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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 6840634" data-attributes="member: 79401">As someone playing both 4E and 5E currently, I'll say I definitely don't feel like I have more of a choice in 5E, or that the choice comes up more frequently or gets weighed for longer when it does come up.Nearly any time a group would say no to a 4E short rest, they'd also say no to a 5E one. If you can't spare 5 minutes or secure a location for that long, then you can't spare an hour or secure a location for that long. (There are corner cases where you have consumable resources that would give you safety for an hour or longer – but not for long enough to get in a long/extended rest – and it might be a bit wasteful to use them for a 5 minute breather, but generally such resources are tailored to the system enough that something that's only good for an hour in 5E is either good for significantly less time or significantly more time in 4E.)Pretty much any time a group would say yes to a 5E short rest, they'd also say yes to a 4E one. If this place is secure enough to hold for an hour, and we have that much time to spare, then automatically it's sufficient for a five minute rest.Then there's the situations where a definite yes with 4E is a definite no in 5E. Cases where you're definitely safe for 5 minutes and have the time to spare, but an hour would be out of the question.In all of these cases, the decision is still pretty much automatic.Where it's not automatic does differ, though. Some of the cases where it's a definite yes in 4E it'll be a judgement call in 5E: We definitely can spare 5 minutes and rest safely here for that long, but due to some degree of uncertainty about time or location beyond that we don't know if an hour rest gives us enough to offset the potential downsides.But the thing is, there's also cases where it's 5E that is automatic, but 4E that's uncertain. Personally, I find these ones more interesting and more filled with tension, because once they come up they can come up multiple times in a row, with escalating time pressure. We've got an hour or less to get through an unknown number of obstacles to stop the nefarious necromancer from completing his midnight ritual. Clearly we can't just sit around idling for an hour. If we rest after every little fight, every trap, every hazard, we may arrive too late. But if we don't rest at every opportunity, we may find ourselves less able to cope with each successive situation, as we expend encounter resources we don't get back in time for the next challenge. We may find that this was our last opportunity to pause. What was an easy yes when we had an hour's buffer is less easy when we're still not at our goal and there's only a half hour to go. We think he's in the next room, and there's less than 10 minutes to go ... do we huddle up for five minutes or kick down the door now?Now, that's certainly not an every-session scenario, to be sure. But in my experience, neither is 5E's non-automatic decision scenario. The vast majority of my adventuring days in 5E have either had no demand for a short rest at all (we haven't lost enough HP or expended enough resources to make us deem the rest necessary, we've got places to be and things to do and people will worry if we take an extra hour ...), or every opportunity that arises is automatically taken ... and often turns out to be a good time and place for a long rest anyway, turning the short rest into 'Let's top up the HP of the first watch'. I think last session was the first I've seen in quite some time where we actually got in two short rests, and the second was the short/long combo. And really, the first was more of a "we're stuck at this place for an hour or more anyway, so anyone who needs it better take the short rest". Any agonizing over the decision to stay at that place would've been there every bit as much if the resting aspect only took five minutes of the time, it was other factors that made us decide to stay that long.I wouldn't mind a ten minute short rest. It makes the decision a little less frequently an automatic yes than 4E, but far less often an automatic no than 5E.</blockquote>

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