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My Short Rest DM trick...

The hut doesn't allow things in or out based on who is holding it; the only check to determine if something can pass through the hut freely is whether it is a creature or object that was within the dome when the spell was cast - and that doesn't change no matter how many times a creature or object goes out and then back in.

So, any thrown weapon can certainly be thrown back, though I doubt the players are likely to throw anything out of the hut after the first time an enemy throws something back in.

Ammunition is a bit trickier. Not because it has a different check to determine if it can pass back into the hut or not, but because it's usability might be in question after it has been fired out of the hut. At my table, we don't track mundane ammunition at all, so there'd be no reason why the baddies outside the hut can't fire ammunition pulled from their own wounds or picked up off the ground back into the hut - but at another table ammunition that gets fired out might be less certainly usable. I think the default 5e rules would suggest that only half the ammo that gets fired one way could be reused to fire the other way, since you can only normally recover half your spent ammunition after an encounter.

Absolutely. I'm not in disagreement that the hut is very good at doing what it does (which is permit safe rest in a wide variety of otherwise unsafe scenarios), just saying characters inside it are "nearly invulnerable" rather than "invulnerable."

Ok ... ok ... I give. "Nearly invulnerable" it is. Assuming you have someone that can disarm the PCs using melee*, enough archers to pick up the unbroken arrows and fire them back with disadvantage while guessing the proper location.

If facing an intelligent foe, particularly one good at military tactics, the PCs are not going to have a good day when the spell ends.

Which goes back to some of the original thread of "I just lock myself in a room to get a short rest" topics. Locking yourself into a small enclosed space when the enemy knows you're there and have no (or few) restrictions on what they can do outside of your safe spot is generally a bad idea. If someone locked themselves in the broom closet in a dungeon in my campaign and the bad guys knew they were there, the PCs either wouldn't be able to get out or the NPCs would have set up a gauntlet o' death for them.

*I guess you could just house rule that, but the only place I remember having rules for disarm was for the BattleMaster fighter, although there could be more.
 

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*I guess you could just house rule that, but the only place I remember having rules for disarm was for the BattleMaster fighter, although there could be more.
Optional combat rules in the DMG specifically for disarming, and of course the "improvising an action" sidebar in the PHB.
 

Optional combat rules in the DMG specifically for disarming, and of course the "improvising an action" sidebar in the PHB.

If you're using the optional rules. And have an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules.

As always, you can make up stuff that makes sense to you. I do it all the time.

The point is that PCs assuming that they're safe because the enemy can't get to them at that moment is not a good idea.

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[edit: took out overly-cranky response. :) ]
 
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1) Nothing happens, and I just hand-wave the journey. Encounters only occur in set-piece locations (dungeons, caves, etc) where I can "force" a certain number of encounters per day. But that limits my ability to tell a story. Lots of classic fantasy tales feature "events on the road". Unacceptable.

2) Sufficient encounters occur over those four days so that the balance guidelines are met. That means 16-20 combat encounters just to travel 100 miles between Town XX and Ruined Keep YY. That's incredibly boring. It'll take my group four sessions (four weeks, real-time) just to get to the Ruined Keep. Also, it ruins the story just as much as having no encounters; the journey to the Ruined Keep took four times as long, and was four times as dangerous, as the Ruined Keep itself.

Except if your problem is "blow all resources, long rest each day", then all you need to do is have the possibility of multiple encounters in a day. It only has to happen one time that the party blow all their resources and then get attacked, and they'll take the lesson (hopefully).

It's also not like this is a new problem: overland travel was only ever a problem in any edition if you were massively out-powered by what you met on the road, which leads to your issue of "dungeons are less dangerous than wilderness".

Finally unless you're totally denying any and all rest in the wilderness, then you haven't really fixed the problem. You've made it so that all short-rest powers will get burned every fight instead, while everyone with long rest powers just kind of hangs back.

I think there's a couple of problems that cause the 5-minute workday.

Exhausting resources is risk-free.

This applies in the wilderness or in a dungeon. In the wilderness, it's caused by wilderness encounter guidelines and itineraries that were always flawed for anything except extremely low levels because they were designed to produce a single encounter or event per day. In dungeons it's typically caused by static dungeon layouts which assume that monsters never move around - in previous editions this was semi-decently handled by random monster rolls done on a per-turn basis.

There is no time pressure.

On a short rest basis, this is caused by dungeons being self-contained and extremely small. If you hit the kobolds or goblins, odds are you'll find that every single one in the area lives within the lair, every one of them are currently IN the lair, and their numbers are on par with the smallest of small villages. That means that if you assault the place and leave, every kobold you kill is one you don't have to face when you bother to come back. If, instead, humanoid monster population densities line up a bit closer with real hunter-gatherer population densities, then if a kobold village is threatening a road that's 1 hour travel away, it probably has more than 100 kobolds within half an hour's travel of the middle of their territory. If you short rest before you polish off the settlement, you just multiplied the defending forces by a significant factor.

The only time you should be free to short rest is if you're hitting a complex that is explicitly self-contained AND is entirely static, which basically cuts things down to "holes in the ground filled with unintelligent foes".

On a longer term basis, most adventures progress 'in the nick of time', or are entirely driven by the PCs. The antagonists just sit there, gormless and waiting for the PCs to leisurely wander in, wreck their plans and wander off with a clue guiding them to the next adventure locale. It's a rare adventure that has a calendar of events, and a rarer one still that has the PC's actions actually matter. Even something like this will make short rests less palatable: if you short rest after each encounter, 4-5 encounters (in a static dungeon) takes up a whole day with only time for a short stroll to and from the dungeon. If you short rest once at the end, you can probably knock over the place in an hour and be home in time to head out to the next section of the plot in the morning. That should matter: the bad guys should still be scrambling to get information about what went down. Heck, they might not even know there's a problem. But most campaigns would reward the PCs for making haste from dungeon A to dungeon B with... nothing.

Seriously, when was the last time your PCs made haste to the scene of the final ritual and found the bad guys hadn't even arrived yet? That should be the effect of taking one less short rest.
 
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I think Oofta made the point pretty well above.

Re: NPC's dealing with the hut: I think these options would work... assuming the NPC's know about arcane magic, are prepped to deal with it, and can take a large number of attacks/arrows/spells flying out of the hut at them while they try to deal with it :)
 
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Or are you going to nit-pick that too?
I apologize for how me interpreting you saying, "...although there could be more." as an opportunity to mention what more there is for the benefit of anyone that might be curious made you feel. It was not my intention to make you feel nitpicked.
 

I apologize for how me interpreting you saying, "...although there could be more." as an opportunity to mention what more there is for the benefit of anyone that might be curious made you feel. It was not my intention to make you feel nitpicked.

::sigh::

Sorry, I'm having a bad day. Trying to fix an issue that I can't recreate locally while blindfolded (deploying to a machine I don't control and can't see). Meanwhile having to wait 20 minutes or more for someone who can see the machine to get back to me to answer my questions :mad:
 

Sorry, I'm having a bad day. Trying to fix an issue that I can't recreate locally while blindfolded (deploying to a machine I don't control and can't see). Meanwhile having to wait 20 minutes or more for someone who can see the machine to get back to me to answer my questions :mad:
That sounds really rough. Don't sweat venting some frustration at me, I can take it. Just wanted you to know I wasn't meaning to pile on any frustrations.

Since I too am parked on the forum at the moment to help me ignore that my plans for the day have gone to pot for no more reason than that ever since getting on medication that actually works for me dropping barometric pressure makes me feel physically relaxed to the point that I feel like I'm battling against sleep even though I got plenty of sleep and woke up initially feeling well-rested and ready to roll. Life with chronic pain is weird like that. I'm thankful that's it is feeling too good, rather than having worsening aches, that is my problem, though.
 
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I'd let them do whatever they want. If more grungs happen to barge in on them 15 minutes into their attempt to take a rest, then that's what happens. I wouldn't forewarn the players about what's about to happen to their characters. They'll learn, eventually.
 


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