D&D 5E My tweak to make (Champion) Fighters decent

Flamestrike said:

For Hexcrawls, you are much better served with the 'Gritty realism' rest variant, that turns Short rests into overnight affairs and Long rests into week long R+R breaks in town.

This perfectly meshes with a campaign that features 0-2 encounters per day, and roughly 3-4 days featuring encounters between the party resting in town. It plays like this:

Day 1: Party finish long rest and exploration prep and leave town.
Days 2-5: Party travel with no encounters
Day 6: Party deal with single combat encounter (bandits)
Day 7: Party travel to bandit camp, no encounters
Day 8: Party deal with bandit camp, 3 encounters
Days 9-11: Party travel and explore several hexes; no encounters
Day 12: Party has random combat encounter while they sleep.
Days 13-15: No encounters, exploration
Day 16: Party has encounter in morning as they wake, and a second one later that afternoon
Day 17-21: Party wearily trudge back to town, down on HP, HD and resources.
Day 22-28: Party arrive back in town, and rest for a week to heal injuries, recover their energy (and spell slots) and spend gold

In the above four weeks, the party has had [long rest] - 7 encounters broken up by 3 short rests - [long rest] - a single 'adventuring day'.



They're designed around dungeon hacks for sure (6-8 encounters is around your standard number for 1 level of a dungeon).

Personally I think the numbers are too high. A default of 3-5 encounters would have been better pacing for mine (with short rest abilities recharging automatically per encounter). Most game sessions only feature around 3-5 encounters, and many groups prefer to arrange or contrive a 'long rest' to happen at the end of the game session (makes book-keeping easier, and is a natural break in play to reset abilities).

To have the game mechanically match that pacing, you would need to reduce long rest resources (particularly spell slots and sorcery points, but also luck points) by around 20-30 percent, and reduce Barbarian rages per day by 1.

In my own 'rules tweak' document, I make the following changes for my own home campaign:

Short rest: A short rest takes 5 minutes, and you cant benefit from more than one every 4 hours (your average dungeon raid). You can spend up to half your HD when you short rest.

Long rest: A long rest takes 8 hours, and you cant benefit from more than one every 24 hours. You recover no HP when you long rest, but you recover 1/2 your level in HD. At the end of the Long rest, you can spend as many HD as you want to heal. You also recover 1 expended spell slot of each of levels 1-5, plus 1 expended spell slot (or arcanum) of levels 6+.

Barbarian 'rages per day' are reduced by 1 (but they get a fighting style to compensate). The Lucky feat is 1/short rest and not 3/ long rest.

Basically it forces spellcasters and barbarians (and paladins) to reign in smiting/ casting/ raging due to having less resources to use, or due to the risk of it taking several days to get those resources back. Short rest classes get one short rest with no jarring 1 hour breaks during dungeoneering.

Its geared for a 4-5 encounter adventuring day, and to increase overall difficulty to my liking.

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Zardnaar said:

Mostly agree with this, I liked the 4 encounters thing of 3E to be honest, the rest of the CR system not so much.

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Flamestrike said:

[/B][/U]IM NOT SAYING THAT YOU RAM 6-8 ENCOUNTERS PER DAY DOWN YOUR PLAYERS THROATS EVERY DAY.

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Zardnaar said:

5E is not good at hex crawls as it turns out due to the encounters and class design. They either get trivially easy encounters or immersion breaking +6 or +7 CR type encounters.

Anything else 5E does well like skill checks perhaps is not really any significantly better than say AD&D wisdom checks to avoid becoming lost or whatever.

The 5E expectations work alright for something like a Dungeon hack, fairly badly for most other adventure types and it might actually be worse than Basic/1E for exploration.

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