Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
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.
Thanks for clarifying/explaining.

It has been my experience that making SR abilities into more times/LR leads to that "tyrannical halting" of the adventure. Yes, you CAN and SHOULD have time pressures where possible to make that less of a desirable trait, but WotC has demonstrated they can't do that in their own modules, and without examples of how to do that in creative ways, many DMs (me, my uncreative self, included) run out of ways to force that. With monsters and the illusion of lethal death awaiting should they press on, it only makes sense that the party who just nova'd their way past them - feeling, thus, that they've been super challenged, if the number of resources spent is any indication - would feel that stopping and waiting for all their resources to be back makes sense.

Players are, in my experience, very good at securing a location for a rest. VERY good. To the point that it seems extremely contrived to pull out the wandering xorn that is all that can get through those defenses every time they try to wait 24 hours (having had less than an hour since their last long rest) rather than just resting 1.

Maybe SRs need to be shorter to accommodate your other concerns, but I vastly prefer them to be encouraged by the resource attrition rate than to be deprecated to something you can just shrug off as "well, they don't restore anything useful to *me*, so the whole party had better rest or I'm useless after novaing everything I have in the first encounter, where I also overshadowed anybody who didn't have nova capability to that degree."