D&D 5E Let's Talk About Chapter 9 of the DMG

[atanakar]

We use:

• Madness (a house rule)
• Session based XP progression (X number of sessions = a level up).
• Major foes have 1 Hero Point. (re-roll)
• Slow Natural Healing

We do not use:

• Feats
• Multi-classing

 

[Worrgrendel]

My group has used Hero Points from the beginning and have not found any real issues with it and the players all like it as it makes their character feel more "heroic" to use a limited resource to dig down deep to push through something/land that needed hit/make that save/make that skill check/etc. As far as putting the game on "easy" mode we haven't felt that, but when I DM'd (a heavily modified Tyranny of Dragons campaign from level 1 - 17) and our current DM (level 1 - 9 homebrew so far) both tend to fall on the side of throwing challenging encounters at them anyway. Had some levels where hardly any were used and other levels where they were gone fast and the players were sweating getting the next level with little/none remaining.

 

[dave2008]

We have several custom house rules, but we use the "Healer's Kit Dependency" and part of the "Epic Heroism" (short rest = 5 minutes) variants. Both work great for our group and help make the game both more heroic and more deadly.

EDIT: We also use a house-ruled variant of "Slow Natural Healing"

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

My experience with 7-day rests is that there are too many things in the game that need adjusting, particularly spells. Many spell durations are tied to 8 hour rests (off the top of my head - goodberry, create undead, tiny hut, mansion, raise dead, revivify, mage armor).
Money also needs to be adjusted. If a long rest needs 7 days then low level characters end up spending a big chunk of treasure simply on food and accomodation.

 

[Lancelot]

We're using the Lingering Injuries rules at my table, in this fashion:

Once per session (only!), the player of a PC who is down and bleeding out may choose to take a Lingering Injury to automatically stabilize. Our table tends to be pretty deadly; we're old-school players who tend to enforce 4-7 encounters between long rests, and those encounters are usually Hard+. This accounts for more than 200 permanent PC losses (playing 1.5 times per week; 10 players in 2 groups) since 5e began.... even with the Lingering Injury option available.

My table loves a bit of random. There's plenty of tension when someone chooses to "take the lingerer" (as we call it), because... 1) they might (and often have) lose an arm or a leg, which creates an interesting RP exercise for the rest of that PC's career; and 2) choosing to take the injury will mean that nobody else can take the option in that session, which makes it more deadly for the next person who drops.

 

[Oofta]

My experience with 7-day rests is that there are too many things in the game that need adjusting, particularly spells. Many spell durations are tied to 8 hour rests (off the top of my head - goodberry, create undead, tiny hut, mansion, raise dead, revivify, mage armor).
Money also needs to be adjusted. If a long rest needs 7 days then low level characters end up spending a big chunk of treasure simply on food and accomodation.

My solution is simple. Multiply durations of spells that last half an hour or more by 5. Don't worry about basic cost of living, assume that if nothing else the PCs can get jobs as bouncers, guards, scribes or common laborers.

 

[Reynard]

My experience with 7-day rests is that there are too many things in the game that need adjusting, particularly spells. Many spell durations are tied to 8 hour rests (off the top of my head - goodberry, create undead, tiny hut, mansion, raise dead, revivify, mage armor).
Money also needs to be adjusted. If a long rest needs 7 days then low level characters end up spending a big chunk of treasure simply on food and accomodation.

Resource management is a thing in D&D and anything that brings it back to the fore is a good thing IMO.

 

[Hriston]

The whole rule is like one paragraph. They really don't go into it at all. I was assuming one week off and one week on, because it seemed like a reasonable balance. Taking a week off after three days of adventuring seems pretty egregious to me. The default balance is more like 60-75% uptime and 25-40% downtime, so it doesn't seem right to invert that. But again, they don't state their assumptions.

When I first read it, I thought they were trying to do a throwback to the old days, when healing and preparing spells was something that you did between adventures. That could easily turn into one long rest per month, or per three months, though. It also raises an issue regarding the inability to heal without spending Hit Dice, since you're likely to run out of those after a couple of days.

There are two paragraphs under Gritty Realism, but I'd say the rule itself is just the first sentence: it changes a short rest to eight hours and a long rest to seven days. That's all it changes.

In the second paragraph, it states that the intent of the rule is to encourage "the characters to spend time out of the dungeon."

As to "their" assumptions, I think they're explicitly stated here:

Short Rests​

In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.​

So if a short rest is eight hours, I think it's natural to assume an adventuring day of about three days.

Also, I'm not sure from where your "default balance" is coming, especially considering the five-minute workday. Minimally, a 24-hour adventuring day includes two one-hour short rests and an eight-hour long rest for a minimum of 42% downtime, but again, I think it's highly unlikely that the PCs are actually spending the other 14 hours "in the dungeon".

 

[dave2008]

I have added this discussion to the Best of the 5e Forum wiki

 

[Esker]

I quite like some of the combat options in that chapter. We've used a few of them in my home game -- they don't come up that often, but it's nice to have more ways to use athletics and acrobatics in combat besides grappling and shoving. The "Mark" one is cool too, though I haven't used that one.