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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8094835" data-attributes="member: 12731">Thank you. Yes, this is my experience also.Hopefully it is obvious to every reader that this assumes somebody learns the Medicine skill and its assorted feats. Yes, thare are alternatives, but for our purposes it's simpler to just have the group realize at least one of them should train Medicine.I realize what about this that disappoints Saelorn, but here I want to discuss another problem.As I understand it, the 10-minute downtime activity was standardized and codified to make the choice of which such activity you take an interesting little mini-game between encounters. Should I regain a focus spell, or use a special ability to regain a spell slot, or should I stand guard, or make repairs, or contribute to the group's healing, or...But for that decision point to be interesting, there must be a scarcity of 10-minute chunks or you can simply choose "all of them".That is why I started out GMing with the expectation rests would complete in 10, 20 or 30 minutes but rarely more (unless you're done adventuring for the day, of course). But once you're off the very lowest levels, Medicine isn't powerful enough to heal everybody back up to 100% health (or 90% at least) in just three 10-minute downtime activities. Just as FrozenNorth says, you'll often need four. Or nine.That becomes a real problem. The mini-game of how to spend your 10-minute downtime activities fall apart when you get so many of them. Not only the simple fact that five or so is often plenty. But also the very notion you can have a variable number of them. If you can take five, why can't you take six? And there is no good reason not to.---As far as I can see, the only thing that restores interest to this area is if the game is predicated on an unwritten convention that resting between encounters is 1-3 downtime activities. More than that, and you can just as well rest for the whole day.In other words, make a "short rest" last ten to thirty minutes. The "long rest" is 8 hours once per 24 hours just like you'd imagine. You can't benefit from two short rests in a row.But for this scheme to work, you need to rejig healing to actually match this. I've already discussed healing above, but in its simplest form you say you automatically heal 1/3rd of your maximum hit points during a 10-minute period, no matter which activity you take. (Any actual healing is on top of that)</blockquote>

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