D&D 5E Short and Long Rest limited Actions

[jaelis]

Perhaps Second wind could be changed to "As a bonus action, you can spend one of your Hit Dice to regain hit points, in the same way that you can do during a short rest."

Check out the 4E rules sometime

 

[Syntallah]

If it works for you, that's cool. You're combining two pools of energy together, which isn't necessarily a bad thing or impossible to do.

Using your hit point example... you currently have a pool of "energy" (hit points) that is worth a certain number of points. And you spend those points doing stuff (like resist getting knocked out.) And you can only do stuff until the pool is empty, at which point you need to rest in order to refill your energy pool.

Action Surge is the same thing, except that it's a pool of 1 point. You have a pool of "energy" that's 1 point deep and once you spend up to it you have to rest. Just like hit points might be a pool 25 points deep and once you spend up to it you have to rest. Or ki might be a pool 4 points deep and once you spend up to it you have to rest. Or Lay On Hands, or Sorcery points, etc. The mechanics are all pretty much the same. But the game creates this differing pools just because they tend to be easier for people to grasp and understand, and easier for them to balance.

But if you want to try and start combining all these pools together, that's great. Best of luck with that, and it'd probably be an interesting design challenge to get it balanced. The game already has another "alternative pooling" system in place with the Spell Point variant rule, where they switch over individually-leveled pools of spell slots into one massive "spell pool" of points with which you can spend them to cast spells. And indeed, I've seen people attempt something like you are talking about by trying to combine the "Spell Point" pool and the "Sorcery Point" pool together to form one cohesive system for the sorcerer class where both spells and metamagic are paid for out of this combined pool. Which is why I don't dismiss your idea out of hand.

The real question just ends up being whether Fighters actually need to be able to take additional Action Surges for the game to work better? What is gained from them getting that, other than this idea that being able to only do a fighter activity "one" time before resting doesn't "make sense"? There's a lot of stuff in D&D that doesn't "make sense" and can "break immersion"... so that's part of your dilemma. Why does this fighter activity warrant trying to re-write the rules for yourself, but so many other nonsensical things in the game don't?

It's the age-old question any of us who fiddle with the rules end up asking. I do it all the time. I find something in the game I think could be done differently... I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with things to try and get it to work... and then once I'm done I look at what I've put together and then honestly think to myself "Will this thing I've put together make any ACTUAL appreciable difference at the table if my players use it?" Or is it just one more oddity of a mechanical system that my players will use if I ask them to... but which won't actually result in my game feeling different?

Usually the answer is 'No'. And why? Because so much of the game is roleplaying, and *not* game mechanics. Which means any individual game mechanic gets used so infrequently that any problem with it comes and goes and I barely notice it during play. It's only BETWEEN games or BETWEEN campaigns that my mind wanders around thinking "You know, this might be better if it worked like..." But once I'm in the game itself... any problems I might've perceived out of it, almost never get perceived while within.

Good luck to you!

I too, tinker with things all the time... and wonder if it's worth it. I don't remember where I heard it, but an amazing quote goes like this: "Complexity is the currency of a gaming system". In other words, you can get as complex and fiddly as you want, with any rule in the Game, but is the cost in implementation (i.e. teaching, explaining, using, re-explaining, etc) worth this amazing new mechanic you've* come up with..?

*using this word in a very general sense, not directed at the OP

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Opinions?

I agree that it's kind of weird for a non-magical character to have a hard limit on ability usage. When you use HP (or hit dice) as an alternative limit, that doesn't make it less weird, because HP is an inherently weird mechanic in this edition. Whether it's more-weird or less-weird is a matter of opinion, but I personally don't see it as a favorable trade-off to ditch the hard-limit abstraction in favor of the HP abstraction.

Ignoring the concept of verisimilitude, just in terms of game mechanics, I really don't like this type of rule. Losing HP is a bad thing, to be avoided whenever possible. Hit Points are the only thing stopping you from dying, and I don't want to die. It's a punch in the gut, every time I lose HP, and I can't imagine using an ability fueled by HP unless it was absolutely necessary. (Which, incidentally, is the wrong way for me to look at it; the correct way to look at it is that I should spend HP whenever I expect that using the ability would save me more HP in the long run, as a result of stopping the threat more quickly.) It's hard for me to look at other players, when they lose HP, and I realize that they don't seem to even care. I don't know when that happened, that other people stopped caring about HP, but it's definitely gotten worse in 4E and 5E and this sort of rule would make it even worse.

Moreover, in 5E particularly, there's a lot of free healing every day. There's already a problem where PCs can punch way above their level when they only have one or two encounters per day, and letting the fighter turn their excess free healing into more actions would only exacerbate that problem. It would be hard to price things in such a way that ability usage remains reasonable across a variety of circumstances.

 

[5ekyu]

While i find the story and feel of short rest abilities fine - and especially action surge, I mean you cannot imagine why you might need a rest after that - there could be a reasonable way to extend it.

BUT...

I would not base it off hit points because hit points are a very replacable and fluid resource. If the extra action surge can yield three attacks or more it can really boil down to math not drama.

So instead, i recall there was an option for extra effort in the DMG where if you failed a roll by 1-2 you could succeed but at a cost that was iirc some obvious detriment. i believe it was called "Success at a Cost."

So for this lets consider the following approach to short or long rest abilities:
You may use any short rest recovery ability after you are out and before you have taken a short rest, but doing so costs you a level of exhaustion.
You may use any long Rest recovery ability after you are out and before you get a long rest but doing so costs you two levels of exhaustion.

Since exhaustion is a bit harder to recover than a block of HP... i think that this homebrew makes a lot of sense game-wise, mechanics-wise and story-wise.

 

[jaelis]

Problem with exhaustion levels is that they are such a bummer to have. If you used a rule like that, I would expect to see a lot of "Well, we had to push things for that fight, we definitely need to take a long rest now."

Which has verisimilitude, but its pretty dull for game play and unhelpful for balance.

Another take would be to use a recharge mechanic. For instance, short rest abilities charge automatically after a long rest, but after you use them you roll a d6 every hour, and it recharges on a 5 or a 6. Long rest abilities don't automatically start charged, but you roll every hour and they recharge on a 6. (That gives a 75% chance or so to recharge during an 8 hour long rest.)

 

[Mistwell]

It's a cinematic abstraction, not a simulation.

 

[Nevvur]

I wouldn't do it out of concern that one dedicated healer can render all encounter maths wonky, as he enables the rest of the party to spam their abilities. If you insist on using HP, I would reduce HP maximum rather than current HP. A better alternative IMO is to use HD instead.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Problem with exhaustion levels is that they are such a bummer to have.

That is an issue. Even just two levels can be severely detrimental. If you wanted to use that as your metric, I would recommend making a Constitution save with a scaling DC for each use, and only giving an Exhaustion level on a failure.

 

[FrogReaver]

Doesn't this argument extend to spell casters and spells the same as fighters?

How is there any verisimilitude in a wizard casting X spells per day?

 

[werecorpse]

I'm happy with the way it is