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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7179844" data-attributes="member: 996">I don't think so.  I can imagine a couple of ways the DM could rule to fix things up without actually authoring a lot of variants, and some mere wording changes that could make the game more open to such interpretations....  Not one of the approaches I was considering, but not as hard as it sounds - simply overhauling CR numbers could do probably be sufficient on that end. That is a major stumbling block to a purely mechanical fix, yes. Considering what 3e-style monsters were like, that doesn't sound like a fantastic idea.  DMing is enough work without monsters as detailed and system-mastery-requiring and optimized PCs.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />[sblock="...hopefully the last..."] Of course.  To be fair, Essentials did re-introduce a pacing-sensitive imbalance between the new AEU martial classes and the traditional AEDU classes, including the powered-up Wizard sub-classes, but it only edged in that direction a little, the Fighter & Thief lost their Dailies, but the Wizard only got more powerful encounters & greater versatility in preparing spells (all but at-wills became preped, and they could retrain new spells without losing the old ones - unmatched Tier-1-prepped-caster-style 'strategic flexibility,' by 4e standards, though still barely a hint of what other editions provide).  Well, pre-Essentials, classes were balanced in spite of day length, which, I know, is what you said.  I just felt like rephrasing it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />    In terms of class balance, mostly sorta true.  4e classes had rough resource parity, so they were balanced (with eachother, to the extent the designers got the powers right), regardless of day length - all classes were a bit more powerful when they popped dailies in an encounter, for the obvious Elephant-relevant example.  But the design still had daily resources, particularly surges, and wasn't designed solely around the encounter (an example of encounter-based design would be the 'D&D Gamma World' system, which was similar in many particulars, but, was, well, all-encounter - powers & even hps refreshed after each encounter).   And, you could still design an adventure around attrition over the day, it'd be primarily hp/surge attrition, as the exhaustion of dailies wasn't too devastating, and milestones granting action points and un-locking additional magic-item dailies mitigated it a little.  Monsters were designed around the encounter - since a given monster usually only existed for one encounter, afterall.  Since PCs weren't designed solely around a single encounter in that way, encounter balance (difficulty) was impacted by encounters/day.  So players could engineer an advantage in one encounter by successfully avoiding earlier ones, for instance.  [/sblock] More importantly, few DMs are going to have both the exceptional design talent and the sheer time to pull it off.   Acknowledges the elephant, which is good, but, still as has been pointed out, not a solution.  Even so, it's a perfectly reasonable way to run if you like that kind of pacing. That's really not in keeping with the spirit of 5e.  5e is not a take-it-or-leave-it system, it's a make-it-your-own system.Now, it is impractical for any but the most remarkably capable and rich-in-leisure-time DM to re-build 5e rules to impose mechanical balance that replaces the 6-8 encounter/day guideline, but there are surely other ways to acknowledge and tame that elephant....On the rulings-not-rules side, the DM can assert the same privilege to make judgments that he has in most other areas of the rules over the length of short & long rests.  That's not much, and it's odd, IMHO, that the PHB didn't just do so from the beginning.  A few weasel-words ('generally take...' 'your DM may allow...' '..recover of up to,'  etc)  would have left the requirements and benefits of rests in the DMs court.  The default 1 & 8 hr rests could have been spun as 'typical' or 'under ideal conditions' or something.  No actual rules would need to have been changed, just presented more like, well, so many other rules in 5e.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Using that latitude the DM wouldn't need to fit the pacing of his campaign to the 6-8 encounter guideline, he could, instead, fit the requirements/benefits of resting to the campaigns' pacing & situation at the time.  In a long, difficult journey, rests are impossible for days & weeks on end.  In an intense high-adrenaline raid, even a few minutes to catch your breath counts as a short rest.  Whether the DM presents that arbitrarily, in a linear structure or like an old-school-wargaming scenario-specific variant, or comes up with such rulings in response to player choices & situations, it should be perfectly workable.One the 'make the game your own' side, of course, it's harder to do at a stroke, entirely with mechanics, but if you do want both class balance and a consistent pacing that is different from the 6-8 encounter day, the DMG does have a modules that change the rules around rests, and just changing those those rules if no module is quite right for the desired pacing, is a much more practical undertaking than re-writing all the classes.  The key is consistent pacing.  You can make rests take more less time to fit a campaign that's generally going to be chugging along faster or slower than 6-8 encounters/day, but you're really just re-defining 'day,' and conforming to the guidelline.</blockquote>

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