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

[CleverNickName]

"If your plan requires you to rest after every single encounter, you're going to need a better plan."
-Me, in an e-mail to my players about resources and the size of the dungeon they are about to enter.

I often find myself having to "help" the players out a bit with their resources. One trick I do quite a lot is to place extra healing potions and spell scrolls all over the place, removing an equal value of treasure for each one.

 

[atanakar]

Our Gritty rule :
Short Rests are only use to replenish class abilities that require a Short Rests. PCs cannot use HDs to Heal unless they take a Long Rest. PCs do not regain all HPs after a Long Rest. Only those gained by spending HDs. PCs only regain half their HDs after a long rest.

 

[S'mon]

True. The duration of many spells is supposed to last across many encounters (water breathing, dark vision, death ward, higher-slot hex). With a 24-hour short rest, these spells only last for one or two encounters, not 6 to 8.

Druids can no longer spend an entire rest in beast form.

The resting and healing spells also get messed by 7 day long rests. No more casting goodberry before going to sleep. No sleeping in leomund's tiny hut or mordenkainen's magnificent mansion. No point in casting alarm, mordenkainen's faithful hound, or nondetection to protect you while you rest (especially the last two, which are not rituals).

The logistics of buying and carrying rations also becomes a problem. A 7 day long rest requires 14lb of food and 58 pounds of water, per person! After all, you won't be foraging for food - you can't do activities like that during a rest (otherwise it is not restful). Who is carrying all of that? I guess it encourages PCs to buy pack animals but now you have to feed and water those animals, and protect them.

These are all features not bugs IMO.

 

[S'mon]

What do you guys, that run more encounters per long-rest do, in terms of making the game fun for your spell-casting classes, if you do that at all, or do you just make them auto attack at some point?

With 6 encounters before a LR, casters need to conserve powerful spells and use them carefully. That resource management is part of the fun of playing a caster - when they unleash the (eg) Hypnotic Pattern or Fireball on the enemy horde and trivialise a nasty encounter.

With 1-2 fights per LR they get to trivialise every encounter and make the non-casters look weak.

 

[Don Durito]

To make wilderness travel work better I sketched out the idea of a 'rough rest'. I haven't had the chance to play test it though. I imagine it would need some tweaking.

Rough Rest:
Any time the PCs have to set watches AND/OR sleep in armour.
Don't regain all the benefits of long rest. Instead.:

• Regain 1 hit die.
• Regain 1 non spell slot long rest resource of each type. Eg: 1 Barbarian Rage. 1 Samurai Fighting Spirit. 1 Indomitable 1 Arcane Recovery. Half Sorcerer Level Rounded Up in Sorcery points
• Restore half-total hit points.
• Restore Spell slots as by "Arcane Recovery" or "Natural Recovery*"

*These last 2 powers gain a new restriction. They cannot recover spell slots beyond what the caster began the day with.

In addition a level of exhaustion can be recovered in a short or long rest - however this recovery always costs 1 hit die.

Of course this is assuming especially dangerous wilderness travel such as you might have in the Scarred Lands or Dark Sun settings. It seems to me that if you are only having one or two encounters during wilderness travel, then you could simply rule that rough sleeping, which assumes precautions such as setting watch, won't result in the benefits of a long rest.

 

[Li Shenron]

Did your party ever try to go to bed after just waking up recently?

First of all, technically you don't need to go to sleep in order to have a long rest, you only need to spend 8 hours quietly (see PHB for details), and you cannot have more than one long rest every day (24 hours).

I think what you mean here is just the party stopping doing anything useful for the adventure and saying "let's come back here tomorrow". And of course that sucks from a narrative point of view.

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.

I see your point, and I don't think increasing the encounter difficulty for the sake of depleting the PCs resources quickly is a good idea.

I think it's actually a false assumption by some DM that the game must deplete the PCs resources on every given day. An encounter doesn't become "easier" if it's the only encounter in a day. Eventually, it's the other way around i.e. it is the latter encounters in the same day which may become harder if you're already down on resources, but that is not even granted... it depends on whether you need some specific resources (typically spells) to properly handle such encounter, and you have few or none of those left. Simply having few HP left doesn't make it harder to beat the encounter, it only makes it more risky.

Anyway, in the majority of cases the players don't know when an encounter is going to be the last (or the only one) of the day. Maybe they are likely to know the opposite e.g. they just entered a dungeon and they expect it to be full of monsters, so their first encounter won't probably be the last. So it's easier for the players to know that today is a "hard day" than a "light day", meaning that they won't just discharge all their resources against a pair of wolves in the forest "because we're travelling so this is likely to be the only encounter". Given this, there is no reason to artificially increase the encounter difficulty every time on "light days", and doing so can indeed teach the players to start metagaming.

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.

Sounds fine to me. With this approach, a single "hard day" works exactly like when using default long rests, while a series of 3-4 "light days" is treated mechanically as a single "hard day", with the exceptions of spells durations... did you alter some spells also? There might be only a few spells to worry about, for instance it might be important to consider modifying some spells that have a duration of 1 day into having a longer duration.

The only case where your approach causes some issues, is if you ever have an adventure that specifically features two (or more) consecutive "hard days".

Overall, I'd set the long rest based on the worst case (i.e. "hardest day" you expect to feature in your campaign), and then think about whether short rests need changing or not.

 

[Don Durito]

So it's easier for the players to know that today is a "hard day" than a "light day", meaning that they won't just discharge all their resources against a pair of wolves in the forest "because we're travelling so this is likely to be the only encounter". Given this, there is no reason to artificially increase the encounter difficulty every time on "light days", and doing so can indeed teach the players to start metagaming. .

 

[Keravath]

I'm not sure that there is a big need to adjust the length of rests. I think the DM might just need to mix up the encounters so that the players can't predict the type of day they are going to have.

Assume there are two types of days - light encounter days with 2-4 encounters and heavy with 6-8. The claim is that the players have too many resources on the light encounter days since they can blow all their resources on the smaller number of encounters.

The big issue with this point of view ... HOW do your players know what kind of encounter day it is? IF your players know what is coming THEN they can choose to allocate all their resources to early encounters and make them easier. But how do they KNOW that? Unless you, as the DM, run all of your non-dungeon days with only 2 or 3 encounters and all of your dungeon days with more ... then it is the DMs habits and encounter design that is informing the players decisions and not the situation they are encountering in the world.

The easy way to fix this is to have days with any number of encounters under any circumstances so that the players can not predict what kind of day it will be. Most of the time they shouldn't be able to do that anyway.

How do you do this?

The wilderness isn't empty. An inn or other establishment has NPCs. Characters can only benefit from one long rest in 24 hours. If the players don't learn to try to save SOME resources at all times then something will come along and kill them off. Players should always be on edge about using that last long rest resource, that last high level spell slot, because it is not entirely up to the party when a long rest can occur. They can indicate an interest in taking a long rest but the DM and the world around them will decide if it happens. Ideally, after a 2-4 encounter day the party should still have about 1/2 of their long rest resources left since they don't know when the day will end.

Anyway, just my take on it. I think most of the issue is the DM design choices on the adventuring day and what they telegraph to their players rather than how long a rest takes.

 

[Don Durito]

6-8 encounters in a single day is a lot of violence. That;s fine if you're doing the traditional dungeon crawl. It's hard to sustain outside of it. During an urban adventure or wilderness exploration the players may not know exactly how many encounters they will face - but regularly facing 6 strains belief somewhat.

So they will naturally start to reset their expectations. And having played the game for a while, I'm really convinced that the game is much better when you regularly hit 6-8 encounters. It doesn't have to get down to 1 for play style to change - even 2 or 3 encounters means you can start being a lot more free with Paladin smites and higher level spells.

Personally, I think 36 hours is a perfectly sensible length of time for a long rest. It's implies a day doing nothing - it's precisely what you would do in something like a through hike if you actually wanted a proper rest. The week in the DMG is somewhat excessive, it largely removes altogether the idea of a long rest in the middle of an adventure.

 

[NotAYakk]

@kerevath, see the comic directly above you.

6-8 encounters is a lot of table time. Do you want to spend table time on random encounters?

So you are traveling from point A to point B. If you want there to be an encounter along the way, you either have to be willing to commit to 6-8 encounters of table time reasonably often in that case, or you have to accept that the players will pretty much know there will be only a few random travel encounters.

You can throw out random travel encounters, you can go all in and have 6-8 random travel encounters on a day, or you can sometimes have a single travel encounter.

If you go with sometimes single, you either have to make it super-deadly or it becomes trivial due to daily resource expenditure.

If you extend the definition of a long rest such that you don't get it while traveling (or right afterwards), travel encounters impact power budgets after the travel. So they can be just another encounter.

---

I sort of like a 3 rest structure.

1 hour - short rest

nightly sleep - Can expend a HD to regain a point of exhaustion. At end of rest, roll all HD expended; on a 5+ they recover. You can reroll failed HD a number of times equal to your con bonus; if you have a con penalty, you must reroll that number of successful HD.

1 week of downtime in safety - long rest. Can do downtime activities during this.

(The HD recovery means 1/3 of expended d6s, 1/2 of d8s 60% of d10s and 2/3 of d12s recover on average.)