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

[billd91]

If Strahd wanted to kill off the PCs early on he can at any moment. That's true with regular rest rules as well.

I'm not emotionally invested in anything, it's just that unless you do the entire Strahd campaign in one day ther isn't a reason you can't use GR rules. Since you obviously do not do the entire campaign in one day, there are reasons you can get long rests.

I think I'm in the same mind as Remathilis as far as Curse of Strahd and GR. It's a bit too extreme and the only benefit you'd get from it would be, maybe, a bit more encouragement to intrigue in and around the town of Vallaki.

That said, there's a medium between the standard resting rules and GR - and that's allowing standard long rests only in certain areas that are comparatively protected such as some places in Barovia, Vallaki, Krezk, etc and not on the road or in other adventuring areas. I think that would work just fine, particularly since being out on the road at night in Barovia is so risky.

 

[AlViking]

That's true. We're not necessarily talking about killing. We're talking about the psychological harassment. It's already hard to get a rest in CoS. GR makes it effectively impossible unless you start playing Strahd like an idiot.


The hangup is seven straight days of uninterrupted rest in Barovia should not be possible as long as long as Strahd is alive and knows your there. If you are playing Strahd remotely competently, he should make sure to attack the PCs once every week so they never get a long rest. Getting 24 hours is tricky but doable. Getting a whole week of breaks the very versimulitude you seek to foster.


Once Ireena is in play, Strahd isn't going to wait patiently. He will take the time to test and pressure the PCs to making a mistake, but he's not going to let her get old or injured waiting. Ireena is what makes Strahd act impulsively.

Anyway, you're convinced that GR works with everything everywhere all the time so any attempt to point out it doesn't always work is a waste. GGs.

GR isn't a good fit if you do old school dungeon crawls. Some people aren't going to care for it. I think it solves a lot of the major complaints people have.

As far as Strahd, Strahd can always attack the PCs at any time. On the other hand he's busy messing around with other things. Strahd is presented as a linear sandbox - you know the end but the path is largely up to the players. I'd likely do some modifications as I would with any mod but it's never made sense to me that Strahd just let's you run around gaining powerful items to kill him if he's so attuned to what's going on. If he has blind spots - or is simply arrogant and busy with other things - then how much attention he is paying to the PCs is up to the DM.

If you can get multiple long rests an there's no reason to believe he chasing the PCs, why does it matter if they are resting overnight or for a week? In our game we had some interaction at the start to establish the narrative and then we didn't really interact with him until we stormed the castle. All other interactions were with the locals, not the lord of the land.

So "He could kill you at any time " doesn't mean much to me. Of course he could. He wants you to give up, to be overwhelmed by darkness. The more time you spend in his domain the more likely you are to turn. At least that's my take, as I said I've never read it.

 

[billd91]

GR isn't a good fit if you do old school dungeon crawls. Some people aren't going to care for it. I think it solves a lot of the major complaints people have.

It's not? I think that's where it may be the best fit. Particularly the really old school dungeon crawls where there are weird enigmas begging to be figured out like the Jeweled Man in the ruins of Castle Greyhawk. PCs can head back to town and do a bit of research while taking a week of convalescing while planning their next foray.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The hangup is seven straight days of uninterrupted rest in Barovia should not be possible as long as long as Strahd is alive and knows your there.

It doesn't need to be fully interrupted. Normal long rests can be interrupted too. You can surely interrupt the gritty rests at least the same amount each day without ruining the rest. Granted, this is one of the areas of the rules which is not terribly clear.

If you are playing Strahd remotely competently, he should make sure to attack the PCs once every week so they never get a long rest. Getting 24 hours is tricky but doable. Getting a whole week of breaks the very versimulitude you seek to foster.

This whole thing seems just highly implausible to me. Strahd does not see the PCs as threat, so he does not kill them, but still is threatened so he has to interrupt their rest that they're not at full power. Seems pretty weirdly specific amount of threatened to me! If the PCs are not worth killing, then they probably are not worth constantly harassing either, or even necessarily keeping track of, especially if they try to keep low profile. Strahd is rules of the whole realm, one would imagine he had better things to do! And of course the exact state of mind of Stradh is for the GM to decide, so just as they can decide that Strahd wants to harass the PCs, they can also decide that he doesn't, at least not every week.

Once Ireena is in play, Strahd isn't going to wait patiently. He will take the time to test and pressure the PCs to making a mistake, but he's not going to let her get old or injured waiting. Ireena is what makes Strahd act impulsively.

So why would he at that point continue with toying with the PCs, instead of just confronting and killing them? Seems like it is the time for the final fight regardless of what rests are used.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It's not? I think that's where it may be the best fit. Particularly the really old school dungeon crawls where there are weird enigmas begging to be figured out like the Jeweled Man in the ruins of Castle Greyhawk. PCs can head back to town and do a bit of research while taking a week of convalescing while planning their next foray.

Also, if everything is not reset every day, it makes the old school approach of trying to actually avoid fights way more important.

 

[Johngernaut]

It's not? I think that's where it may be the best fit. Particularly the really old school dungeon crawls where there are weird enigmas begging to be figured out like the Jeweled Man in the ruins of Castle Greyhawk. PCs can head back to town and do a bit of research while taking a week of convalescing while planning their next foray.

Gritty short rests are the egregious part and the dealbreaker for dungeons. Short rest classes need to get their naps in between fights to keep up. This is where it really shows that GR assumes you aren't dungeon crawling.

So then you'd need to do something like standard short rests and gritty long rests to avoid breaking dungeons. At which point you are officially running homebrew rest rules, so at that point I feel like owning that and doing my own thing.

 

[billd91]

Gritty short rests are the egregious part and the dealbreaker for dungeons. Short rest classes need to get their naps in between fights to keep up. This is where it really shows that GR assumes you aren't dungeon crawling.

So then you'd need to do something like standard short rests and gritty long rests to avoid breaking dungeons. At which point you are officially running homebrew rest rules, so at that point I feel like owning that and doing my own thing.

Honestly, no they don't. They need to get their short rest "naps" in at a higher rate than the long rest classes need long rests. And if the wizards, clerics, druids, and bards are only refreshing their spells on a 7-day pace, getting short rests back daily is still doing pretty well. They'll have to pace themselves, sure, but that's part of the point of GR.

 

[Distracted DM]

I posted this earlier but I'll repeat it and elaborate because people are really fixated on 7 days (the standard for the optional rule).

In my experience 7 days is too long for long rests, but it does also mean that you can fit a downtime period into every long rest, that could be interesting in certain games.
Long Rest = 2 uninterrupted days of respite is the sweet spot for my tables; but sometimes the table agrees "hey we're not pushed right now, let's take a month off for downtime stuff." I like to have bursts of time-dependent things going on- "you need to find and stop the cult's ritual within 5 days." Then after that adventure, they can take some downtime, a few weeks or whatever. I found that, when running Red Hand of Doom, "you need to stop the army within 30 days" means that they'll never take downtime, they'll push as hard as they can as fast as they can- the wizard never had time to copy spells or scribe scrolls. If I were to run RHoD again I'd probably break the different objectives up into their own little time bubbles. "Kill this commander within 3 days before they liaise with the main army."

The main thing is to decouple long rests from sleep; whether it's 2 days or 7 or you're playing Birthright and make it a month, you just need to break the expectation of Sleep = Long Rest.

 

[Silam]

WotC tried to lock everything down so every table played the same in 3 and 4, it didn't really work.

That seems to me like a hasty conclusion… 3e had clear enough rules and it worked very well, both in terms of actual gameplay (my own subjective opinion) as well as commercially (which I think we can objectively agree to?)…

The statement that 4e had less commercial success is probably true but likely caused by many factors (which others have expounded on in other threads). I’m not convinced that rules being "too clear" was one of those factors (but I agree that it was more restrictive overall from a game design standpoint).

 

[AlViking]

That seems to me like a hasty conclusion… 3e had clear enough rules and it worked very well, both in terms of actual gameplay (my own subjective opinion) as well as commercially (which I think we can objectively agree to?)…

The statement that 4e had less commercial success is probably true but likely caused by many factors (which others have expounded on in other threads). I’m not convinced that rules being "too clear" was one of those factors (but I agree that it was more restrictive overall from a game design standpoint).

Commercially it was a big initial hit with quickly diminishing returns. It had a high barrier if entry and sessions regularly ground to a halt as people flipped through pages looking for the correct rules. I really enjoyed 3e but at mid teens when it started to fall apart.