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Where did they came from when you sat on your arses for a week? Gee, I wonder! Seems like an attitude problem, not a game problem. In an adventuring game there usually is some sort of a situation/crisis/conundrum going on, that needs solving, and you just cant dillydally for weeks at any moment. I really don't understand what sort of static games people are running if this is not the case.
You don't get 7 medium encounter in 7 days in a lot of places. You only get a ton of encounters in a small bit of time in dungeons or dungeon-like environments like hideout raids or fort sieges.
It doesn't need to be that many in one week, as there can be some uneventful days between them, just not a whole week of nothing. But ultimately a huge chunk of D&D's rules are about combat, so if people don't like playing in style where combats are at least somewhat frequent occurrence, they're playing the wrong game to begin with
It does have to be that many in a week. That the point. The wizards spells per day was designed around them having at least 5 non-automatically-death encounters between long rests
2 encounter between long rests isn't enough.
Many RPGs have shifted adventuring from resource attrition and given PC a base resource floor of resources every encounter. 4E, 13A, PF2, most mana systems.
5e gives a bunch of classes 8 buttons of 10 power and expects them to meter out 1 button for each of 6-8 encounters to balance the class with 1 button of 3 power that recharges every turn. That's not the only ways to meter power.
I wonder if you took away 1 spell slots per level to a minimum of 1 spell slots and give every cast their own version of Arcane recovery but let them do it every short rest, would it come out to the same amount of total slots while gating some caster power behind taking short rests.
Like a level 10 wizard has 4/3/3/3/2 with 0ne Arcane Recovery of 5 spell levels for a 2nd and 3rd for 4/4/4/3/2.
Subtract base slots to 3/2/2/2/1 with 2 Arcane recoveries to a 1-4 to make 4/3/3/3/1. You lose a 5th level slot but can take a 3rd short rest for that extra 5th. Same total slots.
You don't get 7 medium encounter in 7 days in a lot of places. You only get a ton of encounters in a small bit of time in dungeons or dungeon-like environments like hideout raids or fort sieges.
It does have to be that many in a week. That the point. The wizards spells per day was designed around them having at least 5 non-automatically-death encounters between long rests
Yes, it isn't. So have more. Space the rests as far apart than it needs for this to happen. Hell, make the long rest of a year of downtime chilling peacefully in a keep if that what it takes.
Many RPGs have shifted adventuring from resource attrition and given PC a base resource floor of resources every encounter. 4E, 13A, PF2, most mana systems.
And doing so you lose the strategic aspect of attrition like explained earlier (maybe in this thread, or some of these, who knows.) Also, if you have just per encounter resources that recharge for every encounter, then the only possible mechanical setback from a battle is death. So either the battles become much more deadly to keep up suspense, or they just become pointless dice rolling where we go trough the mechanics until the PCs win and have all their resources in their disposal for the next battle. (Though as far as I know, most of those systems don't work like this and actually have attrition.)
5e gives a bunch of classes 8 buttons of 10 power and expects them to meter out 1 button for each of 6-8 encounters to balance the class with 1 button of 3 power that recharges every turn. That's not the only ways to meter power.
And I am not really denying that a game could be designed differently from ground up to address this matter in another manner. But that is not going to happen, is it? So if the problem is that there are too few combat rounds between rests then obvious easy solution is to space the rests further apart so that this no longer is the case. That is a solution that is readily available, and relatively easy to implement. You can quibble, but whatever the difficulties involved, they're absolutely miniscule compared to redesigning the whole game.
Alternatively find a game that already does this differently and play that instead. Like you said, they already exist.
Yes, this is pretty typical. This is how we play and I suspect how most people play these days. And gritty rests fix most of the issues for this type of pacing. I literally don't understand why people refuse to use it; using it is hella easier than redesigning the entire game from ground up around the assumption of fewer combat encounters between rests. The biggest mistake WotC did was to not make the gritty rests the default, as it better match the pacing of a typical game and a lot of people refuse to touch optional rules.
Gritty Rest rules forces you to interrupt the adventure when you run out of ressources. While with the normal rest rules, you just have to wait one day to get your ressources back when you are near 0, with the Gritty Rest, you have to leave the dangerous environment, go back to a safe place, huddle up for 7 days and only than can you continue adventuring.
Like, in most games I played or DMed yeah, we didn't have enough combats between two rests. The party was always pretty powerful because of that. But in all the adventures, if the party would have just left to rest for 7 days, the adventure would be over. The bad guys would have won that Quest. There is only certain limited Typs of adventures that naturally allow to interrupt them for 7 days without losing to the bad guys. Or you have to design all your adventures to not be longer than a DMG Adventuring Day.
It takes the best of the Gritty Realism rules (being able to stretch the adventuring dat over several days) and removes the need to interrupt the adventure completely to get a long rest.
Actually, it turns the long rest into a short rest, basically.
Than you also tell the DM that he can balance the endurance of a party by giving out Healing and Mana potions to offset harder adventuring weeks.
Gritty Rest rules forces you to interrupt the adventure when you run out of ressources. While with the normal rest rules, you just have to wait one day tonget Your ressources back when you are near 0, with the Gritty Rest, you have to leave the dangerous environment, go back to a safe place, huddle up for 7 days and only than can you continue adventuring.
Like, in most games I played or DMed yeah, we didn't have enough combats between two rests. The party was always pretty powerful because of that. But in all the adventures, if the party would have just left to rest for 7 days, the adventure would be over. The bad guys would have one that Quest. There is only certain limited Typs of adventures that naturally allow to interrupt them for 7 days without losing to the bad guys. Or you have to design all your adventures to not be longer than a DMG Adventuring Day.
Yes, exactly! And that is a feature, not a bug. The amount of resources you have to "solve" the adventure are actually limited, just like they should be. This means you can actually "lose", without it being a PC getting killed.
Can you describe how you experienced them? I came to D&D with 5e and only saw some skill challenges (like in the Spelljammer Academy the training montage or the navigation torugh the asteroid field) that where very yawn-inducing and really bad adventure/game design.
You don't get 7 medium encounter in 7 days in a lot of places. You only get a ton of encounters in a small bit of time in dungeons or dungeon-like environments like hideout raids or fort sieges.
It does have to be that many in a week. That the point. The wizards spells per day was designed around them having at least 5 non-automatically-death encounters between long rests
2 encounter between long rests isn't enough.
Many RPGs have shifted adventuring from resource attrition and given PC a base resource floor of resources every encounter. 4E, 13A, PF2, most mana systems.
5e gives a bunch of classes 8 buttons of 10 power and expects them to meter out 1 button for each of 6-8 encounters to balance the class with 1 button of 3 power that recharges every turn. That's not the only ways to meter power.
I think you use the Gritty Rest Rules wrong, at least as far as I understand them.
For characters to get the benefits of a long rest, they need to be resting for 7 days, without interruption, without strenuous activity, without combat and spellcasting, without walking for more than an hour (per day?). The normal Long Rest Rules still apply.
So, in order for the group to take any long rest with the Gritty Rules, they need to go to a safe place where they will not be attacked for 7 days straight, or the long rest resets and they have to start all over.
The Gritty Realism rules don't stretch the Adventuring Day to a week, it stretches the long rest to a week, which is just the end of the adventuring day. Between long rests in the Gritty Rules can be several month.
Like Lord of the Rings. The only time Frodo and Sam took of long rest was when they got to the elves. After they split from the party? With Gritty Realism rules they had no long rest. They used up all their resspurces to get to Mount doom.
Yes, exactly! And that is a feature, not a bug. The amount of resources you have to "solve" the adventure are actually limited, just like they should be. This means you can actually "lose", without it being a PC getting killed.
Yeah, it is a feature and a bug. Because it puts you again in a binary win/loose state.
The problem with the Long Rest as of today, no matter the normal or the gritty one, is that it regenerates 100% of all of your ressources (Except hit dice, that never get used up anyway) no matter how many ressources you had left at the end of the adventuring day.
That makes going Nova a valid strategy. You don't need to preserve your ressources when you get all of them back no matter what.
But when you only get 10 to 30% of your ressources back during a long rest, first of all, 1 or 2 encounters a day are suddenly enough for ressource attrition to happen and players suddenly need to preserve their ressource. Because when you only get 20% back, it matters if you start your rest with 80% or 5% of your ressources.
A long rest system that only gives back 10 to 30% of your ressources per day also allows for more dynamic campaigns in comparison to the gritty realism rules.
If you are low on ressources, you now have a choice. You can rest some to get a little back to push on. You can rest several days, but risk that the enemy gets more preparation time or ambushes you or doing other proactive stuff.
You add strategic depth to the game.
The biggest Design mistake of D&D 5e is the 100% Ressource Regeneration after a long rest. It is also the most verisimilitude breaking thing in the game, even before fall damage.
Yes, it isn't. So have more. Space the rests as far apart than it needs for this to happen. Hell, make the long rest of a year of downtime chilling peacefully in a keep if that what it takes.
Can you describe how you experienced them? I came to D&D with 5e and only saw some skill challenges (like in the Spelljammer Academy the training montage or the navigation torugh the asteroid field) that where very yawn-inducing and really bad adventure/game design.
Well, if I may, let me give what I remember of two skill challenges I played in one of my favorite 4e campaigns.
For the first, the party had infiltrated an ancient, long-sealed underwater research base from an extinct civilization.
That research base was under attack by gigantic kaiju creatures from the outside, and we needed to figure out a way to save the base, while also reviving someone in the party who had died. So we split up; my character went off with a friend to lead the base's soldiers (he was of the same species, but recovered from a stasis box on a different planet, so the soldiers recognized him as "leader"), while the shamandronesmith and wizard/cleric worked with the ancient healing machines to revive our bard cyber-augmented commando.
The Wizard/Cleric succeeded at reviving our augmented friend, after almost telling the machine to reformat her instead (used a reflavored Deva's past-life memories power to improve the roll.) Now she could help out.
The Dronesmith attempted to reactivate the external defenses of the base, but failed; this meant she had drawn power away from the structural integrity fields, meaning future damage would be more severe (accelerating the end of the challenge.)
I attempted to activate mobility controls to try to escape (because the upper parts of the base could detach and move), but these controls were foreign to me. This drew the kaiju attacks to critical system areas.
I don't remember what specifically commando lady tried to do, but that also failed--which meant we failed the skill challenge. The base was destroyed...
...and as a result, we woke up INSIDE a kaiju that had eaten us! We then had to fight our way out against a gaggle of enemy agents whose ship had been swallowed whole; we eventually defeated them, stole their awesome ship, and then began the next phase of the campaign.
For the second skill challenge, we started off by trying to negotiate with a businessman to come with us, over the objections of his security staff.
Our dronesmith presented technological secrets (without full explanations, just the tantalizing intro) which we only knew because of where we'd gone, which impressed him enough to keep paying attention. He knew we weren't whistling Dixie--this was real, but was it safe?
I then squarely looked at him, and vowed that our offer was exclusively (a) because we truly had something worthy of his attention, and (b) trying to be in his best interest, to the best of our knowledge. I presented this with sufficient earnestness that the DM gave an automatic success--no need to roll Diplomacy. (It pays to be a straight shooter sometimes!)
At this point, he is on board with joining us--but now his own security detail turns against him, and the skill challenge blended in combat-like elements (meaning, we had to consider safety). Our cyber-commando, having been a bit of a poster girl for her former employer, is a dab hand at dangerous rescues (they make great PR material), so she coordinated our escape.
The Dronesmith tried to set up a distraction, but her drones were too obvious popping in from phase space, so the enemy knew they weren't the correct target--allowing them to move toward our intended exit.
Finally, our Barbarian (who had replaced the Ranger that dropped out) boldly struck out ahead of the group, causing our opponents to trigger their trap early, before they were fully ready, allowing us to slip through the opening albeit with a bit of damage taken (successful roll, but had to spend a healing surge.)
This meant we got out of the restaurant area with our businessman intact, respecting us, and having very good reasons not to want to leave our protection until he was certain it would be safe. Unlike the previous, we not only succeeded, but did so with only a single failed roll.
The big thing with both of these SCs is that each roll, success or fail, contributes something to the future state of play. The simplest example of this is the stereotypical "street chase scene" SC: each successful or failed roll leads to some specific development in the chase, losing ground, suffering a setback, having to re-locate the enemy, etc.
The second major thing is, don't just make the results a hard binary pass/fail. The overall ultimate goal can still be binary (e.g. you catch the bad guy or you don't; you protect the base or you don't; you persuade/protect the CEO or you don't), but the nature of the success/failure can be flexible. With the chase scene example, you might fail to catch the person, but if you only barely fail (e.g. you nearly get enough successes to pass), you now know where their secret hideout is--or, at least, what building it's in. Conversely, if you succeed but only by the skin of your teeth, maybe you do catch the person, but they were able to pass a message to their superiors.
Making those two tweaks to the Skill Challenge process turns them from potentially very dry, dull affairs to things that genuinely feel tense and dramatic. It also means that who goes when matters a lot more--it might be the case that a later complication would have been easier to address for a character that has already participated.
