D&D 5E Is 5e "Easy Mode?"

[Minigiant]

I'm still shocked on this "long rest outside of town" thing.

Once you leave the town, next "guaranteed" long rest is when you get back. Maybe.

 

[billd91]

I'm kind of wondering what you're getting at with this? Not saying you're wrong, just don't understand.

It's a classic 1e puzzle, where each PC needs to figure out which tree relates to them, and it provides a bonus for success (and a big one in that era where increasing Ability Scores was not baked into the rules). It's also a lesson in greed. Rather than an arbitrary, "it only works once," it actually has an in-world answer to why everybody can't just eat more fruit.

Are you saying that 5e doesn't do this sort of thing at all?

Yeah, I'm not sure why the fruit in the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun matters either. It's not like that was a particular common encounter in AD&D either - finding something that raised a stat bonus quite that easily. I don't exactly see why it couldn't be done in 5e as well. That particular puzzle would be fairly easy to replicate in 5e, in fact, if that was what you wanted to do. The rules aren't preventing you from doing so any more than they promoted it in AD&D or OD&D.

 

[tetrasodium]

.

I am going from the suggested 6-8 encounter adventuring day guidelines, in which case 6 difficult or deadly encounters would give more XP than the guidelines suggest.

This misses the point. The guidelines are not the system. The guidelines are not rules. They're advice. They are only advice. You are not a new DM, you do not need to follow the advice.

Seriously, my point is not a point that can be countered by "but the guidelines", because my point includes ignoring the guidelines.

Stop building adventures using the guidelines. Instead build a world where guards are lethal, where there is a chance of a wyvern hunting the woods near the adventure site way before the PCs can handle a wyvern, and use the lingering injuries and slower healing from the DMG. Next, let the players know what kind of game they're in for, and play. Last, enjoy how the gameplay changes to something more old school, because the idea of getting in literally any fight is scary.


4e. Barring the dice just absolutely going weird (every enemy critting while PCs roll garbage, round after round), a 4e encounter is as deadly as the DM makes it. The system for building NPCs and encounters is both robust and transparent, the levels are accurate, and the toolset is incredible in both depth and efficacy. And that's true for combat encounters, traps, hazards, and overland travel.

5e is better in some ways, with more optional rules to change how easily PCs recover, whether lingering injuries are a possibility, etc, but 4e still wins out simply for the fact that the DM can accurately predict what a given encounter will do to the party, while the PCs have no idea before an encounter begins how rough it will be.

No it is exactly the point, the only reason that you think that point you quoted is "not the point" is because it causes severe problems with your attempts at dismissal & gm blame. The system itself starts breaking down badly when you start doing the kinds of "the gm can just make it harder" stuff you are suggesting which results in needing to do more & more structural low level system changes to correct the cascading deluge of problems that come up as a result of an overly simplified overly streamlined system designed to mitigate all forms of risk to a thing of near zero concern. That experience point problem you dismiss so quickly is just one of the problems. Pretty quickly you've written a whole new system trying to work around careless design choices that resulted in absurd design goals that left someone thinking healing spirit was a good spell to publish as is.

 

[Mepher]

I'm still shocked on this "long rest outside of town" thing.

Once you leave the town, next "guaranteed" long rest is when you get back. Maybe.

I would love to hear how others handle this also. When do you allow for a long rest? Can you get a long rest while camped about a fire in the forest with someone keeping watch? How about in a dungeon while holed up in a room? When DO you allow a long rest?

 

[Monayuris]

I would love to hear how others handle this also. When do you allow for a long rest? Can you get a long rest while camped about a fire in the forest with someone keeping watch? How about in a dungeon while holed up in a room? When DO you allow a long rest?

I require a safe settlement in order to take a long rest. Usually this means the base town. But it can also mean a settlement or domain of a friendly faction.

My general rule of thumb is that if there is a possibility for an wandering encounter to occur or if you are in a dungeon / dangerous environment, then it is impossible to take a long rest.

 

[Mepher]

I require a safe settlement in order to take a long rest. Usually this means the base town. But it can also mean a settlement or domain of a friendly faction.

My general rule of thumb is that if there is a possibility for an wandering encounter to occur or if you are in a dungeon / dangerous environment, then it is impossible to take a long rest.

See now I think this requirement alone makes more difference to healing than changing the healing rules. There was never a point in our AD&D games that we actually roleplayed out a week in town while waiting for someone to heal up 1-2hp per day, we just hand waived it. If someone wanted to do something specific during that time we might have spent a short time on it but usually we just hit the fast forward button.

The problem though with NOT allowing a long rest is the class related abilities that need that long rest to refresh. Casters need their spell slots back yet melee generally get their abilities back on a short rest. It's really a conundrum for my group because as AD&D players we found 5E to just be over the top for healing.

Last year though we decided to switch back and play a 2E campaign. I ran them through a mix of B2 Keep on the Borderlands and T1 Village of Hommlet. I changed the Kobolds in Cave A to undead Kobolds. Between clearing Cave A and then going to the Moathouse, the players probably ran back to town about 7 times, dragging unconscious characters and licking their wounds. While we all consider ourselves firmly "old-school" players we found it was pretty tedious after a while. All the treks back to town to heal only served to eat up real life game time, disconnect the players from the actual story, and really break the "immersion". I had to continually rewrite the story because it made no sense for the everything to just get put on hold each time the players needed a timeout to heal.

I am not a fan of just being able to hold up in a dungeon to get back to full but would prefer some type of middle ground. I think a 3 tier rest might be better than 2 tier. Short rest for abilities, long rest for spells, complete rest for hit points. HD use during any of the above.

If you aren't using the base rest rules, what are you using?

 

[DND_Reborn]

I would love to hear how others handle this also. When do you allow for a long rest? Can you get a long rest while camped about a fire in the forest with someone keeping watch? How about in a dungeon while holed up in a room? When DO you allow a long rest?

We allow a long rest as long as the criteria is met:

• you sleep for at least 6 hours
• up to 2 hours of light activity
• no more than 1 hour of strenuous activity

Nothing says anything about being in a place of safety or anything else. We had our group throw up a wall of force to keep some lizardfolk at bay while we cast leomund's tiny hut and took refuge inside for 8 hours to rest. They had no shaman or caster to bring it down. After the rest were had all our resources back and finished them off. Unfortunately for them, the hut blocked their only way out, so the lizardfolk were trapped in the mean time.

 

[Mepher]

So what is to stop the player's abusing it by simply casting Leomund's Tiny Hut every night? Sure as a DM you can purposely foil their plans but that is also a dangerous road. Sure a group of intelligent casters might take down their hut but that shouldn't be happening often under normal circumstances. That means 9 times out of 10 there is no longer ANY risk for the players to rest. Pop up a hut every night, forget about keeping watch and just sleep away.

 

[Minigiant]

I require a safe settlement in order to take a long rest. Usually this means the base town. But it can also mean a settlement or domain of a friendly faction.

My general rule of thumb is that if there is a possibility for an wandering encounter to occur or if you are in a dungeon / dangerous environment, then it is impossible to take a long rest.

That's how I always saw it.

After the party leaves town, the only long rest they get is when they come back or clear an area for them to rest.

After Swordy, Staffy, Macey, and K'Nifey leave the inn, they don't get a full heal long rest unless the DM lets them or they get back.

In the old days, if the DM wanted to make them live longer, they drop extra potions.
Since 4e, you don't have to. You have healing surges or HD.

unless it's Leomond...

We allow a long rest as long as the criteria is met:

• you sleep for at least 6 hours
• up to 2 hours of light activity
• no more than 1 hour of strenuous activity

Nothing says anything about being in a place of safety or anything else. We had our group throw up a wall of force to keep some lizardfolk at bay while we cast leomund's tiny hut and took refuge inside for 8 hours to rest. They had no shaman or caster to bring it down. After the rest were had all our resources back and finished them off. Unfortunately for them, the hut blocked their only way out, so the lizardfolk were trapped in the mean time.

LEOMUND!!!!!!!!!!

That's why my dungeons always has mages.

 

[DND_Reborn]

So what is to stop the player's abusing it by simply casting Leomund's Tiny Hut every night? Sure as a DM you can purposely foil their plans but that is also a dangerous road. Sure a group of intelligent casters might take down their hut but that shouldn't be happening often under normal circumstances. That means 9 times out of 10 there is no longer ANY risk for the players to rest. Pop up a hut every night, forget about keeping watch and just sleep away.

Nothing. As you say, unless the DM acts to stop it (it does have a 10 minute casting time after all). It is just another representation of how 5E was made easier by design. Leomund's Tiny Hut was not nearly as powerful in AD&D.

Of course, we could have just as easily cast Teleportation Circle and gone back to the city...