D&D (2024) Long rests getting better but GM needs still not being considered

[kigmatzomat]

I said to the group at Session zero, 'there will be no 5MWD, any attempt to game it will fail, and this campaign adheres to 6 or so encounters per Long rest'.

From a play aspect, any game where 5 minutes into the "work day" the PCs have exhausted enough resources to want a long rest and there's no adequate plot reason to continue, the group sidequests for better resources.

"Holy, geez, these dire squirrels ripped us up bad! The dire wolves are gonna kill us and thwt doesn't even cover the mountain giant. We need some giant eagles or something to fly over this forest. I will tell the elder we can escort some of their people to the next town as we head to the aerie of Mt Doom."

 

[kigmatzomat]

So people want the DM to be the sole decider in what resources PCs have? That PCs should recover only when/what the DM allows them?

Hopefully most people agree that the old fashioned "you can only get a rest when you sleep in a town after (milestone) encounters" is a relic of war gaming and should be consigned to the dustbin of history alongside only earning xp for kills.

And yet I think the GM must be able to say "these conditions are inadequate for a rest". IMHO, anyone in the lower planes should have immense problems resting for any of a near-infinity of reasons that boil down to "no rest for the wicked".

However it should be apparent to a majority of the party why a rest is implausible from gm descriptions (possibly after the first attempted rest ended....poorly). Its too hot, too cold, poppies that will cause you to sleep until you die, soil infested with earwigs, whatever. Ideally, the players are asking "do we think we could actually rest in these conditions?"

Those then become a potentially solvable problem and should also reflect the inhabitants. (Heat/cold resistant, doesn't breath/doesn't sleep/poison resistant, no ears/sleeps underwater, etc) Maybe the party can scrape enough resources together for a few PCs to rest, but not everyone or not every night.

I.e. in a recent game we were in a labyrinth full of a shrieking cacophony, punctuated by moments of absolute silence that was explicitly designed to prevent rest outside of a handful of specific locations.

We did manage to rest unexpectedly because we used a cantrip. There was a 50ft long tunnel in a garden used as an escape route by a monster. After defeating the monster as it tried to escape, we used Mold Earth to move enough dirt from the garden to block the tunnels within a foot of the ceiling for 10ft from the entrances and then put up Tiny Huts at both ends, giving us an adequately quiet & safe resting spot with protection in the middle for the surviving horses.

The gm still could have sent a monster attack against us and it would have been plausible, however for recognizing a weakness in the pregen adventure's design, they ruled it was good for one full rest. They pretty well intimated that before too long, something was going to investigate why the dead monster was being quiet, so enjoy our win.

In the "rest for some, not all" category, we had planned on letting the cleric get a long rest if need be using Meld with Stone, since it obscures what happens outside. However it would make us targets. Tired, sleepy, mostly stationary targets with tired, sleepy horses. So the need would have to be high enough to justify the additional risks. (Which might be mitigated by sending a couple horses into the maze alone, to satiate some of the denizens. Or it could attract more, who knows. Life of Adventure!)

 

[tetrasodium]

Hopefully most people agree that the old fashioned "you can only get a rest when you sleep in a town after (milestone) encounters" is a relic of war gaming and should be consigned to the dustbin of history alongside only earning xp for kills.

That bolded bit is pretty different from the idea that a full & complete recovery not being linked to a biological & narrative requirement like "went to sleep at night & woke up in the morning" though because it's a condition the GM has very little ability to say "no that's not appropriate" without going through a fight. Unlinking it from that biological need & certainty of time.

And yet I think the GM must be able to say "these conditions are inadequate for a rest". IMHO, anyone in the lower planes should have immense problems resting for any of a near-infinity of reasons that boil down to "no rest for the wicked".

However it should be apparent to a majority of the party why a rest is implausible from gm descriptions (possibly after the first attempted rest ended....poorly). Its too hot, too cold, poppies that will cause you to sleep until you die, soil infested with earwigs, whatever. Ideally, the players are asking "do we think we could actually rest in these conditions?"

Those then become a potentially solvable problem and should also reflect the inhabitants. (Heat/cold resistant, doesn't breath/doesn't sleep/poison resistant, no ears/sleeps underwater, etc) Maybe the party can scrape enough resources together for a few PCs to rest, but not everyone or not every night.

I.e. in a recent game we were in a labyrinth full of a shrieking cacophony, punctuated by moments of absolute silence that was explicitly designed to prevent rest outside of a handful of specific locations.

We did manage to rest unexpectedly because we used a cantrip. There was a 50ft long tunnel in a garden used as an escape route by a monster. After defeating the monster as it tried to escape, we used Mold Earth to move enough dirt from the garden to block the tunnels within a foot of the ceiling for 10ft from the entrances and then put up Tiny Huts at both ends, giving us an adequately quiet & safe resting spot with protection in the middle for the surviving horses.

The gm still could have sent a monster attack against us and it would have been plausible, however for recognizing a weakness in the pregen adventure's design, they ruled it was good for one full rest. They pretty well intimated that before too long, something was going to investigate why the dead monster was being quiet, so enjoy our win.

In the "rest for some, not all" category, we had planned on letting the cleric get a long rest if need be using Meld with Stone, since it obscures what happens outside. However it would make us targets. Tired, sleepy, mostly stationary targets with tired, sleepy horses. So the need would have to be high enough to justify the additional risks. (Which might be mitigated by sending a couple horses into the maze alone, to satiate some of the denizens. Or it could attract more, who knows. Life of Adventure!)

Someone used an example from a next playtest packet earlier that makes a good example of this where they said words along the lines of "so you spend a couple days tracking the orcs through the forest" only to have the players assume long rest & get frustrated when they were told no. It makes no sense for the PCs & orcs they are chasing to not go to sleep at night during those couple days but lowering the bar for full & complete recovery of any & all things to a mere scene transition only results in bludgeoning the GM if they say no.

Even in the old days when players got back 1-2hp/day of rest it did not always require "sleep in a town" though & making a new long rest based on an assumption like that bolded bit is just priming the pump for the GM to once more be bludgeoned with reasons for why they weren't clear enough or why they need to give a rest they feel inappropriate. Phrases like "Yea ok. you guys make camp & rest up over a few days" or "Yea ok. you guys make camp & rest up over a few days but..." & similar were not uncommon after the players made a case for why it was justified to rest up here instead. Likewise it was common for the GM to explicitly create things like an safe cavern/hunting lodge/oasis/traveler's shrine/etc during an adventure that allowed the party to rest up.

That GM created exception benefitting the players used a strict rule in a way not subject to peer pressure of multiple players pushing against one GM when introduced. The 5e (and so far still 6e) method is a much higher bar that is no longer a thing the GM can simply withdraw if the players start abusing it for 5mwd type reasons or whatever. A recovery rule that is written expecting the GM to present the burden of why a rest is not appropriate here now & this time ignores the need for that presentation to overcome large number of exceptions based abilities that players will accumulate from race class multiclass skills mundane equipment magical equipment nonconsumable items consumable items & so on that each PC will have. It was never all DCC funnel bloodbath grindfest slog all the time & things were a lot less adversarial than now when one of the players said words like "hey guys I think we need to think about a rest"

 

[Willie the Duck]

Hopefully most people agree that the old fashioned "you can only get a rest when you sleep in a town after (milestone) encounters" is a relic of war gaming and should be consigned to the dustbin of history alongside only earning xp for kills.

Unless I'm missing some context, I don't feel that those are the case. D&D's recovery when it was fresh from wargames was not number-of-encounter gated, and the XP was mostly from treasure acquired.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Someone used an example from a next playtest packet earlier that makes a good example of this where they said words along the lines of "so you spend a couple days tracking the orcs through the forest" only to have the players assume long rest & get frustrated when they were told no. It makes no sense for the PCs & orcs they are chasing to not go to sleep at night during those couple days but lowering the bar for full & complete recovery of any & all things to a mere scene transition only results in bludgeoning the GM if they say no.

Of course they did. DMs who want to gatekeep Rest are fighting decades of published RAW to implement a house rule.

Go read the 5e PHB: there is nothing there about Rests being something DMs need to give permission. "Adventurers, as well as other creatures, can take short rests in the midst of a day and a long rest to end it." (Emphasis mine)

No caveats, unlike the skill section which says things like "Sometimes, the DM might ask for an ability check using a specific skill". Matter of fact, the term "DM" doesn't appear at all in the section on Resting in the PHB. Resting is an event players choose to do.

A DM can interrupt it with combat or the like but there is nothing there that says they can deny it outright. Nor should they as it is based on sleeping and sleeping is akin to breathing; its a given fact of life.

DM: "make a con check to see if you pass out from oxygen loss"
Player:"I'm not underwater, why can't I just breathe?!?"
DM: "Look, I said you can breathe after this fight. Now make a Con check to see if you pass out."

And that wasn't something new in 5e. If you go back to 2000, in 3e/d20 healing merely required "a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night."

Spell prep was essentially identical with "a wizard must first sleep for 8 hours....she must refrain from movement, combat, spellcasting, skill use, conversation, or any other fairly demanding physical or mental task during the rest period"

Again, absolutely no mention of DM permission, but there was caveats for interruptions.

DMs who want to control rest/recovery have to understand they are wanting a house rule that is at odds with 20+ years of RAW, significantly impacts game play in a way at odds with default player expectations and may indicate that they really don't want to play the kind of game that d&d has been for 22 years.

An argument for slower 3e-ish healing could be made (I personally dislike one-night healing combined with short rest healing) but totally gating of recovery beggars rationality. Even if some kind of "minimum comfort" was required by RAW (which it isn't) or common sense (which I support), 5e is a game where a 3rd level spell (that doesn't even need to expend a spell slot) can deal with extreme heat, cold, humidity, weather, and biting insects for up to 9 characters, which accounts for 99% of environmental factors that impact rest.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Unless I'm missing some context, I don't feel that those are the case. D&D's recovery when it was fresh from wargames was not number-of-encounter gated, and the XP was mostly from treasure acquired.

I didn't mean that XP for kills was a wargamer thing but a concept that was already in the dustbin and that the gated recovery should join it.

I used "milestone" because it is the current vernacular for "after you have gone through some unspecified number of events required by the GM". Someone on here explicitly said they only allow Long Rests after 5-6 encounters, which sounds like a "milestone" for rest.

 

[tetrasodium]

Of course they did. DMs who want to gatekeep Rest are fighting decades of published RAW to implement a house rule.

Go read the 5e PHB: there is nothing there about Rests being something DMs need to give permission. "Adventurers, as well as other creatures, can take short rests in the midst of a day and a long rest to end it." (Emphasis mine)

No caveats, unlike the skill section which says things like "Sometimes, the DM might ask for an ability check using a specific skill". Matter of fact, the term "DM" doesn't appear at all in the section on Resting in the PHB. Resting is an event players choose to do.

A DM can interrupt it with combat or the like but there is nothing there that says they can deny it outright. Nor should they as it is based on sleeping and sleeping is akin to breathing; its a given fact of life.

DM: "make a con check to see if you pass out from oxygen loss"
Player:"I'm not underwater, why can't I just breathe?!?"
DM: "Look, I said you can breathe after this fight. Now make a Con check to see if you pass out."

And that wasn't something new in 5e. If you go back to 2000, in 3e/d20 healing merely required "a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night."

Spell prep was essentially identical with "a wizard must first sleep for 8 hours....she must refrain from movement, combat, spellcasting, skill use, conversation, or any other fairly demanding physical or mental task during the rest period"

Again, absolutely no mention of DM permission, but there was caveats for interruptions.

DMs who want to control rest/recovery have to understand they are wanting a house rule that is at odds with 20+ years of RAW, significantly impacts game play in a way at odds with default player expectations and may indicate that they really don't want to play the kind of game that d&d has been for 22 years.

An argument for slower 3e-ish healing could be made (I personally dislike one-night healing combined with short rest healing) but totally gating of recovery beggars rationality. Even if some kind of "minimum comfort" was required by RAW (which it isn't) or common sense (which I support), 5e is a game where a 3rd level spell (that doesn't even need to expend a spell slot) can deal with extreme heat, cold, humidity, weather, and biting insects for up to 9 characters, which accounts for 99% of environmental factors that impact rest.

What on earth are you talking about? Why would you base your entire post on what reference the rules don't say reference the 3.x recovery rules I described as "effectively the values were still the same at first" & linked to in the OP. Then you top all that off by providing an example of the impossible situation that overly generous rests create if the gm dares to say "no" to a rest.

A GM who doesn't feel it's appropriate for a rest is not engaging in "gatekeeping" & calling it that while citing a timeframe that includes the encounter based 4e to bolster 5e's attrition based but broken weight is an example of the exact kind of social contract backed club that the 5e & 6e long rest rules aim at the GM... Ironically the last time I heard it was because after a single encounter on the way to somewhere I had the audacity to say "no you just arrived in town" when asked if they had a long rest after the 2-3 rounds of combat they slogged through since the last long rest.

 

[kigmatzomat]

A GM who doesn't feel it's appropriate for a rest is not engaging in "gatekeeping"

In 5e they are. You can not like it but it is true.

You are telling a player they cannot take an action, just as if you said "no, you cannot attack the mayor." The dm can interfere with the action in-game (no room in the inn or a bodyguard grabbing the PC as they reach for their sword) but "rest" is an action players get to decide they do. It was that way 22 years ago in 3e and it was that way with 5e's release in 2014.

I didn't reference 4e because I played it once. I don't even have a 4e rule book handy to check its rest rules but they are irrelevant in the world of player expectations. Whatever 4e rules were, they were rolled back to the 3e equivalent, which never really went away as they were in the various OGL games. They are at best an anomaly in a 2 decade period of how resting and recovery works.

You can prefer an anomaly, you can like a house rule, that is perfectly fine.

But accept that your preferences are in conflict with 22 years of 3e/3.5/OGL/5e player expectations.

Accept that pushback is going to be the norm and that you are going to have to convince players (or game designers) your way is in some fashion superior for game play.

 

[kigmatzomat]

To continue but separate the thought from last post, I have yet to hear anyone explain why DM gated rests are superior beyond "DMs should be able to control that". Why? What is it that you have problems with that you need to dictate rest?

I have never run into the 5mwd more than once in any campaign over thirty years of gaming in any game system or edition, because it gives the bad guys hours to prepare and/or run away. And IME, preparation involves attacking at around the 6 hour mark to ruin their rest. Flaming arrows, stampeding animals, slings at extreme distance, whatever. Doesn't take much and the players are barely better off while the foes have hours of tactical maneuvering.

The foes running away may not be a bad thing in the case of dire wolves moving up to the high mountains, but for a sentient foe it may create a recurring villain and/or various objective failures which can have their own consequences. Like if the dire wolves just move to the next village and are now even more wary but also more willing to kill humanoids. And of course "run away" also means the treasures go away too. You may get XP but you get much less loot (no wolf hides to sell, no bandit loot).

So...what is it, beyond "because I want to", that causes DMs to desire to control when PCs rest?

 

[tetrasodium]

In 5e they are. You can not like it but it is true.

You are telling a player they cannot take an action, just as if you said "no, you cannot attack the mayor." The dm can interfere with the action in-game (no room in the inn or a bodyguard grabbing the PC as they reach for their sword) but "rest" is an action players get to decide they do. It was that way 22 years ago in 3e and it was that way with 5e's release in 2014.

I didn't reference 4e because I played it once. I don't even have a 4e rule book handy to check its rest rules but they are irrelevant in the world of player expectations. Whatever 4e rules were, they were rolled back to the 3e equivalent, which never really went away as they were in the various OGL games. They are at best an anomaly in a 2 decade period of how resting and recovery works.

You can prefer an anomaly, you can like a house rule, that is perfectly fine.

But accept that your preferences are in conflict with 22 years of 3e/3.5/OGL/5e player expectations.

Accept that pushback is going to be the norm and that you are going to have to convince players (or game designers) your way is in some fashion superior for game play.

This is about the rules as written in the playtest packets, why do you keep bringing up houserules? 22 years ignores how 3.x was very much not complete restoration and includes all of 4e man, your goalposts are moving about with rocket boots.