D&D 5E Let's Talk About Chapter 9 of the DMG

[Don Durito]

Collectively I've looked at all of them, and mostly disregarded them as the equivalent of internet forum spitballing.

Most of them have pretty obvious issues. The only one I would really consider using as is is "ability score proficiency" but that's one's probably only workable because it's basically the primes system nicked from Castles and Crusades.

 

[jgsugden]

Guys, if you're casting fly, fighting dragons, and wielding a wand - realism went out the door. Even if you're just a bunch of rogues and fighters battling humans - and you get hit by a sword 8 times and are not down - not realistic.

 

[Hriston]

I tried it for a bit, but it didn't go well.

The basic problem is that the rest of the system is designed around the assumption of getting hit on a routine basis, balanced by the fact that healing is easy. If you make healing harder, but don't give characters any way to avoid getting hit, then it's kind of a mess.

A secondary issue is that primary spellcasters are unhappy with the inability to recover spells overnight. If you're used to casting multiple big spells per day, then it's a hard sell to go back to casting one spell every other day. Warlocks become more popular than ever, not only because you have 2-3 times as many short rests per long rests, but also because you recover spell slots at a predictable interval; players are used to budgeting spells on a per-day basis.

The math suggests that it should remain relatively balanced, if you have six encounters in an "adventure week" instead of in an "adventure day"; but there's more to the game than just combat. Spell duration doesn't translate well, in many cases.

My biggest issue is just that it doesn't go far enough toward restoring the old balance. I mean, this is as gritty as the game gets, and you can still go from 1hp to full after sleeping for one night. Granted, you can't do that as frequently as you could under the base rules, but if there was any hint of realism involved then you wouldn't be able to do it at all.

Maybe I’m missing some context, but the Gritty Realism variant isn’t that you take one long rest every seven adventuring days. It’s that a long rest takes seven days of downtime, so you have your “adventuring day” (which ought to be about three actual days) then take seven days off to rest before the next one. Your comments seem to be based on the former understanding rather than the latter.

 

[commandercrud]

Gritty Realism is by far the best thing you can do to improve 5e.

Our current campaign uses it. About 50 sessions, 4 years of game time, just hit level 5.

 

[Maestrino]

To the OP, what optional rules have I mployed and how did it go?

Spell point variant for sorcerers. Makes them more of a blasty specialist alternative to a jack-of-all-trades wizard. Super fun.

Gritty realism? No thanks. If anything my parties already try to tackle too many encounters without resting as is. They're more likely to charge ahead even though they're out of abilities and hit dice and get screwed by a big bad.

 

[Reynard]

Gritty realism? No thanks. If anything my parties already try to tackle too many encounters without resting as is. They're more likely to charge ahead even though they're out of abilities and hit dice and get screwed by a big bad.

Lucky you. One of my groups is the 5-minute adventuring type: Let's nova then rest! Ugh. The gritty realism resting rule might help with that.

Somewhat relatedly, does anyone have practical experience with the alternative healing rules? it seems like needing healing kits is a good way to sap treasure (which 5e desperately needs) and slow natural healing seems like a way to allow for more time to pass. I don't know that I would combine it withgritty realism long rests, though.

 

[commandercrud]

Somewhat relatedly, does anyone have practical experience with the alternative healing rules? it seems like needing healing kits is a good way to sap treasure (which 5e desperately needs) and slow natural healing seems like a way to allow for more time to pass. I don't know that I would combine it withgritty realism long rests, though.

We use all of those. Lingering injuries and system shock too. They all work well together. If I could only adopt one though, it would be Gritty Realism.

 

[RSIxidor]

I think gritty realism takes it too long. Instead of just changing how long short and long rests are, they should change what is recovered with each. If the idea is that you can't get everything back, then you could have more tiers of resting.

Short rest - 1 hour - get back some "short rest" resources, but not all, recover HP by spending hit dice
Overnight rest - 8 hours - get back all "short rest" resources, get back some "long rest" resources, get back half as many hit dice as normal long rest, regain HP equal to your level+con mod.
Weekend rest - 3 days - get back half hit points + con mod, get back all "short rest" resources," get back all normal amount of hit dice for a "long rest," get back more of "long rest" resources compared to overnight rest
Week's rest - only possible in relatively secure locations like a settlement where PCs wouldn't need to guard their own rest, get back all HP, all HD, all "short rest" and all "long rest" resources

I'm not saying what I have above is exactly as it should be, just spit-balling an example. Having a binary of short vs long rests doesn't feel like it makes sense for the "realism" scenarios.

 

[Oofta]

I think gritty realism takes it too long. Instead of just changing how long short and long rests are, they should change what is recovered with each. If the idea is that you can't get everything back, then you could have more tiers of resting.
...

Not sure I follow, it's just an issue of campaign narrative pacing.

One note I should make is that I do modify how long spells with duration of half an hour or more last - I multiply their duration by 5.

But it really depends on your style of campaign. I tend to run urban investigation/exploration/RP heavy campaigns. I'm not doing large dungeon crawls where you're facing down wave after wave of monsters.

 

[Reynard]

Not sure I follow, it's just an issue of campaign narrative pacing.

One note I should make is that I do modify how long spells with duration of half an hour or more last - I multiply their duration by 5.

But it really depends on your style of campaign. I tend to run urban investigation/exploration/RP heavy campaigns. I'm not doing large dungeon crawls where you're facing down wave after wave of monsters.

I often considering using the longer rest times for wilderness travel and switching back to the shorter ones for the dungeon crawl. I know it is a metagame element, but I hate the tendency to nova in every wilderness encounter simply because the probability of more than one or two encounters is very low.

I also have been using a hack of the TOR/AiME Journey rules, which helps alleviate the same problem.