The Longer Rest Variant from DMG Worth Playing With?

[dafrca]

I was thinking of running the rest periods a little longer, so I went and looked at the Varian in the DMG but I was not thinking of extending them as long as the variant in the DMG (SR=8 hours & LR=7 days).

I was thinking more like Short Rest be 2 or 3 hours and Long Rest be 2 days.

But I admit I am unsure how badly it will impact things.

Thoughts and opinions would be welcome. :smallsmile:

[Angelalex242]

Practically speaking, you get lazy wizards who can't be bothered to do anything on their 'off days.' lazy clerics, lazy other long rest classes.

"Orcs are attacking? Meh, I'm not on the clock today, screw you guys."

[Pex]

How often you have combats matter. It matters how many you have in a gameworld day. If there's only one per gameworld day (but more per real world game session) there's not much of a problem. You will need to be mindful of short rest and long rest recharge of resources. Also be careful of long duration spells like Mage Armor.

However, in my opinion, the real issue isn't how long in gameworld time it takes to rest. A long rest can be 8 hours, 8 days, 8 millennia. What really matters is how many rests (short and long) the players get per game session. Players want to use their stuff. They're supposed to use their stuff. They're supposed to use their stuff and get it back. If you have too many long rests everyone novas and overpowers the combats. However, just as bad or worse is having too few rests. If you do not let the players long rest they don't get to use their stuff and don't have fun. One of two situations happen. First is players are so worried they need to use their big guns later they don't use anything because of fear of not having them when they need them. Therefore they do basic boring attacks not using their stuff and combats become a slog. If they have to use something because their character will die if they don't they will be real world upset about it because now they're angry they won't have it later when they were supposed to have used it. The second situation is they do use their stuff because they'll die of they don't, but now they don't have anything left. They won't get a long rest for a long time so now are running on fumes doing basic attacks because they have nothing else to do. The more combats there are the worse they feel.

It takes real world time and energy to play the game. For many people real life gets in the way. They need to make the free time available to play, and often unforeseen important or emergency personal stuff happens they can't come to a game session. When they can play they want to play. They want to use their stuff. I have found that as long as players get at worst one long rest per two game sessions they'll be fine. The first game they used about half their stuff and still have plenty for next game. Another good way to handle it is one long rest per game session where the long rest happens at the end of the game session, and everyone has all their stuff to start fresh the following game session.

Therefore it doesn't really matter how long a long rest is in game world time. Use however long a length you need for whatever verisimilitude you want for the game world, aesthetics, personal taste, or even concern about game mechanic balancing. The important thing is pacing of the rests, the ratio of rests per game session.

[Second Wind]

If a long rest is a weekend, you'll need to be lenient about "light activity." A normal long rest can be spoiled by walking for an hour or by casting any spell. But that's unreasonably strict for a weekend, unless you're on bed rest.

On the other hand, if "light activity" can include browsing the shops, practicing with your weapon, working some hobbies, dinner with the NPCs, etc., that's more reasonable.

[Bjarkmundur]

@Pex - do you'd suggest some sort of agreed upon level of transparency at level 0. Something like "You can expect your characters to gain the benefits of a short rest once each session, with the third session being a long rest instead"

[stoutstien]

I was thinking of running the rest periods a little longer, so I went and looked at the Varian in the DMG but I was not thinking of extending them as long as the variant in the DMG (SR=8 hours & LR=7 days).

I was thinking more like Short Rest be 2 or 3 hours and Long Rest be 2 days.

But I admit I am unsure how badly it will impact things.

Thoughts and opinions would be welcome. :smallsmile:

Ironically there'd be no noticeable impact on pacing unless you track smaller units of time. For example there isn't a real difference for table time between a 1 hour short rest and a 3-hour short rest unless you track time by hours at the most. Same is true for LR.

[Zhorn]

Pex and stoutstien have the core elements covered.
If you want to adjust the timing on rests, you'll need to be able to answer what the timing change is being done in service of.
What aspect of the game are you trying to impact with the altered timescale?
How do you run your adventuring days?
How do you run your rate of encounters per session vs rests per session?

[MoiMagnus]

I was thinking of running the rest periods a little longer, so I went and looked at the Varian in the DMG but I was not thinking of extending them as long as the variant in the DMG (SR=8 hours & LR=7 days).

I was thinking more like Short Rest be 2 or 3 hours and Long Rest be 2 days.

But I admit I am unsure how badly it will impact things.

Thoughts and opinions would be welcome. :smallsmile:

It should work. What's important is that in practice, (1) you rarely sequence more than two combat encounters without a short rest and (2) players reasonable with their resources rarely completely run out before the opportunity for a long rest.
So as long as the GM keep in mind that they've change the resting rules when preparing the session, things should go well.

There is one point you might want to look at: spell casting time and duration. You might want to scale them up a little on a case-by-case basis.

For example, Mage Armour's "8 hours" duration means "often enough to last for all the encounters between two long rests, but two casting are required for particularly long days, and a third casting if you want to cover the long rest itself", meaning that in your case, you might want to homebrew it as a 48h duration OR
accept that this spell was de facto nerfed, and warn beginner players that relying on Magic Armour for this campaign is probably not a good plan.

On the other hand, it also make sense to increase some casting time. When we play with 8h short rest, we usually increase ritual casting time to be 1h instead of 10min.

[Gtdead]

It would be a nerf to long duration spells and it would dissuade the casters from using spells in social situations because I assume that even if you keep the combat pacing similar, there will be more chances for social encounters in general.

Like other posters have said, if combat pacing remains similar, then it won't make much difference.

[ad_hoc]

It's a narrative tool allowing an 'adventuring day' to happen over many actual days in game. This allows for different scales of doom clocks.

Common uses are for urban adventures and overland travel.

You don't need to stick to exactly what the DMG says. Pick times that will work for you.

[Burley]

I've seen this variant used in a campaign where the party is out in the wilderness and survival is a plotline. It encourages casting classes to use cantrips more (and their damage output will align more with non-spell classes). The game feels more gritty and more mundane (not a bad thing).
Other rules that are often ignored came up in the campaign: Exhaustion, food and water, shelter.

Usually when I play, resting goes like this: "We should do a long rest. Do we need to set up watch? Okay, I'll do first, you do second. *roll, roll* Okay, all refreshed! Let's go loot some corpses!"

In this campaign, resting was like: "Okay, I'm out of hit die and you're out of spells and Grrrald is stable, but unconscious. We need to find shelter before nightfall. There's an outcropping of rocks there, but we saw some wolves yesterday, so, I'll scout while you build the fire. It's too late to hunt safely, but tomorrow, if the weather permits, I'll set up some snares." Spoiler alert: Weather did not permit and not eating meant taking a level exhaustion, which meant more difficult survival checks until food was found. It took a week of just trying to rest before we had food and shelter enough to start recovering.


I didn't get to play much of that game, but it was memorable.

[BoutsofInsanity]

Its by far my favorite rule in the DMG and I use it exclusively in all of my games. I will never, ever, go back outside of very specific circumstances.

It changes so many things in regards to the game world. I run it as is, out of the book at Long rest being 7 days and short rests being 1 day.

I recommend it for the following style of campaigns

Lots of overland travel
Roleplay heavy games
Sandbox games
Narrative driven games


I do not recommend it for

Dungeon Crawl Games
Lots of combat in short amounts of time
High powered fantasy games in regards to the game world


--------------------------------------
It changes so much in the game world and as a DM it's the strongest tool I have. The following benefits are

It reduces murderhoboism because of increased opportunity costs for combat.
It forces casters to be strategic and buffs short rest classes by a lot
Having a safe space to rest becomes incredibly important. You don't want to be out of hit dice and spell slots in hostile territory ducking the mafia for 7 days
Politics matters a lot for the above reason
Wands, staves, rods, and items that refresh at dawn are premium. It really makes them feel special
Good Berry is nerfed
Narrative, it allows you to have combats over the course of several days or weeks, rather than within a 3 day time period.
Enforced Downtime


Again, my favorite rule. I love it.

[Sorinth]

As others have mentioned the 8hr duration spells like Mage Armour, or Aid become less impactful since you need to reup them to last between long rests. The other thing to be careful with is the wording of certain abilities, for example a Wizard can Arcane Recovery every day, but a Land Druid's Natural Recovery is once per LR. So normally it's the exact same but for GR it's vastly different. So there might be some stuff like that to house rule.

[Yakk]

I have written up a medium state to cover corner cases.

1. short rest is a safe night's sleep.
2. long rest is a week in safety.

Less safe environments may require longer and/or survival checks.

Then some other recovery changes:
1. You can expend a HD to regain a level of exhaustion, max HP lost.
2. At the end of a short rest, after spending HD, roll HD that are expended. Even rolls of 4 or higher are recovered. (A bit under half; bigger HD recover faster)
3. You can do downtime activities during a long rest. Serious activity sets it back or can cancel it.
4. Spell durations of 1 hour or more are 5x longer. So mage armor lasts 40 hours.
5. When you are subject to most healing magic, you must expend a HD and add it to the HP healed. If you lack HD the magic can only stabalize you. Exceptions: Regeneration (spell and effects), Lay on Hands, Life-transfer spells, Heal, Mass Heal, Power Word Heal
6. Cure Wounds can replace the d8 with the HD rolled.

Exhaustion requiring weeks of recovery seemed off. Similarly, I wanted a bit faster HP recovery; the "burn HD" to boost heals makes hesling rely on the target's capacity, and recovery of HD outside of a LR means taking 3 days to recover can help more than 1 night; a bit more continuous.

Pacing wise, it means to budget "scenes" like a dungeon or a cult den as something you'd do between short rests. So 2-3 encounters of enemies for the scene danger level. Tie 2-4 scenes together to get an arc, where pacing makes going after the next scene after a night's rest (due to travel or investigation or bad guys doing something) make sense.

Arcs in turn are seperated by downtime from other arcs.

An "Arc" is a DMG adventuring day.

[Psyren]

Instead of adjusting rests I would consider adjusting session length. You can have multiple sessions per long rest and that will accomplish the same result (taxing the players' "daily" resources and forcing them to be more strategic) without you having to comb through dozens of abilities and class features looking for where the floorboards might creak.

[Yakk]

Instead of adjusting rests I would consider adjusting session length. You can have multiple sessions per long rest and that will accomplish the same result (taxing the players' "daily" resources and forcing them to be more strategic) without you having to comb through dozens of abilities and class features looking for where the floorboards might creak.
The question is more of a narrative one. Do you think you should have most of an adventure -- most of a PC level -- occur over a single day? If not, the default rests don't work.

The point of week-long long rests and overnight short rests is you can have plot where resource management period is over multiple days, not over a single day, in the narrative.

It does make some magic items better unless you modify them (the ones that recharge on daily basis). It also requires that you budget adventure pacing to match.

In standard D&D, if some location requires 3 long rests worth of resources, you need to pace it so that the players can do it over 3 days. With gritty rests, this means the location might take a month to clear.

Similarly, "taking a short rest" to regain some resources requires an hour of narrative justification in standard D&D. In Gritty, it is a full night.

It is all *narrative*.

But, for example, telling a travel story without gritty resists (or otherwise resetting long rests) is difficult in standard D&D, because almost all resources reset multiple times on the journey; so all of the drama needs to be a single day? Or in clumps.

But a full week of restful downtime is something you can narrative-wise say "no" to easily, and have a travel adventure that takes many days (or even weeks) without a resource reset.

[Psyren]

The question is more of a narrative one. Do you think you should have most of an adventure -- most of a PC level -- occur over a single day? If not, the default rests don't work.

I'm not sure how you define "most of an adventure" or even "most of a PC level." A day should involve a number of encounters. How much of the "adventure" you get done during that timeis mutable and thus subjective. Levels are even moreso, I doubt most groups expect to be leveling once per long rest.

[dafrca]

Thank You All - I appreciate all the answers and input.

:biggrin:

[Kane0]

I was thinking of running the rest periods a little longer, so I went and looked at the Varian in the DMG but I was not thinking of extending them as long as the variant in the DMG (SR=8 hours & LR=7 days).

I was thinking more like Short Rest be 2 or 3 hours and Long Rest be 2 days.

But I admit I am unsure how badly it will impact things.

Thoughts and opinions would be welcome. :smallsmile:

Some more context would be helpful, was there something in particular that was causing this or an end result in mind?

I would probably say slow natural healing and healer kit dependency is better than gritty realism resting except for some circumstances

[Osuniev]

I personally love the Gritty Realism variant, but it's really a question of "what kind of stories do you want to run ?"

If your campaign is a megadungeon, Gritty Realism sucks. If it's a social intrigue, small 5-room dungeons, wilderness exploration, anything with no more than 2 fights a day, it's great.

It means random encounters during long journeys MATTER.

Basically, Gritty Realism works fine where you have 3-4 in-game days maximum of action. The main effect is that the players cannot Long Rest whenever if there's a vague clock : one week of rest would mean the assassin would cover it's strack, the spy would leave the city, the Thieves Guild would get out, the rival expedition would empty the dungeon, the king would hire other adventurers, etc... With Normal Resting rules, it's really hard to justify in game why players wouldn't chill outside the dungeon for 8 hours.

This mean spell slot become a resource you need to account for. Obviously the DM needs to make sure the number of fights stay reasonable : beyond 6-8 encounters between long rests, your PC may cry.
Warlocks, Monks and Fighters work great there, because the party will have a Short Rest every night.

One thing to be mindful of : exhaustion can be really punishing if played RAW in Gritty Realism.

I also use the long rest of one week as "downtime", where the players spend some time in the city looking for magical objects, working, etc.

[Abracadangit]

How often you have combats matter. -SNIP-

This should really be an overarching philosophy, in the game at large. "Let The Players Use Their Stuff"

[Kurt Kurageous]

It worked very well in an adventure when there were days between locations, and some of the locations they could pay to stay seven days.

It made the long rest a party decision, not just the LR based casters. Everyone got a short rest at the end of every day, and there was never more than one combat in a day. Stuff did happen at night, though.

Gritty reality is not so bad when you set it in a gritty world. The world was Arthurian England, the game Quest for the Holy Grail which I ported from a TFT module of the same name (1981?). TFT is absolutely gritty.

[Pex]

@Pex - do you'd suggest some sort of agreed upon level of transparency at level 0. Something like "You can expect your characters to gain the benefits of a short rest once each session, with the third session being a long rest instead"

That's a long rest per three game sessions not two. :smallyuk:

However, yes it is something that should be discussed in session 0. In fact it's how I learned about it. A proposed game was going to use modified gritty realism. Short rest 8 hours, long rest 3 days. At the time I was vehemently opposed to the gritty rules and discussed my angst about it with the DM. He explained how it would work in his game. Even though it was three game world days we'd get the long rest at the end of each game session. Gameworld time was flavor text. The physical and emotional fun of play the game mechanics wouldn't change. He taught me the new perspective that my problem wasn't how long a rest was, just how often the players get it - the ratio of rests per game session because it's all about active play.

Players need to understand they will get their stuff back regularly despite how long it takes in game world time. You can use an analogy. Suppose the party needs to go somewhere where the adventure takes place. It takes a week's travel. The DM could roleplay out every day of travel for random encounters and filler combats, but he could also just say "A week later you arrive." Same thing with the long rests. It's a four hour game session. At the end of the game session you say "Ok, next game session is three days later. You all long rest. See you then. If you want to do any non-strenuous downtime activities let me know in email."

The point of gritty realism resting is not to make the players suffer in frustration of not getting their stuff back. "Gritty realism" is a poor choice of words on 5E's part. It's simply a game mechanic adjustment because for that particular campaign it does not make sense to have more than one combat in a game world day. It might even be three game world days between combats. To use the normal long rest rules would mean everyone could nova which is not good for the game. For that one epic battle against the BBEG and his minions, sure, nova like crazy and have a blast. For regular play it stomps over the game.

In any event, do not use gritty realism resting when doing dungeon crawls or time limit adventures.

[MoiMagnus]

I'm not sure how you define "most of an adventure" or even "most of a PC level." A day should involve a number of encounters. How much of the "adventure" you get done during that timeis mutable and thus subjective. Levels are even moreso, I doubt most groups expect to be leveling once per long rest.

Narrative scale is the point here.

If you want the PC to be negotiating for a peace or raising armies, setting up multiple weeks sieges, and all of that and more within a single session (those example come from a campaign I've played), you probably want to have a few months played during each session, leading to long rest being a full week or even a full month.

Sure, you can always play multiple sessions per day and it works quite well, but it significantly reduces the kind of campaigns you're able to play.

[Saelethil]

I use a variant of it.
-Short rests take the regular overnight
-Exhaustion goes away after a short rest
-The length of a long rest depends on their safety and quality of shelter ranging from 2 full days (in a safe area with beds in a warm dry space, usually in a town or city) to 6 days (without decent shelter or bedding in bad weather)

They usually have 1 or 2 combats a day and 3-5 day between long rests. I generally try to stick to 4-8 encounters/long rest. The fighter, monk, and rogue don’t have a problem with it but they’re also new players. The wizard player, who has been playing for years, mostly as spell casters, likes it enough that he implemented it for his own game. The only pushback I’ve gotten is from the Paladin’s player who hasn’t played a lot but has been DMing on and off for years and usually runs pretty short adventuring days. He hasn’t expressed exactly why he doesn’t love it but those smite slots go fast. We haven’t played much since Tasha’s due to one player getting engaged and another moving out of state so I may need to remind him again about being able to get a slot back with his CD.
In the game that I’m a player in using it I’m playing a bard and really enjoying it.

Overall it has works really well at facilitating a slower paced, high role play, resource management game. As long as your players understand the pacing and are willing to suffer the consequences if they try to nova with LR resources it works well.

[Psyren]

Narrative scale is the point here.

If you want the PC to be negotiating for a peace or raising armies, setting up multiple weeks sieges, and all of that and more within a single session (those example come from a campaign I've played), you probably want to have a few months played during each session, leading to long rest being a full week or even a full month.

Sure, you can always play multiple sessions per day and it works quite well, but it significantly reduces the kind of campaigns you're able to play.

I think the disconnect for me here is why resting would even matter when you're operating on a scale like that. Presumably you're able to sleep several times in between the days of a protracted siege preparation, or raising armies, or negotiating peace etc. Why would per-rest resources even matter on that scale? It's not like you can persist a lattice of spells on the walls or something like you could in 3.5.

In other words, you can say something like "each day over the course of several weeks you meet with the diplomatic envoys of the kings of Anywhere and Somewhere, and *rolls/calls for roll* as you retire for bed each night you feel you've made some headway." Multiple days per session, just like that.

[Tanarii]

Therefore it doesn't really matter how long a long rest is in game world time. Use however long a length you need for whatever verisimilitude you want for the game world, aesthetics, personal taste, or even concern about game mechanic balancing. The important thing is pacing of the rests, the ratio of rests per game session.
I completely agree. But some people don't even seem to be able to fit 3 Deadly or 6 Medium combats into 8 hours (or 2 longer sessions) of play, let alone one session. That's the rough minimum baseline for what the game is balanced around in terms of resource drain per long rest, even if it's not actually used in combats.

It kinda blows my mind, because my players were always able to fit well over an adventuring day's worth of content into 3-4 hours of session. And IMC there was a "Session End = Long Rest" rule (ie a reversible statement).

[KorvinStarmast]

I was thinking of running the rest periods a little longer, so I went and looked at the Varian in the DMG but I was not thinking of extending them as long as the variant in the DMG (SR=8 hours & LR=7 days).

Don't. It's a half baked idea, as are most DMG variants.

[Zhorn]

Don't. It's a half baked idea, as are most DMG variants.
Mostly, yeah.
They can work, but they are not simple plug'n'play alterations.
You cannot change the timing on rests and assume everything else will just work.
Any change you go for needs to be understood in terms of the purpose it is serving AND how you as the DM will adjust your game style to work with that change and support it, much of which is not spelled out for you in the books.

[Angelalex242]

All I can say is, ultimately, not my cup of tea, and I would decline such a game.

[Dark.Revenant]

Lately I've just taken to just changing the time scale of Short and Long Rests to fit whatever the party is doing. Overland travel? Long Rest at the beginning and end, Short Rest at various notable milestones along the way. City intrigue? Long Rest between acts, Short Rest between scenes. Dungeon Crawl? Long Rest in town or at a rest-stop midway through the dungeon, Short Rest between floors.

Yeah, I give up a bit of verisimilitude, but the game runs better.

[MoiMagnus]

I think the disconnect for me here is why resting would even matter when you're operating on a scale like that. Presumably you're able to sleep several times in between the days of a protracted siege preparation, or raising armies, or negotiating peace etc. Why would per-rest resources even matter on that scale? It's not like you can persist a lattice of spells on the walls or something like you could in 3.5.

Because that's more interesting for them to matter?

It allows resources to be tight even when you have one short combat per week (an assassination attempt here, confronting a shapeshifter conspiracy there, etc). Otherwise peoples would just nova those combat without any consequence.

And it doesn't really break verisimilitude as peoples do get exhausted if they don't get weekends or holidays, and you can even adapt the worldbuilding with things like "in this universe, you need a full moon to restore your spell slots".

[Yakk]

I'm not sure how you define "most of an adventure" or even "most of a PC level." A day should involve a number of encounters. How much of the "adventure" you get done during that timeis mutable and thus subjective. Levels are even moreso, I doubt most groups expect to be leveling once per long rest.

They aren't.

But if you build 5-9 encounters per day of advised difficulty (both days and encounters), you get 1-4 adventuring days per level (depending on PC level).

If your adventure is over 5 levels (because the narrative scope of said adventure; it is a high-T2 scale problem and your PCs start at level 5; so they have 5 levels to get it done before it is obsolete), that means 10-20 "adventuring days" in your adventure.

If your narrative pacing is that this should occur with world-spanning travel and intrigue over the course of most of a year, then "gritty" rests just work.

Now you have the "BBEG" plot occurring over the course of a year, the PCs getting exposed to it, and trying to stop the BBEG.

(I think I made some math errors above, the numbers don't look right, but I hope you get the drift).


I think the disconnect for me here is why resting would even matter when you're operating on a scale like that. Presumably you're able to sleep several times in between the days of a protracted siege preparation, or raising armies, or negotiating peace etc. Why would per-rest resources even matter on that scale? It's not like you can persist a lattice of spells on the walls or something like you could in 3.5.

In other words, you can say something like "each day over the course of several weeks you meet with the diplomatic envoys of the kings of Anywhere and Somewhere, and *rolls/calls for roll* as you retire for bed each night you feel you've made some headway." Multiple days per session, just like that.
Because if a long rest is a week of downtime, you might have 10 days with single encounters every 2-3 days in it (scouting parties, assassinations, whatever). There is no time for a long rest between now and the invasion.

You'll get multiple short rests, but no long rest. Your budget of daily resources ain't gonna refresh.

In non-gritty rest, for the entire period to be in the same set of resources, you'd have to compact everything down to a single day's adventure. The army has to be less than a day away, instead of a week away, at the start of the problem.

The difference is narrative pacing. Are problems identified and solved over a period of a hour-day-week, or over a day-week-month? You get a different feel for what an adventure is with the two different pacings.

[JellyPooga]

I've brought this up in threads before and faced stern resistance, but I'll keep trying!

Gritty Realism (or Longer Long Rests) can be about narrative pace as has been discussed here, but personally where I think it comes into it's own is not to simply change the time-scale of encounters; down that road lies zero actual change in the game mechanics and making the rule change largely meaningless (and if it's meaningless, then why bother?).

No, the point of using GR must be to offer a different style of play. A style of play that offers a choice to the players to break out of the mould of 6-8 encounters between Long Rests and 2-3 encounters between Short Rests. It offers GMs the opportunity to make time a critical aspect of their campaign and/or consequences that normal, more "heroic" rest rules/pacing do not. If all you're doing is changing the narrative pace, you're not doing anything.

If, on the other hand, you offer players the opportunity to face a dozen or more encounters before they have a chance to take a week to rest, then the actual dynamic of play changes:
- Short Rest abilities become much more expendable than Long Rest ones, leading to LR abilities (typically the bigger, flashier ones like spells) being used less frequently.
- HP and HD as resources become scarcer. As a result, combat becomes less viable a solution to problems and additional care must be taken to avoid taking damage, which changes the course and tone of combat itself (e.g. "yo-yo healing" is less attractive because it's predicated on riding the 0HP line; a place you don't really want to be because it puts you one instance of damage away frim needing assistance).
- The balance of features of different Classes changes dramatically. Assumptions of what characters can do change accordingly. E.g. Mage Armour is no longer sufficient to protect you for the duration of a Long Rest, giving the player with it the choice of when best to use it rather than the assumption that they'll have it active.

There's a reason GR changes Long Rests to a full week. Under normal rules the ratio of Short:Long rests is 1:8. Under GR, that ratio changes (IIRC) to 1:21, as well as changing assumptions about how often the "might as well" clause applies (i.e. normal rules: you have to sleep 6 hours, so "might as well" Long Rest, but you never really need to Short Rest. Using GR: that "might as well" applies to Short Rests instead). That's not just a narrative change; it's a rules one and it's significant. In my mind, it's enough to create a divergant style of play that changes many things. Does it "nerf" a lot of player character abilities? Yes. Is that a design intent? From the name of the rule itself, I interpret that as a "Yes" as well. It"s supposed to make the PCs less heroic, less devil-may-care, less indestructable and it's supposed to make the game appear more gritty and realistic...which is not happening if all you do is change the narrative to keep the PCs being just as larger than life as they are using normal rest rules.

[Psyren]

They aren't.

But if you build 5-9 encounters per day of advised difficulty (both days and encounters), you get 1-4 adventuring days per level (depending on PC level).

If your adventure is over 5 levels (because the narrative scope of said adventure; it is a high-T2 scale problem and your PCs start at level 5; so they have 5 levels to get it done before it is obsolete), that means 10-20 "adventuring days" in your adventure.

If your narrative pacing is that this should occur with world-spanning travel and intrigue over the course of most of a year, then "gritty" rests just work.

Now you have the "BBEG" plot occurring over the course of a year, the PCs getting exposed to it, and trying to stop the BBEG.

(I think I made some math errors above, the numbers don't look right, but I hope you get the drift).


Because if a long rest is a week of downtime, you might have 10 days with single encounters every 2-3 days in it (scouting parties, assassinations, whatever). There is no time for a long rest between now and the invasion.

You'll get multiple short rests, but no long rest. Your budget of daily resources ain't gonna refresh.

In non-gritty rest, for the entire period to be in the same set of resources, you'd have to compact everything down to a single day's adventure. The army has to be less than a day away, instead of a week away, at the start of the problem.

The difference is narrative pacing. Are problems identified and solved over a period of a hour-day-week, or over a day-week-month? You get a different feel for what an adventure is with the two different pacings.

I understand a little better but still definitely not a fan.

For starters, you can accomplish this without changing the rest system simply by pacing the narrative such that fewer long rests are possible. If you're in a race against time against the BBEG for instance, stopping at an inn every night and ordering spa treatments is not feasible. Or you can set the adventure in a magical phenomenon like a corrupting mist, such that the party can sleep for the night if they want to but gain reduced or no benefits from doing that. This will strain daily resources and create ludonarrative tension just like changing the rest cycles will, except the DM has total control over when rests are possible instead of needing to carve out a set block of time (e.g. a week or however long your new long rest will take) in the middle of the narrative. You can dynamically shape the number of adventuring days/encounters between long rests instead of setting a number ("long rests need a week") that you'll then be beholden to.

Even better still, if you ever want to revert to a traditional encounters/rest structure, you can do so without causing dissonance with the players. They won't have a jarring shift from "for this subplot long rests take 7 days, now they only take 1" etc. This has the added benefit that if you want to change the pace of long rests later, e.g. reverting back to a traditional 6-8 encounters per LR model, you can do that without appearing capricious or arbitrary. Long rests always take 8 hours is easy to wrap your head around, and either "you don't have 8 hours to do it" or "you do but don't get the expected benefits" are easy to layer on top.

So while I understand the reason for doing this better now - I think it's not the best way to accomplish that objective.

[Yakk]

I've brought this up in threads before and faced stern resistance, but I'll keep trying!

Gritty Realism (or Longer Long Rests) can be about narrative pace as has been discussed here, but personally where I think it comes into it's own is not to simply change the time-scale of encounters; down that road lies zero actual change in the game mechanics and making the rule change largely meaningless (and if it's meaningless, then why bother?).
Because stories matter? Because I want the ship to take a week to travel between two spots, and not 24 hours? Because I want wilderness exploration over a period of days, not hours?

No, the point of using GR must be to offer a different style of play. A style of play that offers a choice to the players to break out of the mould of 6-8 encounters between Long Rests and 2-3 encounters between Short Rests. It offers GMs the opportunity to make time a critical aspect of their campaign and/or consequences that normal, more "heroic" rest rules/pacing do not. If all you're doing is changing the narrative pace, you're not doing anything.
Your claims are not supported by evidence.

And changing the narrative changes what kind of stories you can tell. D&D is more than a series of combat and non-combat encounters tied together with fiat.

So I think you are wrong.


If, on the other hand, you offer players the opportunity to face a dozen or more encounters before they have a chance to take a week to rest, then the actual dynamic of play changes:
Almost all groups have that opportunity in any rest system. They could, for example, decide to fight a long grinding war against the guards of a city, never ceasing and taking a break.

There is generally no shortage of things to fight in D&D.

- Short Rest abilities become much more expendable than Long Rest ones, leading to LR abilities (typically the bigger, flashier ones like spells) being used less frequently.
- HP and HD as resources become scarcer. As a result, combat becomes less viable a solution to problems and additional care must be taken to avoid taking damage, which changes the course and tone of combat itself (e.g. "yo-yo healing" is less attractive because it's predicated on riding the 0HP line; a place you don't really want to be because it puts you one instance of damage away frim needing assistance).
- The balance of features of different Classes changes dramatically. Assumptions of what characters can do change accordingly. E.g. Mage Armour is no longer sufficient to protect you for the duration of a Long Rest, giving the player with it the choice of when best to use it rather than the assumption that they'll have it active.
You can throw 100 encounters at a party in a single day using non-gritty rests. It is narrative ridiculous, but there is no difference in the rest budget in doing it in gritty rests or non-gritty rests, except with gritty rests they can be over a week or more, while in non-gritty the same "thrown encounters" occur in the same day.

In a non-extended rest version, you can have a "day of hell" scenario, where there are an average of an encounter every 20 minutes all day long, with two hard-fought for breaks of an hour. So you get 8 encounters, a short rest, 8 encounters, a short rest, then 8 encounters, then the "day of hell" ends.

In the extended "gritty" rest version, the same would be an encounter showing up every couple of hour for a day, a night's rest, another 8 encounters the next day, a night's rest, then another 8 encounters the next day. Then a week's rest as the problem fades.

The same budget of per-encounter in the two scenarios, the only difference is the narrative pacing. That is it.

But that narrative pacing matters. In the extended "gritty" rest scenario, I could split those 8 encounter days up by a few days each (travel, recovery) and the mechanical resources remain basically the same; much as a 3 hour break in the normal rest period is the same as a 1 hour break.

Second, in the extended "gritty" rest case, I can plausibly be traveling between cities or the like in between those encounters. In the short one, I have to add magic teleportation or the like to make it more than a local issue, because there aren't enough hours in a day to move outside of the immediate are of a settlement before there is a long rest reset.

It is true that justifying a "day of hell" where there are plenty of obstacles and not enough resources to handle them or time to take rests is easier with extended "gritty" rests; but that is a narrative difference, which is exactly what I am saying extended "gritty" rests do. The exact same encounter resource mechanics without gritty rests can be there, just the story is far crazier and paced game-world time faster.

[Pildion]

It depends on if your changing the combat per short rest/long rest or just changing for flavor text.

If you use short rest per night, long rest per 3 days/week but still follow the 3 deadly / 6 medium encounters per long rest with 1 deadly / 2 medium per short rest then you really changed nothing. It would be more like a flavor text thing, but if you try for short rest per night, long rest per 3 days/week then throw 4-6 encounters a day at your party that isn't going to work at all.

It really comes down to the game not being balanced at ALL for the longer rest variant in the DMG.

[Pex]

Certainly there is more to the game than combat. Exploring and Discussions are valuable too. There can be game sessions where not one die is rolled, except perhaps the occasional skill check. It's only talking in character with each other and NPCs. I find them fun and they are nice breathers between combat heavy game sessions. It's as if the game is taking a long rest. However, combat is an essential part of D&D. If you're using gritty realism because you intend the campaign to be very light on combat or to make combat the last resort because it's so costly (health, resources) then I would say D&D is not the correct game system for your campaign. Players want to use their stuff and get them back. The warriors want to fight. They want to hit bad guys, take hits, rage, smite, battle maneuvers. The spellcasters want to cast their spells. They want to cast Fireball, Banishment, Web, etc., and not just Prestidigitation or Thaumaturgy at parties and Comprehend Languages to read an old book.

[DraxiusII]

I enjoy it quite a bit - it just creates a different pace for the game. I definitely wouldn't call it "gritty" or "realistic" though. The default system feels a lot more like an action movie, while the variant feels more like a novel. If that's the feel you want, I recommend trying it.

Magic items get very confusing with this variant - since most recharge at dawn rather than a long rest. Things like pearl of power get a lot better without tweaking. Also this variant makes dungeon crawls much more punishing. Minor complaints - just something to be aware of if you're using the system.

[Magicspook]

I run SR=8h, LR=24h with the caveat that the LR must be in a safe location (so basically a day off from adventuring in a safe town). The campaign I run currently has a lot of travel and is a witcher-style gritty world full of the uglyness of war. The players are running several levels of exhaustion and are trying to bring some good into a conflict between one evil and the other.
The longer resting rules have been superb in brining a feel of desperation and ever-dwindling resources into the game that would never have been possible with the normal rules. 24h long rests are perfect for this. But I think 7 days per long rest is ridiculously long and will not work for any campaign where time pressure is a thing.

[JellyPooga]

Because stories matter? Because I want the ship to take a week to travel between two spots, and not 24 hours? Because I want wilderness exploration over a period of days, not hours?My point isn't that the narrative isn't important; it is; it's that changing the rules in the way others have discussed (i.e. maintain the 6-8 encounters per Long Rest / 2-3 encounters per Short Rest paradigm) has little to no impact on that narrative. It's just bigger numbers (hours instead of minutes, days instead of hours) and you face the "problem" of having to rebalance Class Features and spells and so forth to try and maintain the balance of the game under that dynamic.

If, on the other hand, you allow the rules change to actually change the dynamic and balance of play, then the narrative actually changes with it and it'll have been meant/intended to do so. By way of analogy, if you double all instances of damage but then compensate for it by giving everything twice the HP, you've achieved nothing but bigger numbers. In the same vein, if you change the duration of rests and then alter the encounter rate so that you have the same number of encounters between those rests, you've achieved equally little. All you've done is make the numbers bigger (i.e. the number of hours between encounters). If, on the other hand, you change the duration of rests and nothing else, then the narrative changes for you, because how the rules have changed quantitively determines how the narrative functions qualitatively.

Consider the difference between a Warlock and a Wizard under normal rules and under Gritty Realism:
- In the first case (normal rules), the Wizard has little reason to hang around for the Warlock to take Short Rests; it's an oft discussed issue with the Warlock Class that it is so Short Rest dependent. Generally speaking, the Wizard is considered a much more powerful spellcaster than the Warlock; they have more spell slots at any given time, they're more versatile, have a much larger spell list to choose from, etc. If the Warlock can Short Rest frequently (3-4+ times a day), then that balance of power can change somewhat, depending on the encounter rate, level of danger, etc.
- In the second case (GR), this dynamic flips on it's head. The Warlock gets to Short Rest every day and the Wizard...well the Wizard might not get to Long Rest for an entire adventure. The Wizard has to selectively hoard their resources for the opportune moment, while the Warlock can much more freely spend theirs. Add in things like Invocations that allow at-will use of spells such as Mage Armour and the qualitative difference between the Classes becomes increasingly stark. In order to rebalance just these two Classes to fit the mould of the normal rules except with longer narrative gaps would take a lot of fudging.

Also consider the rest ratios I mentioned. The 1:8 ratio of the normal rules should translate to (roughly) an 8 hour Short Rest to 3 days Long Rest (give or take 8 hours). It doesn't, so you have to ask yourself why whoever wrote the variant rule chose to not only throw out that ratio, but to almost triple it to 1:21. That's a conscious choice someone made and it dramatically changes the dynamic of how rests function within both the narrative AND the rules. It says to me that, under normal circumstances, you aren't supposed to Long Rest in the middle of an adventure. Like, not even close. It's not; "if you can squeeze it in" or "have a Long rest on the 3 day carriage ride between Dirt Village and Merchantsville" or "this utility spell should let you grab a safe long rest while you prepare your next assault"...it's "you have one set of Long Rest resources for this adventure; deal with it". You could conceivably go for months of in-game play without ever taking a 7-day Long Rest. That's not just a change of narrative pace, that's a hard limit on how fast and loose the Players can be with their resources and that changes how they're going to play the game. If you try to rebalance that dynamic back toward the normal rules (as Pex advocates for; Players liking to spend resources, etc.), then you're working against the dynamic of play that Gritty Realism is offering.
It's not supposed to give players lots of resources to spend. It is supposed to make the players think about how they use their resources.
It's not supposed to allow them to charge headlong into combats knowing they'll be at full power again tomorrow (or in a few days). It is supposed to make the players consider whether they want to use violence to solve a problem.
It's not supposed to have spell durations and effects extended to "compensate" the longer time scales. It is supposed to make players use those features at the opportune moment.

@Pex: Yes, Players like to spend their resources and combat is an integral part of the game, but allowing GR to limit combat changes the game being played from a fast-and-loose combat simulator into something more of a puzzle. Is D&D the best system for that style of campaign? Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for it and many players dislike chopping and changing between systems (or simply don't have the time or interest to learn multiple rulesets). What it does do is it takes the onus of deciding how much combat is in the game away from the GM and puts the choice into the Players hands. Under normal rules, the Players are probably going to fight most things that look like they need a-fighting; it's just up to the GM how many combat encounters to put in front of them. Using Gritty Realism, the GM can put a dozen "combat" encounters in front of the Players, but it's up to them whether to actually engage them as combats or to pursue alternative resolutions (evasion, avoidance, bribery, social, etc.) and they're much more likely to consider the consequences of that choice (whichever way they decide). To all those that don't think GR is more realistic or gritty, that choice is what's more "realistic"; the encouragement to consider consequence. Because normal rules D&D has very few consequences, it's easy to go gung-ho full-on murderhobo with an action-packed and "heroic" dynamic. Encouraging Players to reserve resources and consider their options, to take a slower pace and more considered approach is exactly what GR does (much like generally making encounters harder or more deadly does), so if you take the consequence out of a GR campaign by readjusting the narrative to compensate for the longer time scales involved, you're missing the point.

[Pex]

@Pex: Yes, Players like to spend their resources and combat is an integral part of the game, but allowing GR to limit combat changes the game being played from a fast-and-loose combat simulator into something more of a puzzle. Is D&D the best system for that style of campaign? Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for it and many players dislike chopping and changing between systems (or simply don't have the time or interest to learn multiple rulesets). What it does do is it takes the onus of deciding how much combat is in the game away from the GM and puts the choice into the Players hands. Under normal rules, the Players are probably going to fight most things that look like they need a-fighting; it's just up to the GM how many combat encounters to put in front of them. Using Gritty Realism, the GM can put a dozen "combat" encounters in front of the Players, but it's up to them whether to actually engage them as combats or to pursue alternative resolutions (evasion, avoidance, bribery, social, etc.) and they're much more likely to consider the consequences of that choice (whichever way they decide). To all those that don't think GR is more realistic or gritty, that choice is what's more "realistic"; the encouragement to consider consequence. Because normal rules D&D has very few consequences, it's easy to go gung-ho full-on murderhobo with an action-packed and "heroic" dynamic. Encouraging Players to reserve resources and consider their options, to take a slower pace and more considered approach is exactly what GR does (much like generally making encounters harder or more deadly does), so if you take the consequence out of a GR campaign by readjusting the narrative to compensate for the longer time scales involved, you're missing the point.

It still comes down to players want to use their stuff and get it back. If you make them too cautious and slow pacing they become bored and frustrated. Even in normal rules long rest classes need to learn conservation of their stuff. There can be more than one combat encounter in a game day, especially in a dungeon. Even in normal long rest rules players should learn not everything needs to be solved by combat. That's all good, but using game mechanics is part of the fun. The paladin wants to smite already. The wizard wants to cast Fireball. Once done, the player does not want to have to wait until 5 game sessions later to do it again, and he doesn't want to have to wait 5 game sessions before he does it the first time in an adventure. I maintain however long you want a long rest to be, whatever adventuring pacing you want, players should get the long rest no longer than once per two game sessions. I didn't say it before, but I meant to. Game circumstances matter. If once in a while a long rest doesn't happen until the third game session, that's fine. Maybe a game session was nothing but talking. Maybe a particular in game event takes longer to resolve.

[JellyPooga]

It still comes down to players want to use their stuff and get it back. If you make them too cautious and slow pacing they become bored and frustrated. Even in normal rules long rest classes need to learn conservation of their stuff. There can be more than one combat encounter in a game day, especially in a dungeon. Even in normal long rest rules players should learn not everything needs to be solved by combat. That's all good, but using game memchanics is part of the fun. The paladin wants to smite already. The wizard wants to cast Fireball. Once done, the player does not want to have to wait until 5 game sessions later to do it again, and he doesn't want to have to wait 5 game sessions before he does it the first time in an adventure. I maintain however long you want a long rest to be, whatever adventuring pacing you want, players should get the long rest no longer than once per two game sessions. I didn't say it before, but I meant to. Game circumstances matter. If once in a while a long rest doesn't happen until the third game session, that's fine. Maybe a game session was nothing but talking. Maybe a particular in game event takes longer to resolve.

I do agree with your comments about game pacing, but here I think it's important to talk about the difference and relationships between the various forms of pacing that exist in the game.

(1) Narrative Pacing. This is, IMO, the one that really seems to divide people. It boils down to how much time you spend on describing/playing events, or equally how often you're skipping over the "unimportant" details. The value of this is hugely subjective; some people like to roleplay finding every shop and haggling with the shopkeeper, whilst other people skip even spending money and just assume they have what they need. This also includes such things as how much time between events there is, what the consequence of those events or encounters are and how those events impact the characters (player and non-player alike) involved on a personal level (i.e. outside of game conceits such as HP and other depletable/renewable resources). All of this is largely independent of the actual rules and applies just as equally to whatever variant of D&D you're using, or whether you're using a different system altogether. Note that this is distinct from Narrative Content; whether you're fighting Goblin Anarchists or Elite Drow Assassins, or if you're travelling by spell or by sea makes little difference to how quickly you get to the point or the dramatic beats of the narrative itself (i.e. Narrative Content will determine that fighting goblins for a lvl.1 party is just as dangerous as fighting drow is for a lvl.8 party, but whether your fighting one or t'other makes no difference to whether you have to face 3 or 4 encounters with Mooks before you fight the Boss).

(2) Rules Pacing. This is where the variant Gritty Realism and Epic Heroism stake their claims. They change, IMO, the dynamic of how the game functions and by doing so, change the tone and nature of the game itself. It's distinct from Narrative Pace because it's not fluid but fixed. Where Narrative Pacing concerns itself with the dramatic beats of the story and the characters in it, Rules Pacing concerns itself with how to achieve those things; the actual consequence of Players actions within the rule system. Changing this changes some basic assumptions about how the game actually works, just as changing from using a d20 to 3d6 changes assumptions about critical hits and the value of static bonuses, or how using GURPS is different to using D&D. Narrative Content, interestingly, has more impact here in the rules than it does on Narrative Pace; more challenging or complex NPCs and Encounters tend to take longer to adjudicate in the rules than simpler and easier ones.

(3) Game(night) Pacing. This is entirely dependent on the Players, their availability, preference and how long your sessions are. It's all well and good saying that a group should have a Long Rest every session or two, but if your group is a school lunch-club with only an hour to play, twice a week, then that advice is awful; there's only so much gameplay you can fit into short slots like that; you might even be looking at a single encounter per session. Likewise, if you only get together once a month, but it's for a marathon weekend of D&Debauchery you might not want to limit yourself to one Long Rest in that entire 48-hour session if you want a fast paced, slug-a-thon (or maybe you do, if you're looking for a less combat oriented or grittier game). This is tied intrinsically to Narrative pacing because how quickly you advance the story can depend on how much time you have available; e.g. a one-shot adventure at a gaming convention typically doesn't want to be left on a cliff-hanger, so by necessity the Narrative Pace must also be relatively fast; move the adventure along to hit all the beats. Then again, that same game-con adventure might only have a single scene or two which are roleplayed with a slow Narrative Pace but a wealth of depth in contrast/to compensate the fast Game Pace; less beats to hit means less story to get through.

Changing from the normal rules of D&D to Gritty Realism does little to directly change the Narrative Pacing of the game and nothing to change the Game Pacing (which is what you, Pex, are advocating for). As has been pointed out, you can have as many or few encounters between rests regardless of the narrative or how long your sessions are. What is changed is the Rules. The rest-ratio change, how long effects last compared to the duration and frequency of rests, how various abilities, items and spells function in light of the assumptions that can be made (e.g. wands and other items that recharge at dawn)...these things change and are supposed to, because nothing else does. Not directly. GR certainly encourages a change in Narrative Pacing and it's a great consequence (IMO) of using it if you lean into it, but it doesn't have to.

[Yakk]

Except the point of why I want to use nightly short/downtime long is because of the pace of the stories I want to tell.

I can starve wizards of long rests and shower warlocks with short with any rest time rules. It just makes a different story between encounters.

And fundamentally that is all it can do.

Now, I added rules to modify some other stuff intentionally, like changed repeated spellcasting to be 1/week and a final "supercast" with extra compoment cost, made 1 hour+ spells last 5x as long, etc, and what you can do during a rest. And other stuff, again to tweak pacing at the story level.

The point is that a week of downtime will provide a reasonable period of time for a chapter to end. Any short term machinations will come to fruition; if the players haven't stopped the bad guy plot, it evolves and advances.

So my narrative unit becomes the adventuring "week" (about 10 days, give or take). Machinations of foes can be budgeted in those units, on that time scale.

In T1/early T2, the range of events the PCs can interact with is a ~10 day radius of travel on foot or boat for a given "chapter". Things more than 10 days travel away are in a different "adventuring week"; a different "chapter", due to the fact that getting there reasonably involves downtime.

Chapter transitions can happen without distance, of course; the timescale should be ~10 days between chapters.

A 30 day (1 month) deadline for a problem is then a ~3 "chapter" problem (24ish encounters in "length").

In late T2/T3 chapters becomes more global; the pace and scale of the game accellerates.

If we switch to standard rests, instead we get a chapter "radius" of 1 day - 1 days travel or more than 1 days time means a resource reset. That is claustrophobic.

And even in T2/3, the pace of whatever problem the PCs are involved in has to be frenzied, or the PCs end up fully rested after each scene.

Imagine an army marching on a city. It takes a month to get there. With standard rests, that is *30* long rests; I'll run out of play time before they run out of chances to take a long rest; there is no time limit. With the "gritty" pacing, the players might get 3 or 4; that could be a meaty player-timed plot adventure, and still have resource stress.

Similarly, a force a week out is a single "adventuring week"; to pull that off in standard rests, the attack has to be within a day of the target. Which is really hard to explain all of the time (what, nobody noticed?)

This does mean that we don't have heros who heal all of their wounds every night. So the story is, indeed, grittier.