Level Up (A5E) End the 5 minute work-day by making all classes work off short rests.

[ThatGuySteve]

It depends on what they power & how. I bet if I had said "burning a hitdie to recover second wibd & action surge but I'm not sure if it should recover one or both" your post would have looked very different... Burn a hit die to recover our rages?... maybe... Burn a hit die to make this bow shot a line or burst? same deal... Burn a hit die to cast one of these spells/spell like abilities?.. how is that any different from the prior examples other than being unfinished? The key is that everyone needs to want to use them, right now backline classes hardly ever use their hit dice for anything and they have nothing to use them on
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@Kinematics I think the point is more using hit dice to recover or power balanced amounts of short rest abilities & designing those abilities accordingly so everyone has a decent selection of go to powers that way. Of course it would require not having a couple munchkin classes built entirely to abuse the 5mwd.

Since Second Wind does more healing than hit dice after you've gained a handful of levels, you are not losing anything by burning the hit dice and gaining free hit points. Adding Action Surge on top of that would be way over the top. You can't guarantee a particular class will be front or back line, archer fighters exist and would love that trade in.

I think the mechanism would unfairly punish characters who are more likely to take damage. They need to balance reserving enough hit dice to stay on their feet vs refreshing abilities. Characters less likely to take damage can be more gung ho and spend more on refreshing. I know which one I'd find more fun playing.

 

[RangerWickett]

Build up momentum within a single combat? Not sure if that'll work.

But - if you have to build up momentum through a few encounters* before you can pull off your coolest moves, you're on to something.

* - and the DM would have to be VERY harsh (as in, out the door with you, old son; it's been nice knowing you) on anyone who tries to 'bag of rats' this rule.

I sort of envisioned that you'd start each combat with 0 GROOVE (I'm using terminology from Capcom vs SNK video games), but could gain GROOVE as you fight. And if you're a 3rd level fighter, you start each combat with 1 GROOVE. A 20th level fighter might start with 5 GROOVE, and gain more than 1 each turn.

Obviously I don't have a full system in mind yet.

 

[tetrasodium]

Since Second Wind does more healing than hit dice after you've gained a handful of levels, you are not losing anything by burning the hit dice and gaining free hit points. Adding Action Surge on top of that would be way over the top. You can't guarantee a particular class will be front or back line, archer fighters exist and would love that trade in.

I think the mechanism would unfairly punish characters who are more likely to take damage. They need to balance reserving enough hit dice to stay on their feet vs refreshing abilities. Characters less likely to take damage can be more gung ho and spend more on refreshing. I know which one I'd find more fun playing.

No your spending a bonus action in a fight & the character most likely to be taking damage without rage to mitigate it gets a bit of self healing capability. so later when the group has been running for a bit that fighter says "I'm good for hitpoints but I've only got 2 hit dice left... maybe we should think about taking a long rest instead of chasing the fleeing badguys" & the wizard says "Yea I'm kinda low on spell slots for good spells & my emergency button abilities have been eating a lot of my hitdice too"

 

[MichaelSomething]

Wait, I thought everyone hated all the classes having the same refresh system because it made all too samey?

 

[CleverNickName]

Wait, I thought everyone hated all the classes having the same refresh system because it made all too samey?

Usually the "too samey" argument has to do with damage per round, bounded accuracy, probability curves, and other gamey-sounding phrases. This is the first time I've heard it applied to resource recovery...which I admit is also a very gamey-sounding phrase. And I kinda hate it. So yep, that all checks out.

 

[Lucas Yew]

Instead of embracing the old "fire now and rest to recharge later" paradigm, I'd rather support a "charge up superpowered deeds by taking time while either soaking/avoiding imminent harm or be protected from it" paradigm.

 

[tetrasodium]

Wait, I thought everyone hated all the classes having the same refresh system because it made all too samey?

@CleverNickName touched on it & nails it but I'll show just how bad it was with this review of 4e started partway in at a relative point. Having a mix of always available stuff (sneak attack/multiattack/ regular attack/ritual spells/etc) along with spend a hit die for this thing, in addition to spell slots for spells is important to keep even if some stuff is created or shifted to be fueled by hit dice. For casters, misty step/shield/absorb elements/false life/maybe even counterspell might be good hit die fueled abilities to compare against the example of recovering second wind or action surge but I'm not sure if they should all use the same number of hitdice. I pulled "emergency button abilities" from thin air earlier rather than some deeply considered & thought out subsystem & the specific ones are just pulled to fit the conversation. Might be that cleric sorcerer bard & so forth have a completely different type of abilities they power with hitdice. Sorcerers might power metamagic for example

 

[Asisreo]

So, this discussion got me thinking exactly how a DM would introduce a risk to players sitting on their hands without a fight interruption and I had remembered something:

Uncomfortable environments. Imagine for a second that there's a lower level party without taking prestidigation or any spell similar to it. They have to fight in a ruined mummy's tomb but they're experiencing Extreme Heat. Well, with no real means to defend themselves against the heat, they'd be quickly gaining levels of exhaustion with iterative additions to their Constitution save DC. Going 20 hours without resting will most certainly kill them, which adds pressure.

I looked into Curse of Strahd to see what they had done and, without spoiling, I'll say they check for random encounters for every 10 minutes during rest attempts. There was a 15% chance that a random encounter would happen and the random encounters were not all combat, but even with those odds, the chances that the characters could get away with a peaceful 20 hours in the specific area was short.

Looking deeper, I noticed some more patterns. Put briefly:

Not all areas are meant to use up all resources that the players had during every movement in that adventure. Some were just meant for the players to explore without the threat of attrition.

Some areas threatened to have all the forces of the area crash onto the players if they are detected and hostile. They were balanced not as separate encounters, though. It was balanced as a multi-wave encounter which made it less unfair for short rest classes.

 

[tetrasodium]

Looking deeper, I noticed some more patterns. Put briefly:

Not all areas are meant to use up all resources that the players had during every movement in that adventure. Some were just meant for the players to explore without the threat of attrition.

Some areas threatened to have all the forces of the area crash onto the players if they are detected and hostile. They were balanced not as separate encounters, though. It was balanced as a multi-wave encounter which made it less unfair for short rest classes.

This is why people complain about how 5e forces the GM to play rest police. In the first example classes designed to munchkinize the 5 minute work day are much more powerful than the long rest leaning classes while in the second example the long rest classes are not really that much if any notable amount more powerful than the short rest classes. The only time it really shows is when the GM punishes the party with a meatgrinder that unfairly punishes everyone.

In the old days of 3.5 you rested a full night (8 hrs) phb146 to recover 1hp/level but could do a full 24hrs bedrest for double that. If you rest for for 8 hours wizard/sorcerer/bard got their spells back ph178 (divine casters prayed to recover their spells at a particular time of day like dawn or whatever). For every day of rest you recovered one point of ability score damage. PHB75/76 had some rules for providing long term care that accelerated things some using the heal skill. Also Complete warrior had a feat called faster healing that shifted those like so

In practice everyone would look at how much hp they were down & if it was really bad they'd probably go back to a town or somewhere safe so the casters with heal spells & abilities could safely dump all of their spell slots leaving them in an effectively helpless condition but if not too bad they might spend whatever heals they have left over & rest while eating the attrition or proceeding to use some consumable resources like potions/scrolls/wand charges. All of that time translated into baddies & npcs are doing a lot so every little bit added up to far more risk than "guess the wizard will need to cast tiny hut & we will sleep safely in the improved force cube laughing at the dangerous monsters we've been killing" The idea that some classes should recover a significant amount of their abilities on a smoke break was just silly & would have been massively broken. 5e's recover all hp spell slots & other class abilities by sleeping the night is not long enough to force the party to trek back to town or burn up a bunch of consumable resources and is too quick for much beyond a random encounter or getting chased by the leftovers but a third level ritual spell completely shields the party from most of that including a lot of environmental effects.

Even in 5e CoS I can't recall ever seeing a party consider trekking back to one of the places safe to rest & there was certainly nothing I recall from CoS like

Spoiler: nightmares

that might make it something that the party would consider. Unfortunately 5e is pretty much tuned under the assumption that rests are fairly plentiful so even trying to force it by porting that kind of thing over would cause a lot of problems between classes.

 

[John R Davis]

Every class ( maybe heritage) should get something back in a short rest. To take a short rest though should cost ' something' to bring in some balance. Maybe you have to spend a Hit Dice to take a short rest ( bit harsh at 1st level) or there is a law of diminishing returns ( so you get an absolute minimum back after 3rd short rest).