D&D 5E DM purposely gimping my Warlock

[daddystabz]

If your game world has 24 hours in a day and a long rest is 8 hours, you can easily fit more than 2 short rests in a 16 hour period. The "must be 8 hours apart" thing is the more heinous aspect though.

You can only take TWO in a day and they must be at least 8 hrs apart.

 

[daddystabz]

OK now that you have posted his response - his response sounds pretty calm and reasonable, and you sound very aggressive in that thread. You exaggerate greatly the impact of this house rule on your character (how many short rests did you think you get in the game even without this rule? Let me tell you, after a year and a half playing it, it's roughly 2-3 per day anyway). Yes, the rule impacts Warlocks in a meaningful way, but by constantly pretending it makes your Warlock 99% less effective does not help your cause. Plus, if you had any hope of persuading your DM to change his mind, you blew it right away by being so aggressive and adversarial in tone. You immediately made him defensive, though he tried to continue to be polite while you increased your angry tone.

I'd find another game. You guys are not going to get along, that is obvious at this point, it's time to move on.

You forget that there was already dialogue WELL before this post you are talking about. DURING the first session is when it all started. When in the middle of the game he announced his house rules and I protested simply stating my concern for how it limits my character he said to me "then you better re-roll as another class because this is how I run MY games." He is very forceful about things and frankly, gives little thought or care how his house rules effect one class vs. another.

 

[daddystabz]

I dont think the OP ever stated he expected 'free' short rests. Just the ability to use them normally (instead of with the DM limitation).

There is no reasonable reason, in my opinion, to limit short rests to a number of times a day. Monsters can be smart, there can be patrols. But if the PCs want to take their time and rest often, so be it. A good DM will adapt if it becomes an issue. What happens when they get spells like rope trick or Tiny Hut? Will wandering monsters start being able to dispel magic at will?

The arbitrary limitation on short rests, as well as all the other restrictions this DM imposes is more akin to Hackmaster, DM vs Players. The post the OP shared corroborates this. I felt the OP was reasonable and the DM was very unreasonable in that exchange. Not once did the DM acknowledge the OP's backstory, or try to assist the player with valid suggestions. Moreso he cut him down and berated his 'playstyle' while trying to defend his 'dm style'.

Again to OP. Run. You wont miss this game. Even that other guy saw the writing on the wall.

Absolutely 100% correct. My face-to-face DM doesn't arbitrarily limit short rests. If we are deep in a dungeon it might not be feasible to get one in because there are too many wandering mobs, etc. This is a better way to handle it. We have a Bard in our group that can't even get a musical instrument to play, we have a fighter with no real weapon or armor, etc. It is going to be tough going. The DM originally was going to take away my Dark One's Blessing feature too after I used it the first time, killing a giant rat and gaining 4 temporary HPs as a result. He seems rather obsessed with making the game as difficult as possible and being adversarial to the players.

 

[daddystabz]

There is no rule in RAW about how far apart short rests need to be....only a rule that they are around 1 hr in length.

Which is why the response was to you and not the OP. You has just respond to someone else, who HAD said "they are not free" and you disagreed with him. It was YOU who was saying they are free.



It's not my house rule, but I absolutely think it's a reasonable house rule. He's not limiting your ability to rest - he is limiting your ability to regain some abilities and hit points from a rest. The creators of the game have already said they recognize this is a playstyle they will support, with support for it in the DMG. This DM, lacking a DMG right now, is just doing their best to address the issue now. Extending the time between short rests makes as much sense as the current time between short rests (1 hour). If the 1 hour makes sense, then the 8 hours makes sense - neither are really based on anything other than a vague time frame concept.



Some may. I am saying the game does not assume you get short rests at fixed rates - it assumes a widely variable rate, and this DM is simply encoding that rate at a different time frame than you prefer. It does not make his preference wrong and yours right. In fact I gotta ask, how often in your experience are you finding the party takes a short rest in your games?



ALL short rests are based on an arbitrary time limit, so complaining you like one arbitrary limit and not the other is silly.



That is not how I read it - the tone is very clearly aggressive on the player's part, and not aggressive on the DMs part. Other players also mention that the player in question is being aggressive. It's a matter of tone more than anything else. Others in this thread also noticed it.

 

[daddystabz]

I felt the OP was trying to establish a baseline to compromise with the DM, who completely shut down the discussion 'if you don't like it walk'. The OP clearly wanted to be in the game, and was trying to find a solution to make that happen. DM didn't seem interested in listening.

I say we agree to disagree.

This is EXACTLY right. As soon as I asked him about his house rules that was sprung on us in the middle of the first session he got VERY defensive and spurted at me that if I didn't like it I could just re-roll a different class. HE was the aggressive one. Even another player spoke up in my defense who plays a Warlock in another game, trying to explain that Warlocks only get 2 spell slots through lvl 11 and short rests are how we regain those spell slots. The DM couldn't care less. In addition, he tried at first to take away my special feature the first time I used it too, Dark One's Blessing and he challenged me the first time I cast my one and only spell, Hellish Rebuke. The other player who plays a Warlock in another game had to speak up to help me in that case as well.

 

[daddystabz]

While we're armchair-quarterbacking this -- here's a pretty good example of good and problematic ways to ask DMs about rules. GOOD: ask privately and politely, in such a way that you aren't challenging their authority in front of the other players. PROBLEMATIC: ask publicly and using a lot of ALL CAPS, get defensive, and post publicly about it on other sites when you don't get the answer you want. I'm not crazy about the GM's house rule, but it's kind of a rough way to go about creating change.

I can't blame the OP, but I suspect his response did more harm than good in this case. C'est la vie.

I only came to this forum after I had decided I was probably going to leave the game and yes, I was taken aback and somewhat angry the way he treated me because I dared ask him about the impact of his house rules that none of us were told about before-hand, that were simply sprung on us in the middle of the session. I wanted to see where others stood on this situation. I never once was aggressive or disrespectful of him but he was to me for sure.

 

[Mistwell]

There is no rule in RAW about how far apart short rests need to be....only a rule that they are around 1 hr in length.

They need to be 1 hour apart, in that they take 1 hour to accomplish. This DM has added 7 hours to the time between taking them (the 1 hour from the first one, and 7 additional hours, instead of just the 1 hour from the first one). Mearls has discussed how they know that is a pretty active playstyle out there, and there will be options in the DMG to add length between short rests, length of short rests, and otherwise tinker with the short rest, long rest, and healing rates of the game.

 

[Remathilis]

This is EXACTLY right. As soon as I asked him about his house rules that was sprung on us in the middle of the first session he got VERY defensive and spurted at me that if I didn't like it I could just re-roll a different class. HE was the aggressive one. Even another player spoke up in my defense who plays a Warlock in another game, trying to explain that Warlocks only get 2 spell slots through lvl 11 and short rests are how we regain those spell slots. The DM couldn't care less. In addition, he tried at first to take away my special feature the first time I used it too, Dark One's Blessing and he challenged me the first time I cast my one and only spell, Hellish Rebuke. The other player who plays a Warlock in another game had to speak up to help me in that case as well.

This is probably a prime example of "reactionary DMing"; when the DM is unaware of what the actual rules are (vs. his perceived notion of the rules) and when the player attempts to use said rules, he becomes defensive and often attempts to ad-hoc houserule or ban the offending item. Nothing you can do about it but find a better DM.

 

[Remathilis]

They need to be 1 hour apart, in that they take 1 hour to accomplish. This DM has added 7 hours to the time between taking them (the 1 hour from the first one, and 7 additional hours, instead of just the 1 hour from the first one). Mearls has discussed how they know that is a pretty active playstyle out there, and there will be options in the DMG to add length between short rests, length of short rests, and otherwise tinker with the short rest, long rest, and healing rates of the game.

Hopefully, said rules take into account short-rest refresh abilities when short rests are less plentiful. When you can only rest twice per day (effectively, 1 short and 1 long) you've basically turned those short rest abilities into 2/day ones.

 

[Uchawi]

I have left every game, where a DM has sprung a house rule that has significantly altered my character with no recourse for discussion or arriving at some type of mutual agreement. But that is a problem with 5E overall, since too many mechanics are mixed from various editions without a good method to pick and choose, i.e. too many sub-systems.