Alternatives to short rests and long rests?

[werescythe]

So I'm trying to make an rpg game and whioe I've taken some inspiration from DnD 5e, I've been trying to change some elements as well as put my own spine on the things I do like.

However I've noticed that I've been falling back on a rest mechanic, like having some things reset at a rest. But I don't necessarily want to just borrow Rest, so I was wondering if anyone either knew of an alternate to it or had some suggestions on how a Rest could be done better.

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and have a splendid day.

[JNAProductions]

What is it about rests that don’t fit with your system?

[werescythe]

What is it about rests that don’t fit with your system?

It's not so much that they don't fit, it's just a matter of trying to make them feel different/unique?

[animorte]

Worlds Without Number has a mechanic in which most of the abilities function once per scene. A scene is basically one encounter, combat or otherwise.

There are also some abilities that work once per day basically. I don’t remember exactly how the Rest functions, as I haven’t had the opportunity to play very much and I haven’t even read through it for a couple months.

[BloodSquirrel]

It's not so much that they don't fit, it's just a matter of trying to make them feel different/unique?

I'd suggest re-thinking that impulse. Resting isn't just a mechanic in D&D, it's a real-life thing that happens, and if your system is intended to even roughly model real life, it's a thing that's going to apply to your system. Human beings get tired when they do things, and in order to recover they need to rest.

There are different ways you can model it, such as having stamina points that recover over time or making characters recover faster if they eat, but if you're looking to keep things simple, short rests and long rests do a pretty decent job of modeling the two different ways that the human body gets physically tired.

[Just to Browse]

I'd like to first echo the comments that you shouldn't be different just for the sake of being different. There's value in standing out, but your game systems should be primarily built to solve problems. You should go back to the problems that resting was designed to solve, and evaluate if (1) those problems are worth solving in your game, and (2) if you can find an alternative fix.

As I see it, the rest system was built to solve 3 different problems with a single mechanic:
Encourage longer-term planning (at least, longer than 1 combat) by adding more attrition to the game.
Add abilities with a variety of power budgets. For example, an at-will ability generally needs to be weaker than a recharge, which needs to be weaker than a SR-gated, which needs to be weaker than a LR-gated.
Diversify classes by changing how they depend on rests.
I'd argue that the last bullet point there was, in hindsight, a bit of a failure. But the rest system still does solve 2 pretty important problems.

Depending on what kind of game you're making, here are some ideas that try to preserve all of those bullet points by messing with time scales and when abilities refresh:
If you're making a game where everyone has magic powers, you could just have abilities refresh at certain corners of the day (midnight, dusk, noon, dawn).
If you're making an RPG where everyone is stuck in a video game, you could have fixed Checkpoints where abilities refresh, and build travel around a race to visit a checkpoint.
If you're making a game where stuff takes longer to accomplish, you could keep the concept of resting but draw it out. For example, wounds take weeks to heal and players get powerful abilities that refresh on the full moon or even only at equinox / solstice.
If you're making a game with lots of travel between towns, you could make everyone equipment-based and have them stock up on resources at towns they visit.
To take this in a more dramatically different direction, what if you don't want to encourage long-term planning at all, so you don't care about the attrition element?
You could make a game where abilities all refresh after a cooldown measured in seconds, travel takes up a lot of time, and adventures are measured with in-game timer counting down the number of days. Essentially giving the players an explicit adventure-spanning clock and letting them shoot fireballs all day.
You could make a comic book game where the players straddle the line between heroes and collaborative authors. Every conflict must be resolved within a fixed number of turns (representing a rough estimate of a comic book's page count). The closer you get to the end of the turn limit, the stronger the heroes' powers are, but they have to achieve their goal within the turn limit or else an editor takes over and writes an ending where the villain wins. This is roughly the premise of the Sentinel Comics RPG.
One more idea... Let's say you're making a fantasy RPG that's a bit simulationist, that supports weak level 1 characters that grow to near-godlike power, which supports hexcrawls, pointcrawls, dungeoncrawls, wilderness adventures, and linear stories, and you'd like to have fighters and paladins and wizards and warlocks. Well, that hypothetical game sounds a lot like D&D, so it's probably going to do just fine with a D&D-style rest system

[Tvtyrant]

So I'm trying to make an rpg game and whioe I've taken some inspiration from DnD 5e, I've been trying to change some elements as well as put my own spine on the things I do like.

However I've noticed that I've been falling back on a rest mechanic, like having some things reset at a rest. But I don't necessarily want to just borrow Rest, so I was wondering if anyone either knew of an alternate to it or had some suggestions on how a Rest could be done better.

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and have a splendid day.

At one point I experimented with Rest Potions. The actual rest time is a week for a short rest and a month for a long, the potions cut that to the classic times. This incentivizes making money to become more powerful, since the potions are enormously expensive but let you full heal over night.

[werescythe]

One more idea... Let's say you're making a fantasy RPG that's a bit simulationist, that supports weak level 1 characters that grow to near-godlike power, which supports hexcrawls, pointcrawls, dungeoncrawls, wilderness adventures, and linear stories

What are Hexcrawls and Pointcrawls? O_O

[MrStabby]

You could do something like:

Some abilities reset on meals (a little analgous to short rests)

Some abilities reset on sleeping (analogous to long rests)

Some abilities rest through time

Some abilities reset on the character's birthday


Abilites resetting though time might be best with more continuous resources - to use 5e examples, Ki, HP Sorcery points where X per hour is good enough granularity. You get ambushed and you roll a D8 to see how many hours into the day the ambush happens so how much resource has been recovered. Interestingly enough this could even let some things go in reverse - you start the day on empty and some resource arives through the day as long as you are awake (so going unconscious in a fight would empty the resource pool as well, adding a little more cost to pop-up healing.

[PhoenixPhyre]

There are also entirely separate "resource pool" concepts:

* Gauge builders/spenders. You have a gauge that starts empty. Builders add to the pool, spenders cost points from the pool. It either never resets or only resets when you level/take a really long break/etc.
* Mana/stamina + secondary pool. Burn your mana to do things, that also fills your secondary pool. Which you spend to do other things. This gives you a within-day (assuming a daily reset to mana/stamina) flow--your primary abilities start strong and weaken throughout the day, while your secondaries grow in power the more you fight.
* Escalation dice (a la 13th age). The further you get into one "reset", the higher this additional "tension meter" is. And abilities feed off of it (without actually reducing it). So your "big boom" ability may do X when the tension meter is at 1 but 3X when the tension meter is at 2. Or whatever. Combined with some expendable resources, this gives a nice dual polarity effect.

[Dienekes]

Well you can do a lot of things to try and make different refresh systems or pools.

One question that I often come back to is: What is the behavior of the players you wish to reinforce?

D&D 5e, for example uses Short and Long Rest. And while, they do have a verisimilitude answer to why they exist, in theory your body needs to rest in order to keep behaving at peak capacity, in practice resting doesn't actually work like 5e portrays it. If you had a single fight a couple hours ago that lasted all of 30 seconds and since then you've been just walking at a steady pace but haven't really sat down to take a formal 1 hour break, you won't suddenly be unable to perform your best martial arts moves. Provided you weren't seriously injured in that fight, you're probably fine. But for D&D the Monk doesn't get back their Ki and the Battlemaster doesn't get back their Superiority Dice until the prerequisite 1 hour break is done.

So what does this incentivize? Well, going through an adventure day where resources dwindle over the day, but you can set up stopping points where you refresh yourself so you can keep going.

That's the model of play 5e expects the players to engage in, and that's what the system tries to push toward.

But there are plenty other games that do other things.

For example in Iron Heroes, there's an Armiger class that is all about having heavy armor and being the focus of the enemy's aggression. It got the points to do their abilities based on how many enemies were attacking them each round. There was also a Harrier class that was all about dashing around the battlefield. So they gained their points based on their momentum, based on how much they moved every round.

And we can even look back to 3.5, I personally love the Tome of Battle. In it there were three classes, the Warblade, the Crusader, and the Swordsage. The Swordsage was supposed to be the roguesh/monkish bag of tricks character, so it got a pool of abilities, but could only use them once per encounter (essentially, you could get one back, but it required wasting an entire turn to do it, so in practice every maneuver you had was one and done for the encounter) what this meant, was that the Swordsage player had to be ever on the lookout for the exact right time to use one of their many maneuvers. Then there was the Crusader. The Crusader was divinely empowered, and the designers thought that this inspiration that comes not from the character but some outside force could be best portrayed through randomness. So they always had maneuvers to use every round, but they were a random allotment from their prepared maneuver pool, and it was up to the player to figure out how to use the gifts the gods had given them. Then there was the Warblade, the Warblade was essentially just a Fighter, the mostly mundane warrior. So how did they limit them? Well, they modeled the Warblade's fight patterns off of what you do in an actual fight. Usually, a combatant will engage with a rough plan of attack mixed with ideas how to react to what the opponent is doing. Engage in roughly 3-5 exchanges deep. Then back off, re-calibrate, refocus, and figure out a new plan of attack to go at it again. And well, that's how the Warblade was. It had a handful of maneuvers, once they used them they needed to step back, and not use any more for a moment to get all of them back.

And you can figure out ways to do this sort of thing with a lot of classes.

Let's say you want to really focus on ultimate but uncontrollable power for a class. Well, have it cast spells that perhaps aren't even limited in any normal way, but roughly on the cheap side. But if they so choose, they can super-power their spells but doing so comes at a cost of control. They could roll on the Wild Magic Table like the Wild Magic Sorcerer. Or perhaps if you want a more rigid limitation, each time you super power your spell you gain a level of Exhaustion or lose some HP.

Perhaps you want your Paladin's to actually follow their Oaths more closely. Instead of spell slots they get Oath Points, and if they perform actions that correlate with their oaths directly they get 1 to spend that lasts until they use it or do something that grossly contradicts their Oath. You can even have fun with this in class design. Giving every Oath a combat ability or two that really closely fits with their Oath and when using it they automatically get 1 to use. So you have this nice little cycle of following the tenets of their oath giving them more power to expand on great deeds to continue demonstrating their dedication to their oath.

Or we can think of channeling power. Perhaps you want a class that starts out every encounter relatively weak, but each round of the encounter they grow stronger as they charge themselves up. Well, then you can give the class powers each of which have a different Power Requirement, and every round you get an additional Power Point allowing you to use whatever ability has less than or equal to the amount of Power Points you currently have charging you up. So on the first round of combat you only have 1 and maybe can send out the equivalent of a cantrip. On the second round you have 2 to do something more powerful. So on and so forth until round 4 or 5 where your character can bring out the big guns.

Another play pattern I've seen to try and model combat is something like Edges. You're trying to demonstrate how in a fight you start out with non-committal probing attacks, until you find your opening and go in for the kill. You start the fight without edge, until you make your first unmodified hit, or perhaps you have a list of weaker attacks you can use, that when successful provides an Edge against that target opponent that you can then use to expend on one of your more powerful attacks.

Or you can look at 13th Age, with their Monk. Which is a fascinating little class which tries to incorporate flowing martial arts forms and sequences into gameplay. So every round of combat the Monk must make a starter, linking, or finishing move. Always in that order, each roughly more powerful than the one prior. Each of these moves have flowing mystical sounding names so it comes across that your combat is akin to creating Haikus. Very neat design that functions as a means of making the character flow around combat performing different moves, so combat doesn't become stale, while loading it up with as much flavor as they could get.

I hope some of that is helpful. But I do think the king is asking yourself "What is the type of gameplay I am trying to reinforce with my design?" closely followed with "Does this design actually make sense in a way that the players will grasp and accept?" Which was, I think the big sin of 4e. On the whole, the At-Will, Encounter, Daily system isn't a bad one. In fact it's so good, it got repackaged with a fresh coat of paint to At-Will/Short Rest/Long Rest. But because it didn't even try to hide how game-y it was, some people who love that layer of verisimilitude in their gameplay found it distasteful, even if they accept 5e's system.