D&D (2024) How long should a Short rest be in 5E(2024)?

[Remathilis]

...what class besides wizards can "abuse" short rests?

The biggest abuser is warlock, since they get two spell slots of the highest level from levels 2 to 10. In theory, if they were able to rest every combat, they would never suffer spell attrition. Having two fourth or fifth level spells every fight at level 9 is powerful.

Additionally, the warlock is able to abuse multi-classing, particularly with sorcerers and paladins, to use their spell slots to fuel smite and sorcery points.

Honestly, the half-caster warlock fixes both these problems, but if that's not in the cards, the best bet would be to limit recharge of pact magic to 2/day and make one of them a free "1 minute" recharge like the monk gets. It's a bandaid, but it makes the warlock more consistent and less prone to abuse.

 

[mamba]

For sure. My point though is that the 'short rest' was designed as a per encounter ability recharge point. If there are going to be short rest-based abilities in 5E (2024), I would hope that those abilities are designed to be used per encounter.

I am not a fan of per encounter abilities, to me that is a step in the wrong direction. I am not sure what skill is weak enough to justify that and powerful enough to matter…

They got it right with the new Warlock (which we will probably not see, given the Monk in the current playtest), have everyone recharge on a long rest.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Short rests don't need an exact measurement... DMs just need to determine how often and how powerful their combats/encounters are and whether they want players to get their abilities back for every one of those fights, or every couple.

Me personally... I don't care how long in "actual in-world time" it takes for a short rest, because I don't track time for really anything else so why get hung up on this? I usually tell my players '10 minutes' for a short rest precisely because it overlaps with the spellcaster '10-minute' ritual time and rogue's '10-minute' search and/or lockpick/disarm time in my games. But even those claims of '10 minutes' are pretty much handwaved because it's not like I'm keeping track of exact times for the rest of the adventure.

I do not run combats so many times in a single 'adventuring day' where the Warlock becomes "overpowered" by having 2 max-level slots available over and over and the Fighter gets to Action Surge every combat after each 'short rest'. So I just let everyone refresh their short rest abilities after each encounter and not worry about it... and I've never had an issue in my particular style of gameplay.

Other people, who play a more strictly delineated timed-out game, they might want/need a faster-held policy. But in both cases my response is the same-- since the book and game itself cannot know what type of game any of us runs... it doesn't matter what they put down in ink because every single one of us should just ignore the book and use whatever works best for our own table.

5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, 8 hours, no set time and Short Rest becomes its own length of time-- you as a DM and a table choose. What makes the game most fun for you all? Use that.

 

[Pauln6]

Rituals take 10 mins so everyone else could take a short rest. That might be too convenient. If it's not 5 or 10, it might as well be an hour.

If it's going to be shorter then it needs to be capped. Maybe everyone gets two and fighters get 3 at level 5?

 

[Osgood]

Way back in the days of the BECMI Red Box, the exploration part of the game ran in turns of 10 minutes each, but then switched to rounds of 10 seconds each. This of course meant that a turn consisted of 60 rounds, but of course combats basically never lasted that long. However, a combat encounter was assumed to last a full turn - whatever time was left was assumed to be that "5 minutes to catch your breath". (I'm not sure if B/X and other older versions did that the same way.)

I'd kind of forgotten about that, and while it was confusing to me at the time, I think a version of that could be reimplemented now. Keeping to the current baseline, your could have Combat rounds (6 seconds), Exploration rounds (1 minute, or 10 combat rounds--though I could see the case for 10 minute rounds here), and Travel rounds (1 hour). It aligns with the movement charts, and you could implement an action economy similar to combat for the other two activities.

 

[Staffan]

Somewhere in the 5-15 minute range. The important bit is that you should be able to take one after every encounter unless there's a very strong time pressure. Whatever it is, it's probably a good idea to scale other things that use non-combat time (e.g. rituals) to use the same unit. And most classes should have a significant number of things that recharge on a short rest, or at least have the option to do so. For example, casters in 13th Age get a certain number of spells per level, but the spells themselves can be either at-will, per-encounter, or daily, so you're encouraged to choose a good mix of them. Another nice example is the CRPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 (I guess 1 was similar but I haven't played that) where "skills" are balanced by having cooldowns of 1-5 rounds, so you can use them multiple times per encounter but not at-will.

The whole thing of attrition over the course of an adventuring day can and should go away, or at least be minimized.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I am not a fan of per encounter abilities, to me that is a step in the wrong direction. I am not sure what skill is weak enough to justify that and powerful enough to matter…

5E Fighter Action Surge? 5E Warlock spell casting?

They got it right with the new Warlock (which we will probably not see, given the Monk in the current playtest), have everyone recharge on a long rest.

Agreed, and pretty much my point... if as a design team you can't get a short rest-based ability to work on a per encounter basis, you should just stick with long rest recharging. I disagree with you though that there isn't room for both to be viable.

 

[Incenjucar]

The biggest abuser is warlock, since they get two spell slots of the highest level from levels 2 to 10. In theory, if they were able to rest every combat, they would never suffer spell attrition. Having two fourth or fifth level spells every fight at level 9 is powerful.

Additionally, the warlock is able to abuse multi-classing, particularly with sorcerers and paladins, to use their spell slots to fuel smite and sorcery points.

Honestly, the half-caster warlock fixes both these problems, but if that's not in the cards, the best bet would be to limit recharge of pact magic to 2/day and make one of them a free "1 minute" recharge like the monk gets. It's a bandaid, but it makes the warlock more consistent and less prone to abuse.

The design of the warlock implies they expected them to always start a combat with those spells. Is there actually a problem there given wizards exist?

 

[delericho]

The enemies dark ritual will complete in an hour.

So...do we have time for a short rest?

Um....sure will take about 30 minutes, so you only have 30 minutes to get to the ritual.


Next time: Party is severely exhausted after the last fight.

Ok when are the reinforcements coming against us, like about half an hour right? Crap we don't have time for a rest, we have to keep going.

DM: Well...you could probably take about 10 minutes and get your stuff back.

Players: Wait, but it took 30 minutes last time, why is it different now?


There will always be those groups that work with time pressures that are going to want to know how much a short rest will tick down that ticking clock.

This is a good point - the players should be aware, at least in broad terms, of how long these things take. They do need to be able to make informed choices along the way.

That said...

Hmmh...

First 1d6, second 2d6, 3rd 3d6 and so on.

I very much like this. I think there is a strong argument of the duration being at least partly random, and the time escalation as the number of rests goes up is nice too.

 

[OB1]

I'd go with 2 options.

5 Min Short rest limited to 2 times per day
1 hr short rest unlimited

Or as a combo, a short rest is normally an hour but you can spend half your level of hit die (min 1) to get a 5 min short rest (but no healing from the hit die). If hit die basically represent your overall endurance for the day, then you can expend those to either get HP back or get short rest abilities back in a rush.