D&D 5E Long Rest House Rule to adjust to "frequently resting" campaigns

[Fanaelialae]

If you're especially concerned about verisimilitude, it's easy enough to justify this as a special healing ritual or magic item that can only be used once a week (but can be used by any hero). Then just change a normal long rest to require the same amount of time.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In the end, it is 100% up to the DM whether or not characters can rest. A DM can always interrupt one.

In practice, the DM is obligated to remain impartial unless there is a very good reason not to be. If the DM interrupts your rest just to mess with you, then they're going to be met a lot of groaning and eye-rolling by annoyed players; and if they keep it up, then they probably aren't going to have a group for very long.

The benefit of a 24 hour long rest is that it gives more opportunities for the rest to be interrupted naturally, by events and NPCs that had already been set in motion beforehand, so that the DM doesn't come off like a jerk for arbitrarily contriving the interruption.

 

[Lanefan]

Guys unless you have encounters between theses rests, it don't mean nothing. Jasper is going to hold up at the bar till he is fully up. Big fat hairy deal. So Jasper the Jerk Fighter took 2 weeks to go from the Empire State building to the New Jersey tunnel.

Which is fine provided the rest of the party doesn't just leave ol' Jasper at the bar with a few bucks to buy beer, cross over to the Jersey side, do the adventure without him (but maybe take in Banff, his replacement character) and pick him up on the way back to Manhattan.

Lan-"benefits all round"-efan

 

[clearstream]

In practice, the DM is obligated to remain impartial unless there is a very good reason not to be. If the DM interrupts your rest just to mess with you, then they're going to be met a lot of groaning and eye-rolling by annoyed players; and if they keep it up, then they probably aren't going to have a group for very long.

The benefit of a 24 hour long rest is that it gives more opportunities for the rest to be interrupted naturally, by events and NPCs that had already been set in motion beforehand, so that the DM doesn't come off like a jerk for arbitrarily contriving the interruption.

Exactly. The longer rest allows it to unfold naturally, more often.

Players might gripe that an 8 hour rest keeps getting interrupted, or lets the foes run off with the plot. 24 hours (so far) has felt long enough that the PCs buy into it: they appear at the table (so far) to expect a real probability of interruption, or stuff going on that they don't want to let go on.

 

[Sir Brennen]

Which is fine provided the rest of the party doesn't just leave ol' Jasper at the bar with a few bucks to buy beer, cross over to the Jersey side, do the adventure without him (but maybe take in Banff, his replacement character) and pick him up on the way back to Manhattan.

Lan-"benefits all round"-efan

Wouldn't the assumption be that the rest of the party would have spent resources similar to Jasper, and they'd *all* be sitting at the bar with him?

Though I guess it depends on party composition. This (and the Gritty variant) would have huge impact on some characters and almost none on others. A sorcerer gets no short rest benefits until very high levels, so he's kinda screwed for a week. A rogue doesn't really have many class based resources he has to worry about replenishing, short or long rest. These variant rules would just exacerbate the differences between the classes which have more abilities requiring a long rest, vs short or no rest abilities.

The only resource that's rest dependent across all classes are hit points (and hit die). If I were trying to solve a "too many long rests" issue, I'd 1) make sure to enforce the 1 long rest per 24 hour limit and 2) use the Slow Natural Healing variant (or something similar.) That will either put a greater reliance on healing magic (possibly requiring casting cure wounds even after a long rest), or the party going into the next adventuring day without full hit points. If you really want to slow that up, rule that characters only regain 1 Hit Die after a long rest, instead of half. Even harsher? Characters can only benefit from healing magic (other than cantrips) once per long rest.

The other option might be to tweak the Gritty rules to Long Rest = 24 hours (requiring 24 hour gap between).

Note that the Gritty Rules aren't trying to solve any "problems" - the text states the characters are going to spend a lot of time *out* of the dungeon, likely engaged in more social interaction/role playing heavy situations(or ticking off hours to learn new skills and other downtime activities.) They're for a completely different type of campaign. The Gritty rules are going to *be* a problem if you expect the characters to be able to explore a complex, isolated, inhabited dungeon in any reasonable amount time, or without getting killed because they can't find a place to rest for a week. I much prefer playing the bad guys as active entities, who respond/alter plans to the murderhobos invading their home, even while the the PCs are away/resting up. Will the NPCs just sit and wait for the PCs when they're up against their 7 day Long Rest wait period? Nope, and this means the players will often be at a greater disadvantage.

Question to the OP: does your house rule still use the Short Rest = 8 hours like the gritty rules?

Question to all: anyone actually ever used the Gritty rules (short rest = 8 hours, long rest = 1 week)? Why did you choose to and what was the impact?

 

[jodyjohnson]

I don't think changing the Rest mechanics will actually change this behavior as already stated elsewhere.

My options:
1. Talk to the group and tell them I'm not interested in this kind of play. Most likely the group believes this is required for them to play 'smart'. My personal preference is for 'interesting' play.

2. Worst case scenario, we play the rests out in some proportion of real time: when they say 'long rest' I determine whether there will be an interruption otherwise we're potentially done for the day (DM discretion). For 'short rests' probably just do 5-60 minute breaks until they get the point.

3. We do random encounters with no XP rewards. This effectively has the same effect as the above but may be less boring. An interrupted short or long rest may eat up 20-60 minutes of play-time with no plot or adventure progression.

4. If the group is just trying to avoid challenge, I simplify things to give them what they want. I don't worry about challenging the party. We play and they do whatever they want and rest whenever and we just grind through encounters without feeling like I need to challenge the group or I may just go all the way and we just hand-wave combat and focus on interaction and exploration. As combat is the typical source of 'interesting', this probably means the campaign ends after a couple sessions and I find different players unless they keep the game satisfying with interaction and exploration.

5. The last option is to give in and require this behavior. Every fight is can use a full day's resources and there is a long rest between every encounter. We have set-piece encounters that basically are the entire chapter/session with maybe some interaction and exploration which don't use resources. For most published adventures I usually pull the entire zone into a single fight. This is the standard procedure for 2-2.5 hours games down at the store. Probably double the 'short rest' powers for certain classes to bring them some parity. (Continually interrupting 'short rests' results in the same thing).

6. Something else. It really depends on what the group wants out of play and how far I'm willing to bend to accommodate them.

 

[Satyrn]

Which is fine provided the rest of the party doesn't just leave ol' Jasper at the bar with a few bucks to buy beer, cross over to the Jersey side, do the adventure without him (but maybe take in Banff, his replacement character) and pick him up on the way back to Manhattan.

Lan-"benefits all round"-efan

Oh, Satyrn's happy hanging out at the bar with him. Isn't that part of every (Lawful) adventurer's creed?

Leave No One Behind.

 

[Lanefan]

Wouldn't the assumption be that the rest of the party would have spent resources similar to Jasper, and they'd *all* be sitting at the bar with him?

The impression I got was that Jasper would be doing this regardless of what condition the rest of the party might be in...

Age-old question: when one party member needs to rest for a while but everyone else is mostly fine, do we press on or not?

 

[Mortilupo]

I think the oroblem stems from people not understand that HPs are more a reorestation of energy, not damage. It simply doesn't somebody more than 24 hours to recover.

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[Lanefan]

I think the oroblem stems from people not understand that HPs are more a reorestation of energy, not damage. It simply doesn't somebody more than 24 hours to recover.

Which opens the inevitable can of worms regarding whether hit points represent physical damage, energy or spiritual or luck damage, or some combination of these two.

While there's hard-liners on both sides, a general vague consensus seems to be that most if not all h.p. represent luck or energy or whatever (though with a few physical nicks and scratches involved to allow such things as poison-coated weapons to work as intended) while the last few h.p. - or just reaching 0 - kinda represent more serious physical damage. The D&D rules, however, have always treated all h.p. the same, making it just as easy to recover from 40 to 50 h.p. as it is from 0 to 10.

Some systems e.g. Star Wars have two types of hit points - they call theirs "Wound" and "Vitality" - where the vitality points more or less represent the non-physical damage and wound points more or less represent actual physical harm...and are thus more difficult to recover. Normally in such systems you go through your vitality points first when taking damage, before starting on your wound points...unless a specific attack or injury goes straight to wounds - nobody said it was simple.

If D&D had such a system most of these meat-vs.-luck h.p. arguments would go away, but unfortunately it doesn't (officially), and so they don't. Sigh.

Lanefan