D&D 5E Long or short rests? What is better?

[The Crimson Binome]

That highly depends on the DM and would probably lead to players just saying that they stop somewhere for X time till they recharge Y ability (exactly the same as a rest sistem).

The point isn't to end the concept of resting, although a convenient side-effect is that you get the benefit of resting even if you don't declare it ahead of time. The point is to normalize the resource-recovery rate between short-rest and long-rest classes.

If you decide to rest for two hours, so that the monk can get a quarter of their ki back, then the wizard would also recover a twelfth of their spell points back. Since long-rest classes nominally have three times the resources of a short-rest class, it means that everyone can keep going at the same pace instead of one character setting the pace for everyone.

 

[S'mon]

Definitely prefer balancing around long rests so the game is balanced with 1 fight in a day, week or month. Feels much more lifelike. I like the realistic sense of desperation of a group forced to fight multiple times in 1 day.

That said, I find 4e's system works well, too, whereas 3e works poorly since it's all-long-rest but seems balanced around 4 fights a day. I want it balanced around 1 fight in a day, but able to handle multiple fights.

 

[DaviMMS]

Definitely prefer balancing around long rests so the game is balanced with 1 fight in a day, week or month. Feels much more lifelike. I like the realistic sense of desperation of a group forced to fight multiple times in 1 day.

That said, I find 4e's system works well, too, whereas 3e works poorly since it's all-long-rest but seems balanced around 4 fights a day. I want it balanced around 1 fight in a day, but able to handle multiple fights.

DnD 5e is definitively not balanced for 1 fight per long rest. If you like mainly doing 1 or 2 fights per day, a long rest system is exactly the opposite of what I would want (at least in the way it is implemented currently). You could certainly balance a game around only 1 fight per long rest, but I think that would highly displease a good percentage of the player base.

The game should be able to accommodate easily the days with 1 fight and the days with 8 fights, and a short rest system does that much better IMO. If you try to make a typical dungeon run in a game balanced around 1 fight per long rest the PCs would probably have to stop and fall back to sleep around the 2nd or 3rd room of the dungeon so they don’t die, leading to the infamous 5-minute work day. 1 fight per day is not what I would call a “DnD Standard Experience”, although it is quite common.

And if you balance it around more fights (like the current 6-8 encounters per long rest), your 1 fight days will probably become too easy unless you start to put fights that should be above the characters pay grade, but become possible because the PCs can just go nova every round. It leads to no resource management. Just use your most powerful option every round or you’re going to die.

I think short rest balanced game does it better because you can just make your 1 fight every day without worrying about the players going nova every turn, and when you want to put more fights without rests, just put some kind of time restraint or interrupt it while your players are trying to rest.

 

[Uller]

I think the answers in this thread prove that balancing the game around short rests or long rests is an impossible taks for the designers.

They have givenn us a variety of tools to sipport various styles of play. As DMs it is our job to provide a variety of challenges for our players to overcome and as players it is our job to accept that sometimes challenges will be presented that our own character will not be ideally suited to overcome. Sometimes even the whole party won't have the ideal tools for the job. Sometimes the paladin/light cleric is fighting radiant vulnerable undead in melee. Sometimes he is fighting a dragon that is flying and has to resort to his very suboptimal ranged attack. So what?

 

[Corwin]

So, for me, in a talk about mechanics, combat balance is more relevant than spotlight balance (that do not depend so much on the mechanics).

That's fine. But how do you define "combat balance"? There are so many moving parts. So many unknowable variables. So many aspects of play that change, or have differing degrees of weight, based on how the game is being played. And the preferences of those playing it. That's why, to me at least, spotlight matters more. Because its the only method that can be applied across all tables and be effective. The rule books can never achieve such a claim.

Besides, how can you even properly weigh "combat balance" when you have to then step back and consider it as being only one of three important pillars of play? Are we talking about making sure all characters have equal "combat balance" as an isolated aspect of the overall play experience? Because that's even less useful in the grand scheme of things.

It is my personal opinion that all this hand-wringing, and worrying about this unicorn that is "true balance", stems from people used to cutting their teeth on the last couple editions of the game. Or certain other systems out there. Where the system is very tightly, mathematically, fine-tuned. Such that constant eyes need to be kept on how the game is being played, or balance can skew and impact playability. I know, cuz I've been there, played those. But good news! 5e isn't those systems/editions. It doesn't hinge on that kind of swinginess, that kind of hyper-calculated math. Its far more forgiving. Far more muted. I've found it far more capable of handling standard deviation. You can play a beastmaster ranger alongside a paladin and a wizard. And they should all have plenty of chances to meaningful contribute to the story. Both in and out of combat. Because 5e is built that way.

 

[CydKnight]

The rest issue is effected by the type of campaign, the DM's style, the type of character, and the play style of the player. My answer could change from campaign-to-campaign or even session-to-session. With that said, this only effects my personal preference. "Balance" is one of those personal preferences and isn't always a requirement for me depending on what it is you feel needs balancing. So I am not so sure the issue is so much that people have issues with long/short rests as they do with "Balance" however they happen to define it.

 

[S'mon]

DnD 5e is definitively not balanced for 1 fight per long rest. If you like mainly doing 1 or 2 fights per day, a long rest system is exactly the opposite of what I would want (at least in the way it is implemented currently). You could certainly balance a game around only 1 fight per long rest, but I think that would highly displease a good percentage of the player base.

The game should be able to accommodate easily the days with 1 fight and the days with 8 fights, and a short rest system does that much better IMO. If you try to make a typical dungeon run in a game balanced around 1 fight per long rest the PCs would probably have to stop and fall back to sleep around the 2nd or 3rd room of the dungeon so they don’t die, leading to the infamous 5-minute work day. 1 fight per day is not what I would call a “DnD Standard Experience”, although it is quite common.

And if you balance it around more fights (like the current 6-8 encounters per long rest), your 1 fight days will probably become too easy unless you start to put fights that should be above the characters pay grade, but become possible because the PCs can just go nova every round. It leads to no resource management. Just use your most powerful option every round or you’re going to die.

I think short rest balanced game does it better because you can just make your 1 fight every day without worrying about the players going nova every turn, and when you want to put more fights without rests, just put some kind of time restraint or interrupt it while your players are trying to rest.

I prefer to see Nova powers turned down a bit, something 5e basically does already - ime Nova was only ever a problem in 3e, that system lacking the balance of prior and subsequent editions.

That said, I basically think Vancian casting got it right.

 

[mellored]

A home rule I ran with for a while is that 2/day, you can use an action to take a short rest, even spending hit dice in the middle of combat. It allowed both big fights, and a string of short fights, without having to mess with anything else.

 

[Raith5]

I would like to see what 5e looks like with no long rests. I have never really understood the whole vancian thing that you run out of magical power or divine power.

As a player i do feel like the long rests are just so good that they intrude on the way the players think about resources and thus the slow and distort pacing of the game. .

 

[Tony Vargas]

So, I would like to ask you guys, how would you prefer the game to be balanced? Around Short rests? Around Long rests? Or you like different classes recharge their resources on different types of rests?

Limited-use mechanics are arbitrary, clunky, and tend to hurt balance no matter how carefully designed or implemented. It's really kinda the point: if you have a limited-use ability, when you use it, you're more powerful than when you don't. It allows the game to model the way, in fiction, a hero can be handily defeated in one scene, then turn around and take out the same foe dramatically in a later one - it's not a great way to model that kinda thing, but it's a way.

That said, you could do a lot better balancing recharge powers than D&D has this time around. Going 'all' short- or long- rest doesn't really cut it, either, because they'd still be being balanced against at-will abilities (inevitably, there'll be some), and you're right back to needing to control pacing. The key would be to give all PCs comparable resources, be they only daily or only short-rest in addition to at-will, or all at-will, or in any combination. In the context of D&D, that'd be classes, all classes would get so many recharge abilities, on the same recharge schedules - they might still be very different, situational, or imbalanced in myriad other ways, and they'd still mess up encounter balance when you vary pacing, but it'd be an improvement.