D&D 5E Healing and resting variants

[loverdrive]

I use gritty realism (but that's a pretty dumb name, honestly), and I think it should've been standard. Reliably fitting supposed amount of encounters into one day is pretty hard.

 

[S'mon]

I use 7 day long rest; I keep short rest to 1 hour 3 times/day.

 

[touc]

I use RAW for healing of Hit Points and selected "None/RAW" because I also use a homebrew regarding what happens when you reach 0 hit points.

Homebrew: Any damage sustained after 0hp is taken from a "vitality" pool that reflects the body's actual damage taken (whereas hit points reflect avoiding real damage given anyone whose body got hit that often or by a dragon's claw would be obliterated). These are much harder to heal, even with magic, and take much longer to recover naturally.

 

[NotAYakk]

I use gritty realism (but that's a pretty dumb name, honestly), and I think it should've been standard. Reliably fitting supposed amount of encounters into one day is pretty hard.

It is more about narrative pacing than it is about being gritty.

This does mean that fixed location adventures (a shrine or a dungeon) should be fit into the "time between short rests" notch of adventure design, and plots should advance at a pace of days instead of hours. But that is easier to handle than making every day have 8 combats.

It also means that when the players finish the week long adventure and fight the lich boss, they are expected to be not 100% fresh, even without DMs forcing it. And "we take a week off" is a lot more like "we give up" than "we go to bed" to the PCs.

Which means that the CR of BBEG no longer has to be stratospheric to feel like a challenging fight.

In standard 5e, if you force the BBEG to be after fighting 4 other encounters the same day, and want wilderness random encounters to be non-pointless, that random wilderness encounter has to be harder than the BBEG!

If you go with daily short rests and week-long long rests, the random wilderness encounter is just one encounter in the "adventuring day"; it can be easier than the BBEG and still matter.

Now, what I find interesting is that 5e expects between 1-3 "adventuring days" per level. If we stretch this out to a 10+ day period (as gritty rests tend to), this means it is 10 to 30 days per level.

So level 1 to level 20, instead of taking just over a month, takes about a year (plus any extra downtime). Still fast.

Also, as you permit downtime activities during long rests, downtime becomes something integrated into the game.

Another fun bonus is that if you play weekly, and manage a bit over an "adventuring day" per session, then game time and real world time advance at roughly the same rate (except extra downtime).

("adventuring day" refers to the time between long rests. For a gritty rest variant, this takes up about 10 days of time; for standard, it is 1 day.)

 

[S'mon]

Now, what I find interesting is that 5e expects between 1-3 "adventuring days" per level. If we stretch this out to a 10+ day period (as gritty rests tend to), this means it is 10 to 30 days per level.

So level 1 to level 20, instead of taking just over a month, takes about a year (plus any extra downtime). Still fast.

For my current game I added in the DMG train-to-level rules too. Looking at the logs, the PCs who started in August 2020 have gone 1st-4th level in 4 months of game time (IRL 6 months of approximately weekly play), and are nearing 5th level, but I'd expect the advancement rate to be a good deal slower at level 5+, no more than 1 per 2 game months I'd think. So I'd expect around 3 game years to 20th level at least. And that's with a fair bit of bonus non-combat XP, about a third of all XP awarded.

 

[Laurefindel]

I used gritty realism, slow healing, and RaW in three different games as DM. For the next game I'm planning RaW short rests at meal times (so 2-3 per day) and long rest = a weekend off, but I'll have to see with the players what we all want to play at that point.