D&D 5E 5E Healing and my next Greyhawk campaign

[Mort]

Standard 5E healing revolves around the short and long rest - 1 hour for the short rest, 8 hours for the long rest.

Basically a long rest recovers most ills (some exceptions but not that many).

In my last campaign this was just the way it was - the reasoning etc. wasn't discussed.

In my next campaign, I'm thinking of changing that up and throwing a curve ball at the players.

First, the campaign will be in Greyhawk - one of my favorite settings. I'm going to explain to the players that Greyhawk is steeped in magic both Arcane and Divine from eons of Gods, Demi-Gods, powerful mortals having walked the land. The land has absorbed this energy and essentially redirects it: minor cuts are healed within an hour (HD recovery and a short rest) and even major life threatening injury recovers quickly - an 8 hour long rest. The Arcane recovery of wizards and clerics can also be explained this way as well as the short and long rest resets of the other classes can be explained this way too.

Here's the curve-ball:

The timeline will be one where Iuz (the evil demigod of Deceit, Evil, Oppression, Pain, and Wickedness) will have been recently freed and is re-consolidating his power base. He has discovered/perfected a ritual to corrupt the land so that in areas he/his followers have gotten to and performed it (still working out the details) the full healing/recovery benefit only works for those that have sworn loyalty to Iuz. Everyone else will need 24 hours to receive the benefits of a short rest and 7 days for the benefits of a long rest.

Obviously this will mean a significant change in tactics/strategy on the part of the players and a real urgency to stop Iuz/find a counter ritual etc.

Thoughts? Suggestions? comments?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Obviously this will mean a significant change in tactics/strategy on the part of the players and a real urgency to stop Iuz/find a counter ritual etc.

Thoughts? Suggestions? comments?

I originally used 8 hour short rest / 7 day long rest for my two Curse of Strahd campaigns because of the same sort of setting beliefs. Here's my biggest takeaway from it:

It really screws up narrative.

In the Baratok Valley of CoS especially... things are always occurring. Plotlines feed one into another. Find Ireena in the village of Barovia and you need to get her across the valley to the village of Kresk with the hope of avoiding Strahd's notice... and then encounter all the events that occur on the road and in Vallaki that pop up during the travel, several of which are "We have to do this now!". Or rescue the Wizard of Wines from the druids and blights and that triggers events at Yester Hill, including the eventual ritual to create the tree blight which then attacks the winery back.

Now when I coupled that with everyone taking a 7 day break to regain spells and hit points they used during these events... all of a sudden the story ground to a halt. The urgency of finding little Isabelle suddenly disappeared because they weren't going to get to that plotline until at least a week later (by which point she would have died) because there were already a bunch of other things in motion that they had to get to first, and they already were taking 8 hour / nightly rests just to try and regain as little strength that they could from a short rest. Eventually I had to trim the long rest down from 7 days to like 3 to 5 days (depending on the number of exhaustion levels people had) just so that we could try and narratively justify why the PCs basically pulled themselves out of the constantly-moving story for entire weeks at a time.

Had I been running a campaign in which actual Downtime between small adventures was to be an actual part of the game and built into the narrative... justifying pulling the PCs out of the flow for 7 days for a long rest would be easier to do. But even still... while 7 days definitely makes the recovery rules feel a bit more natural in terms of regaining all hit points and most hit dice... 7 day breaks to regain spells is still a massive roadblock to narrative flow. Especially when we're talking low levels of the game-- any spellcaster gets 2 spells total every 7 days (and the rest have to be cantrips)? You end up taking weeks off from the story. So unless each adventure has like less than a half-dozen encounters in it, your PCs are going to adventure for like 4 hours of in-game time... then go back to town for a week. Then go back out for conceivably another four hours in-game of adventuring... then back to town for another week. You have to hope your story can take that into account.

The fact that you state outright that there is meant to be a real urgency to stop Iuz/find a counter ritual... I can tell you that a 7 day long rest will slam up against that and completely deflate it. There WON'T be any real urgency, because the players will know that an entire month within the game can disappear just so the cleric can cast 8 1st level spells (a 1st level caster getting 2 spells per long rest, with a week in between each batch.) There's going to be a lot of "Well, we'd LIKE to go out and help... but we're stuck here in town for the week to recover both our health and our small number of spells and abilities."

 

[Mort]

I originally used 8 hour short rest / 7 day long rest for my two Curse of Strahd campaigns because of the same sort of setting beliefs. Here's my biggest takeaway from it:

It really screws up narrative....

Interesting, that is a big concern.

Keep in mind though, the extended rest isn't everywhere, in fact it's in a minority of places. Initially, the party will have no problem resting normally just about anywhere.

The change means resting on enemy territory is even more problematic, but the party can always retreat.

When I said, urgency, I meant urgency in stopping /reversing the spread of the ritual and its effects. Such a change will not just affect the party, but anywhere it's done. The party can always move out of range, a city can't.



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[Oofta]

I use the alternate rules myself, I simply adjust pacing and what happens to allow for the longer timeframe. Like many novels (The Dresden Files pop to mind) the heroes are minding their own business when things go sideways for a few days. There is no time to take a long rest because if they take a week off really bad things happen ... even taking a much needed short rest becomes more critical.

So from a pacing standpoint it works well. I sometimes have more than the standard 6-8 encounters but if I do some of them are on the easy side.

The biggest issue I've faced is how to deal with spells and abilities that have a duration based on standard long rests. If I'm stretching out the timeline, how long are goodberries good for? Only 24 hours? Several days? A week? Until they take a break?

Then the other question is spells/abilities that last for a good chunk of the day. How long should a druid's wildshape last? Mage Armor normally lasts 4 hours, which in a standard campaign is probably 1/4 of their waking hours.

How you answer these kind of questions doesn't necessarily matter. If you leave them as is, you are reducing their utility. Personally I just multiplied all of the durations by 5 and figured that was close enough.