D&D 5E Playing with the short rest mechanic

[ccooke]

I've been thinking a bit about how short rests work and how satisfying - or not - some people find them. The thing is, during a short rest you can do a number of things - regain expertise points, regain some spells, perform mundane healing, etc. In a standard one-hour short rest, you can do as many of those things as you want to. It got me thinking that there might be a fun way to introduce some more tactical options - an "Expedited Rest", if you will. During an Expedited rest, you would be able to do one of:

• Recover one class, race or other feature that recovers on a short rest, so long as you have taken a short or long rest since the last time you recovered that feature during an Expedited Rest
• Use up to a third of your Hit Dice (rounded up)
• Take any other single action that can be completed in a short rest, so long as it takes less than 20 minutes

An expedited rest would, therefore, be 20 minutes.

Thoughts?

 

[wedgeski]

That honestly seems to me to be an unnecessary complication, unless your game is run on a more rigid clock than mine.

Are there really that many adventuring circumstances where a 20 minute rest is feasible but an hour-long rest is not?

If there *was* such a situation, I think I'd instead ask for ability checks (Constitution, Concentration, Int) for characters to do quickly what they would normally be able to do in more time.

 

[Neonchameleon]

My take is quite simply that 20 minutes is not different enough from an hour. It's the same order of magnitude. I like the 4E five minute rest mechanic because it's just long enough to catch your breath and patch up any wounds, and to keep things on a classic "10 minute turns" 1e basis. An hour or even 20 minutes is a full out stop rather than a "Clean yourselves and the battlefield up" break.

 

[MortalPlague]

Through lots of playtesting, I have really come to appreciate the one hour short rest. It becomes a real tactical choice whether or not to rest, and just as often as not, the PCs have decided they couldn't risk it and pressed on instead.

I don't think that twenty minutes versus one hour would make an appreciable difference. I'm with wedgeski on this one; it feels like a needless change.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Seems like a bit too much to track IMHO.

 

[Wrathamon]

I'm not a fan of this.

The only thing I would allow during a 10 min rest is

• recovering weapons and ammunition
• using magic items (or normal items like eating some food)
• ability checks & skills for players trying to do something creative.

I dont think they need to recover anything

that is what the 1 hour rest is for or the full day one.

If you want to rest to recover then you risk getting attacked or if youre on a time sensitive mission you may fail it.

But, as a DM you could always say you get everything back at the end of a fight, nothing is stopping you

 

[Tony Vargas]

Pegging a 'rest' - really, a mechanical recharge - to any fixed time period is potentially problematic, since it limits the DM's options when pacing his adventures. An adventure that takes weeks, for instance, would either have to have all the action forced into one 'day,' or have each day where there's meant to be one combat encounter have one /really/ overwhelming, very long, encounter.

One sort of solution is to decouple re-charges from time, but still use them. You get a 'Short Rest' every other encounter and a "long" one every 4th - works for 13A. Or, you get minor re-charge after every 'scene' and a major one at the end of a 'chapter' (then, I don't know, level up at the end of the 'story').

The other is to balance classes and encounters in a way that is robust, regardless of the number of re-charges the party manages to finagle in a given time. The classes part is easy: give them resource parity at each re-charge level - worked for 4e. The encounter part is a lot harder. If everyone has all their resources, they need to face a tougher encounter. I suppose encounter guidelines that adjusted the exp value of the encounter (and exp rewarded) based on the number of prior encounters might work. A 'first encounter of the day' has a higher exp budget, the 8th encounter of the day a lower one - but both present about the same difficulty relative to the party's remaining resources, and earn them the same exp.

Anyway, changing the arbitrary value of the rest period (or adding more arbitrary-length rest periods) just shuffles the issue around without actually fixing it. If your campaign is going to have very consistent pacing, though, it could be an adequate work-round, so don't let that stop you.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Mearls tweeted there will be DMG guidance on changing short rests to 5 mins for example, and suggestions about how some abilities might need tweaking if you do so, his example was changing second wind to temp hps.

 

[77IM]

You could steal from Numenera and vary the length of the short rest based on how many you have taken:
Your first rest takes 1 minute, your second takes 10 minutes, your third takes 1 hour, your fourth takes 4 hours,and after that you have to take a long rest.

(Actually in Numenera your first recovery takes 1 round but that's probably inappropriate for a short rest considering all the stuff it gets you.)

 

[the Jester]

No thanks. Making a rest shorter than an hour takes away what is, to me, a tactically meaningful, interesting decision point.