D&D 5E When do you short rest?

[Clint_L]

I allow them when it makes narrative sense, and I really like the OP's Die Hard example. Story-wise, an hour long break doesn't usually make sense, and I don't see any particular reason the short rest needs a timer attached, except to account for some spell effects.

So mostly, it's probably 5-10 minutes. Enough time to do some quick first aid, catch your breath, have a drink, go pee, whatever.

In story terms, what I am deciding as a DM is whether or not the current ticking clock has space for the party to take a little break, or whether it needs to be clear to the players that if they stop for a breather, there will be Consequences.

 

[Sorinth]

I will say that I get the impression that a lot of people who complain about resting would really benefit from the Epic Heroism resting variant but ignore it. It's a shame they didn't present the resting variants as being pick and choose the SR resting time and LR resting time independently because I think we would have seen more uptick in people using the 5min SR.

 

[James Gasik]

I use 10 minute short rests but limit characters to 2 per 24 hours, which has worked out well so far.

 

[Distracted DM]

I use 10 minute short rests but limit characters to 2 per 24 hours, which has worked out well so far.

Since playing BG3 Ive thought that if you put a limit on short rests, 2 or 3 per day, people would use them more whether it's an hour or 10 min or whatever.

When I worked at a job with limited PTO we always used it up... When I worked at a law firm with unlimited PTO I took off less time than I did in the finite PTO position.

It's a flawed comparison but the point stands: Putting a limit on something makes it more valuable- you'd better use it!

 

[TwoSix]

Random encounters during wilderness travel, mainly. Or while exploring sites with not much time urgency or that are not heavily populated.

 

[el-remmen]

We still currently use 1 hour short rests and like someone else said above, I find they use them about once or twice per adventuring day, sometimes 3 times. Never have I seen 4. Plenty of times it can also be 0, of course.

Whether a short rest is even possible is something the players usually discuss at length given the environment and/or time constraints.

When we started our most recent campaign, I offered the players the option of 10 minute short rest but 24 hour Long Rest. They chose to keep the rule as is.

In my VF5E homebrew project I've made short rests 20 minutes long. Seems like a reasonable rest and recoup amount of time and is 2 rolls for wandering monsters in a wilderness or dungeon environment.

 

[Charlaquin]

The default 5e short rest time is one hour. As a player in 5e games I can't remember the last time we stopped for a short rest. Anytime there is stuff ongoing taking a one hour siesta after a fight always seems like a bad idea, let alone doing it multiple times a day. Either stuff will likely come at us while we are sitting around for an hour, or we really don't want to give bad guys an hour to get away or continue with their plots that we are trying to counter.

It’s for dungeon delving, when your only real time pressure is wandering monsters and you have about a 1/6 chance of a wandering monster encounter per 10 minutes, meaning the short rest is just long enough that the average number of such random encounters to interrupt it is exactly 1. Remember, the adventures people were given to playtest the new rules with were Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread. A lot of seemingly strange design decisions in 5e make a lot more sense when taken in the context of an old-school dungeon crawl or hex crawl.

I also really don't get the narrative they are going for with an hour rest. In 4e it was just a five minute breather or so and that made sense to me narratively. Essentially when there would be a scene cut in an action movie after a fight that was the short rest. John McClane in Die Hard fighting bad guys, winning then taking a breather to catch his breath and pull glass out of his feet before picking up his gun and going after more bad guys in the huge multi-level building. An hour long rest between fights in a single day does not seem to fit most narratives that I can think of.

In the D&D Next playtest, short rests started out as 5 minutes, and the folks responding to the surveys (mainly DMs) complained that they didn’t like the players being able reliably count on getting a short rest after every encounter. They wanted taking a short rest to be a risky decision you were never totally sure you’d be able to finish, and WotC obliged.

Narratively what’s supposed to be happening during that time is that the PCs are cleaning and binding their wounds, which might require doffing their armor to do, and almost certainly requires first-aid supplies of some kind. In fact, in the D&D Next playtest, the rule that ended up becoming the “healer’s kit dependency” optional rule in the DMG was a built-in part of how short rests worked. You needed to expend a use of a healer’s kit to be able to spend hit dice and heal during a short rest. I’m not really sure why this got taken out, I remember it being fairly well-liked on the WotC forums. Though, it wouldn’t be the first time I misremembered details from that long ago. Maybe there were enough people who felt the risk of waiting around for an hour was enough and short tests didn’t need to cost a limited resource on top of that.

When I DM 5e I go with the 14 DMG option of the shorter time period short rest but the games I play in go with the default one hour and it is very rare for an hour window to pop up between fights. Most times we have an opportunity for a secure hour rest after a fight it is because we don't expect anything else that day (travelling wandering monster, after an unexpected fight like getting ambushed while doing other stuff, etc.) and so short versus long rest does not really matter.

What are the narrative situations you have found that a short rest works for you? When does it fit in naturally in your games?

Again, it’s by design that it never quite fits. Under the old-school assumption of a 1/6 chance of a wandering monster every 10 minutes in the dungeon, you have about a 1/3 chance of making it through a short rest uninterrupted. So, it’s never a safe bet, and you really only risk trying to take one when you really need it, or when you can take precautions to mitigate the risk of a random encounter, such as a room with only one entrance that you can barricade while you rest, or someone in the party has rope trick prepared (rope trick actually becomes really good if you follow these assumptions, in fact).

 

[Charlaquin]

Since playing BG3 Ive thought that if you put a limit on short rests, 2 or 3 per day, people would use them more whether it's an hour or 10 min or whatever.

When I worked at a job with limited PTO we always used it up... When I worked at a law firm with unlimited PTO I took off less time than I did in the finite PTO position.

It's a flawed comparison but the point stands: Putting a limit on something makes it more valuable- you'd better use it!

I see this all the time while working with kids too. If there’s another kid waiting for a turn at whatever they’re doing, they always slow down and take longer to finish, because the presence of someone else who wants to do it after them makes them subconsciously aware that the time spent doing it now has value.

 

[Chaltab]

Again, it’s by design that it never quite fits. Under the old-school assumption of a 1/6 chance of a wandering monster every 10 minutes in the dungeon, you have about a 1/3 chance of making it through a short rest uninterrupted. So, it’s never a safe bet, and you really only risk trying to take one when you really need it, or when you can take precautions to mitigate the risk of a random encounter, such as a room with only one entrance that you can barricade while you rest, or someone in the party has rope trick prepared (rope trick actually becomes really good if you follow these assumptions, in fact).

But that becomes a problem when some classes rely on short rests for their baseline. Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks are particularly shortchanged if you only take long rests.

 

[jasper]

every sunday between 2 and 4 some times on saturday.