Except when it does. Which in our games is often.
So many adventures have time pressures built in that I just don't understand how others don't understand time pressure in an adventure. All those wandering monster charts (most adventures), death curses that causes populations to die over time (tomb of annihilation), poison gas filled dungeons (hidden shrine), etc.. How is this a new concept to some people? How have you played D&D for this many years and found that your PCs can just stop for an hour wherever they are whenever they want to and nothing bad ever happens?
And that's not even accounting for longer-duration based spells and other abilities that run out because of an hour rest.
Yeah, this matches my experience.
People keep finding issues with the XP budget per adventuring day. If there's no time pressure, well then sure there's no reason not to short rest. But there's no reason not to
long rest, either! Might as well nova
every encounter and then long rest. It even means you'll have more resources available to survive any interim ambushes! And then you're back to the Five Minute Adventuring Day.
So then you implement narrative time pressure to push the PCs forward and stop them from constantly long resting. But now you have
the opposite problem. If there's not enough time to long rest, maybe there's not enough time to short rest, too! We can't stop just because the Battlemaster burned Action Surge, Second Wind, and all Superiority dice. Everybody else can keep going and hp isn't a problem. We gotta keep going before the world literally ends! If we're on an actual schedule and not a narrative device -- which is what the players should be assuming -- we might be out of time if we delay even a moment. Say goodbye to short rests, downtime activities, side quests, and anything of that sort! You've designed those out of your game. Now boarding track 29: non-stop rail service to BBEGsville.
The other popular option is gritty survival recovery, where short rests take 8 hours, and long rests take 7 days. Except now, you
can't use time pressure, because one encounter where the DM rolls well and the PCs roll poorly means the PCs are out of action for a week. And spells or abilities that are meant to last a whole adventuring day, like mage armor, now... don't. It also makes the game, well,
gritty survival instead of the more pulpy action. It changes the
style of play. Lots of tables don't want that. And you shouldn't have to abandon your preferred style of play just to have a game that functions.
Mixed rest ability recovery is a problem. It's like having both 3e and 4e classes in the same game, which is exactly what they were trying to accomplish. But I don't think moving everything to long rests really solves the core problems; it just
starts to solve them. The next issue is that
long rests being so universally powerful are a big problem.
Always being at maximum effectiveness immediately after a long rest, even in the middle of a dungeon, is a terrible design choice. It's silly, and DMs try to punish that behavior with ambushes to prevent it.
Unfortunately, the game is designed around needing rests to
not die as well as needing rests to
be cool. That's an issue when you need to stop and rest to
not die in the middle of the dungeon (sometimes trigger by random events) but also needs to not let players burn all their cool constantly and just stop so they can keep being cool. The two designs work against each other, but that tensions is also part of making the game a game. So DMs decide to punish the PCs when they're just trying to
be cool, knowing they can hold back when the PCs are force to stop and
not die.
Except punishment doesn't encourage players to do the behavior you want. It encourages them to
avoid punishment, which isn't the same thing. That's why I keep arriving at the conclusion that the game needs to
reward the players for doing the behavior that you want: not long resting and reaching the end of the adventuring day. Even if you're planning 3-4 encounters per day, the players need mechanical rewards to justify pushing through the end of that adventuring day. The PCs -- the players -- should be rewarded for bearing the risk of not long resting.
It can't be a long-term reward like more treasure or XP, either, because that compounds on itself. Your only benefit will be commensurately harder encounters -- because if not, then the game gets boring -- so it doesn't really get you anything except down the class progression chart faster. A long-term reward also encourages
stopping the short-term behavior change once you don't really need more long-term reward. It's gotta be a short-term reward to encourage short-term behavior change. Anyone who has owned a dog or raised a child should understand this.
So what the game really should do is let the players
be cool in ways they normally can't just by reaching deeper into the adventuring day budget. There's nothing at all in the game that does that, really. I don't think such an overhaul would be compatible with 5e, either, and that's a design limitation for One D&D.
