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

When hearing arguments about which class or build is stronger, there are often a lot of assumptions. Some obvious ones may include:

1. Susceptibility to MAD: if using standard point buy, then MAD is often a big issue, whereas if using some custom stat rolling method, then it may be different (usually not in the direction of yielding weaker stats and thus making MAD even more problematic, though that's also possible).
2. Magic items availability: if playing through some pre-conceived adventure, then you get whatever that offers, but if playing custom-built adventures, then it's entirely up to the DM.
3. Size of the party: obviously, if all the roles are well-covered, then everyone can specialize and be really strong at one thing, whereas in the opposite case versatility may be valued at a premium (even with the tradeoffs it usually brings).

Another such factor I was considering, which I've seen a little bit of discussions about, but which might be less obvious overall is...

The Ease of pulling off a Long Rest

In a campaign where you get to Long Rest any and every time you'd like, then you can go all out on every battle. There is no resource economy to worry about. Having the ability to replenish some resources with a Short Rest matters less if you'll never short rest anyway. And why would you if there is no downside to long rests?

Some DMs may decide to curb their players' enthusiasm for long rests in various ways, such as:

1. Urgency. The world will blow up in 3 days, and there is this 12 steps fetch quest to complete before then, so can we really afford to call it a night just yet? Or maybe there's a demonic horde chasing on the heels of the party, and letting them catch up is game over?
2. Dungeons. Sleeping in the middle of a dungeon, when there are monsters crawling around, may be imprudent. What if you get ambushed while sleeping? Well, you have guard duty right? But what if the designated watcher gets taken out by a poison dart? Or what if the DM gives a level of exhaustion to characters that sleep in their armor? The DM wouldn't be this nasty, would they...?

Whatever the reason is, if long rests are hard or impossible to come by, that puts a spin on the game. For example:

1. Resource economy becomes important, and is fraught with uncertainty. Each round of combat can be thought of as a candidate to make some hiring decision about in the Secretary problem. The decision to spend some scarce resource has to be taken now, in the absence of knowledge of what future rounds (or future encounters of the day) have in store.
2. At will abilities, like cantrips and most martial attacks, become valuable. Oddball builds such as the Multi-Cantrip Gish may be useful, even though you might rarely see them chosen in "regular" games.
3. Healing, whether of one's self or others, becomes critical. Feats like Healer or Chef may be prized more highly. Also, giving all members of the party secondary healer responsibilities might matter more. If everybody's grinding through their HPs that much more often, then perhaps it's more common for the "main hospital" to get downed, in which case secondary healers are critical.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the above.

It's not a revolutionary idea, by any stretch, but I've been pondering it lately, and thought I would share.

Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily works.

I've been running the Heroes of the Borderlands boxed set for two groups and, a few balance issues aside, it's not what anyone would consider a hard or challenging adventure. But 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.

By your metric, that would make this adventure a hard or challenging campaign, which I don't think is accurate in this case, since how and when player characters can take a long rest is a dial that gets turned for more reasons than just increasing difficulty.

Yeah, I think it is a really important, and maybe unappreciated, dial. The DMG gestures at it with the 'gritty realism' variant which pops up in online discussions now and then but I don't know how widely it is used. I ran a campaign with some version of it and the players said they were more excited about trying the short rest classes.

I voted for 3 - exact middle of the road. I generally try to provide some sort of time pressure to discourage long rests - most often wandering monsters and dungeon restocking, but occasionally ticking clocks. But I also try to make sure that it isn’t too difficult to take a long rest, provided the players consider that time to be an acceptable cost to pay for it.

Based on conversations with other DMs online and in person, I suspect that I’d be a 1 on ease of short rests. It seems like a lot of people have a stance of “if you can get 1 hour to rest, you can probably get 8 hours” and that’s very much not true in my campaigns. I typically roll for random encounters on an hourly basis (with risky actions potentially triggering additional rolls). The difference between one check for random encounters and eight checks for random encounters is enormous. Taking a short rest in the middle of a dungeon is not trivial in my campaigns, but it is reliably possible with pretty minimal risk. Taking a long rest in the middle of a dungeon is technically possible, but incredibly risky in my campaigns.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily works.

I've been running the Heroes of the Borderlands boxed set for two groups and, a few balance issues aside, it's not what anyone would consider a hard or challenging adventure. But 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.

By your metric, that would make this adventure a hard or challenging campaign, which I don't think is accurate in this case, since how and when player characters can take a long rest is a dial that gets turned for more reasons than just increasing difficulty.

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Sure, I guess what you’re saying is that players can’t long rest anytime since they must be at the keep to do it.

But if they have the flexibility to get back to the keep whenever they feel like, then the extra constraint is actually moot, is it not? Which means, therefore, that it still qualifies as an "easy long rest" campaign (or maybe a 2/5 at worst)?

Silam said:

But if they have the flexibility to get back to the keep whenever they feel like, then the extra constraint is actually moot, is it not?

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I don't know why you'd assume they have this ability.

If a group decides to spend every bit of daylight at the Caves of Chaos, when night comes, they either are going to have to deal with a dangerous trek back at night or hunker down in a cave and hide out until things are safer in the morning, without rest.

Silam said:

Sure, I guess what you’re saying is that players can’t long rest anytime since they must be at the keep to do it.

But if they have the flexibility to get back to the keep whenever they feel like, then the extra constraint is actually moot, is it not? Which means, therefore, that it still qualifies as an "easy long rest" campaign (or maybe a 2/5 at worst)?

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It sounds functionally similar to how I run things. I don’t say players can’t take a long rest in the dungeon, but doing so is almost never worth the risk, so you generally want to return to town or at least find a defensible spot to make camp outside the dungeon. Which is generally pretty easy to do. The constraint is not moot, because leaving the dungeon and coming back the next day gives the world time to advance in your absence. New monsters can move into the dungeon to take the place of the ones that the party defeated, or enemy factions can adjust their patrols, set additional traps, or otherwise prepare for the party’s return. That’s why I voted 3. Taking a long rest isn’t difficult, but it comes with consequences, which must be weighed against the risk of pressing on without a rest.

I chose 4, because when it is hard, it is hard.
For example, in a current game's most recent sessions, the party had to force march to find what they hoped was a decent place to camp for the night in some haunted fey woods and ended up having their rest interrupted twice (but managed a short rest in between) before giving up and deciding to trust an ally made during the second encounter and traveling to a safer place where they finally succeeded.

In my other game, the party spends time seriously considering the likely of safe long rests before attempting them. See this thread I started for an example: D&D General - What would you do? (Example from my game)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

I don't know why you'd assume they have this ability.

If a group decides to spend every bit of daylight at the Caves of Chaos, when night comes, they either are going to have to deal with a dangerous trek back at night or hunker down in a cave and hide out until things are safer in the morning, without rest.

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Makes sense.

BTW, a campaign or DM with an "easy long rest" policy doesn’t necessarily mean the games are easy. Likewise, a DM making long rests hard doesn’t mean the game is automatically hard.

What I’m getting at is that it affects the gameplay.

If the players don’t match their playing style to the campaign’s style, then it might make it more difficult. For example, in a "hard long rest" game, they could go all out on the first fight of the day and be out of steam after that, but unable to rest. But in an "easy long rest" game, they might not even survive the first fight if they’re too frugal with their resources!

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

I don't know why you'd assume they have this ability.

If a group decides to spend every bit of daylight at the Caves of Chaos, when night comes, they either are going to have to deal with a dangerous trek back at night or hunker down in a cave and hide out until things are safer in the morning, without rest.

Click to expand...

How dangerous is that trek, though? Because can't they largely stick to the trail where the encounters aren't all that violent on the encounter table?