House Rule: Progressive Short Rests - each successive short rest takes longer.

[Krachek]

An idea that occurred to me as a kind of compromise between the 10 minute short rests optional rule in the DMG and the 1 hour short rests that are the default.

Have your short rests initially only take a few minutes, but each additional short rest takes longer and longer until you take a long rest and the short rest duration resets.

Example:

1st short rest: 15 minutes
2nd short rest: 1 hour
3rd short rest: 4 hours
4th short rest: 8 hours (at this point you just take a Long rest instead).

The idea being that it takes longer and longer to recover as your day of strenuous adventuring goes on. Also limits "short rest abuse" that some abilities are prone too.

What do you think? Useful, or doesn't add anything to the game?

On a day with two short rest, you effectively help class with short rest refresh. Is that your intent?
3 short rests adventure day are rare at my table. And with that mechanic I would prefer a long rest instead of a 4 hours short rest.

 

[Caliban]

On a day with two short rest, you effectively help class with short rest refresh. Is that your intent?
3 short rests adventure day are rare at my table. And with that mechanic I would prefer a long rest instead of a 4 hours short rest.

Well, the best time for each short rest is up for debate. I was just using a simple formula - each short rest takes 4x as long as the previous one, until you hit 8 hours.

The intent isn't to drastically change the number of short rests during a "normal" adventuring day. If I remember correctly the game assumes 6-8 encounters with 2-3 short rests between long rests.

But I have seen situations where the players are incentivized to take back to back short rests to maximize the use of certain short rest recharge abilities. (Sorcerer/Warlock expending the warlock spell slots to regain sorcery points, then taking a short rest to regain the spell slots, repeat until full, etc.)

That being said, I'm not overly concerned about that particular aspect of short rests. This is just something that occurred to me (probably inspired by the Cypher system rest mechanic - I was looking at their system a few weeks ago and forgot about it until HomeGrownHydra mentioned it) as an interesting way of managing short rests.

The PC's can take a quick breather after the first encounter or two and be on their way, but as the day goes on it takes longer and longer to recover until they are forced to take a long rest.

The DM can adjust the rest times to allow as many or as few short rests as they feel makes sense.