D&D 5E (2024) Limiting Short Rests to 2x/day

[Krachek]

M’y wish rule would be:
a short rest is a rest of 5 to 60 minutes that you can take a couple of time during the day. The DM will use the current conditions of the adventure to evaluate the time and the availability of the short rest.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Attrition and Dungeon Crawling are things in D&D.

And they should stop.

And it's not like Dungeon Crawling required grinding down. Just... crawl in the dungeon.

 

[Vaalingrade]

To be fair, people didn't like 4e because all class powers were combat powers, not because of 5 minute short rests.

Am I the only one who got a PH with Utility Powers in it?

 

[Mistwell]

5e is eventually going to have to accept that no one is going to do 8 encounters in a day for an in-person game that is usually played on a weekly basis and fix its design to account for that.

A decade of not fixing that says maybe they won't ever have to accept that?

 

[DEFCON 1]

I do 10-minute short rests as often as the party wishes to.

But that's just my preference. More to the point though... it doesn't matter what WotC sets their rules as, because each and every DM should be making short rest however long or short they want-- RAW be damned. Change the rules. Make yourself happy. It doesn't matter what WotC puts in their book.

(And if by some chance you are a DM who for whatever reason is stuck running only Adventurer's League games and you don't like the rule for short rests WoTC ultimately puts forth-- unfortunately you are just part of that small sliver of the player base that isn't going to get what you want and you just have to deal with it. If you only play AL, that's just the issue that comes with doing so. And you either accept the length of the WotC-printed short rest as-is and work around it... or you find yourself a table of players outside of AL to run games for, and then you can make short rests whatever length you like.)

 

[Vaalingrade]

A decade of not fixing that says maybe they won't ever have to accept that?

They did fix it!

Then someone came along and knocked over all the blocks.

edit: Decade, not the whole history.

I mean eventually we're going to have a new edition no matter how much they protest and then D&D will be allowed to progress.

 

[Ringtail]

Baldur's Gate 3 has no day/night cycle, passage of time, etc.

It makes sense to limit it in that context, since you have no time pressure to limit their use. (Either from hours available in a day, or from an impending threat. Time mostly stands still in BG3.) Similarly this is why Long Rests require camp resources. (I speculate, since I am not a member of Larian Studios.)

So limiting them to 2 a day (or 4 a day, or whatever) feels a little arbitrary for table play. Why? I think as a player I might just find that a little annoying, the GM restricting something like that for an arbitrary reason. Short rests are meant to be taken, they are part of the encounter balance, hence why I support them being shorter, 10 minutes for example.

This is of course subjective, some parties rarely use them so this would change little.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The 5 minute short rest worked great in 4e. The 1 hour short rests in 5e cause inter party problems when everyone has different reasons to rest or not rest. If they designed classes around the assumption that short rest features come back every fight and went back to 5 minute rests, most of the pacing issues of 5e would disappear.

And it would be back to trying to use all your buttons as early as possible so you don't waste anything. Less than half an hour short rests would be a step back. Not forward.
I had rather shifted to only long rest recharges for class abilities and hp regeneration for short rests. And maybe some: during a short rest you can do X abilities (lile rememorizing a spell, identifying something etc.).

 

[Charlaquin]

5e is eventually going to have to accept that no one is going to do 8 encounters in a day for an in-person game that is usually played on a weekly basis and fix its design to account for that.

Hi, I’m no one, nice to meet you

 

[Vaalingrade]

Hi, I’m no one, nice to meet you

I heard what you did to that poor Cyclops.