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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 7868869" data-attributes="member: 72555">I'm tempted by the opposite.  Using gritty rests; short rest is overnight, long rest is a week in "safety" -- civilization or similar (long resting while travelling might be possible if you are on a cruise ship or equivalent, but not otherwise).Then bundle encounters into "scenes", with clear story consequences if you skip out half way through a scene.  (Ie, suppose you want to fight the Goblin nest.  That Goblin nest is a scene with multiple encounters.  If you retreat from it before finishing, you "lose the scene", because the Goblins flee/reinforce/raid the humans.)Single-encounter scenes can still exist, but by consuming the entire scene budget they are usually going to be reasonably beefy.Scenes are then usually grouped into Chapters, usually with 3 Scenes in them.  Similar to Scenes, a Chapter is "failed" (with planned, sensible and logical consequences) if you take a long rest from it.  Travel days between Scenes is possible (and some travel days can be uneventful); if you travel for a month and there is one Scene in it, it is mechanically nearly identical to traveling for 2 days with a single Scene.  And the time pressure; if a 5 weeks is too long but 4 weeks is just in time, 4 weeks of travel doesn't leave time for a long rest; if the players can shave a week of time off (clever players!) they can get a long rest out of it.An adventure then becomes a sequence of Chapters.  Or Chapters can be mini-adventures all their own.Now, Chapters need not be linear -- you could have a Chapter that is "goblin infestation".  Scene 1 could be "ambushing a caravan", with an initial encounter and a chase-them-down encounter.  Which leads to a day travel to the nest (short rest).  Scene 2 could be "clearing the nest".  From there you find clues where they come from.  Scene 3 could be "track down the source" (again, travel, so short rest) (where did they come from? - opening to the underdark, or feywilde, or whatever).That Chapter could be stuck somewhere in the world waiting to be activated.  The players don't have to pull the thread, but if they don't the consequences occur (the opening is lost/the portal moves somewhere else/the goblins wipe out a settlement) and the game continues.---The reason why I say "gritty" is that the larger short rests and long rests make it far, far, far easier to justify "if you take a rest the world moves on".  An hour break is a really awkward unit of time; it is harder for me to to think of a situation where taking an hour off is reasonable and safe, but taking 8 hours is unthinkable, than a situation where an overnight is reasonable, but a week would be foolish.This does require embracing the "attrition" balancing of 5e.  Easy and medium encounters become more common than the 5 minute adventuring day "if this encounter doesn't seem to threaten death, it was wasted" style.</blockquote>

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