Level Up (A5E) Gritty Realism

[Novak]

Vanilla 5e has an optional rule, "Gritty Realism" that changes short rests to eight hours (i.e., once a day, being equivalent to a night's rest) and long rests to seven days.

I've never used that variant but the appeal to me is that it changes the pacing of the game in ways that no longer require me to assume multiple battles (or equivalent resource expenditures) per day just to challenge the group-- this is a matter of taste, but it never felt realistic to me. (Back in the murky depths of 4e days, I changed the rest economy too.)

I have looked, but not found an equivalent rule in A5e. Is there such a variant by a different name? Or are the Fatigue/Strife mechanics intended to deal with that?

Regardless, has anyone tried something similar to a "Gritty Realism" approach in A5e? How did it work?

 

[Tessarael]

We're currently using one long rest per five days, and two short rests whenever you want per long rest. The characters have only been 1st and 2nd level so far. It works okay for travel and intermittent encounters in between destinations.

I'm doubtful about it for dungeon crawls. Maybe it would work if we had more healing items, but we're short on resources as we're low level and lacking somewhat in the money department and more so in insufficiently careful preparation with the money that we did have before this dungeon crawl. We've already burned through out hit dice to regain hit points, I think we've got one short rest left, but after the next encounter or two, I think we'll be needing a long rest and that will be after only a couple of hours total dungeoneering. So for intensive dungeon adventuring, I think one long rest per day and two short rests a day makes much more sense, IMHO.

Fatigue works fine. No opinion on strife as we haven't had much yet. Fatigue does start to add up, after you use a reaction to prevent a critical, which costs you a fatigue level, or are beaten down to unconscious and then come back with another fatigue level. It does make it feel a bit more gritty.

 

[Raven Nash]

The campaign setting I'm working (and playtesting) on basically uses the rest rules from Ruins of Symbaroum. Breather after a fight for 1d4+CON HP, Short Rest at 4 hours (Hit Dice use as normal), Long Rest at 8 hours (Max of 1 Hit Die in HPs, normal HD use) and Extended Rest for 1d4 days at a Haven (HD-regeneration, Full heal-up). Additionally, a level-up can only be made during an Extended Rest of at least a week of training and resting.
Adding the low-magic nature of the setting, this is rather gritty, but works just fine for the general mood I want. I don't like dungeoncrawling, though, and delving into ancient ruins can become dangerous rather quickly.

Fatigue is great, and Strife is extremely cool for things that are a little more on the cthuloid side.

 

[lichmaster]

Vanilla 5e has an optional rule, "Gritty Realism" that changes short rests to eight hours (i.e., once a day, being equivalent to a night's rest) and long rests to seven days.

I think this can create some serious problems for classes that recover powers on a long rest basis. At a minimum, class powers that recharge on a long rest should become "per day".

 

[Tessarael]

It depends how frequent encounters are. If you're only having 2 or 3 encounters a day, then a long rest could be every 2 days.

 

[Novak]

I think this can create some serious problems for classes that recover powers on a long rest basis. At a minimum, class powers that recharge on a long rest should become "per day".

What makes you say this? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand the reasoning because this would seem to undermine at least half the technique of Gritty Realism.

 

[dave2008]

What makes you say this? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand the reasoning because this would seem to undermine at least half the technique of Gritty Realism.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. To some "gritty" just means slower / more difficult HP/HD recovery.

However, the rule as written also limits classes that rely on long rest recharge more than short rest recharge. Though that depends on the pace of play. I you can't recharge your spells for a whole week it definitely changes things - but is that "gritty realism," IDK?

FYI, you are not required to have 6-8 encounters per day to challenge your PCs in O5e or A5e. We regularly only have 1-2 encounters per day and I find it rather easy to challenge my group.

 

[lichmaster]

What makes you say this? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand the reasoning because this would seem to undermine at least half the technique of Gritty Realism.

@dave2008 summed it up quite nicely.

Also: several magic items recharge at dawn. Would you change that too?

On top of that: If I wanted a grittier campaign (let's leave realism entirely out of the equation with D&D) I may use 3E's rules for recovering HP (1/level/night, 2 if there's someone with the medicine skill), or even with 2E's rules (1hp per full day of rest, 3 per full day if at bed rest). But spell and abilities recovery wouldn't be affected.

 

[Novak]

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. To some "gritty" just means slower / more difficult HP/HD recovery.

However, the rule as written also limits classes that rely on long rest recharge more than short rest recharge. Though that depends on the pace of play. I you can't recharge your spells for a whole week it definitely changes things - but is that "gritty realism," IDK?

FYI, you are not required to have 6-8 encounters per day to challenge your PCs in O5e or A5e. We regularly only have 1-2 encounters per day and I find it rather easy to challenge my group.

First, sorry, I meant to get back to this before now, but it was a busy week at work.

Second, let's not harp on the semantics of the phrase "gritty realism" or the individual words in the phrase. I'm using the term to mean nothing other than the rules changes for rests and recharges above, and nothing else. And I'm using the phrase because that's the phrase used in the original 5e rules (in just that one location, as far as I can tell.)

Finally, what am I trying to accomplish Fair question. I'm trying to change the pacing.

Basically, the mechanics of a rest economy imply (and to some degree enforce) a pacing of encounters that I don't like, and I'm trying to change it. Since 4e introduced the idea of daily powers-- and by extension, the idea of the rest economy-- the basic idea of encounter pacing has been "Your group should be expected to get through X encounters per day, broken into smaller groups of Y encounters, punctuated by long and short rests, respectively, to recharge abilities."

It's a decent enough model, except it normalizes the idea of X encounters per day, because that's how many encounters it takes to burn through the party resources to make things feel challenging.

Your pacing mileage may vary, but for me that seems weird. If I send the characters on a quest to find a lost city 150 miles into the trackless desert, it's going to take about a week to get there. I might not need to have an encounter every day, but if I do, I either need to have X of them, or I need to make the one encounter apocalyptically challenging. ("But don't the characters have to assume that the first encounter of every day is encounter 1 of X and conserve resources accordingly, ratchetting up the challenge on their own?" Good question-- Yes, but that only lasts until the players figure out that I don't want to have that many encounters per day during travel time.)

On the other hand, if I'm using Gritty Realism, that week of travel will support the same number of encounters as a day. This absolutely does change the artificial one day quantum of adventure time to seven days, but (1) it still feels more natural to me and, (2) my style gives me more tools to adjust the pacing of overland journeys than dungeon crawls. Tessarael raises the valid question of overland travel vs dungeon crawls. To that, I can only say: (3) I tend not to run big dungeon adventures. Never found them realistic.

If I were just interested in running an original 5e game (or probably a Pathfinder 2e game) I wouldn't sweat it too much.

But the fatigue/strife/supply rules are a set of wrinkles I'm not sure how to account for.

As for the difference between long rest/short rest powers, does this really disadvantage one more than the other? The classes limited by long rests are still limited by long rests, they are just farther apart. But so are the short rests.

 

[Novak]

@dave2008 summed it up quite nicely.

Also: several magic items recharge at dawn. Would you change that too?

On top of that: If I wanted a grittier campaign (let's leave realism entirely out of the equation with D&D) I may use 3E's rules for recovering HP (1/level/night, 2 if there's someone with the medicine skill), or even with 2E's rules (1hp per full day of rest, 3 per full day if at bed rest). But spell and abilities recovery wouldn't be affected.

Magic items charging: I am inclined to say yes. But that's the sort of thing I'm asking about.

 

[Pedantic]

Magic items charging: I am inclined to say yes. But that's the sort of thing I'm asking about.

An adventure I quite liked, Strangers in Ramshorn used a model of standard short rests, but week long long rests and recharged magic items on a specific day at the end of the week. The structure of the adventure takes advantage of the longer downtime in two ways, it gives the PCs ample time to get attached to the NPCs and life in the town they're defending, Ramshorn, and allows all of the external threats to the town to escalate. There's essentially a set of different dungeons/encounters scattered around outside the town that all correspond to a different threat. Each week of rest that a threat isn't accounted for, it does something to the town. Spiders kill all off the local wildlife, goblins interrupt the trade caravans and make it impossible to get potions, the bandits count down to a massive raid on the town, and so on.

Significantly, the module doesn't really stop the PCs from resting at any point, as long as they can get back to town, they can take a long rest whenever they want. Instead, knowing that all these threats are poised to destroy the town and seeing how things get worse over time, it encourages them to push themselves as hard as they are comfortable with before recovering resources. Short rests are pretty much available between all encounters, but the pressure on hit dice made running out of HP a real issue over the course of the week. Much like 4e, that setup allowed the encounters to be built with an assumption the PCs were going in with full hitpoints most of the time.

The module does recommend giving slot based casters a free wand of magic missile to stretch out their resources a little, and has pretty generous access to magic items, particularly potions and later wands at a lower level than might be typical to fill in the gaps somewhat, but my players all felt it provides a pretty reasonable tension throughout.

If I was going to combine that structure with A5E's journey rules, I might replace the stationary town with something like a caravan. That gives you a big pool of Supply, presumably feeding a lot more people than just the PCs, that you can deplete and makes it a more meaningful set of journey HP, with consequences for not keeping it up.

 

[Jacob Vardy]

I used the gritty realism rules in a couple of run-throughs of Out of the Abyss. Which has a great deal of travel through the Underdark. The gritty realism rule variant worked quite well for keeping travel challenging without being a slog. Although i did it that the eight hours rest at the end of the week is the long rest. That is, for the first nine days of the week, eight hours is a "short rest". On the tenth day of the week eight hours is a "long rest".

Dungeons and settlements were on dungeon-time. That is, normal rules. Short rest 1 hour. Long rest 8 hours, once every 24 hours. I tried to signal this clearly but sometimes forgot.

Magic items reset on specific days of the week. But i did also gave the players a lot of single use items from creature parts. Mostly from this blog Creature Loot: Intro and index Although it is a bit too generous.

Five to six encounters spaced over a ten day "adventuring day" meant the players still had to husband their resources. Rather than blowing through each encounter by using all their daily resources. The balance was best at mid-tier play. Levels 1-3 almost every encounter in Out of the Abyss is deadly. Getting above level 14, the PC's minions could handle most of the challenges.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

That is, for the first nine days of the week, eight hours is a "short rest". On the tenth day of the week eight hours is a "long rest".

...uh...a week...a week is 7 days.

 

[Pedantic]

...uh...a week...a week is 7 days.

I'm not immediately familiar with Out of the Abyss, but calendar changes are a pretty standard fantasy setting adjustment, that doesn't sound beyond the pale.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

I'm not immediately familiar with Out of the Abyss, but calendar changes are a pretty standard fantasy setting adjustment, that doesn't sound beyond the pale.

huh. yeah, apparently in the forgotten realms weeks are ten days long.

that uh...that disoriented me, i won't lie.

 

[Jacob Vardy]

apparently in the forgotten realms weeks are ten days long.

Yeah, sorry. I wasn't sure if to write it up as i actually did it, or to change it for clarity.