D&D (2024) Rests should be dropped. Stop conflating survival mechanics with resource recovery.

[Vaalingrade]

then you might as well remove short rests altogether and refresh per encounter,

That's what I'm saying to do!

 

[tetrasodium]

It sounds like you are saying that Diablo potions would be the primary way people recover hit points, spells, and rechargeable abilities. Really? Is there even a Diablo TTRPG, or any TTRPG for that matter, that does it that way? And if so, what is this system that is so good that the game in question is popularly played and lauded for its awesomeness?

Yeah, it's not even worth my time to go into all the reasons why that wouldn't or shouldn't work for D&D, mainly because those reasons are many and obvious.

/clutches their pearls with a gasp

Agreed on the first part but shifting it to require heavy duty glamping/safe haven in town with something like a PC Level number of days or weeks rather than "we chose not to go for forced march penalties & went to sleep last night" would avoid a lot of problems and make it easy for the gm (or any individual player who cares about something in the lurch) to sell "I don't think it's appropriate to rest here guys" & "I don't think we can afford to wait around that long guys" without an endless chain of scrounging for contrived reasons that border on fiat & trolling the group to justify those statements.

The rest mechanics available to PCs make monsters like trolls & even a lich look like downright fragile beings that could collapse in death at any second.

 

[mamba]

That's what I'm saying to do!

I know, but you conveniently left out my opinion on this

Not that I would want anything to be per encounter

 

[Smackpixi]

Recover everything on short rests. Recover short rests on a long rest. Limit one long rest per day.

Permit using all rests first in the morning for anyone interested in playing a long rest based character idea.

 

[Willie the Duck]

In general, I am sympathetic to the notion of readdressing the recharge mechanics of the game. I don't feel that there really was* 'a plan' on this since 1974 and not everyone took up the 'if you go rest, you are done for the evening, and in the meantime the dungeon will react and/or my other group might come and take all the treasure' method Gary and crew theoretically used. The balance of power between people with always-on abilities and those that get used up (and the balance between high-HP and high-AC fighter-types) has always* been dependent on how frequently the group is allowed to recharge without serious consequences (sometimes leading to other verisimilitude breaks like doom clocks where they make no sense).
*excepting 4e and 13A, which both hit nerves for people by being inherently gamist conceits.

That said, well first of all I agree with everyone else who said chugging mana potions isn't their idea of better verisimilitude*. Second to that, if you are going to readdress the rest/recharge system, readress the fundamental assumption that underpin it and/or proceed from it:
*where does the big bad NPC who lives in the abandoned temple cut off from civilization get their mana potion renewal?

• Spells** are generally powerful on a per-day level (to make them worth giving up high hp/AC/at-will attacks/etc.), but not overly grand in scope unless they also have a costly component or the like. Should that change? Should there be spells that take a week to cast/recharge from? Months? Should spells be weaker but casters more rugged or be able to do most of them at will? Should there be spells with other riders to balance them (uses a 3rd level slot, but locks a 2nd level slot after you use it as a cooldown). If spells don't recharge during a rest, Should they each recharge individually (cooldowns, or individual prep)?**excepting cantrips and ritual spells
• Martials have started getting per-rest abilities alongside casters. Should that be reconsidered? One D&D's weapon system seems to include special abilities which proc under certain circumstances (right weapon, right target type), would that be a better model? Would they be better with something like 3E psionics focus quality (action taken to establish focus, once focused either gain benefit or expend for other benefit)?
• Hit points are still going to be a resource generally recovered by rest unless we change that. Do you look at that? Perhaps HP really do mostly equal combat luck and each battle the coffers refill (add lingering would and 'grievously injured' status effects).

All that is just spit-balling ideas, but the point is -- assessing whether the D&D recharge system works well for you is not a bad idea, but then don't just stick another poorly aligned patch on the thing, break down the entire assumption chain and reassess what you're really looking for in total (at which point you're designing your own system, I guess).

 

[MichaelSomething]

I guess resource attrition is a scared cow people are willing to kill.

 

[tetrasodium]

In general, I am sympathetic to the notion of readdressing the recharge mechanics of the game. I don't feel that there really was* 'a plan' on this since 1974 and not everyone took up the 'if you go rest, you are done for the evening, and in the meantime the dungeon will react and/or my other group might come and take all the treasure' method Gary and crew theoretically used. The balance of power between people with always-on abilities and those that get used up (and the balance between high-HP and high-AC fighter-types) has always* been dependent on how frequently the group is allowed to recharge without serious consequences (sometimes leading to other verisimilitude breaks like doom clocks where they make no sense).
*excepting 4e and 13A, which both hit nerves for people by being inherently gamist conceits.

That said, well first of all I agree with everyone else who said chugging mana potions isn't their idea of better verisimilitude*. Second to that, if you are going to readdress the rest/recharge system, readress the fundamental assumption that underpin it and/or proceed from it:
*where does the big bad NPC who lives in the abandoned temple cut off from civilization get their mana potion renewal?

• Spells** are generally powerful on a per-day level (to make them worth giving up high hp/AC/at-will attacks/etc.), but not overly grand in scope unless they also have a costly component or the like. Should that change? Should there be spells that take a week to cast/recharge from? Months? Should spells be weaker but casters more rugged or be able to do most of them at will? Should there be spells with other riders to balance them (uses a 3rd level slot, but locks a 2nd level slot after you use it as a cooldown). If spells don't recharge during a rest, Should they each recharge individually (cooldowns, or individual prep)?**excepting cantrips and ritual spells
• Martials have started getting per-rest abilities alongside casters. Should that be reconsidered? One D&D's weapon system seems to include special abilities which proc under certain circumstances (right weapon, right target type), would that be a better model? Would they be better with something like 3E psionics focus quality (action taken to establish focus, once focused either gain benefit or expend for other benefit)?
• Hit points are still going to be a resource generally recovered by rest unless we change that. Do you look at that? Perhaps HP really do mostly equal combat luck and each battle the coffers refill (add lingering would and 'grievously injured' status effects).

All that is just spit-balling ideas, but the point is -- assessing whether the D&D recharge system works well for you is not a bad idea, but then don't just stick another poorly aligned patch on the thing, break down the entire assumption chain and reassess what you're really looking for in total (at which point you're designing your own system, I guess).

When you start going back to 2e & earlier it took long enough & the system was lethal enough that resting was pretty much "I think we are probably pretty run down. We should probably pull back & find somehere to rest up "->[events pass] ->"Ok you guys made it back to town, you don't encounter any issues in the days/weeks it takes you to rest up but you spend level TIMES X on your living expenses each day" 3.x was a little faster with the addition of CLW wands but those were also important to cover between fight healing & the GM could trivially just say that a vendor was out of stock on them or that they only had the one left in stock. In 3.x (but not really 1e/2e because spell recovery was too slow) a cleric could speed it up by dumping spell slots into healing, but doing that left the cleric feeling like deadweight absent all of those spell slots and/or stuck with a sheet full of cure spells instead of anything useful in a fight if there was an interruption; that made the cleric have reason to push for making sure that the GM agreed now/here was a good place to rest.

 

[Willie the Duck]

When you start going back to 2e & earlier it took long enough & the system was lethal enough that resting was pretty much "I think we are probably pretty run down. We should probably pull back & find somehere to rest up "->[events pass] ->"Ok you guys made it back to town, you don't encounter any issues in the days/weeks it takes you to rest up but you spend level TIMES X on your living expenses each day"

Disclaimer: Anything 2e(/BECMI) and earlier, I always throw in the asterisk that I don't expect people to have played completely by the book.
I think this was really DM-dependent. I certainly know lots of people resting up out in the wilderness X hours away from the dungeon (or equivalent). At the levels where you were likely to be in that situation* a party with a cleric or two (who could re-prepare all their healing spells during the timeframe of a day not adventuring) could heal up (and then recharge healing spells) well within their ration-load time limit**. Yes, there were wilderness encounter checks, but the net-average damage per day had to be less than the expected healing rate, or else the party had no business entering the dungeon in the first place (since they would need all their resources for the trip home).
*and in my experience how the game played out name-level and above was total group-dependent free-for-all.
**and if there are living expenses per day for wilderness living, I never saw them enforced.

3.x was a little faster with the addition of CLW wands but those were also important to cover between fight healing & the GM could trivially just say that a vendor was out of stock on them or that they only had the one left in stock. In 3.x (but not really 1e/2e because spell recovery was too slow) a cleric could speed it up by dumping spell slots into healing, but doing that left the cleric feeling like deadweight absent all of those spell slots and/or stuck with a sheet full of cure spells instead of anything useful in a fight if there was an interruption; that made the cleric have reason to push for making sure that the GM agreed now/here was a good place to rest.

Yeah, 3e really changed depending on whether the group had discovered (and decided to use) the CLW-wand resource-limit-bypass. But yes, overall point is spot on: even in 3e, it was in peoples' interest to get the DM to declare this next spot past the last fight as safe to rest, recharging their per-days (and pulling the power balance towards them relative to those with at-will capacity).

 

[tetrasodium]

Disclaimer: Anything 2e(/BECMI) and earlier, I always throw in the asterisk that I don't expect people to have played completely by the book.
I think this was really DM-dependent. I certainly know lots of people resting up out in the wilderness X hours away from the dungeon (or equivalent). At the levels where you were likely to be in that situation* a party with a cleric or two (who could re-prepare all their healing spells during the timeframe of a day not adventuring) could heal up (and then recharge healing spells) well within their ration-load time limit**. Yes, there were wilderness encounter checks, but the net-average damage per day had to be less than the expected healing rate, or else the party had no business entering the dungeon in the first place (since they would need all their resources for the trip home).
*and in my experience how the game played out name-level and above was total group-dependent free-for-all.
**and if there are living expenses per day for wilderness living, I never saw them enforced.


Yeah, 3e really changed depending on whether the group had discovered (and decided to use) the CLW-wand resource-limit-bypass. But yes, overall point is spot on: even in 3e, it was in peoples' interest to get the DM to declare this next spot past the last fight as safe to rest, recharging their per-days (and pulling the power balance towards them relative to those with at-will capacity).

oh yea I'd be shocked if there were not groups who were hardcore on tracking things like travel times/resting/etc in the wilderness & such. My point was more why you rarely saw players brave enough to dismiss the GM's warning & saying "yea lets rest here I bet we will be fine" but it was still pretty common to just handwave it.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Thinking about it more, if powers are attached to HD, short rests wouldn’t need to be that long. Just a quiet place to meditate or rest and recover, narratively speaking. The amount of powers increases with HD and your adventuring day is kind of based on that resource. Since you only recover half on a long rest, there would be a feeling of attrition. So really, it would only be on a long rest that you have to worry about rest cycles. For the most part. Since a ‘short rest’ is narrative, you could include complications to disrupt them. You’d have to, as a dm, let the players know there is the potential for risk.