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

[shoak1]

Meh, modules aren't the game. You can have a good game with bad modules and vice versa.

(And, BTW, thanks for saying 'modules' instead of 'adventures' or 'APs,' makes me feel less ancient.)

A module does prep for you, but, IMHO, prep just isn't as valuable in 5e as it may have been in prior eds, and it's certainly not easy, either. So, yeah, buy a module so you don't have to do prep that's hard, I get. But prep isn't that useful, either, you're still going to have to react, improvise, & make rulings, regardless, and every time you do there's a chance to inject a little of the balance or challenge or whatever it is you were hoping the 6-8 encounter guideline might deliver.

Levels still have meaning even in a 5MWD, it's just that meaning is more hps/damage rather than bonuses/DCs - that's a matter of BA.

And it's not the core balancing mechanism, I'm not sure it's even a mechanism. It's a guideline that's supposed to help with balance, but balance is still primarily the DM's responsibility - like everything else, that's DM Empowerment, taking responsibility for the success of your campaign. You can't blame D&D for being imbalanced, it's virtually always been imbalanced, if it weren't, it wouldn't be D&D. Just be thankful that there's even that theoretical guideline, at all, it's one of the playtest promises that was actually delivered on, afterall.

LOL I guess that takes care of any problems I might have with the game. Just have the DM take care of anything missing or imbalanced, its his job anyway, not the game designers - got it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Just have the DM take care of anything missing or imbalanced, its his job anyway, not the game designers - got it.

Yep! The community was so divided that if 5e had been designed as a coherent game that worked in one particularly, clearly-defined, default way, anyone who didn't feel perfectly 'supported' by that default might have gone off and started an edition war against it.

There's no one default 5e. There's the basic free-pdf game, but there's also free material coming out every month in AL. There's the PH game with no options turned on that's arguably the standard, but there's also standardized AL play with more of those options turned on. There's the 6-8 encounter guideline, but there's also modules that don't exactly stick to it.

5e is a starting point, it's not what's between the covers, it's what you make of it - and you have to make /something/ of it, because it's no driverless car, it needs the DM behind the wheel or it doesn't run.

 

[Soul Stigma]

LOL I guess that takes care of any problems I might have with the game. Just have the DM take care of anything missing or imbalanced, its his job anyway, not the game designers - got it.

I've never known modules to do a better job of balancing and challenging than I do as a DM. You don't seem to like the notion that a lot of DMs don't see an issue where you do. I don't use modules personally (not since 1E anyway), and a big reason for it is that modules don't anticipate anything effectively, which always meant I was working on the fly more than if I designed my own adventures.

So I guess I'm saying that, yes, the DM does and should take care of anything missing or imbalanced. One size rarely fits all.

 

[kbrakke]

Guys you seem to be missing the point. Imagine all the published modules came out with no monster stats for any new monsters. You complain about it, saying they should have included stats for the new monsters. After all, aren't you buying a module so as to reduce your workload? So you post your complaint and we all say, hey its no biggee, this way you can make monster stats that suit you and your table...we tell you you could even change the monster to one of the published ones so as to not have to create any stats......

silliness....of course they should include monster stats.....of course they should include the core balancing mechanism, without which levels have very little meaning...come on guys....I mean what point are the monster stats or CR guidelines without rest regulation?

Monster stats can be made in a vacuum, the characters resting is something that must be determined in play.
Questions based on this.
If a specific party is finding the threats in a given adventure far easier than their CR would indicate (A pally/cleric party in Curse of Strahd for example), should the book provide you with options for increasing the difficulty to handle this specific group make up?

If the generic advise is ~2-3 encounters per short rest and 2 short rests per long rest what more should the books be doing? My recollection is not perfect, but I remember many places in Princes of the Apocalypse being marked as reasonable or save places to take rests. Should they explicitly provide you "How to pace this dungeon over the course of one adventuring day"? Should they provide more generic advise but take party make up in to account (EG, if you have more short resters than long resters try to have them get through these rooms before taking a rest, if they take a rest do x)? Should they provide explicit timers for your use (Once the players begin this dungeon, if they fail to complete it before a long rest BAD_THING happens).
Why would this advise be better than giving the DM the motivation of the villains and layout of the dungeon and allowing them to determine these things for themselves?

Regardless of which info you would like to see added, what would you want to cut from the book?

My personal answers are No, No and I when I buy a book these are the things I care about most. Background Stuff (Places, People, Names, Villains and their Motivations) > Monsters > Items > Maps > The Adventure > Specific advise for running the adventure.

I find pacing the adventure is based more on the party in front of me than the system or module. Which as a result makes me not want them to spend words and pages suggesting ways to pace it. I think a supplemental article, or chapter in a DM advise book would be worth it but still ultimately just be solid generic advise. Spending that time in a published module would be wasting space to me.

 

[Corwin]

I've played in games where the DM spent far too much time flipped around a 32-page module, constantly looking for whatever little tidbits of author-assumed data could help him make the "right decision".

I can't imagine a "fully comprehensive" module that is intended to cover every possibility and do all the DMs thinking for them. Ugh. A 300 page module intended to cover 8 hours of play? Nothankyou.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Should they explicitly provide you "How to pace this dungeon over the course of one adventuring day"? Should they provide more generic advise but take party make up in to account (EG, if you have more short resters than long resters try to have them get through these rooms before taking a rest, if they take a rest do x)? Should they provide explicit timers for your use (Once the players begin this dungeon, if they fail to complete it before a long rest BAD_THING happens).

I think the plausible approach for a module intended to stick to the 6-8 encounter guideline would be a linear ('railroad') story. Advice wouldn't be 'how to adapt the difficulty' but 'how to keep plot on the rails' - so-called 'GM Force' is good for that.

For instance, a module could give 6 encounters in an area before the party reaches a safe place to rest; if the party explores the portions of the area where only 4 of those encounters are nominally located, the other two are 'random encounters' out wandering that run into the PCs, or that pile on when their 'neighbors' are attacked, or that interrupt the first attempt to rest...
The party makes decisions, those decisions may affect the order in which they have the encounters (or not, the DM could 'force' that, as well), but they'll have those 6 encounters, in that area, in one day.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Guys you seem to be missing the point. Imagine all the published modules came out with no monster stats for any new monsters. You complain about it, saying they should have included stats for the new monsters. After all, aren't you buying a module so as to reduce your workload? So you post your complaint and we all say, hey its no biggee, this way you can make monster stats that suit you and your table...we tell you you could even change the monster to one of the published ones so as to not have to create any stats......

silliness....of course they should include monster stats.....of course they should include the core balancing mechanism, without which levels have very little meaning...come on guys....I mean what point are the monster stats or CR guidelines without rest regulation?

Rest regulation isn't required to maintain balance and challenge, though.

I've run adventuring days with one fight and days with "too many" small to mid size fights, and days with 1 or 2 big fights, etc, and they all work. They are all as challenging as I wanted them to be, the classes remain balanced, the game works fine.

5e is no 4e, when it comes to robust class balance, but it's isn't a delicate game.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

You pretty much have three scenarios in which over-resting might be a problem:

1. Traveling. The aforementioned desert trek, sea voyage and so forth. Having 6-8 encounters a day for 2 weeks straight is a bit ridiculous. And if there is no attrition for 1-2 low to mid difficulty battles a day you're basically just handing the PCs free xp and gp with no danger. I don't know how published adventures handle this sort of thing. The DMG doesn't provide enough insight on how to make this common fantasy staple into an exciting and challenging part of an adventure, however. My homebrew solutions were to:
*Add "harsh terrain" tags that drain HD, spell slots and add exhaustion. This represents minor challenges and obstacles overcome when traveling that don't necessarily need to be played out for the sake of brevity. This could include a horse breaking a leg and needing to be healed, a character being bitten by a cobra, heat stroke, etc.
*Require a long rest in such conditions to be a full 24 hours in some sort of shelter.
*Use high-difficulty Encounters tend to be high-difficulty ones or ongoing situations, such as the attack of dragon or a group of bandits that begin shadowing the party.
*Rigidly enforce food and water rules.

2. City Adventures. If you have an extended periods of city adventuring or your campaign is based around it, 5E doesn't do you a lot of favors with the resting rules. The good news is that city adventures are not thematically based around "attrition" anyway. It's usually about out-thinking and out-maneuvering your opponents, solving mysteries, winning allies, etc. Often these are dynamic situations in which time is of the essence, so you do have strings to pull. For a whole campaign I'd use a slower rest variant just to help balance things. For a just a single adventure or session I'd just ignore it.

3. Nibblers. These are the worst offenders--parties that go into a dungeon, engage in one encounter then retreat and rest. The 5MWD problem. Some players are naturally inclined to be nibblers. Other parties wouldn't even think to play that way. Sure you can attack them with random encounters, but they'll probably be well protected by rope tricks and tiny huts. And even if you do attack them, they'll just thank you for the xp. Sure you can restock the dungeon with every rest--but hey, MORE XP! You can institute a time limit--but do they really even want to save the princess or get the duke his family's sword back? Short of trapping them in the dungeon or some other extreme tactic, you're out of luck. Thankfully, I don't deal with groups like this very often and so I don't have to consider these tactics when I write content. WotC, on the other hand, should do so at every step of a published adventure. What happens if the PCs take a short rest in a dungeon? What happens if the PCs leave and take a long rest? What actions do the NPCs and villains take? How does the situation change? A paragraph for every dungeon level or chapter is all it would take and neglecting to give insight to DMs in what is a very common eventuality is just short-sighted.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I do agree that a few paragraphs on what various npcs do as time passes in the adventure would be a good thing. I'm not going to use that to try to force attrition via testing restrictions, and I don't want that to be the focus of such a thing, but I would love to see it included.

 

[Lanefan]

3. Nibblers. These are the worst offenders--parties that go into a dungeon, engage in one encounter then retreat and rest.

From the DM side these are a problem, but from the player side (and from the realism side where characters are people with a reasonable sense of self-preservation) this is often the most effective means of defeating a module and-or completing a mission, provided the table has enough patience to pull it off.

In the game I play in we're doing this nibbling tactic right now: we know that if we just try to gonzo in and lay waste to the place (a frost giant/white dragon stronghold) there's far more in there than we can handle, and we'll get annihilated. So, we're nibbling - a patrol here, a roomful of ogres there, then back off and reload for the next day; lather rinse repeat until we've beaten the population down to something we can handle in an all-out blitz.

And even some of the nibbles are proving to be almost more than we can chew!

The 5MWD problem. Some players are naturally inclined to be nibblers. Other parties wouldn't even think to play that way. Sure you can attack them with random encounters, but they'll probably be well protected by rope tricks and tiny huts. And even if you do attack them, they'll just thank you for the xp. Sure you can restock the dungeon with every rest--but hey, MORE XP! You can institute a time limit--but do they really even want to save the princess or get the duke his family's sword back? Short of trapping them in the dungeon or some other extreme tactic, you're out of luck. Thankfully, I don't deal with groups like this very often and so I don't have to consider these tactics when I write content. WotC, on the other hand, should do so at every step of a published adventure. What happens if the PCs take a short rest in a dungeon? What happens if the PCs leave and take a long rest? What actions do the NPCs and villains take? How does the situation change? A paragraph for every dungeon level or chapter is all it would take and neglecting to give insight to DMs in what is a very common eventuality is just short-sighted.

All it would take would be to set an arbitrary start point - for example, 'Day 1' is whatever day it is when the party first enter the ogre's cave that hides the real dungeon, and the module-as-written is a 'snapshot' of things as they are on that day - and a day by day or even week by week "development track" as to what happens next unless the adventurers somehow interrupt it. This development track might even include resting notes, e.g. "Day 8: The Fire Titan begins to awaken. Earthquakes become frequent and harsh enough to prevent long resting within the dungeon or immediate surrounds, and short-rest benefits can only be regained by passing a DC 12 saving throw on each attempt."

In some modules e.g. Tomb of Horrors this might just be a one-liner saying, in effect, "Other than by direct PC action the dungeon environment will remain unchanged for years to come." For other modules it might become much more complicated - and thus more necessary.

Take Keep on the Shadowfell. The entire premise of the module is the PCs are supposed to arrive just in time to disrupt what's going on in the big set-piece encounter at the end, but there isn't a word about what happens if the PCs get there early...or worse, three months late like my crew did. This is an example of a module that really could have used a "what if" timeline of events that I-as-DM could use as a backdrop behind what the PCs are doing, but as a 4e module the writers obviously expected (and it shows!) the party would be blasting through it non-stop. My crew nibbled, in no small part because they were busy fighting each other at the same time, and made repeated trips back to town; and at 6 days each way that makes time pass quickly!

Lan-"there's limits, of course, to how many 'what ifs' a module can answer but a development track would catch a lot of them"-efan