D&D 5E The Resting Mechanics - What Works Best?

[AnotherGuy]

Short Rest - as per PHB
Travel Rest - as per Short Rest and regain 50% of your HD (rounded down)
Long Rest - 24 hours at a Safe Haven

We allow the use of HD to be spent for racial/class abilities so the Travel Rest has its worth for regaining some abilities/powers. One can push themselves into exhausted condition should run out of HD.

 

[TwoSix]

Voted other.

1) Narrative time based recharge. Abilities recharge based on natural cycles (dawn, noon, moon rise, etc), not on the gathering of stamina by the PCs.

2) Per-level recharge. Pretty much every game I play or DM, leveling is fast; we rarely take more than 2 or 3 long rests before leveling. (I believe the amount of encounters per level using XP/CR in RAW 5e supports this, also.) So why not tie resources to level, in which leveling can be a narrative event with downtime/training to justify the recharge?

 

[Krachek]

The most awful experience I got in 5ed have been when the DM was holding to hard on his planned adventuring day. It makes a shift in game play, and slowly all players get off character and start viewing the game in term of ressources, resting, gimmick.
we have shift to a Ressource Planning Game instead of a role playing game.

So I think that a DM should use all these methods at need to produce the most challenging and interesting game sessions.

 

[Willie the Duck]

NONE OF THE ABOVE

Location based resting.

The safer the location, the shorter your rests.

Herioc rests in fortified town with doctors/spas/clerics
Normal rests in wilds, forts, and fringes villages
Gritty rests in dungeons and outer planes

We do similar (well, reversed almost), but go straight up gamist on it -- situation based resting. Heroic rests for dungeon crawls (where you need the recharges most), normal rests for everyday adventuring (where you might have 2-3 encounters per day, but never 6-8 relatively challenging ones or the like), gritty rests for overland travel (the 1 enc./day or less kind).

That's the problem exactly when classes have things that last for N hours intended to last a good chunk of the adventuring day or the entire adventuring day 1 day duration stuff. Switching to gritty realism as written effectively cuts the duration of those dramatically by expanding the adventuring day without expanding duration or resource cost of those abilities

Yes, Mage Armor, for example, stops being something you can rely on for constant protection (unless you dedicate more slots to it). That could be a feature, or it could be a bug.

You are still missing the problem. It doesn't make players "wildly more powerful than average people" , it makes "some players wildly more powerful than some other players and still other players dramatically weaker than others" depending on what class they chose

Please be assured, no one misses the problem. Regardless, this is a universal quality of D&D -- any change will advantage one class compared to another. The more you tune down recharging, the more you advantage classes with always-on abilities (and HP-preserving martial options over low-AC/high-damage). The more you allow anytime rests, the more you advantage nova-capable classes and builds. The change is still a feature or bug exclusively depending on whether one subjectively considers the change a good thing.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I voted RAW only because I use a house rule on reaching 0 hp, and I really think the two concepts go hand-in-hand.

I treat player HP as avoiding taking real damage through any combo of luck, skill, fortitude, whatever narratively fits. Thus, a fighter's Second Wind doesn't actually regenerate damage (why would it). And, realistically, if you took stab wounds and fire blasts day in and day out, you'd be a scarred wreck within weeks. The only time a player at our table takes "real" damage is 0hp. That's when your defenses are busted, your luck has run out, you're physically out of it, etc.

At 0hp, we tag on a very-hard-to-heal form of damage. Get enough of that type of damage and you're dead dead, so it encourages PCs not to accumulate too many. It's not quite what Level Up 5E is doing, but the idea of a harder-to-shed, deadly if it accumulates penalty for hitting 0hp seems to resolve (for us) the whole "fully healed in 8 hours" thing.

 

[S'mon]

7 day Long Rest, 1 hour Short Rest. That way you can actually see 6-8 encounters per LR sometimes, and no 15 MAD. Dungeon crawls are unaffected.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Short rests to spend hit dice and recover during the day are fantastic.

Short rests that recover class or racial abilities are generally awful, especially when some classes look like Wizard or Paladin and others look light Warlock or Fighter. They create a dynamic where some players want to short rest so that subsequent encounters aren't boring and they have something cool to do, while other players don't want to rest because they get no benefit from it and nobody needs healing. This is not a great dynamic, it's not an interesting choice from a game design perspective, and I don't feel like it belongs in a game that's designed around the PCs cooperating. It just adds arguments.

Worse, it leads to this illusion that the game will work seamlessly with drastically different rest schedules and widely varying encounter difficulties, when it just doesn't. The fact that long rests only recovery half your hit dice, but also all your HP feels like the game can't decide between being an attrition-based pulp fantasy game and a heroic high epic fantasy game. Which is 100% true. 5e D&D didn't make a decision about that. So it kind of feels like the mechanics never suit the tone of the campaign, regardless of the campaign in question.

In general I think de-coupling ability recovery and HP recovery from needing to share the same schedule would be nothing but beneficial for the game.

I'm also relatively tired of the game design being built around punishment for resting "early" and doing the "5 minute adventuring day" thing. Grim and gritty resting is supposed to be about a different game tone, but instead I think it's more often used to punish PCs that reflexively long rest after a few encounters. Similarly time pressure to prevent rest instead of as a narrative device is also not a great design, because it means so many downtime activities are just not available at all when the game is under constant time constraints. It's a poor design, as it encourages the PCs to avoid the punishment and it ignores the fact that you're changing the tone of the game instead of fixing the game mechanics. A better design would instead reward the players for pushing through and tacking more encounters between recovery periods. Rewards like abilities/items/etc. that turn on only after you've reached 50% of your daily XP budget, or that get better the longer you go would be a great way to do that. PCs need to have a tangible mechanical benefit to pushing their luck and tempting fate rather than taking the safe approach and stopping and long resting. That benefit probably can't be something easy like "more XP" or "more treasure," either, because that compounds on itself. It works sometimes, but not for a whole campaign.

 

[Jer]

Over time I've found that what works best in 5e for me is to design my encounters around the opportunities for recharging the players are likely to have:

Dungeon crawl, few places to rest, lots of battles expected in a session, attrition of resources is a big part of the adventure - use the standard encounter guidelines.

City based adventure, more rp encounters than fighting, fighting is likely to be no more than once a day and possibly even have days pass without incident, attrition of resources is not supposed to be a real problem - ramp up the bad guys they're working against and assume the players will always be near full power in encounters and have more resources to spend. It also fits because most city battles at my table tend to be cinematic events rather than random encounters.

Wilderness adventures - somewhere in between Dungeon crawls and City based. If the adventure is about getting to a dungeon then it's closer to the dungeon model, because expended resources will be important (and really that "wilderness" is just an extension of the dungeon in a lot of ways). If the adventure is about getting from one city to another and it's actually an adventure and not just a "red line" where we do it as a montage, then closer to the city encounter balance.

With those tweaks in mind I can follow either rules as written or the Epic Hero variant and things generally work pretty smoothly. I struggled with city encounters for a bit in 5e until I realized that if the problem was that the players had more resources available, that meant they could face off against bigger challenges so it wasn't really a "rest" issue it was a challenge level issue at my table.

 

[SkidAce]

1 hour in a relatively peaceful area? Enough time for lunch, a quiche activity...

I find myself intrigued by the quiche activity....

 

[Cruentus]

I ended up creating my own healing/HP recovery system for my last campaign, trying to balance a decreased HD expenditure/recovery mechanic. It didn't work particularly well, primarily because it wasn't intuitive or easy to remember - trying to balance rests and HD recovery, Healer Feat, Healing Kits, etc.

We tend to play a more "old school" style and pacing, where you're not having 6-8 encounters per day unless you're deep into the end game of a particular adventure, and even then, the recovery/rest/prep for the major encounter is pretty much a given. So my players always expected to be able to rest in a dungeon (we have done this for 40 years , and/or prep before the final encounter. They definitely don't take to going in against the bad guy without being near peak (regardless of ticking clocks, etc.). 5e makes this even easier with Leomund's Hut, etc. So unless I specifically tailored the enemies against this, they could rest wherever in perfect safety.

We changed all of our short rest abilities to PB times/long rest to smooth out the game, and allowed up to 2 "short rests" which allowed HP recovery "whenever". Wasn't great either.

With our pacing, the Gritty Realism may have been better, but you can bet that every one of my players, except the fighter types, would have switched to "short rest" recharge characters, rather than anyone with a long rest under that system. That's just the way they game the system.

So ideally any HP recovery system is 1) simple, and 2) can support varied pacing of the game. HPs should take longer to recover, and fighting shouldn't be the default game state.

We're switching to Basic/Expert for our next game. I'm already frightened, and all I've done is roll up a character.