D&D (2024) What would your ideal rest mechanic look like?

[Yaarel]

What is your own ideal rest mechanic that you use or want to use for the game.


In 5e, per day, the standard rest mechanic assumes about 6 to 8 encounters until the next 8-hour long rest. In addition, there are perhaps two 1-hour short rests, between these per-day combat encounters. So the standard schedule tends to approximate something like:

Long Rest − 3 encounters − Short Rest − 2 encounters − Short Rest − 2 encounters − Long Rest


This standard schedule seems to happen less frequently than intended because the same hostile environment that fills a single day with about seven combat encounters is the same hostile environment that makes full 1-hour short rests less obtainable.

Nevertheless, many adventure stories take place in a hostile environment, such as an underground dungeon crawl, and the schedule where each night is a long rest and a short rest is an emergency triage, seems adequate for many gaming tables, at least upto around level 12.

For much of the adventure, especially levels 5 to 8, also 9 to 12, there work out to be 2 long rests per level.



The difficulties with the rest mechanic include:

Story Setting
• Some stories make combat less frequent, such as a well-policed urban environment or seafaring ship, one combat between long rests.
• Some stories make combat more frequent, making a 1-hour rest implausible.

Story Mood
• "Gritty" stories portray fragile and weary heroes, making an 8-hour full refresh feel too vibrant. Here prefers 7 days of relaxation or similar.
• "Heroic" stories portray action heroes, full of urgency and power, making a 1-hour short boost obstructive. Here prefers a 15-minute break, 10, or 5.

Gaming Balance
• Some classes depend more on long rest refresh (Wizard) and some depend more on short rest (Warlock), so straying from standard affects balance.

New Mechanic: Proficiency Times Per Long Rest
• Most editions of D&D relied on the 8 hour or week long refresh long rest. 5e short rests are new.
• 4e per-encounter powers translated into 5e as per-short-rest.
• The short rest seems to be the most difficult regulate routinely if story makes the standard schedule less plausible.
• Designers recently employ the proficiency times per long rest mechanic, where one might expect a short rest.
• A hero can do the feature a number of times equal to the current proficiency bonus. This number increases while advancing in levels.
• Perhaps the designers are phasing out short rests.
• If short rests disappear, the amount of time for a long rest becomes easier to "dial", while the proficiency times per long rest regulate accordingly.



The above is many of the considerations. What is your ideal rest mechanic?

 

[aco175]

Maybe there could something on floating rests? There is a lot on powers being tied to proficiency bonus/ time per day from the looks of things. Make it simple enough like 4e with rests being 5 minutes (or whatever) and let the player take them as needed and not force some classes to break when the other want to.

Maybe space them out in hours to make the gaming day longer so you get away from, nova, nova, nova, long rest after 15 minute day.

There should be something from 4e that works and pulled over.

 

[Thunder Brother]

I can't really think of an ideal system (I'm not a game designer), but I don't like an approach the reinforces proficiency bonus as the master dial to be tweaked for game balance.

 

[commandercrud]

Here's what I've found works best with 5e.
"Quick Rest" - 5 minutes, only usable immediately after a battle. Can use only 1 HD.
Short Rest - full night's sleep
Long Rest - 5 downtime days

 

[el-remmen]

I think the system works nearly as well as I'd want as is. But I am considering the following for my next campaign:

• Short Rest (30 minutes) - spend hit dice as normal - regain short rest powers
• Long Rest (8 hours of sleep/rest - at least 6 hours of the former - with less than 10 minutes of interruption and no combat) - regain long rest powers and spend hit dice (but with advantage) as a short rest. At the end of a long rest you get half-level rounded down hit dice back. No more than one long rest in a 24 hour period.
• Extended Rest (a week of long rests with no combat) - heal back damage from energy-draining undead and like and recover from some other long term conditions - all hit points and hd go to max if they haven't already.

 

[overgeeked]

There's already another thread dealing with this exact question.

You either need to change how classes recharge their resources (everyone on the same pace of short rest or long rest) or you need to adjust the length of rests to roughly emulate that change.

For me, the ideal is long rests based on the environment, so long rest as written somewhere safe and guarded, like a town. Long rests in the wilds, in dungeons, etc will take longer. Maybe not Gritty Realism long, but definitely longer than 8 hours. But to also decrease the time short rests take, something like an action or bonus action is ideal, though you'd need to limit short rests to 2 per day.

I've tried this a few times and it seems to resolve quite a few issues with game design assumptions (6-8 encounters per day) and the lingering issues of linear fighter, quadratic wizard. It's not perfect, but it's dramatically better than RAW.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Radical approach: the rest mechanic only impacts hit point recovery. Everything else isn't based on x/rest.

You can totally make a game like this. It wouldn't do well under the D&D brand.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The way 4e did it was pretty much ideal already. Don't balance short-rest abilities on the assumption they have to be stretched out across multiple encounters. Let them be tricks you can pull out pretty much every fight.

Of course, I'm also of the opinion that Wizards being able to cast three spells a day that are likely to put a quick end to encounters is just fundamentally bad design. It dramatically encourages everyone, regardless of the resting mechanic, to take whatever rest gives spells back as often as humanly possible. But people tend to react pretty nastily when you tell them that design of this nature has some inherent issues that are exceptionally difficult to design around.

 

[Oofta]

Not sure there is a one size fits all, the best we can do is give people options. As I said on the other thread, I don't really do gritty rest rules because they're gritty. I do it for purposes of pacing and feel. I don't want to cram in a ton of encounters in one day and it take more than overnight to recover HP. Even if you consider HP damage to just be stresses, strains and bruises, you need more than a good night's sleep a lot of times. I do multiply duration by 5 for spells that last 30 minutes or more to compensate.

On the other hand, I think some of the difficulty is the rate of recovery for spells and other abilities. I could see an option where you get back X per hour of rest with the option to change that to getting back X per night of rest or similar. I kind of look to The Dresden Files as inspiration - things are going fine and then the poo hits the air circulation device. By the end of a couple of days of strenuous casting, Dresden is at the end of his rope physically and mentally which can be a fun challenge.

So my ideal system would be a hybrid system with more flexibility built in based on the style of game. Oh, and I don't want some metagame logic for it. I want it to make sense in world from the PC's perspective.

 

[GMMichael]