D&D 5E (2014) Should short rest be an hour long?

[ccs]

A short rest should be however long makes for a good story/makes sense at the time.
This can vary by situation.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Now, what bugs me the most about 5E is short rest in duration of 1hr.
One thing 4E got right was encounter powers on 5 min rest recharge. Wrong was that EVERYONE had them, in SAME number on a given level.

AEDU was very right for class balance, clarity, new players learning the game, and remaining functional in the face of radically different pacing.

The 'short rest' to recharge being 5 min was arbitrary, though. In a raid on stronghold it might've been too long, in an overland journey, far too quick. Might've been better to just have had encounter powers recharge after an encounter ended, or, maybe even, at the risk of greater damage to fragile senses of verisimilitude, upon rolling initiative (because that'd've prevented systematically abusing an encounter power outside of an actual encounter, FWIW). Same goes with the time for a long rest. Any single time frame is arbitrary and limits the range of pacing for which encounter design guidelines work well.

5e assumes a single time frame: a 6-8 encounter 'day' with 2-3 short rests, and a long rest between days, among other things (party composition, lack of feats or magic items, etc, etc). You can then adjust those assumptions to change the feel of your campaign, letting you tune both class and encounter balance...

They tried to balance out short and long rest class mechanics but in 95% of situation where you can afford 1hr rest you can manage 8hrs also.
This tips the balance in favor of per day mechanics.

Nod. That's how D&D has mostly been. If players can pick their battles and proceed at their own pace, they can do much better than if they're pressed for time. It can be thought of as 'a reward for skilled play' or as 'a source of severe class imbalance,' depending on how positive or negative you want to be. Or, perhaps more neutrally: D&D is, in significant part, a game of daily resource management.

Sort rest recharges are kinda tacked onto that, maybe as a nod to 4e, or as a way of pulling back further from the balanced AEDU framework than Essentials already had. Things might've gone better had there been a simple way to translate short-rest-recharges back to more traditional daily recharges. (Since the game supposes 2-3 short rest per day, multiplying the number of uses by 3 or 4 could do it, for instance.)

Once per short rest becomes the classic 3/day.

If they want to get away from 5 minute work day(5MWD) they should cut down short rest to 5-15 mins at most.

Easily done, as long as you can maintain the 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest 'day.' In 4e, the 5-min (if that) short rest was typically taken after almost every encounter, that'd be twice as often as 5e seems tuned for.

Maybe have 5 min short rest but limit it to 2× per day?

Would work for consistently-6-encounter days.

 

[CapnZapp]

Changing the duration of short rests doesn't solve this either, though.

Not sure I follow you: What isn't solved by my suggestions?

(If you mean my PS, there's a reason for having that as a PS - its not a problem my suggestions were meant to solve)

 

[Li Shenron]

Now, what bugs me the most about 5E is short rest in duration of 1hr.

They tried to balance out short and long rest class mechanics but in 95% of situation where you can afford 1hr rest you can manage 8hrs also.
This tips the balance in favor of per day mechanics.

If they want to get away from 5 minute work day(5MWD) they should cut down short rest to 5-15 mins at most.

I think they did the right choice with 1 hour. If you shorten the short rests like you suggest, then the balance will be seriously tipped in favor of per-rest mechanics. I mean, seriously... how can you not see that 5-15 minutes are pretty much a guarantee after every single encounter? With such short rests, and with the average low number of rounds per encounter in 5e, per-rest abilities would be overpowered. The only exception case would be a tight-packed dungeon with an encounter in every room, a very artificial and unrealistic kind of campaign where you probably should reconsider a lot of other rules beyond resting.

 

[Rhenny]

At first, I didn't like 1 hour rests. But after playing/DMing with them for a few years, I like them. There is definitely a tension and deliberateness to taking them. When rests were too short (4e 5 min rests) they became "standard operating procedure" after any moderately taxing encounter.

But really, it doesn't matter what amount of time a short rest is if the emperor (funny, my phone auto corrected DM and made it emperor) sets up conditions for a short rest. If it makes sense that the PC can get enough uninterrupted time to eat, drink, take a breather, bandage wounds, then the DM should allow for a short rest. I think 5e made a 1 hour short rest to emphesize that somewhat safe conditions needed to be met before the DM allows the rest to happen. I think 20 min to an hour works for that purpose, whereas 5 min didn't.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I think they did the right choice with 1 hour. If you shorten the short rests like you suggest, then the balance will be seriously tipped in favor of per-rest mechanics. I mean, seriously... how can you not see that 5-15 minutes are pretty much a guarantee after every single encounter? With such short rests, and with the average low number of rounds per encounter in 5e, per-rest abilities would be overpowered. The only exception case would be a tight-packed dungeon with an encounter in every room, a very artificial and unrealistic kind of campaign where you probably should reconsider a lot of other rules beyond resting.

Yeah, if you do a short rest every 5 minutes or so, then it quickly becomes the Druid/Monk/Barbarian/Warlock show in short order.

"Man, why is the barbarian ALWAYS mad?!!!"
"Because he can."

 

[Captain Panda]

If your players are using long rests constantly and short rests not at all, you aren't making random encounters in hazardous locations common enough or dangerous enough, in my opinion. It's not a problem with the rules.

The assumption in the design seems to be that a short rest is pretty doable, but a long rest in a dangerous spot gives nasty bad guys plenty of time to sneak up on you. Got this system from Matt Colville, but it's a good one. For every hour of rest in a dangerous place I roll a d12 (or have my players roll it), on a 2 they get a hard encounter, on a 1 they get a deadly encounter. Too tough? Then don't treat a scary vampire's lair like it's the Holiday Inn.

 

[Tony Vargas]

**delayed blast double post**

 

[CapnZapp]

I think they did the right choice with 1 hour. If you shorten the short rests like you suggest, then the balance will be seriously tipped in favor of per-rest mechanics. I mean, seriously... how can you not see that 5-15 minutes are pretty much a guarantee after every single encounter? With such short rests, and with the average low number of rounds per encounter in 5e, per-rest abilities would be overpowered. The only exception case would be a tight-packed dungeon with an encounter in every room, a very artificial and unrealistic kind of campaign where you probably should reconsider a lot of other rules beyond resting.

All this talk about "15 minutes being better than 1 hour" (or whatever) completely ignores the true best solution: the right choice is not to make one choice, and force it across all adventures, all stories.

 

[CapnZapp]

The 'short rest' to recharge being 5 min was arbitrary, though. In a raid on stronghold it might've been too long, in an overland journey, far too quick. Might've been better to just have had encounter powers recharge after an encounter ended, or, maybe even, at the risk of greater damage to fragile senses of verisimilitude, upon rolling initiative (because that'd've prevented systematically abusing an encounter power outside of an actual encounter, FWIW). Same goes with the time for a long rest. Any single time frame is arbitrary and limits the range of pacing for which encounter design guidelines work well.

Agreed