Level Up (A5E) Rests & Level Up

[Phoebasss]

The thing I hated most about 13th Age was not getting "Daily" powers and a full-heal until a certain number of encounters had happened... regardless of the number of clock hours/days, unless the party takes a "campaign loss". It certainly does what the rules say and balances daily and encounter powers... but nothing made it feel more like just a game and not being part of a story. But I guess having encounter powers already does that to an extent anyway.

On the other hand, one of the things they bring up as a possible "campaign loss" for resting early, is that it gives your enemies time to do more things. That might not matter in a classic disconnected dungeon crawl, but I can see it having a big effect in other adventures.

Yeah, see I like that about it. But that's because I'm pretty fine with having certain things gamified if it makes them actually function as intended. Which 5e's short rests just... don't. And the campaign loss was an interesting way to work it in narratively. Admittedly it is an additional stress on the GM to make sure a narratively appropriate resting place comes up every 4 encounters. But undue narrative stress is nothing I'm not used to as a GM.

 

[tetrasodium]

In a way they are. The big thing was that they were balanced between each class so everyone had the same amount. There was less short rest vs. long rest classes

Changing it so different classes had different amounts of short rest & long rest based abilities wasn't the problem so much as saying "we want two-three versions of this class but don't really have room to make them different so give them mostly the same exact spells at the same levels even but one is going to have fewer uses tied to short rests plus powerful at will abilities of its own" The spitball for that idea should have been met with the disdain it rightfully deserves for expecting the GM to balance c;ass A & class B against each other at the same table during the same game when they are largely going to be doing the same things. Nobody complains that warlock gets chill touch frostbite create bonfire & poison spray instead of firebolt like a wizard because agonizing eldritch blast is objectively better than an an evoker wizard's potent firebolt at every level unless the party is fighting a helmed horror & the gap gets even bigger every time the two reach a new cantrip plateau. The fact that warlock can multiclass with sorcerer to largely overcome the "well you only have a couple pact slots & they are always of your highest level" by burning one to make a bunch of lower level ones only exacerbates the problem.

 

[TheSword]

The distinction there is combat. Outside of combat, there are relatively few mechanical time limits 5e gives you to put on players. C'mon, don't change the scale like you don't see the problem with that. An action is a narrative amount of time, 6 seconds, and a mechanical amount of time, 1 action. Hours don't have the same mechanical backing. There isn't anything that is supposed to happen each hour or anything like that.

The difference isn’t 1 hour it’s 24 hours. There is a practical difference. If there isn’t because you’re travelling or thats how the encounter is written so be it. It really isn’t a problem.

 

[clearstream]

If you can take an entire hour sitting somewhere I don't really see what's preventing you from taking 8 or even 24 most of the time.

I wanted to respond to this comment from my experience as DM. There is a difference that is felt in narrative scope - ability to plausibly advance plot and subplots - at a granularity of days.

I find that there's little difference outside the dungeon between 1 and 8 hours. A party who can find a way to stop for an hour usually feels they could stop for 8 hours as readily. When I dialled short rests up to a day and added a 1 hour breather to spend HD, I found that players readily took breathers and were a bit more reluctant to stop so often for a short rest. I dialled long rests up to 3 days and stipulated that after a rest, the duration of the rest must pass before another can be taken, and I found that was enough that players would see a window for a short rest and still not feel they might as well take a long rest. Before that, I'd tried week long, long rests, but that was too long - the party committed into chains of short rests (and generated more short-rest class characters).

So my finding has been that there is a difference felt in game between 1 hour and 1 day, and between 1 day and 3 days.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm gonna post it here for consistency and because this is the thread more properly about this question. I'm in favor of going all the way on A and having per-n-encounter rests with no interruption. It is then up to the DM to make that work narratively, or if there is no way to do that in the moment, move the long rest back or forward at most 1 encounter. So long as we have different rest types, they need to be more evenly split than the very common situation of 1 short rest a day, 1 long rest at night. Because that's not what 5e is balanced around and it makes any class with short rest abilities much worse off than their long rest counterparts.

I'm not in favor of such a widespread, constantly used metagame mechanic where the explanation is "the DM has to come up with an explanation". It was the biggest problem I had in 4th ed. We either to use some subtlety with stuff like that or we need to find a better way.

 

[Phoebasss]

I'm not in favor of such a widespread, constantly used metagame mechanic where the explanation is "the DM has to come up with an explanation". It was the biggest problem I had in 4th ed. We either to use some subtlety with stuff like that or we need to find a better way.

I'm not opposed to going the other way, if Level up wants that. I just don't think it can stay as is with classes balanced around a ratio of short rests to long rests if we're going to leave it up to the DM to make something close to that ratio happen. Your class's baseline effectiveness shouldn't be basically up to the DM's whims or how many encounters per day your party or GM finds annoying. If we can rebalance the classes so they all want long and short rests, or so that they all only work off only long or short rests, then the rest system doesn't need to change. Otherwise, we gotta do something with the rest system.

As far as something in the opposite direction from a metagame rule, removing the easy availability of long rests might be an option. Every time you sleep for 8 hours probably shouldn't cause a long rest. You should need to find somewhere a little more comfortable to get those benefits. Exhaustion would still enforce sleeping every day, so that's not too much of an issue.

This would at least make it so the GM doesn't need to provide 6 encounters a day to make the short rest classes equal to the long rest classes. Even if the GM only has 1 encounter a day, they can make long rests weekly-ish by not providing comfortable sleeping locations in the area, or adjust based on how safe you want the long rest players feeling. Now we need to keep in mind that this system relies very heavily on the GM being careful about when they provide long rests, but if that's made clear in the DMG equivalent, that's probably fine.

It's better than the current system, because very few situations call for 6 combat encounters a day. It's pretty much just dungeons where that makes sense. This at least openly tells the GM that how effective classes are compared to one another is up to them. And GMs need to know that that's what rests are doing mechanically, because I think a lot of GMs don't even notice how heavily their current rest structure favors long rest characters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not opposed to going the other way, if Level up wants that. I just don't think it can stay as is with classes balanced around a ratio of short rests to long rests if we're going to leave it up to the DM to make something close to that ratio happen. Your class's baseline effectiveness shouldn't be basically up to the DM's whims or how many encounters per day your party or GM finds annoying. If we can rebalance the classes so they all want long and short rests, or so that they all only work off only long or short rests, then the rest system doesn't need to change. Otherwise, we gotta do something with the rest system.

As far as something in the opposite direction from a metagame rule, removing the easy availability of long rests might be an option. Every time you sleep for 8 hours probably shouldn't cause a long rest. You should need to find somewhere a little more comfortable to get those benefits. Exhaustion would still enforce sleeping every day, so that's not too much of an issue.

This would at least make it so the GM doesn't need to provide 6 encounters a day to make the short rest classes equal to the long rest classes. Even if the GM only has 1 encounter a day, they can make long rests weekly-ish by not providing comfortable sleeping locations in the area, or adjust based on how safe you want the long rest players feeling. Now we need to keep in mind that this system relies very heavily on the GM being careful about when they provide long rests, but if that's made clear in the DMG equivalent, that's probably fine.

It's better than the current system, because very few situations call for 6 combat encounters a day. It's pretty much just dungeons where that makes sense. This at least openly tells the GM that how effective classes are compared to one another is up to them. And GMs need to know that that's what rests are doing mechanically, because I think a lot of GMs don't even notice how heavily their current rest structure favors long rest characters.

I am in favor of a "sanctuary" rule that requires a bona fides safe place to get a long rest. I just have a hard time convincing players to accept that kind of limitation. There's always somebody who has an issue with it.

 

[Charlaquin]

The thing I hated most about 13th Age was not getting "Daily" powers and a full-heal until a certain number of encounters had happened... regardless of the number of clock hours/days, unless the party takes a "campaign loss". It certainly does what the rules say and balances daily and encounter powers... but nothing made it feel more like just a game and not being part of a story. But I guess having encounter powers already does that to an extent anyway.!

Yeah, I’m usually not bothered by “gamist” or “dissociated” mechanics or whatever people want to call them, but this one was a bridge too far for me.

 

[glass]

Yeah, I’m usually not bothered by “gamist” or “dissociated” mechanics or whatever people want to call them, but this one was a bridge too far for me.

Yeah. I have yet to actually play 13th Age (despite having several of the books and liking most of what have read), but that does seem like something that would bother me.

_
glass.

 

[Phoebasss]

Yeah. I have yet to actually play 13th Age (despite having several of the books and liking most of what have read), but that does seem like something that would bother me.

I have yet to have any issue with it in actual play, it just means there's less narrative focus on setting up camp and doing watches every night. I don't really notice it as missing because the gm kind of skips over narrating sleep. Also speeds up travel, because you don't have to go over watches every time and all that.