D&D 5E Correcting ripple effects of slow resting variant

[Horwath]

I honestly do not see the point about duration of long rest.

Any duration you set; default 8 hrs, or 5 mins or 2 weeks, you are still limited with the fact that you have a limited amount of encounters that you can throw at the party per "rest cycle".

This just turns 5min work day into 5min work week.

And time pressure still stands no matter the duration of long rest if you put the time pressure on the players.
It's the same if you say that you have 2 weeks to save the village with 1 week rest time as you have 2 days with 8 hr rest time.


Only benefit I see, is your personal narrative preference about how many levels could a character gain in a week/month/year

 

[ninjayeti]

I have also been thinking about using the longer rests option for a hexcrawl campaign I am working on. I hadn't considered the spell duration issue, so thanks for raising it.

To me the biggest potential issue is making sure to balance single encounter days with some multi-encounter days (or at least much longer fights) so long rest casters don't get overshadowed. So an "adventuring day" might be a couple days with just one random encounter (where the short rest classes can shine while the long rest casters need to ration their spells) and a "dungeon" with say 4-5 encounters (where the long rest casters have enough resources to better handle multiple fights).

In addition, long rests should restore all HD instead of just half. I imagine HD will be an important source of healing, and don't feel like the party should need to take two weeks to top off.

Other sources of short rest haling (Celestial Warlock, healer feat) have the potential to be OP since they can be used "free" on days without any encounters.

 

[TwoSix]

Only benefit I see, is your personal narrative preference about how many levels could a character gain in a week/month/year

That's far from a small benefit!

It also allows for the idea of travelling being its own source of attrition; if you have one wandering encounter a day for 4 days travel to a boss encounter (my groups rarely do dungeons or large site encounters, so this is a pretty common occurence), that fits the 6-8 encounters per long rest paradigm without needing to pack multiple encounters into a site.

 

[ninjayeti]

I honestly do not see the point about duration of long rest.

Any duration you set; default 8 hrs, or 5 mins or 2 weeks, you are still limited with the fact that you have a limited amount of encounters that you can throw at the party per "rest cycle".

In an exploration style campaign you are probably only going to have one encounter per game day. So if you fully recharge all your resources every game day, it just makes every encounter a nova fest. Which some people are fine with. But if you want to retain the "resource management" aspect of 5E you need to tweak the rest rules so the PCs need to spread their resources over multiple game days.

(Yes, in theory you could compress the time frame so the exploration only takes a few days with the usual 6-8 encounters in each day to shoehorn it into the standard resting rules. But that doesn't really seem like a particularly epic campaign).

EDIT: got ninja'd by TwoSix making a similar point; wasn't trying to pile on!

 

[Voadam]

Some of the Travel rules in Adventures in Middle Earth (5e) work in a similar direction, journeys are through the wilderness and you simply cannot take a long rest until you get to a haven such as Elrond's house or to a civilized destination. It also gives the party different roles in the journey and depending on what (not necessarily combat) encounters come up people in those roles make checks that impact things along the way and your state at the end of the journey. You can come out either oppressed by the Shadow or hopefully striving for the light. Some good concepts.

 

[Blue]

As previous posters have mentioned, there are some features that are limited by days rather than long rests. You may wish to adjust these to fit with your new pacing.
How long will your party generally be going before having a Long rest?

During tier 1, say 2-5 encounters between long rests, with 1-3 encounters between short rests. And there very well may be days without encounters - exploration and all that. So that would be adjacent short rests that I'm not counting above. So for example it might be a five day trek to get to safety they can take a long rest, with day 1 being no encounters, day 2 being one, day 3 with three, day 4 having none, and day 5 having one.

After tier 1, when they can go further, I will encourage 4-10 encounters between long rests, with 2-4 encounters between short rests. Again, with the possibility of no-encounter days so that there are back-to-back short rests not counted above. If they go too long, I will surprise them with something like a druid's sanctuary or "the perfect sunrise over the cliffs - your short rest counts as a long one" or other DM slight of hand.

Considering daily item recharges and the like, those blank days would really impact. I think I might make them recharge on something like the three days of the full moon and three days of the new moon or once a ten-day or something like that. I like the asymetrical moon one even though I just came up with it. It's both enough recharges to bring stuff back to full unless you roll really bad, but also something you can time to doing a specific activity so it recharges during that.

 

[Blue]

Another aspect of the alternate rules that I like is that I have a lot of control over pacing, and people are much more hesitant to take even a short rest. That, and it's easier to justify the "you can't take a long rest now".

The only issue is that I've hit is that every once in a while I want to give the group a break. The dice went bad, the group's tactics were sub-par, I underestimated difficulty or what have you. So I want to give them a long rest but depending on the background story that can be difficult. I end up using "magic rest time" which can be less than satisfactory.

Along with pacing, I don't set up large "dungeon" type settings. Not a big deal for me because I've always thought dungeons were a bit silly. On the other hand it does make battle royale scenarios more difficult, but then again maybe they should be.

In any case I find that it works a lot better for me. People are much more conservative with resources and the game is better paced for my taste.

Pretty much in agreement with everything you say. Not big on dungeon running, and if I have something I'll more likely use a Five Room Dungeon sort of idea.

I explicitly intend to give breaks (and this will be discussed in Session 0). Rest in safety and comfort (like Elrond's) would be at the 8 hours/1 hour normal rate. But also things like finding a magic fountain, etc.

On the other hand, one great experience I had was in 4e, where we were stuck on this magic island and were luring an airship closer that was hunting us so we could take it over. We had a usual amount of battles on the king kong sort of island. Then more. We were really scraping the botom of the barrel. Then we had a boss fight level. We survived but were out of everything. Then the DM threw another fight at us after a short rest. We just barely survived, had a short rest. Then the airship showed up and we had to fight them. We had to get super clever and tactical and pull out every single consumable we had, and just had to work it. We ended victorious, but I think with some people unconscious and out of healing surges.

So sometimes going way past your comfort zone ends up being epic.

 

[Blue]

I honestly do not see the point about duration of long rest.

Any duration you set; default 8 hrs, or 5 mins or 2 weeks, you are still limited with the fact that you have a limited amount of encounters that you can throw at the party per "rest cycle".

This just turns 5min work day into 5min work week.

And time pressure still stands no matter the duration of long rest if you put the time pressure on the players.
It's the same if you say that you have 2 weeks to save the village with 1 week rest time as you have 2 days with 8 hr rest time.


Only benefit I see, is your personal narrative preference about how many levels could a character gain in a week/month/year

I haven't offered any of the reasons why I'm doing it except that it's for a specific exploration-based campaign, so judging them is rather hard to do. I explicitly didn't because I didn't want to derail the thread with people questioning if it should be used as opposed to what the thread is about, but I see I still need to address this.

The party will not often have the chance to take 7 days without encounters and such where they can force a long rest, without being smart, skillful, or lucky. Or really a combination of all three. I am fine with either controlling the pacing as I want, or my players really getting into how to have a safe base for 7 days out in the middle of nowhere.

If you'd still like to discuss why I shouldn't do this, can we move it to PM so we don't litter this thread with off topic discussion.

 

[Blue]

Some of the Travel rules in Adventures in Middle Earth (5e) work in a similar direction, journeys are through the wilderness and you simply cannot take a long rest until you get to a haven such as Elrond's house or to a civilized destination. It also gives the party different roles in the journey and depending on what (not necessarily combat) encounters come up people in those roles make checks that impact things along the way and your state at the end of the journey. You can come out either oppressed by the Shadow or hopefully striving for the light. Some good concepts.

Thanks for bringing it up, AiME was one of the inspirations for how to handle this and has a lot of good ideas to mine. However, I was picturing less structured phases - it's not that they are traveling to do X, it's that they are exploring and may end up coming across X, Y and Z before heading back to frontier civilization so there's less structured "this is journey phase", and there will be times they will be able to hole up for a week and get a long rest.

 

[Harzel]

That's far from a small benefit!

It also allows for the idea of travelling being its own source of attrition;

Well, kind of? The 'gritty' variant just says that a long rest takes 7 days. It says nothing about the length of time that the PCs must adventure between long rests, nor how often they can benefit from a long rest. Unless you take further measures, there is nothing to stop the PCs from resting for 7 days after each encounter.

if you have one wandering encounter a day for 4 days travel to a boss encounter (my groups rarely do dungeons or large site encounters, so this is a pretty common occurence), that fits the 6-8 encounters per long rest paradigm without needing to pack multiple encounters into a site.

So if the party traveled for one day and had one encounter and then just stopped traveling and hunkered down would the wandering encounters continue? If so, it seems to me that maybe what you are saying is that you feel that the 7 day time frame provides more narrative cover for denying them a long rest. That is, it's more believable that you couldn't spend 7 days without getting interrupted that it is that you couldn't spend 8 hours without getting interrupted. I guess I would agree with that, but the point is (and I think this is what @Horwath was getting at) that the 7 day length in and of itself doesn't prevent 5 minute work segments separated by long rests.

Also, it seems to me that you still need a narrative reason for encounters to stop at the point you think they 'deserve' a long rest.