CubicsRube
Hero
I feel comfort that long after I'm gone, some yet to be born kid will reply to a post of mine on how to "fix HP" or something or other.
D&D 5E Long Rest is a Problem
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
Sure, but I'd do the opposite; have hit points recover quickly, say on a short rest. Give a larger pool of spells and special abilities but have them recharge on a long rest, which can easily be multiple days in a civilized place (or at least safe).
(a) of course adventures not plotted for Gritty rests don't plot well with Gritty rests.
(b) Does the Curse of Strahd plot plan for PC failure?
To go with Gritty rests, you should structure your plot around it.
Start encounter building from the top down.
Chapter: A chapter is the time between long rests. Chapters have plot-pressure at the scale of days or weeks; if players ignore the contents of a chapter for 2-7 days, bad things (tm) happen. A Chapter should have 2-4 Scenes of varying difficulty.
Scene: A scene is the time between short rests. Scenes have plot-pressure on the scale of hours or days. If players ignore the contents of a scene for 2 - 24 hours, bad things (tm) happen. A Scene should have 1-5 Encounters of varying difficulty.
Encounter: An encounter is something that has time pressure over seconds to 10s of minutes. Combat encounters can be built using the various encounter building tools, and are measured as easy (1 point), medium (2 points), hard (3 points) or deadly (4 points). Above-deadly can also exist, below-easy is fluff.
A typical Scene has 4 points of Encounters in it, but can vary from 3 to 6 or more.
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Now, instead of building your adventure as a bunch of encounters, build it as a bunch of chapters. Each chapter is built as a bunch of scenes (some mutually exclusive), and each scene as a bunch of encounters.
Players are free to start a scene and abort, but for each encounter/scene/chapter there are consequences for players "losing" the plot-unit (ie, letting the thing they might want to interfere with happen).
Having more possible scenes than players can reasonably deal with in a chapter, or more chapters than the players can reasonably deal with in an adventure, is good. It means you have to be serious about the "losing" consequences. "Losing" doesn't have to mean, and shouldn't mean, "game over, players lose", but rather that the world changes in ways that the PCs might have motivation to avoid.
"Winning" does the opposite; you should have an idea what the PCs get out of defeating a Chapter, Scene or Encounter. What "progress" occurs.
Random encounters/scenes/etc are possible. But even then, there are consequences to "winning" or "losing" them. If they are attacked by bandits, and they flee, what happens world-story wise in the future (the "loss" path), compared to defeating them, tracking them down and clearing their hideout (a "win" path)? Or if they recruit the bandits, what does that look like (another "win" path)?
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This structure can be applied to single-day chapters and single-hour scenes. But I find those kind of stories are harder to think about (to me), and are crazy frantic, and really don't work for any kind of wilderness exploration.
With overnight resets, all chapters have to be frantic single-day ones. With gritty week-long resets, a chapter where danger and risk happens every 2-4 days can go on for months without a reset.
PCs who get exhausted are free to take a week off, but you'll have planned consequences for it, and it won't "break the plot". It will be part of how the plot develops.
The idea of having "too much stuff to do" and setbacks when the players choose not to address a problem and rather rest also means your adventure can adapt to different degrees of PC optimization.
The same adventure can be one of constant, frantic retreat of refugees from onrushing hordes, as PCs run out of resources and rest, letting the "lose" conditions go; or a story about rallying the populance into resisting and pushing back a retreating horde, as they knock off win after win.
My starting point in response to this: what does need to go back to civilisation mean?
Of course I know what it means in the fiction; but what does it mean at the table, for the play of the game?
Does it mean conceding a loss? This is the 13th Age and Moldvay Basic approach: you leave "civilisation" with a finite pool of resources (spells, hps, gear) and you go on your adventure, and if you can't win your adventure with that pool of resources then you have lost, and have to go back to recover resources with your tail between your legs. (Moldvay Basic is a bit less up-front about this and leaves it as an implication; 13th Age just comes right out and says it.)
Does it mean waiting for the GM to tell you that civilisation is available? This is largely how I approached things in my 4e play: as GM I regulated the pacing of extended rests by regulating the availability of resting places. There were a few points of player input: skill challenge successes could expedite that availability; player choices could push things to "just one more fight" within a given pool of resources; and - at higher levels - a player decision to spend resources on a Hallowed Temple could make civilisation immediately available to them. But the notions of win and loss were not really apposite, except on the margins: the players knew that I was framing challenges having a pretty keen eye on their available resources. What was mostly going on here was pacing. Even when the players were making the call, it was largely about their sense of how much more do we feel like proving the point that we can go on on the smell of an oily rag? In some cases this can start to bleed into a version of the previous paragraph: if the players decide to call it quits and take a rest, they are giving the GM licence to narrate that the world moves on in some way that is at odds with the players' (and their PCs') desires. Of non-D&D systems, Burning Wheel works quite a bit like this.
Does it mean having to succeed at some sort of ingame challenge? As per my previous paragraphs there were hints of this in some of my 4e play, but only on the margins. A game where it moves from margins to centre seems to me to run the risk of tedium: the point of spending our resources is to get the chance to recover our resources. Maybe some hex-crawling sort of play could be the non-tedious version of this, as there are trade-offs between doing other stuff but keeping enough in reserve to get home. I think it is, as a practical matter, pretty hard to run this sort of game without having it turn into GM decides - at least in the D&D context, where it is the GM who exercises so much control over what the "other stuff" is and hence how resource-draining it will tend to be.
There are probably approaches beyond the three I've outlined, but they're the main ones I thought of. Once one of them is settled on, we can then start talking about whether and how to flavour things in terms of ingame time periods. Moldvay Basic uses "the day" as its time frame, because the adventure is a spelunking expedition. But as every GM of mid-to-upper level D&D knows, this will tend to break down in the third paragraph approach because spells on a daily recovery make a mockery of realistically-framed exploration challenges. So if the game is going to involve adventures/challenges that unfold over longer time periods than a spelunking expedition, tying recovery to ingame time periods doesn't seem worth worrying about too much, at least until we know what else we want to do with those time periods. Eg maybe if we want the GM to really be able to go to town in the event of taking a rest = concdeding a loss, we want to make those rest periods weeks or even months so the GM can really mix things up without the fiction seeming too contrived. Burning Wheel heads in this direction.
To start with the last paragraph: my own view is that once we look at this through the lens of actual game play it makes very little sense for magic - which is just an in-fiction label applied to a certain set of player resources - to be a device for freely circumventing whatever we think the recovery rules should be. This is one thing 4e got right: eg even at high levels, the players using Hallowed Temple to force a long rest requires non-negligible resource expenditure. (At least that is how it was experienced in our game.)
As far as the relationship between recovery and story goes, I think the real question is what are players expected to achieve on a given set of resources? "Story" then needs to be built around that. If the GM is largely in control of pacing, s/he introduces the story elements in a way that allows resource recovery to take place when necessary (Tom Bombadil, The Prancing Pony, Rivendell, Lorien, Edoras, Minas Tirith, etc). If the game is more challenge-focused, the story elements need to be set up so it is at least feasible for the players to win on a given resource set, and if they lose then it is fair to chalk up a "campaign loss" (as 13th Age calls it).
Whether the ingame time period of recovery then gets narrated as hours or days or weeks or months seems a matter of detail, depending on the other details of the particular story being told. If it's LotR, days and even weeks are fine. If it's Die Hard, then we're talking hours at most.
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
Well, I'd start off by saying I'm envisioning this purely in terms of gamist considerations, narrative is put in place to support the needs of the game play.
The primary consideration for the players is in-game time; the campaign concept is set up with the understanding that the play length is finite due to in-game story considerations. "You have 2 in-game years to discover the source of the curse that will doom your village", that sort of thing. Everything else flows from the knowledge that if they retreat to rest and recharge, they're using up a portion of the campaign clock.
Secondly, I'm envisioning shifting the bulk of the characters' power into consumables, not personal power. Magic is intrinsically external to the caster, effects are created by writing scrolls while in town, or by crafting items that are usable once or on an in-narrative timer (recharge at dawn, recharge at midnight, recharge by performing an hour-long ritual at the altar of the Sun God, etc.)
Thirdly, taking a long rests costs resources. It costs money and supplies to rest, and if the characters don't adventure to gain them, they'll slowly fall behind. Characters can work to earn their keep, but that consumes yet more time.
Also, adventure sites are designed to be one-off, whether that be due to intelligent enemies moving their lair and gathering reinforcements, or the gate to Faerie only being open during the new moon. The amount of resources that can be gathered from an adventure increases as the adventure moves; the first part of the adventure might only have 10% of the available treasure, the second part 20%, the third part 30%, and the most difficult part 40%. Sometimes the adventure design is more linear, sometimes it has more of a wing structure to let the players decide what to tackle first. Crucially, if they fail and decide to retreat, that means the rest of the adventure is closed. Maybe that location is still available in the narrative, but subsequent visits will change what is available to be gathered and encountered. As such, whenever the PCs retreat, they will lose something due to the need for upkeep and the loss of time, but ideally they will have gained enough to offset this and progress. Adventures are specifically designed so that completion is not necessary to offset upkeep and give progress, finishing the entire adventure will grant a large reward and a large positive bonus within the narrative.
No, the idea is that civilization is clearly telegraphed to the players. Indeed, the characters are provided with a magical way to return home when desired, to give the players more control. Also, death is intended to be much less likely, the rules are changed such that going to 0 only causes injury. This is to encourage players to extend the characters into greater risk, and thus greater reward.
Yes, I'm framing this specifically in a gamist/challenge perspective. There is very much a "hidden board" aspect here.
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
I ran my 5e yoon-suin campaign this way and it worked well enough. There is still a fair amount of natural healing left (waaay more than say 3.x), but not so much than the party receiving a drubbing has no consequences.
This sort of leads to a death spiral.
If you are poor, your resources aren't enough to finish more than 20%, which gives paultry resources, which leaves you poor.
If you are rich, your resources let you finish near 100%, which gives great returns, which makes you richer.
Ie, the freedback is divergent. Control theory says the result is chaos.
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If the ROI from adventures doesn't feedback into making future adventures yield more, this doesn't go divergent.
Hence the idea that failure doesn't strip you of adventuring resources, but causes orthogonal plot/story "damage", and same for success.
Such a system is stable not chaotic, in terms of adventuring rhythm.
A long rest does 2 things:
One of the goals of 5E was to make sure that no class was mandatory. That if you wanted to go with two rogues, a fighter and wizard, that would be perfectly acceptable.
If you want to get rid of long rests, you have to break the link between health and ability resources. Examples are Wounds/Vitality, or the system in Pillars of Eternity.[1] Or accept that the playerbase will insist that all parties must have a healer.
[1] 2 pools, Health + Vitality, Vitality is 5x Health. Damage is subtracted from both Health and Vitality. However, magical healing only adds to Health. If Health goes to 0, you fall unconscious. If Vitality goes to 0, you die. A short rest after combat restores Health to full, a long rest at camp restores both to full. You could tweak the pool multiplier for Vitality and the long rest rules to match how you want to play. Maybe Vitality is 10x, and you gain a max of 25% of Vitality per long rest.
- Restores ability resources
- Restores health
One of the goals of 5E was to make sure that no class was mandatory. That if you wanted to go with two rogues, a fighter and wizard, that would be perfectly acceptable.
If you want to get rid of long rests, you have to break the link between health and ability resources. Examples are Wounds/Vitality, or the system in Pillars of Eternity.[1] Or accept that the playerbase will insist that all parties must have a healer.
[1] 2 pools, Health + Vitality, Vitality is 5x Health. Damage is subtracted from both Health and Vitality. However, magical healing only adds to Health. If Health goes to 0, you fall unconscious. If Vitality goes to 0, you die. A short rest after combat restores Health to full, a long rest at camp restores both to full. You could tweak the pool multiplier for Vitality and the long rest rules to match how you want to play. Maybe Vitality is 10x, and you gain a max of 25% of Vitality per long rest.
EpicureanDM
Explorer
That's not the only other thing to do. You correctly identified the tension between "in-game narrative" and "out-of-game mechanics", but chose the wrong bullet to bite. Do what 13th Age does and connect rest to an out-of-game schedule. Remove the players' ability to decide when they can rest and sever the idea of "rest" from the in-game narrative. That's what I do in my game and it works great.
Oofta
Legend
I know some people like the mechanical fix of linking a rest directly to game mechanics of N number of encounters.
I kind of hate it. It removes flexibility from the DM because sometimes I want 10 encounters, sometimes I want 2. But more importantly, it takes the game from the realm of narrative fiction and story to the realm of pushing "I'm a game!" front and center.
From a narrative perspective, I can justify recovering after a long rest (in my games it takes a week or more) because HP doesn't represent serious wounds. In addition magic permeates the world. People really do heal more quickly because their bodies inherently use magic. No one realizes this because it's normal. Same way I simply say that bandages are tapping into that magic if you have the healer feat and use a kit to restore HP.
There is no "wrong" way to play of course. I just prefer a style that I can justify with in-world logic. Even if that justification requires magic.
I kind of hate it. It removes flexibility from the DM because sometimes I want 10 encounters, sometimes I want 2. But more importantly, it takes the game from the realm of narrative fiction and story to the realm of pushing "I'm a game!" front and center.
From a narrative perspective, I can justify recovering after a long rest (in my games it takes a week or more) because HP doesn't represent serious wounds. In addition magic permeates the world. People really do heal more quickly because their bodies inherently use magic. No one realizes this because it's normal. Same way I simply say that bandages are tapping into that magic if you have the healer feat and use a kit to restore HP.
There is no "wrong" way to play of course. I just prefer a style that I can justify with in-world logic. Even if that justification requires magic.
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