Quote Originally Posted by Bjarkmundur View Post
Why do you think the short/long rest mechanics exist at all? What was the design goal of these rules?
Trite response: because if you had infinite healing spells, the adventure would take the characters about ten minutes.

Now for a real answer.

Since the beginning of time...well, no, but early in the game at least...there's been basically two major truths in the D&D world.
1) Spellcasters are more powerful than nonspellcasters.
2) Until they run out of spells.

Simply put, magic missile does 3d4+3 at the minimum and never misses, doing 10.5 damage per round. If he's "competing against" a fighter, he's probably winning for a while. If the fighter does 1d8+3 and attacks twice per round, the fighter does less damage unless he can hit with a natural 6. Unless it's a werewolf, golem, ghost, anything with cover, vampire, vampire that sparkles, demon, devil, daemon, slaad, salad, or any number of other things.

Until the spellcaster is out of magic missiles. Depending on which edition you're playing, the spellcaster either reverts to a cantrip, pulls a light crossbow, or takes a smoke break. 1st Edition was NOT a wizard's best friend.

The idea of "running out of gas" is part of the difference in playstyles, even above and beyond the other RPG elements. On one end, there's the Rogue, who either never runs out of anything, or has nothing to run out of, your call. At the other end is the barbarian, oddly enough, who has a fixed number of rages between long rests, and outside those, underperforms the fighter in pretty much every way. Neither are particularly numerically interesting. The baseline rogue has one attack and Sneak Attack, the barbarian has Rage, and that's about it. Everyone else is between them somewhere, from the warlock who lives in the short rest to short rest period, to the cleric/druid who get their channel divinity/wild shape back at a short rest, but not their spells.



Don't hold this up as laser accurate or anything. It's just a quick rough sketch, not the Classtine Chapel.

At this point, we talk briefly about 4th Edition STOP BOOING YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING. 4th Edition made everyone balanced by making everyone equal. Everyone had the same number of "short rest" "long rest" and "cantrips". Wizards knew more, but that's it. And I'd be willing to bet, if you looked around for opinions as to why 4th Edition was so different from the rest -- and why it ended -- that'd be high on the list.

D&D, like many RPGs, doesn't just allow options but encourages them. This includes choices of playstyle. If you want your game actions to be simple, with minimal bookkeeping, there are ways to do that. If you want a five-page character sheet loaded with options, you can do that, too.

The NFL is an intense, physical sport that players need a week to recover from -- or two, if you're going to the Super Bowl -- and even with the players "only" on the field thirty minutes, they still frequently get game, or career, ending injuries. Baseball players have short bursts of action spread out over several hours, and play a few times a week. Tennis players constantly move for an hour or two, and in competitions a few days in a row (unless they lose). And a sprinter could expend every square inch of energy in ten seconds and be done for the year. Every sport is a little bit different. But a bigger deal than all of that is the Olympics. Everyone has their favorite events. And the more and more involved a country is, the more and more events they compete in, representing a wider and more interesting mix of skill.

Oh, and nobody binges the whole thing in ten minutes.