D&D General Changing your Rest paradigm is the single biggest, yet smallest, change you can make

[bedir than]

I'm about to start a new campaign with a rest change to essentially have 6 short rests per long.
My two main challenges in the adjustment are;
What about Trance?
What to do about the once per long rest recharge on short rest abilities? (Arcane Recovery)

 

[Oofta]

I'm about to start a new campaign with a rest change to essentially have 6 short rests per long.
My two main challenges in the adjustment are;
What about Trance?

Not sure why it matters. Even with trance you still need equivalent time to benefit from a long rest just like everyone else.

What to do about the once per long rest recharge on short rest abilities? (Arcane Recovery)

How many encounters are you planning on throwing at the group between long rests? Because the number of short rests doesn't really factor in here - they'll still only be able to recover a certain number of spell slots. Classes like monk could be more of an issue since they recover pretty much everything that matters.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I would go along with this by saying that the one that people always seem to add to their Short Resting mechanics that to me seems rather unnecessary is something along the lines of "Max 2 per Long Rest".

To me, I just don't really get the need to make this a hard and fast rule. After all... I'm the DM-- unless the party just voluntarily goes out in the world to kick the crap out of every single thing come upon-- I'm the one who will pretty much dictate how many encounters the party will have. If I want the party to have three encounters with a pair of Short Rests between them and then have a Long Rest... then that's what I will put in front of the players. But if the situation of the narrative calls for like six or seven encounters over the course of a day (usually dungeon crawling) and the party is able to squeeze three or four Short Rests in there... why put in a rule that says to them "No! You can't take those! Two only!" What's the point of denying them more Short Rests on occasion?

As the DM I will be able to give every character with all of their various resource recharging mechanics relatively equal time and spotlight just by varying up the different encounters (in size, length, and number). So there's no reason to create or force an arbitrary rule. See what the party might need on any particuar day, and work around it accordingly.

The only time I've put a limit on short rests per long rest is when SRs are Actions or otherwise something you could do mid-combat. You don't want warlocks casting 2 leveled spells every three rounds.

But ultimately I didn't really like making SR's that fast so the limit went away.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Yeah, but the problem is that I want a game style best supported by the default rest schedule, except the class design and adventuring day encounter guidelines completely work against each other when you do that.

The game, as presented in it's default configuration, works terribly because short rests are absolutely vital for some classes, and basically only useful for healing for others.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Deciding on how Resting and Recharging of Abilities work was the single most important house rule that I made for our table.

EDIT: As a DM I couldn't design adventures with the default mechanics. What worked in Dungeons didn't work in Urban or Wilderness areas, and vice versa. That significant element reflected very poorly on the designers IMO.

 

[Oofta]

Yeah, but the problem is that I want a game style best supported by the default rest schedule, except the class design and adventuring day encounter guidelines completely work against each other when you do that.

The game, as presented in it's default configuration, works terribly because short rests are absolutely vital for some classes, and basically only useful for healing for others.

The rules seem to be based on players primarily dungeon delving where you are constantly under threat and rarely have a safe location to recuperate.

But I find that things work fairly well even up to high levels if you do 2-3 encounters between short rests and 4-10 (higher at low levels, lower at high levels) encounters between long rests. YMMV. If you have 5 minute work days, things can get unbalanced quickly but that's pretty much always been an issue.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The rules seem to be based on players primarily dungeon delving where you are constantly under threat and rarely have a safe location to recuperate.

That word is doing some heavy lifting.

 

[Oofta]

That word is doing some heavy lifting.

Which is why I included it. We don't know exactly what they were thinking, but they have stated that when they were designing 5E that it took into consideration a lot of history and old school gaming style. That they wanted to pattern it on how older games were played. Those older games? A lot of them focused on dungeon crawls.

If I could wave a magic wand we'd have more options and guidelines for alternative rest rules to fit your campaign style. We don't have that so I use gritty rest rules and a house rule extending the duration of some spells.

 

[LordEntrails]

The game, as presented in it's default configuration, works terribly because short rests are absolutely vital for some classes, and basically only useful for healing for others.

Strange, that's nothing like my experience. Nor does it seem to be the experience of most tables I've heard about. Though their are certainly ones like your that rests don't work for them. I wonder what the difference between your table and mine are.

 

[The Grinning Frog]

I'm very excited to try out 8 hour short rests and haven requirements for longrests. I'm thinking about using Survival skill to make temporary havens, the DC depending on how rough the area is.

I have always made it a requirement that a location is 'safe' before long rest benefits but I hadn't thought of involving the survival skill. I like that a lot. Nice one.