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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 6839846" data-attributes="member: 6688858">Yes, you're right. When I   said a short rest whenever I was thinking whenever the players like,   which will be after almost every encounter when your adventure model is   3-4 deadly+. The important variable for balancing short and long rest   classes is the ratio between short and long rests (assuming equivalent   resource depletion).I don't find it hard to believe that the   designers would want to let the DM know how many encounters the typical   party can get through while knowing that this won't happen in practice   most of the time. To get the number of encounters the PCs do get  through  to consistently  align with the number of encounters they can  get  through requires rest  restriction (of the sort @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6788736" target="_blank">Flamestrike</a>  advocates),  which is not a trivial modification of the game and the DMG   doesn't give an advice on how to do that. So I find it   hard to  believe that the designers expect that to occur.In the typical adventure the players get a "free" rest at the end--when   you clear the dungeon and go back to town you rest whether you need to   or not. So if the DM prepares a 6-8 encounter dungeon, and the party   takes one long rest during (say when they feel that the "boss fight" is   coming up) and one after completing it, that's like 5 or 6 encounters   before the first long rest, and then 1 or 2 tougher ones at the end. I'm   sure they realize that's how the typical adventure plays out.Yes, trying to control encounters per day is a clumsy way to troubleshoot the game. I think in most cases it's better to encourage the party to take more short rests than to try to prevent them from taking long rests.That changes the ratio of short to long rests. If you run  the numbers comparing 6 encounters with a short rest after every second  vs 3 encounters with a short rest after each (same 2:1 ratio of short to long rests), you will find the classes  are balanced similarly.There are a few additional considerations: long rest classes have more  AoE abilities and (slightly) weaker basic attacks, which is an advantage with fewer  encounters, and with longer adventuring days they're also more likely  to be too conservative using their abilities, "wasting" them more often.  So I would expect the short rest classes to come out a bit ahead when  you look at damage inflicted and healed with 2 short rests per long rest  to account for that. If not, I would admit that implies the game is  balanced to some extent in favor of longer ADs.Planning encounter by  encounter is too on-the-nose for me. I prefer the sandbox approach where  you leave the choice of when to rest in the hands of the players but  add more variables and greater variance into the encounters and the  environment to make it a more interesting choice. My focus is on giving  the players interesting decisions to make, not depleting the PCs'  resources. A game that's hard on the PCs is not necessarily hard on the  players.I don't like to plan for variety in general. That's inefficient. If more  variety would make the game better you should use more randomness in  your adventure design procedure.Yes, I don't disagree with the rest of your post. If you ramp up  encounter difficulty to the point where you get 5MWD issues then you do  have to start restricting rests, either with hard limits or stiff  disincentives. I'm pointing out that the DMG doesn't advocate this, and by default rests are only very mildly disincentivized, not to argue that restricting rests is a bad idea but to cast doubt on the notion that the statement that the party has enough resources to last 6-8 encounters constitutes advice that the game plays best with 6-8 encounter days.There's nothing magical about 6-8  encounters/day. The magic number, to the extent that there is one, is 2 short rests per long rest.The game seems designed to play well with a variety of encounters per day.</blockquote>

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