Changing the Duration of a Rest

I'm A Banana · Mar 12, 2012

I had a brainplop today.

Maybe an "extended" rest is a full week, or a month, in your campaign, but only overnight in mine. Maybe a "short" rest is overnight, or a few days, in your campaign, but only five minutes in mine.

This means that folks who want a slower pace and more believable injury can easily have it simply by defining how long "extended" is, and folks who like the faster pace can have it simply by deciding that "extended" is relatively quicker. They can both play by the same rules (rate of ability and hp recharge), without necessarily having to have the same feel to their games, and those who want longer rests don't have to loose the elegant pacing that the 4e system allows for. They just mean different paces.

It seems pretty simple, straightforward, and potent to me. Want your injuries to be real and potent? They take days to recover. Rests are longer blocks of time in your game than they are in mine. Ultimately, they play out the same way: "You sleep overnight, and in the morning, you wake up feeling refreshed," or "You take a week to get your broken bones and scars tended to, and you replenish your supplies."

Whatcha think?

Sunseeker · Mar 12, 2012

There really is no need to define exactly how long the minimum "short" or "extended" rest is. Though I do think it's helpful to have an absolute minimum, to keep people from saying "well I took an extended rest" for 10 seconds.

We could say that an extended rest requires sleeping at least once.

Kingreaper · Mar 12, 2012

It's something that should have been done in 4e from the very beginning. Many people houseruled it that way, and it just plain works; but if there is a sidebar mentioning the possibility anywhere, I've missed it.

My preference is for the rules for extended rest, in the PHB, to simply say: "You rest for an extended period, after which you have returned to full strength. Your GM will determine how long this requires, and what happens if you get only a partial rest"

And then a page or so on extended rests in the DMG detailing options, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to treat partial rests (ie. if an extended rest is a week, and they end up having to move on after 4 days, how much have they gotten back?)

BobTheNob · Mar 12, 2012

This is the same question as "how long is a round?" (i.e. trying to define game time in real time).

The mechanism of short vs long rest is about its impact in terms of capacity to recover. You could say an extended rest is a minute or a year...its still an extended rest and does exactly the same thing.

If anything, the impact is purely down to the type of campaign the DM is running. Does it matter that its a night or a week? Is the extended time going to create consequences outside of what the party is doing? Given this would vary, I would, if anything, present a number of models and let the DM pick to match his campaign.

Quickleaf · Mar 12, 2012

Yeah, that works fine for home play when you're making up your own adventures.

However, with more delicate areas of design - adventure modules or organized play - that kind of flexibility is more challenging. Pre-written adventures usually need to make assumptions about how many challenges are appropriate per dungeon or per day.

I'm A Banana · Mar 12, 2012

Quickleaf said:
Pre-written adventures usually need to make assumptions about how many challenges are appropriate per dungeon or per day.

I think you might be able to say something like "The party can face X challenges before an extended rest, and Y challenges before a short rest," without necessarily saying how long each of those needs to be.

For 4e, those values would be effectively 3, and 1 (and those values can certainly change...and probably should; they seem kind of low?).

Then, an individual adventure might state what it is assuming as a baseline. A longer-paced adventure done in a more LotR mode might say that an extended rest is a month, and a short rest is a week, and a faster-paced dungeon-crawl style adventure might say that a short rest is "at the end of each encounter" and that an extended rest is one night.

Quickleaf · Mar 12, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
I think you might be able to say something like "The party can face X challenges before an extended rest, and Y challenges before a short rest," without necessarily saying how long each of those needs to be.

For 4e, those values would be effectively 3, and 1 (and those values can certainly change...and probably should; they seem kind of low?).

Then, an individual adventure might state what it is assuming as a baseline. A longer-paced adventure done in a more LotR mode might say that an extended rest is a month, and a short rest is a week, and a faster-paced dungeon-crawl style adventure might say that a short rest is "at the end of each encounter" and that an extended rest is one night.

So the spellcaster going into the longer-paced adventure would find that it took them a month to recover their spells instead of a night's rest?

If each adventure has to redefine what constitutes an extended or short rest, I think you get into a level of abstraction that disconnects from what's actually happening in the game.

I mean, there really is no logical explanation for why the PCs' wounds in their last adventure healed overnight but now they take several weeks to heal. The only possible explanation is: the story demands it!

That might be a fine solution for some, but it's a very directed design decision that won't appeal to others. And can they afford to put out adventures where they're losing sales because of it?

Maybe, I don't know. Food for thought.

I'm A Banana · Mar 12, 2012

Quickleaf said:
So the spellcaster going into the longer-paced adventure would find that it took them a month to recover their spells instead of a night's rest?
...
I mean, there really is no logical explanation for why the PCs' wounds in their last adventure healed overnight but now they take several weeks to heal. The only possible explanation is: the story demands it!

That's a pretty good point. The lack of consistency over multiple adventures might be a bit of an issue, though it's one that I think can be solved fairly efficiently in practice (DMs can easily change the pacing, and two tournament or Encounters-style public adventures need not necessarily have consistency between them).

It is a monkey wrench in the elegance of it though, that's for sure. Hm.

Kingreaper · Mar 12, 2012

Quickleaf said:
So the spellcaster going into the longer-paced adventure would find that it took them a month to recover their spells instead of a night's rest?

If each adventure has to redefine what constitutes an extended or short rest, I think you get into a level of abstraction that disconnects from what's actually happening in the game.

In my experience, people seem to either use a single adventure path (at which point the Extended Rest time is constant throughout) or they actually put in some amount of effort to customising the adventure to fit their campaign (at which point they can speed up, or slow down, the pace for many adventures; or justify it with a specific magic effect)

It would be a problem for people who use lots of unconnected adventures, with different settings and tones, without customising them, but whether that's an issue worth worrying about depends how common such people are.

I'm assuming that all Forgotten Realms adventures would use one pace, all Dungeon Crawler adventures would use the same pace, etc.

D'karr · Mar 12, 2012

I have implemented an alternate "wounding" system that is total simplicity. Every time a character fails a death save they incur a wound. The wound prevents a healing surge from being recovered during an extended rest.

So now I've been toying with the idea of refreshing certain resources (daily powers and healing surges) at milestones, and milestones occur when the DM decides they are appropriate. In this fashion I've been able to extend the adventuring day almost indefinitely and still keep wounds if I want to.

To date it has worked well. I'm still tweaking.

Changing the Duration of a Rest

I'm A Banana

Potassium-Rich

Sunseeker

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Kingreaper

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BobTheNob

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Quickleaf

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I'm A Banana

Potassium-Rich

Quickleaf

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I'm A Banana

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Kingreaper

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D'karr

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