D&D 5E So...resting in 5e

[Charlaquin]

Do you have a long rest at the end of every session? Because honestly, my current group yaks RPs too much to get more than 2-3 combat encounters in each session.

I don’t. Again, because my current campaign is all dungeon delving, and I make long rests in a dungeon very dangerous, my players don’t often have the opportunity to take long rests very often in this campaign. I’d estimate that they tend to take long a rest maybe once every 2-3 sessions, though I imagine that might be more frequent in a less dungeon-delvy campaign.

That's fine, I just tell people to note where they are and we pick up next session. That way I don't have to worry about real-world pacing, just in-game pacing.

Yep, I do the same. Like I said, one of my current goals is picking up the pace of play so that we can get a full adventuring day in per session instead of one adventuring day taking 2-3 sessions.

EDIT: I'm not telling you how to run your game, just something I find useful

No worries, I didn’t take it that way

 

[cmad1977]

In answer to another part of your questions:
We do not necessarily have a long rest at the end of every session.

 

[BookBarbarian]

In Adventures in Middle Earth you can only rest in a sanctuary (so no easy long rests during wilderness travel)

This is only true for Journeys.

However even in the adventuring phase the advice is that you can freely long rest if you have Safety from threat of Attack, Comfort, and Tranquility. Which is really just another way of saying the DM determines if the players can gain the benefits of a long rest.

Anyway to the topic at hand, I find that with the restriction of only being able to gain the effects of one long rest per 24 hour period that my players is all the restriction I need. I just don't have players that are willing to sit out 8-16 hours of a day before the even get to start a long rest.

Trying to short rest after every combat is more of a problem, but there are lots of ways to introduce in game time sensitivity.

 

[5atbu]

I do this quite frequently. Generally it's one encounter then another encounter comes in, even if it just looks like one big encounter.

Plus if it's looking Dodgy, cancel the later waves.. players never need know

 

[iserith]

Plus if it's looking Dodgy, cancel the later waves.. players never need know

I'm personally not in the habit of saving the characters, but yeah, that could be done. A middle position might be to design the encounter such that the subsequent waves can be prevented by achieving a secondary objective like overcoming an exploration or social interaction challenge.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Back when I was running the game as-written, I tried sticking to the six-encounter guideline wherever possible, and actually managed to pull it off more often than not. Most of those fights were filler, though, designed to wear through healing surges without ever posing a real threat.

After extensive house ruling, I moved to a five-minute short rest, along with the removal of healing surges and a drastically reduced rate of natural healing. Now, any amount of damage is meaningful, so it doesn't matter whether or not it's all in the same day. (Note that I also changed some key abilities of the fighter and warlock, so that there's no real benefit to chaining short rests.)

 

[ad_hoc]

Do you have a long rest at the end of every session? Because honestly, my current group yaks RPs too much to get more than 2-3 combat encounters in each session.

That's fine, I just tell people to note where they are and we pick up next session. That way I don't have to worry about real-world pacing, just in-game pacing.

EDIT: I'm not telling you how to run your game, just something I find useful

This.

IME this is the heart of where people think having many encounters per day is too difficult.

Just have an average of 1 long rest per 2 sessions. Done.

Our group spends half our time talking about our lives and making jokes. Game time is split pretty evenly between the 3 pillars. That means not a lot of resource taxing encounters per session. So we just try to end the session on a short rest.

 

[5atbu]

I'm personally not in the habit of saving the characters, but yeah, that could be done. A middle position might be to design the encounter such that the subsequent waves can be prevented by achieving a secondary objective like overcoming an exploration or social interaction challenge.

I am in the habit of recognising that I can get it wrong in encounter design.. a little flexibility is often appropriate for me.

 

[iserith]

I am in the habit of recognising that I can get it wrong in encounter design..

The DM is never wrong if the DM is fair.

But what is "fair" is the tricky thing to pin down. I personally don't think there is a "fair" difficulty for a challenge. There's just a difficulty that, when properly telegraphed, conveys to the players what they're getting into and gives them a choice as to whether to engage or not. If they know it's Deadly and stand their ground or use suboptimal tactics and it turns out badly for the characters, that's on them in my view.

 

[Don Durito]

Do you have a long rest at the end of every session? Because honestly, my current group yaks RPs too much to get more than 2-3 combat encounters in each session.

That's fine, I just tell people to note where they are and we pick up next session. That way I don't have to worry about real-world pacing, just in-game pacing.

EDIT: I'm not telling you how to run your game, just something I find useful

That's something that doesn't get talked about much but has to be part of the mix.

If we say something like 6 encounters per long rest (regardless of time), than this risks being unsatisfactory for long rest characters.

If you get 6 encounters in a session than the wizard gets to use his fireball every session.

If you have 6 encounters over a period of 4 weekly sessions than the wizard gets to use fireball once a month - which is probably not especially satisfying for the wizard player (And if you play forthnightly that would be once every 2 months).