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

[tetrasodium]

...adjusting effect durations to support gritty rest mechanics is trivial to house-rule for balance: just bump up all effects (beyond instantaneous) by one duration, i.e. one minute -> ten minutes, ten minutes -> one hour, one hour -> eight hours, eight hours -> one day, one day -> one week, etcet...

You just created a 24hour tiny hut with an 11 minute cast time that uses no spell slot & the warlock's Hex spell now lasts eight times longer but the warlock is getting seven of those overnight 8 hour gritty short rests to the wizard/cleric/paladin/druid/etc's adventuring days. It seems easy in theory, but the results are a mess of cascading edge cases & one off exceptions that sometimes don't even become clear until a player tries to make build choices around the slapdash & incomplete bandaid of a variant rule as they advance in levels. Those edge cases & one off exceptions lead to an adversarial environment that sours things.

 

[...m...]

...nah, it works great in practice...

 

[tetrasodium]

...nah, it works great in practice...

Maybe when the players are abusing Long rests with long rest classes or still at low levels. Gritty realism ceases to be all that useful when players are abusing short rests with short rest classes as those short rest classes gain levels & progress into late tier2 or tier3+ levels. If anything gritty realism makes things worse because it's normal for living things to simply maintain a wake/sleep cycle & gritty realism turns that biological need into short rests.... But I'm sure it's fine if you railroad hard enough or choose to overlook those kinds of problems in play.

 

[Scott Christian]

I'm going to comment on this because it's central to the point I keep making that you keep completely ignoring in order to blame the GM for not doing better at one thing or another until the players choose to start caring.

Can I ask you a favor? Please stop putting words in my mouth. Thank you. I appreciate, and will in turn, try to do the same.

To respond to this, I have to state something, and I need you to hear it very clearly: It is not just the DMs job to care about story, it is also the players. In fact, the things I said before almost imply it is mostly a player problem, not a DM problem.

In the past the GM had mechanical reasons why the players feel like they need to care even if the GM is using those elements in service of exerting a light touch of "control" over the pacing. There were a lot of those elements& discussion pages back touched on some, but a couple of the big ones that were flatly removed by 5e were things like:

• There was a bar that the PCs needed to clear before they could realistically say "lets take a rest" without a second (or third+) player at the table stopping them from doing something that would be obviously harmful to the group or that second player's PC.
  • The mechanics that led to that were quoted & discussed in 89, 92, 94 along with some of the posts between.
• The PCs themselves required regular infusions of gear ranging from consumables to better magic items.

With Those two broad categories removed in favor of "magic items are optional" & all or nothing explosive total restoration of resources it becomes possible for players to simply refuse to move at any pace until their rest interruptions are no longer standing in the way of their rest. No matter what you choose to call a doom clock or how narrowly you describe one, they all pretty much depend on the players caring about the consequences & the GM had the consequence lever removed unless the players choose to care because "story".

This is valid. I think previous editions did do a better job implementing levers for the DM to control the rest/recuperation of PCs. But 5e is a slightly different game, and the levers now sit in the hands of both the DM and players. That may be a terrible thing at your table, but for some tables, it helps them focus more on the story than the mechanics. I think on that point we can agree.

I would like to see alternate styles of rest. Personally, for your situation, I think this might be an option:
- Players are unable to long rest until they acquire enough experience to raise a level.

That would certainly push resource management to the forefront. It would also let the "slow burn" classes shine. You could adjust the experience points given from behind the screen to help the pacing of the story.

"Story" is good maybe even great, but my average table has around 4-5 players & the average campaign tends to run into low to mid teens. Over that span of weeks & months it would be absurd to suggest that the GM somehow weave a "story" that every single player can say "wow MyChArEcTeR really cares about this particular story element" 100% of the time across every session absent gm facing levers that control any mechanical hurdles or teeth. That level of "story" development would still be absurd even with a short lived campaign like "we are going to go through LMOP★"... yet you keep bringing up solutions relying on that level of transcendental "story" weaving from the GM in order to avoid admitting that 5e may have shifted the balance of power over the pacing & consequence of rests too far in favor of players.

This implies the characters do not care about one another? For a group risking death, that seems odd. For players invested in their characters, that seems odd too.

 

[tetrasodium]

Can I ask you a favor? Please stop putting words in my mouth. Thank you. I appreciate, and will in turn, try to do the same.

What you complain is putting words in your mouth is simply pointing out why your suggestions consistently ignore the problem scenario being discussed and are incapable of manifesting as the solutions you present them as being.

To respond to this, I have to state something, and I need you to hear it very clearly: It is not just the DMs job to care about story, it is also the players. In fact, the things I said before almost imply it is mostly a player problem, not a DM problem.

I agree that it's not the GM's "job to care about story", but when you are consistently told that the players are incentivized to ignore all of the toothless consequence free pure story things that you keep suggesting and each time present a more specific flavor of those things or something else entirely that depends entirely on the players caring it creates a problem. That problem is how absent text in the book telling players to care or shared narrative style ouch mechanics like fate compels and the bitd equivalents the only way to make them care absent gm accessable teeth is to expect the gm to implement the solution so well that the players start caring in ways that appeal to some other setting of motivations it might be different, but [ignore that]and appeal to the motivation the player doesn't care about with a method that appeals to the original motivation is just gm blaming for the failure.

If you could suggest a way to make players with motivations incompatible with your solutions

This is valid. I think previous editions did do a better job implementing levers for the DM to control the rest/recuperation of PCs. But 5e is a slightly different game, and the levers now sit in the hands of both the DM and players. That may be a terrible thing at your table, but for some tables, it helps them focus more on the story than the mechanics. I think on that point we can agree.

I would like to see alternate styles of rest. Personally, for your situation, I think this might be an option:
- Players are unable to long rest until they acquire enough experience to raise a level.

Yes it's something that wotc should have address long ago, but it's not surprising when any complaint about that gm support failure results in an avalanche of suggestions about story and similar or questioning why players who don't care would even want to play.

That would certainly push resource management to the forefront. It would also let the "slow burn" classes shine. You could adjust the experience points given from behind the screen to help the pacing of the story.

This implies the characters do not care about one another? For a group risking death, that seems odd. For players invested in their characters, that seems odd too.

Could you maybe stop talking about players and characters as if they are interchangeable identical concepts? Doing that is the soil where your stop putting words in my mouth comment grows from. Players and characters are different things. I'm certainly not willing to gm for Robbie Wheeling from mazes and monsters∆ with all of his problems and never going to seek out such an individual.



∆saving the Google lookup for those familiar with the movie, that's the character Tom Hanks played
.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Not every story has a clock running, though. If we get the job to secure an artifact from a dungeon, there might be no time table at all, the people want the artifact as soon as possible. But they want it, a dead party and no artifact does nothing for them...

Some stories might have clocks, but they might not be that long that you can't afford a few extra days because you play it smart and safe.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

...nah, it works great in practice...

Probably, though using gritty rests and not altering the spell durations works just fine as well. Casters are not exactly underpowered in D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

To respond to this, I have to state something, and I need you to hear it very clearly: It is not just the DMs job to care about story, it is also the players. In fact, the things I said before almost imply it is mostly a player problem, not a DM problem.

This is valid. I think previous editions did do a better job implementing levers for the DM to control the rest/recuperation of PCs. But 5e is a slightly different game, and the levers now sit in the hands of both the DM and players. That may be a terrible thing at your table, but for some tables, it helps them focus more on the story than the mechanics. I think on that point we can agree.

The players have, with usually-very-temporary exceptions due to the specific situation the characters are in in that moment, always had some control of their characters' ability to rest by simply deciding not to go any further that day and-or to retreat to somewhere they (think they) know to be safe. In this I don't think 5e is really any different than the prior editions; and if it's what the characters would do, I'm fine with it.

What is different with 5e is a) that everything comes back on a long rest rather than just some of it, and b) 5e added the short-rest mechanic and designed some classes around it.

This implies the characters do not care about one another? For a group risking death, that seems odd. For players invested in their characters, that seems odd too.

For a group risking death, risking death purely for someone else's benefit isn't in everyone's playbooks even if that someone else is a good friend.

As for players being invested in their characters: they're invested in their own characters, sure, but not necessarily those of the other players to any great extent. There's nothing saying PCs have to like each other or get along all the time; my investment in another player's character who my character doesn't like might, for example, go no further than hoping said other character will soon find a conveniently high cliff to jump off.

 

[Lanefan]

Not every story has a clock running, though. If we get the job to secure an artifact from a dungeon, there might be no time table at all, the people want the artifact as soon as possible. But they want it, a dead party and no artifact does nothing for them...

Some stories might have clocks, but they might not be that long that you can't afford a few extra days because you play it smart and safe.

Agreed; and while having an adventure on a clock is fun once in a while, it's a trope that can very quickly get old if overused.

 

[Marandahir]

You don't sound very convincing when you can't even describe the rules in question while telling others to go find the rules you are referring to

I'm not trying to convince you about anything. Chill off.

I did recommend Lanefan look at the Exhaustion rules, which are one way of forcing longer rest periods for players because they only lose a single level of exhaustion each long rest. This is a secondary dial that can be used if the players are going to push on forward despite their exhaustion or let the BBEG get a lead on them by resting another day at basecamp.

But again, I'm talking about the campaigns that -I- run and not telling you how to play your game.