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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7170001" data-attributes="member: 71699">An angle to consider is how rests balance against map scale? Let me explain that. I'm running OOTA. Initially, my PCs were long-resting after each encounter. Consequences were typical - <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">over-valued "recover on long-rest" features</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">under-valued "recover on short-rest" features</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">clear trend of alpha-striking</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">consequent need to make each encounter lethal to keep them mechanically interesting (that's not to say we couldn't have narrative encounters, but only that mechanically an easy encounter that wasn't a narrative encounter became pointless)</li> </ul>The issue here was not inability for me as DM to introduce more encounters between rests. I can do that. But whereas in a dungeon the next event is minutes away down a corridor - so 8 hours is a long time - on a world map the next event is days away across the Darklake (or wherever) and 8 hours is a blip.My goals as a DM therefore became <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I wanted to mix up encounters more so that there could still be lethal encounters, but could also be mechanically meaningful easy and medium encounters</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I wanted to be able to allow lengthy travel times and periods of downtime to deliver my vision of an open-world campaign</li> </ul>I felt drawn toward the gritty realism DMG option - one week long rests - and we may indeed go there in due course. But for now we're using 24 hour long-rests. Extended short-rests (8 hours+) still count for recovering levels of exhaustion and training days (we're using that option for downtime). My players accepted this without complaint once I explained that my goal was not to tax them beyond what their features were balanced against (6-8 medium to hard encounters between long rests) but only to map long-rests against the temporal and spatial scale of the campaign. Which got me thinking about this thread and wanting to draw attention to this finding. As empowered DMs we can always drop in more encounters between long-rests (yes, it can stress our narrative, but we can do it). So that isn't the issue. And we aren't (or at least, I'm not) aiming to stress PC capabilities more than the designers' game balance intends (which is stated expressly in the DMG). Our issue is doing all that without bogging down our campaign, and that depends on our temporal and spatial scale. It accordingly makes sense to scale rests against that scale. I feel like the DMG misleads in this regard because longer long-rests isn't mechanically about grittier realism at all. It's about whether my next encounter is a corridor or leagues away. A threat system such as the Angry DM advocates is kind of like a squashy balloon. When players push down on one part of the balloon, it swells up in another. So if they avoid challenge by dawdling, more challenge rises up elsewhere via threat. It alleviates to some extent the narrative stress of finding ways to keep them moving. However, to me it now feels like it fixes the wrong problem. I now feel like a DM needs to look at their temporal and spatial scale, and match their long-rests to that.</blockquote>

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