D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Krachek]

Let me take you through it one step at a time.

The fundamental balance of the game relies on adventurers pressing through 6-8 encounters before taking a long rest. This both includes the challenge level of individual encounters (that an encounter that by itself isn't dangerous could be, given that you must conserve resources for more encounters without rest), and the class balance between "longresters" and "shortresters".

But the game never actually makes sure the conditions for this balance are met.

Short of the beaten-to-death horse of story time restrictions, how does the game restrict mid- to high-level resting?

The answer is: not at all. In fact, it provides plenty of magical assistance in facilitating said rest.

This is a fundamental flaw to me.

Speanking of "fundamental flaw" you should look at what they claim to offer.

They offer a Role playing game, base on equals part of Social interaction, Exploration and Combat.
33% combat is what they offer.
They dont sell strategic combat in a fantasy world, where every resource is counted for.
They dont sell top notch tuned challenge.

They offer you a game where you can incarnate a wizard, a fighter, a rogue.
Do they have to be exactly as effective all the time in all aspect of play?
Do calling a rest have to be a cautious and strategic decision?
I think the developer simply dont care.
You are asking rules and adventures and caring that simply dont fit in the core of the game.

 

[jasper]

Captain Zapp…The secret that so few people want to acknowledge is that all these "the princess gets eaten in three days - hurry!" storylines are really completely arbitrary, and I dislike a game that forces me to come up with arbitrary thinly-disguised limitations……
So you okay with a gnome king hiring a green goliath and a druid who loves to wild shape into a donkey to save the princess. Meanwhile the princess just stays in the dragon guarded castle till rescue comes. We will not talk about how the princess gets food, water, or clothing. We will not talk about how good her makeup and hair dressing skills are either.
CapnZapp, you COULD write your own adventures and submit them to Adventure League, WOTC, Third party in which you handle the issues with resting.

It sounds like CapnZapp wants an extra paragraph inserted into every module on how to EXACTLY handle resting. And gives suggestions on what to do. HMM I think that should be in the players guide under the dm section. Since DDAL06-01 A Thousand Tiny Deaths got the standard verbiage down to 2 pages. Into, Adjust, before table, playing the dm,(that was page 2) and Background, overviews, and hooks (page 3). Which is much better than DDAL05-01 5 pages of verbiage.
Back in 1E resting was a problem too. 1 on 12 isn’t going to come up much during 8 hours downtime. And if as a DM you kept throwing monsters at them during the rest they were going to ask when they killed all the wandering monsters. I did like T1 Temple of Elemental Evil because it gave a reason on why the monsters were restocking, and a chart. At the time I was enforcing training times and it was interesting when the pcs discover after a month out of dungeon they had a lot of do over work.

 

[Jester David]

Thank you for bringing up something that so many people seemingly prefer to not discuss.

If there ever was competitive D&D-as-sport WOtC would have their work cut out for them...

Back when they did competitive D&D (in the 1e era) they forced some limitations to prevent resting. Like the poison gas of Lost Shrine of Tamoachan. Or just docking points. Gamists solutions to the "problem", and not very workable in a campaign situation.

This is the issue of the 5 minute workday, which D&D has always struggled with to some degree. Every edition. 4e tried its hardest with milestones and encounter powers, but the appeal of a total recharge and more daily powers is too strong.

Because if they players *really* want to stop and rest after each dungeon room, you can't stop them. They will find a way.

Sometimes it would be a huge relief to be able to just point to the page in the adventure book and say "it's not me that's preventing your rest and generally making life hard, it's the adventure".

The secret that so few people want to acknowledge is that all these "the princess gets eaten in three days - hurry!" storylines are really completely arbitrary, and I dislike a game that forces me to come up with arbitrary thinly-disguised limitations.

The big problem with the hard coding it into the adventure just makes it a way to fail.
Groups can be unlucky. They hit every trap and they have a couple encounters where the rolls nothing below a 15 and they roll nothing above a 5 and need to spend an extra day or two resting. Or the cleric (or bard) rolls a 1 and gets turned to stone and the party needs to spend a week heading to a temple for a greater restoration. Suddenly, they haven't just failed an encounter because of the dice, they've failed the whole damn campaign because the book *says* the princess gets eaten in three days.
Failing should be a result of the players' choices. Or there should be an obvious causal relation, not an unknown and unforseen consequence that comes after the fact.

A good and skilled DM implies there's a time limit, but that time limit only counts down during wasted time. "You need to rescue the Dwarven Delegation and every day you waste, another might die." With a flexible deadline, the time limit is implied but not firm, so the party can do what they need to do. It doesn't become solid and "real" until endgame.
Besides, unless the players are reading the adventure, they don't know one way or another if they arrived too late because there was a countdown or because the DM decided they were wasting time. If the DM needs to point to text in the book, that's just an excuse. (After all, the DM could have changed the text, so the final decision rested with them.)

I would much rather they were hardcoded in the game (as variants, he said to prevent people from bursting a blood vessel), so I would be freed from having to think up ever-new story complications, and the game would just work even if I present the players/characters with a wide-open sandbox.

At that point, you need something more. To me, it's utterly baffling how the game allows a central conceit like resting to rely on such a "low level" issue like a dry warm undisturbed bed. Relying on wandering monsters only takes you so far. Terrain and environment factors too. By mid level they are easily trivialized.

First off, there ARE resting variants in the DMG.
The catch is, there is zero practical differences between a variant printed in the DMG and a homebrew version. Except that you can tweak the homebrew version to perfectly fit your group.
If your group isn't happy with you using rules you created, they're not going to be happy with variant rule from the DMG.

As for how the game allowed resting to work like it does, the answer is simple: player feedback. People *really* wanted a long rest to fully recover hit points. Or the largest minority did.
Personally, in my game, resting in an unsafe place (like a dungeon, the wilds) restores 1/4 of your hp, resting in a safe place (an inn, a guest room) restores 1/2 your hp, and leisurely resting in a very comfortable place for 12+ hours restores all your hp. Because I wanted slower healing while adventuring.

"You're about to cross the Desert of Parched Throats, which will take you approximately two weeks at best. You can only take long rests at Oases, should you find any. Good luck."

In this case, you can have a single encounter every other day and end up with 7 encounters per long rest, assuming you never find any Oasis. This way, every encounter becomes significant even if it is "easy" per DM guidelines.

So do that. That sounds fine.
The rules are the baseline. By design there are meant to be exceptions. They can't include rules for every environment or situation in every campaign in every campaign setting for every DM.


One of my early introductions to D&D gaming was the videogame Eye of the Beholder II. There was a nasty section of the dungeon where you couldn't rest (because nightmares) and were trapped by a sealed wall. That was the challenge: do the area without resting.
And it was hard. Never quite got passed that maze…

But to make this work, I have to take away the characters' toys (teleportation or pocket dimension magics). While I can do that, I don't want to have to. It's much better if the game gives these toys to the DM, who then gets to be the good guy.

This edition does make it slightly more difficult. Teleport is a higher level spell and you decide where teleportation circles are in the world. If any.
And there's a long history of DMs saying "long range teleportation doesn't work in my world". That's an assumption of Kobold Press' Midgard setting.

But that doesn't prevent stuff like tiny hut or rope trick or magnificent mansion. Those spells are pretty classical, so I'm not sure how they could be omitted from the game. But they just make resting safe. However, if the party *wants* to rest nothing can stop them (short of ongoing poison damage).Those spells just make it easier and safer (but cost a spell slot). Removing them will just slow things down as the players try and find an alternative to allow them to safely rest.
Any solution will be artificial because it's it literally is: the time limit will always exist solely to stop rests.

As an aside: working around teleportation is a big issue D&D has always struggled with, especially at high levels. So many DMs and adventurer writers just forgot it existed. I found this particularly awkward when running through the original Dragonlance modules.
The catch becomes you have to change how adventures work at high levels. D&D has regularly struggled with this. The authors at Paizo have discussed this a few times. An adventure that is designed for high level characters needs to require high level magics like teleportation. To even succeed at the adventure you need to be able to fly and teleport and use divination.

To me, it's the same long drawn-out war as with Detect Evil and alignment. Back in the old days, I would have been thrown out of town for suggesting these spells are bad for the game much how I get significant friction for suggesting to abandon the old bad resting mechanism. But I remain convinced the game will get there eventually, possibly over the graves of some of the posters in this very thread.

Those spells were thrown out. They became rituals in 4e, which were almost never used. And despite having an all-you-can-eat hamburger fest with sacred cows, 4th Edition STILL DIDN'T FIX THE 5 MINUTE WORKDAY. It still didn't remove the potential of the nova followed by a rest.

This is because resting early isn't a mechanical problem. No mechanics are entirely going to stop it. You can't expect a rule patch to fix a social issue. If one player is being abusive to another, or a player is metagaming, or one player is optimized by the others aren't, or one player spends all their time on their smartphone then turning to the rulebook won't solve anything. There's nothing in the DMG, no house rule or narrative fix, that will solve the Facebook issue.
The issue exists at the table with the players, and in the unfolding narrative, and the solution needs to take place at the same level.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Let me take you through it one step at a time.

The fundamental balance of the game relies on adventurers pressing through 6-8 encounters before taking a long rest. This both includes the challenge level of individual encounters (that an encounter that by itself isn't dangerous could be, given that you must conserve resources for more encounters without rest), and the class balance between "longresters" and "shortresters".

But the game never actually makes sure the conditions for this balance are met.

Short of the beaten-to-death horse of story time restrictions, how does the game restrict mid- to high-level resting?

The answer is: not at all. In fact, it provides plenty of magical assistance in facilitating said rest.

This is a fundamental flaw to me.

Players will rest as often as they think that they can get away with so long as they eventually win. The DM has control of victory conditions and has the ability to declare that the PCs lose if they take too much time to accomplish something important.

Award XP only for the completion of goals. A goal not completed earns no XP.

So lets say the party needs to keep something from happening. You can award XP by percentage based on how on time or late the group is in getting to their goal.

Party stops the bad guys and saves all captives- 100% XP
Party stops the bad guys only after several captives have been murdered-75% XP
Party stops the bad guys only after most of the captives are murdered- 50% XP
Party stops the bad guys only after the captives are killed and the evil plan is enacted 0% XP

You don't have to force anything. Let them nap till their blessed little hearts are content- and watch their smug faces as you inform them that mopping up the spilled milk after it has run off the counter and soaked into the carpet results in no progress whatsoever with regard to level advancement.

Want to level? Get off your rear and adventure!

 

[Corwin]

This is because resting early isn't a mechanical problem. No mechanics are entirely going to stop it. You can't expect a rule patch to fix a social issue. If one player is being abusive to another, or a player is metagaming, or one player is optimized by the others aren't, or one player spends all their time on their smartphone then turning to the rulebook won't solve anything. There's nothing in the DMG, no house rule or narrative fix, that will solve the Facebook issue.
The issue exists at the table with the players, and in the unfolding narrative, and the solution needs to take place at the same level.

This. And pretty much only this, really. When it all boils down.

 

[Uller]

You could implement a house rule that resting is in real time. So if the party takes a short rest you pull out your phone and stop paying attention to them for a while. If they take a long rest "Okay. See you all tomorrow! "

Sent from my SCH-I535 using EN World mobile app

 

[Mistwell]

That I brought the rules into the discussion was to show how DMs are left to their own devices. And now I'm talking about DMs that run published campaigns. They read the DMG too.

That the rulebook dicusses the issue is to no help when you don't write adventures yourself. The writer whose work you buy is supposed to have read that stuff.

Besides, for all its discussion there is still next to zero actual enforcement mechanisms.

I don't think that's a fair read of what you wrote. It might have been what you were thinking, but it's not really what you wrote to start this thread. As a reminder:

The spiel, btw, is "just add time constraints through your story". But that's just dishonest - it's not part of either the rules or its supplements.

When you specify "not part of the rules or its supplements" you seem to be making it clear that being part of the rules is at least a meaningful part of your point.

Now, here comes the elephant(s) in the room, that nobody seems to actually want to discuss:

* The official published scenarios never* provide what's needed to enforce this attrition.

* The rules never enforce any attrition.

* In fact, the rules bend over backwards making attrition as unenforceable as possible.

When you give a list of three items, and two out of those three items specify the rules rather than the published scenarios, it seems fair to say the rules are a meaningful part of your point.

So when you say,

You don't get to misinterpret my mention of the rules to say my points are incorrect.

I think that's a blatantly unfair accusation. I didn't misinterpret your mention of the rules. I presented them with full context, and they very clearly highlighted the rules as a meaningful part of your point. Indeed, any way you look at that first post, you're either saying the rules are 50% of your point, or 66% of your point. It's how you stated your point: rules and supplements, or published adventures and rules and rules.

The rules do in fact address this issue. They do not "enforce" the issue because that's not a useful measurement when discussing RPG rules and this topic. They give you a tool to address an issue if that issue arises in your group. It does not necessarily arise in every group because there's too much group variation for it to be a generalization. Not every group uses combat as often as other groups, not every group has a party composition that gets a lot out of short rests, not every group wants to take pauses as often as other groups, and of course not every adventure allows for more frequent resting. But if you run into the issue in your group, they give you a tool to address that issue. And that seemed to be your point. You claimed there was no good means to add constraints on resting provided in the rules. But, there is. So yes, that portion of your point appears incorrect.

I have never said the DMG is devoid of adventure writing advice.

Strawman. Neither I, nor anyone else here, has ever claimed you made such a general statement. I was addressing your much more specific statement concerning placing constraints on resting. The DMG does provide a tool to offer constraints on resting.

I am saying there is little to no enforcement in the rules as a whole, and that there are more rules that work against enforcement than toward it.

As I said, "enforcement" is an odd approach. IF the issue comes up, the rules provide a tool to help address that issue. The rules do not work against using that tool. In fact the spells you mention ultimately run counter to your point - if the party is expending precious limited resources to rest, only to end up with a random encounter as they exit the rest causing them to rest again, it sure seems like that's a self-defeating method of resting. The rules (multi-part encounters and random encounters and instructions on how to use time constraints and rest interruption) appear to deal with this fine and do not work against doing that.

The rules don't get away with hundreds of pages that ignore the issue, and then simply writing a few paragraphs that off-load the burden on the DM (or adventure writer). Where are the actual enforcement variants?

First of all, quantity of rules is meaningless. It's quality of those rules to address the issue that is the only thing that's got meaning. And the rules we're talking about, which is about 8 pages in the DMG between chapter 3 and chapter 5, address it fine in my opinion.

Second, it's not "off-loading the burden" on the DM. A list of random encounters and a time frame to check for those encounters, or a built-in multi-part encounter, means the bulk of the burden is on the adventure writer and not the DM. Now if an adventure said, "you should maybe come up with some random encounters" and left it to the DM to determine everything about those random encounters, then you'd be correct. But that's not an accurate scenario.

As for "enforcement variants" that's again not a very useful construct. It's not an issue of "enforcement" it's an issue of toolsets.

Excellent. Now, what are your thoughts about Tyranny, Abyss, Strahd, Thunder and Yawning? Would you say Princes is typical or atypical? ...So Princes get an OK from you. That's great to hear! Any other WotC 5e modules you'd like to share info on? Or do you concede my point that this stuff is mostly absent from the edition, even though it's more central to balance than ever?

That's not a particularly fair response Cap. You didn't specify a list to start with, you made a broad statement about how the rules and adventures don't have any support for this issue. I addressed the rules and then spent a lot of time to go through literally a random adventure that I happened to have, covering hundreds of pages and giving you specific exact quotes so you can see how a published adventure addresses this issue. And now you're argument has become a moving target - I addressed your generalization so you just shift to some other adventure without having specified one to begin with. Not fair. Pretty clear if I chose a second one, you would just punt on that one too and claim I had not covered some other set of adventures.

I am not going to address every single adventure. First, because I don't own them all. Second, because that's not a fair burden to put on anyone.

I do have Storm King's Thunder handy. I am not going to go page by page through that adventure though, because you already demonstrated that's mostly a waste of my time as you will just dismiss it as "one adventure". But I will say the adventure does have similar references all over the place to random encounters, it has a huge section in chapter three on the topic, it gives some guidelines on how to use it, and includes this text:

"Characters exploring the North are likely to encounter wandering monsters. Such encounters can occur as often as you like-but keep in mind that too many random encounters can bog down the adventure and cause players to lose interest in the story. You can roll on the Random Wilderness Encounters table or choose an appropriate encounter. Each encounter is described in more detail after the table. For guidelines on how to use random encounters effectively, see "Random Encounters" in chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide..."

And then it proceeds to provide a truly huge list of random encounters and variations based on the terrain the characters are traversing and a change for percentage odds based on that terrain, including Forest, Grassland, Hills, Moors, Mountains, Roads, Trails, Sea, and Tundra. And every one of those encounters has a full write-up.

Then there is a second section just for Ice Wind Dale random encounters, with similar level of detailing.

Then there is a third section just for random encounters during Air Travel.

There are also several multi-stage combat situations and patrol situations that can also put constraints on too much resting.

Now you might say that most of these are non-dungeon oriented, and you'd be right. But, that's because this adventure is non-dungeon oriented. It's an adventure that involves a lot of travel, outdoors. So the encounters are tailored to the adventure. But if you try to overdo resting during this adventure, they've given you the tools to interrupt that, and to keep the adventure moving and drain the character resources if they try to do that.

And it's not some huge burden on the DM. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. If the issue arises where you as the DM feel the party is resting too often and the adventure is bogging down from that or meaningfully being altered because of it, the adventure gives you an easy tool to use to address it. All you need to do is roll either a percentage dice or d20, depending on the location, and you have your random encounter to interrupt the rest with. Or you can skip that step and just choose an appropriate random encounter. Either way, not a lot of burden on the DM there, as the adventure writer went to a lot of effort to create some detailed encounters for you to use, complete with descriptions and stats and tactics and treasure and terrain suggestions and everything.

I hope I do not get another "but that's just one adventure" hand-waive response. If me looking through the two adventures I have here (and it's not like we're talking about a looooong list of adventures that are out for 5e) isn't enough to demonstrate this issue is in fact considered by both the rules and the adventures, then I'd suggest you're trying to "win" an argument more than actually get to the bottom of your question regarding whether it's an issue that's addressed.

 

[Satyrn]

Good points. I had been eyeballing x3 per day, and it just looked like too many, but I haven't wanted to shortchange short rest classes. That they wouldn't necessarily be running on empty when a short rest happens makes sense, though, so x2 does look to be a fair amount.

I can give you a bit more advice on this. I feel like my gnome battlemaster would be swimming in superiority dice at 3x. At 2x, I think I'd be feeling like I have plenty for the day but not so many that I would want to recklessly squander them, thus keeping them valuable and interesting.

That's to say I think 2x is far closer to the right amount than 3x would be.

 

[Kalshane]

The nearest corollary I've ever seen in any module to this is in some adventures both from PF and 4e where within the module are (strong) suggestions indicating at what point(s) the party will level up. These annoy me to no end as they assume a) I'm running it as written, and b) I'm using anything close to a standard advancement rate.

This is a tangent, but no one is requiring you to use them or adhere to them. I actually like them because they give you an idea of what party level the adventure writer had mind when creating that portion of the adventure. (I've also used them when I've decided I don't feel like bothering with tracking XP for that particular campaign.)

If you're doing a lot of modifications to the adventure then this would be a yet another thing to simply modify ignore. I'm not sure that "The party is expected to reach 5th level after defeating Lord Fussypants" is any different than "Lord Fussypants is expected to have four bodyguards in attendance at all times" when you're making changes to the adventure.

 

[OB1]

I would love to see an official campaign module written with this in mind.

Even if it were, it likely wouldn't produce the same results. Official modules have to be written too generically to bring about the kind of results I get with Exploration/Mission phases in my homebrew.

At the same time, you can apply these principals to any of the official APs, but the problem of course is that if the stakes you set up are real, then failure of a mission would mean having to homebrew material to either get the players back on the AP or veering off in another direction. Having the ability to branch and change isn't something an AP can really do well and even if it tried, it could never cover every possible scenario.

Again, if you want challenge, your players are good with an AP ending early due to TPK and you don't want to do much work, have them roll 3d6 in order or give them a starting array of 8, 9, 10, 10, 11, 12 to work with and see what happens.