good luck with that, I fail to see the point, esp. with the 'between different scenarios'. In one campaign I would expect consistency
In case you truly haven't got the point, lemme explain.
Again.
Say one adventure has you clear out a goblin cave. You move from one dungeon room to the next. Each fight or encounter takes place a few minutes after the last one, tops. If you run from room to room, encounters can be separated by as little as one combat round, or not at all.
In order for long rest classes to not be utterly irrelevant, the rules pretty much steer you into fighting for 15 minutes and then calling it a day. (I mean that literally, do google "the 15 minute adventuring day")
So we drop that useless and senseless rule and instead say, if you take a breather, say pausing five minutes without anything happening, that counts as a long rest.
And balance between characters is restored without needlessly having to come up with stupid reasons the goblins just sit on their hands for 23,5 hours.
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Say the next adventure takes the heroes across a big frikkin desert. You definitely don't want or need a random monster popping up every 2 minutes or so. Instead, what you want is several days of nothingness interpunctuated by the occasional encounter.
In order for long rest classes to not utterly dominate (since going nova is the obvious norm when the next encounter takes place three days from now), we also drop the useless and senseless rule "you gain back all your powers after sleeping for one night".
Instead we say, you only gain the benefits of a long rest if you sleep for a night at an oasis or other safe haven. Which obviously is something the adventure controls access to.
And balance between characters is restored.
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Point is: the default assumption, which partly is "sleeping for the night counts as a long rest" but more importantly is "long rest works the same all the time", works against adventure writers. It is a bad rule that makes writers avoid some stories for no reason.
Don't argue spells must be replenished by sleeping because that's "realistic". It's magic. There's zero reason to shackle yourself to "realism" (rolls eyes) for this particular rule when just about everything else isn't.
Rests need to happen at the speed of plot, just as everything else. Saying this is the job of the most core of the core rulebooks: the Player's Handbook.
It should specifically and explicitly say that rests happen when the DM says they do. You can ask what you need to do to achieve a rest, but you should expect the answer to be tailored towards the specific adventure you're currently having. There is no default assumption. Every single adventure should adopt the habit of telling the DM up-front, just as you tell the DM the intended level range of the party and such.
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Look, I might come on strong, but I'm basically explaining to myself and everybody else just how far the game needs to go to break the current expectations and finally make long and short rests work.
It's either that or drop the dichotomy.
Either way, please remember this issue doesn't make my list of top three things I want 6E to do.
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