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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7910400" data-attributes="member: 1465">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 &quot;let's come back here tomorrow&quot;. And of course that sucks from a narrative point of view.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 &quot;easier&quot; 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 &quot;hard day&quot; than a &quot;light day&quot;, meaning that they won't just discharge all their resources against a pair of wolves in the forest &quot;because we're travelling so this is likely to be the only encounter&quot;. Given this, there is no reason to artificially increase the encounter difficulty every time on &quot;light days&quot;, and doing so can indeed teach the players to start metagaming.Sounds fine to me. With this approach, a single &quot;hard day&quot; works exactly like when using default long rests, while a series of 3-4 &quot;light days&quot; is treated mechanically as a single &quot;hard day&quot;, 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 &quot;hard days&quot;. Overall, I'd set the long rest based on the worst case (i.e. &quot;hardest day&quot; you expect to feature in your campaign), and then think about whether short rests need changing or not.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 7910400, member: 1465"] 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. 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 [I]must[/I] 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 [I]latter[/I] 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 [I]specific[/I] 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. 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 [I]worst case[/I] (i.e. "hardest day" you expect to feature in your campaign), and then think about whether short rests need changing or not. [/QUOTE]

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