D&D 5E Should short rest be an hour long?

[Rya.Reisender]

Definitely depends on scenario, but you'd neither want short rests nor long rests to be "always available without punishment". And you always want short rests to be sometimes possible while long rests aren't (or are more risky). How you accomplish that is of course up to you (as DM).

 

[Sacrosanct]

"If you don't eat your veggies, you won't get a short rest!"
"But I'm not hungry! Isn't it good enough that I'm not doing anything!?"

 

[Blue]

The hour short rests have been working fine for my campaign. It's mostly been dungeon crawling with a bit of overland travel mixed in, with some side helping of urban intrigue.

Hour long short rests require planning and tactics ont he players' part. Sometimes they don't have time. Sometimes they risk it. Sometimes they decide it isn't worth the risk.

Seems to me shortening the rest period would remove a lot of tension form the game.

You know, I originally didn't like the hour-long short rest - seemed like it was a big toll on short-rest-recharge classes. But I am really liking the "can we get away with an hour?". As you say, it's a good source of tension.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There is no rule that says you must eat, drink, read, and/or bind wounds during a short rest, and no rule that says if you don't actually perform these tasks you don't get the benefit of a short rest.

That's bordering on the "Nothing says a dead character can't take actions!" level of missing the point.

A short rest isn't just some game construct. It's a game construct which represents a definitive in-game reality. It represents that hour where you're not doing anything strenuous. And when you're not doing anything strenuous for an hour, you have time to do other things, like eat and tend to your wounds and recover spells. But the hour, alone, isn't enough to actually do all of those things; you need to actually do those things, to gain the benefits of doing them.

If you have no food whatsoever, but you take a series of short and long rests, you still (eventually) die from starvation. If you need a medkit to spend hit dice (because you're using that option), and you're injured at the start of a period of downtime, you can't spend those hit dice if you don't have a medkit; you need to actually tend to your wounds in order to gain that benefit. If you're a wizard and you want to recover spells by studying your spellbook, you can't do that if you don't have access to your spellbook, even if you rest for an hour; you actually need the spellbook there, and you need to be studying from it, in order to use that ability.

Meanwhile, there is a rule, quoted above, which states that if you do nothing more strenuous than those tasks then you gain the benefit of a short rest.

All short rests are a period of time, of at least a certain length, where you don't do anything too strenuous. It does not follow that all such periods of time are necessarily short rests, in much the same way that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. The phrase you quoted describes a short rest, but is insufficient to define it.

Or if you wanted to be super pedantic about, which is kind of the opposite of what 5E is supposed to be about, then you can say that an hour which just passed uneventfully was a short rest... it was just a short rest where you didn't get to recover spells or spend Hit Dice or anything.

 

[77IM]

You can also go the other way: Keep the short rest at 1 hour, but increase the time of long rest to a week. Even increasing the long rest to a day would change the adventuring dynamic considerably.

 

[CapnZapp]

Of course, you also need to keep in mind that characters are aware of whatever in-game reality corresponds to a short rest or long rest. If it takes the monk 5 minutes to regain ki one day, but an hour to regain ki the next day, then there needs to be some in-game reason for why that happens.

No you don't and there doesn't

Trying to justify this in-game is exactly the trap that keeps you shackled to the commitment of a single duration.

If you instead consider a dungeon, or a jungle, or an ocean, or a big city, is like different genres (thriller, slasher movie, romance, action hero, gritty war movie etc), you see how different their pacing requirements are. A dungeon has lots of encounters crammed together in a very small space. A desert voyage doesn't really feel like one if you can't go days without seeing a single soul.

The reality is that the game is set up for X encounters per long rest. Whether you cram those encounters into half an hour or stretch them out over weeks doesn't matter.

What does matter is the fact that allowing players to suddenly go "let's call it a night and conjure up the old rope trick" completely and utterly wrecks these assumptions.

You can fix this by saying "the princess will be tossed in the cauldron of doom unless you hurry", but that sort of applied time pressure will get old eventually. This suggestion is for you that has reached that stage, where you have tired of the burden to once more come up with a reason why there's only three days left.

Not to mention completely incompatible stories - everything from the hexcrawl where "no time pressure" is the defining property of the campaign, to said desert voyage where the point is to go several days without a single encounter, and where 6-8 encounters in a row simply never would make sense.

If the rules by which your world works are silly or arbitrary, then you can expect the PCs to (quite logically) act in silly or arbitrary ways while following those rules. If it's only possibly to gain the benefit of a long rest while you're sleeping at an actual inn, then the party will figure out some way to drag an inn around with them.

That would be silly and arbitrary indeed

 

[The Crimson Binome]

No you don't and there doesn't

Trying to justify this in-game is exactly the trap that keeps you shackled to the commitment of a single duration.

Okay, so what is the cleric supposed to think, when their deity doesn't grant them spells on the second morning of a three-week trek? Or when a monk is completely unable to meditate and regain ki, even after trying for an hour? Are they supposed to just go with it, and trust that everything is going to work out? Or are they going to panic, and assume that something has gone incredibly wrong?

The reality is that the game is set up for X encounters per long rest. Whether you cram those encounters into half an hour or stretch them out over weeks doesn't matter.

It may not matter in terms of game balance, but it matters a lot to the people who actually live in that world.This is a role-playing game, after all. A world where wizards can cast spells every day is a different world from one where wizards need two weeks of downtime before they can cast again. And if the world shifts between those two at random, then the characters are going to be incredibly confused, while the players at the table stop caring about the game entirely since none of it makes any sense.

 

[CapnZapp]

Okay, so what is the cleric supposed to think, when their deity doesn't grant them spells on the second morning of a three-week trek? Or when a monk is completely unable to meditate and regain ki, even after trying for an hour? Are they supposed to just go with it, and trust that everything is going to work out? Or are they going to panic, and assume that something has gone incredibly wrong?

It may not matter in terms of game balance, but it matters a lot to the people who actually live in that world.This is a role-playing game, after all. A world where wizards can cast spells every day is a different world from one where wizards need two weeks of downtime before they can cast again. And if the world shifts between those two at random, then the characters are going to be incredibly confused, while the players at the table stop caring about the game entirely since none of it makes any sense.

It is okay for you to simply say you don't like it you know.

After all there's no arguing for taste...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It is okay for you to simply say you don't like it you know.

After all there's no arguing for taste...

It's not a matter of liking something or not. There are plenty of things that I don't like which still actually make sense within the game world. (You could play Highlander-style, where you need to decapitate foes in order to recover your powers, and that would still make sense for how the world works.)

A variable recharge rate isn't one of those things. The variable recharge rate doesn't make sense within the game world (at least, not without sufficient justification). Your proposed solution doesn't solve the problem at hand, because it goes beyond the constraints of playing an RPG, which are simply that game mechanics must reflect the in-game reality.

If I ask for consensus on what kind of pet I should get (given various parameters, like how much space I have and my tolerance for shedding), and your suggestion is a new computer, then that isn't helpful to the topic at hand (no matter how well it would solve the issues of space or shedding).

 

[Tony Vargas]

No you don't and there doesn't

Trying to justify this in-game is exactly the trap that keeps you shackled to the commitment of a single duration.

Feels like a variation of the 'Reality isn't Real' trope (sorry for even mentioning such a thing, but at least I didn't link to it!).

Game mechanics imperfectly (inevitably) model the imagined reality of the game world, mistaking those imperfections for that imagined reality is the same kind of 'trap' (as you rightly put it) as thinking the sound of real gunshots or the appearance of a real explosion seems unrealistic, because you're accustomed to the fake versions supplied by Hollywood.