Exactly. I wrote my post in a hurry as I was having an appointment.
I am a bit surprise that this manner of playing was not having an impact on your play patterns. Sometimes, players are starting the day with HP lower than their maximum as they want to "save" HD for a critical rest. They get quite prudent when they are not starting at full HP. Yes it is a bit of min/maxing but my players (all 12 of them) like that approach.
When I played it, what ended up happening is that we would rely on magical healing over natural healing whenever possible, since our healers got all of their spell slots back on a long rest, while we only got half our hit dice back. As long as we didn’t spend more than half our hit dice between long rests, we’d be back to full HD after one, and if for some reason we needed to go below that threshold, we could spend multiple days recovering. Sure, we’d occasionally have to start a day with 41 HP instead of 49, but in the big picture that didn’t really make much difference. That’s why I say it didn’t really change our play
patterns. Some minor shuffling of resource management priorities, and we were easily able to keep playing largely the same way we always did.
This is why I say that simply draining the players’ resources faster, increasing the time it takes to recover them, or both doesn’t really work to increase the difficulty. Sure, players will have to retreat to a safe resting location more often, and they’ll have to spend more time there, which will mean missed opportunities unless the world waits for the players. But ultimately that’s all the same patterns of behavior. In my experience, it doesn’t really change how the players approach challenges, it just leads to them doing largely the same things, and missing more opportunities, cause what else are they gonna do?
If your goal is to get players to play cautiously, to think carefully, and prioritize avoiding combat over direct confrontation, the easiest and most effective way to do that is to limit the players’ ability to recover their resources. This will break up the “kick in the door, go nova, gather the stuff, repeat until you need to rest” pattern of play, because the players will have an immediate need to think about how they’re spending their resources. They’ll start thinking long-term, because they’ll have to if they want to survive.
I’m not saying you have to do 6-8 encounter adventuring days to slowly grind your players down, especially if that isn’t the kind of play they enjoy. But fiddling with HP, damage, and healing values and times is only going to change how likely a given fight is to force the players into rest mode. If you want to see an actual change in gameplay, you need to make your players consider not just this fight, but the next few fights.
