Advice: A less hectic workday for my D&D characters

[HorusZA]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.
I think I'll try the "short rest = 8 hours and Long Rest = Suitable Downtime" approach.

 

[Oofta]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.
I think I'll try the "short rest = 8 hours and Long Rest = Suitable Downtime" approach.

That's worked well for me as well. As others have pointed out other tweaks such as increasing encounter difficulty just emphasizes those classes that have limited resources.

The only issue I hit was what to do with spells and effects that last for an hour or more. My decision was to have anything that is measured in hours or days is multiplied by 6. So those goodberries last almost a week, mage armor lasts 2 days, etc.

Every once in a while the group would get an option to recuperate more quickly either through some special blessing or treatment depending on the story.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I've read in multiple different places that one of the core assumptions in D&D 5e is a workday of around 6 encounters (combat or some other obstacles that consume resources) per day.

Only if you equate per day with per long rest, which while the default in 5e is not the only way to run the game. The Gritty Rest Variant is one way to go, but I prefer a simpler method of "You can't get a long rest in a place that's not restful" which would include a measure of comfort, safety from threat and utility. Players can spend resources making a place in the wild satisfy these requirements, but that is functionally the same as an encounter.

Or I just use the Gritty Realism Variant

 

[Tony Vargas]

The true solution is to have rest frequencies vary depending on the needs of the scenario.

This is the solution. Anything short of this does not solve the problem for all kinds of adventures.

That's the best work-around I've seen: Don't just turn on one alternate rest variant, that only shifts the problem. Change the needed conditions/durations of rests to suit the current story dynamics, so the pacing always approximates the 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest balance point at which classes are theoretically competitive with eachother, and encounters perform as close as possible to their ratings.

An actual solution[/s] would be to design classes that balanced with eachother (which 4e did), and were challenged by encounters consistent with guidelines (which plenty of other not-D&D games have done), regardless of pacing. But, as many options as 5e presents, those aren't among 'em.

 

[jgsugden]

*Sigh*

The DMG recommends six to eight medium to hard encounters in an adventuring day (which most people think means "per Long Rest"). They anticipate that you'll take a short rest twice during that span, after 2 or 3 encounters and then against somewhere between 4 and 6 encounters.

In a medium encounter the PCs may lose a few hps and use a very limited amount of limited resources (spells, 1/SR class abilities, etc...) and a hard encounter is likely to see them use a decent number of hps and more of those abilities. In a deadly encounter, PCs should be using up a good number of limited resources and a lot of hps. This will not be true of every deadly encounter, but it will be of most if they deserve to be called deadly.

So, if you want to only have 1 or 2 encounters per day, you want to make them more than deadly so that they're using a lot of resources. To that end, I'd set them at double the deadly level from the DMG.

However, I think this is a bad approach for a day in, day out approach.

Deadly encounters are fights for survival. Your objective pretty much has to be "kill before being killed". If you're doing that for every encounter, it gets boring fast... and it makes the heroes feel less like heroes and more like town guards that can barely hold their own against typical threats. That doesn't make for great storytelling.

Instead, I suggest that you have encounters in the game where the PCs are not fearing for their lives (because they're HEROES, not ZEROES), but instead are trying to achieve a goal - often a goal that must be achieved 'in time'. Save the children before the orcs kill them... escape the dungeon before it floods ... stop the ritual before it is completed. These may be "easy" encounters from a survival standpoint, but they can still be difficult challenges that the PCs can actually lose without it ruining the game. Many DMs skip over the guidance in the DMG on encounter building and go straight to the table and numbers - trying to figure out just how difficult they can make the game... but D&D is not a strategy survival game - it is a role playing game in which we tell heroic tales. Not all heroic tales are constantly about survival (although some encounters - or even who sessions - can be all about just making it out alive).

 

[AriochQ]

I run my game this way and have adopted some homebrew rules to account for it.

1. Increase monster hit points, sometimes up to double.
2. Any attack abilities except for the primary attack use a bonus action. e.g. A dragon will claw/claw/bite as an action and then Breath as a bonus action. (This also makes solo monsters more formidable, allowing you to run fewer monsters per combat making DMing a little easier).

 

[Harzel]

[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] I generally find your posts insightful and interesting; I hope you will not be offended by the directness of my comments below.

Unfortunately, that's a commonly spread misconception.

The DMG suggest 6-8 encounters with 2 short rests, about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the day. (DMG pg 84.)

Actually, that is the commonly spread misconception. Here is the actual quote from the DMG.

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

So, first, the 6-8 number is associated with encounters of a particular difficulty, and the text explicitly mentions more and fewer encounters as equally viable alternatives. Per this section in the DMG, there is nothing special about 6-8 encounters. Second, this section in the DMG is not, per se, making a recommendation about how many encounters a party ought to have; rather, it is suggesting an approximate upper limit on what they can handle.

Just having harder encounters doesn't balance because of durations. An easy example is the barbarian - starting at 2 rages a day, they are supposed to be able to rage 1/4 to 1/3 of the encounters. With 1-2 encounters per day they would always be able to rage - you'd need to scale it back to one rage every two or three days to hit the same balance point.

Look at spells. If encounters are fewer, any "all encounter" buffs will be great, and you're casting then 1-2 instead of 6-8 times. If encounters are harder because of mroe foes, area effect can often hit more and be a lot more effective. If combats are harder because of more dangerous opponents, then debuffs/crowd control can make a huge impact - and because of one 1/3 of the saves are proficient it will still be easy to find spells that will affect them even if they are tougher.

Fewer, harder encounters changes the balance dramatically vs. the expected amount. It's far from an unplayable balance, but it makes some classes a lot better, especially full casters, and makes other classes relatively weaker, like those that are primarily at-will (weapons, etc.)

These are good points about how the number of encounters per "adventuring day" affects class balance. Except that there is no evidence to suggest that, for instance, a 1st level barbarian being able to rage in 1/4 to 1/3 of encounters is the intended or preferred balance point.

A better solution is to scale back on your rests so that you can have the recommended number of encounters between them. The DMG has a Gritty Realism variant (pg 267) that makes a short rest 8 hours, and a long rest 7 days. So you can have 2 encounters per day and a short rest, and long rests only between adventures.

I have considered using this variant, but the notion that you can sit around for 6 days and not recover any resources and then suddenly be made whole after day 7 is just a little too weird (for me anyway). Admittedly, it is logically no different than the miraculous 8th hour of a standard long rest, but stretching out the fictional time just makes it seem way more discomfiting to me.

What I think I really would like is a finer-grained recovery over the extended time, but I haven't thought of a way to do that that isn't way fiddly.

 

[Harzel]

I have an idea about slower spell recovery as well, maybe you can recover a percentage (33%?) of your total spell levels per day. A 5th level Wizard with 5/3/2 spells has a total of 17 spell levels and would recover 6 levels worth of spells after a long rest.

If you are thinking of this in conjunction with having days that feature 1/3 of the "adventuring day" encounter load, there are a couple of things to consider.
1) If the PCs spend 1/3 of their resources each day and get back 1/3 each night, they still start each day on full and end each day at 2/3. Which means you never get the same effect as you would at the end of a "full adventuring day" when they are supposed to be on/near empty. (I thought of almost exactly the same scheme and did not realize that it would not achieve the intended affect until after I had actually proposed it to my players. )
2) You will do weird things to class balance if you only pick on HP and spells. Unfortunately many other resources come in such small quantities (e.g., barbarian rages, bardic inspiration, Wild Shape, Channel Divinity) that round off (after dividing by 3) can create a significant effect - markedly increasing or decreasing the effective number of uses "per day" depending on which way you round. The alternative of making the recovery irregular to account for the rounding (e.g. 2/2/1 for something with 5 uses per day) becomes pretty fiddly.

 

[CapnZapp]

[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] I generally find your posts insightful and interesting; I hope you will not be offended by the directness of my comments below.



Actually, that is the commonly spread misconception. Here is the actual quote from the DMG.



So, first, the 6-8 number is associated with encounters of a particular difficulty, and the text explicitly mentions more and fewer encounters as equally viable alternatives. Per this section in the DMG, there is nothing special about 6-8 encounters. Second, this section in the DMG is not, per se, making a recommendation about how many encounters a party ought to have; rather, it is suggesting an approximate upper limit on what they can handle.



These are good points about how the number of encounters per "adventuring day" affects class balance. Except that there is no evidence to suggest that, for instance, a 1st level barbarian being able to rage in 1/4 to 1/3 of encounters is the intended or preferred balance point.



I have considered using this variant, but the notion that you can sit around for 6 days and not recover any resources and then suddenly be made whole after day 7 is just a little too weird (for me anyway). Admittedly, it is logically no different than the miraculous 8th hour of a standard long rest, but stretching out the fictional time just makes it seem way more discomfiting to me.

What I think I really would like is a finer-grained recovery over the extended time, but I haven't thought of a way to do that that isn't way fiddly.

Actually, the thing nobody seems to want to admit is:

An encounter the DMG calls medium to hard is, in reality, laughably easy.

If none of the encounters have the capacity to actually threaten the characters (and challenge the players) what does that lead to?

A very wonky ubermensch feeling, that's what. Not only is "easy mode" boring for the players (and DM), it has devastating effects on keeping characters in line.

 

[Vymair]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.
I think I'll try the "short rest = 8 hours and Long Rest = Suitable Downtime" approach.

Our table has come to similar conclusion. We settled on short rest is daily rest, long rest is either 3 days or overnight in a safe place. If you are sleeping in the lord's castle, you can get long rest benefits every night, but deep in a dungeon, it's very difficult to get a long rest.