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

[Flamestrike]

You skipped past the fact that wotc's own hard cover adventures are not built with a six to eight encounter grind fest either.

Yes they are.

Not every adventuring day has to feature 6-8 encounters. No-one is saying they do. Many will feature far less (and a few will feature far more).

I own every published adventure, and literally every single one of them contains multiple large dungeon areas, with up to a dozen or more encounters each level or each dungeon. In addition to those large dungeon areas, there are solo encounters, smaller mini dungeons with 3-4 encounters and so forth.

HotDQ, has you forced into an overnight siege (single AD), then raid a Bandit camp (single AD) and so forth.

It's up to the individual DM as to how they choose to police the Adventuring day. You dont have to sit there and let players game the 5 minute Work Day, any more than you have to sit there and watch as they cart around a bag of rats.

Nothing stopping a DM from imposing a Doom Clock, simply saying 'Nope', applying any one of the several Rest variants the game provides (or using his own), throwing a 'random' encounter at the party till they switch on, having an out of game chat with the players, or whatever works.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

It's a feature, not a bug. One of the benefits is that the pacing comes more naturally for me and, yes, it's easier to push the party to it's limits. I regularly have 4-10 encounters between long rests and it feels like there's more of a balance between classes that rely on resting and those that do not.

I do, however have a house rule that any spell that lasts for 30 minutes or more has it's duration multiplied by 5. It's mostly for spells like mage armor.

Yep. Gritty variant creates much better pacing and (for me at least) adds versimilitude about why casters haven't rendered everyone else obsolete, by increasing the amount of time needed for them to regain their strength.

I use it in all my current campaigns - its lifted up the martial classes, and the wizards and clerics utilise their ritual spells far more than they would otherwise. For me ditching the RAW rests has had no downside.

 

[clearstream]

True, but when I see the word "day" I parse it to mean (assuming Earth-like astronomy) one light-dark cycle in the setting.

This is one where if the designers really wanted the "adventuring day" to be a more malleable amount of actual in-game time they might have been better served by coming up with (and then sticking to!) a different term for it; much like we use "round" and - in days of old - "turn" to represent not-always-specific amounts of game-world time in relation to the rules.

Looking at the text, I agree that your interpretation is justified. Toril in the default setting is a planet near a sun, so perhaps it turns. I believe Eberron is also a planet. Still, not all D&D settings must be planets, and the DMG does advise that "It's your world". In the five places that "adventuring day" appears, it is consistently measured in encounters rather than calendar time, and that's how I interpret it.

One motive is that when I look at the guidelines for advancement near the end of the DMG (in the section on experience points) and map those back to XP thresholds, it's 29 adventuring days to earn enough XP to level from 1 to 20. Were I to assume that encounters cannot be divided over multiple calendar days per "adventuring day", then for me that lands on campaign cadence that feels forced. Whereas when I assume that an "adventuring day" is about encounters, and those can be divided over multiple calendar days, I find it easier to produce a natural campaign cadence even while adhering close to the guidelines (if I choose to.)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would have preferred an 'encounter neutral' model, where effectively every class feature refreshes after every encounter (including HP, which are reset to half max if lower) and then we wouldnt have this problem (but we also miss some of the advantages the current model provides).

You're not the only person who has suggested something like that, and to me it seems like a terrible idea. It basically removes resource management and attrition, which has an effect of making death the only possible meaningful mechanical consequence of a fight. To me this seems like highly undesirable situation in a game which is likely to contain a lot of combat.

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, I agree the system could be more elegant. I mean even now like 10 years after release date there are still people struggling with the concept of Adventuring days, encounters and so forth.

It's a genuinely difficult problem to solve. I mentally divide solutions into narrative and mechanical. The former make space for DM narration (e.g. enough time passes that it feels plausible the villain adapted their plans). The latter typically control refreshes / encounter.

I would have preferred an 'encounter neutral' model, where effectively every class feature refreshes after every encounter (including HP, which are reset to half max if lower) and then we wouldn't have this problem (but we also miss some of the advantages the current model provides).

4th edition showed a good take on this, but it weakened suspension of disbelief.

Basically every class works like a ToB class, with spells reskinned as 'manouvers'
I was working on something like that, but keep shelving it to do other things.

I've experimented with half-a-dozen solutions in my campaigns over the last four years. Where I land is essentially 3-days for long rests, 1-day for short, no automatic HP recovery. Plus a few rules needed around that like breathers to spend HD, and for sleep.

 

[Flamestrike]

You're not the only person who has suggested something like that, and to me it seems like a terrible idea. It basically removes resource management and attrition, which has an effect of making death the only possible meaningful mechanical consequence of a fight. To me this seems like highly undesirable situation in a game which is likely to contain a lot of combat.

Agreed; like I said, it has disadvantages.

The advantages are threads like this wouldnt exist (and nor would the problems that lead to them existing exist), where we have to repeatedly explain concepts like the 5 minute work day, 6-8 encounter adventuring day, rest frequencies etc.

There are other ways of ironing out the above problems (or removing death as a consequence).

For example you can have a 'escalation' reward system baked in. Implementing an XP bonus (or similar reward) baked into cumulative encounters in a single AD. Half XP for encounters 1-2, 3/4 XP for 3-4, full XP for 6-8, and 1.5 (or double) XP for 9+ sort of thing.

Tables that have problems with players trying to game the 5MWD would likely benefit from such a rule.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Looking at the text, I agree that your interpretation is justified. Toril in the default setting is a planet near a sun, so perhaps it turns. I believe Eberron is also a planet. Still, not all D&D settings must be planets, and the DMG does advise that "It's your world". In the five places that "adventuring day" appears, it is consistently measured in encounters rather than calendar time, and that's how I interpret it.

That is an interesting interpretation.

One motive is that when I look at the guidelines for advancement near the end of the DMG (in the section on experience points) and map those back to XP thresholds, it's 29 adventuring days to earn enough XP to level from 1 to 20. Were I to assume that encounters cannot be divided over multiple calendar days per "adventuring day", then for me that lands on campaign cadence that feels forced. Whereas when I assume that an "adventuring day" is about encounters, and those can be divided over multiple calendar days, I find it easier to produce a natural campaign cadence even while adhering close to the guidelines (if I choose to.)

IME combining this idea with the version of gritty realism, you might typically finish an "adventuring day" in roughly a week or so, with any downtime probably long in calendar time. This seems like you could also allow more than 2 short rests per long rest without any issues.

But if you are doing a dungeon crawl / infiltration, does the idea breakdown? It seems like it would work well with travel, though.

 

[Minigiant]

. Gritty variant creates much better pacing and (for me at least) adds versimilitude about why casters haven't rendered everyone else obsolete, by increasing the amount of time needed for them to regain their strength.

Gritty also has the drawback of having those more reliant on hit points to naturally be cowardly. If it takes too long to recover, warrior types will naturally became over cautious as they put themselves in more danger. The natural consequences is characters being more cowardly, refuse requests without heavy incentives or reward, or eschew it all for a death wish personify.

Many of us play these games so long we forget dungeon crawling and adventuring are stupid occupations normal folk won't do even when desperate.

 

[tetrasodium]

The concept of an "adventuring day" predates 5s by years if not decades. It's also a pretty massive attempt at talking down to people when acting like any possible complaints they might have with o5e's rest design & encounter expectations can only stem from a failure to understand a decades old concept.

Expanding on that, o5e actively takes steps to make shifting from day/night by clock & sun to adventuring days. Not only are durations exclusively in rounds minutes & hours to create interclass rebalancing problems for the gm but it goes one step further by placing long rest as the choice between forced March penalties or recovering everything including nearly all lingering conditions.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Gritty also has the drawback of having those more reliant on hit points to naturally be cowardly. If it takes too long to recover, warrior types will naturally became over cautious as they put themselves in more danger. The natural consequences is characters being more cowardly, refuse requests without heavy incentives or reward, or eschew it all for a death wish personify.

It doesn’t encourage such behaviour as the intent is not have more encounters per rest than recommended. It’s just the pacing that is changed. The thing you mention could only happen if you compare gritty to a game that has far fewer than recommended amount of encounters, making it too easy.

Many of us play these games so long we forget dungeon crawling and adventuring are stupid occupations normal folk won't do even when desperate.

I actually want adventuring to feel at least somewhat dangerous. Risk free beat ‘em up would bore me to tears.