@Manbearcat I think the example is getting in the way here. People have too much baggage bound up in terms of how they handle long rests and whether or not they can be “earned” and what “story” even means in a D&D context, let alone what makes one good. All you’re likely to end up with is bickering over definitions and trying to re-contextualize the example. If what you want to know is if people prioritize honoring the results of skilled play or preserving a particular intended narrative structure, that’s what you should ask. No clarifications or examples or context. Such things just give us pedants something to pick apart instead of answering the actual question.
For my part, I prioritize skilled play when those two things come into conflict.
Let me say a few things on this:
1) I appreciate your clarity.
2) I accept no responsibility for what others continuously smuggle into conversations (despite my best attempts to disarm this borderline inevitable smuggling + reorienting/reframing the conversation that happens in these situations in particular). Everyone who does the smuggling and does the reorienting needs to take responsibility for their own work here.
3) You (and by "you", I mean "a person") could sub out recharge (Long Rest in this case) and sub in any number of other favorable gamestates (which can be anything from favorable framing of a follow-on conflict to gaining an asset). Perhaps you've:
- won an audience with the king
- won the favor of the king
- won access to the portal
- won the activation of the portal
- won a combat
- won the arrival at the location you're seeking (via a journey or a teleport or whatever).
This happens_in_D&D constantly. Its not clear to me in the slightest why "won" is better or worse than "reaped" is better or worse than "earned" or whatever verb one wants to apply to it.
This happens in D&D. We all know it does. Haggling over these stupid verbs seems to be what we ("we" here meaning the ENWorld userbase) do best though, so I guess we should keep doing what we do best!
4) Why would I use Long Rest (which yields a favorable framing of a follow-on conflict - Team PC now has all their resources) vs any of the other ones in (3) above (which, again, each of those should be plenty sufficient to convey the point)?
Because the game's sensitivity to the Long Rest recharge was intentionally designed into the game. The designers made this decision (and I pushed back hard at this precisely because how sensitive the game would be, with classes having asymmetric resource suites + the apex potency of a class like a Wizard balanced around the big guns of limited-use "Dailies" being able to go nova on a refresh and short Adventuring Day, to the Long Rest Refresh). We're all aware of it. Its been discussed to death. So this being such a massive fault line (on one side you've got a group that is resource-ablated and has a tough fight...on the other side you have full resource refresh and a complete anticlimax), it has to be the most stark example of the paradigm I'm trying to convey in the lead post (acquiring audience with a king doesn't have the same heft as a Long Rest recharge before a climactic encounter).
5) Its unclear to me why people can't talk about D&D as a game. That is all I was trying to do here. Find out how ENWorld GM's broadly (via a poll) prioritizes the two most pivotal imperatives of 5e (Skilled Play vs the "Tell a Memorable Story" Imperative). You're playing a game. You have a Long Rest that should trigger. But it will damage something else (the likelihood that the rest of the dungeon or the climactic encounter leads to unfilfilling, therefore not memorable, anticlimax). Do you let it trigger or do you initiate a block? I mean I guess we got there as people voted. But jesus, this is too much haggling. Its a really simple question.
