D&D 5E Long Rests vs Short Rests

[jmartkdr2]

I voted short rest, because then you can build abilities with the assumption that they'll be available for most encounters.

Which means you build encounters on the idea that all abilities are likely available.

And if you build like that, one encounter per day becomes balance-able. Longer days are a new, interesting challenge, rather than a prerequisite to any challenge at all.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

It's possible. I read a lot of posts about how people can play D&D as a combat-simulation board game, and the rules definitely support that style of play...but I've never seen it in real life, and it's not something I'd like to try. (Sounds exhausting to me, but to each their own.)

Encounter =/= combat

 

[Flamestrike]

Yeah, I really cannot remember ever playing or running the sort of game where there are six to eight fights in one day (in any game, in any edition, ever.) That seems absolutely bonkers to me, and that to be some sort of norm that must repeated every day utterly surreal. Do people actually play like that?

It's standard fare in a dungeon man. A dungeon level easily has at least half a dozen encounters in it.

And it doesn't have to be repeated every day either. A rough median of 6 or so encounters with 2 or so short rests works just fine.

 

[tetrasodium]

But if we put all classes on the same resource recovery system, they'll end up feeling too "samey."

They tend to have different abilities too

 

[Xeviat]

Short rest does make it so the 2 fight day is just as easy to balance as the 6 or 8 fight day.

It is interesting how much resource management lends to the feel of d&d. And that works for dungeon crawls. I think it ends up working less for more story focuses games, where casters end up excelling with their utility spells over noncasters, and where long rest classes can nova for the rare encounter while short rest classes don't get to stretch their endurance legs.

 

[Xeviat]

But if we put all classes on the same resource recovery system, they'll end up feeling too "samey."

Do bard, druid, cleric, sorcerer, and wizard feel samey because they're built on the same chasis?

 

[Charlaquin]

Short rest all the way. To be honest, I kind of hate long rest abilities. It’s really difficult as a player to predict how many encounters there are going to be in any given day, which makes it a nightmare to try to manage your daily resources. If you blow through them all early and it turns out there’s still a lot more to go, you screw yourself, but if you try to conserve them and it turns out there was only one encounter that day, they go to waste.

With short rest abilities, you can generally count on being able to use them in most encounters, unless it’s clear you’re in a position where you can’t spare an hour. It’s significantly easier to predict when you can afford to spend them and when you need to conserve them. If I had to pick just one or the other, it would definitely be short rest, but Ideally, you’d have a mix of both. Mostly short rest abilities that are your bread and butter for most encounters, and a couple of big long rest abilities that you save for when you need a Hail Mary.

I think 4e really nailed this, but I get that every class having the same structure felt too samey for many. I think Essentials was very close to finding the sweet spot, with some classes being more reliant on at-will abilities with a few Encounter and Daily, and others being more Daily heavy with fewer Encounter and weaker at-wills. They tried to do this with 5e as well, but it didn’t work as well. I think that’s due in large part to short rests changing to an hour instead of 5 minutes, making short rest abilities less reliable and more dependent on the DM.

 

[Dausuul]

You have to burn a random card on a short rest, but you can pick the card to burn on a long rest.
Either way, you get all your discarded abilities back. A cookie for whoever gets this reference.

D&D might gloom onto that mechanic, but is it really worth haven?

 

[FireLance]

I think what I would like is to restructure resource recovery so that long rest abilities have about half the current number of uses, but you recover about a quarter when you take a short rest.

So if you currently get twice proficiency bonus uses of an ability per long rest, you instead get proficiency bonus uses per long rest, and each time you take a short rest, you recover half proficiency bonus expended uses.

I think this would mitigate what to me are the two unsatisfactory extremes of long rest classes in play: expending all their resources in a single encounter and hoarding resources and eventually not using them.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Short rest all the way. To be honest, I kind of hate long rest abilities. It’s really difficult as a player to predict how many encounters there are going to be in any given day, which makes it a nightmare to try to manage your daily resources. If you blow through them all early and it turns out there’s still a lot more to go, you screw yourself, but if you try to conserve them and it turns out there was only one encounter that day, they go to waste.

That's kinda the point though. That way relatively easy encounters still have a purpose. The challenge is not whether you can win, the challenge is to win whilst not burning all your resources.