D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room
Celebrim
Legend
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.
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Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ
Remember—that's 6-8 medium or hard encounters. You're supposed to vary the number depending on difficulty of the encounters. If you want increased difficulty in encounters, decrease the number of encounters, or vise versa (or some suitable mixture).
But, then again, you can just ignore the encounter guidelines altogether. The rules exist to serve the DM, not to be hidebound to.
jaelis
Oh this is where the title goes?
I agree with both points, but to the second: I don't even think they are meant as guidelines. Just advice about what you can expect.
Because yes, if they were guidelines, then it isn't obvious that the published adventures follow them at all. Which I guess is what CZ is annoyed about?
I believe it does - but it's a unique situation connected to whether the PCs might be caught up by the Drow? A very different mechanic from the one the Capn is concerned about
Jester David
Hero
Good question.
I don't think there's a way without some degree of work. As the DM you need to have things change because the players stopped to rest. The dungeon needs to shift. Monsters re-position, enemies rest and ready themselves, traps are reset or laid, and the like. All the reactive living dungeon advice people have said since the time Against the Giants.
Really, I think you also need some player buy-in. The players have to want to adventure for longer than two or three encounters. The players have to want to not nova and obliterate anything.
In my last couple sessions, my level 7 party had five combat encounters and a trap hazard before being hit by another combat and deciding to take a long rest.
During that time, they had two short rests. So an average of one short rest every 2.5 combat encounters.
I added a *slight* time crunch. In that after an uncertain number of hours, a large number of gnolls and slaves would arrive and interrupt the delving, potentially disrupting exploration of the dungeon and being a difficult threat to overcome.
But it was not insurmountable, as the party *could* have fallen back to rest and return at a later date, and had a way to retreat via a teleportation circle scroll.
I honestly try and avoid reading his stuff or giving him hits, so I'll be skipping that...
The rules are just the rules for telling stories. But they do require you to add a story. D&D doesn't function unless you bring your own narrative. It's not a board game where you can play it right out of the box.
Well... no. Why would they? That's up to the DM. If they force that, it'd be taking power out of the DM's hands.
If there was a hard attrition rule like "you can only take a long rest after seven encounters" things get super screwy. What if there's a month between encounters? What about boss fights? Do traps and environmental hazards count? How many encounters is a deadly boss fight?
OB1
Jedi Master
My pleasure. I give a lot of credit to Metal Gear Solid 5's structure for inspiring me to this a couple of years ago. If you have a chance to play it, I highly recommend doing so.
The group I DM for just finished an Exploration Phase and will start their Mission this weekend. They've did a pretty good job in the Exploration section, so they will be able to avoid a couple of tough encounters, giving them a chance at a big treasure hoard to the side of the main objective if they are willing to take some risk of failing the primary goal. Watching them weigh the risk and reward of those moments is one of my favorite things about being a DM.
The other big advantage of this structure is it tends to allow for mission failure without TPK. A few missions back, they had a run of bad luck and ended up abandoning their primary goal. On this weekend's mission, the story stakes are much higher, and I could see them risking TPK to complete their mission, but either way the decision is theirs. It's not just a single battle that goes bad, it the culmination of several sessions of play all leading up to a decision to open that last door or run away and regroup.
Bacon Bits
Hero
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.)
Uller
Adventurer
No, it doesn't mention rests specifically but it does mention that if the party spends too much time in one place the drow gain on the party. It also says if the party is travelling at a slow pace the drow gain on them. Certainly if the party is resting too much they will not get very far.
Your problem statement is lacking. Are you trying to say that "attrition" isn't working as you'd like? What do you want get get from "attrition"? Something about providing a different type of challenge for high-level PC's? Like, make it more like low-level PC's struggle to survive? Are you trying to beat the players? Make their lives more difficult, or somehow actually more fun? If there's an Elephant in the room, I'm not seeing it the same as you are, or at least you're not explaining the kind of elephant that you can see...
So I'm not sure I get it... as characters level up, they change, their role in the world changes, and their ability to survive changes. It goes from a struggle to live hour to hour and day to day, to magic being able to pretty much survive anything except maybe a TPK. That's just the way the whole game has pretty much always gone, it's built-in to the D&D game's core.
As a campaign progresses, the PC's ability to deal with the mundane increases, and so if you want them to continue to have fun overcoming challenges, IMO you need to stop sweating the mundane stuff that used to be an interesting challenge, and focus more on the stuff that's interesting for higher-level PC's. It's like overland travel - interesting and challenging (potentially deadly) at low levels, but most likely completely boring at higher levels, so just hand-wave it and move on to the next location where it can actually be interesting for players.
So I'm not sure I get it... as characters level up, they change, their role in the world changes, and their ability to survive changes. It goes from a struggle to live hour to hour and day to day, to magic being able to pretty much survive anything except maybe a TPK. That's just the way the whole game has pretty much always gone, it's built-in to the D&D game's core.
As a campaign progresses, the PC's ability to deal with the mundane increases, and so if you want them to continue to have fun overcoming challenges, IMO you need to stop sweating the mundane stuff that used to be an interesting challenge, and focus more on the stuff that's interesting for higher-level PC's. It's like overland travel - interesting and challenging (potentially deadly) at low levels, but most likely completely boring at higher levels, so just hand-wave it and move on to the next location where it can actually be interesting for players.
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