I'm mostly running pre-made adventures - Princes of the Apocalypse, to be specific. Random encounters aren't really a thing in most of the dungeons in that adventure except in particular places with lots of traffic. However, they are inhabited dungeons, so people in nearby areas may respond to sounds of battle and such - either by entering the original battle, or by preparing for intruders somewhere else. That's mostly something I base on my own judgment.
D&D 5E Short rest house rule
I'm mostly running pre-made adventures - Princes of the Apocalypse, to be specific. Random encounters aren't really a thing in most of the dungeons in that adventure except in particular places with lots of traffic. However, they are inhabited dungeons, so people in nearby areas may respond to sounds of battle and such - either by entering the original battle, or by preparing for intruders somewhere else. That's mostly something I base on my own judgment.
I apologize to [MENTION=907]Staffan[/MENTION] if I seem unfair.
I see the core of the proposal that each of the first three rests takes an (increasingly longer) different amount of time.
The DMG raises the possibility of 5-minute rests (DMG 267), and says that two a day is about right (DMG 84). The house rule helps to enforce that design constraint, and suggests that the players won't police themselves (i.e. that short-short rests will be abused).
If the OP doesn't like hour-rests, shorter ones are fine. What I do not see is what is gained by distinguishing between 5 minutes and 15 minutes for a short rest in most games.
hawkeyefan
Legend
[MENTION=907]Staffan[/MENTION] I don't see any problem with this house rule at all. If it makes your game work better, go for it.
My only question is about the difficulty with taking an hour long short rest to begin with. Why are these so hard to come by? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about limiting where and how often my PCs can rest, but I do generally allow them options. So I ask out of curiosity to better understand your need for a house rule.
My only question is about the difficulty with taking an hour long short rest to begin with. Why are these so hard to come by? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about limiting where and how often my PCs can rest, but I do generally allow them options. So I ask out of curiosity to better understand your need for a house rule.
Under the premise that short rests are so long, anytime you could rest for an hour you can often rest for 8 instead.
Satyrn
First Post
I find that calling a short rest a "lunch break" and dropping any sort of specific length of time from it provides the players a better understanding of what's really happening in the fiction, making them more likely to take one as appropriate.
Similarly, a long rest becomes a night's rest (or a day's rest if they're operating at night ), and they don't get the benefits of it until they've spent the day doing stuff.
Similarly, a long rest becomes a night's rest (or a day's rest if they're operating at night ), and they don't get the benefits of it until they've spent the day doing stuff.
Emerikol
Adventurer
Second Wind was the last straw and it's what drove me away from 5th Edition. Well it didn't drive me away because I was never there. I just didn't buy it.
I wish they'd tried a little harder to make a game that included all playstyles and viewpoints on hit points etc...
Not really seeking an argument. Just lamenting the fact that it would have been so easy to be inclusive and they decided not to be. My only recourse was to just not buy their game.
I wish they'd tried a little harder to make a game that included all playstyles and viewpoints on hit points etc...
Not really seeking an argument. Just lamenting the fact that it would have been so easy to be inclusive and they decided not to be. My only recourse was to just not buy their game.
cmad1977
Hero
This is what I do. A short rest is basically 'as long as it takes to regroup, up to an hour'.
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No worries.
Mostly to retain some form of verisimilitude - rests become harder to come by "naturally". I could instead go with some 13th age-esque "You get a short rest every X encounters, regardless of actual resting" or "You can get the benefit of a short rest in five minutes twice a day", but this way serves to have a rising time-cost for the short rest.
Like I said, I'm mostly running pre-made adventures, particularly (at least at the moment) Princes of the Apocalypse. The dungeons in that adventure are active locations - once you've entered the Sacred Stone Monastery and started fighting, for example, there's really no place there to hole up for a whole hour without having the rest of the dungeon come to you. But a five-minute break could be doable.
Um... thanks for the input, I guess. Are you sure it's in the right thread?
Tony Vargas
Legend
Pinning down a specific time for rest benefits constrains campaign pacing. 5e & 13A both went with imbalnced-resource class designs to better evoke the classic game. 13A used an arbitrarily recharge mechanic to limit the imbalances, so the GM could pace the game as he liked, and an abstract 'campaign loss' option to retain some player agency in spite of it. 5e, favoring DM Empowerment, left balance-through-pacing to the DM/player dynamic: if the DM forces the prescribed number of sufficiently taxing encounters between rests, as much mechanical balance as possible is retained, if the players take more rests than intended, they'll do much better against encounters, and trash class balance - classic feel all the way.
Sure. In other circumstances, 5 min rests might be easily taken after every encounter.
IMHO, a more general solution, in keeping with 5e's rulings-not-rules philosophy is to generally just rule on whether a rest is possible and how long it takes as you go. Don't get pinned down to specific times, and you can adapt 5e resource-management to your campaign rather than vice-versa.
