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

[Satyrn]

My preferred solution is to rename long rest as a "good rest," and say comfortable conditiins are a requirement to taking one.

So, a party travelling overland, camping as they go can't get a good rest unless they have an RV (aka, magnificent mansion) or something similar like a goldminer's abandoned cabin or a mysteriously-out-of-the-way inn.

Likewise, taking a long rest in a dungeon is unlikely, too, though in a megadungeon, I'll definitely include a few locations that allow for a long rest. Finding them might not be that easy, but they are an award that makes delving ever deeper more possible.

And I've even included a shrine that grants a long rest in just one hour to help with time sensitive tasks.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't t find resting and recharging your magical energies to be all that artificial, I've read enough novels where the spellcasters have to do this as casting spells is draining and they need to restore the energy expended. The restriction on a battlemaster does seem artificial, i kind of hate it but I put up with it.

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After reading my post did you really honestly come away thinking that I was suggesting that resting to recharge magical energy was artificial or silly?

The silly part is the exact precise timings. 7 hours of rest. Still no spells. 8 hours, look all my magical power is suddenly back.
The silly part is that you can cast all your spells at the 23 hour mark. Rest for 8 hours and you get all your spells back but if you cast all your spells 8 hours since you last rested and then rest for 8 hours you get nothing back.

You see spells in D&D 5e don't come back just because you rest. It must be precicely a a day before you can regain any and you must rest precicely 8 hours or you get nothing back. These kinds of requirements don't follow any novels. In the scope of the world and genre and game they are totally artificial.

In fact if you were looking to novels for inspiration then they usually don't have a detailed magic system in them. People cast spells. They don't too often because some kind of bad thing happens if they do. They can be depleted of magical energy and must rest a long time to replenish it. However, there's rarely a set time to do so. There is no preset amount of magic they can use before they are depleted and must rest and recharge. Sometimes they may get an overnight rest and be seemingly ready to take on the world again. Other times they may takes weeks to do so. It sometimes is even the same character in the same novel that has these varying rest times for magical recharge. Sometimes the novel wizards will cast a ton of spells back to back. Sometimes they will barely cast anything for weeks at a time even when they aren't in need of recharge.

In fact to better follow how novels handle magic I would think we would need a system that can be totally transparent to the Player but a bit more ambiguous in how it's working to Character in the game. His notions of magic in the game world should more closely adhere to the novel interpreatations. He can tell when he's getting low on it. He knows resting helps but it's hard to say exactly how much rest before he's better and ready to go again. Magic is mysterious and doesn't behave neatly like scientific laws. As long as it's not viewed as character knowledge the exact number of spells a wizard has left for the day etc, even if the player knows it then you have a world where magic is mysterious again instead of totally scientific.

They key to having magic feel right in D&D is to roleplay like it's mysterious in game even if you as a player know just how much more the wizard can do and when he will recover it again.

 

[FrogReaver]

My preferred solution is to rename long rest as a "good rest," and say comfortable conditiins are a requirement to taking one.

So, a party travelling overland, camping as they go can't get a good rest unless they have an RV (aka, magnificent mansion) or something similar like a goldminer's abandoned cabin or a mysteriously-out-of-the-way inn.

Likewise, taking a long rest in a dungeon is unlikely, too, though in a megadungeon, I'll definitely include a few locations that allow for a long rest. Finding them might not be that easy, but they are an award that makes delving ever deeper more possible.

And I've even included a shrine that grants a long rest in just one hour to help with time sensitive tasks.

It depends on the story you want to tell. Some stories have the heroes stopping in out of the way INN and staying the night. Some have them storming the whole dungeon all night long and keeping on going. The later story doesn't work so well for D&D and large dungeons but there's no reason it shouldn't be able to.

 

[cbwjm]

After reading my post did you really honestly come away thinking that I was suggesting that resting to recharge magical energy was artificial or silly?

The silly part is the exact precise timings. 7 hours of rest. Still no spells. 8 hours, look all my magical power is suddenly back.
The silly part is that you can cast all your spells at the 23 hour mark. Rest for 8 hours and you get all your spells back but if you cast all your spells 8 hours since you last rested and then rest for 8 hours you get nothing back.

You see spells in D&D 5e don't come back just because you rest. It must be precicely a a day before you can regain any and you must rest precicely 8 hours or you get nothing back. These kinds of requirements don't follow any novels. In the scope of the world and genre and game they are totally artificial.

In fact if you were looking to novels for inspiration then they usually don't have a detailed magic system in them. People cast spells. They don't too often because some kind of bad thing happens if they do. They can be depleted of magical energy and must rest a long time to replenish it. However, there's rarely a set time to do so. There is no preset amount of magic they can use before they are depleted and must rest and recharge. Sometimes they may get an overnight rest and be seemingly ready to take on the world again. Other times they may takes weeks to do so. It sometimes is even the same character in the same novel that has these varying rest times for magical recharge. Sometimes the novel wizards will cast a ton of spells back to back. Sometimes they will barely cast anything for weeks at a time even when they aren't in need of recharge.

In fact to better follow how novels handle magic I would think we would need a system that can be totally transparent to the Player but a bit more ambiguous in how it's working to Character in the game. His notions of magic in the game world should more closely adhere to the novel interpreatations. He can tell when he's getting low on it. He knows resting helps but it's hard to say exactly how much rest before he's better and ready to go again. Magic is mysterious and doesn't behave neatly like scientific laws. As long as it's not viewed as character knowledge the exact number of spells a wizard has left for the day etc, even if the player knows it then you have a world where magic is mysterious again instead of totally scientific.

They key to having magic feel right in D&D is to roleplay like it's mysterious in game even if you as a player know just how much more the wizard can do and when he will recover it again.

Yeah, I did, because that is what it sounded like you said.

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[FrogReaver]

Yeah, I did, because that is what it sounded like you said.

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And it sounded to me like you purposefully made a strawman to avoid having to deal with my actual position. Oh look it still seems that way because you still are not dealing with my actual position...

 

[cbwjm]

And it sounded to me like you purposefully made a strawman to avoid having to deal with my actual position. Oh look it still seems that way because you still are not dealing with my actual position...

Actually it's because I'm drunk and can't be ed reading what you posted...

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[Warmaster Horus]

My preferred solution is to rename long rest as a "good rest," and say comfortable conditiins are a requirement to taking one.

So, a party travelling overland, camping as they go can't get a good rest unless they have an RV (aka, magnificent mansion) or something similar like a goldminer's abandoned cabin or a mysteriously-out-of-the-way inn.

Likewise, taking a long rest in a dungeon is unlikely, too, though in a megadungeon, I'll definitely include a few locations that allow for a long rest. Finding them might not be that easy, but they are an award that makes delving ever deeper more possible.

And I've even included a shrine that grants a long rest in just one hour to help with time sensitive tasks.

I believe the younger generation calls those 'save points'.

 

[Satyrn]

I believe the younger generation calls those 'save points'.

And now you leave me no choice but to officially call them "Safe Points."




Thank you. I think.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You see spells in D&D 5e don't come back just because you rest. It must be precicely a a day before you can regain any and you must rest precicely 8 hours or you get nothing back. These kinds of requirements don't follow any novels. In the scope of the world and genre and game they are totally artificial.

To be fair, the only part that seems artificial is the precision, and that's just a limit imposed by our ability to write rules concisely. A more natural-seeming system would require a lot more work to operate, and it's not necessarily worth that trade-off. The underlying premise of needing a good night of rest in order to recover your magical energy is reasonable enough, as far as magic goes.

In fact to better follow how novels handle magic I would think we would need a system that can be totally transparent to the Player but a bit more ambiguous in how it's working to Character in the game. His notions of magic in the game world should more closely adhere to the novel interpreatations. He can tell when he's getting low on it. He knows resting helps but it's hard to say exactly how much rest before he's better and ready to go again. Magic is mysterious and doesn't behave neatly like scientific laws. As long as it's not viewed as character knowledge the exact number of spells a wizard has left for the day etc, even if the player knows it then you have a world where magic is mysterious again instead of totally scientific.

They key to having magic feel right in D&D is to roleplay like it's mysterious in game even if you as a player know just how much more the wizard can do and when he will recover it again.

I know that this is just a personal preference, but I enjoy stories where the magic behaves according to consistent laws that can be analyzed scientifically. I like that Harry knows how long it will take to transfigure ten cubic millimeters of substance, or that he'll be out of juice for the next hour. It makes the world more believable, because the idea of magic being innately mysterious and unknowable is such a hard break away from anything we have in the real world, but the idea of this new thing being just another branch of natural law is something that happens not-infrequently.

Historically speaking, from what I recall, the old Vance books used discrete spell preparation because it was just sufficiently-advanced technology rather than any sort of mysterious magic. From a practical standpoint, if you aren't treating spells slots as in-game information that the characters can refer to, then it becomes incredibly difficult to actually play the game; if you go that route, I would strongly recommend also using the spell points option.

 

[FrogReaver]

To be fair, the only part that seems artificial is the precision, and that's just a limit imposed by our ability to write rules concisely. A more natural-seeming system would require a lot more work to operate, and it's not necessarily worth that trade-off. The underlying premise of needing a good night of rest in order to recover your magical energy is reasonable enough, as far as magic goes.
I know that this is just a personal preference, but I enjoy stories where the magic behaves according to consistent laws that can be analyzed scientifically. I like that Harry knows how long it will take to transfigure ten cubic millimeters of substance, or that he'll be out of juice for the next hour. It makes the world more believable, because the idea of magic being innately mysterious and unknowable is such a hard break away from anything we have in the real world, but the idea of this new thing being just another branch of natural law is something that happens not-infrequently.

Historically speaking, from what I recall, the old Vance books used discrete spell preparation because it was just sufficiently-advanced technology rather than any sort of mysterious magic. From a practical standpoint, if you aren't treating spells slots as in-game information that the characters can refer to, then it becomes incredibly difficult to actually play the game; if you go that route, I would strongly recommend also using the spell points option.

First off let's talk a bit more about the idea that it's incredibly difficult to play the game if spell slots aren't character information. A character doesn't have to know exactly how many spell slots are left or even that spell slots exist in order to have a general awareness of how much magical power he currently has left. It's that general awareness that is required. The player can translate his exact knowledge of how many spell slots are left into less specific character knowledge in order to easily play the game. Maybe an example would be better.

Assuming the scene and chapter recovery system I proposed earlier

The Wizard tells his companions that he is getting low on magic. They ask how many more spells he will be able to cast. He replies I don't know but not many. They ask how do you replenish your magic. He replies that magic returns to me in it's own time but rest tends to help that along.

Vague, playable and plenty of information for the characters in game to base decisions on. Players out of game can request more info on exactly how many spell slots are left, but in game it's not affecting character decisions.

Secondly, Artificial was the complaint about untying magic recovery from in game rests. The counter-point to that was that rest rules in D&D are already artificial because of their exactness and all at once recovery. Also, as I just detailed it's easy to detail a system in which magic can come back at it's own pace and then to allow the DM in the game to structure that pace and recovery around whatever timings would work for his campaign. Heck the whole idea where a character doesn't know exactly how many spell slots he has is probably not a requirement to get this structure to work and feel non-artificial, it's likely just a preference I have that this system enables.