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

[miggyG777]

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.

 

[NotAYakk]

So if you are doing gritty, that just means your budget for a dungeon is basically one scene -- the time between short rests.

So a level 5 party of 5 might find a dungeon with 15 kobolds and a bugbear boss a decent set of encounters (split up if they do it right) for a short rest.

They can then follow the tunnel in it for 2 days and find the lair of the kobold sorcerer (another 10 kobolds and a CR 3 sorcerer in one encounter).

The issue is, can you handle that low of a budget? Shorter short rests do give you more flexibility; but personally I find "1 hour" to be very awkward timing. If you are engaged with hostiles, 1 hour is forever, and if you are not, 1 hour could often as easily be 36 hours or an overnight.

When dungeon crawling in a complex, how do you justify the PCs spending an hour out of danger?

I mean, imagine you had a team of monsters attacking a human villiage. After some fights, with human still around, they hole up in a pub to recover?!

 

[Seramus]

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.

 

[DND_Reborn]

First, why do you feel the need to change the types of encounters on low encounter days? So what if the party has just one easy encounter during the "adventuring day" (a concept which, BTW, is pretty stupid IMO... but anyway...). Some days are just easier than others.

Part of playing is understanding and managing resources. If the party has the opportunity to refresh themselves, they should take it, because they can't be certain when the next chance might come. In that light, they also shouldn't use all their best stuff because they are counting on getting a rest soon.

For instance, as a DM, have you ever hit the party with 5-6 encounters during a traveling day? Hmm? Most groups feel (wrongly IMO) that such days they can expect an encounter or two, maybe three, but also are under the assumption that the DM will "balance" it out so it might be challenging but not horrible.

Screw balance.

If your party uses a lot of resources on the first encounter, and then the second they are almost out of "big bang" features, the third is harder, but they see the light fading and know sleep is coming. WRONG! Suddenly, the night is restless, no sleep comes--only 3 more encounters. "But... but... but... we need to rest! We can't handle it," they cry. Oh, and they come quickly, so they are even denied the short rest they crave!

If players played more like life in a war zone, they would understand resources are precious and should only be expended when necessary. Sure, it might make a fight harder because they don't nova or something, but then at least they know if the time comes later on, it is there.

The real balance comes in understanding that.

Our table has had times when we were stretched to the breaking point, spread so thin we feared even easy encounters because we knew if too many happened, we would eventually fold. Dungeon crawls are like that. Rarely is it one assault into the complex, more often it is a series of attacks and retreats, moving in and holding ground or retreating to safety when we understand we are so depleted that if we can't get back, we're screwed.

5E is notorious for being too easy IME if you play by the guidlines for encounters. It is basically like a video game, once you get to a certain point, you just have to put in the time and you will win. Changing things up like encounter difficulties makes it unpredicatable and more exciting as well as more challenging IMO.

Now, sorry for that sort-of-rant, maybe it does address your issues--maybe not. To address a specific concern of the players with casters. You are nerfing them. I'm not saying that is bad thing necessarily, but to them it is. Remember that 5E nerfed a lot of spells compared to earlier editions to remove the power difference between casters and non-casters. With your idea, short-rest classes become more powerful because their abilities refresh, while the long-rest classes abilities don't.

Consider the ki points of a Monk or the Warlock's spell slots compared to the spell slots of a Paladin who wants to divine smite. The paladin's slots are much more valuable because you are making them even rarer when you require a longer long rest. Meanwhile, the Monk and Warlock and Battle Master and other short-resters are sitting pretty with most if not all their stuff back.

 

[Shiroiken]

There are many aspects of resting that make any kind of universal system problematic. Either you use a gamest system (automatic resting after a number of encounters) or your have a stimulationest system that leads to the problems related by the OP.

I have found that the number of encounters per day is vastly underutilized by most DMs, as many prefer to have a few BIG fights than a series of smaller ones. Some adventures are, by design, going to have fewer encounters per day than others (again, as noted by the OP). The trick to both of these, and the utter removal of the 5MWD, is to never give the players any indication of when their next rest might occur. As @dnd4vr said, if they blow their good stuff early, they may suffer for it later (or not). Having a few big fights rather than small fights is fine... so long as the players don't know how many, or how long they might have for even a short rest.

As a player, I always try to have resources left when we begin a long rest. Not only because it meant that I was conservative enough with my resource, but just in case the DM has a night encounter to two up his sleeve. The worst experience I had as a 5E player in this regard was when we did "just one more room" in a secret temple under Baldur's Gate before we retreated to safety, wherein 4 of the 6 PCs were dropped to 0 and between our 2 conscious PCs we had a total of 3 HP. We were literally dragging our companions back to our townhouse when we were set upon by a dozen street toughs. Normally a single PC at the end of the day would wipe them out with ease... but instead we had to give over half the treasure we had on us (vowing that they'd have to bleed for the rest). A painful lesson indeed.

 

[Wiseblood]

If you make encounters too easy people don’t use their abilities that recharge on a rest mechanic. If you make them too hard they nova and feel like they need to rest.

 

[Iry]

If players played more like life in a war zone, they would understand resources are precious and should only be expended when necessary. Sure, it might make a fight harder because they don't nova or something, but then at least they know if the time comes later on, it is there.

I certainly agree that resources should be meaningful. But unlike a real war zone, conserving your resources in D&D usually means more auto attacking, something many (but not all) people consider to be mechanically boring as watching paint dry. I would love a happy medium.

 

[Horwath]

1. You can't have more that 1 long rest every 24 hrs.

2. Put time pressure on players for certain quests.
I.E. this has to be solved today or orc camp must be raided in 5 days and there is 3 day travel time to there.

3. I also see short rest no really short in duration. If you can get 1 hrs free, there is a good chance that you can get 8hrs free also.

I would go with 12hrs long rest(Elves can do it in 8hrs) and 15 min short rest(Limit 3 times, between long rests). 12 hrs are for sleeping, resting, standing watch, maintaining your gear, washing and eating 2 decent meals(before and after sleeping).

Also you can have only 4 long rests before you must have and extended rest. Extended rest is 3 nights in a row in a "relative" safe location. This of this as weekday-weekend mechanics.

 

[Monayuris]

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.

I have run 5E in various formats... long sessions, short sessions, online... In my experience, I find Gritty Realism is the best option if you are running shorter sessions.

I think messing with the spell economy in this way is a good thing. It helps make martial classes more powerful relative to spell casters since most martials are short rest based.

The game as is only works for a 6-8 encounter 8 hour session. When you have shorter sessions you have two compounding problems...

1. Shorter sessions equal less encounters which allows for more frequency of daily resources. This gives advantage to daily spell-casters.
2. Shorter sessions equal less encounters which also tend to discourage the need for short rest. So martials that recharge abilities on short rest are weakened.

I have Long Rests be 7 days (basically no Long Rest during a session).

 

[Seramus]

I have run 5E in various formats... long sessions, short sessions, online... In my experience, I find Gritty Realism is the best option if you are running shorter sessions.

I think messing with the spell economy in this way is a good thing. It helps make martial classes more powerful relative to spell casters since most martials are short rest based.

How am I supposed to lead a seemingly endless army of undead when everything is gritty and slow?
Shakes a fist humerusly.