Short Rest Recovery and Daily Endurance.

[Xeviat]

Hi friends. After playing 5th for a while, my initial suspicions have proven true. Perhaps it's self fulfilling in a way, or simply from my experience with 3rd and 4th, but I'm not liking the largely long rest recovery system in the game. It has worked incredibly well for highly contained games, such as a dungeon crawl or an explicitly one day adventure (save the village children tonight, or they die at sunrise).

Now, the Fighter, Monk, Rogue, and especially the Warlock show me that the game can be balanced around short rests. I think this could work better for my groups more open games. When time isn't always a concern, having one or two battles in a game day feels like it overpowers the long rest classes (barbarian can always rage, wizard can always fireball).

I tried aiming for 3-4 hard-deadly fights a game day, but it still didn't work out. My players were still apt to use too much in the first fight and then struggle with the last. Yes, this could be "trained out", but my players aren't animals, and I want to run a game that plays the way they want to play it.

Now, if all spellcasters ran off the Warlock's chassis, there's an immediate problem with HP and curing. This can already happen with an MC Bard/Warlock or the Healer feat, but it becomes more of a problem when it applies to everyone. If healers get their spells back on short rest, then it's going to be safe to assume that HP recovery is going to be a lot faster.

Do you think this would be a problem? Would I simply want to vary the timetables of adventures, like have no chance to short rest sometimes? Would exploring some kind of wound system be good (I LOVE the idea of a WP/VP system, but then "cure wounds" needs to be rebranded if it doesn't "cure wounds").

I am looking to use Spell Points and convert the Warlock into Spell Points. I'm also looking to smooth out progressions. Since it's Spell Points divided by 3 as the goal, I may just go with 2 spell points per level and be done with it: with some adjusting, it makes the Monk into a half-caster with no spells known. I think this will avoid part of the warlock's issue of not having Spell slots for low level non-scaling spells.

What do you think?


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[mellored]

My houserule
Twice per day, you can use an action to take a short rest (and can't short rest otherwise).


Also, you can simply adjust short rest and long rest to whatever you want. A long rest could be a week, and a short rest a night. Or whatever.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The easier solution is to deny long rests. You can give a reason (inhospitable environment usually works) or it can be arbitrary (like 13th Age's full-heal-up after every 4th challenge).

 

[Oofta]

I use the optional rules where a short rest is a night's rest and a long rest is several days (usually a week or more).

I also regularly have carryover from one game session to the next and average around 6-10 combats between long rests and have 1 or 2 short rests.

I find that it fits better with my DM style. I still occasionally give people a short rest in a shorter period of time because they've found a healing temple or some such depending on what makes sense for the story.

 

[FrogReaver]

It takes more work to have an open world.

That said it may be best to steer clear of random encounters and have random mini events.

For example. Instead of wandering through the woods and coming across a band of orcs and fighting, you may wander through the woods and find 2 men being surrounded by orcs. Attempt to save them. Now instead of that ending this random encounter perhaps saving them opens up a door to another quest and so on such that this one chance encounter branched out into a full fledged multi-encounter adventure that always gives the players a reason to go on to the next leg instead of stopping too long to rest up.

Of course if your players are the kind to brush off any adventure that doesn't suit their fancy then there isn't much you can do except not run an open world campaign...

 

[MostlyDm]

It takes more work to have an open world.

That said it may be best to steer clear of random encounters and have random mini events.

For example. Instead of wandering through the woods and coming across a band of orcs and fighting, you may wander through the woods and find 2 men being surrounded by orcs. Attempt to save them. Now instead of that ending this random encounter perhaps saving them opens up a door to another quest and so on such that this one chance encounter branched out into a full fledged multi-encounter adventure that always gives the players a reason to go on to the next leg instead of stopping too long to rest up.

Of course if your players are the kind to brush off any adventure that doesn't suit their fancy then there isn't much you can do except not run an open world campaign...

This is good advice for random encounters in general.

My reusable random encounter tables are always resolved by generating 2 results, so that the encounter is with a dynamic event rather than just a group of hostile or nonhostile dudes.

In fact, I think I'm going to start a different thread to discuss it. I'm curious how other people handle random encounters.

 

[TwoSix]

Short rest is 6 hours. Long rest is 72 hours in a safe place. Use consumables to give more power as needed.

 

[Xeviat]

See, I enjoy tactical combat. By switching to a more short Rest focused recovery, I feel players will be less able to Nova. With short rests (or two short rests) giving the players a near full recovery, I can push the challenge, complexity, and difficulty of combats higher.

"But then just play 4E!" Well, I do like 4E, but I like the player rules (class structure, multiclassing) in 5th more than 4th. I do miss the tactical challenge of combat, though, so I'm trying to bring a little back.

Denying long rests or making long rests very long would only require my players to ration their long rest abilities; it wouldn't prevent overextension.


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[Xeviat]

Random events do sound like an interesting way to frame random encounters. Rather than a random fight with goblin scouts on be outskirts of the horde, it's an event: "you see worg riders approaching. They seem very determined to get somewhere, and aren't actively searching for something. What do you do?" The first sounds like a random fight. The second is the option to fight or follow or simply hide and let the threat go by, all which could effect the future game.


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[Lanliss]

A while back someone had a similar problem, and wanted all of the classes changed to Short rest. That gets tricky with things like single spell slots later on. One recommendation was to simply make everyone long rest, then build adventure days around that. It gets much easier, because you simply multiply all short rest mechanics by 3.