D&D (2024) Limiting Short Rests to 2x/day

[mamba]

You say that despite continuing to argue.

I was not arguing, I said I have no interest in your 'solution' and explained why

Because I actually have interest in talking about these things.

no one is stopping you, you had an entire thread for it. Not sure why you bring it over here now, this is about the 2024 version of D&D, not about whatever system you came up with to replace any type of rest

You're the one responding to me when you clearly don't want to.

I am not sure why you say that. If I did not want to reply, I would not

Knowing you'll not engage fairly,

so you knew this when you first posted here, impressive.... and as to 'not fairly' I am drawing logical conclusions based on what you do say about your system in the absence of more information. You have a pattern of complaining about people drawing conclusions based on what you said which I do not quite understand, what else do you expect them to do....

Well, you have this to yourself now, I said my piece. As you said, we can simply disagree, and anything beyond quietly disagreeing with you always ends with you blaming the other person with misrepresenting your ideas and making unwarranted assumptions, even when they are just filling in the blanks you left in your posts. Not interested in more of that.

 

[Emberashh]

I was not arguing, I said I have no interest in your 'solution' and explained why

You were and still are.

Not sure why you bring it over here now, this is about the 2024 version of D&D, not about whatever system you came up with to replace any type of rest

...

I am not sure why you say that.

I said I have no interest in your 'solution' and explained why

...

you knew this when you first posted here, impressive..

Its almost like Ive interacted with you on several occasions and know how you tend to argue. You're not the only person on this site who has a tendency to argue and engage in a very unfair manner.

You have a pattern of complaining about people drawing conclusions based on what you said

If I kept aggressively asserting to you things you didn't say while refusing to engage with you from any other angle you wouldn't appreciate it either.

You could have asked questions and actually talked with me, but instead you asserted strawmen and then dismissively insulted my logical reaction to that as just being "complaining".

As said, you clearly don't want to talk with me about my ideas and you demonstrate by continuing to not actually talk to me about my ideas.

You have, quite literally, not said a single word thats stuck to the topic since you first levied your strawmen, and have instead spent the last several posts trying to litigate me reacting to you being abrasive.

even when they are just filling in the blanks you left in your posts

Fun fact, if I "filled in the holes", not only would you not have actually read the resulting lengthy post, but you'd almost assuredly still be pulling the same shtick you are now.

And thats without even getting into the also predictable dismissal because I wrote a wall of text.

So yeah. Do feel free to stop, though I doubt you will. Im still here because I want to discuss this. No idea why you are.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Yay. Give me a potion so I don't need sleep. Heard that somewhere...

 

[Emberashh]

Yay. Give me a potion so I don't need sleep. Heard that somewhere...

Potions don't replace Survival mechanics.

Until they do, at which point now its a question of interesting trade offs. If such a potion were to exist in my system, itd stop you passively losing Energy dice, but you'd also not be able to gain any back for the duration.

That then presents the question of when such a potion is useful. My first thought is trying to travel overland through the Night. Certainly saves time, and the potion counteracts the consequence of doing so, but now theres a new consequence, and now you have to wonder if its worth it to risk the Nightly travel when the MacGuffin Wraiths are after you and they're liable to smack you hard if they catch you. Do you give up the relative safety of the Ideal Campsite you've discovered, or do you trade the risk of a mad dash through the Night for more time Holdo Saggins to heal from being stabbed?

You don't really get all those interesting questions off Rests alone, which is what Im getting at about going for something that allows for more meaningful content, and the interesting parts of that hypothetical scenario wouldn't work if you conflated the "I don't need sleep" widget with the "I can actually fight" widget, when in truth the two widgets should be two cogs in a proverbial machine, interrelated but not the same function.

And in a broader meta sense, Potions also have a valuable property in allowing for Survival itself to be fully optional.

All this arguing over how long Rests should be is, imo, just haggling over how much Survival we're going to allow affect the game, when Survival in DND is (and always has been and still is in the bulk of all TTRPGs) a poorly integrated system that doesn't incentivize engaging with it.

 

[Horwath]

Hit point attrition from one fight to the next became of minimal importance in 3e thanks to WoCLW (3.5, WoLV) cheaply converting gp to hp, (which, for whatever reasons, didn't trigger Grognards enough to instigate total war against it). After each fight you could take a minute or few to heal everyone up (rounds were already 6 seconds, so even draining a WoCLW entirely - on average 220 hp - only took 5 min Natural healing was still pretty slow, so it was faster to take an extra day and have the Cleric (or other caster who could) just take & cast all healing spells. Outside of that, casting a healing spell would be reserved for getting someone back up immediately in a tough fight, or saving the gp cost of the wands (and, of course, making more wands)

Amateurs!

Clearly you would take Touch of Healing feat to get everyone to 50% HP then use Wand of Lesser vigor, 11HP vs 5,5HP on CLW for a charge of wand for full HP.

 

[Emberashh]

As an addendum, heres a post I made elsewhere (and it ironically speaks to just the sort of thing I was also talking about in regards to distrusting the different) to illustrate not just the system Ive been describing but also my general philosophy towards delivering the kind of experience my game is going for:

Something Ive noticed is that people will just get intellectually lazy and cynical if I describe the general scope of my game and what all it covers, and default to calling it unfocused when in reality they just aren't willing to engage with it on its own terms.

But its also a problem of them defaulting to a shallow criticism thats easy to levy at a lot of games simply because they fail to properly integrate their mechanics with each other.

For example, my game in the simplest pitch I can make is about being the legendary people that other games turn into background fluff and funny names for epic loot.

But when you look at the mechanics, you see a rather massive in scale sandbox RPG that seeks to thread the needle on a lot of different things, with an eye for integrating everything together between the "Pillars" of the game, to borrow DNDs take on the concept.

For example, my game has Taste mechanics. The reason for this is to support not only Crafting, which is a huge part of the game (Food is just as deeply customisable as Weapons or Spells will be), but also to further support Survival as an enjoyable and less abrasive part of the gameplay loop.

When Food is something you engage with on its own merits, because Food can provide benefits that reach out and hit every other part of the game, then Survival rules compelling you to take the time to Eat doesn't feel the same as when Food is just abstract nothings that only exist to serve the Rules. But at the same time, the need to spend time eating also makes for interesting choices.

Scarfing down rations will work in a pinch, but they'll never give you the same benefits as a proper meal will. This ties Food, Taste, and Survival all into the games Time Mechanics, which in turn touches everything else from Combat to Exploration to Settlement Building to Questing and so on.

And this meanwhile is reinforced by Survival all being tied into how characters restore their Energies, their essential "resources" to be useful whether its Combat, Exploration, Crafting, or what have you.

Whether its Composure, Mana, Stamina, or Acuity, they all get restored off a characters Energy Dice, which are basically universal hit dice that players can access by consuming either certain types of food (some of which won't consume the die) or, as they'll need ways to do it in a pinch, by consuming potions.

So, by eating food you get more Energy dice. By staying warm and well rested, you keep them for more significant lengths of time. And when you consume them you're automatically being told when you're hungry and need to stop because you'll already be tracking how many Energy dice you have available to use. This gives another critical tie in to several other areas of the game.

But thats not all, because through Bloodlines, my games race mechanic, you also have a lot more choices being generated that tie into Taste mechanics, as certain characters are going to end up having preferences, and meeting those preferences will have greater benefits, making those people stronger in the long run, so long as they meet their preferences rather than just their needs.

And meanwhile, all of this serves to reinforce the theme Im going for of an extreme power fantasy, but one thats actually meaningful to play.

Characters in my game can casually suplex dragons after a point, and you are directly intended to be able to solo entire armies, while leading your own.

And yet, these characters are fundamentally mortal. That is why Food matters and why Needs matter, and why whether or not your character likes Sweet over Bitter matters, amongst a great deal of other things that all reinforce this idea in similar ways.

In order to deserve to be called legendary you have to demonstrate you're capable of rising above mere mortality, and in a game, you can't really capture that idea if you're not depicting that mortality.

That is something I think is best encapsulated in another thing my game is doing, by having Modifiers grow in excess of the base roll. (You can gain a +30 of your skills alone, when you're rolling 1d20)

Conventional game design wisdom says modifiers shouldn't ever exceed the value of the roll.

But what my game accomplishes by breaking that wisdom is that it becomes a game that gets easier to run the longer it goes on. Theres no need to roll for certain things past a given point, and so the game becomes more narrative in nature, as players are free to just do, with the need to roll being naturally and immersively relegated to the challenges that truly matter at that level.

By simply breaking that wisdom I not only solve a specific problem that plagues a lot of complex RPGs, with high level play being too hard to run, but also solve the problem of enabling the basic theme of the game in the fullest way possible.

When you've earned it, you don't have to negotiate with the game or the GM to suplex that dragon of the mountain or rip off its scale and use it as a club to beat it to death with.

You just do it.

The overall point that can be gleamed between that and my previous posts is that I care a lot about integration and see integration as the key to delivering the desired experience.

Rests aren't integrated in DND. They are proverbial buttons you press out of game that only mildly affect the narrative being fostered, and only majorly affect it if one can't get past the cognitive dissonance required to accept what should be a consequential choice in the game being mechanically meaningless except for the systems uncaring demand that you do it for its own sake, and not because its actually fun or does anything for the experience.

My game will be avoiding these pitfalls by way of, well, integration and just by being fun. Exploring the world is fun. Finding loot is fun. Crafting crazy stuff out of that loot is fun. Using that crazy stuff is fun. And so on.

Every single mechanic will all give new dimensions to that gameplay loop. Potions and Food, as noted in that post, are not just the means by which Class resources are restored, but also interesting mechanics unto themselves that would still be interesting even if we removed the whole resource question.

Thats because Crafting itself is going to be interesting (and fun!), and so all three become integrated very easily, because you'll want to engage with these things already, so engaging with the things they naturally feed into is only a natural part of the overall gameplay loop, and not just something the system compels you to do.

But even if you're the curmudgeonly contrarian type that wants to say you wouldn't do any of that, thats fine, because other parts of the game, like Combat, Social, and Questing, are integrated through Loot and NPCs.

You certainly won't be at your most optimal if you wish to just run off Loot and NPCs handling all this for you, but the game isn't going to go out of its way to tell you how to have fun; it'll only encourage you to engage it on its own terms, as any game should, and leave you with the consequences of your choices.

And if you don't find that fun, oh well! Im not anyone's personal game designer, so a few lone voices of dissent isn't really going to deter me.

Now, why did I go on this long rant?

To make the point that people should be more open to the idea that may be the mechanic is just bad and that there's better solutions out there by getting to the root of the problem (ie, shoehorned and unfun Survival mechanics) and addressing it from new avenues rather than just trying to glue Humpty Dumpty together just right.

 

[James Gasik]

Amateurs!

Clearly you would take Touch of Healing feat to get everyone to 50% HP then use Wand of Lesser vigor, 11HP vs 5,5HP on CLW for a charge of wand for full HP.

Alternately, some multiclasses into Dragon Shaman so you all have fast healing up to 50% HP before you start healing.

 

[Stalker0]

Alternately, some multiclasses into Dragon Shaman so you all have fast healing up to 50% HP before you start healing.

Bah you all aren't even trying. Be a dread necromancer, kill all of your party members and raise them as skeletons. Then kill the monsters and raise them as skeletons. Now you can fully heal your entire party with no resource cost, and you don't need anyone, you just win!

 

[Tony Vargas]

To make the point that people should be more open to the idea that may be the mechanic is just bad and that there's better solutions out there by getting to the root of the problem (ie, shoehorned and unfun Survival mechanics) and addressing it from new avenues rather than just trying to glue Humpty Dumpty together just right.

TBF, the mechanics in D&D have mostly been pretty bad. Classes have been bad from the get-go, they limit the characters players can bring to the table. Powerful spells 'limited' by being 1/day (when you can have more of them than you face encounters/day), bad. Stacking bonuses, bad. Single-target, multi-target, and multi-tap attacks all being possible in single action, bad. Even the d20, itself, as a linear distribution, bad.
And, yes, rests of a prescribed duration, bad. Also, scrounging for or using make/buy for consumable items just to survive? Bad. (Sorry but seriously, 3.x already did that, see the above WoCLW/LV &c comments, and, like, as annoyed as I was when D&D was compared to WOW, under that paradigm, it'd be legitimately compared to Gauntlet)

Nor is that list exhaustive. (in another thread, "what do you actually like about D&D," I responded "hit points" - that's probably the only mechanic in D&D that actually provides enough simplicity and genre emulation to make up for the knock-on problems it contributes to)

If you allow yourself to step back and dispassionately judge D&D, you can only conclude that it's a bad game, through and through, completely irredeemable, un-salvageable, and no one not already acclimated to it through decades of suffering, should ever be subjected to it, just on, like, the grounds of basic human rights.

(It's too late for me, save yourselves!)

edit: I tried a little humor to soften the ol' cynicism/fatalism/pessimism/sub-clinical depression/whatever that has always been one of my signatures, there, but D&D isn't a game that we play because it's good, it's a game we play because we played it for so long in the past, or, if you're not a Grognard, that you try because you've heard so much about it. Like, an acquired taste. (I have a few of those, really - D&D, lemberger, imperial stout, rye (the bread & the whiskey), sushi, Ed Wood films movies, and so forth). I don't insist anyone else have the same list of bad things they enjoy, I just expect to be left to enjoy them, myself - and hope they don't become too hard to find.
(no worries on the D&D front, but, lemberger... you'd think, in a big, flush, foodie community like Silicon Valley, you could find a not particularly exotic cheese, but no, only Whole Foods has it, they get it in on a weekday (when I'm working), and by the time I can drop by, they're sold out - WTF, Whole Foods? Can you not keep a little extra on hand? It's not like, if you let it sit in a refrigerated case an extra week, it'll start to smell good...)

 

[Umbran]

I was not arguing, I said I have no interest in your 'solution' and explained why

You were and still are.

Mod Note:
This is about the least valuable interaction available to us. Please, both of you stop.

Its almost like Ive interacted with you on several occasions and know how you tend to argue.

So, that means it is almost like you had the information to avoid this conflict by not engaging, but chose to anyway. That doesn't sound so great.

So yeah. Do feel free to stop...

The only person you get to control is yourself. Choose for yourself if you will continue to respond.