D&D 5E Why sleeping shouldn't be a long rest

[dave2008]

Doesn't seem like a good solution to me.

I have no idea, but I could see it would for some groups. We have our own system of house rules for rest and recovery. Number of encounters per day vs play power has never been an issue for us. I am not saying that is because it is our house rules, I think it has more to do with our group.

 

[auburn2]

Did your party ever try to go to bed after just waking up recently? Then you might be interested in this.

The DMG on p. 84 suggests six to eight encounters of medium to hard difficulty per adventuring day.

Since I often need to be flexible when it comes to the amounts of encounters per in-game day I ran into a problem:
I generally stay well below 6-8 encounters per day, say when the party is solving a mystery, and on others days, when they are in a dungeon, the encounter frequency gets a lot higher.

This means that on the low encounter days, the long rest is resetting the party too often, making them too strong, while on encounter heavy days it's about right.
The way I have seen many DMs, including me, approach this issue, is to just increase the encounter difficulty for low encounter days. With the obvious problem of increasing the volatility of the fights, comes a way worse side effect, in my opinion. You are teaching your players to hit the long rest button after every second encounter or so. And that is a habit you really don't want to get into, since it significantly alters how the game feels and frankly was envisioned to be played, based on the assumptions in the DMG. If that doesn't bother you that is ok. It did bother me.

So instead of trying to alter my encounters to fit the resting system, I decided to think about how I can have a resting system, that is flexible enough to suit my encounter needs.
If I simply was to stretch the adventuring day out (as the DMG suggests) by making both long and short rests longer, it would work well for the low encounter days but get worse for the high encounter ones. So that just shifts the problem.

Example, "Gritty Realism" variant (DMG p.267):

• A long rest of 7 days. A short rest of 8 hours. The Party goes dungeoneering and after clearing two rooms they have to rest 8 hours. Not good.

The solution I came up with was, to keep the short rests fairly short, so the party can use it after every encounter if they wish too, while a long rest is a 36h period which pretty much is a whole day off.

My reasoning behind this is, that the decoupling of going to bed in the game world from gaining the benefits of a long rest has a good impact on how low encounter scenarios play out, while not shifting the mode of play for high encounter ones much.

Example:

• The game is slower and the party has two combat encounters per day? Fair enough, after three days they got to take a day off and they don't wake up fully restored every day.
  
  
• The party is dungeoneering for a full day and gets eight encounters in? They have to leave the dungeon and rest, which they usually also do with the normal 8 hours long rest.

On top of leveling the wonky difficulty across the different modes of play, not teaching the players that going to bed equals a long rest adds a layer of planning for them to consider. The long rest feels more impactful and reflects its importance. You regain hit dice, prepare your spells, buy equipment and plan your next step. To further embody that notion, I also let the party recover all hit dice during a long rest, not just half.

Making short rests easier, or making them shorter in comparison to long rests, on the other hand, does not change their impact too much. Many short rest abilities have 2 charges for instance, effectively making them a per encounter ability already and the limiting factor really is the parties hit dice pool. At the same time this change, will decrease a short rests influence on the pacing of the game, which is especially nice if you want to run an action packed scenario.

Now I can have a consistent way of letting the players rest across all scenarios with less changes in the games difficulty, giving them an incentive for planning and better resource management, while still staying true to the original design according to the DMG. A win-win situation, in my opinion.

What do you guys think about this? Two of my players felt I was nerfing their casters with this change. I tried to reason that I am not changing the balance of the game significantly, if at all, I am getting closer to how WotC envisioned it to play out.

I would disagree with this.

I think there are a lot of low encounter days and I don't think there is a problem with that. I really think the 6-8 encounter "rule" is for the height of an adventure or climax. Certainly on downtime players are not doing 6 encounters a day, or even 1 encounter. If they are in a city working on solving a mystery they are not doing 6 encounters a day until perhaps the day they find the cult's hideout and go down into it (i.e. the climax). If I am scouring the wilderness searching for the lost pyramid I am probably not getting 6-8 encounters a day, the DM is probably rolling wandering monsters and I am averaging 1-2 random encounters a day plus something with a fixed location encounter that I stumble upon certain days, maybe another random encounter every other night while we sleep. Once I find the pyramid it is probably 6-8 a day until I do whatever it is I came to do.

Adding encounters in the scenarios above would really slow down the roleplay. Imagine if you are traveling from town A to town B and it takes a week and there is no "story hook" durign that trip, just random encounters. If the DM has you fight 6 encounters a day on the road that is over 40 encounters with no tie in ti the story. It is just combat for combat's sake and that is not fun, at least for me. On the other hand giving one encounter and then telling the Wizard he can not refresh his spell slots until he has met the 6-encounter threshold makes no sense to me either.

As a player when I am in a low encounter day I use my limited use abilities with abandon - during that trip from town A to town B - you see 5 Goblins on the ridge ahead, they are surprised .... ok I cast fireball, let's move on. I don't think there is a problem with that. The game is about the story and there is no problem with the party wiping out enemies in combat that is not really central to it.

 

[tetrasodium]

Did your party ever try to go to bed after just waking up recently? Then you might be interested in this.

The DMG on p. 84 suggests six to eight encounters of medium to hard difficulty per adventuring day.

Since I often need to be flexible when it comes to the amounts of encounters per in-game day I ran into a problem:
I generally stay well below 6-8 encounters per day, say when the party is solving a mystery, and on others days, when they are in a dungeon, the encounter frequency gets a lot higher.

This means that on the low encounter days, the long rest is resetting the party too often, making them too strong, while on encounter heavy days it's about right.
The way I have seen many DMs, including me, approach this issue, is to just increase the encounter difficulty for low encounter days. With the obvious problem of increasing the volatility of the fights, comes a way worse side effect, in my opinion. You are teaching your players to hit the long rest button after every second encounter or so. And that is a habit you really don't want to get into, since it significantly alters how the game feels and frankly was envisioned to be played, based on the assumptions in the DMG. If that doesn't bother you that is ok. It did bother me.

So instead of trying to alter my encounters to fit the resting system, I decided to think about how I can have a resting system, that is flexible enough to suit my encounter needs.
If I simply was to stretch the adventuring day out (as the DMG suggests) by making both long and short rests longer, it would work well for the low encounter days but get worse for the high encounter ones. So that just shifts the problem.

Example, "Gritty Realism" variant (DMG p.267):

• A long rest of 7 days. A short rest of 8 hours. The Party goes dungeoneering and after clearing two rooms they have to rest 8 hours. Not good.

The solution I came up with was, to keep the short rests fairly short, so the party can use it after every encounter if they wish too, while a long rest is a 36h period which pretty much is a whole day off.

My reasoning behind this is, that the decoupling of going to bed in the game world from gaining the benefits of a long rest has a good impact on how low encounter scenarios play out, while not shifting the mode of play for high encounter ones much.

Example:

• The game is slower and the party has two combat encounters per day? Fair enough, after three days they got to take a day off and they don't wake up fully restored every day.
  
  
• The party is dungeoneering for a full day and gets eight encounters in? They have to leave the dungeon and rest, which they usually also do with the normal 8 hours long rest.

On top of leveling the wonky difficulty across the different modes of play, not teaching the players that going to bed equals a long rest adds a layer of planning for them to consider. The long rest feels more impactful and reflects its importance. You regain hit dice, prepare your spells, buy equipment and plan your next step. To further embody that notion, I also let the party recover all hit dice during a long rest, not just half.

Making short rests easier, or making them shorter in comparison to long rests, on the other hand, does not change their impact too much. Many short rest abilities have 2 charges for instance, effectively making them a per encounter ability already and the limiting factor really is the parties hit dice pool. At the same time this change, will decrease a short rests influence on the pacing of the game, which is especially nice if you want to run an action packed scenario.

Now I can have a consistent way of letting the players rest across all scenarios with less changes in the games difficulty, giving them an incentive for planning and better resource management, while still staying true to the original design according to the DMG. A win-win situation, in my opinion.

....

What do you guys think about this? Two of my players felt I was nerfing their casters with this change. I tried to reason that I am not changing the balance of the game significantly, if at all, I am getting closer to how WotC envisioned it to play out.

I've tried gritty realism & it causes a lot of problems due to durations being in rounds/minutes/hours & is made worse by wotc foisting long/short rest class interclass balancing off on the gm so you still need to shape your campaign around 5e being designed with encounter per adventuring day targets that assume every adventure is a dungeon crawl through a zerg nest or some warzone which @auburn2 went into nicely in #62.

 

[Gadget]

I have heard of some groups switching back and forth between different settings on the rest dial, though I'm not to sure how well it works, and it might be too gamist for some. Basically, during travel and in between "Dungeons," there is a an overnight Short Rest and 3-4 day Long Rest. However, once the party reaches the Lost Temple of Doom, it switches to the regular one hour short rests and overnight long rests.

I've also seen people use the method of having anyone take a short in a minute (or even sacrificing your actions & movement for a round), but you can only take a maximum of two short rests per long rests. This allows a little better parity between short rest and long rest classes, as the short rest folks will get their short rests in under almost any circumstances. Now, if it is a one encounter "day," this will still favor long rest classes, but it does help keep the ratio of shot to long rests if the adventuring "day" is stretched out over a longer period to get the requisite 6-8 encounters in.

 

[clearstream]

The solution I came up with was, to keep the short rests fairly short, so the party can use it after every encounter if they wish too, while a long rest is a 36h period which pretty much is a whole day off.

My reasoning behind this is, that the decoupling of going to bed in the game world from gaining the benefits of a long rest has a good impact on how low encounter scenarios play out, while not shifting the mode of play for high encounter ones much.

Example:

• The game is slower and the party has two combat encounters per day? Fair enough, after three days they got to take a day off and they don't wake up fully restored every day.
  
  
• The party is dungeoneering for a full day and gets eight encounters in? They have to leave the dungeon and rest, which they usually also do with the normal 8 hours long rest.

On top of leveling the wonky difficulty across the different modes of play, not teaching the players that going to bed equals a long rest adds a layer of planning for them to consider. The long rest feels more impactful and reflects its importance. You regain hit dice, prepare your spells, buy equipment and plan your next step. To further embody that notion, I also let the party recover all hit dice during a long rest, not just half.

Making short rests easier, or making them shorter in comparison to long rests, on the other hand, does not change their impact too much. Many short rest abilities have 2 charges for instance, effectively making them a per encounter ability already and the limiting factor really is the parties hit dice pool. At the same time this change, will decrease a short rests influence on the pacing of the game, which is especially nice if you want to run an action packed scenario.

Now I can have a consistent way of letting the players rest across all scenarios with less changes in the games difficulty, giving them an incentive for planning and better resource management, while still staying true to the original design according to the DMG. A win-win situation, in my opinion.

What do you guys think about this? Two of my players felt I was nerfing their casters with this change. I tried to reason that I am not changing the balance of the game significantly, if at all, I am getting closer to how WotC envisioned it to play out.

I think you are right to feel a whole week is too long. I tried it and found that. Having lengthened long rests you are likely to find it necessary to lengthen short rests, otherwise over time you may find players drawn to short rest classes like warlock and battle master. A positive side effect of longer duration rests is that the availability of high-level spell slots is lowered, which I think helps the game world feel less volatile.

I settled on 3-day long rests, and 1-day short rests. I made it explicit that rests can run into one another (a short rest can be extended into a long rest, which should be obvious). Time equal to the rest length must pass before resting again. Having made rests longer, I added a 1-hour breather to spend HD.

This is working well (playtested over two campaigns and many sessions). You do also need to provide a balance of encounters because it is true that if players are smashed by super-deadly encounters they will seek to rest whatever the duration.

 

[clearstream]

7 day long rests mess with the spell economy in a big way. Easier to say that a long rest must be in a cozy comfortable place away from threats. Like an inn.

"Changes" is for me a better framing than "mess with"

I use longer duration rests and really value that in my game world, powerful revival spells and such like are less available. It makes the world feel more stable and - to me at least - makes the economy a touch more explicable.

 

[S'mon]

I think you are right to feel a whole week is too long. I tried it and found that.

I found that for running time-critical adventure Red Hand of Doom, a 3 day long rest worked best. But for typical Gygaxian dungeon delving & hex crawling, 7 days definitely seems to work best. PCs go adventure, have up to 6-8 encounters, then rest a week. I also use the 5e DMG training to level rules, which are 10, 20, 30 or 40 days to train up.

 

[DND_Reborn]

FWIW I remember once trying a long rest was 2 or 3 days (sort of like having your weekend off) and a short rest was 8 hours (your normal "sleep"/ rest).

Then we thought about a long rest 24 hours and a short rest 4 hours.

We decided just to go back to normal.

 

[Seramus]

"Changes" is for me a better framing than "mess with"

I use longer duration rests and really value that in my game world, powerful revival spells and such like are less available. It makes the world feel more stable and - to me at least - makes the economy a touch more explicable.

If it's working for you then that's the most important thing. It can have consequences like removing the "always on" potential of spells like animate dead, magic aura, and water breathing. Or not being able to regain mage armor every morning, etc.

 

[clearstream]

If it's working for you then that's the most important thing. It can have consequences like removing the "always on" potential of spells like animate dead, magic aura, and water breathing. Or not being able to regain mage armor every morning, etc.

Or not being able to hole up in a tiny hut

EDIT I've been keeping an eye on such concerns - that some spells would be inadvertently hard nerfed - and so far it has been unproblematic. With mage armor for example, you are right that it is no longer just always up... instead mages that have it cast it as they knowingly head into danger meaning it may be down in the case of an ambush.