D&D 5E Have the designers lost interest in short rests?

Charlaquin said:

Interesting. My experience has been the opposite - new players seem to be afraid to spend any of their limited-use abilities, regardless of what kind of rest they recover on. They just spam at-wills all day, only spending spell slots to heal or to nova in obviously climactic battles.

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New players in your group or you playing in new player groups?

Zardnaar said:

New players in your group or you playing in new player groups?

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I’ve played in and run games for many groups over the 6 years 5e has been out. Most of them have included a non-zero number of players who had never played D&D (any edition) before.

Charlaquin said:

I’ve played in and run games for many groups over the 6 years 5e has been out. Most of them have included a non-zero number of players who had never played D&D (any edition) before.

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Ah. Yeah something like that will vary by players. 6-8 encounter not being followed that well applies to WotC own modules.

Zardnaar said:

Ah. Yeah something like that will vary by players. 6-8 encounter not being followed that well applies to WotC own modules.

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True. Though, it seems to me that many WotC published adventures do follow that guideline during their introductory segments - Death House in Curse of Strahd and finding Floon in Dragon Heist, for example. They just don’t seem to follow through after.

AbdulAlhazred said:

It NEVER ceases to amaze me how all this fiddling and faddling goes on, but the results are always inevitably just a covert return to something closer to A/E/D/U.

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While Encounter powers were the precursor to Short Rest powers, they went too far, resulting in samey combat. It was, however, a decent idea. Now a short-rest PC has to decide whether or not to expend her short-rest powers. That's good. Similarly 1E - 3E and now 5E encouraged the 5-minute workday, which is, again, bad. Short-rest recovery discourages the 5MWD, which is good. Somewhere there's something good waiting to be found.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I've always referred this basic concept as 'plot power'. If you think of a game in narrative terms, then this is a relevant measure. However, I am not sure that it is really all that balanced in 5e. Wizards and other full casters, but especially wizards, have a LOT of plot power! I played one through a good chunk of the levels back a couple of years ago, and wow. Given a lot of the constraints of 'classic' spell casters have not been restored (IE consider a 1e magic user) the wizard has a LOT of very plot powerful spells available. Most of the plans our party made as far as dealing with different stuff pretty much revolved around figuring out how to strategically manipulate the situation in our favor using my spells. I would not say the other PCs were 'weaker' at all, but planning was pretty much an exercise in developing a spell-casting approach to a problem, and then the other PCs contribution was to 'be there' and handle a few specifics, or just provide the muscle needed to wrap up a situation. Of course some other casters, we had a cleric IIRC, got some of this too, but their spells seemed a bit more situational, or else supporting/supplemental.

I thought 4e was, again, a bit more successful in this area. Anyone could learn 4e rituals, for the cost of a feat, and those were the main 'strategic' resource. Plus the whole SC concept kind of insured that skills and such played a larger strategic role in the game. 5e's version of rituals OTOH is just yet another way to loosen restrictions on casters. Admittedly, some of the ultra-power level spells of the days of yore have been toned down SOME, but not that much!

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the "plot power" point assumes perfect omniscience on the part of a wizard player who needs to balance int mod+wizard level prepared spells against spells they manage to collect in their spellbook and every possible situation they might come into contact with. Back in the 3.5 days when you had vancian magic it meant that level x y & maybe z had a niche spell that could really save the day where the marginal cost to pull that ace out of their sleeve was to devote one of the possible 1-4 slots for that spell level to that spell
Warlock still has huge spell lit overlap with the wizard to further erode the "plot power" argument, but w hen they changed how spells were prepared so preparing a niche ace in the hole spell has the same opportunity cost as a daily driver bread & butter spell they can expect to depend on most sessions or long rest to long rest. It doesn't help matters that they over used concentration, energy resist, lowballed damage & all sorts of stuff to thwart linear fighter quadratic wizard in a no feats no magic items game & wound up inverting it in a normal game with both while the wizard/sorcerer/etc is still left with a quiver of spells that are generally almost good enough to just keep pace at their best.

Asisreo said:

Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers can get a longbow from their starting equipment.


My point isn't necessarily about warlocks, its just an example that I could use for any class. You are correct that level 1 is fragile and going up in power provides more spotlight opportunities, which actually helps my point.

The first level example was to isolate and simplify a specific example. Another example at extremely high levels could be fighters vs rogues. They both have unique qualities that guide the DM into knowing what a high-level spotlight for each character could look like.

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Yes they can start with it, but the fighter chooses from "chain mail or (b) leather, longbow, and 20 arrows" & is more likely to choose the chain mail while a paladin can choose from "
a martial weapon and a shield or (b) two martial weapons" & is again not likely to choose a long bow because they aren't really a ranged class & the javelins are probably good enough to help the raged types until things are close to melee if it comes up. If they find that a longbow is needed so often that they really need to invest in dex & longbow combat thy can do that later but probably don't at level 1. Your 1st level spotlight example wasn't just an niche abstraction it was an isolated white room example so far removed from actual play as to be irrelevant. Concern about the spotlight at level 1 is so minimal even in a game that drags things out like my precovid campaign where the party spent about three months of weekly games just surviving & gathering basics before reaching first level. I believe they were 4-5 within a couple levels of hitting first. Wotc can't balance casters other than warlock against the assumption of perfect omniscience 100% of the time both in the adventure the gm plans as well as against other players... They certainly can't do it assuming that the resulting just keeping even at peak vrs at will with normal gameplay where magic items & feats are a thing so it works with no feats no magic items if their HCs rain down magic items & new books keep releasing more feats as they have.

DM Dave1 said:

I believe part of the issue some have with the baseline of six to eight medium/hard encounters per adventuring day is that some may have this idea of an adventuring day = a game session OR that they must fit the adventuring day into one session because of... reasons. One adventuring day can certainly span over several game sessions. We do that regularly and have not... er... encountered this "book keeping pain in the ass" that is claimed here - and I award XP after every session based on the challenges the present PCs had overcome that session. If you do session-based XP such as in AL, it becomes an even easier bookkeeping task. I should also note that while I try for 6-8 encounters, I don't don't rigidly adhere to that. Some adventuring days will have more encounters, some will have less. Another point to make is that not every encounter is resolved via combat and not every combat is a fight to the death. With those points in mind, we have more "time" in any given adventuring day for more encounters. Based on my experience, I've not found 6-8 encounters to be either hard or unrealistic.

As for short rests, as others have mentioned there are enough short rest features that are part of the core classes that they are an integral part of the game. That said, I've found that in one of our games where the PCs are now levels 19 and 20, short rests are rarely utilized. I haven't been keeping track, but my guess is that short rests became less of a thing once they hit the fourth tier. Then again we don't have a full warlock in the group which could be argued to be the class most dependent on the short rest due to so few spell slots.

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Part of the issue here is that the most natural time breakdown for resource management in rpgs is the game session. This does have to figure in to calculations.

If you're doing lots of social interactions with an average of one combat a night (sometimes two, sometimes none, not particularly unusual to my experience) then it could be 6 weeks between long rests. This means that you have abilities you may be using once every 6 weeks (assuming you play weekly - if fortnightly longer), at a certain point the game is going to strain under that long a refresh time, and it's almost certainly going to creep shorter.

tetrasodium said:

the "plot power" point assumes perfect omniscience on the part of a wizard player who needs to balance int mod+wizard level prepared spells against spells they manage to collect in their spellbook and every possible situation they might come into contact with. Back in the 3.5 days when you had vancian magic it meant that level x y & maybe z had a niche spell that could really save the day where the marginal cost to pull that ace out of their sleeve was to devote one of the possible 1-4 slots for that spell level to that spell

Spoiler: wizard slots

3.5
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5e
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Warlock still has huge spell lit overlap with the wizard to further erode the "plot power" argument, but w hen they changed how spells were prepared so preparing a niche ace in the hole spell has the same opportunity cost as a daily driver bread & butter spell they can expect to depend on most sessions or long rest to long rest. It doesn't help matters that they over used concentration, energy resist, lowballed damage & all sorts of stuff to thwart linear fighter quadratic wizard in a no feats no magic items game & wound up inverting it in a normal game with both while the wizard/sorcerer/etc is still left with a quiver of spells that are generally almost good enough to just keep pace at their best.


Yes they can start with it, but the fighter chooses from "chain mail or (b) leather, longbow, and 20 arrows" & is more likely to choose the chain mail while a paladin can choose from "
a martial weapon and a shield or (b) two martial weapons" & is again not likely to choose a long bow because they aren't really a ranged class & the javelins are probably good enough to help the raged types until things are close to melee if it comes up. If they find that a longbow is needed so often that they really need to invest in dex & longbow combat thy can do that later but probably don't at level 1. Your 1st level spotlight example wasn't just an niche abstraction it was an isolated white room example so far removed from actual play as to be irrelevant. Concern about the spotlight at level 1 is so minimal even in a game that drags things out like my precovid campaign where the party spent about three months of weekly games just surviving & gathering basics before reaching first level. I believe they were 4-5 within a couple levels of hitting first. Wotc can't balance casters other than warlock against the assumption of perfect omniscience 100% of the time both in the adventure the gm plans as well as against other players... They certainly can't do it assuming that the resulting just keeping even at peak vrs at will with normal gameplay where magic items & feats are a thing so it works with no feats no magic items if their HCs rain down magic items & new books keep releasing more feats as they have.

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This why I roll a buy what I wanted.

My goliath wanted to use a big axe and not suck at range so 18 strength, 14 dex medium armor, axe, longbow, 2 Javelins, two daggers latter.

Zardnaar said:

This why I roll a buy what I wanted.

My goliath wanted to use a big axe and not suck at range so 18 strength, 14 dex medium armor, axe, longbow, 2 Javelins, two daggers latter.

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Don't forget that the Sharpshooter feat can be used with thrown weapons.

Quartz said:

Don't forget that the Sharpshooter feat can be used with thrown weapons.

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It the range on thrown weapons suck. And you can't really multi attack.