D&D 5E Playing with short rests, potential problems?

[Tony Vargas]

True, but I also get aggravated by the fact that the casters are out of resources after one big fight.

Well, you could have smaller fights and more of them (that's the guideline, 6-8 medium/hard encounters). The theory is your players will learn to hold back a little in most combats so they'll have something for later.

If you do feel like re-jiggering things at the class level, though, you could put all casters on something more like the warlock schedule. Cut slots down to 1/3rd, but let them recover them with a short rest (round 2 slots up to 1 and 1 slot down to 0; or leave the remainder as daily slots). That'll give them about the same number of slots/day (assuming 2-3 short rests per day, which is what the encounter guidelines imply), but keep them from dumping too many on any one encounter. At that point, you could probably get away with reducing the time it takes to get in a short rest, too.

 

[Mercule]

I still have concerns that there are not enough caster resources to handle a typical sprawling dungeon, and I think there may be a solution to that, but for now I will stick with what we've got.

I assume you didn't play 1E or earlier. Starting Wizards got one 1st level spell per day and no cantrips (at least not recognizable as such). Slots were prepared individually, so, you had to guess which of your spells to put in that slot before you even knew what sort of adventure you were going on. I hated Wizards, not because of the limited resources, but because of the "guess wrong" factor. When I did play a wizard, the spells were almost secondary, at low level. The wizard player's job/perk was to be able to use almost all his meta-knowledge and to help the less experienced players -- wizards were just "smarter". Wizard players also tended to be the ones who liked to solve the copious riddles and puzzles that were present in early modules. Also, secondary effects -- like haste aging the recipient every time -- tended to minimize the spell spamming for the coolest spells.

The game was well equipped (more or less) for a certain play style, where the playing pieces often reflected more of the player. Both gaming and the fantasy genre have evolved to where people want smart fighters and rogues and they have some expectation of wizards throwing magic at everything, rather than being "wise ones". 4E was one attempt at modernizing that part of the game. Unfortunately, the slots are one of the "sacred cows" that make it D&D. There's only so far you can push the mechanic before it doesn't fit. I sometimes wonder if 3E and 5E are both somewhere in the "sour spot" of being just enough resources to imply that they can be used in every combat but not enough that to make it reality. Removing "name level" at 10th-ish only compounds the issue.

In other words, the game is mechanically constructed such that there aren't supposed to be enough caster resources to handle a sprawling dungeon. The secret is that you aren't supposed to use a non-cantrip spell every round. Really, even at higher levels, many combats should only see one or two spells thrown. Many others will see only cantrips. Only boss and lieutenant battles should see significant depletion of resources. Otherwise, it's a slow attrition and the Fighter should probably run low on hit points, first.

All that said, I'm sure you can find a way to let casters cast all the time, but I think it'd be difficult. At-will cantrips are the middle ground and should not be dismissed.

 

[Uller]

What I will do is give my players a warning speech about how just because they can dump their spells in a single travel encounter doesn't mean they should do that in a dungeon encounter which is likely to be the first of many.

This is a problem a lot of folks have and there are a number of threads regarding it. The Travel/Exploration pillar of the game doesn't fit well with the 6-8 encounters per day paradigm for many groups. If you are doing a lot of travelling you tend to get only one or two encounters per day and players that conserve resources feel like they are wasting chances to use them. If you then switch to dungeon crawl mode your players may continue to play like they need to use their high level spells quickly and run out.

There was a thread on the boards that suggested changing the random traveling encounter into the random travelling _adventure_. The suggestion was to pre-roll your random encounters then pack several of them into one day. For instance, let's say the PCs are on a 10 day journey with a 25% chance of an encounter twice per day. That should amount to ~5 encounters. Roll them in advance, put them in relative proximity to each other, give them a simple backstory and play it out as its own little adventure as something interesting that happened along the way.

I'm planning on giving that a try in one of my current games.

Here is an example: Using this Out of the Abyss encounter generator https://repl.it/BFpk

I generated encounters for 10 days and got the following encounters:

Encounter 1:
Rope Bridge
4 drow, 2 giant lizards (merchants with treasure)

Encounter 2
Warning sign (2 shadow demons) - the PCs take a long rest within a mile of the area 2 shadow demons attack them

Encounter 3
Mad creature (duergar) - RP encounter with a mad duergar

Encounter 4
11 Fire beetles

Encounter 5
Ambush: Grell floating near a high ceiling over a muck pit

You could take these 5 encounters, move them around into a different order and turn them into their own little mini-adventure. For instance, maybe they meet the mad duergar and if they play it right they can extract a cryptic warning from him not to stay near the warning sign. But to move on they need to cross the bridge but the drow merchants (slavers?) are there so they will have to negotiate their way past or fight or bypass it. If they bypass it, the have to go through the muck pit and fight the grell and that fight attracts the fire beetles. If they are clever, they could actually attract the shadow demons and lure them into fighting the drow....or something like that.

So instead of 5 encounters strung out over the course of 10 days they get anywhere from two to four in one day. Have one such adventure every 2d4 days or something...

Sometimes a random encounter is just that...a single random encounter meant to give the game world a feeling of being alive with more going on than whatever the interests of the PCs are. But sometimes a random encounter is tied to something more interesting and the PCs shouldn't be able to readily tell the difference. They should always feel a need to conserve resources because there may be more challenges ahead.

 

[Oofta]

I'm probably one of the last people to give advice on this topic since I've switched to the optional rules and do a short rest is overnight and a long rest is a week or more. There are times when we have several fights before they even have an opportunity to have a short rest, occasionally I throw in a fight when they're well rested and know they won't have any other fights soon.

However, I do see valid points on both sides of the argument. First thing first though, we need to acknowledge that it's incredibly difficult to balance out the classes. How do you compare a raging barbarian's DPR per round to someone who can just plane shift a creature into another dimension if the target fails a charisma check, effectively killing it by touching it?

If I were going to increase the power of magic users, I would probably just give them more spell slots because that seems like a simpler solution.

Another option would be to give them items that they can cast spells from. For example, a wand of fire that can be used to cast fireball, burning hands, etc but that can only be used by someone who could normally cast the spell. Give the item a cool-down period so they can't just spam fireball all day if you want.

Let people create scrolls and then cast spells off of those scrolls.

But I'm not sure there is a real solution. A fighter can play whack-a-tarrasque all day long until they get stomped on, but not matter what you do some people will cast their highest level spells at the first opportunity until they have nothing left.

If you do increase the power level of magic users, just pay close attention to make sure they don't dominate combat. Magic users may not be DPR kings, but what they lack in damage they often make up for in utility.

 

[alienux]

I appreciate all the feedback. I think you've convinced me not to muck about with the spells at this time. If I were to do it, I think I like the idea of just giving the Wizard's once-per-day arcane recover to all spellcasters. For for now I'm not going to even do that. I tend to favor being very reluctant to change game rules anyway unless there has been a lot of time and thought put into it.

What I will do is give my players a warning speech about how just because they can dump their spells in a single travel encounter doesn't mean they should do that in a dungeon encounter which is likely to be the first of many.

One comment I disagree with is that I'm giving my players encounters that are too hard. As I mentioned before, I set up fairly sandbox situations, so that my players may run across a lot of easy encounters, but they may also by chance happen into a difficult one. Just because they run into a difficult one early on in their adventuring day doesn't mean I am always giving them tough encounters. Even if I give them moderate encounters all the time, they will be nearly out of resources after about 3 of them -- Not nearly enough to handle any kind of dungeon.

I still have concerns that there are not enough caster resources to handle a typical sprawling dungeon, and I think there may be a solution to that, but for now I will stick with what we've got.

Keep in mind that the number of encounters between long rests completely depends on the difficulty of the encounters. If they are running into a couple of difficult or deadly encounters early in the adventuring day, they're going to need a long rest much sooner than if they run into twice as many easy to medium encounters.