D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Lanefan]

Off-the-wall idea: what happens if one does the following:

1. shift some of the short-rest benefits to either become long-rest benefits or go away entirely (thus a short rest doesn't do much at all except maybe get you back a few h.p.)
2. make long rests much easier to interrupt
3. enforce that during a long rest any interruption means you have to start over

That said, I've a question for [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] :

You've fairly clearly stated what you think is missing, but I'm curious what you'd actually like to see in the modules that isn't there now? Is it:

- guidelines within the modules for how many short and-or long rests the average party will require in order to succeed; and-or
- specific sites within the modules set aside as resting places; and-or
- guidelines within the encounters as to how to weaken/strengthen them based on the rested-up status of the party; and-or
- guidelines within the modules to the effect of "an average party will likely long-rest at this point"?

The nearest corollary I've ever seen in any module to this is in some adventures both from PF and 4e where within the module are (strong) suggestions indicating at what point(s) the party will level up. These annoy me to no end as they assume a) I'm running it as written, and b) I'm using anything close to a standard advancement rate.

How many encounters is a deadly boss fight?

Gimli to Legolas: "That still only counts as one!"

Lan-"none shall rest until the dead are made dead"-efan

 

[Henry]

Uh, you don't. It's like asking how we can make my cat run on diesel.

...with a cat-alytic converter, of course. Otherwise he won't be eco-fur-iendly.

 

[ljblakey]

There is also the gritty realism option

Sent from my LG-H812 using EN World mobile app

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Uh, you don't. It's like asking how we can make my cat run on diesel.

Cats run on diesel all the time!

 

[Harzel]

It's interesting @CaptZapp chose to post now with a reference to that Angry article, since Angry just posted this http://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/ a few days ago, which seems to reflect a slightly different attitude.

 

[Yunru]

Yes, I've also noticed the same problem. And I've also always gotten a condescending, "Just add time constraints," response over and over and over again. It's particularly infuriating when you tell people you're planning on running a player-directed sandbox game and the response is, "Well sandbox games can have time constraints, too." No, you twit. We want to discourage certain resting patterns without railroading the players. This is like saying, "Downtime activities are broken, so I never give the players any downtime."







The problem as we identified it wasn't one of lack of attrition. It was just one of combat encounter difficulty. That's really the same thing, just taken from a different point of view. What have we done to combat the issue? Cranked the average combat encounter difficulty to Hard, Deadly or higher as levels increase. Instead of slowly cutting the PCs down with a thousand cuts every day, you chop them down very quickly by making combat encounters consume more resources. The PCs either rest or die, and in some cases you have to pick your battles very carefully. To us, that's very much like 1e AD&D, where combat was what everybody was trying to avoid. Combat will just get you killed!

Even then, the pattern that we've experienced in game is this:

* Below level 5, the PCs short rest after 1-2 combats. There are between 1 and 4 encounters per long rest.

* Beginning about level 5, the PCs short rest roughly once every two long rests. That is, once every other day. As the game progresses, the number of long rests between each short rest gets longer and longer. By the time we were level 15, I think we'd had 2 short rests since level 10. There are between 1 and 3 encounters per long rest.

Once the players get enough survivability, they never short rest. So we've got 6-8 PCs and most encounters are hard, deadly, or higher. Inevitably, someone spends a lot of resources and wants to long rest. That's why we have between 1 and 3 encounters per day. The only problem this causes is that short rest classes get shafted because they don't get to short rest. Basically, the rule is: Don't play Warlock, Fighter, or Monk and expect to get your powers back during the day. Either people in the party will consume enough long rest resources to prompt a long rest, or they don't and not enough PCs will want (or need) to stop. The short rest players just suck it up.

What stops the party from resting? Not much. Threat of ambush is really all there is, but leomund's tiny hut and rope trick circumvent much of that. Unless the PCs try to do something genuinely stupid like set up camp inside the enemy stronghold, they can find a pretty safe spot to steal a rest (long or short). We never kick in the door of a keep, kill everybody on the ground floor, and then ignore the rest of the levels while we take a short rest. That just never happens. If we need to rest that badly, we withdraw and regroup. Mainly it's just that short rests don't do enough to bother with. When you're level 8 with 14 Con, you've got about 60 hp max. With 10 out of 60hp you can freely recover only 4d8+8 (26) with Hit Dice over a short rest -- the rest of your Hit Dice don't come back for 2 days. [This has made me wonder multiple times if it would encourage more short rests if long rests just recovered all Hit Dice.] That gets you to 36 out of 60, which is still not good. Even then, half the party will often only have spent resources that are long rest refresh anyways.

This has led to my conclusion that short rests as a mechanic and as they exist in the game, don't work well. Maybe the designers intended which type of rest to be made by the party to be an "interesting choice," but they're really not. Most of the time, it's obvious that you need to long rest, and the other times, you just get the party disagreeing because one person needs a long rest, one needs just a short, and one is still undamaged with nothing lost. Adding time pressures doesn't really make for an interesting choice, either; it just makes not short resting the only choice. Including mechanics that encourage party disagreement is not interesting, and when you have one class with almost all their mechanics set to short rest, and another with all their almost mechanics set to long rest, the outcome should be pretty obvious. Short rests are not rewarding enough to all classes, or long rests aren't difficult enough to accomplish, for short rests to be truly worthwhile. [Again, this is in the context of significantly higher encounter difficulty.]

I know some people have switched to long rests requiring comfortable accommodations (shelter, warmth or fire, proper beds, good food, a bath, etc.) such that long resting basically requires a town or roadside inn to accomplish and everything you can do with a tent or in a dungeon is going to be a short rest. That does work, but it makes short rest classes a lot more compelling than long rest ones, and also might really limit your options. I can't imagine playing Out of the Abyss that way, for example. It's a lot more grim 'n gritty play style, though, and I am considering it for an open wilderness sandbox campaign.

I know other people have converted all short rest abilities to long rest by giving them 2x or 3x as many uses as a long rest ability. Others have gone the other way, and wanted to eliminate long rest and make all spellcasters built on the Warlock class model. (I think that would be a terrible disservice, because the Warlock class model is very broad but also very, very shallow. I also think the game would stop feeling like D&D.)

Sounds to me like your not doing it right

There are three pillars in DnD and this seems to be focusing on one, oh and ignoring the time restraints.

If the party rests in town, the travel time imposes a time restraint on how long they can explore. And if they leave for too long, any remaining mobs are going to be on a higher alert when the heroes return.

Even with Leomund's Neon We're Here Sign, eight hours is more than enough for a dungeon, complex or camp to go on full alert and be prepared for next time.

TL;DT: You're having problems with long rests because you're not enforcing the consequences.

 

[Flamestrike]

Feel free to use existing modules as examples; anything from Rise of Tiamat through Storm King's Thunder and Tales of the Yawning Portal. Just keep in mind that I'm mainly thinking of the mid game and above. If you absolutely must have a specific level to discuss let's use level 10; that way every published campaign qualifies.

All of which have time constraints ranging from broad: 'Stop the cult before the ritual is complete and Tiamat wins' down to 'youre stuck in a castle overnight and have to recon the mill/ rescue the prisoners/ capture a dragonclaw by dawn.'

You just ignore them because your prefer to sook about the game.

The only constraint I'm asking of you is that you can't dismiss or "solve" the issue by the flippant "just add time constraints to the adventure" thing. Trust me, I've been given that piece of useless advice enough times already.

And therein lies your problem. You refuse to set any time constraints on any quests you hand out to your players, resulting in a boring quest that lacks any tension or narrative drive. The players are free to ignore the quest because there are no consequences for failure or success. Nothing changes if they succeed or fail, and they are free to do something else and then come back to the boring quest you've laid in front of them. They can leave a place where they've murdered dozens of people, return weeks later and nothing has changed.

When you sit down to design your adventures/ hooks/ quests, start with: PCs must [do X] before [time Y] or else [bad thing Z] happens.' From there, design your individual encounters, and the consequences for failure.

If you were writing a book with no temporal constraints or consequences for failure by the protagonists it would be as boring as bat poo. If your antagonist is (trying to destroy the world, sacrificing a maiden, gathering an army, overthrowing the king) he's doing it by (time X). Your players/ protagonists should have to do (task A) by (time X) or else (bad thing Z) happens.

Basically mate, you're complaining about a huge flaw in your own DMing and not a flaw with the game.

You also consistently refuse to listen to advice given to you on how to be a better DM because (for some reason that escapes me) you would rather complain endlessly and hand-wring on the internet.

Its super weird.

 

[Corwin]

I want to add that it's really hour long short rests that don't work well in the game. If it was 5-15 minute short rests I think you would get a lot more mileage out of them as there would be a lot more narrative spaces where it would make sense to take them that it doesn't make sense to take an hour rest.

I'm not disagreeing that your narrative preferences inform your opinion. I even get where you are coming from. I just wanted to point out that, millions of people around the world today take a one-hour lunch brake during their work day. And so many of them do far less strenuous, tense, labor-intensive, dangerous work as an adventurer in the average D&D game.

 

[The Old Crow]

I haven't noticed problems or issues. It matters, of course, what classes you have. The original party was Rogue, Paladin, Ranger x2, Sorcerer, Druid. Not much short resting there. The Rogue changed to Monk and one of the Rangers changed to a Fighter so I eventually got more short rest mechanics to deal with.

I have a much smaller party, with a Druid, Paladin, and Bard/barian at the moment. It would take my group awhile to get the breadth of playtesting you have, so I really appreciate your report.

One benefit of eliminating short rest class features and making short rests only 5-15 minutes (for expending HD to regain HP) is that it's easier to design encounters. I don't have to care if/when players can rest an hour to regain resources. I can make a single encounter in a day harder and the short rest folks can still shine. The frontline fighter can be an Action Hero heroic chewing through two Action Surges or two Second Winds.

Adventuring Day design (or balance) for encounters devolves to determining whether the encounters are going to be in quick sequence/waves or spaced out (which is the usual). If the PCs can lightly search a room, loot bodies, and gather their stuff up they can rest. This is far easier than determining whether they can rest a full hour.

It's easy to switch from "Dungeon Time" to "Wilderness Time" with no short rests. "Dungeon Time" is where the PCs can go to a dungeon and get back to relative safety and comfort. That equals eight hours of rest for one long rest. "Wilderness Time" is where encounters might be spread out while the PCs trek cross country. You can extend a long rest to four days or a full week (Specifically 4 or 7 eight-hour rests). Whatever.

Yes, exactly. I want to design what makes sense, and have the PCs all have the option to contribute, whether it is one big fight, waves, a series of isolated encounters, or the party deciding they need to press on.

The game assumes 2 short rests per day and, therefore, a maximum of 3x short rest abilities per day. I only gave them 2x uses of short rest mechanics as I think in reality it's unlikely all PCs would be at zero short rest abilities when they actually took a short rest. In addition, converting short rest abilities to 2x per long rest adds a great deal of flexibility and encourages more use of the abilities as the PC knows precisely how many uses they have.

Good points. I had been eyeballing x3 per day, and it just looked like too many, but I haven't wanted to shortchange short rest classes. That they wouldn't necessarily be running on empty when a short rest happens makes sense, though, so x2 does look to be a fair amount.

With everyone operating on a long rest, the only debate is about HP, and since rests are 5-15 minutes it's trivial. Basically, if you short rest for HP after an encounter you don't get to loot, search, cast detection spells (barring the party spending a seriously long time doing the aforementioned).

For using healing Hit Dice, I don't mind a very short rest of 5 to 15 minutes.

I am one of those people who argued for longer short rests during the playtest, because the 5 minutes seemed trivial. I wasn't picturing at that point though that the classes would have different resting requirements. So now I just want to get everyone on the same rest cycle, and since healing Hit Dice are a finite resource, having them used during a "trivial" rest time is not an issue for me.

 

[CapnZapp]

Sorry, I'm not going to be much help - I never used published adventures in my home game, and I lately I avoid DM'ing for Adventure League because I don't like using their published modules.

That's fine. Thank you for being one of few people that actually realizes when to step down from a discussion.