Psikerlord#
Explorer
I would have greatly preferred the devs to have simply used the old 2/day mechanic instead of per short rest (assuming 2 short rests/day on average). It just works better.
D&D 5E Short Rests: How many does your group get/take between long rests, on average?
redrick
First Post
The mechanic that encourages this is wandering monsters/random encounters. Plus monster initiative, which isn't exactly a mechanic, but it's also not too hard for a DM to intuit.
There's no hard mechanic in the RAW to force these exact ratios, because they aren't meant to be that rigid — they are a general planning guideline for the DM. On the other hand, if the DM rolls random encounters when PCs rest in the dungeon and allows the monsters to act while the PCs are busy resting, resting ceases to be a free action.
If players know that taking a rest will increase the chances of an extra combat encounter between them and their goals, they might be less likely to take that rest, preferring to press on with the excitement of their main objective. If players know that spending an hour will allow them to maintain some degree of the offensive, while spending a whole 8 hours will allow their opponents to bring in reinforcements and effectively reset the dungeon, they are going to have some motivation to conserve resources and push ahead with the minor gains of a short rest.
In my games, I've found this worked naturally, without any additional house rules on my part. Enough random encounters and dungeon change-ups had the players always asking each other, "do you think we can get away with a short rest here?"
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
That's a case of what works better for you doesn't necessarily work better for the rest of us.
My experience with the two different systems is that 2/day usually means the player uses it at the first two decent opportunities, and 1/short rest means the player carefully considers how likely they are to get to rest soon and sometimes chooses to save the use for a more prominent need. Which is a really dramatic difference in play despite not seeming like much on paper.
Psikerlord#
Explorer
And I find the opposite to be true in any wilderness or city adventure with no real time pressure - spam the short rest abilities coz you can take an hour break and get them straight back... So in my experience, short rests are inferior both on paper and in practice.
In any event, this kind of 2/day conversion would be a great Unearthed Arcana optional rule.
CapnZapp
Legend
My problem is that what works best for the game as a game isn't enforced or upheld by the rules.
Case in point: having one or two wilderness random encounters per day. Easy write up, sounds logical; no match for DMG expectations and a dreary game challenge unless you crank up the difficulty level to near TPK-level.
To "work", any one of these encounters need to really be a string of d6 encounters. Both to allow "medium" (dirt easy) encounters to become a game challenge, and to keep players guessing (and to really enable the "do I nova now or save up for later" aspect of D&D)
Case in point: having one or two wilderness random encounters per day. Easy write up, sounds logical; no match for DMG expectations and a dreary game challenge unless you crank up the difficulty level to near TPK-level.
To "work", any one of these encounters need to really be a string of d6 encounters. Both to allow "medium" (dirt easy) encounters to become a game challenge, and to keep players guessing (and to really enable the "do I nova now or save up for later" aspect of D&D)
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
I find it interesting to see which DMs do and do not have issues on this topic.
My players have their characters behave like real people, but very rarely like real people who are also lazy. By that I mean that I don't have to create time pressure beyond that time passing means things keep happening in the world around the characters - and yet the characters view, because their players do, the idea of sitting down for an hour rest after every maybe 10 minutes doing something to be a great big waste of time. Time that they could have been actually doing something in. It's the in-game difference that mirrors how, for example, I have things I intend to get done with my time during a day (clean the kitchen, paint some minis, prep a bit for my current and next six campaigns, convert a few more Mystara monster to 5th edition, play some video games, visit the forums, and still manage to eat meals, sleep plenty, and spend as much time with my wife as is available) so I never just stop and sit down to rest when I don't absolute have to... but other people can't get anywhere near as many things done in a day, and don't even understand how I can do so much, because their default is to do one thing that takes maybe 20 minutes and then sit around not doing anything for an hour before doing another thing for a few minutes, and then lounging for another stretch of time.
And because that is verbose, a simpler version: My players play characters that actually have things they care about doing, so spending a bunch of time resting instead of doing things always feels like wasting time - even if none of the things they plan to do actually have a clock on them.
As always, experience varies.
That much I can sort of agree on. I say sort of, rather than wholly agreeing, because it's so simple and obvious that you have basically covered all the detail needed for such an optional rule in a forum post... so it being the topic of an unearthed arcana article would mean one particularly thin article, and I would rather not see that sort of thing when an article could continue to do as those so far have done and actually give stuff to test out that isn't so readily thought up by basically any DM.
I would have preferred they used a scale, where lower level abilities are recovered faster than higher level abilities, regardless of the class as a general rule. So you would start with at-will, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, etc. as a general guideline. It would allow for a more granular progression, versus just short rest and long rest.
Kryx
Explorer
Wilderness encounters are meant to follow the normal adventuring day. If you only do one wilderness encounter per day then it obviously won't matter unless you use "deadly".
However 5e's whole concept is that you have multiple forest encounters in a day, or a forest encounter that leads to a dungeon, or a forest encounter that leads to a city where there are more encounters.
1 encounter per day is not what 5e is balanced for - it expected 6-8 of differing difficulties.
Psikerlord#
Explorer
this is why using injuries (we use an expanded Injuries and setbacks table) is useful - even wiht only 1 combat a day, someone might end up with an injury, which is a meaningful setback/opportunity cost to the combat, even if HP etc are easily healed up.
Injuries mean you dont have to worry so much about meeting any kind of "quota" of encounters per day, which I find inherently unrealistic.
CapnZapp
Legend
You say this as if something will be explained by just saying it.
The recent official module Out of the Abyss features "wilderness" where you are instructed to make an encounter check twice a day for days on end.
Explain that.
Or, rather, don't. And instead reread what I wrote above and truly take in what it says.
Cheers!
