everything on a previous day.

So if we were to take you level 5 example, assuming on day 1 they have all 5 hit dice, hey could potentially take up to 5 short rests on that first day (if only ever spending the 1 hit dice per short rest), but would only recover 2 hit dice after the next long rest, so on day 2 they only have 2 short rests available due to only having 2 hit dice recovered.

Then with how many they are spending on any given rest, if we assume on average 1 spent hit dice will undo 1 standard weapon attack worth of damage, a character that gets hit more than once in a given combat will want to spend an equivalent amount of hit dice during a short rest. With to-hit bonuses outpacing AC as characters level up, and multiattack also coming into play, an increase in level would naturally be balanced with a demand for more hit dice being spent per short rest.

Supplementing their hit point recovery with spells is option to conserve hit dice, but that's spending a more versatile resource to just save a less versatile one whose only role is hit point recovery. It's a choice the players have, but it is chewing up their day's resources anyway, which for DM's still achieves our goals for encounters requiring resource expenditure and getting characters to have lower resources towards the end of an adventuring day.

Ultimately my favouring of this method comes down to it just being a more narratively reasonable limitation versus the arbitrary 2-per-day limit, since it is still a finite number of short rests but the players have some control over.
Secondly is that it ties the need of long rests into the game in a way that reigns in infinite-short-rest builds like the coffeelock. I don't need to ban such builds so the players can enjoy a little bit of the cheese, but is restrained from getting out of hand.

I suppose my question, if you're pointing out how little 1 HD really restores, is this: if they care that they're not getting back many hp at each short rest, why are they short resting so often? After all, under standard rules, if they use up their HD in two short rests, they can't heal during any subsequent ones.

It just feels like you're not really looking at the motives in conjunction, here, and the results are unlikely to be noticeable, or if they're noticeable, they seem likely to distort things in undesirable ways rather than lead to what you seem to want.



How many short rests are you seeing players take per adventuring day as-is? How many HD do they spend during them? Are they ending the day with HD left over, and are they taking many short rests with all HD expended prior to the rest even starting?

[Zhorn]

I suppose my question, if you're pointing out how little 1 HD really restores, is this: if they care that they're not getting back many hp at each short rest, why are they short resting so often? After all, under standard rules, if they use up their HD in two short rests, they can't heal during any subsequent ones.

It just feels like you're not really looking at the motives in conjunction, here, and the results are unlikely to be noticeable, or if they're noticeable, they seem likely to distort things in undesirable ways rather than lead to what you seem to want.



How many short rests are you seeing players take per adventuring day as-is? How many HD do they spend during them? Are they ending the day with HD left over, and are they taking many short rests with all HD expended prior to the rest even starting?
Spending ONLY one hit dice per short rest was as per your example in #129 for 7 encounters separated by 5 rests.
They COULD do that, but I've not seen anything like that actually happen in play.

from experience;
If they are taking a short rest for hit points specifically, the players will spends more than 1 per rest.
They only spend just 1 on a short rest if they are just focusing on recharging their per short rest abilities (action surge, second wind, ki points, pact magic, etc).
Usually 2-3 encounters pass by before my players opt for a short rest, and they are generally spending more than 1 dice at a time.

[Segev]

Spending ONLY one hit dice per short rest was as per your example in #129 for 7 encounters separated by 5 rests.
They COULD do that, but I've not seen anything like that actually happen in play.

from experience;
If they are taking a short rest for hit points specifically, the players will spends more than 1 per rest.
They only spend just 1 on a short rest if they are just focusing on recharging their per short rest abilities (action surge, second wind, ki points, pact magic, etc).
Usually 2-3 encounters pass by before my players opt for a short rest, and they are generally spending more than 1 dice at a time.

Have you run it under standard rules? I am curious what you've observed under those compared to what you've observed under your house rule.

[Zhorn]

Have you run it under standard rules? I am curious what you've observed under those compared to what you've observed under your house rule.
There was campaign I ran a few years back before lockdowns I did for some folks through my uni's tabletop club.
We did use the short rests must spend at least one hit dice, and not using slow natural healing.
Tricky to gauge though as the party had a ranger, light cleric, celestial warlock and paladin, and so had a lot of healing at it's disposal (was also a monk and rogue, but they weren't healing).

The hit dice ruling actually first appeared there as during session 0 the warlock did say they were concerned about having cure wounds with pact magic might lead to some cheese if there wasn't some reasonable limit (he was my DM from the prior campaign). They first suggested 2 or based on proficiency bonus, and once we moved the discussion onto a scaling value the table settled on hit dice.

The value of that campaign though, along with the two that followed with me as a player, to me was in learning big burst damage to counter abundant healing resources wasn't the answer to supply a fair and reasonable challenge, and geared me more towards attrition models.

[Sception]

As I've mentioned earlier in this, I'm fond of the house rule of "you must spend at least one hit dice to benefit from a short rest".

The problem I have with this is that it's too limited at first level - which granted doesn't last very long, but it can set player habits that last into higher levels - while basically no longer being a meaningful limit of any kind around level 4 or 5.

[Zhorn]

The problem I have with this is that it's too limited at first level1st level characters would only have a single hit dice to spend anyway, and most short rest features won't be showing up till 2nd or 3rd level anyway.
I think it's only second wind and pact magic that are 1st level short rest recharges.


while basically no longer being a meaningful limit of any kind around level 4 or 5.
Could you elaborate? I genuinely would like to see your point of view but without elaboration I only have my own information to go on and I disagree for the reasons I've pointed to in post #130.

Also, what types of limits did you have in mind since you were requesting a limit on short rests

Maybe an explicit limit on short rests per long rest...

[ProsecutorGodot]

I'd like to see explicit rest limitations. At the very least, no more than one long rest per 24 hours. You can't double the benefit of a full night's sleep by taking two in a row.

Hope I'm not misunderstanding, but this is already a thing. You cannot benefit from more than one long rest in a 24 hour period.

Before we consider limiting short rests we need to reach a stage where they're being used regularly, which I don't think we've reached.

[KorvinStarmast]

What I'd like to see is DMG material, and basic rules material, in the How to build encounters section give some examples and how to pace an adventuring day with rests being organic to the day .

This means: giving better tools to beginner DM's for how to do stuff like this, in both the Basic Rules and the DMG. Yes, it does. That's what's missing from the Adventure Day section of both books.

That will help with a lot of the short rest/long rest strangeness and hopefully preclude the 5 minute adventure day thing somewhat.

[Tanarii]

Before we consider limiting short rests we need to reach a stage where they're being used regularly, which I don't think we've reached.
Before we consider making short rests shorter, we need to reach a stage where they're not being used regularly and the DM doesn't want to use the heroic rests variant, which I don't think we've reached.

There a segment that complains loudly about it. But I've never felt it's a general problem.

[ProsecutorGodot]

Before we consider making short rests shorter, we need to reach a stage where they're not being used regularly and the DM doesn't want to use the heroic rests variant, which I don't think we've reached.

There a segment that complains loudly about it. But I've never felt it's a general problem.

I suppose you've got a point, no reason we can't leave it suggested as an optional thing.

I'll agree to the second point as well, although in my personal experience it might be because I'm the short rest based character advocating for their rests regularly.

[Man_Over_Game]

I suppose you've got a point, no reason we can't leave it suggested as an optional thing.

I'll agree to the second point as well, although in my personal experience it might be because I'm the short rest based character advocating for their rests regularly.

Personally, I think a lot of the issues could be solved by just adding features to each class that make them want each kind of Rest as much as everyone else.

Barbarians get Short Rest features.

Fighters get Long Rest features.

Rogues get... Features.

There's not really any thematic or mechanical reason Warlocks have to recharge their spell slots on a Short Rest, but changing it to be more streamlined might make the game more bland. So instead, just make those new features feel unique to each class. It won't look generic and same-y if the Barbarian gets ways to throw enemies while Fighters can reflect projectiles and make powerful counters against bosses.

That way, you can make balance more boring while making the game feel more dynamic and unique.

[schm0]

Okay... so when the players cast Leomund's tiny hut and you're in a "long adventuring day - really multiple days of travel" period, how do you explain that they can't actually get a long rest each day?

At my table if they are resting outside civilization or the dungeon itself, they get the benefits of a short rest. There's no "explaining" needed, those are just the rules we established in session zero.


Why don't you just enforce food and water tracking? From what I can tell it has the same effect. you have two weeks to the dungeon, two weeks back, now you only have your food and water minus four weeks. It cuts into the taking a day off between combats real good.

I do. Water and food have nothing to do with resting or resource management, though, at least not as it pertains to class features and hit points.

[Aimeryan]

At my table if they are resting outside civilization or the dungeon itself, they get the benefits of a short rest. There's no "explaining" needed, those are just the rules we established in session zero.

My mother used to do that when I was a child; I would ask why something was the case and she would reply because it just is. Is wasn't a satisfying answer back then and it still isn't now.

[schm0]

My mother used to do that when I was a child; I would ask why something was the case and she would reply because it just is. Is wasn't a satisfying answer back then and it still isn't now.

D&D doesn't care if you are "satisfied" with any of it's rules, nor do any of them require the DM to "explain" to they player why they are written the way they are, so I'm not sure how your mother is relevant. If a player insists on some sort of narrative explanation, it's quite simple: a long rest is not achievable in the wild because it's too dangerous.

[Aimeryan]

D&D doesn't care if you are "satisfied" with any of it's rules, nor do any of them require the DM to "explain" to they player why they are written the way they are, so I'm not sure how your mother is relevant. If a player insists on some sort of narrative explanation, it's quite simple: a long rest is not achievable in the wild because it's too dangerous.

D&D doesn't care about anything; people do. As a person, I would insist on an explanation, because the rules of the world should make sense for me to function in and I want to know what I must do to be able to acquire the desired effect. In this case, now I would know to use a Leomund's Tiny Hut, or a Demiplane, or a teleport circle, etc. I would also argue that the entire point of setting a guard or two is for this very reason, however, I expect the result would just be constant attacks to undermine the possibility.

[Sorinth]

I would insist on an explanation, because the world should make sense and I want to know what I must do to be able to acquire the desired benefit. In this case, I would use a Leomund's Tiny Hut, or a Demiplane, or a teleport circle, etc.

What's the narrative explanation for only recovering half your max hit dice during a long rest?

Because as far as I can tell there isn't one it's just the rules and nobody complains about needing an explanation or trying to find ways to "break" it.

[Aimeryan]

What's the narrative explanation for only recovering half your max hit dice during a long rest?

Because as far as I can tell there isn't one it's just the rules and nobody complains about needing an explanation or trying to find ways to "break" it.

Recovery takes more time? That isn't exactly difficult to explain.

To be fair, for the long rest not in the wild the DM could just say a magic pervades the wilds disturbing sleep to such an extent that a long rest is not possible - the presence of civilisation disperses this magic, however. It would still leave open planar travel and teleportation circles to avoid the issue, but both are not exactly early level.

[Sorinth]

Recovery takes more time? That isn't exactly difficult to explain.

So why isn't recovery takes more time in the wilderness a valid explanation for why you don't get all your LR resources back? It makes as much sense as to why HP recover 100% and HD at 50%.

[Aimeryan]

So why isn't recovery takes more time in the wilderness a valid explanation for why you don't get all your LR resources back? It makes as much sense as to why HP recover 100% and HD at 50%.

That is not an explanation, it is a statement. Don't know what more to tell you.

[Tanarii]

In this case, now I would know to use a Leomund's Tiny Hut, or a Demiplane, or a teleport circle, etc. I would also argue that the entire point of setting a guard or two is for this very reason, however, I expect the result would just be constant attacks to undermine the possibility.You seem to be assuming LTH is equivalent to resting in a civilization. And the entire point of having to set a guard or two is it's not safe.

Safe Having Long Resting might not be your preference, but there's nothing unreasonable about why it happens in-universe about it. IMO it makes more sense to work that way in-universe, not less. Of course, I grew up on AD&D and BECMI, where that was already the rule. You don't rest / end your session in the dungeon. You go back to town.

[schm0]

D&D doesn't care about anything; people do. As a person, I would insist on an explanation, because the rules of the world should make sense for me to function in and I want to know what I must do to be able to acquire the desired effect. In this case, now I would know to use a Leomund's Tiny Hut, or a Demiplane, or a teleport circle, etc. I would also argue that the entire point of setting a guard or two is for this very reason, however, I expect the result would just be constant attacks to undermine the possibility.

I mean, I guess? I've never once demanded an explanation from my DM. I suppose that's a difference in play style. It sounds like you just don't like the rule itself.

Tiny hut doesn't really change the way resting works, but the players are free to cast it if they prefer. And if you are at the point in your campaign that you are casting demiplane, you're not going to be camping in the woods to begin with...

Regardless, the whole point of the change is to reduce the frequency of long rests, which allows the DM to balance encounters around the adventuring day. I can't emphasize enough how elegantly this simple change solves that problem.

[MoiMagnus]

D&D doesn't care about anything; people do. As a person, I would insist on an explanation, because the rules of the world should make sense for me to function in and I want to know what I must do to be able to acquire the desired effect.

I'm assuming that "desired effect" here is "having more long rests".
The whole point of the houserule is to decrease the number of long rests, so the exact opposite. When a table agrees to an houserule, they should IMO also agree to the intend of the houserule and not try to circumvent it.

And if you are a perfectionist that want rules that are fully coherent with the universe, when you agree to an houserule and then find a way to bypass it (in this case LTH, Demiplane, ...), you should try to think of a way to reword the houserule in a way that fixes all those issues and reach the intent of the houserule, rather than playing cat & mouse with the GM.

[Aimeryan]

I'm assuming that "desired effect" here is "having more long rests".
The whole point of the houserule is to decrease the number of long rests, so the exact opposite. When a table agrees to an houserule, they should IMO also agree to the intend of the houserule and not try to circumvent it.

And if you are a perfectionist that want rules that are fully coherent with the universe, when you agree to an houserule and then find a way to bypass it (in this case LTH, Demiplane, ...), you should try to think of a way to reword the houserule in a way that fixes all those issues and reach the intent of the houserule, rather than playing cat & mouse with the GM.

No I get why the DM wants a Short Rest per day while travelling, presuming they are having only an encounter or two per day and the journey is only a few days. I am saying, as a player, I would want a Long Rest if the situation gave me the chance - so I would like to know why this situation is not giving me that.

It is perfectly fine for the DM to say, ''You know what guys, I want travelling through the wildness to be interesting, but unfortunately 5e has failed here. I am going to only grant Short Rests while travelling instead of Long Rests - there will be no in-game reason for this. Is that alright with you all?''

I would rather that then some un-explanation, or trying to con me with poorly thought out ones that fall apart. Personally, I would expect travel outside of something like the Jungles of Chult to be fairly uneventful for anything past tier 1 adventurers. Trying to fit in a balanced set of encounters along the travel just seems like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let the group of four level 10 players have an encounter with some wolves if you like - don't expect them to be challenged, though. Its called Dungeons & Dragons, not Dungeons, Dragons, and some Wolves.

[Psyren]

No I get why the DM wants a Short Rest per day while travelling, presuming they are having only an encounter or two per day and the journey is only a few days. I am saying, as a player, I would want a Long Rest if the situation gave me the chance - so I would like to know why this situation is not giving me that.

It is perfectly fine for the DM to say, ''You know what guys, I want travelling through the wildness to be interesting, but unfortunately 5e has failed here. I am going to only grant Short Rests while travelling instead of Long Rests - there will be no in-game reason for this. Is that alright with you all?''

I would rather that then some un-explanation, or trying to con me with poorly thought out ones that fall apart. Personally, I would expect travel outside of something like the Jungles of Chult to be fairly uneventful for anything past tier 1 adventurers. Trying to fit in a balanced set of encounters along the travel just seems like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let the group of four level 10 players have an encounter with some wolves if you like - don't expect them to be challenged, though. Its called Dungeons & Dragons, not Dungeons, Dragons, and some Wolves.

If you're not going to scale up the outdoor/random encounters to be interesting for a high level party, it's probably better for them to not travel on-screen at all. Just skip the boring stuff entirely.

"It takes you a couple of days to reach the dungeon entrance; you do a good job repelling any wildlife that take an interest in you on the road. Deduct X from your rations and then tell me what your marching order is as your approach."

[strangebloke]

No I get why the DM wants a Short Rest per day while travelling, presuming they are having only an encounter or two per day and the journey is only a few days. I am saying, as a player, I would want a Long Rest if the situation gave me the chance - so I would like to know why this situation is not giving me that.

It is perfectly fine for the DM to say, ''You know what guys, I want travelling through the wildness to be interesting, but unfortunately 5e has failed here. I am going to only grant Short Rests while travelling instead of Long Rests - there will be no in-game reason for this. Is that alright with you all?''

I would rather that then some un-explanation, or trying to con me with poorly thought out ones that fall apart. Personally, I would expect travel outside of something like the Jungles of Chult to be fairly uneventful for anything past tier 1 adventurers. Trying to fit in a balanced set of encounters along the travel just seems like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let the group of four level 10 players have an encounter with some wolves if you like - don't expect them to be challenged, though. Its called Dungeons & Dragons, not Dungeons, Dragons, and some Wolves.

the entire resting mechanic is arbitrary and the primary thing it replenishes is HP which is itself purely a gamist construct that doesn't clearly correspond to anything specific.

A "long rest" is a pure game mechanic, nothing more. A DM can elect to have it have whatever requirements they want with whatever justification they want. The key is managing player expectation and being consistent. Something as simple as "look in order for the game to be balanced we need lots of encounters so I'm making it harder to get long rests" has been a reason that all my players have accepted for the last five years.

As for field encounters, if the encounter is 'a bunch of wolves' then sure I'm not going to roll a bunch of level 10 PCs fighting them. But maybe they're in giant country, or maybe the dragon's pet wyvern herd stumbles into them. Maybe the 'encounter' is trivial but its also an introduction for a new NPC who will be important.

[Aimeryan]

If you're not going to scale up the outdoor/random encounters to be interesting for a high level party, it's probably better for them to not travel on-screen at all. Just skip the boring stuff entirely.

"It takes you a couple of days to reach the dungeon entrance; you do a good job repelling any wildlife that take an interest in you on the road. Deduct X from your rations and then tell me what your marching order is as your approach."

Agreed; this is how my group plays. The problem is not that you cannot have a odd encounter with something level appropriate (although, any campaign near civilisation will naturally make even this unlikely), it is that you cannot have improbable challenging encounter after improbable challenging encounter several times a day for several days without seeming very contrived. Then, to make even that work, you need to come up with some contrived reason that despite spells like Rope Trick and Leomund's Tiny Hut, or just setting a watch, you are never able to get a Long Rest along this journey. It just beggars belief - it is almost like D&D wasn't designed for this.