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

[SkidAce]

PCs have them in towns, outside of towns, on patrolled roads, in the wilderness. They have them everywhere, which means that they ARE everywhere.

My point is, its really a matter of choice.

My PCs dont have encounters on patrolled roads for the most part.

Except when there is something going on, the danger level has risen, NPCs, citizens, guards, are being slaughtered, and the adventurers get called in.

If they win, back to normal. If they lose, then that part of the world effectively becomes "wilderness" and those at risk NPCs will stop going there.

Leading to the classic tropes of abandoned roads, castles, and fallen kingdoms etc.

 

[Mistwell]

Man what an odd feeling it is to see a thread you started freaking out with tens of new pages, and I don't even have a clue where the discussion has gone...

(No complaint, just sayin')

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

You might like this one:

Pasted below is what I'm using currently in my OOTA campaign. I'm holding my "recovery" mechanics in abeyance until the calendar-time solution fails. Note that I'm ignoring Crawford and applying the RAW strictly, i.e. any combat or any spell cast interrupts a rest. It's worth reiterating that Crawford's ruling evokes a mild ambiguity in the language to require one hour of fighting to break a long rest: at an average of 5 rounds a fight (30 seconds) that entails 120 encounters to break a rest! That's enough encounters to go from level one to level ten. If that's what the author really meant, then it's worth exploiting the ambiguity to ignore them. Per RAW characters need to avoid strenuous activity and - for a Long Rest - sleep. I think that allows a DM to rule on comfort requirements.

Short Rest
A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 3 hours long.

Extended Short Rest
An extended short rest is a period of downtime, at least 8 hours long. Along with the standard benefits of a short rest, an extended short rest allows characters to reduce exhaustion, examine or attune magic items, and train. A character can’t benefit from more than one extended short rest in a 24 hour period.

Long Rest
A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 24 hours long. After taking one, a character can’t benefit from another for 24 hours.

I made this change as a halfway house between standard and Gritty Realism. I wanted mechanically meaningful easy and medium encounters (often as random encounters) without slowing the travel pace to a crawl. I found a need to move "world effects" into an extended short rest. My concept for that is there are no character ability recoveries there, only other things. Possibly hit point maximum drain could recover on extended short rests. What do you think?

Which got this comment:

(a) It still allows for the Short Rest recharge without requiring house rules for converting Short Rest abilities to daily uses;
(b) It mitigates the effect Rope Trick/Leomund's Hut spells on the Rest Mechanics; and
(c) It thematically makes sense without the jarring gritty system's one-week requirement to learn spells.

In a word, Brilliant!, but I will give you another Elegant!
My house-rule system only did (b) and (c) and fixed a HD issue I had. This is infinitely better - consider it borrowed.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Can you provide an example from in game where you rolled for a random encounter for an NPC? I'm genuinely curious when that might come into play.

For one, when an NPC is with the party, then they are also subject to any random encounters that the party is.

But I actually do roll random results, and occasionally "encounters" for NPCs. In my campaign there are a lot of NPCs going about their business. So if the NPC happens to be a villain, and they have an ongoing scheme that the PCs may or may not have engaged with, I will often have to determine what has happened to those schemes between sessions many months apart. And in that process I will often roll random results, and it has occasionally been a random encounter related to other known things going on in the area.

But really, my point was just that whether we actually roll for the NPCs or not, it doesn't mean that NPCs don't encounter the same sort of things that the PCs do, with the same probabilities designed within the encounter tables. The PCs aren't necessarily "special" in that regard within the game world. They just happen to be the ones we're focused on at the time.

And as for the random encounter tables applying across the board....I don't know if it matters. The tables are going to be used for the PCs only in probably 99.99% of cases.

Yes, but that's not the point. The point is that what they represent is consistent across the game world. And should we choose to focus on those particular people at a certain point in time, then they would be subject to the random encounter tables.

I get the consistency that you and others are talking about....that encounter tables are designed with the world that has been established in mind. I get that. This is why I am saying this is a case of the mechanics (encounter tables) coming from the fiction (the area of the world you want the encounters to represent).

--

Any such comparison is a poor one in this case because the real world isn't just a simulation with people determining its properties. That was my point. Compare all you want....I shouldn't have said you "can't".

I was just being a smartass. And yes, it's imperfect, but the intention is to be consistent and as "realistic" as we care to make it.

For the first part above, I never said that adventuring parties were typical, or that they were representative of the norm. Not sure of your point here.

And for the second, I can't disagree more. They are the stars of the show. They are certainly more important than any other character in their books. Within their fictional world, perhaps they're average or whatever you want to call it....but they, and PCs in D&D, are special because they are the focus of the book or the game.

I mean....who's more important to your game: any PC or Joe the Blacksmith? We all know the answer.

To our game, but that doesn't make them "special" just special to us. In most of our campaigns, it would be the equivalent of the cops on Law and Order. Which ones? There were a lot over the seasons. The point is, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter, they are just another pair of cops. In the context of the story of some particular characters, to the players who played those characters, their characters and their story is special. But the world doesn't inherently function differently for them.

You can (and seem to be saying) that it does, since we (the DM and players) are working out their story within the context of the game rules. But from my perspective as a DM, all of the NPCs should have a story that fits the same structure. They follow the same in-world rules, and they should also be able to be created and achieve their place in the story using the rules of the game.

Not everybody agrees with that, obviously, or probably even cares. But each NPC I create, with whatever spells or abilities, etc., is written to explain any new effects in game terms. Something that the PCs could conceivably do under the right circumstances. I prefer that sort of consistency within the game world.

I honestly don't have a problem with the rest mechanic. I pretty much agree with you...I don't mind the players taking long rests overnight, and short rests where possible along the way. I have tweaked it at times to fit a dynamic I was going for, which I've previously mentioned in the thread....but those were more extreme cases. For example, no long rests in Barovia outside of settlements. Pretty easy.

I proposed this to @Lanefan as a possible solution. But ultimately, each group should do what works best for them. My point was more about how the rest mechanic can work differently for Travel Time versus Adventure Time (for lack of a better term). The 5E Middle Earth book has a mechanic designed this way, for example.

Yep, and I don't entirely like the Adventures in Middle Earth approach, although I certainly think it would do the trick for a lot of folks here. And I might run an adventure using those RAW simply because the rules themselves actually work together really well to get the feel they are looking for. It's really well done, and I'm hoping if I run some games, others might pick it up.

But doesn't it also matter who we're talking about? Adventurers would certainly seem more prone to encounters than say farmers, right? Much like cops in Baltimore may be more prone to encounters than the average citizen.

Yes. Adventurers would be more prone than farmers to encounters. Unless the farmers are adventurers, wandering in the sort of places adventurers wander. In other words, at least in my campaign, it probably doesn't matter who you are. It's more a question of when and where. But there will be some circumstances where the who matters too.

 

[Hussar]

PCs have them in towns, outside of towns, on patrolled roads, in the wilderness. They have them everywhere, which means that they ARE everywhere.

Like @Lanefan said, if they only happens in the middle of nowhere, that's fine and creates a different kind of consistency. Non-PCs who go to those same locations would also have encounters.

Sorry, but, no. Correlation does not equal causation and all that. Just because PC's have dangerous encounters everywhere they go does not mean, in any way that dangerous encounters are everywhere.

After all, everywhere a fireman goes there's a fire. That doesn't mean that there are fires everywhere. Same with police officers. Funnily enough, police officers find crimes pretty much everywhere they go. However, that doesn't mean that crimes are committed everywhere.

Encounters are how you build campaigns. Not worlds. Your encounters will be informed by your world building, but, the reverse is not true.

Back a few pages ago, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned a group of 100 soldiers wandering down a road and meeting something that disagreed with them and only 17 survived to return. Yet, at no point, were any mechanics actually used. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that he never rolled a single random encounter, never rolled any combat mechanics, never actually engaged the game in any way, shape or form.

Yet, I'll double down and bet even more dollars to donuts, that if the PC's walk down that EXACT same road, random encounters will be rolled and every encounter, random or otherwise, will be played out using the mechanics.

Mechanics DO NOT APPLY to the world. End of story. Even [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] who claims to use random encounters and mechanics when PC's aren't present only does so arbitrarily. He (or she, appologies) won't use them for every single NPC in his entire world. Not even for a tiny fraction of NPC's. And, I'll bet that not a single classed or leveled NPC has been created using actual encounter mechanics.

The argument is ludicrous on its face. Game mechanics might inspire world building. And world building will certainly impact encounter creation, but, there is no evidence whatsoever that the reverse is true.

 

[clearstream]

Back a few pages ago, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned a group of 100 soldiers wandering down a road and meeting something that disagreed with them and only 17 survived to return. Yet, at no point, were any mechanics actually used. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that he never rolled a single random encounter, never rolled any combat mechanics, never actually engaged the game in any way, shape or form.

Yet, I'll double down and bet even more dollars to donuts, that if the PC's walk down that EXACT same road, random encounters will be rolled and every encounter, random or otherwise, will be played out using the mechanics.

Mechanics DO NOT APPLY to the world. End of story. Even [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] who claims to use random encounters and mechanics when PC's aren't present only does so arbitrarily. He (or she, appologies) won't use them for every single NPC in his entire world. Not even for a tiny fraction of NPC's. And, I'll bet that not a single classed or leveled NPC has been created using actual encounter mechanics.

The argument is ludicrous on its face. Game mechanics might inspire world building. And world building will certainly impact encounter creation, but, there is no evidence whatsoever that the reverse is true.

It's not ludicrous on its face. You simply take a different approach to your world building than some other DMs do. For me, those 100 guards met a thing that was there because it was on the encounter table. The reason it was on the encounter table is because the mechanics represent something true about the world, and the world represents something true about the mechanics. As those tables are fleshed out, the world is being built up from them. We discover that this region has numerous undead, and wonder as to the reason? That seed of inspiration shapes and reshapes our world. Hmm... maybe this is partly because I see world-building as ongoing? In a living campaign it's not a process that is ever finished. Hence there is always scope for some nuance of the mechanics to inform it.

 

[Lanefan]

After all, everywhere a fireman goes there's a fire. That doesn't mean that there are fires everywhere.

Well, let's hope not; because firemen go where fires aren't on a fairly regular basis. Like home for supper with their families.

Back a few pages ago, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned a group of 100 soldiers wandering down a road and meeting something that disagreed with them and only 17 survived to return. Yet, at no point, were any mechanics actually used. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that he never rolled a single random encounter, never rolled any combat mechanics, never actually engaged the game in any way, shape or form.

Yet, I'll double down and bet even more dollars to donuts, that if the PC's walk down that EXACT same road, random encounters will be rolled and every encounter, random or otherwise, will be played out using the mechanics.

Mechanics DO NOT APPLY to the world.

Sigh.

You're taking one thing - that mechanics ARE not applied in every instance - and (wrongly) extrapolating that to say mechanics DO not apply; that the results obtained are going to be somehow inconsistent with what the use of mechanics would or could produce.

Just because something isn't seen doesn't mean anything. I don't need to see the actual mechanical engine running in a passing car to know that it is in fact running well enough to move the car along. By the same token, I don't have to see the actual mechanics running the game world to know that they are in fact doing their job well enough to move the world along. I - and everyone involved - just know they're out there, and take it as a given that a soldier in a battle three continents away is using the same combat mechanics as the PCs are even if no physical dice get rolled for/against her at the table. Further, we take it as a given that if we sat down and hard-rolled her battle out the end result would be more or less the same as if I had simply narrated that result.

So, the hundred elite soldiers head up into the mountains. I as DM know what's waiting up there and can lay down a pretty good guess as to what a likely range of outcomes would be were I to apply the mechanics and hard-roll it all through; and that 17 soldiers coming back is well within that range. So at that point the mechanics have done their job for me, and back come the 17 with lots of tales mostly starting and ending with "You really don't wanna go up there!".

Lan-"there's large parts of the real world I've never seen, but I take it as a given that the world mechanics (physics, chemistry, etc.) work the same there as they do here"-efan

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sorry, but, no. Correlation does not equal causation and all that. Just because PC's have dangerous encounters everywhere they go does not mean, in any way that dangerous encounters are everywhere.

After all, everywhere a fireman goes there's a fire. That doesn't mean that there are fires everywhere. Same with police officers. Funnily enough, police officers find crimes pretty much everywhere they go. However, that doesn't mean that crimes are committed everywhere.

Encounters are how you build campaigns. Not worlds. Your encounters will be informed by your world building, but, the reverse is not true.

Back a few pages ago, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] mentioned a group of 100 soldiers wandering down a road and meeting something that disagreed with them and only 17 survived to return. Yet, at no point, were any mechanics actually used. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that he never rolled a single random encounter, never rolled any combat mechanics, never actually engaged the game in any way, shape or form.

Yet, I'll double down and bet even more dollars to donuts, that if the PC's walk down that EXACT same road, random encounters will be rolled and every encounter, random or otherwise, will be played out using the mechanics.

Mechanics DO NOT APPLY to the world. End of story. Even [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] who claims to use random encounters and mechanics when PC's aren't present only does so arbitrarily. He (or she, appologies) won't use them for every single NPC in his entire world. Not even for a tiny fraction of NPC's. And, I'll bet that not a single classed or leveled NPC has been created using actual encounter mechanics.

The argument is ludicrous on its face. Game mechanics might inspire world building. And world building will certainly impact encounter creation, but, there is no evidence whatsoever that the reverse is true.

Let's take this as true for the sake of argument: mechanics only happen to PCs (and NPCs on screen with PCs) and random encounters only ever happen to PCs.

That has a pretty big set of worldbuilding impacts.

If random encounters only happen to PCs, then where did those encounters come from? Did they appear only for the PCs, or did they have a larger impact in the area? If the encountered foes have treasure, where did that come from? You can handwave all of this, but doing so is just denying the problem, not solving it. If your answer is 'I don't bother with that' that just means you ignore it, not that it doesn't exist. And that's your argument -- I can ignore it, I don't have to do it, so therefore it doesn't exist.

To give you an example of encounter building affecting wordlbuilding, I return to the dire wolves -- if they're on my encounter table, they exist in the world to be encountered. If they don't turn up on as a random encounter, they don't exist as an undefined possibility, they're still out there in the world, being dangerous. Your solution seems to be that they don't exist at all until and unless they turn up as an encounter, and then they exist only for the duration of that encounter. You're welcome to that, it's a fine way to play with a long pedigree, but that just pushes it under the rug, it doesn't solve it. And it doesn't show that the problem does not exist. As an example, you not having an issue with a recalled item on your car doesn't mean there's not a problem with that item.

Three deadly encounters a day has implications whenever you chose to use it. Out in the dangerous wilderness, there's no problem, but if you ever decide to have an encounter in a safer area, you need to have 3 dangerous encounters, and now you need to square that with how there's three dangerous encounters in a short period of time in what is an otherwise safe area. Handwaving is one solution, but that's still addressing the issue even if it's just to ignore it. And it doesn't matter what you pick for the encounter, if you have threats of that level there, they need to be integrated into the worldbuilding. Assassins need to be integrated. Dragons need to be integrated. Etc, etc. Again, you can ignore this and have a fun game (I can't, but you might), but ignoring it doesn't mean it's not still there, and all it takes is a player to start asking questions about the weirdness and suddenly you have to address it, even if it's to say 'shutup, Kevin, play your fighter.'

 

[Sadras]

My players are inquisitive, they like to ask questions and try make sense of who/what their characters encounter - be it creature or object. It feels natural to me, to build encounters with the world as well as the particular adventure in mind.

We recently had a thread dealing with the issue of incorporating Elminster in any number of the FR APs and the barrage of table questions that would presumably arise from the PCs meeting him, I cannot imagine how an increase in number of dangerous wandering encounters wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

 

[SkidAce]

Three deadly encounters a day has implications whenever you chose to use it. Out in the dangerous wilderness, there's no problem, but if you ever decide to have an encounter in a safer area, you need to have 3 dangerous encounters, and now you need to square that with how there's three dangerous encounters in a short period of time in what is an otherwise safe area.

Why would you have the same level and number of encounters in a safer area?

To challenge the PCs? If it is a safer area, I am okay with them not being challenged.

 

[Imaro]

Let's take this as true for the sake of argument: mechanics only happen to PCs (and NPCs on screen with PCs) and random encounters only ever happen to PCs.

That has a pretty big set of worldbuilding impacts.

If random encounters only happen to PCs, then where did those encounters come from? Did they appear only for the PCs, or did they have a larger impact in the area? If the encountered foes have treasure, where did that come from? You can handwave all of this, but doing so is just denying the problem, not solving it. If your answer is 'I don't bother with that' that just means you ignore it, not that it doesn't exist. And that's your argument -- I can ignore it, I don't have to do it, so therefore it doesn't exist.

To give you an example of encounter building affecting wordlbuilding, I return to the dire wolves -- if they're on my encounter table, they exist in the world to be encountered. If they don't turn up on as a random encounter, they don't exist as an undefined possibility, they're still out there in the world, being dangerous. Your solution seems to be that they don't exist at all until and unless they turn up as an encounter, and then they exist only for the duration of that encounter. You're welcome to that, it's a fine way to play with a long pedigree, but that just pushes it under the rug, it doesn't solve it. And it doesn't show that the problem does not exist. As an example, you not having an issue with a recalled item on your car doesn't mean there's not a problem with that item.

Three deadly encounters a day has implications whenever you chose to use it. Out in the dangerous wilderness, there's no problem, but if you ever decide to have an encounter in a safer area, you need to have 3 dangerous encounters, and now you need to square that with how there's three dangerous encounters in a short period of time in what is an otherwise safe area. Handwaving is one solution, but that's still addressing the issue even if it's just to ignore it. And it doesn't matter what you pick for the encounter, if you have threats of that level there, they need to be integrated into the worldbuilding. Assassins need to be integrated. Dragons need to be integrated. Etc, etc. Again, you can ignore this and have a fun game (I can't, but you might), but ignoring it doesn't mean it's not still there, and all it takes is a player to start asking questions about the weirdness and suddenly you have to address it, even if it's to say 'shutup, Kevin, play your fighter.'

Or conversely your worldbuilding is such that you take it into account when placing your encounters and thus they don't have an impact. As an example... you only place that deadly dire wolf encounter in a place it would make sense for in your world, thus it doesn't impact anything... A lone assassin in a town can be a deadly encounter and yet it has little to no implications (beyond the basic ones of a fantasy world) in your worldbuilding so use that instead of the Dire Wolves.

To further expound if you have an area where 4 Dire Wolves shouldn't reasonably exist... well why would you use them when there are tons of other pre-made threats (along with rules to create your own custom ones) available to use that would fit without the implications you want to avoid on your worldbuilding? IMO that's the point of worldbuilding, you are setting up the areas, limitations, etc. of your world that you abide by when populating it.