How often does your party take a short rest?

[Sleepy Walker]

My players short rest quite a bit. In the campaign I play in we long rest quite a bit. This is the difference between a campaign with a lot of smaller encounters verses one with a few very difficult encounters.


As the DM I personally am far more lenient with short rests than I am with long rests.

-A short rest can be done just about anywhere and at any time. Consequences vary, but it is not impossible to hole up undetected for an hour or so in quite a few situations.
-A long rest (8 hours rest) only has a benefit every 24 hours of time. If the players take a long rest right after just having a long rest (say a bloody ambush in the morning), then it takes a full 24 hours until they get the benefit.

Generally what happens is while the players are in a dangerous but stable situation (standard dungeon quiet segment) they take short rests when appropriate to regain health and short-rest abilities. Most of the time they take these short rests in a safe manner and there is not a lot which changes while taking them. Occasionally a short rest is interrupted

When they do take long rests to regain spell slots the upcoming encounters can change, often becoming harder as forces organize defenses or perhaps a target escapes entirely. This is the players choice and they go into each rest knowing that time will pass. If I feel they are flippantly calling for a long rest I tell them that if they do this things will change and that they need x hours to get the benefit. I never tell them they cannot take a long rest and must continue. I've been on the receiving end of that and much prefer just telling them that they can do the thing they want but there is an extra penalty of time, difficulty, or mission critical objectives (I don't run my campaign where the PCs can never fail and cannot retreat to come back or try somewhere else).

 

[Invisible Stalker]

We have 1-2 short rest per day, *sometimes* 3.

As far as the "almost never" group... so your characters never have lunch? That's what a short rest is.

Lunch isn't the problem. It's the halfling that wants second breakfast, he's the problem.

 

[bgbarcus]

In my home game I eliminated short rests as a mechanic for recovering any resources outside of using HD for HP (and that takes 5-10 minutes). I found it too irritating and not a fun aspect of the game to deal with.

So on the assumption PCs get two short rests in one adventuring day I tripled the things people recover on a short rest and they can do that on a long rest. Also, long rests are one week.

This pretty much matches my opinion of short rests. I've been running a 5e game since the pre-release play tests and short rests always rubbed me wrong. My players would take a rest after every encounter if it were possible so I found myself designing dungeons specifically to prevent that which felt cheap.

A couple of weeks back we started trying out a house rule with short rest removed and all short rest recharge abilities are allowed triple uses per day. I allow up to three hit dice per turn to be used during an encounter. The player can use one hit die each in exchange for their action, bonus action, and/or movement. Outside of encounters, hit dice can be used freely. We've only been doing this for a couple of sessions without any major encounters so I can't say if we will stick to this rule. But I hope it works as well as I anticipate.

 

[Larnievc]

We’re using the one minute short rest 1 hour long rest with the addition of a sleep period (the only way to regain all of your spells). This means spell casters have to sleep at some point if they want to regain all of their spell slots in one go. We also add a rule where if you are ‘well rested’ you gain temporary hits points to boost you up to the maximum hit points you may have at your level. If you go without sleep for too long you get exhaustion levels (but that’s never happened).

We do this because it seems to work. The team is a fighter, thief, druid, ranger, wizard.

 

[Reynard]

I like the idea of determining the lengths of rests based on the current mode of play. During dungeon delving, a one hour short rest and 8 hour long rest makes sense, while during overland travel making a regular night's rest a short and a full 24 hour camp a long rest works. During downtime it doesn't seem relevant but I guess if it came up you could extend short rests to doing nothing for a day and long rests burning a whole week. I know some folks will find that somehwat metagamey, but I think sometimes D&D benefits from leaning into the game aspects and using mechanics to control pacing. I also think potions of short rest should be a thing.

 

[Invisible Stalker]

My preferred potion of short rest