Got it. If we agree that we should not care about HPs nor about spells and abilities that recover HPs nor about those that let us prevent losing HPs in the first place… then indeed, it must be true that at every table any rules tweak that affects HPs is irrelevant. With those parameters in place, we can turn towards what effects remain upon resting, and if we say that those include the recovery of daily resources, then for sure it will benefit classes more tilted towards daily resources.
I think you might have missed his point. It wasn't that HPs are completely irrelevant. It was that resource expenditure & resource attrition is too important. It's generally assumed that the PCs will almost always survive outside of scenarios like a DCC funnel where death is practically a drinking game & that's fine. However... The core foundations of the math used by the game's design place very strong expectations about the rate of resource expenditure & resource recovery across encounters.
It's generally assumed that the PCs will almost always survive outside of scenarios like a DCC funnel where death is practically a drinking game & that's fine.
I agree… and that is why I thought it might be interesting to "start the day feeling already spent" because some or all of the HDs and slots you recovered went straight into healing, and the few slots you still have, you guard carefully in reserve in case you need a Shield, etc.
But apparently the above idea causes great revulsion, so I’m not looking to lobby for it further for now…
But you're on the right track with Arcane Recovery. It's a great model for how long rests could partially restore spell slots. Ideally, at least for the kinds of dungeons I run, full casters would only get 1/3 to 1/4 of their spells back per LR. I think this makes the resource management game a lot more interesting.
It would certainly be interesting if 6e built things from the starting point of a "rest" restored a percentage of a classes resources, one night helps, two is better, etc...
I agree… and that is why I thought it might be interesting to "start the day feeling already spent" because some or all of the HDs and slots you recovered went straight into healing, and the few slots you still have, you guard carefully in reserve in case you need a Shield, etc.
But apparently the above idea causes great revulsion, so I’m not looking to lobby for it further for now…
Oh there have been multiple posts from multiple posters in the thread that brought up the strengths of past edition incremental and level scaled recovery over the current "all", they just tended to get hit by a deluge of how a real gm could make gritty Realism work and similar. The SR "hit dice" is a god awful mechanic barely even supported by the character sheet.
I've had 20 fights in a single day. It is pretty realistic considering campaign design and timing and there are published campaigns that are going to do that or close to it.
It is not. Not at all. It becomes very contrived to concoct reasons why a party cannot get occasional eight hours (four if elves) of rest over such long period of time, especially as they have access to magic that secures a safe resting location.
You have to be extremely high in level to have magic that actually ensures a safe resting location, and it is quite easy to deny long rests with environment and other things and
It is far easier than figuring out how to give a long rest in 2 days when you need 7 to accomplish one.
This is the main issue with normal rests. Sensible stories have one or two fights a day (and several days of no fights between) and the characters sleep at most nights. This means they have full days resources to burn on these fights, either making them trivial
I would disagree with this on multiple fronts, the most significant being that
For example play Tomb of Annihilation as written and you are probably getting less than 2 fights a day most days you are exploring Chult (with spikes up to 5 or so when you find a location). However if you play that as written you are not resting every night. Aside from being interrupted from random monsters you also have weather that prevents rests losing a lot of rests and many days you will be exhausted from failing to rest the night before.
ROTFM also has times you will not get long rests, although it is not a central part of the campaign for such a large part of it like it is in TOA.
That is if you play those as written without any DM modification of the story to make it more difficult.
There are a lot of problems with the hit dice spending during a SR, it's hard to find anything positive about the 2024 rules for it. In no particular order though look at the rules
Hit Point Dice. Your class's description tells you
the die type of your character's Hit Point Dice (or
Hit Dice for short); write this on your character
sheet. At level 1, your character has 1 Hit Die. You
can spend Hit Dice during a Short Rest to recover
Hit Points. Your character sheet also includes space
to note how many Hit Dice you've spent.
At no point does it mention how many hit points are restored & if players should roll them or take the average.
Well if they are spent, when do they get recovered?... For that you need to know the answer & look up that type of activity on phb370 where it specifies long rests restore all hp all lost hp-max all reduced ability scores all spent HD and a single point of exhaustion.
Beyond that it does not specify if a player needs to declare how many hit dice they are spending before the rest or even if the rest needs to be confirmed successful before spending the HD.
When are they spent? "During a SR". Mmmhmm... sooo... when do they come back? the instant a rest starts? Just before/during an interruption to the SR? At the end of the SR? Something else? Super important is the lack of a nod towards even pretending that the SR could be interrupted or unsuccessful for whatever reason, what happens to the maybe spent Hit dice & the clearly recovered hit points then?
What order are they spent in for MC builds? "I don't remember what order I took what [so I rolled my biggest one, duh]"
If the player should be rolling them FiFo or choice in order of getting them does that mean a PC who hypothetically starts as a level 1 barbarian then MC to something else from L2 on can roll all of those spent hit dice as the barbarian d12? If no only the one d12, does that reset to a new D12 every roll/SR as the player spends hit dice or only on a LR?
Pg368 has an entry in the glossary for "hit point dice" but it fails to correct any of those obvious omissions. It also doubles down on that oh so helpful use of the word "during".
373 in the glossary covers short rests and there is little added for any of the above except that it specifies they should be rolled with result plus con mod & that you can roll then decide to roll more after each spent HD. Nothing about making sure the rest was a success before doing so or announcing the spend.
From there you start running into the downstream problems caused by all of that & it becomes super clear running AL where you see a wide range of players of varying skill/background/experience.
Alice might declare she's spending N HD at the start & then wait to see if the rest is successful before rolling because she thinks that's such an obvious RAI despite the omissions
Bob might declare he's spending N HD then immediately erase his current HP while tossing & counting how many HP he recovers
Cindy does one of those but takes the average
Dave does none of that rubbish and just starts silently rolling dice until he's back to a HP value he's happy with because RAW told him that's all he needs to do
Eddy does the same as Dave but takes the average
Some of those players will update the spent hit dice and it hardly matters because the GM is incapable of auditing it on their sheet for any useful insight into what the PC did (not) door how much gas in the tank there might be.
A lot of character sheets players find online don't even have a spot to track current/spent hit dice & given the swiss cheese of a subsystem it's not like there's much room for the GM to even scold them over needing to add it.
There is so much left to the player's interpretation about the amounts & when "during" happens that the GM really has no way of actually making the rest interruption/poor quality get reflected by the time they hear "oh I already erased the old total & don't know how many hit points I had before".
Even if the GM does manage to quickly squeeze in an "ok but you only get back half the HP " / "ok but roll your HD with disadvantage" or "ok but each HD costs two from your HD pool" no two players are interpreting the rules the same & everyone is doing something different. The whole thing is practically designed as if SR were assumed guaranteed success & there would never be a scenario where the GM might feel some kind of ruling was in order before eraser meets paper
If a Vampire is preying on a city and every night they kill a few innocents. If you want to stick to the 6-8 encounters per LR math then under GR you are somewhat pushed into making the entire adventure no more then the 6-8 encounters including the final confrontation. Because if you go to say 20 encounters then the PCs will need to take 2 LRs during this adventure. And the idea that the heroes are taking several week long vacations while the Vampire is going around killing innocents isn't exactly a heroic tale, you've lost the flexibility to make this a "long" adventure under GR.
Why would you think that the vampire has to feed every week or multiple times every week? He might kill three on successive nights and then take 2 and a half weeks to strike again.
Why would you think that the vampire has to feed every week or multiple times every week? He might kill three on successive nights and then take 2 and a half weeks to strike again.
Not to support GR, but maybe it's fun? IoW the housecat and Fox model? I don't remember the specifics but seem to recall VtM broke them down along a bunch of behavioral norms with that shirt sighted sort of herd collapse hunting for fun being present in at least one type.
Not to support GR, but maybe it's fun? IoW the housecat and Fox model? I don't remember the specifics but seem to recall VtM broke them down along a bunch of behavioral norms with that shirt sighted sort of herd collapse hunting for fun being present in at least one type.
This completely misses the point. The point wasn't that you can't do it that way. The point was that you aren't forced into making the entire adventure one 6-8 encounter adventuring day.
