• The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!

D&D (2024) Limiting Short Rests to 2x/day

Should Short Rests be artificially limited to 2x/day, potentially allowing for shorter rests?

  • Yes, Short Rests should still be 1-hour, but limited to 2x/day.

  • Yes, Short Rests should be 5-15 minutes and limited to 2x/day.

  • No, Short Rests should still be 1-hour and taken as often as time and circumstances allow.

  • No, Short Rests should be 5-15 minutes and taken as often as time and circumstances allow.

  • Other, (I'll explain in the comments.)


Results are only viewable after voting.
Probably the best limit would be: if you take a short rest, you can't benefit from another within the next 4 hours.
Same litmitation as the long rest one. You might fit in 3 or 4 short rests in a day, but chances are slim. No more double or triple short rest. Also no hard limit. So if you need to go on short rests for a while, no problem.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

There is no amount of short rests that is balanced for every party. Some require 1. Some require 2. Some require 3. A party of, say, 2 Battlemasters and two Celestial Warlocks, with no limit on how many rests they can take, can practically adventure forever.
This is why short rests are broken with 5e as they are right now. The celestial warlock heal spam, for example, wouldn't have been unlimited in 4e because healing takes the recipient's limited healing surges. The system is built with failsafes. If we're making a hypothetical 6e, you'd obviously not make things that break the game when you spam them every 5 minutes into short rest features, and we've seen it work in 4e.

And with no assumption of how many resources the party has at the beginning of each encounter (other than, I assume most of their hit points), no assumption of a particular accuracy or AC, only "how much damage can they do" and "how much damage can they take".
To be fair, that's every edition. You don't know if the 3.5e wizard is showing up with 12 spells or 1 if there are any encounters after the first one, and the range AC was absolutely wild. This was how it was before short rests were even a thing and eliminating them now doesn't affect this phenomenon. In fact, the one way to create a system where you know the party's exact power at the beginning of each encounter is to make all features only per-encounter based, and old-timers would really hate that.

Probably the best limit would be: if you take a short rest, you can't benefit from another within the next 4 hours.
I think you'd have a funny situation where a lot of players would be essentially asking for a 4 hour short rest after the first one. ;)
 

mamba

Legend
what big powers are in 5e the problem?
warlock spell slots?
then fix that.
they tried to by making the Warlock LR, unfortunately they gave up on it, so now we are stuck with the same nonsense in 2024 (and they never tried making the others LR as a consequence)
 

mamba

Legend
Why is having any number of powers a problem though, if having them doesn't actually make you too powerful compared to encounters? It's clearly not a power or balance issue if combats still took too long.
getting the powers back after each encounter still is too powerful, the length of encounters is independent of that. The two are not related.

You removed attrition as a factor
 

mamba

Legend
There's no way you can make a game able to run out of the box in this fashion. It is absolutely on the Dungeon Master to make this work.
I assume you mean this as a criticism, I cannot read your two posts any other way than ‘SR are entirely broken and always will be, we need to get rid of them’
 

Horwath

Legend
they tried to by making the Warlock LR, unfortunately they gave up on it, so now we are stuck with the same nonsense in 2024 (and they never tried making the others LR as a consequence)
half-caster sucks for warlock,
maybe if it was 2/3rd caster it would be better?

1-7th level spells, new spell level every 3 class levels: 1,4,7,10,13,16,19th level
 

getting the powers back after each encounter still is too powerful, the length of encounters is independent of that. The two are not related.
The length of encounters is directly related to how much damage the powers do. How are they too powerful if they're underpowered compared to monster hp?

You removed attrition as a factor
Your most powerful stuff still came from dailies. All of your healing was limited by daily resources. Attrition was still there for every class. 🤷‍♂️
 

Horwath

Legend
getting the powers back after each encounter still is too powerful, the length of encounters is independent of that. The two are not related.

You removed attrition as a factor
it still is.
Short rest powers should be there that, even if you blew EVERYTHING in your 1st fight of the day, you are not left with auto-attacking the rest of the day.

Now, problem is how much do you get back on short rest back and can you stack effect of short rests?

I.E. short rest healing could be that your HP goes to 25% or 50% of your MAX HP.
or if using spell points, you recharge up to 50% of your spell points pool.
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Supporter
I assume you mean this as a criticism, I cannot read your two posts any other way than ‘SR are entirely broken and always will be, we need to get rid of them’
You can fix short rests, but you need to alter how classes work.

Either all classes recover some powers on SR or no classes recover powers on SR. This mix and match thing has to go. If classes do regain powers on a short rest, the amount of power they regain needs to be the same as well. Take the Monk. At low levels they have a limited pool of ki. Their AC is (unless you have a couple of 18's to play with) too low to be able to stand toe to toe with enemies. So they need to either dodge or disengage on every turn (or be able to land a Stunning Fist every turn) to avoid not only regular attacks, but opportunity attacks for moving away from enemies (if you believe in the myth of Monks as skirmishers). This requires more than 1 ki point per round of combat, which Monks won't get until levels 6-10 (depending on combat length). In Tier 1, you have half that ki to work with even with a short rest after ever battle.

You can mitigate this if your Stun lands, you're not surrounded by multiple foes, or you have Mobile as a Feat tax. But even then, you need a ki each turn to then get your extra Flurry of Blows attack (if you believe in the myth of the Monk as a Striker).

Now contrast the Warlock; they get all their Pact slots back on a rest. At level 1, a spell slot spent on, say, Shield, is roughly equal to 1 ki spent on Patient Defense (not that Monks can do that yet, but you get the idea). By level 3, a spell slot can be a Hold Person, which is already better than the Stunning Fist the Monk won't gain until level 5, when a spell slot could be a Hypnotic Pattern that can shut down a combat entirely while the Monk is still struggling to down a CR 1 in one round.

Ki < Pact Slots, yet both are on the same recovery schedule. Worse, the Monk doesn't have any awesome at will abilities (using others phrasing) like Eldritch Blast. Without Ki, they are arguably the weakest class.

So I would say that one change that should be made is that Warlocks only regain ONE Pact slot on a short rest, if we have to have them on a SR schedule (which apparently we do, because people love them some Pact Magic). It's still really strong in Tier 1, but it will at leas level off.

It's not that there don't exist some abilities that are fine for short rest recovery; I can't imagine combat would be busted if a Battlemaster uses all their Superiority dice, Action Surge, and Second wind in every battle. Regain one Channel Divinity, fine. Ki? Likely, especially now that it appears Stunning is going to be 1/round.

Arcane Recovery I think is too good, but it's only 1/day.

Anyways, you get the idea; my hypothesis is that you can fix resting if you adjust who gets what and how much out of resting. I don't believe you can fix resting by setting limits on how often you can rest.
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Supporter
half-caster sucks for warlock,
maybe if it was 2/3rd caster it would be better?

1-7th level spells, new spell level every 3 class levels: 1,4,7,10,13,16,19th level
1/2 caster sucks for everyone. But the playtest Warlock having extra spell slots on top of being a half caster by taking Invocations wasn't bad; the problem was, it made those Invocations must haves, because they were obviously better than most other choices.

But "spells" > "any other possible ability" is so ingrained into 5e I'm not sure how you can rectify that without a complete overhaul...which is kind of where I think we are on resting.
 

Remove ads

Top