D&D 5E My vision of ability recharge

[Jester David]

The concept was to not guarantee anything gets recharged and to roll randomly to see if you regain the resource. In my vision short rest classes would roll randomly as well. All classes would roll at both short rests and long rests. How easy it is to regain things at a short or long rest may be tweaked somewhat by class if desired.

That means on an average, you regain half your powers. Average being probably the better part of a campaign. Maybe two.

That does mean half the time you regain less than half your powers and half the time you regain more than half. Because everyone is rolling, that means generally half the party will get <50% and half the party will get <50%. So you'll have the awkward situation where half the party is relying on the other half, and will run out sooner prompting another rest. And potentially 10% of the time (which seems low but over the course of a level 1-20 campaign, is roughly a dozen times) the entire party will roll and get less than 40% of their powers back. And once in a campaign, everyone gets 20% back.

 

[FrogReaver]

You have to start from here, because you speak for yourself. Not everyone have problems with the current rest mechanics.

I don't think what you suggest is necessary. Chance to regain abilities? So if I'm unlucky, I could rest for days and regain little, that would be terrible. Plus, how would you even measure '50% of abilities' for martial classes with a mix of short rest and long rest powers?

1. If you don't have issues with the current rest mechanics then do nothing. Obviously you don't need a solution!

2. But more importantly, yes you could rest and regain little. That's the risk and tradeoff you take for using all your abilities. That's the benefit to conserving them when possible, because you don't know for sure when you will get them back again. However I want to add that in general when it comes to resting we aren't just talking about you. We are talking about a party. The party itself has a very high chance of recovering about 50% due to the sheer volume of abilities the party will be rolling for. Some individuals may recover more and others less, etc. But the party has a very high chance to recover close to 50% of their abilities.

3. It's easy. Just roll for each ability use separately and see if you roll an 11 or above. If you roll 11+ then you recover that ability. For example if a battle master had used 3 superiority dice and action surge he would roll a d20 four times. Each time would correspond to the ability he was attempting to recover. If he passes the check with 11+ he gets that ability back. If not he doesn't.

 

[Immoralkickass]

1. If you don't have issues with the current rest mechanics then do nothing. Obviously you don't need a solution!

Sure, I don't. But you could at least state YOUR problem with it, instead of assuming we know it and assuming your problem is the same as our problem.

3. It's easy. Just roll for each ability use separately and see if you roll an 11 or above. If you roll 11+ then you recover that ability. For example if a battle master had used 3 superiority dice and action surge he would roll a d20 four times. Each time would correspond to the ability he was attempting to recover. If he passes the check with 11+ he gets that ability back. If not he doesn't.

That's too much dice rolling for me. Not to mention when you reach higher levels, when you have a ton of abilities, rolling for each and every one of them will slow down the game.

 

[FrogReaver]

That means on an average, you regain half your powers. Average being probably the better part of a campaign. Maybe two.

That does mean half the time you regain less than half your powers and half the time you regain more than half. Because everyone is rolling, that means generally half the party will get <50% and half the party will get <50%. So you'll have the awkward situation where half the party is relying on the other half, and will run out sooner prompting another rest. And potentially 10% of the time (which seems low but over the course of a level 1-20 campaign, is roughly a dozen times) the entire party will roll and get less than 40% of their powers back. And once in a campaign, everyone gets 20% back.

You bring up some points I would love to address.

1. I think you forgot about the full rest. There is a way to get back all resources, it's just not as easily accessible. But it should be accessible between most "adventures".

So the basic flow: At the start of an adventure the PC's will have all their abilities. They will face some challenges and use some of those abilities. I would say depending on the challenges different characters will use different amounts of resources here. Next comes the decision point. Of course the players will want the characters to get their abilities back. At this point they have 4 options, they can continue on. They can short rest. They can long rest. Or they can full rest. If they choose to rest at all they will need to decide which type of rest they want. A short rest provides a harder DC to recover abilities with a small setback. A long rest provides a moderate DC to recover abilities but with a moderate setback. A full rest will result in a major setback or failure of the campaign (but heck sometimes it is better to live to fight another day!).

In this example let's say a long rest is chosen. Keep in mind the following points.
a. Most characters still have some resources remaining
b. Not all characters spent the same amount of resources
c. The more abilities a character used the more they have a chance of recovering.

As such it's very likely that the characeters that used the most, gain the most back, but also still have the least remaining abilities going into the next leg of the journey.

2. Because of how things work above, I see your potential critique of some characters pulling more weight on a given day as non-problematic as what you are afraid will happen in my system already happens in our current recovery system. If anything my system will help alternate what characters do the heavy lifting from day to day as opposed to the same character doing the heavy lifting each day and then resting and repeating!

3. I think your 10% and 40% figures are off as we are talking about a 50% chance for each ability and not each character. Each character may have anywhere from 0-20 abilities they are looking to recharge. As such maybe 40 abilities that each have a 50% chance of occurring should have a much lower chance of occurring than you propose? Maybe you accounted for this but you can let us know for sure

 

[FrogReaver]

Sure, I don't. But you could at least state YOUR problem with it, instead of assuming we know it and assuming your problem is the same as our problem.

That's too much dice rolling for me. Not to mention when you reach higher levels, when you have a ton of abilities, rolling for each and every one of them will slow down the game.

1. Are you just trying to pick a fight? I mean seriously?

2. I referenced other peoples issues with the rest mechanic as numerous other threads have recently been opened on the issue. The issues they had were all somewhat varied and so I can't say X is the issue because that's not how it works. If they had issues they know what those issues are and they can evaluate if my proposal will work for them.

3. I'd estimate most characters would never roll over 20 times. Most of the time characters would roll significantly less, even the ones that may sometimes be able to reach 20 abilities they need to recharge.

 

[S'mon]

Very complicated but may work for what you're trying to achieve.

BTW I'm using the MM dragon breath recharge rule (5-6 on d6) for dragonborn breath - you could use something like that for SR recharge powers?

 

[Blue]

You are right that resource recovery doesn't have to be tied to an in game mechanism. However, if your table is fine detaching that connection then you have many more options for resource recovery than most of us

I had the luck of running a different system so there wasn't the same set of expectations. You're spot on that it has a lot more inertia to overcome in D&D, being one of those unchallenged assumptions about how the world works.

 

[ccs]

1. Elaborate on what you find too complex? I'm not seeing it?

Refer to the previous 3 pages of discussion.
I'll also add initially poorly written/explained. At least you cleared that up much later.
But still too complex. A lot of dice rolling for no added benefit.

2. For many of us the Wizard/Cleric spell recovery system hasn't been working fine for 40 years.

Well, at least your issue with the W/C spell recovery system is unique. Most want more uses of their spells. You seem to want (potentially) less....

 

[FrogReaver]

Refer to the previous 3 pages of discussion.
I'll also add initially poorly written/explained. At least you cleared that up much later.
But still too complex. A lot of dice rolling for no added benefit.



Well, at least your issue with the W/C spell recovery system is unique. Most want more uses of their spells. You seem to want (potentially) less....

1. Most of the discussion so far has been from people reading into what I actually said and making comments about something I never said. Yea apparently I could have written it a bit better, but it really wasn't written that poorly to begin with. Instead people honed in on 1 or 2 key phrases and went on from there instead of reading the whole post and thinking about what it meant or asking a few questions for clarification before trying to rip into it.

2. There's a difference between complex and lot's of dice rolling. I've still not seen anyone who understands the system say it's complex. I've seen a bunch of people who tried to place their own assumptions into what I was posting come away very confused and claim it's complex because of that. I mean it's so simple I can summarize it into a 6 step guide.

a. Start adventure
b. Have some encounters
c. rest (short or long) - (everyone rolls dice here to see what abilities they recharge)
d. Continue adventure
e. repeat steps c and d as often as desired
f. Finish adventure and go back to town and enjoy your full rest.

I don't understand why this needed to be spelled out to anyone. Regardless that's how it would work but explaining how it works isn't the interesting part of the discussion. Instead explaining why these design choices were made and possible problems with them was the interesting part. Somehow though, that did not happen.

3. I'm not sure you understand the system if you think this will make for less spells in a full rest to full rest period than we currently see.

 

[MarkB]

1. Most of the discussion so far has been from people reading into what I actually said and making comments about something I never said. Yea apparently I could have written it a bit better, but it really wasn't written that poorly to begin with. Instead people honed in on 1 or 2 key phrases and went on from there instead of reading the whole post and thinking about what it meant or asking a few questions for clarification before trying to rip into it.

2. There's a difference between complex and lot's of dice rolling. I've still not seen anyone who understands the system say it's complex. I've seen a bunch of people who tried to place their own assumptions into what I was posting come away very confused and claim it's complex because of that. I mean it's so simple I can summarize it into a 6 step guide.

a. Start adventure
b. Have some encounters
c. rest (short or long) - (everyone rolls dice here to see what abilities they recharge)
d. Continue adventure
e. repeat steps c and d as often as desired
f. Finish adventure and go back to town and enjoy your full rest.

One thing I can't see that you've covered is hit dice. Do these still work by the book - i.e. can be expended during a short rest, and recovered (up to 50% of total) during a long rest? Are they only recoverable during a full rest? Or are they included alongside abilities in the things players roll to see whether they recover?

The party's healing capacity is a major factor in their ability to continue adventuring, and your omission of this factor may have led to people making assumptions.

I don't understand why this needed to be spelled out to anyone. Regardless that's how it would work but explaining how it works isn't the interesting part of the discussion. Instead explaining why these design choices were made and possible problems with them was the interesting part. Somehow though, that did not happen.

It really, really didn't. You went in with the assumption that the reasons for your choices were obvious and universal rather than personal, which led to you never really expressing them until much later in the thread. My suggestion for next time would be to separate the rules from the discussion - first, explain exactly what issues you're trying to address and why, and only after you've established that, proceed with explaining the how.

3. I'm not sure you understand the system if you think this will make for less spells in a full rest to full rest period than we currently see.

Most players don't think in terms of full rest to full rest. They think in terms of an adventuring day, and your system will generally leave them with fewer resources on any particular day after their first without a full rest.