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Long Rests vs Short Rests
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<blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8263786" data-attributes="member: 6777737"><p>I don't think any of that is relevant to <em>resting</em>. I recall earlier editions you'd wake up, the cleric would prepare all their spells as healing spells, cast them all, and then <em>immediately rest again</em> and repeat until the party is healed.</p><p></p><p>In theory, yes, this could leave the party more vulnerable or risk external events impacting the party. In practice, that doesn't happen because it means that bad die rolls from one encounter snowball into catastrophe. That's realistic, but it's stupid†. </p><p></p><p>My experience was that if the DM keeps rolling random encounters where the PCs chose to rest for days on end, eventually the PCs just say, "Okay, we go somewhere that we think we will be safe and rest until we fully heal." Not letting the PCs heal when they have determined that healing is a prerequisite to continuing the progress of the adventure is stupid†. Yes, there are contrived situations where that is impossible, just as there are contrivances in 5e that make long rests impossible, that is never the general rule because that would make the game stupid†. </p><p></p><p>For real, if you don't want the PCs to rest in the dungeon, just <em>change the rules</em> so that resting in a dungeon isn't possible. Just tell them what you want them to do. Don't try to punish with surprise or harder combat encounters after they've clearly determined that the difficulty of the non-surprise and expected difficulty encounters is <em>already</em> more than they can handle. If you want long rests to feel more like 1e, just make them take a week like they de facto did in those editions. Don't bait-and-switch them with the RAW rules if you're not going to ever actually let them play as written. Just admit that you prefer grimdark resting and <em>tell the players</em>.</p><p></p><p></p><p>(† Stupid here means putting the players into a de facto unavoidable failure state and then forcing them to play through it by giving them a false choice of dying in the next combat encounter or dying trying to recover. Being given two paths that lead to abject and total failure and told to choose is neither a particularly compelling story for fantasy heroes, nor a particularly enjoyable game experience. I don't remember any of my DMs after high school inflicting that kind of ridiculous waste of time on the players. Giving the PCs a Kobayashi Maru as an in-game dramatic or narrative situation is great (save the princess or save the kingdom, but you can't do both!). Building Kobayashi Maru into the fundamental game mechanics of rest and recovery is ridiculously poor design. Building in unavoidable death spirals that potentially take multiple sessions to play through is ridiculously miserable design. If you want to overmatch the PCs, you don't need attrition to do it.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bacon Bits, post: 8263786, member: 6777737"] I don't think any of that is relevant to [I]resting[/I]. I recall earlier editions you'd wake up, the cleric would prepare all their spells as healing spells, cast them all, and then [I]immediately rest again[/I] and repeat until the party is healed. In theory, yes, this could leave the party more vulnerable or risk external events impacting the party. In practice, that doesn't happen because it means that bad die rolls from one encounter snowball into catastrophe. That's realistic, but it's stupid†. My experience was that if the DM keeps rolling random encounters where the PCs chose to rest for days on end, eventually the PCs just say, "Okay, we go somewhere that we think we will be safe and rest until we fully heal." Not letting the PCs heal when they have determined that healing is a prerequisite to continuing the progress of the adventure is stupid†. Yes, there are contrived situations where that is impossible, just as there are contrivances in 5e that make long rests impossible, that is never the general rule because that would make the game stupid†. For real, if you don't want the PCs to rest in the dungeon, just [I]change the rules[/I] so that resting in a dungeon isn't possible. Just tell them what you want them to do. Don't try to punish with surprise or harder combat encounters after they've clearly determined that the difficulty of the non-surprise and expected difficulty encounters is [I]already[/I] more than they can handle. If you want long rests to feel more like 1e, just make them take a week like they de facto did in those editions. Don't bait-and-switch them with the RAW rules if you're not going to ever actually let them play as written. Just admit that you prefer grimdark resting and [I]tell the players[/I]. († Stupid here means putting the players into a de facto unavoidable failure state and then forcing them to play through it by giving them a false choice of dying in the next combat encounter or dying trying to recover. Being given two paths that lead to abject and total failure and told to choose is neither a particularly compelling story for fantasy heroes, nor a particularly enjoyable game experience. I don't remember any of my DMs after high school inflicting that kind of ridiculous waste of time on the players. Giving the PCs a Kobayashi Maru as an in-game dramatic or narrative situation is great (save the princess or save the kingdom, but you can't do both!). Building Kobayashi Maru into the fundamental game mechanics of rest and recovery is ridiculously poor design. Building in unavoidable death spirals that potentially take multiple sessions to play through is ridiculously miserable design. If you want to overmatch the PCs, you don't need attrition to do it.) [/QUOTE]
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