D&D 5E Have the designers lost interest in short rests?

[ph0rk]

The problem with just giving short rest classes more uses of short rest recharging abilities is that the abilities ir class tend to be powerful to a degree that would be problematic if those abilities were no longer tightly restricted.

Therefore it is best to push harder on the 6-8 day structure, because merely tripling short rest resources may be too much but doing nothing (and having them essentially up against zero-restriction long rest casters during a 5 minute adventure day) is also badly balanced.

 

[Zardnaar]

Therefore it is best to push harder on the 6-8 day structure, because merely tripling short rest resources may be too much but doing nothing (and having them essentially up against zero-restriction long rest casters during a 5 minute adventure day) is also badly balanced.

It's hard to get 6-8 encounters in a session and a book keeping pain in the ass to split it over multiple sessions.

Narratively it's also stupid outside a dungeon crawl.

They made hit point attrition the expected thing and nerfed everything that bypasses them or threatens the PCs in other ways.

They did them I suppose for the D&D for everyone idea. I suspect 5E has become it's own thing now and did all people are trying for 6-8 encounters.

 

[tetrasodium]

Therefore it is best to push harder on the 6-8 day structure, because merely tripling short rest resources may be too much but doing nothing (and having them essentially up against zero-restriction long rest casters during a 5 minute adventure day) is also badly balanced.

6-8 is an unrealistic number, people have gone into why quite a bit in this thread & others

 

[ph0rk]

6-8 is an unrealistic number, people have gone into why quite a bit in this thread & others

But that's how the classes are balanced. If the "fix" isn't simple (i.e. triple resources) then it won't work without a major redesign. And a major redesign does not appear to be forthcoming.

Therefore - people run things as they have been which tends to disadvantage short rest classes.

Doing nothing does not fix the problem - and it is a problem. Particularly once you get out of Tier 1.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Maybe I missed something, but if the problem is that the warlock and battlemaster only work in campaigns that are rigorously balanced around a certain number of encounters and short rests, then why isn't the solution to disallow those classes in campaigns that aren't balanced in such a way?

 

[Zardnaar]

But that's how the classes are balanced. If the "fix" isn't simple (i.e. triple resources) then it won't work without a major redesign. And a major redesign does not appear to be forthcoming.

Therefore - people run things as they have been which tends to disadvantage short rest classes.

Doing nothing does not fix the problem - and it is a problem. Particularly once you get out of Tier 1.

Class balance has never really been a major thing.

At least in terms of making a viable game.

Alot of the most popular classes are also the least powerful.

There's various other ways of making the short rest classes not suck as well.

 

[Zardnaar]

Maybe I missed something, but if the problem is that the warlock and battlemaster only work in campaigns that are rigorously balanced around a certain number of encounters and short rests, then why isn't the solution to disallow those classes in campaigns that aren't balanced in such a way?

Depends how badly unbalanced they are.

Battlemaster is so frontloaded you're not going to really notice at low levels.

Think I'm going to ban the worst offenders of the crap archetypes. They're a newbie trap.

 

[tetrasodium]

Maybe I missed something, but if the problem is that the warlock and battlemaster only work in campaigns that are rigorously balanced around a certain number of encounters and short rests, then why isn't the solution to disallow those classes in campaigns that aren't balanced in such a way?

Depends on the level of imbalance & if the imbalanced thing stomps on the toes of someone else's niche or not. 5e design tried to pretend that casting virtually all of the same spells and getting great class abilities like EB was a totally different niche because it's short rest dependent. Without wotc saying that xy&z are broken so here is a UA that helps it's difficult for a GM to justify such action like you suggest. A similar problem exists within spells yet wotc likewise refuses to point fingers to give a gm solid footing for "this stuff is banned"

 

[MichaelSomething]

Wait, I though the 6 to 8 encounter day was meant to solve the issue of the five minute workday. Give PCs enough durability so they don't feel the need to rest after just one fight?

The short rest mechanic was designed to create differences in the classes. 4E put everyone on the same resource structure and people hated it because it made classes too samey. So now classes operate on different rest structures and people have issues dealing with how different they are?

 

[Don Durito]

Maybe @Charlaquin is right and people are thinking a little too rigidly here.

As I said before 6-8 only applies if the battles are medium/hard. If the battles are deadly you can go down to 3, and you'd probaby have at least one 'deadly battle' in any given day (as hard is not really hard). So realisitically, the way most people tend to prep things, it's more like 3-6. (More than that is if the players are working through something like an old school dungeon crawl.) At 3 combats Fighters can still keep up, provided they're not spending two of those combats waiting to get their action surge back. (I'm not so sure about Warlocks, I banned them in the first game I ran and I've yet to see one in play despite allowing them since and hence have never looked that closely at them.

So there's two issues that I have seen arise.
1. Games in which the number of combats during a long rest is reduced, but the frequency of short rests doesn't change.
2. Games in which the number of combats during a long rest is reduced to one or two.

There's also issues in how the game plays well which are more subjective. At about 3 combats, the PCs will be much more powerful, and combat will take longer to challenge them - this becomes a game much more about the set piece combats - which I don't think is a strength of 5e.

At less than 3, the game becomes extremely swingy, as the PCs throw everything they've got with abandon and the GM has to keep upping the ante until they accidently up it too much and accidentally TPK. Even at this level when playing in such a game my rogue did not actually feel 'weak' the party needed his single combat damage. It was more that combat took so long and clerics and sorcerers were pouring through their spell list and doing multiple things on their turns against multiple opponents while I was just too doing my boring predictable sneak attack every round.

The game is pretty resilient. As I said at the beginning it's a matter of 'better' or 'worse', not really of broken.

We then played one game with a different GM in which the party fought about 8 combats (at least two of them 'deadly' and 3 short rests with my Fighter ending the day after 3 action surges and with 4 hps and no hit dice, and it was obvious, after playing through the former, that the game was designed to work this way. Individual combat was faster - much faster - combat rounds were quicker because the spellcasters were using cantrips about half the time, the Fighter was clearly more important to the party; Action Surge swung a combat multiple times.