D&D 5E Short rests and encounters a day.

[AnotherGuy]

I've changed short rests to 15 minutes in my game. Depending, a group might get in 3-5 short rests, usually less.

Still working on tweaking long rests primarily as I don't like the "get all HP back in a single night", but don't want long rest abilities to take a week to recover. I'm thinking something along the lines that resting in a dungeon = no HD recovery, resting on the road = 1/2 HD recovery, resting in a safe place = full HD recovery.

We have something similar
travel rests (1/2 HD recovery) - dungeon and road
long rests (full recovery) requires a safe place, 24 hours minimum

 

[AnotherGuy]

That is what we do. Spend 1 HD recharges an encounter ability. Spend 2 HD recharge a daily ability. Spend at least 1 HD any time you get healing (even magical). It works well with 5e in our experience. HD becomes the exhaustion resource.

Ours is a little more nuanced just because there is a big difference between casting a Cone of Cold and casting Knock or an Action Surge with 1 attack or 3 attacks.

Level (1-4) - HD Cost (1)
Level (5-8) - HD Cost (2)
Level (9-12) - HD Cost (3)
Level (13+) - HD Cost (4)

i.e. if you are a 13th level Fighter and you want to get one additional attack, you only need an Action Surge for Levels 1-4 so it costs you 1 Hit Dice. If you want to have your 3 full attacks it is going to cost you 3 Hit Dice as it needs to be a level 11 ability.
You do the same with spells. A basic fireball is in the 5-8 bracket, therefore 2 Hit Dice. If you sup up the that fireball you may have to pay extra Hit Dice. It all depends at what level you want to use it at. Of course you need to be of the required level.

EDIT: If you don't have the Hit Dice you pay in Levels of Exhaustion. You also cannot recover HD in our travel rests if you have Levels of Exhaustion. A travel rest reduces your Level of Exhaustion by 1. If you get knocked unconscious you gain a Level of Exhaustion.

 

[jimtillman]

How many encounters and short rest do you actually have on an average adventuring day?
I'm curious how other groups usually do it.
The games I play in, it is widely random.

I'm wondering how it would turn out to just have short or long rests for most things.
I'm thinking short rests would be easier to balance but I'm not sure.

Either increase short rest abilities to long rests or turn long rest abilities into short rest.
Example:
Ki (2*monk level) + Wis mod regains on long rest.
or
Casters having having less spells maybe about 1/2 the first 5 spell levels and allow them to be regained on a short rest.

when i was playing 5th about 3 though mostly pf2 these days for my d&d rpg needs

 

[Baron Opal II]

How many encounters and short rest do you actually have on an average adventuring day?
I'm curious how other groups usually do it.
The games I play in, it is widely random.

# of Encounters: 0 - 12 and up. Although, then it is mostly just one long encounter and chase scene.

Short Rests: up to three per day. That seems to nicely balance the short and long rest classes, while giving everyone sufficient opportunities for self-soothing with HD.

 

[Steampunkette]

Here's what I've learned:

Short and Long Rests should take exactly how much time you need them to take as a DM/Narrator, rather than a pre-specified fixed quantity of time based on a person who wrote a book of rules that you are explicitly encouraged to change or discard to best fit your personal game.

And you should let players know this during Session 0.

Because while the "Five Minute Workday" can be somewhat lessened by short rests, it can also be exacerbated by short rests. But it can also be -ruined- by rests in general.

Adventures move at the speed of plot. And for some adventures that means weeks of effort but for others it means a mad dash through the villain's castle, and short rests/long rests are still part of the common game-cycle even when you're running fairly short narrative duration adventures where taking an 8 hour break in the middle of hostage negotiations to get some shut eye really isn't an option.

Isn't that right, Harry?

If you want your party to face 3 encounters before they can get a short rest in, give them a short rest after the third encounter unless they come up with some clever way to finagle a short rest outside of your plans (player agency is still a thing), but you can frame a short rest as an option with description of a scene or situation... and then have it take 5 minutes.

Or 15 minutes.

Or 3 hours.

Depending entirely on how you want your story's plot to unfold.

Same thing with long rests. "As you take a breather behind the locked door you lock eyes with other members of your party and realize that this is it, this is the time to dig deep. There's no turning back and it's time to bring all your might to bear. You gain the benefits of a long rest."

Because whether it takes 6 seconds or 6 days is in the end largely irrelevant outside of the shared narrative you're creating with your players.

Worried your party is gonna blow all their power on a single encounter, take a rest, and then do it again? Chain encounters. Have the baddies wonder what happened to their friends and interrupt. Have the noise of killing the evil vizier draw the attention of cutthroats or his allies or the guard... Have utterly common NPCs scream in fear and shock when they witness an act of gruesome violence, then flee, screaming for help.

"You're punishing the players!" Sure, you could see it that way. Mostly I'm reminding them through the shared narrative not to play their characters as bundles of game-mechanics rather than characters to inhabit. That blowing all their resources in one shot and expecting to be rewarded for their gamist ingenuity won't go well. Or, at least... not all the time.

 

[Stalker0]

I have never understood why the game is designed around a 6-8 encounter day. That's just a LOT, its both narratively weird (even in a lot of adventuring lore the heroes aren't facing tons of encounters in a single day, but often our journeying over several days).

Are their DMS that really enjoy pushing in that many encounters into a single day, that actually think that makes the game better, more exciting, more narratively interesting....or do they only do it because thats what you need to do to properly drain your PC's resources?

I personally would much much MUCH prefer balancing around 2-3 encounters, and then letting the 6 encounter day be a truly epic, absolutely stamina crushing session, rather than the expected norm.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I have never understood why the game is designed around a 6-8 encounter day. That's just a LOT, its both narratively weird (even in a lot of adventuring lore the heroes aren't facing tons of encounters in a single day, but often our journeying over several days).

Are their DMS that really enjoy pushing in that many encounters into a single day, that actually think that makes the game better, more exciting, more narratively interesting....or do they only do it because thats what you need to do to properly drain your PC's resources?

I personally would much much MUCH prefer balancing around 2-3 encounters, and then letting the 6 encounter day be a truly epic, absolutely stamina crushing session, rather than the expected norm.

It’s not really designed around that number - it’s just that they found out after being mostly done with the design that’s how many “medium” encounters it takes to wear down the pcs. If you stick to “hard” or “deadly” it’s closer to three encounters to wear the pcs down.

Which in more story-driven play styles is still a lot.

 

[Stalker0]

It’s not really designed around that number - it’s just that they found out after being mostly done with the design that’s how many “medium” encounters it takes to wear down the pcs. If you stick to “hard” or “deadly” it’s closer to three encounters to wear the pcs down.

Which in more story-driven play styles is still a lot.

The issue with that though is:

• I find even deadly encounters need to be REALLY Deadly in order to truly challenge PCs.
• Its hard to justify those narratively, there are only so many adult red dragons and legions of undead and iron golems, etc. Having to push the CRs into the deadily range often requires using a caliber of monster that is not meant to be common or casual, but quickly becomes that when you are needing deadily encounters all the time.

 

[Celebrim]

Things that used to recharge on short rests will become "can be used a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus and is then recharged with a long rest".

That sounds like a huge improvement. Maybe with tweaks like that they'll eventually get 5e to a place where I'd want to run it.

 

[tetrasodium]

I mean, it depends on how much adventuring you want to get done. I remember playing in AD&D, and if you didn't have a cleric, you could be resting at an Inn for weeks! But even the stingiest and most lethal DM's I played with were pretty fast and loose about healing times- the faster you healed up, the faster they could tear you apart with unbalanced encounters!

There is a caviat to that (probably) completely true historical detail that went well beyond one's you played with /near. Specifically the fact that it took a long time in game meant that a few things occurred

• when recovery is slow like that it becomes increasingly implausible to rest wherever you want and pushes players to take note of limited ssfeish places or go back to town.
• if there was anything going on in the world then the longer rests allowed time for in to plausibly progress or interrupt a rest midway when the gm felt it necessary
• if none of the last point was going on then there was no point in not handwaiving the time a bit.

The short rest durations in 5e basically just declare that no gm will ever have reason to care about any of that and the dual short/long rest class design needs ensures theit becomes difficult to change that without creating other problems.