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5E Healing and my next Greyhawk campaign
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7247935" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>I originally used 8 hour short rest / 7 day long rest for my two Curse of Strahd campaigns because of the same sort of setting beliefs. Here's my biggest takeaway from it:</p><p></p><p>It really screws up narrative.</p><p></p><p>In the Baratok Valley of CoS especially... things are always occurring. Plotlines feed one into another. Find Ireena in the village of Barovia and you need to get her across the valley to the village of Kresk with the hope of avoiding Strahd's notice... and then encounter all the events that occur on the road and in Vallaki that pop up during the travel, several of which are "We have to do this now!". Or rescue the Wizard of Wines from the druids and blights and that triggers events at Yester Hill, including the eventual ritual to create the tree blight which then attacks the winery back.</p><p></p><p>Now when I coupled that with everyone taking a 7 day break to regain spells and hit points they used during these events... all of a sudden the story ground to a halt. The urgency of finding little Isabelle suddenly disappeared because they weren't going to get to that plotline until at least a week later (by which point she would have died) because there were already a bunch of other things in motion that they had to get to first, and they already were taking 8 hour / nightly rests just to try and regain as little strength that they could from a short rest. Eventually I had to trim the long rest down from 7 days to like 3 to 5 days (depending on the number of exhaustion levels people had) just so that we could try and narratively justify why the PCs basically pulled themselves out of the constantly-moving story for entire weeks at a time.</p><p></p><p>Had I been running a campaign in which actual Downtime between small adventures was to be an actual part of the game and built into the narrative... justifying pulling the PCs out of the flow for 7 days for a long rest would be easier to do. But even still... while 7 days definitely makes the recovery rules feel a bit more natural in terms of regaining all hit points and most hit dice... 7 day breaks to regain spells is still a massive roadblock to narrative flow. Especially when we're talking low levels of the game-- any spellcaster gets 2 spells total every 7 days (and the rest have to be cantrips)? You end up taking weeks off from the story. So unless each adventure has like less than a half-dozen encounters in it, your PCs are going to adventure for like 4 hours of in-game time... then go back to town for a week. Then go back out for conceivably another four hours in-game of adventuring... then back to town for another week. You have to hope your story can take that into account.</p><p></p><p>The fact that you state outright that there is meant to be a real urgency to stop Iuz/find a counter ritual... I can tell you that a 7 day long rest will slam up against that and completely deflate it. There WON'T be any real urgency, because the players will know that an entire month within the game can disappear just so the cleric can cast 8 1st level spells (a 1st level caster getting 2 spells per long rest, with a week in between each batch.) There's going to be a lot of "Well, we'd LIKE to go out and help... but we're stuck here in town for the week to recover both our health and our small number of spells and abilities."</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 7247935, member: 7006"] I originally used 8 hour short rest / 7 day long rest for my two Curse of Strahd campaigns because of the same sort of setting beliefs. Here's my biggest takeaway from it: It really screws up narrative. In the Baratok Valley of CoS especially... things are always occurring. Plotlines feed one into another. Find Ireena in the village of Barovia and you need to get her across the valley to the village of Kresk with the hope of avoiding Strahd's notice... and then encounter all the events that occur on the road and in Vallaki that pop up during the travel, several of which are "We have to do this now!". Or rescue the Wizard of Wines from the druids and blights and that triggers events at Yester Hill, including the eventual ritual to create the tree blight which then attacks the winery back. Now when I coupled that with everyone taking a 7 day break to regain spells and hit points they used during these events... all of a sudden the story ground to a halt. The urgency of finding little Isabelle suddenly disappeared because they weren't going to get to that plotline until at least a week later (by which point she would have died) because there were already a bunch of other things in motion that they had to get to first, and they already were taking 8 hour / nightly rests just to try and regain as little strength that they could from a short rest. Eventually I had to trim the long rest down from 7 days to like 3 to 5 days (depending on the number of exhaustion levels people had) just so that we could try and narratively justify why the PCs basically pulled themselves out of the constantly-moving story for entire weeks at a time. Had I been running a campaign in which actual Downtime between small adventures was to be an actual part of the game and built into the narrative... justifying pulling the PCs out of the flow for 7 days for a long rest would be easier to do. But even still... while 7 days definitely makes the recovery rules feel a bit more natural in terms of regaining all hit points and most hit dice... 7 day breaks to regain spells is still a massive roadblock to narrative flow. Especially when we're talking low levels of the game-- any spellcaster gets 2 spells total every 7 days (and the rest have to be cantrips)? You end up taking weeks off from the story. So unless each adventure has like less than a half-dozen encounters in it, your PCs are going to adventure for like 4 hours of in-game time... then go back to town for a week. Then go back out for conceivably another four hours in-game of adventuring... then back to town for another week. You have to hope your story can take that into account. The fact that you state outright that there is meant to be a real urgency to stop Iuz/find a counter ritual... I can tell you that a 7 day long rest will slam up against that and completely deflate it. There WON'T be any real urgency, because the players will know that an entire month within the game can disappear just so the cleric can cast 8 1st level spells (a 1st level caster getting 2 spells per long rest, with a week in between each batch.) There's going to be a lot of "Well, we'd LIKE to go out and help... but we're stuck here in town for the week to recover both our health and our small number of spells and abilities." [/QUOTE]
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