I mean, absolutely, what I'm proposing is about making recovery much more expensive than it is in a normal D&D game. The number one thing that needs to be tossed, what really is the core problem with D&D-style attrition, is the idea that sleeping it off restores all your magic.
At its core, magic should be about the transformation of acquirable resources into desired effects. Making healing potions requires reagents. A wand of fireballs costs reagents. Deific power requires sacrifices and tithes.
The amount of innate magic that caster character has, that bubbles up in them from some internal mana generator, and that regenerates like health, should be relatively small. No character should be recharging multiple 5th level spell slots in effect every single day. The point of a caster character should be to take the earned resources from adventuring them and converting them into the effects the party needs.
Ah, OK. Now I get you.
It doesn't have to be disciplined. Believe me, disciplined play at my table does not work.
Good to hear!
It's simply this. A mage doesn't have 1 fireball a day. Instead, the mage used several hundred gp of their last haul to make a wand with 5 charges of fireball. If they choose to trivialize the first five encounters they face with 5 fireballs, that's great, but they probably haven't earned enough money back to rebuild that wand. Now they're going to walk into the rest of the dungeon without the backup of a fireball. Resting 24 hours won't change that. If they want fireball, they have to earn enough money to pay for it.
And if you don't want to pay money for your special powers, be a fighter! Of course, see how long you last without fireballs, or haste spells or stoneskins or, you know, anyone to cure you.
Were I to implement this it'd solve any martial-caster imbalance issues in my game in a heartbeat: nobody would play a caster.
If the dungeon generates 5,000 g.p. each in treasure and the Fighters and Thieves each get to keep all of their share while the Clerics and Mages have to plow 3,000 of it back in along the way just to keep themselves going, that ain't gonna fly.
And if the party as a whole foots the bills to keep the casters going then nothing changes except there's a big reduction in the overall amount of treasure to divide at the end of the adventure, which isn't - I don't think - the problem you're trying to solve here.
This is my core argument. Everything that people complain about in terms of encounters per day, 5 minute work days, class balance between casters and noncasters, between short rest and long rest characters in 5e, etc., all derives from the fact that recharging abilities is cost-free.
I'm not sold on this premise. That said, what was once a major in-game cost of recharging abilities (where such includes hit points) has been eroded significantly in 4e-5e: time. You get all your h.p. back overnight and even if you don't, there's way more healing available than once was the case.
Sure the casters might get all their spells back overnight but if the Fighter's still only at 6 h.p. out of 40 you're not going anywhere until she's cured up, which in theory should put a nice dent in your healer's spells for today. Can you afford to rest another day to refill the healer?
When the core gameplay becomes "spend resources to adventure to acquire more resources", the entire game engine suddenly locks into place,
In a way they already do that when buying or claiming magic items that make them better at what they do; this puts that model far more up-front and, as I noted earlier, risks making the whole thing become very treadmill-y. It also presupposes you-as-DM are always going to seed enough treasure into each adventure to make this model viable.
AND the verisimilitude of the world increases, as a bonus.
Meh - not sure about this.
What would increase, in my game anyway, is casters' vulnerability if all their "spells" are in fact stored in devices that are at risk of being destroyed with some bad luck. And
Dispel Magic just became the go-to means of ruining a caster's week (I still have it as area-effect rather than targeted); it couldn't affect a caster's available-to-cast slots in any edition but if it can hammer their device-stored spells, they're hosed.
