I know, I know. Just hear me out. Also bear with me. I'm gonna start this out a bit meandering, but I am getting to a point. Trust me.
So today my mind was wandering a bit, and I got to thinking about 4e and how they did their powers in categories of at-will, per encounter, and per day. As my mind does as it wanders, I also began thinking about short rest, long rest, and the so-called 6-8 encounter adventuring day.
Now, on this forum I have heard a great deal about how 5e is balanced around the 6-8 encounter adventuring day, with 2 short rests in between capped off by a long rest. Now, white wall theory crafting, that's great. But is that how D&D is actually played? In my experience, it is not. While the games I have played in have had periods where resource management was important, more often than not myself or my players have had ample time for long rests. This gives greater advantage to classes and builds whose abilities refresh on a long rest than those with short rest refresh. Now while I do not have very good familiarity with most of the official modules that have been released, I am preparing to run Curse of Strahd. And based on what I have seen, outside of Castle Ravenloft perhaps, and maybe Death House (both fairly enclosed dungeon-esque places), you aren't going to get the 6-8 encounters per day unless you roll often for random encounters. And while play styles vary, I see combat as not being a highlight of D&D or the reason to play, but more as a driver of the story. And if combats are happening frequently with little connection to the story, it makes combat overall less impactful from my perspective (YMMV).
It has also been my experience that not everyone really knows what constitutes a short rest. I have been in games where a short rest was considered 4 hours, and were seldom actually used. Thus my fighter/warlock would be super low on any resources, while the wizard and cleric characters had plenty of things left to fling around.
So I got to wondering, what if we got rid of the short rest? We would then alter existing abilities that refresh on a short rest to instead become encounter abilities similar to 4e.
So what would be the potential consequences?
1) Short rest powers would need to be reduced in number to allow for balance, since these were initially meant to be used over 2-3 encounters. Therefore, I would reduce the number of uses by half rounded up. This would include Superiority Dice, Inspiration Dice, Ki points, and Pact Magic to just name a few things.
2) This would allow martial characters to no longer have the sense of an artificial limit per rest how often they can do something. Instead, they will always have at least one use every encounter.
3) This would make certain abilities irrelevant, such as the bard's capstone ability, and the Battlemaster's ability to have at least one Superiority Die when initiative is rolled. These abilities would need to be replaced or adjusted (possibly allow one additional use per encounter).
4) What value do Hit Die have in a system where there are no short rests? I have an idea for that. Perhaps as a minute long action (making it a non-combat ability and representing bandaging yourself or recentering your focus), you could spend Hit Dice. They get replaced as normal (# = 1/2 your level per long rest). A similar approach could be used for a wizard's Arcane Recovery ability.
5) How does one capture non-combat encounters? This is probably the most tricky of the bunch. I'm not sure there is really a good answer that doesn't revolve around DM Fiat to determine whether something outside of combat consists of an encounter or how long that encounter goes.
There may be other consequences, but these are the ones I see.
Now, one of the things addressed by this is helping short rest characters (such as largely martial characters) get a bit of a power bump. This relates to another issue I have frequently heard argued on the boards of the linear fighter versus the quadratic wizard. So I was thinking, perhaps if we look at an adjustment to certain long rest abilities, we can reduce the power of higher level magic uses to bring everyone more in line of relative power balance.
My thought is that any spell of 6th level or higher does not automatically recharge on a long rest. The reason being that if a single game session has multiple long rests, a magic user of sufficient level could cast multiple 8th or 9th level spells. The problem with this is that spells above 6th level really do tend to "break" the game. They grant access to powers that dwarf many of the abilities that non-spellcasters can achieve. In a single round, meteor swarm can out damage even the best built fighter, especially when considering the range.
So my proposal is that for spells of 6th level or higher, they recharge on a long rest + one session. What does that mean or even look like? Well, say you have a wizard that casts meteor swarm in a session. They've used their 9th level spell slot. During that session, the wizard gets a rest in. Great! But, he doesn't yet get back that spell slot. He must wait until the next session to use that spell slot again.
What if the player uses the spell slot, but does not get a rest before the end of the session? I'll be honest, there's a couple of ways this could go, and I'm not sure where I stand on the fence. One way would be that if the wizard gets a long rest in the next session, then they get their 9th level spell slot back. The other way could be that the wizard gets a rest, and must wait until the next session to get their 9th level slot back (effectively meaning they had a whole game session where they did not have access to their 9th level spell slot).
My reasoning for this approach is to limit really big spells to not just once per day, but once per game session, or maybe less if using one of the possible examples/interpretations above.
I know this creates a big change to the game. And I know that my perspective is limited and full of blind spots. So that's why I'm throwing this out to the community with the following questions:
1) Is this adjustment reasonable?
2) What potential impacts/consequences have I not considered or foreseen?
3) Does this actually accomplish what I'm attempting to do (eliminate short rests in a reasonable fashion while reducing linear fighter vs quadratic wizard issues)?
