D&D General The "Ease of Long Rests" as a metric for describing campaigns / DM styles?

[tetrasodium]

I assume you mean, by "explosive recovery", the fact that in 5e you regain everything on a long rest, and even a short rest can get you a lot. As opposed to previous editions where, essentially, there were no short rests and a long rest gave you even less HP than a 5e short rest (but still gave you all your slots back, at least).

Yup

I’m curious about what you mean in the second half though. That people who answered 4/5 are basically not playing 5e?

Not at all, but writing through melatonin right now. There's nothing wrong with homebrew changes, just that a poll like this gets more benefit from the details behind why and how those changes are made than numbers go up on a poll.

 

[greymist]

I changed my vote from 4 to 5 as I have made resource recovery from resting more difficult in my game.

PCs now take a 10 minute Breather every hour - they have the option of expending a single HD to heal.

Short rests are unchanged, 1 hour, expend HD at will.

Sleeping Rough: same amount of time as a long rest but only half of expended spell slots are recovered; only half of lost HP are recovered; DC 10 CON to recover 1 level of exhaustion; DC 12 CON to recover half expended HD.

Full Long Rest: 2 consecutive nights in a safe haven; equivalent to Long Rest RAW.

We just started using these rules last session, so I can’t say of they will work as planned, yet.

 

[Faxfire683]

I've thought a lot about this question too and it really illustrates how you can modify the 5e system to accommodate many different approaches. In the base game, my allowance of long rests has normally been based on pacing and somewhat on the adventure if it's prewritten. For instance, the Dragonlance adventure a few years back involved one particularly punishing sequence of encounters toward the beginning that I also augmented with an option for them to basically stay up all night and raid an enemy camp. The party was completely spent in these encounters that in-game time (not real time) amounted to about 24 hours straight. It was fun! But not what I do for my city-based Ptolus campaign.

There are several supplements and flavors of 5e that also play with these mechanics, much as related above:

you can't take a long rest outside the Keep on the Borderlands, enforcing a gameplay loop of going out into the wilderness to explore and get into mischief, and then coming home for the night and interacting with the NPCs there.

Dungeons of Drakkenheim comes to mind, which restricts long rests within the titular city, enforcing a degree of planning and a delve-like structure on expeditions into it. Another is Adventures in Middle Earth (AIME) and the Lord of the Rings 5e, along with the AIME-derived Uncharted Journeys from Cubicle7. All of these latter ones restrict long rests to locations considered safe and secure, like a town, or perhaps a friendly NPC's home (like Elrond's Last Homely House). This definitely makes journeys lasting weeks feel like they have higher stakes.

 

[Charlaquin]

What a lovely bell curve the poll results are forming (at time of posting)!

 

[DrJawaPhD]

I voted 3 in the middle because in games I run, longresting without being interrupted is typically automatic, but the quest structure is frequently (though not always) set up where excessive longresting would cause the mission to fail (NPC to save dies, NPC to capture gets away, etc)

I generally balance combat encounters around assuming the party has all their resources, and structure things around having 0-2 combats per day. So longresting ends up being driven more often by the questing day being over rather than players caring about resting for recovering resources

 

[Horwath]

Regarding long rests. Our games start each level at max, and allow one long rest per level. Each player can choose when to take the long rest benefit for their own character. All other rests are short rests.

Officially, from levels 5 to 8, it takes 15 encounters to reach the next level. Thus one long rest per level keeps the mechanical balance between caster classes and atwill noncaster classes. Thus around the ninth encounter is a good time to take the long rest, or better yet hold on for a few more short rests if possible.

Rather than track xp, track the number of encounters to reach the next level.

why bother to play any caster except warlock this way?
that could be 15 to 1 ratio of Short vs Long rests.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I voted 1. We rarely have multiple combat encounters per day, and often have some overland travel. In our D&D 5 Eberron campaign, we regularly were off on lightning rail or airship and travel for a while (a lot less then if we would be on foot or horse) providing easy opportunity for resting, and the destinations usually weren't long dungeon delves with countless of monsters that could replenish every day, or princesses being sacrificed on some altar if we don't get there in time.

In my 4E Knights of the Silver Dawn campaign, I also had only a few encounters per day, with travel between locations. At some point the group even got an airship they could use for safe travel, but even without, I was never fond of doing random encounters, nor of long dungeon delves. I really prefer to have more story elements in my game then just rushing from combat to combat. (But when I get to combat, I like tactical depth.)
EDIT: However, since it's 4E, and it works with any length of adventuring day, I tended to pile up on enemies. Still, the players always managed, so I guess it was still easy. Or they're that good.

In our Pathfinder game, we're hexcrawling the world, and while there are random encounters, there is rarely more than one per hex, and you always end up taking Pathfinders version of a long rest.

 

[Charlaquin]

Regarding long rests. Our games start each level at max, and allow one long rest per level. Each player can choose when to take the long rest benefit for their own character. All other rests are short rests.

Officially, from levels 5 to 8, it takes 15 encounters to reach the next level. Thus one long rest per level keeps the mechanical balance between caster classes and atwill noncaster classes. Thus around the ninth encounter is a good time to take the long rest, or better yet hold on for a few more short rests if possible.

Rather than track xp, track the number of encounters to reach the next level.

Interesting in concept, though 15 feels like a high number of encounters to me. By XP, most levels should take 10-12 Medium or Hard encounters.

 

[jayoungr]

I rated my campaign(s) at level 2. I regularly DM for two different groups, both of whom take Leomund's tiny hut as soon as they can. I can throw a few obstacles in their way, but messing with long rests gets a lot harder after they have that spell.

 

[Cergorach]

It depends, so I gave it a 3. We're currently playing in Undermountain, and certain rooms are relatively safe, but there's still a change for wandering monsters (for which I throw), it also depends on how much they cleared out. Sometimes they do backtrack all the way to the Yawning Portal Inn when they feel unsafe...

In other cases Long Rests are very easy as no one is looking for them and they are resting in a save Inn in a save town. Other times it's extremely difficult, when they are in monster invested regions that they haven't cleared or they are closely pursued.