D&D (2024) Fixing short rest novaloops is important... using the moon druid

[bedir than]

I don't believe that's something I've said. Wotc wants everyone to have incentive to take them & wants to increase the incentive for classes that have very little... That says nothing about not valuing them. Short rest classes like the current monk & most recent warlock have too much incentive in ways that negatively impact the game & their design needs to bring that in line.

In this very thread you've ignored that Druids now have reasons to short rest while suggesting that they only have reasons to long rest.

 

[tetrasodium]

In this very thread you've ignored that Druids now have reasons to short rest while suggesting that they only have reasons to long rest.

No I've talked about how the current monk has too much incentive to short rest & used the druid's more restrained short rest gains as an example of how balance needs to be given more consideration.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

No I've talked about how the current monk has too much incentive to short rest & used the druid's more restrained short rest gains as an example of how balance needs to be given more consideration.

I’m going to agree with @bedir than, your argument has been hard to follow. I too thought your argument was different than what you stated here. Maybe update the OP?

 

[mellored]

I don’t agree that it’s a problem. Everyone (except the rogue, I guess) benefits from a short rest.

And rangers.

Though i can easily see giving rangers a spell 1/short rest.

Horizontal Walker can get longstrider
Beast Master can get Beast Bond.
Hunter can get Hunters Mark
... I forgot the 4th.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wotc seems to disagree with you there. Tp support that I'm going to cite all of the times Crawford has mentioned how they want to give other/every class more reasons to also want a short rest & the recent threads where someone blames long rest players for denying their short rest PC a rest because they don't want their character to wait around rather than honestly admitting the consequences of such a rest being the reason.

Huh? That doesn’t disagree with me at all “everyone benefits from a short rest” is an important element of “everyone benefits from a short rest, and some benefit more from a short rest than others.”

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Short rest nova is not worse than long rest nova. In my experience, if you can justify 1 hour in enemy territory, you can probably justify 8 hours. One hour is ridiculously long for something called "short", to the point where you shouldnt be able to get one in a dungeon, enemy castle, etc.

I just moved to a narrative rest timeframe. You get one long rest and 2 short rests, then need to take downtime in a safe area. Bards add one extra short rest. Short rests are 5 minutes or so. Adventures are designed around this and paced accordingly.

 

[tetrasodium]

Huh? That doesn’t disagree with me at all “everyone benefits from a short rest” is an important element of “everyone benefits from a short rest, and some benefit more from a short rest than others.”

There's a point where it moves from A benefitting more than B and moves to being so much more that it's a problem

Short rest nova is not worse than long rest nova. In my experience, if you can justify 1 hour in enemy territory, you can probably justify 8 hours. One hour is ridiculously long for something called "short", to the point where you shouldnt be able to get one in a dungeon, enemy castle, etc.

I just moved to a narrative rest timeframe. You get one long rest and 2 short rests, then need to take downtime in a safe area. Bards add one extra short rest. Short rests are 5 minutes or so. Adventures are designed around this and paced accordingly.

I agree that neither of them are good or even a little reasonable but does it really matter if a sorcerer wizard or cleric is spamming 5th level spells or if a couple warlocks are doing it at a faster pace with shorter rests while the monk burns through discipline points like they are running an unlimited discipline point cheat code?

Unfortunately for both wotc has made no effort to address either type of rest>nova>rest loop I'm the UAs... If anything they have presented slight tweaks to the rest & recovery mechanics that do little other than make it easier for players to force a 5mwd up until the gm effectively declares rocks fall or invokes fiat.

Both are a serious problem and there is a great blog post talking about the resulting 5mwd without getting too system specific here. Where the two flavors of 5mwd differ is that the short rest class nova has a much lower bar to pull off unless the doom clocks and similar start resembling half minute hero type gameplay.

 

[Charlaquin]

There's a point where it moves from A benefitting more than B and moves to being so much more that it's a problem

I am willing to grant that this could theoretically become a problem if pushed hard enough, but the playtests definitely aren’t there. Assuming a short rest after every two encounters as per the adventuring day guidelines, warlocks can do up to one leveled spell per encounter and monks basically get Cunning Action. Even if you assume the players manage to force a short rest after every encounter, two spells per combat and being able to flurry of blows and step of the wind (or whatever) each turn is just… not that big of a deal? Like, both are strong, but they are far from game breaking, and most groups are still not going to be short resting more than once every other encounter. For the average group, this is perfectly fine. For groups that try to hardcore exploit 5 minute workdays, this isn’t any more problematic than what they can do with long rest classes.

 

[tetrasodium]

I am willing to grant that this could theoretically become a problem if pushed hard enough, but the playtests definitely aren’t there. Assuming a short rest after every two encounters as per the adventuring day guidelines, warlocks can do up to one leveled spell per encounter and monks basically get Cunning Action. Even if you assume the players manage to force a short rest after every encounter, two spells per combat and being able to flurry of blows and step of the wind (or whatever) each turn is just… not that big of a deal? Like, both are strong, but they are far from game breaking, and most groups are still not going to be short resting more than once every other encounter. For the average group, this is perfectly fine. For groups that try to hardcore exploit 5 minute workdays, this isn’t any more problematic than what they can do with long rest classes.

Your numbers fall apart as levels progress & honestly start breaking down even before then somewhere in late tier2. I'm going to again defer to Jeremy Crawford's wisdom on refuting this with a timestamped video link & quote from him "There are some spells that just become too powerful if you get to just keep pressing the 5th level version of that over and over and over again". However the most recent warlock (packet7) has two 5th level slots each short rest & that jumps to 3 of them each short rest at 11. It very much spills into being so much more that it creates a problem that wotc needs to do a better job addressing.

The current monk is not different enough to avoid that problem

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

There's a point where it moves from A benefitting more than B and moves to being so much more that it's a problem


I agree that neither of them are good or even a little reasonable but does it really matter if a sorcerer wizard or cleric is spamming 5th level spells or if a couple warlocks are doing it at a faster pace with shorter rests while the monk burns through discipline points like they are running an unlimited discipline point cheat code?

Unfortunately for both wotc has made no effort to address either type of rest>nova>rest loop I'm the UAs... If anything they have presented slight tweaks to the rest & recovery mechanics that do little other than make it easier for players to force a 5mwd up until the gm effectively declares rocks fall or invokes fiat.

I've ran 5E since it's beginning, and it was always the short rest classes who came up short, no pun intended, in our games prior to moving to a limited rest model just from how adventures flow. Daily classes utterly wreck the 1-2 random encounters per day you might face while traveling to a location, and there's no way I'm running 6-8 5E trash fights per day for the party to get to the fireworks factory.

I don't even know how your players are sitting on their butts for an hour in dangerous territory after every encounter, and it doesn't seem like that would be feasible in published 5E adventures (any more than just spamming long rests). In our games, getting in the expected 6-8 encounters was rare even in a dungeon environment (and when it did occur, simply un-fun as it's a lot of no stakes grind for the sake of attrition). We're clearly running differently paced adventures, but I believe you when you say it's an issue for your table. However it does seem to be a rarer issue, as I don't think I've ever seen anyone say monks are OP like you experience.

Both are a serious problem and there is a great blog post talking about the resulting 5mwd without getting too system specific here. Where the two flavors of 5mwd differ is that the short rest class nova has a much lower bar to pull off unless the doom clocks and similar start resembling half minute hero type gameplay.

Short rest classes nova power level is also much lower than the long rest classes. They get to dump 1/3 of their expected daily resources in a fight. The daily class gets to dump 100% of theirs. Action economy is a factor, but with paladins smite nova, sorcerers dumping their sorc points on quickened/twinned everything, etc, the daily nova is a lot more fearsome from my experience. During stretches of non-combat intense adventure segments the daily vancian classes control the narrative a lot more as well through various schennanigans. Action surge really only has significant value when you're trying to kill someone, less when you're taking a week to rig an election or rebuild a fort and a caster can safely dump the vast majority of their leveled spells each day, rest and repeat.

And then there's poor rogues, who get to be C tier all day long lol.

5E is complete easy mode compared to previous editions, particularly if your players have any amount of tactics beyond "get em!". I've given up on WOTC balancing it enough to challenge them. A hard limit on a fixed number of rests per adventures or per level might seem artificial, but then again you're already limited to 1 long rest per day IIRC, so /shrug. I think this is more a table issue than a rules issue, but having discussions on rest pacing in the player's handbook might help with that. Basically let players know that rests are DM fiat as the baseline.