D&D 5E [ToA] Hex-crawling and Long Rests

[DEFCON 1]

OK, firstly, what you define as fun is different from other people. That's just your opinion. You really need to stop with statements like the game is broken, or it's not fun, or whatever just because your personal tastes aren't met. We need to establish that this discussion is just your opinion and everyone else's opinion.

Don't dictate to others what they can or cannot talk about, especially if it's on topic. For one, D&D does work. Even if it didn't, "making it work" for a lot of people absolutely includes adding elements of realism to how it impacts game play. Your opinions are not the One True Way, so you have no right to tell people what they can or can't talk about on a topic.

Oh COME ON, Sacrosant... would you give it a rest already? You know full well that CapnZapp is referring to HIS GAME and for other people that would agree with him on this topic... and he's trying to find ways to make HIS GAME work. He doesn't NEED to put "I think" in front of every one of his goddamned sentences. Any of us with general reading comprehension can tell that in this instance... he is making statements for his game and what can be done for his game. So you don't need to whine about it.

If he was saying "Exhaustion isn't fun and WOTC needs to give us rules to change things because I shouldn't have to do it myself..." then yeah, we can make the point that if he wants it done he doesn't need WotC to do it and he can do it himself.

But in this thread DOING IT HIMSELF IS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S TRYING TO DO!

So let the guy actually DO THAT for pete's sake... and stop trying to "Well, ACTUALLY..." him for once. Honest to god...

 

[bleezy]

My group has been using a pretty cool resting system for the last few campaigns, and it works *much* better than the slow resting system described in the DMG. There are only a few rules:

1. You do not recover hit dice when you long rest.
2. You must spend a minimum of 1 hit die to gain any benefit from a short rest.
3. You must spend 1 hit die to gain any benefit from a long rest. (doing so gives you the full benefit of a long rest- you recover all your HP, spells, abilities, etc.)
4. You can recover hit dice only through downtime. It takes one downtime day to recover a hit die. This can generally only be done in a settlement.
5. With a DC 15 Wisdom (Survival) check, a character can spend one downtime day setting up a camp to allow others to recover hit die. This check can be DC 10 or DC 20+ depending on the terrain, it might also take more than one day.
6. If you level up, you replenish a hit die.

In practice this gives each PC an 'adventuring range' equal to his/her level. For example, a level 5 party might set out for Omu from Port Nyanzaru, fully rested. They might spend 1 HD on their journey to Omu, leaving them with 4 HD for short/long rests in the city and its dungeons. A lower level party would presumably need to rest more in the wilderness and so would be more exhausted upon arrival in the lost city.

The advantages of this system over the slow resting system in the DMG are quite substantial:
1. You don't have to worry about inappropriate spell durations, magic item recharge rates, etc., etc.
2. You can use the same resting system for city, wilderness, and dungeon adventures. Players aren't forced to undertake two weeks of wilderness encounters and a whole dungeon's worth of combat in a single rest.
3. The slow resting rule in the DMG is *enormously* biased towards short-rest classes. You might easily have 10 or more short rests per long rest.
4. You can use the time scales of WotC's published adventures. The PCs will be a bit slower, but not 7 times slower. Published adventures generally need substantial reworking of events to fit with the DMG slow resting variant.

In defense of the OP, you don't need to play ToA to realize that 5e doesn't support cross-country treks out of the box. If you have a campaign where the PCs will travel overland for weeks and have 0-2 combat encounters per day, those encounters will never tax them unless each encounter is a deadly threat. It's often impossible to make wilderness encounters this deadly (for reasons of verisimilitude), so one cannot have a LotR-style game without modifying the rest rules somewhat. I haven't played ToA either, but I've played 5e campaigns similar enough to realize that the jungle won't work as an adventure location as written. In fact in my very first 5e campaign we tried playing with no house rules, then we tried the slow resting variant in the DMG, then we began to experiment with resting house rules. This was only needed because, as I say, it was a LotR-style cross-country exploration campaign.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Oh COME ON, Sacrosant... would you give it a rest already? You know full well that CapnZapp is referring to HIS GAME and for other people that would agree with him on this topic... and he's trying to find ways to make HIS GAME work. He doesn't NEED to put "I think" in front of every one of his goddamned sentences. Any of us with general reading comprehension can tell that in this instance... he is making statements for his game and what can be done for his game. So you don't need to whine about it.

If he was saying "Exhaustion isn't fun and WOTC needs to give us rules to change things because I shouldn't have to do it myself..." then yeah, we can make the point that if he wants it done he doesn't need WotC to do it and he can do it himself.

But in this thread DOING IT HIMSELF IS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S TRYING TO DO!

So let the guy actually DO THAT for pete's sake... and stop trying to "Well, ACTUALLY..." him for once. Honest to god...

Honest to God is right. Come on, you can't be that blind. I'm not buying this, because he doesn't ever present his arguments as his opinion/tastes only, like most other people do. He positions them as the One True Way, and as some sort of objective truth. For the past three years, it hasn't been "this doesn't work for me.", it's been "the game is broken, the developers are lazy and incompetent, and anyone who disagrees with me is an apologist." He's used those actual terms several times. That's a big difference between "this is just my opinion." Combine that with what he just said in this thread alone, that any disagreeing opinion doesn't have the right to contribute and should leave the thread, and it's pretty clear. So if you're going to take a personal shot at me and my reading comprehension skills, I suggest you take a long hard look in the mirror, and then look up irony in the dictionary.

 

[CapnZapp]

OK, firstly, what you define as fun is different from other people. That's just your opinion. You really need to stop with statements like the game is broken, or it's not fun, or whatever just because your personal tastes aren't met. We need to establish that this discussion is just your opinion and everyone else's opinion.

Secondly, you seem to be contradicting yourself here. That first sentence you're saying that the particular challenge of dealing with exhaustion isn't fun, then you immediately say it's not challenging. If exhaustion "seriously hampers the ability to function in combat", then by inference that means you don't need as many encounters per day because each encounter will be more challenging. It makes no sense to say that rule X makes combat more challenging and then immediately say there is no challenge.

Thirdly, not all challenges in the game are combat. Not all encounters are combat. There is so much to the game that is not combat, and it seems that you always ignore that, and try to shoehorn everything into a combat encounter context. If that's how you like to play, nothing wrong with that. But you need to understand that D&D is not designed that way, and there are 3 pillars, not just one, and each can have challenges to players.

Lots of people think rules like exhaustion and hex crawling are fun. My group certainly does, because it adds verisimilitude to the game. It sets the environment, and helps describe the setting. The flavor of the game. It offers many more challenges besides just figuring out max DPR. The players get drawn into the game world, and think about creative solutions for exploration and interaction. They love all that, rather than just going from one encounter to the next ad infinitum.

So no, I disagree with you that 0-2 encounters per long rest is not fun. It's all about how the game is taking place. Exploration has never been tied to the encounter guidelines. It's not about combat. It's about all those other things. You do realize that many people can go an entire D&D session without a single combat encounter and still have fun, right? Happens all the time.



Don't dictate to others what they can or cannot talk about, especially if it's on topic. For one, D&D does work. Even if it didn't, "making it work" for a lot of people absolutely includes adding elements of realism to how it impacts game play. Your opinions are not the One True Way, so you have no right to tell people what they can or can't talk about on a topic.


One final point. You've created and/or participated in a lot of threads on ToA recently about how this doesn't work, or that is broken, and how you need to change X, Y, and Z. But you haven't even seen the book yet. How about getting the actual book first and playing it before assuming it's all broken and trying to change everything?

How about you discussing that elsewhere.

Sheesh.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[designbot]

In practice this gives each PC an 'adventuring range' equal to his/her level. For example, a level 5 party might set out for Omu from Port Nyanzaru, fully rested. They might spend 1 HD on their journey to Omu, leaving them with 4 HD for short/long rests in the city and its dungeons. A lower level party would presumably need to rest more in the wilderness and so would be more exhausted upon arrival in the lost city.

I'm intrigued by this system, but having trouble picturing how it would work. Are you suggesting a party could get through 40+ days of random encounters and locations and make the entire ~400-mile journey to Omu with only one functional rest, heading into a dangerous area with only one hit die of recovered HP from the damage sustained during the entire trip?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Honest to God is right. Come on, you can't be that blind. I'm not buying this, because he doesn't ever present his arguments as his opinion/tastes only, like most other people do. He positions them as the One True Way, and as some sort of objective truth. For the past three years, it hasn't been "this doesn't work for me.", it's been "the game is broken, the developers are lazy and incompetent, and anyone who disagrees with me is an apologist." He's used those actual terms several times. That's a big difference between "this is just my opinion." Combine that with what he just said in this thread alone, that any disagreeing opinion doesn't have the right to contribute and should leave the thread, and it's pretty clear. So if you're going to take a personal shot at me and my reading comprehension skills, I suggest you take a long hard look in the mirror, and then look up irony in the dictionary.

Here's the difference. He's not trying to get the game changed FOR EVERYONE in this thread (like he does in several other ones about rules he thinks WotC should be changing). He's trying to find ways and get ideas to change the game FOR HIMSELF. That's it. Whether or not YOU LIKE how he presents his premise does not matter. YOU are so blinded by your anger towards him that you apprently can't tell the difference anymore and will show up endlessly commenting about what he says and how he says it... regardless of whether what he says will actually impact your game in the future.

This thread? Has NO IMPACT on your game. Because he's not trying to get WotC to change their plans, policies and rules to suit him... he's getting rules together for himself only. And if you can't constructively add to that... then there's really no reason for you to be here.

Believe you me... I can be one of [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION]'s harshest rebutters when he goes off complaining about how WotC isn't doing their job because their choices aren't reflecting in the game he wants. But I also know when he starts threads to work on his own stuff for his own game and THAT should be applauded and supported. WITHOUT the "forum police" showing up to point out "YOU DIDN'T ADD 'I THINK' TO THE FRONT OF YOUR POST!!!" Because that is incredibly lame and wastes all of our time.

You think the exhaustion rules are fine? Good for you. This thread is for people who want something different. Stop pissing in it because you're unwilling to give the OP any credit or slack.

 

[bleezy]

I'm intrigued by this system, but having trouble picturing how it would work. Are you suggesting a party could get through 40+ days of random encounters and locations and make the entire ~400-mile journey to Omu with only one functional rest, heading into a dangerous area with only one hit die of recovered HP from the damage sustained during the entire trip?

Not quite. I might not have made it 100% clear, but when a character spends a hit die on a long rest they gain the full benefit of a long rest (all hp recovered, all spells, all class abilities, etc).

This system has some similarity to AD&D- overland travel is much easier with a healer of some sort. You can travel quite a few hexes on a single long rest if your fighters do the bulk of the hacking and slashing and your bards/clerics/druids save most of their spell slots for cure wounds. It's better than the AD&D system though, because in those days any party will a healer could heal up to full health in one or two days and there was no long term depletion of resources.

Could ~5th level characters survive 40 days worth of random encounters on 2 or 3 long rests? Maybe not. This system might not be forgiving enough for ToA. But aren't there several forts and settlements scattered throughout the map? The PCs might need to befriend a tribe of aarakocra, frog people, turtle people, or whatever else lives in the jungles of Chult and be allowed to rest in their village. They might take over one of the mini-dungeons in the jungle and fortify it as a resting location. They might locate the lost city, return to their home port and book passage on a ship to return to the site more directly. They might have a skilled guide who could find a spot where they could recover safely in the wilderness. The point is that the PCs will be expending a finite resource while they are travelling.

I'm not sure if this will work for ToA, but it has worked quite well for CoS, OotA, and several homebrew games. I'm not completely familiar with ToA, so I don't know how dangerous the jungle and the lost city are.

 

[jasper]

Oh COME ON, Sacrosant... would you give it a rest already? You know full well that CapnZapp is referring to HIS GAME and for other people that would agree with him on this topic... and he's trying to find ways to make HIS GAME work. He doesn't NEED to put "I think" in front of every one of his goddamned sentences. Any of us with general reading comprehension can tell that in this instance... he is making statements for his game and what .....

But in this thread DOING IT HIMSELF IS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S TRYING TO DO!

So let the guy actually DO THAT for pete's sake... and stop trying to "Well, ACTUALLY..." him for once. Honest to god...

I say isn't there a button or something that says "HOMEBREW". That way we all know any op is asking for suggestions for HIS GAME. Which will allow other posters to pass them by.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I say isn't there a button or something that says "HOMEBREW". That way we all know any op is asking for suggestions for HIS GAME. Which will allow other posters to pass them by.

Not anymore. Morrus got rid of them. And thus it falls upon us to read what the OP writes and figure it out. And when the OP says...

"Here an opportunity!"
"Problem: X"
"Solution: How about Y?"
"And I have questions for people who have the module..."

That's the OP having a problem, suggesting a possible solution for himself, and then asking for assistance to know if that solution is feasible. He's not demanding WotC institute anything for everybody, he's not even saying there's One True Way to solve the problem he himself posed because he even asked "How about this?"... as though there are multiple solutions and he's only just posing one of them.

If you (general you) can't figure out from all of that that this is a problem for the OP personally and is looking for ideas... and instead come back with "HOW DARE YOU SPEAK FOR ME!!!" I don't know what to tell you. You're just LOOKING to be pissed off at CapnZapp if you ask me.

 

[bleezy]

This is a campaign where I think it might be good to do one important change to the game as far as rests are concerned... separate the regaining of spells and features that return on a long rest from the regaining of hit points and hit dice that return on a long rest.

...

Making this split between character features and character health (and allowing for these rests to not necessarily be on the same timetable) would allow us greater freedom in creating what we feel the various hexes can allow for.

I wouldn't separate recovery of HP and recovery of spells. I tried this before, and in a party with any full caster who knows cure wounds, it won't make a substantial difference and it will simply cause more bookkeeping.