D&D 5E Getting rid of the short rest: The answer to Linear Fighter vs Quadratic Wizard?

[Hawk Diesel]

You're way over thinking it.
Just make all short rest abilities into either 2 or 3 uses per long rest & let the players decide how quickly they exhaust their resources.

And your idea concerning 6th lv+ spells is just bad.
Consider:
* It's game night & my players are trekking through the jungles of Chult on foot. In 4.5 hrs of play they cover about 7 hexes worth of travel in the session. (roughly 10 miles/day) They have 7 encounters overall.
And in a weeks worth of adventuring our wizard player is allowed to cast her 6th lv spell once in all that time - for no better reason than "No matter how much time passed in-story, it's still Monday 2/12/18 IRL".
*
* It's now 1 session later & the party has found a dwarven mine. They end up spending this + 3-4 more sessions clearing it etc, representing only about 8 hours of actual elapsed game world time. And yet in those 8 hrs our wizard has been able to cast that 6th lv spell 4, maybe 5 times?

Blech.

You're absolutely right. In games where you actually follow the structure of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, there is no need to adjust the system. What I am proposing is for those of us who find that our gaming experience differs from that standard. Since the game is balanced around that idea, the balance flies out the window if your game structure happens to differ.

 

[Slit518]

First, we have to look at what a Short Rest is.

Sitting down, preparing some lunch or dinner, taking a breather, bandaging some existing wounds, going to the bathroom, etc...

A Long Rest would be going to the bathroom, sleeping for the night, preparing breakfast, and getting your gear ready for the adventuring day.

Other activities can be done during these times, but I feel these are the most common ones.

 

[Ratskinner]

If wizards are quadratic...does that make paladins Exponential?

Seriously, though. I think part of the answer is to be pickier/more restrictive on what conditions allow a rest to occur. I find its too easy to fall into the trap of hitting the "We rest for an hour" button like its automatic.

 

[CubicsRube]

Short rests are difficult to modify because there are so many things that tie off to it. There is a lot of options, but I'm not sure how many work well.

On the subject of short rests...Unless they are resting in a secure area, have them roll for a wandering monster check.

Make them roll it each time they rest. Even if you set it to a roll of a 1 on a d20 it'll be clear to them that every rest is a risk, anf make them question if its worth it.

 

[Baumi]

We tried the "short rest only takes a few minutes but you cannot profit more than twice per long rest from it", which was better then the default solution, but still doesn't work in Situations like Overland-Travel, where you have at least one long Rest after each encounter.

My next approach will be converting short Rest Abilities to long Rest Abilities by multiplying it's uses by three, so there is only one Rest mechanic (Hit Dice can be freely used outside of Action Scenes) anymore and everybody is on the same boat balancewise.

The second step is to make Long Rest Storybased instead of Timebased .. so they get a Rest only after an Adventure or Session. If an Adventure is partitulary long, I will simply give them a chance to recover in the Adventure itself (mystical Location, a few days rest,..). With that it's much easier to challenge my players and balance the Adventure. The Characters will be able to force a long rest (going back to Town) but this will have a "Campaign Loss", which means something bad will happen like the Enemies getting Support, the Damsel in Distress will be sacrifices, etc.

 

[abirdcall]

No amount of houserules will save the game from having 1 encounter/long rest.

CoS is definitely structured around having many encounters per long rest in each of the locations/quests. So is every other adventure I've run in 5e for that matter.

The only time it doesn't is for random encounters on the road. Most of those are more exploration encounters than combat ones anyway.

The 'unless you roll often for random encounters' bit seems weird to me. If the PCs are trying to rest in an enemy infested area, they just can't. Of course there will be enemies attacking them. For example, the PCs allowed a town to come under Strahd's influence. They decided to camp out in a house for the night. Well Strahd was harassing them. After each encounter one of the players convinced the group that there couldn't possibly be more. Of course there could. They're camping out in a haunted mansion in a haunted town at night. Since then I just tell the players whether they're in a safe location for long resting.

You're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Magic is too easy, reliable and cheap in D&D. With this setup, every PC class should just be a caster. Which I guess 5E kind of recognizes.

In order to have a chance of equality, you need to vastly expand what skills can do, to the point of superheroics. A 10th level fighter should easily be able to jump across a 30-40' chasm. A 15th level fighter should divert a river or lasso a tornado. A 20th level rogue should be able to bluff the sun into rising an hour early. Basically mythic demigod heroes to compete with the spell slingers. Then remove all skills from full casters.

Right now you can't have parity. All the fighter gets is more of the same - damage and durability. The caster gets more magical utility as they level up, AND more damage and defense. Damage needs to be gutted from casters in general unless they have a very limited spell selection pool. Right now, they are the swiss army knife that gets to reconfigure AND be better than martials, thanks to the "muh v-tude" crowd that is more concerned with stomping down someone else's character than having fun with their own.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

It's true that they aren't quadratic in the same ways thanks to spells moving towards save every round and with the limits of concentration. But big spells, especially 8th and 9th level, really do seem to go beyond what non-casters can achieve without granting non-casters an additional power bump to compensate. This becomes more true with additional spells being released such as the Player's Companion Guide and XGtE (though this iteration of Wizards is doing a MUCH better job of reeling that in compared to the days of 3e/3.5).

But I think it's important that you mention this. Balance between casters and non-casters is much better than in previous editions.

By that point a caster has earned the right to be somewhat awesome and are still limited (1/day) and their spells subject in many cases to saves or other negation not all that difficult for creatures in their CR realm.

 

[abirdcall]

The caster gets more magical utility as they level up

Here's the thing, if the caster is helping out with utility it doesn't really matter where the source comes from.

When the wizard casts Water Walk all of the characters get to do it. That's why it is a ritual, so that it isn't a penalty on the wizard.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Here's the thing, if the caster is helping out with utility it doesn't really matter where the source comes from.

When the wizard casts Water Walk all of the characters get to do it. That's why it is a ritual, so that it isn't a penalty on the wizard.

Soundly disagree. It matters who does the cool thing. The party is not some homogeneous blob, despite what the apologists for 3E caster creep want to pretend.

Or I guess if it really doesnt matter, lets remove all utility from casters. Hey, if you just succeed as a group, why does it matter if the wizard contributes? Let the fighter and rogue solve everything and they can deal a few d8 damage with firebolt. Look... everyone helped!