I’ve only recently begun learning about 2024 and am not an expert in it yet. I noticed that the Gritty Realism rest rules from 2014 are missing from 2024, but I had not yet come across what you’re referring to about the rest rules. I need to go check that out more deeply.
Between this and customizing monsters, I kind of expect one of the follow-up publications to include some of these options and gameplay dials for game customization.
They kind of cut to the chase in 5e by making it even faster. Which is fine, it streamlines gameplay. Most people don’t care to do the slot-by-slot accounting of the 1st day of rest, and were probably hand-waving it anyway.
And how many people made use of the Fix menu option in their SSI D&D computer games? It automated casting all the healing spells, resting again, memorizing, casting them all again, repeat until the party was fully healed. The calendar advanced according to standard 1e rules, but that never mattered. Healing all overnight in a long rest definitely harkens back to that style of play.
Thanks for taking us down memory lane! This is great stuff.
It’s very interesting to see the trajectory of healing rates across editions.
All in all, I think we can say that average parties in both 2e and 3.5e could heal much faster than these "natural" rates by spending their divine casters’ slots on healing spells after the first day of rest. At best, this meant two full days (one day to get slots back and use them for healing, and the second day to get those slots back again). If the party was super beaten up and/or had particularly high HP counts and/or very few healing-capable slots, then it might require more than two days, of course, though it should still be much quicker than "natural" recovery rates.
They kind of cut to the chase in 5e by making it even faster. Which is fine, it streamlines gameplay. Most people don’t care to do the slot-by-slot accounting of the 1st day of rest, and were probably hand-waving it anyway.
The "streamlining of gameplay" is not without cost though. We can say and agree on that bold bit about the average party generally being able to heal faster like that, but that bold bit carried its own bar that needed clearing & that bar was a doozy with a whole lot of weight to push back against reckless behavior. Beyond that though you are skipping over the ways that that the bar was higher to recover slots themselves too & that unlimited at will cantrips were not a fallback option when casters ran out of spell slots.
That lost element falls into two-ish categories and the "it [just] streamlines gameplay" only fits one of the two. In the case of a minor top-off with a couple cure spells getting burned across the group before setting camp & resting overnight followed by prayer at dawn (or other deity appropriate time) it wasn't a big deal as long as the cleric had some slots left where they could cast a spell or two if their camp was found/attacked
Take . The second situation is where the cleric would need to expend a significant majority of their slots & find themselves unable to even participate in a combat if camp was attacked:
during the rest
While in prayer to recover their slots at dawn
while waiting around all day long
during the next rest
during the next dawn while they were praying to recover their spells to go adventure
what was lost there is the ability for Alice the cleric to say things like:
"no I refuse to burn all my slots here, we need to make a better camp elsewhere"
"guys, we really dropped the ball on our teamwork and it hurt us way more than it should have. lets put our heads together to figure out how we can all work together as a team & prevent that from happening again because I don't want to keep burning all my slots to heal stupid"
"Guys we talked about this before. We aren't working together and I'm not going to burn all my slots like before to recover faster when it means I need to sit out a wandering encounter with nothing useful to contribute... again. We need to go back to town or something"
The other players had reason to lean into their self interest by supporting their fellow player & teammate without feeling like the jerlk saying no in every single one of those kinds of statements from the cleric. That's not the case when the GM needs to step in & do what the party did itself because the rules were changed to "streamline gameplay" by removing any reason for the cleric player to speak up out of fear that an interrupting encounter would leave them twiddling their thumbs uselessly because they burned too many spell slots papering over the party refusing to work together or a fellow team mate playing like a reckless jerk.
Because someone will inevitably say "but what about [traps crits or whatever] grinding down hp".
In addition, a potion requires a number of mundane ingre-
dients. The basic cost of these ingredients ranges from 200
to 1,000 gp. The DM should decide this based on how com-
mon the potion is, its power, and the nature of the ingredients
he has specified. A potion of dragon control is a rare item of
great power and so should cost the full 1,000 gp. A potion of
healing is a fairly necessary item, something the DM may
want to be readily available to the characters. Therefore, it
should be cheap, costing no more than 200 gp.
and 3.x extended that with things like wands of CLW/aid/etc that allowed for minor topoffs. As long as the need for those was in line with the rate that the GM was supplying them in treasure or the party wasn't burning them excessively it wouldn't overly strain their gear upgrade savings. If everyone was working together & nobody was being obnoxiously reckless they just got treated as the cost of adventuring until someone in the party felt the need to say "hey guys, it's been bothering me how $x... we should really .... instead of leaning so heavily on consumables" where once again none of their fellow party members needed to feel like the jerk telling Leroy to find a backpack even if Leroy is enjoying himself playing that way.
The "streamlining of gameplay" is not without cost though. We can say and agree on that bold bit about the average party generally being able to heal faster like that, but that bold bit carried its own bar that needed clearing & that bar was a doozy with a whole lot of weight to push back against reckless behavior. Beyond that though you are skipping over the ways that that the bar was higher to recover slots themselves too & that unlimited at will cantrips were not a fallback option when casters ran out of spell slots.
That lost element falls into two-ish categories and the "it [just] streamlines gameplay" only fits one of the two. In the case of a minor top-off with a couple cure spells getting burned across the group before setting camp & resting overnight followed by prayer at dawn (or other deity appropriate time) it wasn't a big deal as long as the cleric had some slots left where they could cast a spell or two if their camp was found/attacked
Take . The second situation is where the cleric would need to expend a significant majority of their slots & find themselves unable to even participate in a combat if camp was attacked:
during the rest
While in prayer to recover their slots at dawn
while waiting around all day long
during the next rest
during the next dawn while they were praying to recover their spells to go adventure
what was lost there is the ability for Alice the cleric to say things like:
"no I refuse to burn all my slots here, we need to make a better camp elsewhere"
"guys, we really dropped the ball on our teamwork and it hurt us way more than it should have. lets put our heads together to figure out how we can all work together as a team & prevent that from happening again because I don't want to keep burning all my slots to heal stupid"
"Guys we talked about this before. We aren't working together and I'm not going to burn all my slots like before to recover faster when it means I need to sit out a wandering encounter with nothing useful to contribute... again. We need to go back to town or something"
The other players had reason to lean into their self interest by supporting their fellow player & teammate without feeling like the jerlk saying no in every single one of those kinds of statements from the cleric. That's not the case when the GM needs to step in & do what the party did itself because the rules were changed to "streamline gameplay" by removing any reason for the cleric player to speak up out of fear that an interrupting encounter would leave them twiddling their thumbs uselessly because they burned too many spell slots papering over the party refusing to work together or a fellow team mate playing like a reckless jerk.
Because someone will inevitably say "but what about [traps crits or whatever] grinding down hp".
In addition, a potion requires a number of mundane ingre-
dients. The basic cost of these ingredients ranges from 200
to 1,000 gp. The DM should decide this based on how com-
mon the potion is, its power, and the nature of the ingredients
he has specified. A potion of dragon control is a rare item of
great power and so should cost the full 1,000 gp. A potion of
healing is a fairly necessary item, something the DM may
want to be readily available to the characters. Therefore, it
should be cheap, costing no more than 200 gp.
and 3.x extended that with things like wands of CLW/aid/etc that allowed for minor topoffs. As long as the need for those was in line with the rate that the GM was supplying them in treasure or the party wasn't burning them excessively it wouldn't overly strain their gear upgrade savings. If everyone was working together & nobody was being obnoxiously reckless they just got treated as the cost of adventuring until someone in the party felt the need to say "hey guys, it's been bothering me how $x... we should really .... instead of leaning so heavily on consumables" where once again none of their fellow party members needed to feel like the jerk telling Leroy to find a backpack even if Leroy is enjoying himself playing that way.
When I mentioned the phenomenon of "resting fully in two days, the first of which is dedicated to spending slots on healing", I didn’t mean to say that it was unimportant.
Of course, if you’re at the inn, then the only impact is that you’ll pay for your rooms one extra night. Hardly an issue in most quests.
If you’re in the wilderness, then that extra night (and the whole extra day of lounging around twiddling thumbs) is definitely NOT without consequences, for all of the reasons you brought up.
So… the newer editions squeezing the two full days to rest into a single long rest can have profound gameplay implications in some circumstances, for sure.
When I mentioned the phenomenon of "resting fully in two days, the first of which is dedicated to spending slots on healing", I didn’t mean to say that it was unimportant.
Of course, if you’re at the inn, then the only impact is that you’ll pay for your rooms one extra night. Hardly an issue in most quests.
If you’re in the wilderness, then that extra night (and the whole extra day of lounging around twiddling thumbs) is definitely NOT without consequences, for all of the reasons you brought up.
So… the newer editions squeezing the two full days to rest into a single long rest can have profound gameplay implications in some circumstances, for sure.
The newer editions' method also takes away the choice on the second day as to whether to carry on when only partially recovered or to risk taking that second day's rest. Even more so if the resting place isn't necessarily all that safe, as once happened in an old campaign of mine leading to a player quote: "If we rest up and recuperate here long enough, we'll all be dead".
When I mentioned the phenomenon of "resting fully in two days, the first of which is dedicated to spending slots on healing", I didn’t mean to say that it was unimportant.
Of course, if you’re at the inn, then the only impact is that you’ll pay for your rooms one extra night. Hardly an issue in most quests.
If you’re in the wilderness, then that extra night (and the whole extra day of lounging around twiddling thumbs) is definitely NOT without consequences, for all of the reasons you brought up.
So… the newer editions squeezing the two full days to rest into a single long rest can have profound gameplay implications in some circumstances, for sure.
The game, as designed, is based on challenging the party through resource attrition. If you waste resources on encounters 1-3, then encounters 4+ become riskier and more likely to lead to a loss. This incentivizes the players to rest often to minimize their loss chance.
But, if we don't want the players to rest often, we need to incentivize risk (in the form of not resting and pushing on). There are two ways to do that. One, we instead add commiserate risk to resting by adding in wandering monsters, monsters reacting to make the next encounters harder/impossible, etc. The downside to this is it puts the party in the position of having no good choices simply because they were adventuring, and at the table it can make the GM look like an ass if not done properly.
The other option would be to incentivize risk by rewarding pushing on. Give more and more XP for each encounter, or have loot that's only accessible if they complete the site in a single rest, or give them abilities that become available or strengthen later in the adventuring day.
I favor the latter, if the best option of simply not having the game not be based on daily attrition isn't available.
The game, as designed, is based on challenging the party through resource attrition. If you waste resources on encounters 1-3, then encounters 4+ become riskier and more likely to lead to a loss. This incentivizes the players to rest often to minimize their loss chance.
But, if we don't want the players to rest often, we need to incentivize risk (in the form of not resting and pushing on). There are two ways to do that. One, we instead add commiserate risk to resting by adding in wandering monsters, monsters reacting to make the next encounters harder/impossible, etc. The downside to this is it puts the party in the position of having no good choices simply because they were adventuring, and at the table it can make the GM look like an ass if not done properly.
The other option would be to incentivize risk by rewarding pushing on. Give more and more XP for each encounter, or have loot that's only accessible if they complete the site in a single rest, or give them abilities that become available or strengthen later in the adventuring day.
I favor the latter, if the best option of simply not having the game not be based on daily attrition isn't available.
You are just bringing up something else that 5e relentlessly broke though. "Encounters 4+" is really a 5e-ism", 2-4 encounter adventuring days was pretty normal before 5e expanded it to the ultra grindy 6-8 medium to hard encounters and expanded pc gas tanks to support that grindfest.
If players had to stop and recover for the next adventuring day when they might handle what would now be "encounters 4+" it was a good thing because 2-4 encounters fit within the Hickman manifesto:
*A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing.
*An intriguing story that is intricately woven into play itself.
*Dungeons with an architectural sense.
*An attainable and honorable end within one to two sessions playing time
With 6-8 medium to hard encounters only the bold it remains in play because the rest requires everyone remembering what happened multiple seasons ago in too much detail to follow along and kinda requires far too much design work for stuff that will be dismissed under the endless grind.
Thanks for taking us down memory lane! This is great stuff.
It’s very interesting to see the trajectory of healing rates across editions.
All in all, I think we can say that average parties in both 2e and 3.5e could heal much faster than these "natural" rates by spending their divine casters’ slots on healing spells after the first day of rest. At best, this meant two full days (one day to get slots back and use them for healing, and the second day to get those slots back again). If the party was super beaten up and/or had particularly high HP counts and/or very few healing-capable slots, then it might require more than two days, of course, though it should still be much quicker than "natural" recovery rates.
They kind of cut to the chase in 5e by making it even faster. Which is fine, it streamlines gameplay. Most people don’t care to do the slot-by-slot accounting of the 1st day of rest, and were probably hand-waving it anyway.
The game, as designed, is based on challenging the party through resource attrition. If you waste resources on encounters 1-3, then encounters 4+ become riskier and more likely to lead to a loss. This incentivizes the players to rest often to minimize their loss chance.
But, if we don't want the players to rest often, we need to incentivize risk (in the form of not resting and pushing on). There are two ways to do that. One, we instead add commiserate risk to resting by adding in wandering monsters, monsters reacting to make the next encounters harder/impossible, etc. The downside to this is it puts the party in the position of having no good choices simply because they were adventuring, and at the table it can make the GM look like an ass if not done properly.
The other option would be to incentivize risk by rewarding pushing on. Give more and more XP for each encounter, or have loot that's only accessible if they complete the site in a single rest, or give them abilities that become available or strengthen later in the adventuring day.
I favor the latter, if the best option of simply not having the game not be based on daily attrition isn't available.
Keying some abilities off of being bloodied in 4e was a neat way to do that… though I haven’t come across this yet in 5e (are there any cases?)
In terms of risk/rewards for resting vs pushing forward… the "deadline to save the world" trope is a pretty decent one I think, and feels more organic and satisfying than random encounters. It could feel overdone though if you’re in a quest which is the equivalent of the 8th season of 24…
I gave partial ones out pretty often in 3.x & I remember it being almost standard to get partial ones occasionally as a player back then.
Come 5e?... it's not a solution for the fatal rest/recovery design problem.
I've given full 50 charge wands of CLW to more than one group of (totally different) players who started with 5e. In both cases I explained that the hope was that they stop pushing for the 5mwd & use it for top offs if they feel they need to then told them that they could buy more & would probably find more while adventuring as long as they weren't straight up leroy jenkins'ing with it.
ad someone say almost word for word "No we can just keep watch & take this rest because we might need it more at some point in the future" the very first time someone in the party suggested they just use the wand because they were still pretty good on resources & weren't down that much. Every. Single Party.
Also tried giving these out a couple times
Players flat out refused to use them for anything but yoyo healing backstopped by 5mwd resting no matter what grade of healing potion I stuck in them. The GM can't fix the design problem by incentivizing around it with treasure
I gave partial ones out pretty often in 3.x & I remember it being almost standard to get partial ones occasionally as a player back then.
Come 5e?... it's not a solution for the fatal rest/recovery design problem.
I've given full 50 charge wands of CLW to more than one group of (totally different) players who started with 5e. In both cases I explained that the hope was that they stop pushing for the 5mwd & use it for top offs if they feel they need to then told them that they could buy more & would probably find more while adventuring as long as they weren't straight up leroy jenkins'ing with it.
ad someone say almost word for word "No we can just keep watch & take this rest because we might need it more at some point in the future" the very first time someone in the party suggested they just use the wand because they were still pretty good on resources & weren't down that much. Every. Single Party.
Also tried giving these out a couple times
[...]
Players flat out refused to use them for anything but yoyo healing backstopped by 5mwd resting no matter what grade of healing potion I stuck in them. The GM can't fix the design problem by incentivizing around it with treasure
Boils down to the same old thing: if it's consumable rather than permanent, they won't use it.
I'm like that as a player as well: I'll never use a consumable item if there's any other option available, 'cause I never know how long it'll be (if ever) before I can replace - or afford to replace! - the item I just used.
