D&D 3E/3.5 Potential Consequences of using the 3e Resting Rules

[WayOfTheFourElements]

As the title says, what are some of the potential consequences of using the 3e resting and recovery rules in D&D 5e?

By 3e resting and recovery rules, I mean, character do not have hit dice to recover hit points and recover a number of hit points equal to their level at the end of a long rest. All other abilities (spells, etc.) are recovered as normal.


Edit: I'm not sure if I would use these rules in an actual game, but it seems like a possible solution to campaign that feature equal amount wilderness exploration (with few encounters per day) and dungeon delving (with many encounters per day).

Other options, I have considered are making three types of rests: short, long, and extended (5 days) and shuffling the recovery of some resources around accordingly. (Long rest restores a single HD; an extended rest restores all HD and hit points to their maximum.)


Clarification: The problem is that I run 3 sandbox games for 3 different groups in the same world, in which the actions of one group have a dramatic affect on the actions of other groups. Groups will often play tricks and try to thwart the other groups of players, seeing them as adventuring rivals. As a result, any sort of narrative pacing falls flat and drastically reduces player/group agency. Having time flow at my discretion undermines the conflict.

The trouble I have experienced with the rest and recovery method described in the PHB is that because a near-complete recovery happens over night, one group can became several days "ahead" of the other groups over the course of a single session, which can be mind-boggling for me as a DM when trying to actively keep track of thee separate time lines and keeping everything consistent.

When I switched to the slow-paced recovery method presented in the DMG, it was much easier to keep the timelines clustered together. The opportunity cost to resting and recovering resources did its job. On the other hand, it made it difficult to have a wilderness trek, followed by a dungeon crawl, followed by another wilderness trek back to the home base awkward. Short rests in the dungeon become necessary to keep some classes (monk, fighter, warlock) reliant. Furthermore, complete overnight recovery makes wilderness encounters meaningless in terms of attrition.

I really like 90% of the 5e mechanics and overall prefer it to 2e, but these types of problems never arose as dramatically when playing 2e or BX.

 

[CapnZapp]

I can only explain your suggestion by you thinking Hit Dice are somehow responsible for "campaign pacing mismatch"...

But they're not. First off, hit points are only part of the issue, spell slots is at least as big an issue. And spell slots = hit points through healing; in the extreme case a Cleric simply takes two long rests in a row, expending all spells on healing in-between.

No, the real solution is to say a long rest is fast in a fast-paced adventure (say, once per hour), medium in a medium-paced adventure (say, once per day), and slow in a slow-paced adventure (say, once per month).

For one and the same party. In the same campaign.

Only then will you finally have solved the "campaign pacing mismatch" once and for all, and not by having to reuse clichéd story lines" the world is ending; please hurry" to boot. ☺

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I can only explain your suggestion by you thinking Hit Dice are somehow responsible for "campaign pacing mismatch"...

But they're not. First off, hit points are only part of the issue, spell slots is at least as big an issue. And spell slots = hit points through healing; in the extreme case a Cleric simply takes two long rests in a row, expending all spells on healing in-between.

No, the real solution is to say a long rest is fast in a fast-paced adventure (say, once per hour), medium in a medium-paced adventure (say, once per day), and slow in a slow-paced adventure (say, once per month).

For one and the same party. In the same campaign.

Only then will you finally have solved the "campaign pacing mismatch" once and for all, and not by having to reuse clichéd story lines" the world is ending; please hurry" to boot. ☺

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

But explaining the different in healing speed is...odd...to say the least.

There's also the problem of a week long journey to the dungeon, the dungeon run, and the journey back problem. Getting the terms and requirements of a long rest, when one can be taken, and those differences between a long rest and a short rest is rather difficult.

If I was running a narratively (totally a word!) driven campaign, your solution would work. In a sandbox situation - in which the players are in charge and the world, its threats, and adventure sights are defined without regards to a particular group of characters - difficulties arise. Especially because I run 3 groups of characters in the same setting, where the actions of one group affect what happens to the others. Time and record-keeping are very important, making narrative-driven pacing awkward.

 

[CapnZapp]

But explaining the different in healing speed is...odd...to say the least.

There's also the problem of a week long journey to the dungeon, the dungeon run, and the journey back problem. Getting the terms and requirements of a long rest, when one can be taken, and those differences between a long rest and a short rest is rather difficult.

If I was running a narratively (totally a word!) driven campaign, your solution would work. In a sandbox situation - in which the players are in charge and the world, its threats, and adventure sights are defined without regards to a particular group of characters - difficulties arise. Especially because I run 3 groups of characters in the same setting, where the actions of one group affect what happens to the others. Time and record-keeping are very important, making narrative-driven pacing awkward.

*shrug*

What can I tell you? D&D is a game. I can only put the cold hard facts on the table; this is the only true way to make the game work without putting all the responsibility on story.

It's a choice. If you're like me, you're dead tired of the "please hurry" trope, a bluff that almost never gets called. (If official adventures start spending significant effort on what happens when you fail to deliver the McGuffin or even make it a distinct possibility that say 1/3 of all groups are meant to experience unsalveagable failure, call me, and we can talk.)

If you're content with having your NPC King say "please save the princess, you get four days" and re able to ignore how the players roll their eyes at yet another completely arbitrary time limit that's only meant to make players hesitate in taking rests "unnecessarily", you can ignore everything I say.

Your choice

 

[The Crimson Binome]

As the title says, what are some of the potential consequences of using the 3e resting and recovery rules in D&D 5e?

By 3e resting and recovery rules, I mean, character do not have hit dice to recover hit points and recover a number of hit points equal to their level at the end of a long rest. All other abilities (spells, etc.) are recovered as normal.

It should be fine. I would also recommend changing the fighter's Second Wind ability to grant temporary HP instead of healing. Those are the healing rules I plan to implement in the next game I run. It should work as well as healing did in 3E, except you don't have to address the concept of magic wands.

 

[Tormyr]

I have worked on a middle ground with resting. Some of it is based on story, and some of it is based on time. If I know that there is not really going to be much combat over several game days of travel, then the overnights are not going to get the benefits of a full rest during each night of the journey. We play adventure paths. So I have a general idea of where things will go. I have worked this out with the players ahead of time, and we have played enough that they trust me to not just string them along and beat their characters to a pulp. The end result is that the

As for using 3e healing, 5e is so balanced on limited healing that I could see it unbalancing things at times. A lot of the time it would be good enough, but it would slow down progress and cause a disconnect between HP and other resources such as spell slots, dailies, etc. Sometimes it could cause a party's progress to grind to a halt.

 

[Tony Vargas]

As the title says, what are some of the potential consequences of using the 3e resting and recovery rules in D&D 5e?

By 3e resting and recovery rules, I mean, character do not have hit dice to recover hit points and recover a number of hit points equal to their level at the end of a long rest. All other abilities (spells, etc.) are recovered as normal.

So what are the consequences of removing HD, and recovering hps at 1/level/day?

Healers will need to devote more slots to healing, heal-rest-prep-heal-rest cycles will happen when the party gets really badly injured. There will be less impetus to short-rest (which are already an hour long), so classes that depend on them to recharge abilities might find the rest of the party more resistant to taking them.

The party will be unlikely to take on full 6-8 encounter days, so will long-rest more often. That will mitigate against the increased use of slots to heal, and be a wind-fall for classes with significant long-rest recharge abilities that can't be diverted to healing.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It will make a healer more or less mandatory (using HD, a healer is still really nice to have, but I've seen multiple successful groups without one).

Basically, you end up back in the 2e style of play, where you take a day or two to make camp and let the healer heal everyone to full. It worked, although I prefer 5e's approach.

As an aside, if you do go this route can I recommend a house rule we used to use in 3e? Add Con mod to hp recovered. The idea that an ultra sickly person with only 1 hp per level could recover in a single day from death's door while an ultra healthy person took forever to do so used to drive me nuts.

Note: this house rule doesn't actually fix that issue, but it at least moves things in the right direction.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Basically, you end up back in the 2e style of play, where you take a day or two to make camp and let the healer heal everyone to full. It worked, although I prefer 5e's approach.

Or you end up with the other 2E style of play, and you just don't get into many fights on consecutive days if nobody wants to play a healer. It worked well enough if there's a lot of travel time.

Although, since you bring up the comparison to 2E, it may be worth considering how Bounded Accuracy might interfere with the old model. The old model gave you a better chance of having a good AC, and HP were much lower all around, so it was realistic that you might get through some encounters without spending any resources. Under the new model, with worse AC and higher HP totals, attrition might start kicking in faster.

In 5E, you're expected to lose HP in combat, and the generous healing is meant to compensate for that. In older editions, losing HP meant you were doing something wrong.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Or you end up with the other 2E style of play, and you just don't get into many fights on consecutive days if nobody wants to play a healer. It worked well enough if there's a lot of travel time.

Although, since you bring up the comparison to 2E, it may be worth considering how Bounded Accuracy might interfere with the old model. The old model gave you a better chance of having a good AC, and HP were much lower all around, so it was realistic that you might get through some encounters without spending any resources. Under the new model, with worse AC and higher HP totals, attrition might start kicking in faster.

In 5E, you're expected to lose HP in combat, and the generous healing is meant to compensate for that. In older editions, losing HP meant you were doing something wrong.

5e has different expectations for resource management than 2e did, so I don't think that would fly.

Less encounters means more ability to nova. That means that either you play the game on easy, or the DM has to ratchet up the difficulty of the fewer encounters.

Assuming the latter, higher difficulty means more hp loss, meaning that a group that is gun shy about running around at half hp (and fights being harder encourages this) will throw up Tiny Hut and wait for the healer to magically heal them to full. (This will require 3 Tiny Huts a day, but given that the group doesn't want to have any encounters on a recovery day, that's easy enough to do.)

That does, of course, assume that the current quest isn't on a time crunch, which would change the calculus once again. However, forcing the group to push on against higher difficulty fights with less hp recovery significantly increases the risk of TPK. Higher difficulty naturally means that IF something goes wrong (the DM's dice are hot) the players are less likely to be able to compensate.