D&D 5E Limiting Short Rests

[Springheel]

According to the RAW, characters can have as many short rests as they want in a single day?

What's to stop players from stopping to rest after every single encounter? Sure, the DM can interrupt them once or twice, but too many times and it will quickly look like sour grapes on the part of the DM.

While healing has an upper limit of HD, A warlock can get their spells back after every fight this way.

Anyone experimented with limiting the number of rests to X per day?

 

[LapBandit]

In my campaign, you may not benefit from a Long Rest more than once every 24 hours. You get a maximum of two short rests per day. I believe that's what the core rules expect. That said, rest of any kind is never a sure thing. It's completely dependent on circumstance.

 

[iserith]

According to the RAW, characters can have as many short rests as they want in a single day?

What's to stop players from stopping to rest after every single encounter?

In my games, time constraints which can take the form of countdowns to doom, loss of opportunity, or wandering monster checks. Time constraints both increase the drama and address the issue of players opting to have their characters rest a lot.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

What's to stop players from stopping to rest after every single encounter?

Playing characters that have goals they'd like to work towards accomplishing.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What's to stop them from going home and taking a long rest after every encounter?

The same thing applies with short rests, but somewhat less so.

 

[Flamestrike]

What's to stop players from stopping to rest after every single encounter?

The social contract of the game. Also the DM (environment/ conditions).

Most adventures should have some kind of time limit/ constraint attached. For example in real life, I cant recall ever getting hired to do a job or handed a task/ assignment/ project that I had all the time in the world to do. If the princess/ world needs to be saved, or the BBEG stopped/ macguffin retrieved, the PCs shouldnt have all the time in the world to do it.

Nothing in the real world comes without a time constraint, yet I see so many DMs being lazy and ignoring this in their games for some reason.

From there, the social contact kicks in. Any player that tries to game the system gets rule 0 dropped on his head, or gets uninvited from the table.

 

[Azurewraith]

Expanding on the time limit don't even tell your players they are on a time limit this will lead to metagaming. Simply have your world live and breath, say they take to long stopping the goblins from plundering the caravan have the local village starve. Doing something similar in a game of mine a gnoll escaped an encounter and wasn't hunted down when the PC's rest at the next town it's going to be set alight by a gnoll warband.

 

[JonnyP71]

Very similar to the above, my party broke into a corrupt town official's manor and were beaten back. They fled to an abandoned inn, were followed there by an Assassin who they forced to flee. They didn't try to follow him, instead attempting to short rest in the Inn (as he had nearly killed their main front line Fighter). Halfway through the short rest the Inn was surrounded by town guardsmen sent to arrest them.

Fair play to the players though, they turned the situation to their own advantage - created a distraction, just managed to sneak out of a side window, and went straight back to the Manor on the assumption that there were a finite number of guardsmen available - who were now out looking for them, leaving the Manor largely unguarded.

One great (paranoid) session of creeping around, being sure to hide their tracks, they had the evidence they needed of the Official's guilt and had avoided a load of potential trouble!

 

[Azurewraith]

Very similar to the above, my party broke into a corrupt town official's manor and were beaten back. They fled to an abandoned inn, were followed there by an Assassin who they forced to flee. They didn't try to follow him, instead attempting to short rest in the Inn (as he had nearly killed their main front line Fighter). Halfway through the short rest the Inn was surrounded by town guardsmen sent to arrest them.

Ha this made me smile I live it when those that blatantly flaunt the laws then go use them to their advantage.

 

[JonnyP71]

Ha this made me smile I live it when those that blatantly flaunt the laws then go use them to their advantage.

It didn't work out well for the offical though, check my edit...

Great play all round, everyone thoroughly enjoyed the session.