D&D 5E Getting rid of the short rest: The answer to Linear Fighter vs Quadratic Wizard?

[abirdcall]

What I'm proposing would in effect give spellcasters fewer high level spell slots. Instead of having them replenish on a rest (and thus potentially having multiple opportunities to cast high level spells) they would be limited to casting high level spell slots only once per session, regardless of how often they are resting. But I'm not sure how popular this approach would be or if it even really addresses the issues I see in 5e.

At my table we long rest once every 2 or 3 sessions.

Are you saying that your table long rests more than once per session?

 

[Blue]

Now, one of the things addressed by this is helping short rest characters (such as largely martial characters) get a bit of a power bump.

I see this as a fairly serious debuff to short-rest characters, not helping them.

You're taking away nova capability. If every encounter is equally as challenging, enforcing the spread out doesn't change the balance. But as you question in regards to the 6-8 encounters, is that how the game is actually played?

Now the short-rest characters lose any ability to pull out the stops for a more challenging encounter. Which the long-rest-recovery classes still have, so they will be more powerful for the encounters that need it.

So it makes casters more powerful in clutch situations when,
forcing short-rest-resources into a "use them or lose them" where you have no control over pacing for multiple combats. Fighters and the like wil get to shine only in routine or low powered encounters where they are get no advantage not to use their resources and the casters get to save even more of their resources (since the martials and other short-rest-recovery classes are taking care of it) for the challenging encounters.

 

[cbwjm]

At my table we long rest once every 2 or 3 sessions.

Are you saying that your table long rests more than once per session?

This sometimes happens in the games I'm in. We sometimes have a lot of travel in a single session equaling multiple days and therefore multiple long rests. Might even only have a single encounter between long rests.

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[abirdcall]

This sometimes happens in the games I'm in. We sometimes have a lot of travel in a single session equaling multiple days and therefore multiple long rests. Might even only have a single encounter between long rests.

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That's the sort of thing that we hand wave. There is no real tension there.

So either we just declare that time passes and we're wherever we need to be or perhaps have a bit of description of what happened but not actually play it out.

If exploration is the thing then we do that but it would be a series of encounters and obstacles.

It's sort of the same with the skill system. If there is no consequence and/or it isn't interesting then there is no roll.

 

[cbwjm]

That's the sort of thing that we hand wave. There is no real tension there.

So either we just declare that time passes and we're wherever we need to be or perhaps have a bit of description of what happened but not actually play it out.

If exploration is the thing then we do that but it would be a series of encounters and obstacles.

It's sort of the same with the skill system. If there is no consequence and/or it isn't interesting then there is no roll.

Sorry, I didn't explain it well. We won't act it all out. If we have an encounter and then we jump on our ship and sail for a week then we will skip the travel during that time it is assumed that we have had a long rest at the end of each day. If we do have an encounter a few days later in the middle of the trip then we will be fully rested.

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[Blue]

BTW, the resource recovery balance in 5e is my biggest gripe about an otherwise fine game. I greatly prefer how 13th Age does it. (If you've heard me give this spiel you can tune out now.)

13th Age is a d20 by lead designers of 3rd & 4e that came out before 5e but shares a lot of it's philosophy. But the one thing I love is that they divorce the in-game mechanism of resting from the resource recovery mechanic. At their basics, they have at-will, per-encounter, and ones that recover on a full-heal-up. But a full heal-up happens every four encounters, not attached to an in-game event.

A three week trip across the savanna with four encounters? Full heal-up at the end. A day adventuring with four encounters? The same. Two days of two encounters each? Full heal up after the second day. A dungeon delver with four encounters in the morning and four more in the afternoon? That's a recovery at lunch and another at night.

The DM can make it less if they are throwing harder encounters, and the party can always "force" a rest, but they take a campaign set-back in return. Perhaps the vampires turned a pair of the villagers they made off with, or the cult completed the first stage of their ritual and now have a minor demon guarding them.

It's such a sacred cow, but it works so much better. Adventures go at whatever pace makes sense, and the mechanics still balance out.

To yoink it for D&D, something like a short rest every other encounter and a long rest every six.

 

[abirdcall]

Sorry, I didn't explain it well. We won't act it all out. If we have an encounter and then we jump on our ship and sail for a week then we will skip the travel during that time it is assumed that we have had a long rest at the end of each day. If we do have an encounter a few days later in the middle of the trip then we will be fully rested.

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Right, we just go one step further and hand wave the encounter too.

If the result is already known and the party won't be hindered at all from it, then we don't play it out.

 

[FrogReaver]

BTW, the resource recovery balance in 5e is my biggest gripe about an otherwise fine game. I greatly prefer how 13th Age does it. (If you've heard me give this spiel you can tune out now.)

13th Age is a d20 by lead designers of 3rd & 4e that came out before 5e but shares a lot of it's philosophy. But the one thing I love is that they divorce the in-game mechanism of resting from the resource recovery mechanic. At their basics, they have at-will, per-encounter, and ones that recover on a full-heal-up. But a full heal-up happens every four encounters, not attached to an in-game event.

A three week trip across the savanna with four encounters? Full heal-up at the end. A day adventuring with four encounters? The same. Two days of two encounters each? Full heal up after the second day. A dungeon delver with four encounters in the morning and four more in the afternoon? That's a recovery at lunch and another at night.

The DM can make it less if they are throwing harder encounters, and the party can always "force" a rest, but they take a campaign set-back in return. Perhaps the vampires turned a pair of the villagers they made off with, or the cult completed the first stage of their ritual and now have a minor demon guarding them.

It's such a sacred cow, but it works so much better. Adventures go at whatever pace makes sense, and the mechanics still balance out.

To yoink it for D&D, something like a short rest every other encounter and a long rest every six.

I personally dislike tying rests to a set number of encounters. If all the fights are relatively equally hard this works but it forces a DM to design adventures around this contraint instead of being a system that can work for adventures of any kind.

I do think it's a step up from the willy nilly 5e rest anytime feel and become super powerful when not alot is going on and you have 15 spell slots you can burn in town everyday in your month long downtime.

Also in a more "open world" setting as many D&D games become, I can see a strict 4 encounter rule being abused just as badly as our current rules. Go search for a lone enemy and pick a fight. There's 1 encounter out of the way. Just start doing that anytime you want recovery.

 

[Blue]

I personally dislike tying rests to a set number of encounters. If all the fights are relatively equally hard this works but it forces a DM to design adventures around this contraint instead of being a system that can work for adventures of any kind.

I do think it's a step up from the willy nilly 5e rest anytime feel and become super powerful when not alot is going on and you have 15 spell slots you can burn in town everyday in your month long downtime.

Also in a more "open world" setting as many D&D games become, I can see a strict 4 encounter rule being abused just as badly as our current rules. Go search for a lone enemy and pick a fight. There's 1 encounter out of the way. Just start doing that anytime you want recovery.

Simple - fighting a lone orc is not a challenge, it doesn't count. *Nothing* about 13th Age is strict - the rules have sidebars where the two designers talk about where they didn't agree and how it could be done another way. Talk about house rules and ramifications of changing some things. Advice on how to build unfair battles. The tiefling racial power with a note "Players, you need to have a good relationship with your GM for curse of chaos to work in your favor. If that's not what you've got, expect some frustration as you hone your method-acting roleplay of the world's most tormented race." Heck, there's a paladin talent that lets you pick up a cleric domain, and instead of having lots of advice on converting them (or leaving some that mechanically don't work), plus future proofing it for expansions, it just says to reinterpret it to help paladin powers instead of cleric powers.

And yes, this gets run just fine at conventions. It is what happens when you can get away from rules lawyers because you've actually embraced "rulings not rules".

 

[cbwjm]

I personally dislike tying rests to a set number of encounters. If all the fights are relatively equally hard this works but it forces a DM to design adventures around this contrainst instead of being a system that can work for adventures of any kind.

I do think it's a step up from the willy nilly 5e rest anytime feel and become super powerful when not alot is going on and you have 15 spell slots you can burn in town everyday in your month long downtime.

Also in a more "open world" setting as many D&D games become, I can see a strict 4 encounter rule being abused just as badly as our current rules. Go search for a lone enemy and pick a fight. There's 1 encounter out of the way. Just start doing that anytime you want recovery.

I dislike tying rests to a set number of encounters as it just feels artificial. I don't like the thought of the players having 4 encounters in a day allowing which allows them to rest and regain spent powers only to have a week of travel where they might not get a 4th encounter until day 7 when they can finally regain powers with a rest. It just feels weird to me.