Boils down to people either being willing to take responsibility for their own game or not.
I think Mike has taken responsibility for the game he's currently custodian of. ;P
Except any blame for this rests squarely in the lap of the designers.
Not "people".
Designers are people, too. People given a difficult, thankless, task, and told to do it with their hands tied.
It's not about waving the magic wand. It's about actually trying to resolve the issue.
By waving a magic wand, yes. Magic being real in this metaphor.
There are several solutions that have been proposed here and every single one of them gets waved off.
Solution 1 - Timed Adventures
Ok, I get that this one is problematic. It doesn't make sense that every adventure is on the clock. But, you can certainly have some adventure on the clock, no? So, for those adventures where it does make sense to have a countdown clock, the Elephant in the Room is no longer a problem.
No, the Elephant is still in the room, you're just pointedly ignoring it for an adventure.
Solution 2 - Extended Encounters
This one would solve a LOT of the issues. Break up those honking big single encounters into a few smaller ones.
If the setting/pacing/etc of the campaign doesn't call for a bunch of encounters, but instead for the occasional big encounter, saying 'well break them up' isn't helpful.
Solution 3 - New Mechanics
Likely this would be needed for fixed encounters. You'd need to drastically up the firepower of the critters. Probably to the point of adding Legendary to every single monster.
That's addressing half the issue - the issue of encounter difficulty falling off on shorter days. It's not the harder half of the issue to address, though. You can simply dial up encounters until their challenging to a fresh party. You can do that be re-writing monsters or adding more of them.
So, I have to ask again, what's the actual problem here.
Adapting the system to tolerate varied campaign pacing seems to be the issue. There's some clear desire for a mechanical solution, rather than a campaign-driven one (like time pressure, or magic crystals or whatever). IMHO, that's problematic because a purely mechanical solution would have to permeate the system, affecting class designs and magic item expectations, as well as CR and encounter guidelines.
I see the more tenable solution for the Empowered DM to be simply ruling whether rests can be taken, how long they take, and what benefits they give at the end, on a case-by-case basis, depending on the current campaign pacing/tone and the details of the situation....
Solution 4, make long rests meaningfully long against your campaign scale. Which has the official support the OP appears to require, in the DMG.
Useful only if your campaign has a fixed time scale. If you run only intense dungeon-crawls where a short rest can be 5 minutes and a long rest a few hours or if you run only exhaustive hexcrawls where a short rest can be a day and long rest a week. Run some mix or variation and you need to claim more flexibility.
Yes. The MAIN(primary, major, most responsible party) is the GM. I agree.
We've all played in crappy systems and had a blast.
This is an important point.
We've mostly been playing D&D for decades.
We're the ones who kept coming back. ...
But "How often to rest" is not a 5e specific issue. Heck I saw it discussed in other systems published in the 1980s! It's an old problem.
Yep, and I suppose we could say it's back because 5e is consciously seeking the feel of the classic game, a game in which the 5MWD (though I recall calling it the 15min work day) was a perennial issue.
The 5e issue is having different kinds of rests and different resources associated with these rests AND having class balance impacted by this state of affairs.
That's still the same issue, just with only two recharge mechanics (short & long rest) vs n/day, n/hr, n/turn (ye ole 10 min turn), 4-hr rest + 15 min to memorize a 1st level spell, 8 hrs rest + 2hrs 15 min to memorize a 9th level one, studying a spellbook after sleeping six hours, leaving slots open to prep into later, 'dinging' and getting all your spells back at a specific time of day, etc, etc....
