D&D 5E Aren't Short Rest classes *better* in "story-based" games rather than dungeon crawls?

[Raduin711]

As a gm it becomes tiresome having to constantly come up with excuses for why they can't take a short rest this time & expecting the gm to always use doom clocks to make up for wotc's design choice here does not always fit narratively.

Maybe you aren't supposed to? Having a short rest between combats seems to be the natural way that they are supposed to be used. There is nothing wrong with doom clocks, but I don't think constant doom clocks is the intended form of play.

 

[Mordhau]

Short rests are meant to solve a 4e problem by making it at least uncertain whether you will be able to short-rest every fight.

Basically if you can short rest after every fight the Fighter should pretty much start every fight with an action surge (because front-loading damage in a fight is the most efficient way to do it, the sooner you start taking enemies off the table, the faster the party can gain an advantage in action economy). The same goes for the Warlock. If I know I will defintiely be getting my Fireball back after the fight then I should open with the Fireball (Or some other high damage spell that I know). This becomes a bit overly predictable.

At the very least short rests push the short rest classes to make strategic decisions about when to use their resources, and this helps the fight to flow more dramatically and be less anti-climactic. (The Fighter pulls out his action surge when he is sees that this Fight is serious and a particular opponent needs to be taken down now, which may sometimes be in the first round, but often won't be).

13th Age also addresses this issue by using the escalation dice.

 

[tetrasodium]

Maybe you aren't supposed to? Having a short rest between combats seems to be the natural way that they are supposed to be used. There is nothing wrong with doom clocks, but I don't think constant doom clocks is the intended form of play.

d&d is not a board/card game like gloomhaven munchkin or whatever, the GM needs to balance the needs of each player at the table & short rest classes scale in problematic ways compared to long rest classes as rests increase while the inverse is not true as rests decrease due to powerful class abilities*. You've highlighted one of o5e's biggest flaws though by pointing at a problem and just saying don't do anything about or care about it, wotc loves to say that the overly simplified collection of one off edge cases known as 5e is structured that way to make it easy to make changes to but blithely ignores all of the ways the system is structured to fight the very thought while blaming the gm who attempts reshaping that spaghetti code of a ruleset.

 

[iserith]

Maybe you aren't supposed to? Having a short rest between combats seems to be the natural way that they are supposed to be used. There is nothing wrong with doom clocks, but I don't think constant doom clocks is the intended form of play.

The two different types of adventures - event-based and location-based - both have time pressure built in. Event-based adventures have the villain's timeline. Fail to stop the villain's plans and bad things happen. Location-based adventures can have the risk of random encounters. This is discussed and recommended in the DMG. As such, this seems like the intended form of play to me.

Contrary to the belief of some, however, "doom clocks" can always be made to fit "narratively." Being a game of make-believe, the narrative is quite malleable in that way - you can just make it up! If the DM doesn't want to, it hardly seems appropriate to blame WotC for an undesirable result that comes up by not playing in the way that is intended.

 

[Raduin711]

d&d is not a board/card game like gloomhaven munchkin or whatever,

I'm 40 years old, and I've been playing D&D since I was in my teens. I know what D&D is.

the GM needs to balance the needs of each player at the table & short rest classes scale in problematic ways compared to long rest classes as rests increase while the inverse is not true as rests decrease due to powerful class abilities*.

My point is that maybe the problem isn't really a problem. You are supposed to be able to take frequent short rests. Classes that benefit from short rests are going to benefit from more frequent short rests... that's all part of the class design.

Some classes benefit more during some periods of the game than others. This is what is usually referred to as the spotlight. The Bard does well at information gathering, carousing and the like. Druids do better in a natural setting than a city. Short-rest classes are going to see their abilities refreshed more often, while long-rest classes have to be choosy about when they want to use them, because of the restrictions on long rests. This is all baked into the class designs, I don't see how this is a problem.

You've highlighted one of o5e's biggest flaws though by pointing at a problem and just saying don't do anything about or care about it, wotc loves to say that the overly simplified collection of one off edge cases known as 5e is structured that way to make it easy to make changes to but blithely ignores all of the ways the system is structured to fight the very thought while blaming the gm who attempts reshaping that spaghetti code of a ruleset.

Mmm... spaghetti.

 

[Mordhau]

My point is that maybe the problem isn't really a problem. You are supposed to be able to take frequent short rests. Classes that benefit from short rests are going to benefit from more frequent short rests... that's all part of the class design.

You're not supposed to be guaranteed a short rest after every combat however. If they wanted that, they would have kept them like 4e Encounter Powers.

Now it doesn't really matter if in practice the party get a short rest after nearly every combat*. The intended approach, isn't really affected by that - but it is affected if players know they are guaranteed (or practically guaranteed) a short rest after every combat.

*Well other than the fact that combats will be harder than intended and therefore take longer, but it seems to be a fairly rare table where that doesn't happen anyway.

 

[Raduin711]

The two different types of adventures - event-based and location-based - both have time pressure built in. Event-based adventures have the villain's timeline. Fail to stop the villain's plans and bad things happen. Location-based adventures can have the risk of random encounters. This is discussed and recommended in the DMG. As such, this seems like the intended form of play to me.

Contrary to the belief of some, however, "doom clocks" can always be made to fit "narratively." Being a game of make-believe, the narrative is quite malleable in that way - you can just make it up! If the DM doesn't want to, it hardly seems appropriate to blame WotC for an undesirable result that comes up by not playing in the way that is intended.

Sure, do as you please. All I am saying is that the DM who feels pressured or exhausted by this supposed "need" may want to reassess what it is that has them so worried. If the Warlock is a one-man fly-casting machine... what's the big deal? Sure, bye-bye climb checks, but your player chose this character, and this is one of a few things the character can do really well. I say stop begrudging the short resters and embrace them. The daily-resters will have their time to shine.

 

[iserith]

Sure, do as you please. All I am saying is that the DM who feels pressured or exhausted by this supposed "need" may want to reassess what it is that has them so worried. If the Warlock is a one-man fly-casting machine... what's the big deal? Sure, bye-bye climb checks, but your player chose this character, and this is one of a few things the character can do really well. I say stop begrudging the short resters and embrace them. The daily-resters will have their time to shine.

I agree. My position is basically that, if one doesn't have the intended time pressures built into the adventure, one really can't complain when the PCs rest frequently! That's the smart play. It would be frankly weird if the players didn't make that choice under those conditions.

 

[clearstream]

I agree. My position is basically that, if one doesn't have the intended time pressures built into the adventure, one really can't complain when the PCs rest frequently! That's the smart play. It would be frankly weird if the players didn't make that choice under those conditions.

D&D time is essentially measured in events, so I agree that one can make the pressure whatever one wants.

I personally make short rests a day and long rests three days because on the scale of an open open-world campaign it let's me represent the world in a way I find reasonable. For example I have extreme seasons that I want to matter, and long journeys that I don't want to synch with massive amounts of casting. That sort of thing.

I find it creates useful narrative space to slow the recovery cadence relative to calendar time. That said, when the party is involved in lengthy dungeoneering the extended durations can sometimes feel forced, because resource-taxing events are close together calendar-wise.

 

[HammerMan]

While you are correct, rules-as-written, a great many GMs place a limit on how many short rests you can take - the most common I've seen is that you can take a maximum of 2 short rests between long rests.

I had not heard that idea... it seems to hit the weaker classes the hardest. I will admit we rarely take more then 3 short rests but when we do it is because our SR characters need it.