Longer rest periods and non-restful activities

[Greywander]

I've had the concept of a substantial overhaul to 5e bouncing around in my head, and one aspect of that is an expanded rest system, particularly with some longer rest periods.

First, a quick overview of the shorter rest periods:

A breather is 1 minute of light activity. Breather resources essentially act as per-encounter resources, and are basically at-will outside of combat (or other time-sensitive circumstances).

A break (short rest) is 1 hour of light activity. The longer rest time makes it more restrictive, putting you at risk of a random encounter if you don't secure your location. An hour is also a meaningful chunk of time, so taking a break will push the clock forward.

A camp (long rest) is 6 hours of sleep and 2 hours of light activity, once per day. I assume you're already familiar with long rests, I just wanted to drive home that a camp isn't a normal night's sleep, it's a transient rest in inhospitable territory. 6 hours of sleep is less then you'd want, but it's enough to keep you going for a while.

So now we get to the longer rest periods. I originally had two in mind:

A holiday is a day-long rest that includes 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of light activity. This leaves you 8 hours to do downtime activities, or even a bit of light adventuring.

A vacation is a week-long rest that is 7 consecutive holidays. Again, you're afforded 8 hours each day for downtime activities while you're resting.

Because of the difficulty in resting while in the wilderness, holiday and vacation resources would basically equate to per adventure resources. There might be times when you can take a holiday in the middle of an adventure, but the distinction between holidays and vacations is mostly (a) to provide different timescales depending on what you need to recover (i.e. the difference between stopping for a day vs. stopping for a week), and (b) to allow you to spend and recover holiday resources while taking a vacation.

The issue I'm facing is in figuring out what kinds of activities you would be able to do during a holiday or vacation without interrupting the rest. Can you do basically anything during those free 8 hours? Also, the holiday kind of sounds like a normal workday: 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of relaxation. Maybe holidays and vacations should restrict those last 8 hours to "moderate activity", but would would qualify as "moderate"? I could add a "work day", which is just 8 hours of sleep, but I'm not sure that that's meaningfully different from a camp. On the other hand, with only 8 free hours per day, and most downtime activities assuming you spend 8 hours on it, a holiday pretty much locks you into only pursuing one downtime activity at a time, with no room for any other side stuff.

Thoughts on this?

[Ryton]

How would this system work in an urban setting? Would every day effectively be a holiday?

What resources would be recovering on which rests?

[Greywander]

How would this system work in an urban setting? Would every day effectively be a holiday?
See, that's part of the question. Could you do e.g. heavy manual labor, and still get the benefits of a holiday so long as you aren't working for more than 8 hours? That doesn't seem right, but at the same time I don't want to unduly limit what the PCs do. Resting can be an excuse to engage in some downtime activities, particularly in a campaign where they don't get a lot of downtime otherwise. Maybe there's some kind of middle ground? But where would we draw the line?


What resources would be recovering on which rests?
This is something that's still in flux, and would likely vary from class to class. Probably things like spell slots would be on a gradient, where lower level slots would come back on shorter rests, and higher level slots would come back on longer rests. So something like Wish might require a vacation to get the slot back, but, say, Burning Hands might just take a breather or break. It's hard to get more specific than that until I've actually sat down and written up some classes and nailed down how the new magic system will work exactly. It will likely require some playtesting as well to get the balance right.

Then there's also healing. What I'm planning to do is use a two-stage health system, where you first deplete your HP (which is explicitly not meat), then further damage comes out of max HP (which is explicitly meat). HP is easy to heal; you can spend hit dice on a breather to get HP back, and you fully recover all HP on a break as well as getting those hit dice back. Max HP is harder to heal; you can spend hit dice on a camp to get max HP back, and fully recover all max HP and hit dice on a vacation. This will also partially balance a reduction in hit dice and HP, with hit dice scaling with your proficiency bonus; so you'd start with 2 HD at 1st level, and end up with 6 HD at 20th level, but because of the two-stage health system you would actually have the equivalent of 4 HD of health at 1st level and 12 HD of health at 20th level. Maybe you'd recover a single hit die after a holiday, but no max HP, allowing you to partially heal yourself in the middle of a vacation without needing to wait until the end.