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Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7120003" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Well, first a few clarifications:</p><p></p><p>1) I can answer any house rule question for 1e or 3e, but I'm not a 5e rules expert. I don't want to give you advice about house ruling 5e because contrary to what some people may tell you, creating good house rules is not easy. More people do it wrong than do it right, and I don't want to guess at what would work.</p><p>2) I think you are not being fair to the 5e design team when you say that they should call out that they aren't back compatible with 3e. No edition is fully compatible with any other edition. 3e wasn't fully back compatible with 1e/2e published modules despite many attempts to make 3e monsters, spells, and classes very familiar to anyone used to 1e. Of course 5e isn't perfectly back compatible with 1e content or even necessarily 1e play styles. If you want it to be, you'll have to do a lot of house ruling to make 5e have a more old school flair.</p><p>3) "Was this playtested? That is, did the playtest provide feedback on the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest adventuring day assumption?" I presume so, but during the 5e playtest lots of rules are in flux. One thing you have to understand is fundamentally you are talking about a social contract issue, and not a rules issue. How the PC's approach the game and what tactics that they use have more to do with how they think about the game than the rules of the game. Your question is fundamentally less about the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest adventuring day assumption, than it is what to do when the PC's refuse to buy into that assumption and conform their expectations and behavior to it. Was the game playtested with players that took a short rest after every encounter? Probably not, or if it was, that was treated as an aberrant social contract and not something so serious that it required mechanics addressing it.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I can help you with technique for any edition. Fundamentally, in any edition, the only sure way to make sure that players can't rest at will is have a living world or else fake one - probably a combination of both. That isn't too hard but it's not no work at all. </p><p></p><p>First, you must have a BBEG that is active. In 'Strahd/Ravenloft', you have just such an active BBEG who will either hunt you down or send minions to hunt you down. In the 'Underdark' 5e mega-adventure, the drow pursuers are supposed to serve this purpose, but instead they actually are faking it and using them mainly as a sort of rail-roadly antagonist in a set piece engagement. Faking it works, as long as the players don't realize its being faked, but it's not as satisfying for anyone as real consequences. Whatever adventure you are running, you should try to make the bad guys intelligent and reactive according to whatever resources that they have. That means that if the bad guys are goblins, they react in some fashion - they get 1d6 reinforcements per day, they set traps outside of wherever the PC's hole up, or try to wall them in with masonry or collapse passages, and set ambushes. Worse come to worse, a lair of goblins might decide to just abandon the lair and take the treasure with them (perhaps to go beg vassalage/servitude of a lair of Bugbears), forcing the PC's to react. Every bad guy with a brain should be reactive.</p><p></p><p>Secondly, always fake it as well. Prepare and use random encounters to put pressure on the PC's whenever they waste time being overly cautious. Remember that random encounters usually have minimal treasure. They are supposed to attrite the party not bloat them with resources.</p><p></p><p>This isn't 'hard work'. It involves maybe a page of work to create a random encounter, and some time thinking about how bad guys might react and leverage or increase resources. </p><p></p><p>You give me your specific problems, and I'll try to show how to resolve them with technique. For 5e house rules, you'll need someone that has playtested their rule changes in 5e for a year or more and has good rulesmithing skills.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7120003, member: 4937"] Well, first a few clarifications: 1) I can answer any house rule question for 1e or 3e, but I'm not a 5e rules expert. I don't want to give you advice about house ruling 5e because contrary to what some people may tell you, creating good house rules is not easy. More people do it wrong than do it right, and I don't want to guess at what would work. 2) I think you are not being fair to the 5e design team when you say that they should call out that they aren't back compatible with 3e. No edition is fully compatible with any other edition. 3e wasn't fully back compatible with 1e/2e published modules despite many attempts to make 3e monsters, spells, and classes very familiar to anyone used to 1e. Of course 5e isn't perfectly back compatible with 1e content or even necessarily 1e play styles. If you want it to be, you'll have to do a lot of house ruling to make 5e have a more old school flair. 3) "Was this playtested? That is, did the playtest provide feedback on the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest adventuring day assumption?" I presume so, but during the 5e playtest lots of rules are in flux. One thing you have to understand is fundamentally you are talking about a social contract issue, and not a rules issue. How the PC's approach the game and what tactics that they use have more to do with how they think about the game than the rules of the game. Your question is fundamentally less about the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest adventuring day assumption, than it is what to do when the PC's refuse to buy into that assumption and conform their expectations and behavior to it. Was the game playtested with players that took a short rest after every encounter? Probably not, or if it was, that was treated as an aberrant social contract and not something so serious that it required mechanics addressing it. I can help you with technique for any edition. Fundamentally, in any edition, the only sure way to make sure that players can't rest at will is have a living world or else fake one - probably a combination of both. That isn't too hard but it's not no work at all. First, you must have a BBEG that is active. In 'Strahd/Ravenloft', you have just such an active BBEG who will either hunt you down or send minions to hunt you down. In the 'Underdark' 5e mega-adventure, the drow pursuers are supposed to serve this purpose, but instead they actually are faking it and using them mainly as a sort of rail-roadly antagonist in a set piece engagement. Faking it works, as long as the players don't realize its being faked, but it's not as satisfying for anyone as real consequences. Whatever adventure you are running, you should try to make the bad guys intelligent and reactive according to whatever resources that they have. That means that if the bad guys are goblins, they react in some fashion - they get 1d6 reinforcements per day, they set traps outside of wherever the PC's hole up, or try to wall them in with masonry or collapse passages, and set ambushes. Worse come to worse, a lair of goblins might decide to just abandon the lair and take the treasure with them (perhaps to go beg vassalage/servitude of a lair of Bugbears), forcing the PC's to react. Every bad guy with a brain should be reactive. Secondly, always fake it as well. Prepare and use random encounters to put pressure on the PC's whenever they waste time being overly cautious. Remember that random encounters usually have minimal treasure. They are supposed to attrite the party not bloat them with resources. This isn't 'hard work'. It involves maybe a page of work to create a random encounter, and some time thinking about how bad guys might react and leverage or increase resources. You give me your specific problems, and I'll try to show how to resolve them with technique. For 5e house rules, you'll need someone that has playtested their rule changes in 5e for a year or more and has good rulesmithing skills. [/QUOTE]
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