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

[Don Durito]

I think it would be relatively easy to turn the Fighter into a long rest class.

Just say you get 3 Second Winds and 3 Action surges per long rest but you can't use more then one in a single round.
Give the Battle Master 10 Superiority Dice per long rest.

This would mean that if the full casters have just decided to go nova and blow everything, the Fighter can blow all their action surges as well.

 

[Don Durito]

13A is generally good design. It set out with many of the same goals and parameters as 5e, but generally found better solutions. Full heal-ups are just one example. Handling TotM's another big one.

Yep. I'll play 5E - but I see no reason to run it when I could run 13th Age or Shadow of a Demon Lord instead.

Both of them do D&D very well, solve lots of problems and are more GM friendly.

 

[Blue]

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.)

I'd like to use you as an example, but this isn't really about you. No disrespect for what's working at your table intended.

The number of encounters in the unmodified game actually serves two purposes. One is the correct amount of risk and danger to the party. Your house rules, or the more common "fewer but more deadly encounters" both serve this purpose.

But another part is the balance between the at-will, short-rest-primary, and long-rest-primary resource recovery models - or rather the balance between the classes that use them.

Think like this: if you have fewer total rounds of encounters between long rests, who benefits? The at-will classes who have a fairly fixed output per round, or the long-rest who can do the same output as they could in a longer day, just cutting out their low-output cantrip because they no longer hanve a need to stretch their slots.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But another part is the balance between the at-will, short-rest-primary, and long-rest-primary resource recovery models - or rather the balance between the classes that use them.

That's the main reason why I went with extensive house ruling, rather than just getting things to a minimum level of playability. It's the major unforeseen consequence of only changing the resting rules.

The larger part of my extensive house ruling was to re-balance classes so that they gained roughly similar benefits from short rests and long rests.

 

[Tom B1]

I tend to use about 1-3 encounters between rests (long or short depending on the need). I use the 1 hr/8 hr format.

We tend to run about 2.5 hour games with some socializing to we get 2-3 encounters in during a session.

Why so few encounters between rests?

I use lingering injuries, horror, fear and terror, fatigue, and often times when players run across eldritch or otherworldly things, they end up carrying conditions (dizzyness, shakes, strength or con reductions, etc) and conditions have a much greater psychological effect on players than HP loss.

In those situations, short and long rests come less often.

There's not much of a balance issue because the group are a team and they succeed or fail as a group and all players get some spotlight.

Also, another factor contributing is only one is a seasoned D&D player and so there's a lot of tactical and experienced judgment they lack so fights are harder for them.

If I were to contrast them to the my group of PCs who played together for 18 years real-time, their characters could mow through 4 hard to deadly encounters by the book figures in a session because they had focused on synergies, group tactics, role definitions, and had built up a resistance to stupid stuff like people wandering off behind the battle front... oh, 'll go open that door...

In that game, the mage almost never took any damage and rarely more than 1/4 hp. The wall of steel around him and the cleric behind him kept him up and he used necromancy, fire, lightning, etc. to blow up stuff (including sometmes the invisible scout... but eventually the scout requested various charms to protect himself from the mage's spell bombs while he was invisible). That party needed highly mobile and capable foes like demons or drow to seriously test their team - those could skip the meat shields and launch surprising attacks on the casters suddenly and then extract.

But in 5E with a mostly-newbie group of players in a game rife with conditions that go beyond HP loss or spell expenditure, and fatigue and the conditions usually need long rests to clear, there are fewer encounters between rests (and more player fear!).

It all depends on your game and your players.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

That's 1.5 combats a session.
That actually feels about average to me for most D&D campaign's I've played over the years.

Shockingly, I've played D&D games where sometimes a whole session goes by and there's no combat at all!

1.5 per session sounds about right for my campaign as well. And it's also probably about the average between long rests, not because we always long rest between sessions, but because more often than not the crisis of the day can be solved with some RPing followed by a single fight. This is a distribution with a long tail, though: you never know when you're going to find yourself hunted through a yuan-ti infested jungle and facing lots of desperate skirmishes.

And yeah, the last session was, in its entirety, a high-stakes game of Liar's Dice. Although some participants were armed, bloodshed was avoided. So there's that too.

 

[MockingBird]

I will say, nailing down the rest mechanic has been the trickiest part of 5e to run. Sometimes I feel like I give my players too many opportunities. Sometimes I feel like it's too few. Part of it is I dont like sticking to the "this many encounters per rest" thing. It doesnt feel natural to the story I'm telling. I still enjoy the hell out of 5e though, but that's my one not pick. Really I cant blame the game only me.

 

[Ashrym]

Long rests are basically the overnight sleep period. Short rests are opportunities throughout the day to take a short break. Both are part of the natural flow of the activity. How many encounters occur in between is whatever the party and DM fit in there following the plot of the story. In my experience, that varies and the assumptions of the encounters per rest needs to be taken with a grain of salt; possibly several grains of salt.

Generally, the number of encounters per rest increases with the level of the characters. That number also changes with environmental factors. A deep dungeon crawl with a sense of urgency and I've played or run 10-14 or even more without a long rest. A wilderness trek might be 0-2 wandering encounters per day, travel by montage, hourly encounter checks, or no different than a deep dungeon dive with a different atmosphere for a major outdoors adventure. I'll also do waves of attacks or timed events in more complex encounters.

At low levels it might be 4 encounters in a day. More encounters or longer adventuring days means less or more short rest opportunities. The 1 hour minimum requirement becomes important on those longer adventuring days to limit the number of short rests possible due to time constraints. Usually short rests are about 1 per 2-3 encounters but vary. I've seen 4 and none. I've seen the "nothing is happening and consecutive short rests" cheese camping in the wilderness too for things like multiple second winds and don't really count that as typical.

What I don't necessarily do is let the players know how many rests they can expect. I might telegraph through details if I think it's important for them to know but I like to keep them on their toes without a consistent number of rests and frequently vary it. Players seem to become more invested in the story when it's actually a story than bean counting resources for a predetermined number of encounters.

Apropos of very little, there actually aren't a lot of short-rest classes. Warlock, Monk, BM Fighter. At will? Rogue (other than AT), Champion Fighter.

Ask yourself, can we live without the above? Just EKs, ATs, and the other remaining full classes?
I think the answer's 'yes.'

That kind of misses the point of the other classes with mixed long and short rest recharge abilities. Abilities like relentless rage, song of rest, font of inspiration, channel divinity, wildshape, second wind, action surge, stroke of luck, sorcerous restoration, arcane recovery, signature spells, hit dice healing, healer feat, inspiring leader feat, and various subclass features are all short rest related abilities.

I think all classes are "short rest classes" given the hit die is a class feature. ;-)

Hit die healing is obviously easy to work around, rangers don't actually have short rest abilities iirc, and the relentless rage timer is pretty minor; however, some of those other abilities are major class features or capstone abilities. There's more to consider than a couple of higher dependency classes or subclasses.

I think the "5 min short rest, max 2 per long rest" works better due to how simple it is over omissions and changes going over everything tied to short rests. That doesn't really fit my playstyle, however.

 

[Horwath]

I typically have 2-4 combats per long rest. I instituted a house rule that short rests are 5 minutes, but you are only allowed two of them per long rest. This allows the short-rest-dependent classes to keep pace, while giving me the flexibility to have as many or as few combats per day as I find appropriate.

We had similar, but 15 minutes rest. Like half time at many sports. 2 per day also

 

[delph]

It depends on campaign. When we played Curse of Strade, we were short in time - too many tasks to do, no time to rests, but we have to. Some times we were out of slots and HP after tough battles, sometimes we need level up. Now in Waterdeep, we have plenty of time to rest and have only one night with 4 battles