D&D 5E Would you rather have a power 1/Short Rest, or 3/Long Rest?

Which?

  • 1/Short Rest

    Votes: 16 26.2%
  • 3/Long Rest

    Votes: 45 73.8%

3/day.

Problem is that short rest is not that short.

In 4E short rest was short. 5mins is a breather. 1hr is a breather, a meal, a shower and a 15 min power nap also.

If you can get 1hr out of danger in 90% chances you can get 8hrs out of danger. So why not take the best possible rest option.

5min breaks were used even in medieval battles with front line rotation as no one could fight for more than few minutes at a time without some rest.

Cut down little on short rest power curve and make it 5min long and there will be room for it.

Right, I feel like they felt they had to stretch short rests to an hour to accommodate the fact you could spend lots of hitdice and fully heal in it. But it really kills the balance idea of say warlocks. I think I would have preferred something like: a short rest is 15m but you can only spend 1 Hit Die per short rest. So if you have an hour, you could just take multiple short rests to spend more HD.
 

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As a player, and assuming average expectations from the campaign, it would be more convenient to choose the 3/long rest option, because that also allows to voluntarily use it 1/short rest when you want. Again assuming an average campaign, IMHO the risk of wishing you had a fourth daily use is offset by the risk of wishing you had a second encounter use in the other case.

But 1/short rest is slightly easier to track IMHO, so it's more comfortable than "dailies" if you want less complexity in resource management.
 

I have often wondered if 4e would have been more palatable to certain gamers if you could have chosen a weaker at will, a medium strength encounter, or a strong daily power every level (or every other level), and I wouldn't have minded if 5e had gone with that structure.
 

Responding to the OP, I'd rather have 3/day. But in some cases that seems like too many uses. Part of the logic behind the short rest mechanic is to limit the extent to which PCs can nova.

On a similar note, let's say you're running a campaign where safe places, and hence short rests, are few and far between.
What would you say is a good revision for classes such as fighter, druid, and warlock with significant short-rest recharges?
("Don't play those classes" is not a useful response)

* Short rests get progressively harder to take as the day progresses. The first one is 15 min, the second is 1 hour, the third is 4 hours.
* Multiply the number of uses by 2 (warlocks get 4 slots per day, druids get 4 wild shifts per day, fighter gets 8 superiority dice...)
* Any other ideas?

Ben
 

Would you rather have a power that your character can use

1 a Short Rest

or

3 a Long Rest

?

Both of them are turn-offs--the most interesting abilities are at-will or at-will but gated on circumstance or resources, e.g. Shield Master, Shadow Jump, Cunning Action, or even spellcasting. Stuff that you can do only 1/short rest or 3/long rest tends to invite the question, "Why?!?"

However, if you're talking about converting existing powers like wildshape into 3/long rest, as a player I'd opt to leave them alone. 2/short rest wildshape basically means "as much wildshape as you want, within reason"--you can spend most of your time as an eagle if you want as long as you're comfortable taking a break every once in a while (resting while still in eagle form). 6/long rest wild shape would feel much more restrictive.

Ditto monk ki--Shadow Monks get to basically keep Pass Without Trace up all the time if they want; that wouldn't be true if you convert them to (level * 3) ki per long rest--that just makes them poor druids with a low number of spell points.
 
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3/long rest.

1. You can nova it and use it multiple times in a combat.
2. I've rarely had a DM that threw more than three encounters at us and let us get more than two short rests.
3. Some adventuring days you only have a few encounters.

Let's look at the cases:
  • With the 6-8 encounters with 2 short rests recommended by the DMG, 3 per long rest is superior because you have greater control over when you use it (same encounter, back-to-back encounters w/o short rests between).
  • With less than 2 short rests you have that, plus more daily uses.
  • With move than 3 encounters plus more than 2 short rests if the only place where you get more uses per day, but still with less flexibility in how you use it.
So in 2 of the three cases 3/long rest is absolutely better or equal, and in one case (the least likely one at my table) there are pros and cons each way.
 



Would you rather have a power that your character can use

1 a Short Rest

or

3 a Long Rest

?
The latter, assuming I can use up all three usages in one and the same encounter, and then teleport home/disappear up a rope trick/sleep it off in a Leomund's Hut. Much MUCH more powerful than 1/short rest.
 

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