D&D 5E Avoiding the 15m workday.

[Jer]

So the biggest point's I am gathering from here and other forums, is that low level 5e is really not that heroic of play. you need to be sneaky bastards or avoid fighting as much as possible.

Yes. And that seems intentional because it seems to be what people want - the playtest pushed things in this direction. The advice seems to be that if you want to start as "heroes" rather than "sneaky bastards" you should start the characters out at level 4 instead of level 1.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I was getting tired of my players taking a short rest after every combat as well. Really messes up the flow of the story. Until I realized that the problem I had with it was just that, it screws up the story.

So I've actually shortened it to at least 10 minutes, and it's really just part of their post combat routine - verify the area is safe, catch your breath, tend wounds, collect ammunition and loot, etc. It makes sense and doesn't interrupt the flow.

Randy

 

[CapnZapp]

I was getting tired of my players taking a short rest after every combat as well. Really messes up the flow of the story. Until I realized that the problem I had with it was just that, it screws up the story.

So I've actually shortened it to at least 10 minutes, and it's really just part of their post combat routine - verify the area is safe, catch your breath, tend wounds, collect ammunition and loot, etc. It makes sense and doesn't interrupt the flow.

Randy

The problem is that the game isn't built around getting a short rest after each encounter. Some classes become significantly overpowered.

My best suggestion is for you to a) beef up enemy defenses, and b) make it clear it is their short rest that allowed the enemy to do so.

At least until they stop trying to rest on autopilot, and instead make a meaningful decision-point out of "do we take a short rest or do we press on?".

As soon as you notice that when they take short rests only after such deliberation, you can ease off the enemy reinforcements again. The point isn't to punish them for taking short rests - the point is to make it clear taking a short rest may have consequences, and that you should try to press on without them as far as possible.

Conditioning your players into this thinking is a real effort, especially if they're used to other editions of D&D. So you can't expect it to work immediately, so you need to be persistent. Don't give up (which is effectively what you are doing when you reduce short rests to 10 minutes)!

 

[pming]

Hiya.

I was getting tired of my players taking a short rest after every combat as well. Really messes up the flow of the story. Until I realized that the problem I had with it was just that, it screws up the story.

From my perspective, it doesn't "mess up" the story...it just changes it. For example, if you were playing the Lost Mine of Phandelver (Starter Set adventure), and the PC's start to take on the Redbrands in their hideout...resting after each combat would basically be a death sentence. After the first 1 hour rest the other Redbrands would probably have discovered something's amiss. Recon would ensue, likely resulting in the rest of the Redbrands organizing for an onslaught. If the PC's tried to take another 1 hour rest after the battle with some of the recon guys, well, chances are that when they left the room they would be in a lot of trouble! All the other Redbrands, missile weapons, oil flasks, magic, maybe the Nothic and/or Bugbears...all bad. Would that "mess up" the story? Hellz no...it just changes it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that any DM worth his salt will have the campaign world run along at it's own pace and with it's own logical conclusions. The world doesn't "pause" because the players want to get their powers/spells/etc. back. My suggestion to you isn't to change it to 10 minutes...that takes away from the player choice of "should we risk resting...or press on?" and in stead makes it a no-brainer ("of course we should rest...it's only 10 minutes").

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[WayneLigon]

So the biggest point's I am gathering from here and other forums, is that low level 5e is really not that heroic of play. you need to be sneaky bastards or avoid fighting as much as possible.

For those first few levels, plan on losing characters as well. In Savage Worlds you have your bennies and possibly your action cards to help you survive encounters - SW can be very deadly when damage dice start exploding, but equally forgiving for the Vigor checks and that last reserve 'don't die' bennie. D&D doesn't have any of that. Plan to be down on HP and simply stay at unhealed states for a period of time. Don't blow all your slotted spells in the first encounter, or even your second or third. Keep to damaging cantrips and weapons.

Now, if it were really 'old school', then you would have no healing potions - first level characters would think such a thing absolutely amazing, and you also would not be able to buy any, either. People didn't sell magic items at all, and you couldn't make even the crumbiest item yourself until you were something like 12th level - and if it were REALLY old school you wouldn't have any healing magic, either, since clerics didn't get spells at all until second level. Which would take you several game sessions to get to, BTW. You'd plan on losing 1-2 PC's a night at least until you hit about 4rth or so, depending on the class, since 0 HP == dead forever and there was no death save or stabilization roll or any of that stuff. You could be cautious about it, but then your advancement would be even slower since no killing monsters == no XP.

 

[SteveC]

TL;DR, So far in 5e, we have had several sessions where we have had about 15m of action and we are all spent, is the game designed for this? can I avoid this?

It is absolutely designed with this mindset in order: if there is no time pressure your goal is to avoid fights whenever you can, and get the heck out of dodge when you can't go any further. How much fun that is will be up to your group to decide. This is especially true at the lower levels where you have almost no resources to work with, and levels come very quickly.

An encounter or two, getting out and leveling up, then repeating the process until you reach a decent level is par for the course.

Now if you are under time constraints or have a story reason to keep going, by all means, do so. Hopefully your DM will be taking your resources into account as they run the game, otherwise character creation is pretty fast.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I love 5e, but I miss 4e's solution to this: milestones and action points. I found those to be quite effective at motivating players to push on unless they were truly on the edge of falling over. (Of course, the per-encounter powers didn't hurt, either.)

I'm rather hoping for a 5e-balanced AP system in the DMG.

This would actually be super-easy to implement in 5e if you wanted.

In fact, you can pretty much rip the wording from 4e. Every two encounters, you gain a milestone, which gives you 1 Action Point, and after a long rest, you have 1 Action Point, and an Action Point can be spent to take an extra action on your turn.

I might personally bump up the encounter limit (say, to 3 encounters/milestone), but that's not even that big of a deal. If the 4e thing worked, it's totally something you could rip off and put in 5e.

That said, I personally didn't see much interest in the groups I played in with the Milestone. It was rarely ever remembered, and when it was, it wasn't a significant decision. Spent dailies were the main decision-maker, which points in 5e at being low on or running out of spells.

But, as in 4e, the only thing stopping the party from taking a full recharge after every encounter is the DM.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that any DM worth his salt will have the campaign world run along at it's own pace and with it's own logical conclusions. The world doesn't "pause" because the players want to get their powers/spells/etc. back. My suggestion to you isn't to change it to 10 minutes...that takes away from the player choice of "should we risk resting...or press on?" and in stead makes it a no-brainer ("of course we should rest...it's only 10 minutes").

I totally agree. The world doesn't pause. The problem is that the players know how the game works. And thus the game rules introduce this 'pause' in the actions the characters take. This whole thread shows the peril of making a rule that provides for regaining abilities. The idea was to limit that by requiring them to stop for at least an hour. But the only ways to actually prevent that are for something to interrupt their rest (which gets old and punitive after a while), a deadline type scenario (which also gets old), or for the DM to just say 'no.' Sure, you can make 'reasons' for saying no. Just the fact that it's 8:30 AM and you've only been up for 30 minutes should be enough. Part of that could be to limit the number of short rests, or the time between short rests, etc.

But my preference is for the rules to not create situations where the rules intrude into the game like this.

Most of the abilities that are regained with a short rest are:

Dragonborn breath weapon (comparable to a heavy weapon or a spell of similar level)
Bard - Font of Inspiration
Cleric - Channel Divinity
Druid - Wild Shape
Fighter - Second Wind
Fighter - Action Surge
Fighter - Superiority Dice
Monk - Ki points
Paladin - Channel Divinity
Warlock - Fey Presence
Warlock - Misty Escape
Warlock - Dark Delirium
Warlock - Dark One's Own Luck
Warlock - Entropic Ward
Wizard - Arcane Recovery

I may have missed a few. Most of these aren't really all that problematic, and those that are can be addressed by modifying them if needed. For example, I prefer the idea that Second Wind provides temporary hit points instead of healing.

My original ruling was that you could only take a short rest once every 6 hours. Then I decided 8 hours. My daughter determined that meant her druid could shapechange 6 times a day. OK, so why tie it to a rest? Why not just make it available 6 times a day?

After the first day of adventuring, you regain your full hit points, and half of your hit dice. So the first day of a campaign you have some extra hit points, and then it settles into a predictable 1/2 hit dice. So why not just say you have half of your hit dice each day to spend on healing when you feel it's necessary? I'm OK with tying it to an activity, like to heal hit points you actually have to stop and bind your wounds, and that the process takes some time. But it doesn't take an hour. 10-15 minutes makes sense. In the wilderness that's no big deal. In a dungeon, it might happen, it might not.

The point is, you can still determine a limit for the use of these abilities, but it doesn't have to be tied to a game mechanic that either has arbitrary limitations (why can't I take a 4 short rests in 4 hours to use my Second Wind to recover all my hit points before going to the next encounter - because I said you can't stack short rests, or you have to wait 6 hours for the next short rest), or possibly turning the campaign into a players vs DM scenario (we take a short rest - no you don't because you're attacked by orcs, ok, we take a short rest now that the orcs are dead, no you don't, now you're attacked by kobolds).

I don't assume that just because the party is first level and wandering through the deep dark forest, that all of the high level monsters will stay away. There are times to run away. And there are times to rest, or retreat, and such. I've added a simple injury system and some other things that leverage the new exhaustion rules. There are plenty of other ways to address the fact that the PCs regain abilities and hit points.

Of course, that's also the beauty of these rules. You can find what works for you. And for right now this is working for us. I'm not designing a game for thousands of players. Right now I'm just concerned about a barbarian, druid and ranger. But if the rest of the rules are well designed and balanced, it should scale OK.

Randy

 

[aramis erak]

3E began the "it's too much work to have multiple PCs" era.

No, it started about 6 years before that... with the Player's Option: Skills and Powers book for AD&D 2E. Much of 3E's combat system starts there. Some would say it began with the introduction of proficiencies in later AD&D 1E. Next to the PO S&P and PO C&T combined (aka "2.5")... ugh... 3.0 was a simplifcation from that mess.

 

[pming]

Hiya.
[MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION]: I get what you're saying. For me, I'm an old fart still playing a game I learned when I was 10 (I'm turning 45 in a month). When I learned that game, it was more or less standard practice for a DM to roll for wandering monsters every turn (10 minutes); typically it was a 1-in-6 chance, but some dungeons had it 2-in-6, 1-in-8, etc. At any rate, I guess that is still part of my "automatic assumptions" when talking about resting in a dungeon or anywhere outside of a 'safe' area (well located camp, inn, farm house, etc).

With that in mind, rolling a 1 on a d6 over the course of 6 rolls is a pretty high likelihood (rolling 1 per 10 minutes). There doesn't have to be any sort of "time constraint" where the PC's are up against the clock to stop the evil cabal's sacrifice...just regular, every day dungeon wandering monsters. A dungeon/ruin/whatever isn't generally static. The creatures there are moving around, other creatures wander in for a visit, meetings between monster 'groups' take place, monsters go out hunting for food, treasure, slaves, etc. That's what a wandering monster table is for.

In regards to 5e, one of the little-but-big things I noticed right off the bat with the LMoP adventure was the inclusion of the "Wandering Monster" tables. The chances are slightly more than 1-in-6, but the time frame is either twice a day, or "when the PC's are spending a lot of time in an area" (for Wave Echo Caves). This simple inclusion will cut down on the times players are willing to risk attempting to rest in such a hostile environment. Personally, I'll probably stick with my "once per turn" thing for all the dungeon/ruin/cave areas in the LMoP adventure, but then again, my players don't tend to want to rest very often in dungeons simply because they know it's dangerous.

If you are set on a shorter rest period, try going down "bit by bit"...it's easier to give to players than to take away. So I'd start with a short rest being half-an-hour. If that's not short enough, drop it to 20 minutes. Still not short enough, then maybe 10 or 15...don't jump straight into 10 minutes because if you find it too fast, it will be harder on your players to accept if you suddenly say "Uh, guys, I'm actually making a short rest be 30 minutes now..."

^_^

Paul L. Ming