D&D 5E Assaying Immersive Rest Rules

[clearstream]

Summary of latest changes - I noticed XGE uses the unconscious condition to manage sleep, so I drew on that to manage meditating. I also added a reference to those rules to make it clear that characters will want to sleep sometimes even with maximum HD (to avoid exhaustion). I removed the requirement to eat and drink to regain HD, as other rules penalise lack of sustenance.

 

[clearstream]

I've made substantial improvements following a couple of mocked and one live playtest. My ToA campaign group (6 players) preferred these rules to what we were using (a version of Gritty Realism). They found a defensible room and cycled through sleeps and meditations until everyone had taken a rest of the type they needed. 32 hours in all. The party started with a breather and dumped healing magic, reinforcing a belief that regaining full HP from rests is unnecessary. As expected, characters taking long meditation also chose to sleep afterwards.

Random Encounters​

An encounter came up during the rest (I make a check per 8 hours). Three characters were unconscious, and we found using that condition (which is articulated in the XGE sleep rules) worked neatly. The unconscious characters felt appropriately vulnerable, and the active characters worked together to block tomb guardians from reaching them. Our rogue seemed pleased to find that with a 4-hour trance he was good to go. As DM, I loved that there was no doubt who was meditating and who was doing some kind of borderline activity: you're unconscious.

Magic Items​

Doubts came up about magic item charge refreshes. For now I am ruling that attuned items recharge with short and long meditation rather than sun cycles. As an example, a staff of striking recharges d3 after short meditation and then 2d3+1 more after long. Seeing as short flows into long this is 3d3+1 or 1 better than repeated short meditations.

Suspension of Disbelief​

I hoped that players would accept meditation as a fact about the world, and so far that seems to be working. They appear to appreciate that it was in some sense the ability to meditate that separated out "adepts" (aka PCs and generally, creatures with character-class equivalence). Attaching item attunement to sleep seems to help this.

Further Playtests​

Going forward we'll learn what happens as rests are iterated. There are no mandatory cooldowns, so I am curious to discover if players will alpha and then meditate, or if the conditions are strict enough that they will prefer to run a good number of encounters. I'd also like to see if they ever short mediate without also pausing for long meditation, seeing as we have a monk, a battle master, a cleric and a bard. I'll post again after a few more game sessions.

 

[Krachek]

I think that in such a world, Leomund would have create a Tiny Hut that last 24+ hours and even can be upcast to have better defensive effect.
That will feel coherent with resting law.

 

[Stalker0]

One thing just to make your language a little tighter. Instead of saying 8 hours of sleep or 4 hours of trance in multiple spots….just use the 8 hours…and then add a clause that 4 hours of trance equals 8 hours sleep.

that makes things a little tighter and less wordy, and help remove any confusion that trance and mediation could be similar when you first read it

also you had mentioned in a previous post that HD are not supposed to fully regenerate after a long meditation…but that is still not specified

 

[clearstream]

I think that in such a world, Leomund would have create a Tiny Hut that last 24+ hours and even can be upcast to have better defensive effect.
That will feel coherent with resting law.

The unhappy brevity of the hut's duration is a feature, not a bug.


EDIT Note that to some extent I agree with you. Still Leomund might have been thinking of facilitating safe breathers, sleeps and short rests, and perhaps 24 hours lies beyond the power the spell can muster.

 

[clearstream]

One thing just to make your language a little tighter. Instead of saying 8 hours of sleep or 4 hours of trance in multiple spots….just use the 8 hours…and then add a clause that 4 hours of trance equals 8 hours sleep.

that makes things a little tighter and less wordy, and help remove any confusion that trance and mediation could be similar when you first read it

That is a good idea. The "sleep or trance" verbiage was bugging me! Better to handle trance like Aspect of the Moon, i.e. as a modifier to or replacement for sleep.

also you had mentioned in a previous post that HD are not supposed to fully regenerate after a long meditation…but that is still not specified

1 HD is recovered after a sleep, and nowhere else are HD recovered.

It sounds like there could be a reasonable expectation carried over from PHB, that silence on the subject could entail HD recovery on long meditation. For avoidance of doubt, I could add wording to say something like "No hit points or dice are recovered with meditation".

 

[Stalker0]

It sounds like there could be a reasonable expectation carried over from PHB, that silence on the subject could entail HD recovery on long meditation. For avoidance of doubt, I could add wording to say something like "No hit points or dice are recovered with meditation".

I would do it as simply as this:

"features that refresh at the end of a “long rest”, with the exception of Hit Dice and Hitpoints, do so"

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Taking the rest rules as written sincerely and working through them as facts about the game world reveals obvious dissonances. Additionally, the rules don't in my view yield an engagingly bracing game balance. I drafted an alternative built around the idea that rests are a real thing that people do in the game world, and that characters ("adepts" I am calling them, because I want to include NPCs with character-class equivalence) have a special power to meditate and gain uses of abilities. The idea is that this is an in-world solution to rests that also results in a more challenging game system. Please note that I accept D&D can't be used to model consistent worlds because many things are just how they are for the sake of big-tent RPG: I'm going ahead and trying it anyway. I would love to hear critiques of this as a system. Where is it broken, and what tweaks or additions might complete it?

Going to unhelpfully respond that, while I don't have any specific rules-based feedback beyond what's been mentioned so far, I think this is conceptually really great. Having both PC abilities and the wacky rest rules be baked into the setting is such a huge step up from just sort of shrugging at stuff like new powers just popping into place after leveling, and the always hilarious business of people debating the exact length of time to rest after or before a fight. Bravo!

 

[NotAYakk]

I don't get the idea that higher level characters require weeks to recover, while level 1 are fresh after a day.

 

[clearstream]

I don't get the idea that higher level characters require weeks to recover, while level 1 are fresh after a day.

Indeed, hit point and dice recovery is up for scrutiny! In world, the way we are thinking about hit dice (and this came from my players) is that they are a battery or reserve, that refills at a constant rate. A high-level character can push past what a low-level character could... and accordingly take "longer" to fully recover. I put "longer" in quote marks, because if that is done in downtime, then the cost of full recovery is low even if it takes two weeks instead of one day. (And it's a design goal that recovery in general consumes more in-world time.)

Hit points haven't yet been at issue. The party currently has 9th bard, 9th rogue, 8th fighter, 7th cleric, 7th monk, 6th bard. They were down a massive number of hit points at the start of their rest. Seeing at the cleric was nearly out of spells, he cast out what he had. A bard used song of rest. Fighter spent second wind before meditating. In the same order as above, HP (HD), they ended the rest with 55/57 (5/9), 57/57 (4/9), 77/85 (9/9), 63/72 (4/7), 35/45 (2/7), 33/33 (6/6). I felt happy with this as one of my goals is for characters to carry the sting of earlier encounters on with them. They debated resting longer, and chose to move on.

With hit dice, we have a lot of prior experience in play here, as we have trialled a few sets of slower rest rules over the last few years. Outside the dungeon, sleep fits naturally into a day-night travel cycle (only so far you can march before checking for exhaustion), so in that frame sleep has a low 'cost'. The party then enters a dungeon with 'batteries' full. They get worn down as they venture deeper, and that is palpably felt in their dwindling HD totals. Bottom line? We know we don't want to recover many HD per rest.

Maybe later we will scale it. Something like 1/2 prof. bonus (round down as usual).