No, I'm totally with you on this. But, that's the problem. 4e balanced on the encounter. So, that meant that every encounter actually mattered. 5e balances on the adventuring day, which means the first three or four encounters shouldn't actually matter that much, unless you blow your daily budget in the first two or three encounters.
But, since the balance resets after each adventuring day, and nothing carries forward, you can't really use standard 5e attrition resources - HP and spells - to balance over a series of days. Only having one or two "challenges" in a day won't use any actual resources to be challenging, and nothing matters after each day. So, extended challenges like exploration cannot use 5e attrition resources.
5e has attrition ressources for extended challenges. Food & Water (combined with Encumbrance in order to limit those two) and exhaustion. 5e even does have diseases that can get worse, that could be used.
The problem is, the rules for those get ignored the most often in 5e, because the implementation is bad (encumbrance is so high, you usually don't have to care and spells to bypass food & water like goodberry are availableto even the lowest level characters) and also distances are wonky. Who here had Wilderness travel/exploration that lasted for more than like two weeks?
So, now there are four solutions to tackle those WotC 5e systematic problems: 1. enforcing the tracking of food, water & encumbrance and other limited ressources ( for example arrows, torches),
2. Change the System,
3. Homebrewing (or creating your own 5e heartbreaker)
4. and/or implementation of narrative stakes (Time limits, in game failure states and stuff).
So, I'm in the camp of Homebrewing/creating my own 5e system and implementing narrative stakes whenever possible, while enforcing encumbrance and tracking of limited ressources trough better/easier rules.
In my spelljammer game I DM right now, I use the HouseDM resting rules (long rest only in safe locations like cities, long rests only regain HP equal to max. Hit Die + Con Mod).
That is mostly sufficient for Wilderness exploration because characters on the road/Wilderness only can do short rests, so now the adventure day is stretched from leaving town to entering town.
But I found that a little lacking. First of all the players don't have any chance other by DM Fiat to regain ressources in the wilderness and also only limiting HP gain in long rests is benefiting casters who get all their spellslots back as usual.
So I toyed with a new system: Gradual Gritty realism: the
https://www.enworld.org/threads/lon...ty-realism-variant-rules.700415/#post-9162672
In effect it gives you back 0% to 33% of HP and Spell Slots per long rest depending on the conditions of in which you rest in (like camping in the forest during a rainy icestorm without fire, tent and sleeping bag will not give you any ressources back), while resting in a magical Regeneration spa will greatly speed up recovery.
Now ressource attrition is stretched over several days and 1 to 3 encounters a day can be enough for ressource attrition to matter. But also the players can influence the rate of ressource regeneration by bringing adventuring gear like tents and blankets and appropriate clothing for the environment which outside of rime of the frostmaiden is totally ignored by WotC 5e. With adventuring gear mattering, encumbrance now becomes important. I even invented a simple weather system, because now weather matters.
It also weakens tiny hut. You are still protected from the elements, but tiny hut now doesn't guarantee 100% ressource regeneration anymore. And it also weakens stuff like goodberry because now every spell slot counts. And it balances out Warlocks who usually got it enough short rests to keep up with long rest classes. It balances martials and caster also better then the current resting rules.
The biggest problem is to convince players to give it a fair try, because they only see "Oh no, we get nerfed!" and that is not official rules! And 90% of my players play casters, so ... yeah. Also it is a tad more complicated, so players also don't like that.
So I'm toying with another rest Variant idea:
Getting rid of all benefits of a long rest. Players regain at a long rest 1hp (maybe + Con Mod) and the lowest used spell slot back, so it will take a while, to get ressources back.
Instead healing and Mana potions will be the main ressource to regain HP and Spellslots.
Now we have magical ressources that say how long we can adventure and if you run out of Mana and Healing Potions, you have to turn around. That is also a good money sink, exchanging gold for "rest beenfits" and the DM can control the difficulty and pacing of the game bt the amount of healing and mana potions he gives out and also can balance casters and martials reactively during the game if any imbalance arises.
This rules are even easier and I think players are more likely willing to track healing and Mana potions.
What do you girls & guys think?
Also I'm trying to invent a new encumbrance system that uses more of a visual encumbrance tracking sheet that is easy to use at the table (because tracking encumbrance in VTT is not a problem).
The problem with the current encumbrance system is first, that tracking is not supported by the inventory part of the character sheet. In order to track you always have to add up the individual pounds of every item every time you add or redact something. Also there a no benefits of tracking encumbrance.
My system is slot based and a character has slots equal to their strength score. On slot equals roughly 10 pounds. Items have size categories ranging from 0, 1/10, 1/5, 1/2, 1, 2 to 5. In the inventory sheet items are sorted by size and grouped together so that for the smaller items a full group of items equals 1 slot. So when you write down an item into your inventory, l by putting it in the correct size category, 90% of the work of tracking encumbrance is already done. Now you only have to add up the groups to see how many slots total you used up.
Also if you are lightly loaded (less than 1/2 or 1/4 of slots used) you get benefits to movement speed and dex saving throws and for every slot used up over your limit your speed is reduced and more disadvantages are stacked the more your carry over your capacity.
So now you not only can easily track encumbrance, there is now also a reason to do it.
