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

[DEFCON 1]

Absolutely it should be an hour long. It's what is said in the book. And thus we all have to do what the book says. To do otherwise means I would be doing WotC's work for them, and I'm paying them specifically to not have to do that. Thus whatever is written in the books is how we are required to play.

 

[Sunseeker]

I tend to agree, so what I've done is that a short rest must be at least 15 minutes, but no more than an hour. Once you reach an hour of downtime, you can't reasonably do any more unless you take a full long rest. Typically, it's easy to over-pressure the group giving them no more than 30 seconds to a minute between fights. It's difficult and verging on contrived to have hour-long gaps between fights.

 

[iserith]

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.

In our current campaign(maybe DM is not pressing us with time enough), but we have on average less than half of one short rest per long rest. That is we use short rest every other or every third adventure day. And it should be 2 or 3 rest per long rest. They are simply to long to afford, and when you make an openening, you might aswell stretch it for 8hrs so everyone gets their recharge.

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

15mins can be afforded even in a long battles where front lines are rotated. 1hr is impossible.

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.

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

I set the time for rests based on the style of campaign I'm running. A grittier game like the town-to-dungeon game I'm running now gets the 8 hour short rest; a more superheroic game gets 5 minutes. Everything else gets an hour.

Of course, time always matters in my game. It is a valuable resource. As such, how long a rest takes matters. I think this is the most important aspect of it. The frequency of random encounters also plays into this.

 

[Arial Black]

I find it a bit strange to use the short rest game mechanic in advance of the hour; it's putting the cart before the horse.

Although the players may intend to rest for 1 (or 8) hours, it's not the stated intention of 'taking a short/long rest' which provides the benefits of that rest, but simply the fact that they have just rested for 1 (or 8) hours that gives them the benefit.

It doesn't need to be:-

Players: We want to take a short rest, DM.

It can be:-

Players: Have we done anything stressful in the last hour?
DM: Er...no, not really.
Players: Then we've already had a short rest, and will adjust our character sheets and spend hit dice accordingly.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Absolutely it should be an hour long. It's what is said in the book. And thus we all have to do what the book says. To do otherwise means I would be doing WotC's work for them, and I'm paying them specifically to not have to do that. Thus whatever is written in the books is how we are required to play.

Not sure if you're serious....


Anyway, to the OP, the book defaults to 1 hour, but it's also pretty clear that you can adjust that to whatever fits your needs. Simple.

 

[SkidAce]

The hour short rests have been working fine for my campaign. It's mostly been dungeon crawling with a bit of overland travel mixed in, with some side helping of urban intrigue.

Hour long short rests require planning and tactics ont he players' part. Sometimes they don't have time. Sometimes they risk it. Sometimes they decide it isn't worth the risk.

Seems to me shortening the rest period would remove a lot of tension form the game.

This mirrors my thoughts. Well said.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Not sure if you're serious.

What?!? Of course I'm serious! The books were written by professionals! If they have determined a short rest is one hour long, then it is our moral imperative to follow the rules! Otherwise, we might as well throw the rulebook out entirely and just make the entire game up! And I didn't pay $35 on Amazon to just throw the book away once I got it! We either follow every single word written down in these books to the letter... words designed and chosen by men and women who are paid top dollar to do this and thus can never be wrong with any decisions they make... or the entirety of this industry falls apart and Dungeons & Dragons is relegated to history as a poor, sad, husk of a game that had the audacity to ask its players to use the rules merely for inspiration to create an enjoyable entertainment that is satisfactory to the players sitting around the table.

And I think we all know that no self-respecting game company would ever sully themselves to do that.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

But the rules for resting are incredibly generous - you basically can't interrupt an ongoing rest.

So I don't see the case where these assumptions hold.

You can interupt a short rest easily, because it's immediately interupted when the players do something other than the listed actions. Unlike long rests, the rules aren't generous here.

After all, the party will consider taking a long rest because they feel they're "running out of gas", that they don't want to go further down the dungeon without ability recharge.

Since they aren't pressing on anyhow, they will still have to endure those random encounters regardless. And since those encounters will in practice never actually interrupt the long rest (as in forcing you to start over) they're essentially purposeless (if the idea was to add a cost or consequence to the decision to rest; either by encouraging the heroes to proceed even at "low gas" or by forcing them to "return to town").

If anything, the presence of random encounters only make heroes stop their adventure day earlier, since they need to keep some gas in reserve for the inevitable random encounters during the 8 hours of their long rest.

Not saying there's something inherently wrong about this.

But as a commentary on "it's pretty much impossible to do a long rest unless you want to do several battles during that time". What's the alternative? If there are random encounters, there are random encounters. What 5E doesn't have, however, is random encounters that break your rest.

Zapp

PS. And all of this assumes what in practice never happens except at the very lowest levels - that the players don't trivially arrange for interruption-free rest. Many dungeons contain "safe" rooms. More generally, the rules are incredibly generous with magic that all but guarantees safe rest: Rope Trick and Leomund's Tiny Hut spring to mind (but there are plenty more spells that make avoiding random encounters trivial).

If you're acquainted with my views, you will recognize this as perhaps my biggest beef.

On one hand the rules set up challenges and make assumptions about encounters per day. But on the other hand the rules inexplicably hands out an abundance of features that allow players to short-circuit all of that and essentially break the entire game.

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

What I do is:
- I tell players when they can do a long rest, they can't decide that (I will say something like "It's getting dark, you start to feel sleepy. OC: You can take a long rest now."), I think this is within the rules as they say you can only take one long rest ever 24 hours and as DM I have control over the time progression
- When my players insist on waiting or start wasting time so they can take a long rest faster, they have the risk of being attacked while waiting
- Generally, I design each adventuring day so that it has 6-8 encounters, so my players have to fight them, it's up to them if they want to keep pushing into the dungeon, getting attacked while waiting around or having to do some extra encounters when trying to escape the dungeon and resting in the wilderness
- If not clearly stated otherwise in the adventure path (e.g. every 30 minutes risk of encounter in the middle of the enemy lair), I allow my players a safe rest as long as they did a suitable amount of battles for the day already

Result is that my players almost always try to push themselves to their limit rather than waiting and resting around, which makes for a much more exciting adventure and it's also better balance because I can maintain the short rest / long rest balance easier.

Note: On field travels, there may be days without encounters at all (irrelevant in terms of balance). If there are days with encounters, I try to create a "Battle 1 -> SR -> Battle 2 -> SR -> Battle 3 -> LR" structure, which is still quite balanced as long as the battles are sufficiently difficult.

 

[RCanine]

I'm running Curse of Strahd and the 1h short rest has been a problem, not because of power recharging but because of self-healing. We've had on-again off-again healers, and as a result, my party gets into a lot of situations where they know if they don't rest they will die in the next room, but resting doesn't make sense story-wise, especially considering all the random encounters.

I think the trade-off I'd houserule here is that spending hit dice and recovering from unconscious only takes 10 minutes (uncoincidentally the duration of most ritual casts), and leave the power recharges at an hour. This allows the PCs to dust themselves off, patch up a bit and keep moving the story forward while still keeping them thinking about resource usage.

Also, if the difference between short and long rests don't feel meaningful to your players, or if they take short rests too easily, adding a random encounter roll every 10 minutes really makes them focus.

 

[Nikosandros]

In my games, I'm using 5 minutes short rests, but a character can only take one per hour and 3 per day in total.