D&D 5E Short Rest House Rule Idea

[overgeeked]

The DMG makes it kinda clear they expect you to, and have balanced the game around, taking two short rests a day. I’ve let players do a short rest as a free action and it still wasn’t a problem. It mostly let the short rest classes nova along with the long rest classes. Everyone felt cool and awesome. Just upped the difficulty.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I'll add concerns with random encounters.

While attempting to short rest in a dangerous area, 1 hour should create a real risk of something coming along. In turn, players will need to think ahead for defensive measures such as alarms (magical or otherwise), barricading doors or arcane locks, setting a guard, rope trick, and so on. Remove this risk entirely (or delegate it purely to long rests), and you remove a strategic part of the game.

You also run the risk of a "5-minute rest" after every battle. If I'm a fighter, I'm burning off "second wind" because I know there's little risk of not getting it back immediately.

 

[John R Davis]

I am thinking of a new house rule for 5e around short rests. the Idea is that short rests are only 5 minutes long but you can only get the benefits of a short rest a number of times per day equal to your proficiency bonus.

Thoughts? Issues?

Exactly how we have been playing it for a few years
Works well

 

[Benjamin Olson]

So I think if I were allowing 5 minute (or whatever) short rests I'd just allow one special 5 minute breather a day, keep all other short rests at an hour, and not fiddle about with the proficiency bonus.

I mostly like the current short rest regime, but sometimes the full hour undermines the feel of the heroic moment, or brings in unwanted gamism. And sometimes the DM doesn't want to have to think about how the dungeon would react to our heroes awkwardly sitting around for an hour after laying down a path of death through the first four rooms. It would also allow for an interrupted 1 rest to become a successful 5 minute rest, which would make DMs feel a lot better about random encounters.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I am thinking of a new house rule for 5e around short rests. the Idea is that short rests are only 5 minutes long but you can only get the benefits of a short rest a number of times per day equal to your proficiency bonus.

Thoughts? Issues?

I guess that's fine, but I don't typically see a reason to have more than 2 short rests per long rest. Typically more than that is either irrelevant, or an example of a Warlock player trying to do something frustrating and stupid.

I guess the real question is: What outcome are you trying to achieve? Without knowing that I can only tell you what effects there are and guessing and the desired outcome.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

My house rule has been that short rests remain about an hour, but a character cannot benefit from more than 4 of them between long rests.

Since the standard adventuring balance was based around 2 short rests per long rest, I prefer that number to be a middle rather than a cap to be bouncing off of all the time. This also allows short rest recovery classes to be flexible in relationship to long rest recovery classes, which I believe was part of original intent.

By keeping duration at an hour, it makes it very rare that there will be situations when you'd want more than four. (Especially true with my group that is going to press on in a dungeon until they feel like they need a short rest, rather than attempt to take one after every encounter.)

Because an individual chooses whether they are intending to benefit from a short rest, it means that must because the party is taking a break for an hour you aren't automatically wasting one of your rests when you don't need it.

(I also use the healer's kit dependency variant rule, so you need to spend a healer's kit usage to spend HD during a short rest.)

The purpose of this rule (given that the results don't actually change the design expectation for number of short rests taken) is to maintain my suspension of disbelief for certain short rest recovery mechanics, and to provide a built in limitation on certain shenanigans that could be used. Even if they never come up in actual play, saying that the in-world physics put a limit on how often someone can benefit from resting gives me a sense of world continuity.

 

[NotAYakk]

The DMG makes it kinda clear they expect you to, and have balanced the game around, taking two short rests a day. I’ve let players do a short rest as a free action and it still wasn’t a problem. It mostly let the short rest classes nova along with the long rest classes. Everyone felt cool and awesome. Just upped the difficulty.

I have played with giving the Warlock this as a cap feature.

But as an action.

An action is an interesting thing; it is expensive in combat, and cheap outside.

 

[Flamestrike]

I'll add concerns with random encounters.

While attempting to short rest in a dangerous area, 1 hour should create a real risk of something coming along. In turn, players will need to think ahead for defensive measures such as alarms (magical or otherwise), barricading doors or arcane locks, setting a guard, rope trick, and so on. Remove this risk entirely (or delegate it purely to long rests), and you remove a strategic part of the game.

You also run the risk of a "5-minute rest" after every battle. If I'm a fighter, I'm burning off "second wind" because I know there's little risk of not getting it back immediately.

That's why you put a hard limit of 2 per Long rest, and leave the rest in the hands of the players.

I aim for a median of around 5-6 encounters in an adventuring day [any period of 'in game' time between 2 long rests, featuring at least one encounter].

Some days will feature less, and the occasional day will feature more.

Roughly 80 percent of my adventuring days sit inside this paradigm, and I find that's more than enough to make the whole 'rest abuse/ nova/ 5MWD' problem become self policing. In that the Players know I'm onto the 5MWD and come to expect another encounter just around the corner, and a hard 'No' to any attempts to game resting so they police themselves at that point (conserving resources, just in case).

I find handing out (max 2) short rests (mostly handwaived) per long rest avoids the whole 'We find a room in the dungeon, and sit down for an hour and have lunch, surrounded by enemies' phenomenon which is super jarring and unrealistic (moreso, when my games often feature Doom clocks and other contrivances to maintain the longer adventuring day median).