D&D 5E Rest Mechanics: Decoupling Class Feature Recovery & Healing Dice/Hit Points

[Syntallah]

First of all, I absolutely love 5E. The following is not a knock on the great Game at all. It’s just that my preferred DMing style doesn’t fit well with the 6-8 Encounters Per Day paradigm. While I occasionally throw in a dungeon crawl, or string several encounters together, I typically prefer to use just a few bigger, more significant encounters in a single day. In light of this, I have been lurking and reading the various 6-8 Encounters Per Day threads for a while now trying to figure out what to do about it.

I have finally come up with the following:

Some time ago I decoupled healing dice from the Short Rest mechanic. I have something called Triage [takes two minutes, requires one healing kit use, and a Medicine check DC 15; a PC can then expend as many healing dice as they want]. I am going to take it a step further. I am going to separate healing and class feature recovery into two distinct entities.


- Class Feature Recovery (e.g. spell slots, Action Surge, Channel Divinity, Lay on Hands, Rage, etc) will run on a milestone mechanic. For instance, a Party of four 8th level PCs has an Adventuring Day Budget of 24000xp. So, after 8000xp worth of encounters, the Party would qualify for a Short Rest. When they hit 16000xp, they qualify for another, and after 24000xp, they can take a Long Rest.

- Healing and Hit Point Recovery will be in the hands of the PCs. I am keeping the Triage mechanic mentioned above which somewhat mirrors a short rest (i.e. a quick breather, get some health back, push on). For a PC to recover healing dice and hit points, he/she will have to rest for eight hours in a secure, comfortable environment. Basically, a campfire with warm food and a bedroll, an inn, a temple, etc. They will then recover half their healing dice, and all of their hit points as normal.


This system keeps the recovery of class features in line with Game design, and avoids the disparity in balance that can come with altering the rest frequency. At the same time, it keeps a certain element of rest firmly in the hands of the Players. I want them to have some control, and make the meaningful choice of when to rest, and when to push on for the objective.



Thoughts? Any pitfalls I may be missing? I would appreciate any feedback.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Thoughts? Any pitfalls I may be missing? I would appreciate any feedback.

Make sure your players are onboard with fundamentally altering D&D from simulationist mechanics to narrativist/gamist mechanics. As a player, and as someone familiar with the writings of Jack Vance, I would find it extremely jarring if the DM declared that my ability to memorize spells would now function on a narrative (milestone) basis and not as something that was predictable and controllable by me in world. It's not even clear what that means physically, in-world.

You might be able to get the same narrative effect, without the jarring bits, if you come up with concrete mechanics that just happen to coincide with your milestones. E.g. if wizards regain power only by resting in the light of a full moon, and your milestones always happen on full moons, then wizard milestones make sense again.

 

[Syntallah]

Agreed. One of the challenges is going to be to 'make it make sense'. It can't just be: "yay, we killed the mummy in his haunted, creepy tomb. Everybody level up, and oh, the wizard has all her spells back!"

I am leaning towards, the first eight hour rest after the milestone. You wake up, you have your health, and can memorize your spells and such.

 

[Blue]

5e already has variant rules on resting in the DMG that separate sleep from recovery of spells and healing during a "long rest", I think you'll be fine.

Some other posters have commented on how that changes expectations. I'd not only tell your players, I'd engage them into helping keep it up.

DM: Okay, you stay the night at the inn. Why wasn't it a good night's sleep?
Player 1: Well, dogs were barking all night.
Player 2: I didn't even notice, Tazik was drinking and umm, relaxin, all night.
Player 3: Well, I might have caused those dogs. I was still wound up after we couldn't rescue that girl and I just went for a long walk. Wandered the town til 3 or 4 in the morning.

What you describe is close conceptually to how 13th Age does it. (13th Age is a light & fast d20 OGL from some of the lead designers of 3ed and 4e that came out about a year prior to 5e. There's a lot of similarities of philosophy.)

13th Age has at-will, encounter, and full-heal-up replenishments. Full-heal-up occurs around every four encounters, though the DM can do it sooner for tough encounters. So if a three week cross-country travel might have 4 encounters spread across the whole thing and it's not full resources on all of them. But it also gives you the freedom to have them more than once in a 24 hour period. Doing a megadungeon and have the right number of encounters before lunch? Instead of stopping and camping for the night starting at noon, just throw in a narrative reason like "the magic of the fountain rejuvenates everyone who sips it, though it will be a while before you can handle that again".

As a side note, 13th Age does allow players to take a full heal-up early, but at a campaign loss. This isn't explicit 5e language like it is in 13th Age, but the idea is something bad happens. Maybe sleeping before taking on the vampire nest lets them turn the two townsfolk they had earlier captured. Perhaps the evil cleric have time to complete a ritual and now have a minor demon at their service, etc.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I quite like this idea, and as noted by Blue, it reminds me of the full reset of 13th Age after a certain number of battles, subject to GM discretion/story making sense.

I think there is a fundamental problem in 5e of some classes being short rest based, others long rest based, and that screws with balance when either of those kinds of rests occurs too frequently. Too many long rests and paladins/full casters OP. Too many short rests and fighters/warlocks OP. Any reset system which helps the game stick to the 8 encounters/2 short rests/1 long rest is an improvement in my view. The issue then becomes trying to explain "why" things work this way in the game world, if you care about such things.

I think a better overall system would be some kind of "party wide" short rest-ish reset mechanic, with a decreasing effect or chance of working each time a short rest is taken, until finally the party must long rest to full reset.

So for example, first short rest everyone makes a wisdom/willpower check (easy DC if the rest is 1 hour or more, hard DC if the rest is only 5 mins). If successful, you get back some intangible HP (maybe a third max hp?) and one use of a class ability (eg: one action surge use, a used spell slot, etc). Next time you take a short rest, make another wisdom check but with higher DC, recover same as before (perhaps limit on spell casters recovering same spell level slot as before, or similar)... and so on and so forth, until at some point the party gets the opportunity to long rest for a full reset.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Agreed. One of the challenges is going to be to 'make it make sense'. It can't just be: "yay, we killed the mummy in his haunted, creepy tomb. Everybody level up, and oh, the wizard has all her spells back!"

I am leaning towards, the first eight hour rest after the milestone. You wake up, you have your health, and can memorize your spells and such.

If verisimilitude is a concern, you could always make the fiction work. One way might be like this:

In this world, when you take HP damage, it is always an injury. Because you're heroic, you can push on through all but the worst injuries (the ones that reduce you to 0 hp) without any real effect. However, your injuries do not heal on their own - a broken leg or a deep sword wound remain debilitating, even years later. All HP loss is permanent. Death always comes closer, and never goes back.

However, a way was discovered to keep Death at bay - to accomplish heroic deeds, and to keep your name sung about in myth and legend. When you accomplish heroic deeds, including slaying monsters, you earn life-force in the form of XP, which takes the physical form of a white nebulae that clings to legendary beings. When you've accumulated enough XP, it turns into a spark, which is the physical manifestation of your heroic deeds. When you have a spark, you heal your wounds and recover your energies (gaining the effects of a short rest), once. When you gather your third spark, you can join them together into a lifespark, which heals all your wounds and recovers all your energies, once. The XP you accumulate is sought by others in this world, as slaying you qualifies as a heroic deed for them. Additionally, as you accumulate XP, sparks become more difficult to generate - as a being who is already heroic, it is that much harder to generate a big enough epic deed to warrant a spark. This is reflected by the amount of XP required before you get a spark going up as you gain levels.

The constant need for XP is what drives great heroes and horrible villains, and what spurs many of them to target each other. Most normal people accept their inevitable demise with grace - the gods provide solace, and the soul awaits its release. But you are different - you seek this numinous stuff of legend. As long as you gather it, you can keep death at bay and face off against even legendary foes. But if you relent in your pursuit, and stop pursuing your legend, you will slowly gather injuries and die, just as everyone else in this world does.​

I mean, you're in a world with magical elves and gnomes running around, numinous life-force sought by heroes that enables you to live through grievous wounds can certainly be part of the package.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Interesting idea, Banana. (With fairly horrific moral implications BTW.) You'd need to extend that idea to also explain why Action Surges/spell memorization/etc. is also dependent on this "spark," but it could work.

My gut feel is that the world you've described is going to inevitably degenerate into a pack of megalomaniacs, like Epics in Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart. And, as a PC, just about the only morally-acceptable choice I can see making is to operate in an extremely paranoid fashion, relying purely on at-will abilities like cantrips and archery, so that I will neither be tempted nor have the need to seek out "spark" to rejuvenate myself.

But then, I tend towards that playstyle anyway. This would just crank it up by a factor of about 1000%.

 

[Syntallah]

Thanks for the feedback, all!

(Banana, I immediately went Highlander: "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!"...

 

[feartheminotaur]

Our DM also splits the two. Her rules are very similar - only without the triage part. She goes by the adventuring day XP table in the DMG, not the 24 hour clock for rests and her adventures are built around it. She doesn't like the "a short rest is a lunch break and a long rest is going to bed" concept - she adjudicates them as an actual activity (binding wounds, mending armor, praying, etc).

Healing she allows at any time. Potion, features, hit dice, whatever. Since hit points aren't just physical wounds, they can be 'pumped up' at any time. Full hit points and hit dice are restored with a full rest. S

It's worked out great and without any complaints. It's more interesting rather than our old "we plop down for 8 hours and hope you don't roll any wandering monsters"

 

[Blue]

You have a suitably warped and creative mind. I applaud you for marrying the fiction and the mechanics.

Of course, that made me jump the the economy of sparks. Babies aren't worth XP but children probably are since kobolds are. It doesn't come from the parents because they don't CR-down when they give birth. So it must also accumulate. That's good, explains while all ancient dragons are tough even if some are more bloodthirsty.

Wow, I could run with how this affects societies. Death penalties for many crimes, with the victim getting to do it and gain the spark.