D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[CapnZapp]

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.)

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts I can certainly relate to your experiences!

Zapp

PS. If there's an individual point you want my talkback on, feel free to point to it.

 

[CapnZapp]

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.

The problem is: how does the PCs get advance warning the Drow is closing in?

I mean, the hunting party only works as a rest deterrent if the PCs have useful info to act on. Otherwise we're just back to square one and the general vague threat that far too many scenarios rely on to motivate the heroes - not just to act, but to act now.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The secret that so few people want to acknowledge is that all these "the princess gets eaten in three days - hurry!" storylines are really completely arbitrary, and I dislike a game that forces me to come up with arbitrary thinly-disguised limitations.

How is this "arbitrary"? It's very much a real thing- the world moves on while you sleep. Slain guards get replaced. The target of a failed raid get reinforced or what lies within it moved...or both.

 

[CapnZapp]

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.

Let me take you through it one step at a time.

The fundamental balance of the game relies on adventurers pressing through 6-8 encounters before taking a long rest. This both includes the challenge level of individual encounters (that an encounter that by itself isn't dangerous could be, given that you must conserve resources for more encounters without rest), and the class balance between "longresters" and "shortresters".

But the game never actually makes sure the conditions for this balance are met.

Short of the beaten-to-death horse of story time restrictions, how does the game restrict mid- to high-level resting?

The answer is: not at all. In fact, it provides plenty of magical assistance in facilitating said rest.

This is a fundamental flaw to me.

 

[CapnZapp]

3. Time restraints are really the only way to establish the short rest to long rest ratio that's "intended". Random encounters as generally conceived don't really help since PC's can just go back to sleep.

Which gets us back to square one: if this is true, where are these time restraints in published adventures?

Conversely, could it be that the game is flawed for relying on time restraints so heavily? Wouldn't it better if the game offered alternative mechanisms to enforce the short to long ratio, at least as variants?

This is precisely what I want the thread to discuss, so thank you for your contribution.

 

[CapnZapp]

I've yet to see a published adventure that does this.

Thank you.

 

[CapnZapp]

I can't say I've ever run a game where monsters are aware of the party and just let them short rest in the dungeon. Some dungeons are conducive to that. Tomb of Horrors, for instance. But an active monster lair or base of some sort? No. The PCs are expected to leave to rest if the monsters are aware of them. For a short rest, the monsters reposition themselves for better defense and maybe send out patrols looking for the party. For a long rest, the monsters are reinforced...at least in general. Static worlds are for CRPGs.

At low levels everything works.

Then you get teleportation and pocket dimensional magicks.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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.

One of the unspoken consequences of things like random encounters and a "living world" is that players stop using resources as if it were all a game and more like their cha caters actually might in a given situation. It is a truism of life that I is unwise to commit all of your resources to one situation unless/untilit is clear you should, because you don't know what else you might have to deal with.

It's why military commanders keep units in reserve; why sports teams don't use their trick plays every game; why hospitals get built with excess bed capacity; why cars don't all have 50hp.

 

[kbrakke]

How do you make attrition work in a game where you don't fancy doing all the hard work, and instead rely on official published supplements?

My short answer, make time constraints, increase average encounter difficulty and reduce number of encounters.

How many encounters and short rests do you have per long rest? What does the party need to do when they feel they need to stop and rest? What's stopping them from doing this?

1/2 encounters per short rest, 2/3 short rest per long rest. If they want to long rest and we're not in a position where something is in danger they rest. In a game primarily driven by story I usually skip encounters where the party will certainly emerge victorious and have no penalties for resting afterwards. This usually means that overland travel in a game where the story is the forefront is glossed over. In princes specifically they ended up taming three wyvverns so I never did overland travel, but I probably would have stopped doing it around level 5 in either case.

Because I value my time and that of my players, and having played 5e for a while I am confident in my ability to make extra hard encounters that aren't just a game of rocket tag. This usually means doing things like having clusters of lower level monsters harass the players, and purposely having something they are strong against attack them in numbers.

Feel free to use existing modules as examples; anything from Rise of Tiamat through Storm King's Thunder and Tales of the Yawning Portal. Just keep in mind that I'm mainly thinking of the mid game and above. If you absolutely must have a specific level to discuss let's use level 10; that way every published campaign qualifies.

In princes I generally made everything connected, cultists would call for help and alert others quickly. This usually results in a pitched multi-part encounter. In effect, I gave them two battles in the course of one battle as well as make the prospect of resting difficult. For any given keep/temple/sub-temple the rooms are connected, enemies can talk and fetch reinforcements. The party fled about 25% of the time (fire temple, earth keep, fire keep), were close to death by the end of 33% (Air temple, Fire sub-temple, Water Keep, Earth sub-temple) and the others were either skipped because of story sequencing or easier due to good planning.

One tactic I used that you're going to despise because is, when they got about 4 rooms from the final portal where a prophet was located, they would hear the start of a ritual. Every time that happened they immediately grew tense and debated how much they could rest. I never placed a time limit on the ritual, simply said they heard it, my plan was to allow a short rest there, but they wanted to charge in usually, hence the near death experiences.

In my curse of strahd party they could basically rest wherever they wanted, but because there were so many players they were under leveled, and so many encounters ended up being individually deadly though, as a group they eventually over came them.

Really the plan is as follows: Figure out what parts of the adventure should be an adventuring day usually they are pretty obvious. Fighting through a temple in PotA should be an adventuring day. Going through the fane should be an adventuring day. Fighting through one of the giant strongholds should be an adventuring day, being trapped in castle ravenloft should be an adventuring day. If the party finds that they are overwhelmed and flee or otherwise safely take a rest, reset the adventuring day. Each adventure has random encounter tables, a bunch of populated rooms, and other tips on how to add enemies, so do that. They ones they killed are still dead, but that doesn't mean that nothing changed. I am a particular fan of starting an encounter, having the party think it's cake, and then have the second wave show up. Nothing makes them panic spend resources more then suddenly thinking it's a lot harder.

I am specifically asking about ways on how to make D&D and its rules work, given the assumptions that 5th edition suddenly places upon the game.

How did people solve this problem in other games? Having played most editions I don't know how the problem really differs between editions. In 3.5/Pathfinder we have wands of CLW and when the caster runs low on slots we long rest. In 4e players could just use their dailies and rest, and in basic we could leave a dungeon and spend a night camping to regain spell for the wizard, using any spare cure spells to get more than the 1hp/day.

Unless I'm playing wrong, nothing fundamentally changed about the nature of pacing between editions, other than in basic it takes a week or more to be "fully rested" and in 3.5 onwards it only took a night. I distinctly remember in 4e when I was running my players through some one shots I made, they always had some time pressure. In an investigation they quickly realized that their target would murder again and wanted to stop it, in another they realized there was a ritual they needed to stop. In pathfinder, in the adventure path as things got to higher levels there was an external threat they needed to prepare for. As a player in an adventure path for pathfinder right now every single book has some sort of threat with a timer that we are uncovering, we always feel like we are one step behind and blow through money and spells to get to the next encounter. Having a time limit has been the only way to ensure the players aren't at full strength for every encounter, outside of explicit effects that change how resting works. Even suggestions to change the resting rules don't change the fundamental problem. No matter how you measure and do resting, without some outside force the party can just rest until they are at full strength.

Also, I'm not clear on the end goal of this. My goal, when running a published adventure, is to make the players think they could die during plot relevant parts, but ultimately emerge victorious. If through good planning they come to a boss well rested, I will ensure the boss has minions with them(Usually more than written in the module) and try to focus fire on one player to give the impression that things are going poorly when that player goes down to single digit hit points. They usually turn the corner there and start using everything they have and emerge victorious with only the feeling of danger. If they got jacked up on the way there I will usually run it as written and try and spread the damage around so that every player feels individually in danger, rather than thinking one player is in danger. They will be tense and every turn doubles in time as they go over every option. (I live for the moments when they players start searching everything they have and making tenuous plans that are met with "I know it's risky, but it's the only chance we have") If that's the goal, just make the boss encounters harder by adding more minions if they rested, I would strongly suggest making it a two part fight with a wave to soften them before the boss arrives or is in a clear place to fight. The party resting won't change the level of danger for their boss battle, though it could make their approach easier.

If that's not the goal then I am at a loss. If you want to make overland travel a more stressful and danger filled endeavor then I can positively say that the current resting rates do not allow for this easily. If that is your goal then changing what constitutes a short and long rest are your best bets. I am running a hexcrawl style game and have changed the resting rules so that they only full heal on a long rest in a settlement, otherwise they have to spend hit dice. It's not working quite as well as I want because they have 3 druids and a paladin, but the idea is reasonable.

I agree that the current resting rates and stated encounters in the books if run simply won't always result in a party feeling in danger when they get to a boss fight. However I think the modifications you need to make are both supported by the book and not a drastic change that requires a large amount of effort. If the party is taking encounters one at a time in a dungeon, just have the creatures call for help. If they take a long rest before a boss roll two random encounters and add it to the boss fight as they call for reinforcements. Not even using the dreaded T-phrase, you can make multi part encounters to force a fight to be deadly without being rocket-tag esque right in the book.

 

[CapnZapp]

You've fairly clearly stated what you think is missing, but I'm curious what you'd actually like to see in the modules that isn't there now? Is it:

- guidelines within the modules for how many short and-or long rests the average party will require in order to succeed; and-or
- specific sites within the modules set aside as resting places; and-or
- guidelines within the encounters as to how to weaken/strengthen them based on the rested-up status of the party; and-or
- guidelines within the modules to the effect of "an average party will likely long-rest at this point"?

Thank you.

Well, assuming the adventure defaults to the DMG standard, #1 is not needed.

#3 is probably too fiddly, and isn't what any of us want, and would probably not fix the problem anyway, so no

#2 and #4: well, not exactly. The issue isn't to designate places, but how to enforce rests at the designated places and only there?

In other words, what modules need to do is something else than what you've come up with.

They need to acknowledge how easy it is to rest (remember, my focus here is not on low-level play). They need to provide solutions: what specific reasons are there that prevent or at least discourage the party from resting?

It would be excellent if the module shares "meta" information with the DM such as "this adventure site provides at least 5 encounters back-to-back".

But much more pressing: how do the module help the DM ensuring that these encounters really are back-to-back (in this example)?

If there's a story-based time constraint, fine.

If there's magical technobabble reasons why the party can't just teleport away to rest, fine.

If the module have decided you can't rest just anywhere - you must rest in specific areas, fine.

My beef is that NEITHER of these things are commonly present in official supplements.

At best, you get wandering monsters (see [MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION]'s analysis of PotA) which really becomes a very weak enforcement mechanism at mid- to high level play. (And unless they are truly challenging, they aren't really good at preventing rests even at low levels. Either you TPK or you can resume your rest)