They are saying that you can change the length of rests as you feel appropriate, and that the DM shouldn't include content (classes, races, spells, or especially feats) in their world that they don't explicitly choose. While that doesn't give much to go by, it still provides strong contrast to 4E, where "everything was core" and mucking about with sub-systems would cause the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.
except those rules they present for doing it are spmewhere between half baked & destructive at best.
This sounds like it would have a big impact & frankly it might if you have nobody in the party capable of casting healing spells. Given that healing spells are limited to cleric, ranger, druid, some sorcerer, some warlocks, paladin, artficer, bard, & I’d not be surprised to find a wizard archetype with them it’s pretty trivial for the group to just sleep an extra rest & cast a bunch of healing spells around the group in any case where it could make a difference... There is also the "we know this is a bad idea to allow & proved we know it with other classes but went full munchkin here" short rest class problems. Without vancian magic style prepared spells all of those healing spell/ability casters just need to dump any unused slots on cure wounds immediately before recovering those same slots. The group needs to be run through a rather unique white room style hypothetical meat grinder for those unused slots to not be enough.
Frankly nothing about this rule is going to make your game “gritty” or give a sense of “realism”
What it will do is demolish interclass balance between long rest & short rest classes making short rest classes much better & long rest ones feeling a bit crippled. On top of that you wind up breaking many spells & class abilities to the point where they are useless or not worth the new now much higher cost. Eventually you might find what you think is a decent balance of how often you should allow long/short rests there is the supernova of broken that comes with pretty much every magic item generating max charges each long rest & getting quite a few overnight during the short rests known as "sleeping as living beings need to do"... That wand of magic missile, fireball, or whatever can now be used one or more times every encounter with almost no need to bother holding back. Stay away from this nightmare unless you are looking for a game that feels like a few T1000 terminators mowing down hapless civilians.
Like slow natural healing It’s trivial to just use cure wounds, lay on hands, healing spirit, prayer of healing, & so forth before a rest unless you’ve truly managed to somehow grind the entire party to paste. I’ve actually seen players scold each other for “wasting the charge we might need” healers kit charges instead of letting her finish burning spell slots to heal everyone Healers kits are 3 pounds for 5gp each & hold 10 charges. Putting that into perspective, carrying capacity on phb176 is strength times 15. To this day I never figured out what situation could possibly hinge on those two or three charges when the party had tens of healers kits among themselves.
Maybe someone thinks they worked pretty well in 4e, but again it’s half a rule & forgets that non-surge healing was extremely limited & just winds up making characters with wolverine level resilience even more resilient.
unless the goal is pointless hoops or overpowered to a broken degree it’s probably not going to come from adding either of the noted rules, the related ones, or some combination because so much of 5e is written to fight any attempts at dragging it kicking & screaming outside a very narrow scope of valid gameplay.
You keep bringing up how you can change the rest durations & how there are rules in the dmg, but the fact that those rules are so half baked that it's reasonable to ask if they were deliberately written in such a fashion that a gm could not use them to force what someone decided was nothing but badwrongfun.
Possibly. I think they may have also been originally reacting to the criticism of daily powers on Martial classes in 4E. However, it really does seem that no one seems to care anymore, since there's been very little criticism of the creeping increase in long rest powers in 5e.
Personally, I've found that if I make Short Rests 5 mins but maximum twice a day they're very easy to handle. Players control the pacing.
For a while I thought it would be better with a single rest schedule - but after solving the biggest issue, by doing what I described above I also realised short rests do serve a useful purpose.
In 4E, there was a sense in which combat could become repetitive. Everyone had the same encounter powers every combat and knew best how to use them, so they would typically start off with their best one and work down the list. Short rests mean that the fighter needs to hold back and scope out the combat before committing to an action surge - rather than opening with it, they need to decide if it's worth using in this particular combat. (In a sense 13th Age approaches the same issues with 4E by using the escalation die).
Long rests sort of have the same result, but by having everyone on different schedules you do reduce the pressure on the party to be constantly looking for ways to refresh their long rest resources - or at the other extreme, holding everything back for the big boss battle.
Honestly though, 4e's rules really work THE SAME WAY. That is, you recharge your 'encounter' powers on a short rest. It may be an EXPECTATION of players, and an ASSUMPTION of the rules, that every encounter would end with a short rest, but it isn't codified into the game as any kind of absolute. So, yes, probably most 4e players would look at the situation and decide if it was worth a daily, and/or an AP, and open with that if so (making the best tactical sense, generally speaking) and otherwise open with an encounter power. However, a lot of 4e powers are pretty tactically specific, so it heavily depends. Many fighters, for example, might open with a charge (and thus a BA or BA-substitute at-will) instead of an encounter power. A LOT of encounter powers are really no better than an at-will, except in a specific situation (IE ones that let you deliver damage in a close burst, that kind of thing). Others have setups, like RoS.
Actually, playing with these assumptions was always a great way to introduce some variety and uncertainty into the game.
5e's problem is that it broke things up by class, creating the encounter-driven short-rest-recharging fighters and the day-driven full casters. We all told them this would create issues and doesn't work well, but MM and Co. were utterly determined to 'go back to the old days', in which, amusingly, there were PLENTY of examples of what is normal in 4e. As the OP here has noted, nobody seems to complain about daily powers in 5e anymore, even for fighter types.
Anyway, I agree with you, the way to deal with this is to just go back to 5 minute short rests and assume they will happen a couple of times per 'adventuring day'. It is all pretty clunky and the game could have used more elegant pacing mechanisms, but whatever. I will happily just keep running 4e and improvements on it instead.
I think people over-estimate how much importance was intended to be put on that guideline. It’s an assumption around which the designers built certain systems, no different than the assumption of a 4-PC party or of a starting +3 in your primary stat, or the distribution of magic items over the course of an adventure. All of these things are necessary assumptions for the designers to make so that they have something to balance the numbers around, but the game doesn’t fall apart if those assumptions aren’t met.
People grouse way too much about the 6-8 encounter adventuring day with 2-3 short rests, IMO. Yes, that is the assumption around which different resource recovery systems are balanced. Yes, inter-class balance is at its best when you stick broadly to this guideline. No, the game will not break if you don’t follow it precisely.
Personally, I plan my adventures around this guideline, but I don’t enforce the sequence, and I allow my players the freedom to break it. I plan around 4-6 encounters per session, and I roll for random complications (which can include encounters) in dangerous areas. The players are free to take rests when they want, but taking the time to do so creates a risk of such random complications occurring. We generally get close to the 6 encounters with two short rests per adventuring day, but sometimes we get fewer, and that’s fine. It’s very rare that we get more, because the PCs are pretty worn down by or before the end of that time. It works fine.
I feel like with a lot of the game balance assumptions of 5e, people have a tendency to either worry way too much about adhering to them, or decide that they’re oppressively restrictive and actively avoid them while decrying them as terrible game design. I think both positions are far too extreme. Treat them like simple guidelines and don’t stress about following them to the letter, and the game will work out fine.
And this is the nut of the whole problem for me. It forces the game to be paced, and adventures designed around, the rest structure. The DM has to be in charge of making these decisions, and she doesn't have a lot of choices either! This is not a top tier design, at all. It is kind of a crappy design. Instead the game should put power in the hands of PLAYERS to make choices, and the DM should be in the position of giving alternatives. This way a given story line can develop, and the consequences (and the motivations based on meta-game considerations) are minimized.
The other issue here is entirely different, which is that 5e lacks any sort of mechanism for anything except a brief type of encounter. It doesn't really have a way to work in something that takes LONGER than a bloody fight, or produces less motivation for a rest. The lack of structure around non-combat mechanics doesn't help here, and this was something that you could use 4e's SC mechanics to provide for (granting that its rules are a bit vague about things like whether an encounter power used in an SC should just keep working until the challenge ends, but powers fictional effects are less nailed-down as well).
And this is the nut of the whole problem for me. It forces the game to be paced, and adventures designed around, the rest structure. The DM has to be in charge of making these decisions, and she doesn't have a lot of choices either! This is not a top tier design, at all. It is kind of a crappy design. Instead the game should put power in the hands of PLAYERS to make choices, and the DM should be in the position of giving alternatives. This way a given story line can develop, and the consequences (and the motivations based on meta-game considerations) are minimized..
The DM really, really doesn’t have to be in charge of making decisions around resting in this model. I design my adventures to include incentives (such as missable treasure and XP awards and disincentives (such as time pressure and random encounters), but it is 100% up to the players to weigh their options and decide how to proceed themselves.
I'm not actually disagreeing with you on that. Those rules are not designed very well. Still, the fact that they encourage individual DMs to change the rules for their own campaigns is something.
The much larger point, as pertains to the topic at hand, is that the designers don't assume every single class in the book should automatically be included in every single campaign. If you don't want to deal with warlocks, for any reason whatsoever, you have the fully-endorsed option to simply not include them. Likewise with feats, as a whole or individually: if you don't want them in your campaign, for whatever reason, then the solution is as simple as not including them. And yet, everyone seems insistent on ignoring the obvious solution, and making things harder on themselves for no good reason.
The DM really, really doesn’t have to be in charge of making decisions around resting in this model. I design my adventures to include incentives (such as missable treasure and XP awards and disincentives (such as time pressure and random encounters), but it is 100% up to the players to weigh their options and decide how to proceed themselves.
That only goes so far, plus they can be pretty illusory. I mean, if the PCs skip some treasure, then some other treasure is almost surely going to have to show up at some point to keep their expected resources in line. This is the nature of D&D. And IMHO this is all still pretty limiting. I want to have the players more in the driver's seat as far as what they go for, when, why, and how. Entanglements with resource management just tends to get in the way. So if, instead, the management of resources is put on the player side, pretty much entirely, then they're going to decide, and the GM is more just in the position of explaining what the alternatives might mean, or even just delivering the mechanical goods in response to their choices.
One of my theories as to why this sort of scheme doesn't happen in D&D is that it demands a lot more from ADVENTURE WRITERS, which I have rarely seen be up to the challenge. In fact it is pretty darn hard to write adventures that work this way, because the GM doesn't need maps full of pre-arranged content in that kind of play. Instead they need the players to do the heavy lifting of explicating their motives, and making their characters connect with the setting/story such that it can really engage them. Adventures become more guidebooks and resource lists in that kind of a system. You COULD do it with 4e, but it was better to just ditch the idea of written adventures and go free-form and mostly ad-lib, with just themes and a few overarching elements, and maybe a bit of material from some source thrown in to make it pop.
4e's DM-side resource books were actually pretty good this way, there was a TON of that kind of thing. I'm sure it is not exactly too wanting in 5e either, but they seem to spend more time on 'dungeons'. Not something that really works for me.
That only goes so far, plus they can be pretty illusory. I mean, if the PCs skip some treasure, then some other treasure is almost surely going to have to show up at some point to keep their expected resources in line. This is the nature of D&D.
I disagree strongly. If the players miss content, they miss it, and the DM shouldn’t alter things to compensate, otherwise there was really no point of it being missable in the first place. The players decisions should matter, and sometimes that means they miss out on potential rewards. THAT is the nature of D&D, if you ask me.
And IMHO this is all still pretty limiting. I want to have the players more in the driver's seat as far as what they go for, when, why, and how. Entanglements with resource management just tends to get in the way.
Again, I disagree. The resource management challenge is what gives weight to the decisions the players make about how to tackle the adventure. They are fully in the driver’s seat, but there are natural consequences to trying to drive against the flow of traffic.
So if, instead, the management of resources is put on the player side, pretty much entirely, then they're going to decide, and the GM is more just in the position of explaining what the alternatives might mean, or even just delivering the mechanical goods in response to their choices.
The management of resources is entirely on the player side. But unless their decisions surrounding resource management have consequences, they’re meaningless. The players should have to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of resting and recovering their resources or pressing on with what they have, and then live with the outcomes of whatever choices they make. If the players’ choice to rest results in an encounter being easier than anticipated, so be it. If their choice to rest results in them missing out on time-sensitive rewards, so be it. If their decision to press on results in one or more character deaths, so be it. The consequences are what make those choices more than just illusions.
I've played 13th Age (which I like a lot more than 5E in many ways), but one of the things it does is make long rests (or full heal ups as they call them) completely in the hands of the GM with the general expectation that you'll get one around every four combats. Players can take one earlier but they take a 'campaign loss' (which really I find to be just waffle, either the PCs are on a time limit so the consequences are so obvious no rules are needed, or the connection is so vague as to be arbritrary). When I ran it I could see that the players found it disempowering*
This made me appreciate that there does need to be something concrete in world that rests reflect if the game features resource management. I'm a lot harsher on long rests in 5E than default D&D because I like wilderness based travel and don't use long dungeon crawls so long rests end up requiring 36 hours in a safe location. This works pretty well because it requires a concerted decision to retreat or to change plans. But really part of the issue I think with Long rest variants is the focus on time - it's more useful to focus on the necessary conditions. You can do a lot to make Long Rest harder just by saying that if the situation is such that characters are keeping watch then its not restful enough.
*There's quite a few things in 13th Age that work out like this - it's empowering to the players on a narrative level - should they care about and want that - but disempowering on a strategic level.
This sounds like it would have a big impact & frankly it might if you have nobody in the party capable of casting healing spells. Given that healing spells are limited to cleric, ranger, druid, some sorcerer, some warlocks, paladin, artficer, bard, & I’d not be surprised to find a wizard archetype with them it’s pretty trivial for the group to just sleep an extra rest & cast a bunch of healing spells around the group in any case where it could make a difference... There is also the "we know this is a bad idea to allow & proved we know it with other classes but went full munchkin here" short rest class problems. Without vancian magic style prepared spells all of those healing spell/ability casters just need to dump any unused slots on cure wounds immediately before recovering those same slots. The group needs to be run through a rather unique white room style hypothetical meat grinder for those unused slots to not be enough.
I think it can work to a degree. I wouldn't use it myself. But the trick to making this work is to make conserving those spell slots for healing a real concern. This means that the party will either rest earlier then they otherwise would to ensure they can cast healing spells, or they may actually not have the spells left for healing. Of course, if the pcs are regularly ending days without worrying about maintaining those slots and have a lot left over then it's just extra tedious bookkeeping.
Frankly nothing about this rule is going to make your game “gritty” or give a sense of “realism”
What it will do is demolish interclass balance between long rest & short rest classes making short rest classes much better & long rest ones feeling a bit crippled. On top of that you wind up breaking many spells & class abilities to the point where they are useless or not worth the new now much higher cost. Eventually you might find what you think is a decent balance of how often you should allow long/short rests there is the supernova of broken that comes with pretty much every magic item generating max charges each long rest & getting quite a few overnight during the short rests known as "sleeping as living beings need to do"... That wand of magic missile, fireball, or whatever can now be used one or more times every encounter with almost no need to bother holding back. Stay away from this nightmare unless you are looking for a game that feels like a few T1000 terminators mowing down hapless civilians.
The name is dreadful. But if it breaks the balance betweeen Short and Long rest classes you really shouldn't be using it. In fact the reason to use it is precisely to maintain that! To my mind two combats a day is about right for most games I run, and there wouldn't be combats every single day either. The week is somewhat arbritrary and would create as many problems as it solves, but the real issue is that it's no more flexible than the default.
It does interfere with some items and spells but it's hardly a big issue. Just change long durations spells so that they last indefinitely but it's not possible to regain the slot while the spell is still in effect. Magic items decide on a case by case basis.
Like slow natural healing It’s trivial to just use cure wounds, lay on hands, healing spirit, prayer of healing, & so forth before a rest unless you’ve truly managed to somehow grind the entire party to paste. I’ve actually seen players scold each other for “wasting the charge we might need” healers kit charges instead of letting her finish burning spell slots to heal everyone Healers kits are 3 pounds for 5gp each & hold 10 charges. Putting that into perspective, carrying capacity on phb176 is strength times 15. To this day I never figured out what situation could possibly hinge on those two or three charges when the party had tens of healers kits among themselves.
Never saw the point of this - I guess it's meant to make some vague gesture toward realism or some such. Or maybe it's there to make a player feel their tool proficiency is useful or some such.
Maybe someone thinks they worked pretty well in 4e, but again it’s half a rule & forgets that non-surge healing was extremely limited & just winds up making characters with wolverine level resilience even more resilient.
unless the goal is pointless hoops or overpowered to a broken degree it’s probably not going to come from adding either of the noted rules, the related ones, or some combination because so much of 5e is written to fight any attempts at dragging it kicking & screaming outside a very narrow scope of valid gameplay.
You keep bringing up how you can change the rest durations & how there are rules in the dmg, but the fact that those rules are so half baked that it's reasonable to ask if they were deliberately written in such a fashion that a gm could not use them to force what someone decided was nothing but badwrongfun.
They're not great. They don't really address the main issues and they don't clearly express what they're intend to achieve - calling one of them "Gritty Realism" is basically obfuscatory - it actively seems to hide the fact that you're just changing the fictional pacing of the game behind the ludicrous idea that you're increasing realism.
But one of the big problems with 5E is that the designers are completely unable to communicate with DMs on any clear and effective level.
