I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
4e experience here: there's little real effect on the math.
I mean, it's basically re-fluffing. "You sleep for 8 hours" and "You spend a week at the elven lord's castle" paint a different picture, but they don't tweak the math in the slightest.
That painted picture tweaks the psychology, but not the math. So, like, it feels like a bigger risk to camp out for a week in the woods, and of course certain character archetypes (the foppish noble!) would be loathe to do that, but the truth is that this is functionally the same as a break of any arbitrary length (five minutes, one night, an hour, ten minutes, three months, a year, a generation, 30 seconds) in that all it means is that the DM has decided not to interrupt you and let you recharge your characters entirely.
Novas become less appealing. Injury becomes realistic. It feels like there's more attrition (though there's not) because there's bigger breaks. Two encounters in a day feels like a Big Deal (and in 4e, it would be, but in 5e maybe less so...).
You can add on top of this various rules (like training, or hex-clearing, or random encounters, or random weather tables, or injury mechanics, or active adversaries, or downtime rules) which supplement this. In fact, because 5e downtime is already in chunks of 10 days, I'd probably use that as my long rest duration for 5e, and have a "you can do a downtime thing while you rest" thing going on.
There's good reasons they went shorter, of course. D&D has always recharged all of your magic with a night's rest, and the game presumes site-based adventuring as prominent (overland encounters can be scenery, but they're little more than that, even in early e's). These are good assumptions for a basic D&D experience, undoubtedly.
I'm not DMing 5e yet (might start with the DMG this holiday season!), but I loved this in 4e, and will likely continue to do this in my games. I don't see it working dramatically differently. It doesn't affect the maths, just the fluff, which causes the players to behave differently, but in a really interesting and rewarding way. They behave less like bloodthirsty murderhobos on a rocketship to level 20 and start visiting towns, dealing with innkeepers, paying attention to safe and unsafe locations, etc.
It's quite satisfying!
I mean, it's basically re-fluffing. "You sleep for 8 hours" and "You spend a week at the elven lord's castle" paint a different picture, but they don't tweak the math in the slightest.
That painted picture tweaks the psychology, but not the math. So, like, it feels like a bigger risk to camp out for a week in the woods, and of course certain character archetypes (the foppish noble!) would be loathe to do that, but the truth is that this is functionally the same as a break of any arbitrary length (five minutes, one night, an hour, ten minutes, three months, a year, a generation, 30 seconds) in that all it means is that the DM has decided not to interrupt you and let you recharge your characters entirely.
Novas become less appealing. Injury becomes realistic. It feels like there's more attrition (though there's not) because there's bigger breaks. Two encounters in a day feels like a Big Deal (and in 4e, it would be, but in 5e maybe less so...).
You can add on top of this various rules (like training, or hex-clearing, or random encounters, or random weather tables, or injury mechanics, or active adversaries, or downtime rules) which supplement this. In fact, because 5e downtime is already in chunks of 10 days, I'd probably use that as my long rest duration for 5e, and have a "you can do a downtime thing while you rest" thing going on.
There's good reasons they went shorter, of course. D&D has always recharged all of your magic with a night's rest, and the game presumes site-based adventuring as prominent (overland encounters can be scenery, but they're little more than that, even in early e's). These are good assumptions for a basic D&D experience, undoubtedly.
I'm not DMing 5e yet (might start with the DMG this holiday season!), but I loved this in 4e, and will likely continue to do this in my games. I don't see it working dramatically differently. It doesn't affect the maths, just the fluff, which causes the players to behave differently, but in a really interesting and rewarding way. They behave less like bloodthirsty murderhobos on a rocketship to level 20 and start visiting towns, dealing with innkeepers, paying attention to safe and unsafe locations, etc.
It's quite satisfying!
