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

[mellored]

To me it seems arbitrary, short-rest abilities just seem to be standing up and saying "check me out, I'm NOT Vancian!" What sort of narrative is made sense of by waiting an hour instead of 8?

For that matter, 1 hr seems like a long time to catch your breath, bind your wounds, collect your arrows, get your bearings and be ready for the next challenge. Maybe it's just an expectation set by the 10-min turns and 'balance of the turn following combat is spent binding wounds/cleaning weapons/etc' bit from 1e, but I feel like, if you're going to have a short rest at all, it should follow the combat or other intense exertion, immediately - and actually be short.

I don't entirely disagree.

But 1 hour to catch your breath, meditate, and gather your arrows makes more sense than 8.
I do agree that 10 minutes would make even more sense.
Or even just an action.

"As an action, you can regain 1 ki" or "As an action, you survey the battlefield" for instance.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

For reactive abilities, like Indomitable, I would rather have daily charges because otherwise it's going to go un-used. Most fights don't involve failing a save, but the one which do are likely to involve more than one.

For active abilities, like Rage or Ki, I would rather have short-rest charges because I can make sure that they see use.

 

[GMMichael]

To me it seems arbitrary, short-rest abilities just seem to be standing up and saying "check me out, I'm NOT Vancian!" What sort of narrative is made sense of by waiting an hour instead of 8?

For that matter, 1 hr seems like a long time to catch your breath, bind your wounds, collect your arrows, get your bearings and be ready for the next challenge. Maybe it's just an expectation set by the 10-min turns and 'balance of the turn following combat is spent binding wounds/cleaning weapons/etc' bit from 1e, but I feel like, if you're going to have a short rest at all, it should follow the combat or other intense exertion, immediately - and actually be short.

Hmm... Prepare for counterattack: 5 minutes. Catch breath: 5 minutes. Bind wounds: 10 minutes. Collect arrows: 2 minutes indoors, 15 minutes outdoors. Get bearings: 5 minutes. Loot the bodies: 5 minutes. That's a good, conservative, 32 minutes right there.

Really though - short rests aren't supposed to make narrative sense. They're supposed to enable encounter powers without letting 5th edition be nicknamed 4.5. And for those of you taking notes, long rest powers are formerly known as daily powers.
[MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION]: sure, maybe that was less than an hour. But I didn't see any of the characters using their short rest powers again...so I guess they either didn't get a rest or didn't bother rerolling initiative

 

[guachi]

My current campaign we abolished short rests (outside of HP gain) and all the PCs have 2x short rest abilities per long rest.

I know the game assumes 2 short rests per day and therefore 3x short rest abilities per day but the added flexibility meant I felt 2x was a fair compromise. It also means more flexibility in encounter creation when I don't have to balance who gets what ability back when.

We've had fun with one session being a sequence of four encounters with no rests (for hit point purposes) and another with 8 small encounters spaced out. And I reduced the time needed to short rest for HD usage for HP to 5-10 minutes, which is almost always is available after a combat.

 

[fuindordm]

My current campaign we abolished short rests (outside of HP gain) and all the PCs have 2x short rest abilities per long rest.

I know the game assumes 2 short rests per day and therefore 3x short rest abilities per day but the added flexibility meant I felt 2x was a fair compromise. It also means more flexibility in encounter creation when I don't have to balance who gets what ability back when.

We've had fun with one session being a sequence of four encounters with no rests (for hit point purposes) and another with 8 small encounters spaced out. And I reduced the time needed to short rest for HD usage for HP to 5-10 minutes, which is almost always is available after a combat.

That sounds pretty good.

Ben

 

[Tony Vargas]

Really though - short rests aren't supposed to make narrative sense. They're supposed to enable encounter powers without letting 5th edition be nicknamed 4.5. And for those of you taking notes, long rest powers are formerly known as daily powers.

Heh. Encounter & daily powers /were/ recharged with short & long rests, respectively, anyway. If they'd really been 'encounter powers' they'd've recharged when you rolled initiative. ;P

My current campaign we abolished short rests (outside of HP gain) and all the PCs have 2x short rest abilities per long rest. I know the game assumes 2 short rests per day and therefore 3x short rest abilities per day

2-3 short rests / long rest, I think it is.

but the added flexibility meant I felt 2x was a fair compromise.

Nod. 2/n is more than twice as good as 1/n. (OTOH, 4/n vs 2/n, maybe not so much).

It also means more flexibility in encounter creation when I don't have to balance who gets what ability back when.

Sounds reasonable.

 

[Ashkelon]

Since the game balance is designed around the assumption that there will be about 6 encounters per day and 2 short tests per day, 3 per day abilities are objectively more powerful than once per short rest abilities. This is due to a variety of factors such as the daily abilities providing more agency and allowing the player to nova. Daily abilities also allow a player to opt to rest more frequently and turn a 6 encounter per day game into a 4 encounter per day game, thus breaking the fragile balance in which 5e is built upon.

Of course, all this assumes that you are somehow managing to follow the encounter guidelines set forth in the DMG. In my experience it is far more common for there to be only 3-4 encounters per day and only maybe time to take a single short rest.

As such, I feel a far more interesting question is if an ability that is usable 2 times per day is balanced compared to one that is usable once per short rest.

 

[redrick]

Not sure why the short rest is so foreign. I take a 45 minute lunch break every day, and usually a couple other short breaks in between. I usually take 3 breaks a day when hiking or doing other strenuous activity. (Adventuring seems to involve an awful lot of walking.) So, while 1 hour is probably a little on the long side, it's closer to what I think of as a short rest than 5 minutes. 5 minutes is enough time to catch my breath after climbing a flight of stairs, but it's not enough time to clear my mind or recuperate from more serious activity or trauma.

As for what kind of powers I'd prefer? I chose 1/short rest. Sure, in most games, I'm more likely to get 2 short rests per day than I am 4, but I just really like knowing that I always have a little more in the tank if I can find a good place to hunker down for an hour. A short rest can be taken almost anywhere, and because you don't need to go to sleep, there's little chance of an ambush, even if monsters do wander by. At least in adventures that I run, popping down for a long rest is a dangerous proposal anywhere, let alone in a dungeon, where some sort of encounter is almost a guarantee. So I'd rather be able to always be 1 short rest away from something useful, than to run into a heavy encounter at the start of the day, feel like I have to nova, and then spend the rest of the adventuring day wishing we could just head back to down. It's a bummer when my barbarian runs out of rages and we haven't found a good place to make camp yet.