Recent content by overgeeked

It’s only a real choice if there’s a chance they can successfully rest. Saying they have a chance but the chance really being zero means it’s not really a choice. It’s a quantum ogre. Alternately, the possible reward is so overwhelmingly great, i.e. a bog standard long rest, that they’ll simply...

Sure, but unless you’re presenting a false choice, there will be times they don’t face random encounters. Which bring back the problem.

It’s a compromise, to be sure. To me, it’s a question of which is easier to use. Decoupling rests from sleep or the house rules and forced pacing you’d need to fix the mess? I tried the house rules and forced pacing for a decade. I’ll gladly take a clock with 18 ticks over that. Absolutely...

Yeah, it’s all subjective. Everyone has different lines in different places. For me, making the referee’s life a touch easier by just accepting the game is a game makes for a better experience. Like so many of the other “little things” we do or ignore to make the game run smoothly. Shrugging...

You see it as a con, I see it as a pro. Not really. The longer the combat lasts, the more damage you take and the more resources you spend. It's not possible to design a game that gamers won't try to exploit. There's no perfect solution, only a series of compromises. To me, not having to deal...

I'm not sure I see what you're objecting to. They have to eventually get a long rest. If you make long rests a resource they gain after 18 rounds of combat and disconnect it from sleep, it solves all the problems with rests and balance.

You could also make rests a recharging resource based on combat. This is effectively what Draw Steel has done. Gain a spendable short-rest resource after six rounds of combat. Max two per long rest. Gain a spendable long-rest resource after 18 rounds of combat. You could even divorce these...

And the players expect to be challenged.

I was thinking about the two short rests between long rests and how that should be handled. For “balanced” days that would be two fights, short rest, two fights, short rest, two fights, long rest. Assuming 3 round fights, that’s 18 rounds. Which is close enough to Mearls’ ~20 rounds. That...

You can’t. A decade of most referees getting this wrong has trained a generation of players that they can long rest anywhere, anytime.

In a decade of playing 5E I've literally never had a combat go that fast.

The enormous influx of new players Critical Role and Stranger Things brought to 5E. I remember. I was not one of them. I pushed for freeform skills and other wild departures. It got far more eyes than it otherwise would have because of Critical Role and Stranger Things. But people quite...

That's literally all of D&D. The game is designed around attrition-based adventuring.

That's because it was designed as a dungeon crawler. Because it had to cover that aspect of play that people would certainly use. That the vast majority don't play that way apparently never occurred to the designers of the game.

The next obvious question is: would 5E be as wildly popular if the majority of referees got this right? That is to say, if 5E wasn't played as an alpha-strike cakewalk by the majority of tables, would it have become as popular as it is?