D&D 5E The Resting Mechanics - What Works Best?

[Lanefan]

See what happened was... random encounters and wilderness events.

We got lucky coming back from a dungeon and lost more people camping and getting back to town because we were stuck at low HP for a long time in game time.

So we noped out of anything when anyone was at half resources. And if we thought we couldn't make in back in a full week, we refused a quest.

Yikes. Sounds like the DM didn't play up the "adventuring is high-risk as well as high-reward" piece enough before puck drop.

Although our fighter was a bit extra. He complained if the rewards didn't cover double the potion costs.

Now this I can get behind. If I'm not gonna get rich doing this then why am I doing it?

To get us to move forward, the DM had to litter the place with dead adventurers with potions and scrolls on them.

"You round a corner. In front of you is a corpse, which should be no surprise as you left it here twelve days ago. It's Borthwick - remember - the guy you hired as your front-liner to replace the dearly-departed Kathra, who then got killed off by the Ogres? Anyway, it appears his two scrolls and his potion are still hanging from his belt - seems no-one else has been by to loot him yet..."

 

[clearstream]

That is an interesting interpretation.

It amounts to saying an "adventuring day" is the time between long rests, which by design relate to an expectation about encounters. The solution I use (explained upthread) doesn't enforce the number of encounters, but creates enough narrative space to make them likely.

IME combining this idea with the version of gritty realism, you might typically finish an "adventuring day" in roughly a week or so, with any downtime probably long in calendar time. This seems like you could also allow more than 2 short rests per long rest without any issues.

The ratio I use is short = 1 day, long = 3 days. I tried Gritty Realism's week, but it over-favours short-rest classes.

But if you are doing a dungeon crawl / infiltration, does the idea breakdown? It seems like it would work well with travel, though.

You are right that it's hard to find a single rest rule that works well for both contexts. I found in ToA, which locks the party into the dungeon, that 3-days did feel too long. In my own dungeon design I typically use far smaller dungeons, or I don't lock the party in so it feels more reasonable as a series of visits. For ToA, we ended up with roughly 2-day long rests feeling reasonable. That said, in my view the Tomb is very poorly designed and the worthwhile dungeon elements are no more than a third of what is there. It's repetitive and indulges some quite facile whimsy. The first part of ToA - the port and subsequent hexploration - is excellent.

 

[Oofta]

City-based or political games don't use field resources the same way, though, in that any physical supplies can be restocked on a whim and the chances of significant combat are generally very low (but can be deadly if-when they arise).

Which means that those types of games can't try for attrition as an overarching challenge; instead you have to, in effect, make frustration and red herrings become the biggest challenge, and build the adventure around intrigue and investigation rather than combat.

You can't have it both ways. Either attrition in the field is a thing and you have to readjust your city adventures or there's no attrition which makes the city adventures work fine but you then have to readjust the field adventures.

The easier adjustment to make IMO is to the city adventures.

I suspect you're an outlier on the relevance of physical supply attrition mattering. In all my decades of playing I don't remember ever tracking things to a level where it mattered. Torches don't matter if someone can cast the light cantrip or you get access to continual flame. In theory you could run out of food or arrows but people just buy enough extra that it doesn't matter unless you can't resupply food for several weeks on end. People should be more worried about water supplies than anything in many environments but people rarely do.

Frustration and red herrings can be part of any session I run, it's not limited to urban settings. The attrition I assume is in abilities that recharge such as spells, HD and so on.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I suspect you're an outlier on the relevance of physical supply attrition mattering. In all my decades of playing I don't remember ever tracking things to a level where it mattered. Torches don't matter if someone can cast the light cantrip or you get access to continual flame. In theory you could run out of food or arrows but people just buy enough extra that it doesn't matter unless you can't resupply food for several weeks on end. People should be more worried about water supplies than anything in many environments but people rarely do.

Probably an outlier, but then so am I. Not just about features, but also...

I meticulously track oil, torches, food, and water and make certain my players do as well, including for mounts and pets. Such things make the exploration pillar a bit more interesting IMO, especially when the party gets further away from civilization. We've had times when the party needed 2 or 3 mules to carry all the rations, barrels, and waterskins. It makes the group feel more they are explorers when they have to be concerned about the manticore targeting their pack animals, and leaving them stranding with hundreds of pounds of food they either have to find another way or leave behind if a pack animal is killed.

It is one of the reasons why we moved light, dancing lights, and such cantrips to 1st level spells. No more infinite freebies. True, Continual Flame is still an issue, but has a mildly significant cost (the 50 gp equals 500 pints of oil or enough for 8 hours a day for over a year).

Goodberry is an 8-hour duration, not 24-hour, and each berry counts as a half-ration of food OR water, meaning a medium-size creature would need 4 of them for full water and food, instead of just 1. Each berry still restores 1 hp.

I know for most groups tracking such mundane things isn't a big part (if any) of the game, but in tiers 1 and 2 anyway it can be significant depending on the campaign style.

 

[Oofta]

Probably an outlier, but then so am I. Not just about features, but also...

I meticulously track oil, torches, food, and water and make certain my players do as well, including for mounts and pets. Such things make the exploration pillar a bit more interesting IMO, especially when the party gets further away from civilization. We've had times when the party needed 2 or 3 mules to carry all the rations, barrels, and waterskins. It makes the group feel more they are explorers when they have to be concerned about the manticore targeting their pack animals, and leaving them stranding with hundreds of pounds of food they either have to find another way or leave behind if a pack animal is killed.

It is one of the reasons why we moved light, dancing lights, and such cantrips to 1st level spells. No more infinite freebies. True, Continual Flame is still an issue, but has a mildly significant cost (the 50 gp equals 500 pints of oil or enough for 8 hours a day for over a year).

Goodberry is an 8-hour duration, not 24-hour, and each berry counts as a half-ration of food OR water, meaning a medium-size creature would need 4 of them for full water and food, instead of just 1. Each berry still restores 1 hp.

I know for most groups tracking such mundane things isn't a big part (if any) of the game, but in tiers 1 and 2 anyway it can be significant depending on the campaign style.

You're definitely part of an elite few in my experience then. In the few cases where we cared about food at all, you can carry a lot of lembas bread/pemmican/iron rations at 2 pounds per day's worth of rations. That and we simply paid a bit of additional time travelling doing foraging as we went. Add in the occasional owlbear stew and it was never an issue. I don't think we ever cared about water unless we were in the desert.

In any case, assuming you don't houserule things like you have, tracking physical resources is hardly ever worth the overhead.

EDIT: I also don't see how it matters for purposes of resting either. It doesn't matter if you get a long rest every night, if you have to bring a month's worth of supplies you eat the same amount no matter how often you rest so that's part of my confusion.

 

[DND_Reborn]

In any case, assuming you don't houserule things like you have, tracking physical resources is hardly ever worth the overhead.

Very true. The cantrips, Goodberry, and Create Water basically make tracking such things unnecessary for most groups. So, unless you have a group without such spells, and you are frequently in an area where you can't easily resupply, there's no point in tracking such things.

EDIT: I also don't see how it matters for purposes of resting either. It doesn't matter if you get a long rest every night, if you have to bring a month's worth of supplies you eat the same amount no matter how often you rest so that's part of my confusion.

Oh, sorry, I was just chiming in on a different front of the attrition issue. You mentioned Light spells and not tracking torches, so I explained more in depth on that sort of resource management.

 

[Oofta]

Very true. The cantrips, Goodberry, and Create Water basically make tracking such things unnecessary for most groups. So, unless you have a group without such spells, and you are frequently in an area where you can't easily resupply, there's no point in tracking such things.


Oh, sorry, I was just chiming in on a different front of the attrition issue. You mentioned Light spells and not tracking torches, so I explained more in depth on that sort of resource management.

Not a problem, tangents happen all the time.

 

[overgeeked]

Gritty also has the drawback of having those more reliant on hit points to naturally be cowardly. If it takes too long to recover, warrior types will naturally became over cautious as they put themselves in more danger. The natural consequences is characters being more cowardly, refuse requests without heavy incentives or reward, or eschew it all for a death wish personify.

So it gets players to have their characters behave in more in-world appropriate ways. Sounds like a feature not a bug.

Many of us play these games so long we forget dungeon crawling and adventuring are stupid occupations normal folk won't do even when desperate.

Sounds like Gritty Realism is a great reminder then.

 

[overgeeked]

In thinking more about this, I might just bring back AD&D's resting mechanics. All resources recharge with an 8-hour rest (RAW) except hit points (house rule). Those you regain at 1/day of rest out in the wilds or dungeons or 3/day of rest in civilization. It seems to hit all the right buttons. PCs can just keep pushing ahead if they want, but it costs them resources (potions, spells, etc) to heal to full (or near it). But it also causes the PCs to behave a bit more like real people in really dangerous situations instead of unkillable, infinitely regenerating superheroes.

 

[Guest 7034872]

In thinking more about this, I might just bring back AD&D's resting mechanics. All resources recharge with an 8-hour rest (RAW) except hit points (house rule). Those you regain at 1/day of rest out in the wilds or dungeons or 3/day of rest in civilization. It seems to hit all the right buttons. PCs can just keep pushing ahead if they want, but it costs them resources (potions, spells, etc) to heal to full (or near it). But it also causes the PCs to behave a bit more like real people in really dangerous situations instead of unkillable, infinitely regenerating superheroes.

I'm kind of leaning this way, too. I'm not settled on it, of course, but I'm leaning this way. I've long been privately dissatisfied with characters regaining all HP from a single rest; it feels too much like Call of Duty to me, which I never enjoyed.

In my current thinking, if players want their characters to heal quickly, there's magic for that. If they want or need them to heal naturally, they'd better find someplace safe and prepare to hole up for a while.