D&D 5E (2014) The Gritty Realism variant rule seems to solve a lot of problems

[tetrasodium]

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.

",why don't you rebuild the core system math" seems less than useful

 

[Blue]

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’m ok with that conclusion

If you wish to completely twist what I said and misrepresent it, then fine. I shall exit this conversation and any others with you. Good day sir.

 

[AlViking]

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.

And nothing stops you from having all the encounters in one day if it makes sense.

 

[AlViking]

",why don't you rebuild the core system math" seems less than useful

It's always worked for me with minimal changes.

 

[Remathilis]

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.

One of the only AP modules I've run beginning to end is Curse of Strahd and if I was to run it under GR, the players would never get access to a long rest from the minute they enter Barovia to the time Strahd is dead. It's hard enough to get an 8 hour long rest, let alone a week. There is exactly two safe places to rest (Barovia Village or Vallaki) and if the players can make it a whole week without Strahd or his minions harassing them, you're not running Ravenloft correct.

You Would have to make one of the following changes:

• Start the adventure with the PCs over leveled (like around 10th level) but never let them LR.
• Only allow a LR when they level, regardless of time.
• Change the LR to 24 hours, once every seven days.

But as written in the DMG? You could not run GR and have Strahd be remotely competent.

 

[Sorinth]

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.

Because it's the story I want tot tell.

And even in your example where the Vamp is sometimes taking 2.5 weeks before striking again, the players don't know that and so won't want to take a vacation. They will want to use that time to continue to investigate and try to track down the lair, so they likely don't even get a LR.

 

[Silam]

If you wish to completely twist what I said and misrepresent it, then fine. I shall exit this conversation and any others with you. Good day sir.

I’m sorry to hear that, Blue. I did not mean to misrepresent. I saw that we were focusing on different aspects and therefore tried to come over to your side where the emphasis was more on daily resources and less on HPs. I realize the tone of my response may have been abrasive, and for that I apologize. Good day.

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

Spoiler: 2024 phb Pg41

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

Thanks for the in-depth response. I had not realized that there was so much ambiguity in SR rules. Unfortunately, 5e in general is quite ambiguous… Sage Advice is a big symptom of that. We could adjudicate rules in earlier editions just from reading the books, without Twitter required…

 

[AlViking]

One of the only AP modules I've run beginning to end is Curse of Strahd and if I was to run it under GR, the players would never get access to a long rest from the minute they enter Barovia to the time Strahd is dead. It's hard enough to get an 8 hour long rest, let alone a week. There is exactly two safe places to rest (Barovia Village or Vallaki) and if the players can make it a whole week without Strahd or his minions harassing them, you're not running Ravenloft correct.

You Would have to make one of the following changes:

• Start the adventure with the PCs over leveled (like around 10th level) but never let them LR.
• Only allow a LR when they level, regardless of time.
• Change the LR to 24 hours, once every seven days.

But as written in the DMG? You could not run GR and have Strahd be remotely competent.

I've played but not run the mod. While it's not a wonderful place there should be places to stop and rest up. Anywhere you can take a standard long rest should do. You could always add sanctuary locations left behind by some ally.

I guess I don't see the issue - while things go sideways at various locations just don't have them go bad as quickly. You're not going to get a long rest once you hit the castle but neither did we when using standard rest rules.

 

[Remathilis]

I've played but not run the mod. While it's not a wonderful place there should be places to stop and rest up. Anywhere you can take a standard long rest should do. You could always add sanctuary locations left behind by some ally.

I guess I don't see the issue - while things go sideways at various locations just don't have them go bad as quickly. You're not going to get a long rest once you hit the castle but neither did we when using standard rest rules.

Strahd can enter any building at any time. He has deep knowledge of thy land and spies everywhere. If the players have Ireena with them, they have a target painted on their backs. The only way I could argue the characters could get SEVEN DAYS of uninterrupted rest is to make Strahd too stupid to find them or too weak to do anything about it. Strahd might like tht cat-and-mouse aspect, but there is no way he's giving them a week without harassing them in person or with his minions.

Look, I know you're emotionally invested in proving there is absolutely no issues whatsoever with GR, but can we at least admit it doesn't work for every possible D&D adventure structure? Curse of Strahd is a good example of one where changing the rest mechanism requires restructuring the whole module to accommodate it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Strahd can enter any building at any time. He has deep knowledge of thy land and spies everywhere. If the players have Ireena with them, they have a target painted on their backs. The only way I could argue the characters could get SEVEN DAYS of uninterrupted rest is to make Strahd too stupid to find them or too weak to do anything about it. Strahd might like tht cat-and-mouse aspect, but there is no way he's giving them a week without harassing them in person or with his minions.

So if Strahd can find the characters at any time and is motivated to do so, how does this campaign work? Why does he not just kill them when they're lower level; game over?

Look, I know you're emotionally invested in proving there is absolutely no issues whatsoever with GR, but can we at least admit it doesn't work for every possible D&D adventure structure? Curse of Strahd is a good example of one where changing the rest mechanism requires restructuring the whole module to accommodate it.

I am not at all surprised that a premade campaign made in one rest type in mind would take some adjusting if you change the rest mode. I think that any functional adventure that uses normal rest must have build in ways to prevent excessive resting so that you can maintain the balance. It is just that with gritty rests you can ease up on such pressure a bit (there still needs to be time pressure) and allow the story to breathe and not have an utterly hectic pacing.

And then again, I don't think adjusting the story for looser pacing would be particularly insurmountable challenge, and would probably make the story where characters gain about ten levels make more sense. Like events of Dracula take place over six months, but with normal rests Curse of Strahd probably takes a fortnight. Playing it of course takes at least that six months in real time. This is the one thing that gritty rests alleviate, the massive disparity of th time passed for characters and time passed for player, which I find creates dissonance.