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

[Blue]

Moving away from "playing a healer is mandatory" was one of the big steps from 3.5 to 4e. A healer is now always nice in the way that you don't want to have any of the major niche's empty, as opposed to playing without a healer vastly changed your play style because it was necessary.

Funny thing is, it will hurt some classes a lot - those with big HD that get hit a lot like front-line melee but moreso healers who need to spend more resources just keeping everyone else up. On the other hand, the shorter adventuring days will empower your other casters because they know the party is going to want to rest soon so they can blow more spells.

In 3.x, healers quickly using their spells to heal and everyone else using them at the same rate was a big reason there was 5 minute adventuring days.

 

[Blue]

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.)

One sacred cow of D&D that we are so used to is that resource recovery is linked to time passing. And a static amount of time passing both (a) doesn't work for all adventures that can happen on different time scales and (b) is at least partially under player control.

13th Age is a d20 that came out before 5e but they share a lot of philosophy. But one of the differences is that 13th Age divorces a long rest ("full heal up") from static time passing. Instead it's linked to the number of encounters. Have a three week trek across a savanna with four encounters during it? Great, recover your resources at the end. Have a intense dungeon where you do four encounters in a morning? Great, recover your resources. Characters can also take one sooner, but the trade-off is that there will be a campaign setback. Perhaps the vampires have turned two of the commoners you were trying to free, or the cultists have completed a ritual and have support from a minor devil.

There is a 5e-based Tolkien setting (Adventures in Middle Earth?) game that also divorces them. You can expect a "long rest" at the end of an adventure, and not before under usual circumstances. But something like Elrond's Halfway House where you can truly relax in safety can gratn one. IIRC, they also suggest you can grant them for thing like waking on a cliff on a perfect dawn overlooking a beautiful vista - which is both inspiring for players and a wonderful cheat for DMs to insert one where they need it.

So if your issue is different scales of time in which the "6-8" encounters needed for attrition-based tension, considering going with something like one of those.

 

[Uller]

Three solutions I've toyed with:

1) Long rests only restore half HD and no hp. This keeps party HP from ever really recovering during intense adventures but they still get back spells and features.

2) You can benefit from a LR only once every 7 days but whenever you want (still requires 8 hours to do it).

3) You can only LR in very comfortable locations: Inns, houses, well developed camps where hirelings do the work, etc.

They all of pros and cons.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Funny thing is, it will hurt some classes a lot - those with big HD that get hit a lot like front-line melee but moreso healers who need to spend more resources just keeping everyone else up. On the other hand, the shorter adventuring days will empower your other casters because they know the party is going to want to rest soon so they can blow more spells.

You could solve that problem by turning a short rest into eight hours, and making a long rest take a week in town. Essentially, a long rest could only take place between adventures, and the entire adventure would constitute one "adventuring day" under the default rates. (The only real difference would be that an eight hour short rest restored 1hp per level, instead of dealing with Hit Dice for recovery.)

 

[Eubani]

I think the OP has a not so great solution looking for a problem.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I think the OP has a not so great solution looking for a problem.

Um...not so much.

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.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

Three solutions I've toyed with:

1) Long rests only restore half HD and no hp. This keeps party HP from ever really recovering during intense adventures but they still get back spells and features.

This one could work. I'll think about it.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Um...not so much.

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.

An idea I came across on these boards not long ago (unfortunately I don't recall who posted it) was to use the grittier resting rules, but with the option to take a rest requiring only the normal duration at the cost of gaining an exhaustion once the immediate scenario was over.

For example, a long rest normally takes 7 days, but if you need to long rest in a dungeon you can do so in 8 hours. However, when you leave the dungeon the exhaustion gets applied (obviously, you can't fast rest more than 5 times this way without taking time to recover). The idea is that you can push yourself harder in a dangerous situation, but once it is over your fatigue will catch up with you.

That said, if everyone is using the same pacing, I'm curious why you would have such a disparity. Why wouldn't you have the same issue when using slower healing (party A runs into a difficult encounter and has to make camp for a week, while party B gets lucky and has no encounters on the way to the dungeon, resulting in a one week difference in their timelines). Not doubting you, just curious why faster healing causes a larger disparity for you.

 

[Uller]

This one could work. I'll think about it.

It kinda works. It makes HP a more valuable resource that has to be reserved over a longer term. But it means characters that rely more strongly on other long rest recharge features...healing spells become more important and casters in general become more effective compared to other party members.

In my group, everyone has important long and short rest features. Everyone has an interest in keeping the more martial characters up and absorbing attacks.

If your group worries a lot about "spot light" then maybe not the best approach.

 

[schnee]

In ours we're trying a method to abstract time a bit.

The gist: we only track time in one-month increments.

During that month, a character can 'main' on one adventure, as in show up for a few sessions in a row, 'sub in' on one other for a single session to make a table full enough to keep a gaming session from being canceled, and have 1-2 weeks of downtime that we all narrate in a shared Slack channel.

To make it happen, us DMs make the 'meta plots' rather slow-moving. We also hand-wave things like the exact times and positions of players, and the travel in between adventure groups for the ones who 'sub in'. So, this has divorced from the kind of time pressure you get in movies and bookkeeping that creates DM burnout.

It also gives them time to think about and interact with the world in a more rich, narrative way between sessions. So, that automatic downtime, coupled with us giving bonuses to players who write game session recaps and interesting downtime activities, has turned a few of our players into scheming fiction writers. They're generating all sorts of interesting content and leads for us in between games.

So, it removes some pressure from us and the players, and has moved the game to be partially online, partially in-person - so we get several different forms of engagement.