D&D 5E Are Per Rest Resources a Hindrance?

[James Gasik]

So using four different abilities each combat is worse than using one over and over? That's a head scratcher for me, I have to admit.

 

[Bacon Bits]

The problem with "PB uses per day" is that it encourages PCs to nova and then rest - the 15 minute adventuring day. Though the current approach, where classes have a mix of approaches but the big casters are almost all per day is even worse - this encourages them to nova and then force a rest, which not only gives the 15min day but also enhances the imbalances between the classes.

Yes, the issue is that even with short rest recharge abilities it doesn't stop the nova or the five minute work day (5MWD). Even in 4e which explicitly had short rest abilities and generally weaker daily abilities, you still had the nova or 5MWD problem.

I've said it before: the solution to the rest schedule problem or the nova problem or the 5MWD problem is not to punish the players for resting all the time. It's not to make resting more difficult, or so inherently dangerous that the PCs de facto have no rest opportunity in a dungeon. The solution is to reward them for managing their resources better. Reward them for

You ever wonder why players send their characters into combat? Why they seek out dungeons? The reason is because that's where the treasure and experience is. The game needs to be similarly structured that the better you manage, the more you're rewarded. Players like to long rest because it returns them to 100% effectiveness and it's impossible to be more prepared than that. The game tells them to rest as much as possible. Well, we need to change that.

The trouble is that it's hard to do that. Here's some things I've thought about with this problem:

1. A benefit like extra experience and treasure don't really help because they're long term benefits tied to short term performance. You're just making the PCs progress through the game faster rather than providing real rewards. You haven't fixed anthing.

2. Rewarding the players with abilities that turn on or get better throughout the day is probably the best idea. Say that after you reach 50% of your daily XP budget, each PC gains the ability to, three times per combat, either add 1d6 to or subtract 1d6 from any attack roll, damage roll, check, or saving throw that anyone makes before the roll is made. When you long rest, this ability goes away again until you reach that 50% threshold again. You can't stack these dice, either. The big downsite here is that it makes Bards less appealing, since this is kind of what their class does.

3. There are a lot of situations where you're going to legitimately have one to two encounters per day. Travel days, boss encounter days, major set piece encounter days, etc. Combat lethality in these counters will also tend to be on the extreme ends of things. The game needs to support adventuring days with small encounter schedules.

4. Spells and items exist in the game to make resting easy. Yes, the DM can shadow ban them by nerfing what they actually do the same way they can shadow ban resting itself (i.e., in every dungeon ever the monsters are always 100% prepared as soon as the PCs rest). Firstly, that is not a universal style of D&D play. Lots of tables like to be able to rest when needed. Second, there are places where not being able to rest when needed is hard to justify. If you're exploring a 1,000 year old tomb that hasn't been disturbed, it's hard to justify why the monsters refill or reposition. You can invent something, but it strains credulity in some cases, and the game needs to work in all cases and with all play styles.

5. The whole idea of ability recovery and HP recovery being tied to the same rest schedule is at least somewhat questionable. It makes some sense, but it also kind of doesn't. The biggest benefit is simplicity, but it's likely that it's just too simple. A solution might be to give every PC a fixed amount of resources that recover when the DM says they recover. This is basically what 4e did, with varying degrees of success. In this way the DM can say, "Roll initiative, and everyone recovers all their abilities... it's boss time," or something similar.

6. Expanding ritual rules might also help fix the issue; so would dividing non-combat spell resouces from combat spell resources. Although going back to healing surges or making magical healing burn hit dice might be necessary then... Cure wounds on infinite cast is only okay when the character limits their own recovery. That also means HD should 100% recover overnight.

 

[Shardstone]

It's changed over the editions.:

• Back in 3.x certain classes had dramatically greater ability to nova (ie CoDzilla, glass cannon casters, etc). This resulted in those classses taking a much larger share of the spotlight to nova>rest>repeat & forced the GM to dole out treasure that would bring the other classes up or resort to MAD type situations with SR & such that woulds impact classes with reduced nova capability. The "god wizard"* & similar was a bit of an exception simply because they were more dependent on situations lining up to spell selection & the fact that them going nova meant that others in the party were the ones being dialed up to 11. All of that was tempered by the fact that recovery was a nontrivial hurdle that could be dangerous enough that the nova>rest>repeat pattern could trivially be interrupted in ways that resulted in the party falling behind where they were when they started the rest.
• In 5e resting is no longer a risk & it's gone from players saying "can we take a rest" to players saying "we take a rest or you can shoot the shaggy dog" even if they need to say that two or three times. The problem is exacerbated because the simplicity at all costs & magic items are "optional" makes item based spotlight adjusting tools much more difficult to deploy with a much lower bar for leveraging those items into new & bigger problems. You can top all of that off by having classes on two different rest cycle needs so the GM has a higher bar to address the problem and certain classes (ie warlock & others) are almost designed explicitly to abuse the 5mwd nova>short rest>repeat/nova>nova>short rest>repeat in ways that steal the ability for long rest classes to ever enjoy the fruits of their larger tank tied to long rests.

* A specific style of building that focused on buff/debuff & control spells in ways that made their allies awesome & nerfed the stew out of their foes

I'm just not sure I've ever been in a game with a player who has specifically told me their power fantasy is being the only person who is still strong after 6-8 encounters. I don't doubt that his crowd exists, but this seems like it would be a very niche crowd, and that this is a problem that really only effects that crowd.

If I'm playing a rogue, I'm assuming I'm doing other things during the adventuring day then trying to out DPS the druid by backstabbing 100 people over the course of the day. And even thought this is how the Champion Fighter is designed, I don't think many people play the Champion Fighter specifically because it can be a clutch character to have after 8 encounters in one day.

 

[Shardstone]

So using four different abilities each combat is worse than using one over and over? That's a head scratcher for me, I have to admit.

That's not what I'm saying, and is a very silly interpretation of what I was suggesting. I'm saying that we can keep ability diversity, but some abilities don't really need cooldowns. It feels almost like you purposefully misinterpreted my post to make it sound stupid?

 

[payn]

So using four different abilities each combat is worse than using one over and over? That's a head scratcher for me, I have to admit.

After constant rinse and repeat, it feels the same. Just takes longer for combat to be resolved to account for all the whizbangs.

 

[James Gasik]

That's not what I'm saying, and is a very silly interpretation of what I was suggesting. I'm saying that we can keep ability diversity, but some abilities don't really need cooldowns. It feels almost like you purposefully misinterpreted my post to make it sound stupid?

Uh, no. I was more replying to some of the other people who have replied to my post. Like UngeheuerLich who just replied with "yes".

​

 

[Bacon Bits]

I would really like to know what other DMs are finding so harmful about the "5 min workday." Even reading this thread, and others like it, I just don't see where it becomes a problem. Surely if you're running a lot of dungeons, then you're probably going to have 5-8 encounters in that dungeon regardless. And if you're running a city or wilderness adventure, being pushed to the brink by combat isn't something I would expect the entire time, or to be the only thing that has the players stressed. And, if your table really loves D&D combat and only plays it for that, I would think 5E's boring monster design to be the problem, and not the nature of the resource game.

The 5MWD makes encounter design push class design off the rails.

If the Wizard and Paladin use 95% of their spells in one encounter, they're using much more resources than the Fighter or Warlock is even capable of. That means the people playing the Fighter and Warlock feel like they're totally unnecessary. It means the DM can design a super deadly encounter that challenges the Wizard and Paladin but completely bowls the Fighter and Warlock over, or they can make encounters that are supposed to consume the amount of resources that the designers expect an encounter to consume.

If the PCs can reliably rest -- and it should be pretty clear from the spells in the PHB that the game designers do want the PCs to be able to reliably rest when they choose to -- then the only drawback to playing like this is whatever consequences the DM can imagine. Because the mechanics reward the players when they do this. The game rewards the PCs for long resting after every encounter because it always returns them to maximum effectiveness. There is no benefit in the game's mechanics to continuing on to the next encounter instead of stopping to rest.

It's like the weapon reload button in a first person shooter. There's no reason not to do a tactical reload, so players just do it all the time. Or the save game button. There's no reason not to save scum in X-COM. There's no reason in most CRPGs not to rest after every encounter and save before every encounter.

You can add penalties, like lost ammo or limited saves or save points, or checkpoints, etc. But it's better to reward the players than punish them. So the game should probably invent ways to reward the players for playing correctly rather than constantly punishing them for whatever exploit they imagine.

 

[James Gasik]

You know there is a flipside to this as well. I've played in quite a few home games so far where there is no guarantee of X encounters per day, and the DM's adjust to this by having 1-3 tougher encounters, with the "marquee" battle being extra difficult.

Imagine being a spellcaster and not only are you expected to nova, there's not enough rounds of combat to use half your spell slots!

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm just not sure I've ever been in a game with a player who has specifically told me their power fantasy is being the only person who is still strong after 6-8 encounters. I don't doubt that his crowd exists, but this seems like it would be a very niche crowd, and that this is a problem that really only effects that crowd.

If I'm playing a rogue, I'm assuming I'm doing other things during the adventuring day then trying to out DPS the druid by backstabbing 100 people over the course of the day. And even thought this is how the Champion Fighter is designed, I don't think many people play the Champion Fighter specifically because it can be a clutch character to have after 8 encounters in one day.

Change it from that extreme to being the person who can pull a rabbit out of their hat & save the day by reversing an impending TPK when things go sideways or being the person who can allow everyone else to run at 120%through the entire day & it's not so hard to envisage to the point that it's even a high demand role in MMOs with those players generally being able to easily find their way into groups ecstatic to have them. Those are the roles stolen by the way 5e incentivizes the 5mwd.

If you have players with long rest classes at a table being played by players not willing to be the killjoy saying no to the short rest nova classes regularly ending the adventuring day with unused long rest resources you have a table with players impacted by that loss. Worse is the fact that those players are setup with a catch 22 where they either "waste" resources as it's sometimes described or stand up as the bad cop fun police to solve the problem that the system itself creates by trivializing resting & being tuned towards an extreme 6-8 encounters

 

[delericho]

I've said it before: the solution to the rest schedule problem or the nova problem or the 5MWD problem is not to punish the players for resting all the time. It's not to make resting more difficult, or so inherently dangerous that the PCs de facto have no rest opportunity in a dungeon. The solution is to reward them for managing their resources better.

True. As I've said before, and no doubt will say again, what is ideally wanted is to put in place something to encourage players to go for "one encounter more" - maybe XP rewards increase with each encounter in the day, or maybe some powers only become available after some encounters, or something.

Ideally, what's wanted is a tension between "if we rest, we regain this", and "if we press on, we gain that". As long as this and that are roughly equal in value, you then get an interesting choice for players to make.