Opinion: will you be reluctant or eager to switch from 5E to 6E?

[Psyren]

Thing is, if everybody has things they get back on short rests, then all the PCs are likely to consider them worth taking. This will increase the likelihood of a table having SRs. Further, even if you're somehow at a table that doesn't get SRs but still gets LRs, if everybody gets stuff back at SRs, they also still get them all back at LRs, so the design paradigm of leaning more heavily into SRs for everyone would still serve your purpose.

I am in favor of everybody having something they get back on a short rest (generally, some fraction of what they get back on a long rest.) You can have that and still have SRs be optional going forward.

For example: I could see the 5.5 fighter getting action surge back on a short rest like they do currently. I could also see them getting the ability to use additional action surges without resting at all, by spending a LR resource (e.g. a hit die), or being able to recover their action surge without short resting PB times per long rest, or even both. If they did that, then no matter what kind of table you sit down to play Fighter at, you have a reasonable expectation of getting multiple action surges in an adventuring day instead of it having the potential to vary wildly from 1-5.

The only 2 ways I can see your statement making sense and having LR-only be an improvement is if either somehow features ONLY came back on SRs but NOT LRs, and somehow the party was still insisting on only taking LRs, or if LRs are "guaranteed" because the DM is the one preventing SRs but granting LRs. I can't imagine a DM doing this. If there's no time due to DM action to take an SR, how on Toril, Greyhawk, and the Great Wheel are you finding time for an LR?

My assumption - and please correct me if I'm wrong and spell out the actual case you're thinking of - is that you're thinking of games / tables where the LR-based classes simply insist that any rest be a LR in order to recharge them, and refuisng to stop to SR if they still have resources even if the SR classes are tapped out. Leaving aside any commentary on the wisdom or good play of this choice, this would be ameliorated by having everybody get more stuff back from SRs. You might still have Warlocks be almost entirely SR-dependent, but if the wizard and fighter and rogue all got sufficiently refreshed from short resting, they wouldn't resist taking them quite so much. If, indeed, literally every class got features that refreshed on a short rest, the most degenerate case scenario would simply be that those who still also got LR refreshment more strongly than SR refreshment would demand 5 minute adventuring days...just as they do now.

...Having written that out, I'm guessing that's what you foresee, and you're looking at giving all classes the same LR refreshment level so that the currently-SR classes aren't overshadowed by the 5-min.-adventurer who novas then demands 24 hours of total rest before continuing on. Is that correct? (I have what I think is a solution, and it's still in leaning into SRs, but I don't want to dive too deeply into assuming what your thoughts and concerns are before confirming them.)

Actual case I was thinking of spelled out above. For the rest:

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1) By having every 1/SR resource move to multiple times per LR, you don't actually have to worry about "finding time for a LR." Every group with a non-Warlock spellcaster already does that. What it does mean is that you can spend every hour of the adventuring day doing something from one of the three adventuring pillars (exploration, social interaction, or combat) instead of taking a whole hour for a breather. (Note that resting doesn't fall under any of the three pillars, because during a rest you're not allowed to do much of anything.)

2) It doesn't have to be the case you describe of the LR classes tyrannically grinding the group to a halt if they still have resources and the SR classes don't. The party can simply be in a situation where time is of the essence and a short rest is difficult to justify. An hour is a long time to stop and do nothing if, say, you're breaking out of (or into) a prison, or chasing down a kidnap victim as the trail grows cold, or trying to interrupt a critical ritual. But if you spend your 8 hours of active time resolving that situation then long-resting afterward is usually reasonable.

So again, what I want isn't to nuke short rests from orbit entirely. Rather, what I want is to modify classes so that short rests are a nice-to-have for everyone, rather than the current design where they are a critical necessity for some classes and irrelevant for others.

Aside from whatever gripes I have with various rules minutiae (which is the sort of thing we can fight about forever and never agree on), if I was in charge of 6E and/or had a magic wand, the two design elements I would like to see are:

1. Explicitly modular/sliding scale versions of different rules. You keep Short and Long Rests, for example, and the mechanical impact of each is the same, but rather than telling us "Short Rest = 1 Hour, Long Res = 8 Hours" you say that the length of time each takes is up to the DM. And you offer some guidelines ("Gritty" = 8 hour SR, 1 week LR, "Low Fantasy" = X and Y, "Heroic Fantasy = A and B" etc). You could do the same with Racial features, various class features, etc. A sliding scale with a few different stopping points. So then every game, every campaign, as part of its Session 0, would include "We're doing High Fantasy Rests, Gritty Magic Features, Low Fantasy Martial Features." And the language isn't "This is what the rule is but you can do whatever you want." The language is "These are all equally valid options depending on what kind of game you want to play."

This is another great point. By making classes no longer crucially dependent on short rests, you can much more easily tweak the length of SR vs. LR without crippling some classes' effectiveness. If you're in a gritty game for example where a SR takes 8 hours and there are multiple encounters in that day, the LR classes like Wizards and Rogues can ration their resources and rely more heavily on at-wills like cantrips or cunning actions. Whereas the SR classes like Warlocks and Monks feel the pinch very sharply, because they're currently designed to burn through their resources almost in a single fight.