Short Rest, Long Rest, Round Rest, what does different schedules do for a game?

[OgreBattle]

General dungeon crawl tabletop RPG rest schedules are...

1) A night's sleep, long rest, 6 8 hours (Wizard, Cleric, etc.)
2) A short rest, an hour (Warlocks)
3) A breather mid battle, takes a round or based on doing a smaller action (Book of 9 Swords)

How much does this really 'matter' though? There's an appeal in knowing wizard stuff and warlock stuff recharges faster, makes them feel different, but a lot of the time how many encounters per day is up to the game master and the penalties of withdrawing to get a good night's sleep is also up to the game master.

In the D&D5e game I'm currently in, my Paladin/Sorcerer only refreshes on a long rest but I still do more stuff than the Warlock due to the game being a "one big boss fight" sort of pacing. I've mentioned bunches of time here and there my preference for what 4e was attempting (not the execution tho) where every Class or Archetype has a reason to sit for an hour or regain something from solid sleep

The Warblade and Swordsage's "use a full action or attack action to recover something battle worthy" idea is cool... does any D&D5e class do that? Does any not-D&D RPG make that part of the core gameplay?

[Thaluikhain]

Tunnels and Trolls has you recover lost Strength (which you spend to cast spells, and also affects your bonuses in combat) at a set linear rate, which seems a lot of mucking about and much better for computer games which hadn't been invented back then.

Dragon Warriors has you (seemingly instantly) recover your magic at set times of day, different for each type of caster. So, a Sorceror fighting a big monster at 11:59 PM better spam all their spells because they are going to get reset to full magic points once the clock hits midnight. Other casters do this at other times. This just looks bad all around, unless it's just for flavour and you ensure the whole thing is over and done with between reset points.

[Dogbert]

"Short Rest" was 5E's attempt to curb the 5 Minutes Work Day... which is meaningless anyway since we're talking the about Viking Hat Edition where DMs are encouraged to constantly drop wandering monsters and Suddenly Ninjas on players who dare not run the full gauntlet in one sitting.

That's why I just went with an Energy pool which refills constantly (if potentially slow for combat purposes) for my fantasy heartbreaker. Given the choice, enjoyers of games revolving around action care more for action than for unforgiving resource management.

[Kaelik]

I think while some players may not enjoy the management, the balance is better if some pcs have a resource system that encourages the party to stop for a long time to limit players to x encounters a day.

If you have a large single dungeon complex thing and all your pcs are at will or short rest then they are going to just jam every single encounter into a marathon grind session that might be 10 or 20 or 30 straight encounters in a few hours or a day or two of in game time.

I think the game is more interesting when the pcs have to face something over several days and manage a dungeon with rest and retreat and adjusting to enemy responses instead of this smashing long grind.

[Pedantic]

1) A night's sleep, long rest, 6 8 hours (Wizard, Cleric, etc.)
2) A short rest, an hour (Warlocks)
3) A breather mid battle, takes a round or based on doing a smaller action (Book of 9 Swords)

The hour-long short rest is a mistake that came out of 5e's early attempts to poorly court both 4e and OSR players simultaneously. They tried to write encounter powers with a sop to GMs who want to slap their players around more, and embraced the viking hat. There is absolutely value in a 2-5 minute rest period, which lets you reasonably write 1/encounter powers without having to explicitly reference the combat music, but an hour is too long to serve any legitimate purpose.

4e made the same mistake internally with ritual magic, because 10 minutes is far too long to stand around chanting in a dangerous environment, and their stated goal of removing utility magic from combat (a bad idea, but still their stated goal) can be achieved with a 1 minute duration given 6 second combat rounds.

[pragma]

I'm not happy with the short/long rest divide in 5e either. It means that the onus is on the DM to craft adventuring days that wear out long rest resources. Otherwise, long rest characters just have better powers than short rest ones.

I've been playing with a few knobs to try to address the short/long issue. I've had the most success with the following ideas:
* Make all short rest powers in 3/long rest.
* Make long rests a bit longer (2 nights w/ no HP damage or spell slot use), so taking one is a meaningful decision given the pace of the world they're playing in

If I were to make a heartbreaker, I think I might make every class ability short rest based, and reserve long rests for recovering health / conditions. Players like to use their powers, and while I agree that some resource management and knowing when to retreat is are important components of D&D judgement, it's fun to let characters do their thing.

[OgreBattle]

Thanks for the various examples, haven't looked at Tunnels & Trolls in a long time
"Short rest for class resources, long rest for core mechanics healing exhaustion and so on" sounds good. Could still have a 'daily' power that inflicts exhaustion.


How about 'Reserve' spell stuff, like you get a Firebolt pew pew At-will if you memorized a [Fire] spell such as Fireball but haven't expended your slots yet. I like the idea of encouraging 'saving the big effect' but haven't played a 3e game with that

[hogarth]

The Warblade and Swordsage's "use a full action or attack action to recover something battle worthy" idea is cool... does any D&D5e class do that? Does any not-D&D RPG make that part of the core gameplay?

Champions (HERO System) allowed you to use a full round action to recover (nonlethal) health and energy, and all characters get a free recovery every "turn" (after 4-6 rounds of actions for a typical PC).

I dislike "X/day" abilities because it encourages hoarding abilities for a potential boss fight and/or bringing the adventure to a screeching halt to recover.

[deaddmwalking]

The party is going to move at the pace of the slowest member. If the party is at peak efficiency after a long rest, everyone has an incentive to take the long rest when possible. Essentially, having different refresh schedules ensures that you have conflict between people that don't need any 'refresh' and those that do. Even on the same schedule you'll have the issue of some people having spent more resources than others and potentially needing more time to recover.

In our Heartbreaker we largely hold with the 'short rest recovers class abilities/long rest recovers health/conditions' like pragma suggests. That generally works well. We do use 1 hour for a short rest. Effectively, most abilities have a recovery rate per hour of rest (including hit point damage). Resting 8 hours multiplies that by 8 and eliminates some conditions that require a full rest. Every character has a small pool of points that lets them gain the benefit of resting for 1 hour 'in-combat' by spending an action. It's quite possible to have a minor fight, spend a point, and hit the next fight full. It's also possible to want to recover those points and/or gain the benefits of the rest by actually disengaging from combat.

In terms of the fiction that we're emulating, we do want it to be possible to wear out and be forced to retreat, but we generally want characters that aren't wounded/suffering debilitating injuries to do the things in combat that they're supposed to do. We wouldn't want a Rogue be unable to Sneak Attack just because they're tired, so we don't want a Wizard to be completely unable to cast spells just because they did one earlier.

You could think of it like graphing the battery life of an appliance. Some batteries decrease in power steadily, so that electric chainsaw is seriously less effective when the battery is at 50%. Other batteries maintain full effectiveness until they run out of power, so you get consistent performance until you get a sudden drop-off to complete ineffectiveness. I find the second more fun as a player. So getting the character abilities back before the next fight is generally good; but knowing that there is a limit to how much you can do that before you're completely spent is also good.

[OgreBattle]

"Heal on long rest / night's good sleep" seems good, so in your heartbreakers and games do you have a complete restoration to full HP or wound boxes or so on? How 'realizm' this is depends really varies from player to player and game to game, but going on a tangent maybe having a really good comfy cozy full belly spa treatment should give bonus resilience / hp


Ah I had missed the "rituals should take 1 minute to cast instead of 10m or an hour", I like that, it also leaves things organically open to "The NPC casting the banishing ritual is under attack, protect them for the X amount of turns left" without relying strictly on MTP

---

Looking up some hiking rest times... this person says 5 minute rests had them go the quickest but still feel tired, while 10 minute rest was only slightly slower but felt more energized.
https://faroutguides.com/break-time-optimization/

[deaddmwalking]

So in our heartbreaker we distinguish between VP (being winded, a near-miss, luck, action-hero 'hits') and WP (real damage). A character starts out at 1st level with equal amounts (say 12 VP/12 WP depending on Class/Endurance). That same character might have 24VP/16WP at 2nd level. Generally, VP are lost first, and they recover quickly. Critical hits and damage after you've depleted all your VP do WP.

You can't recover VP until you've healed up your WP. A full night's rest for that 1st level character might recover 5 WP (6 at 2nd level). If they were very seriously wounded (like dropped to zero) They might need to rest 24 hours to recover all the WP, plus additional rest to get the VP/additional combat effectiveness back. That'd be pretty rare because of magical healing, heal checks, some alchemical items, etc, but it does provide narrative support for a situation like in Yojimbo (see also A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, among others) where a character has to have a relatively long-period of recovery.

[Emerald]

I've been playing with a few knobs to try to address the short/long issue. I've had the most success with the following ideas:
* Make all short rest powers in 3/long rest.
* Make long rests a bit longer (2 nights w/ no HP damage or spell slot use), so taking one is a meaningful decision given the pace of the world they're playing in

Considering that in early D&D any "once per day" resources were essentially "once per adventure, or maybe twice per adventure if you manage to find and defend a safe place in the dungeon to rest," it's no surprise that lengthening the long rest has helped things out for you and that various "advanced 5e" hacks have suggested rules for longer long rests (though those rules usually also lengthen short rests, which, like most things 5e-design-related, completely misses the point).

In one previous campaign, I declared that any spell slots, power points, and other major daily resources only refreshed when a cleric was able to pray in a major temple, a wizard was able to perform various rituals in their mage tower, and so forth, essentially codifying the "once per adventure" nature of those resources. I then took a look at subsidiary per-day abilities (smites, rages, turn undead, bardic music, PrC features, etc.) and either left them alone or put them on a faster refresh schedule depending on the ability in question, and handed out some free [Reserve]/[Divine]/[Psionic]/etc. feats and a few new class abilities to casters lacking such subsidiary abilities to give them a bit more longevity under the major-resource restriction.

It worked very well to improve adventure pacing and shake players out of the short-adventuring-day mindset, though admittedly if the campaign had had more urban intrigue (and so the party was constantly near a major temple/mage tower/etc. and able to easily refresh things) rather than being very wilderness- and exploration-focused I'd have needed a different flavor rationale to make it work.

[Thaluikhain]

In one previous campaign, I declared that any spell slots, power points, and other major daily resources only refreshed when a cleric was able to pray in a major temple, a wizard was able to perform various rituals in their mage tower, and so forth, essentially codifying the "once per adventure" nature of those resources. I then took a look at subsidiary per-day abilities (smites, rages, turn undead, bardic music, PrC features, etc.) and either left them alone or put them on a faster refresh schedule depending on the ability in question, and handed out some free [Reserve]/[Divine]/[Psionic]/etc. feats and a few new class abilities to casters lacking such subsidiary abilities to give them a bit more longevity under the major-resource restriction.

Oh, I like that idea. Then you could perhaps expand it and have different levels of temple you can pray at, or different levels of praying, so you can get your 1st and 2nd level spells back here in the village, but have to go to the bigger town to get the 3rd and 4th.

Though that'd change the power balance relative between classes depending on how close to certain locations the adventure was set, which may or may not be a good idea. Though, it might explain why the DMPC character of a zillion levels is scary enough to boss the PCs around, but doesn't want to go on the quest themselves.

[OgreBattle]

Has the soft roleplay effect of building temples to your god, teleportation circles or arcane libraries. I figure for the warriors and crime lords they'll increase their reputation n' organization influence further and further

[JonSetanta]

I've been thinking about this ever since you, OgreBattle, asked me the same thing years ago when commenting on my second draft of the Domain heartbreaker.

For years if playtesting (ok, a dozen times in 7 years) multiple players mentioned "It's nice that Health and Stamina recover entirely with an hour of rest, but what about all the injuries?"

I didn't consider the realism vs gameplay contrast that D&D has pervaded for 50 years, many house rules being implemented such as "only recover 1 HD + CON per night of rest", which is just as bad.

So, for a middle option, I stole the Wounded (aka Bloodied) condition of being at half Health from 4e D&D, and applied the Tired (half Stamina) and Exhausted (no Stamina) conditions likewise.

Ten minutes of rest recover half of Stamina, and removes the Tired condition.
One hour of rest recovers half of Health and all of Stamina, and removes the Exhausted condition.
One night of rest recovers all Health and removes the Wounded condition, although exceptions such as Severed Limb or Broken Bone render the respective body part unusable still, even though the Health loss is mitigated.

That's how I handled it.

5e D&D?
My current group just uses the RAW, although we do discuss the absurdity of situations such as Coffelock.

[Stubbazubba]

Agreed that having both short rest and long rest-based classes is a big mistake in 5e and that the proper solution is to err on the side of short rests rather than long rests. Setting aside the differences between players' experiences of different power schedules, the DM of an intrigue/mystery adventure that has 1-2 encounters a day and the DM of a dungeon crawl that has a dozen encounters per level of dungeon have to prepare wildly differently to challenge the same party in the time frames their respective adventures use. Shifting most things to short rests makes the prep for either type of adventure basically the same, which is a huge win. I think a 5- or 10-minute short rest works just fine so long as the number of SRs you can take is not infinite.

I don't see a strong reason to make HP strictly long rest-based. I think healing all or half your HP on a SR and just having less total HP to start with would work just fine. My heartbreaker that uses HP heals half your total HP on a short rest, but also has the Wounded condition that applies penalties and/or reduces your HP recovery until you've rested sufficiently (minor wound = short rest, moderate wound = long rest, major wound = extended rest/24 hrs). You get a wound when you hit 0 HP and roll to determine what kind it is. If you are already wounded and drop to 0 again, you are more likely to get a worse wound. Medicine checks can remove the penalty, but the reduced recovery requires restoration magic.

You only get so many lower rests per longer rest: 2 SRs per LR ala 5e, and 6 LRs per ER, so you have a 6-day adventuring week before you have to take a day's worth of downtime or you get no benefit from any shorter rests. The precise numbers don't matter so much as having some predictable framework for how much you can bite off and chew before the party pulls out or holes up and rests.

I have not experimented with in-combat resting much. I have magic-types who can spend a round re-channeling if they run out of juice to get another drop 1/SR, and soldiers who get Second Wind healing and such, but nothing universal. It's a good design space to explore, though.

[Emerald]

Oh, I like that idea. Then you could perhaps expand it and have different levels of temple you can pray at, or different levels of praying, so you can get your 1st and 2nd level spells back here in the village, but have to go to the bigger town to get the 3rd and 4th.

Has the soft roleplay effect of building temples to your god, teleportation circles or arcane libraries. I figure for the warriors and crime lords they'll increase their reputation n' organization influence further and further

That's technically what I did, assigning a maximum spell level recoverable to each settlement size (from hamlet = 0ths to capital city = 5ths) so that the setting could support casters outside of major cities at all and to provide plot hooks along the lines of "X wants to set up a temple of Y in area Z, pls help" for the party, and then having things like mage towers, wizards guilds, major arcane libraries, and so forth bump the level cap up--including, in some cases, "aspected" structures like e.g. one wizard guild only bumping things up for Abjuration and Conjuration spells, one holy site only bumping things up for Lawful divine casters, and so on--but once it got to the point that the party had 4th level spells and above it basically became "lets head back to City X to refresh spells 'cause it's the only place where we can get everything back in one place," pretty much as intended.

Though that'd change the power balance relative between classes depending on how close to certain locations the adventure was set, which may or may not be a good idea. Though, it might explain why the DMPC character of a zillion levels is scary enough to boss the PCs around, but doesn't want to go on the quest themselves.

Yeah, like I alluded to, that setup only worked as well as it did because the campaign was almost entirely wilderness-based with a very "clearing out the frontier"/"delving into the unknown" kind of feel and a total buy-in for that campaign style from the players, so the players acknowledged that the PCs could stay in the city the whole time and stay topped up on magic but deliberately chose to venture forth instead.

In a scenario where large parts of the campaign would take place in the same city (or at least near a source of refreshing spells), a different basis for recovering things would be needed. You could make it time-dependent, where e.g. the cycle(s) of the moon(s) determines when you get certain things back so you can only refresh your 6th-level spells every 5 days no matter how much or little you rest and so waiting around for those to refresh isn't worth it compared to pressing on.

You could make it duty-dependent, where e.g. to refresh a divine spell of Xth level or higher a divine caster has to carry out various rituals of the faith, so the uber-archpriest DMPC can afford to stay topped up on 9th-level spells because they spend most of their time running the huge cathedral in the capital but PC clerics ain't got time for that and so only put in a token 6-hour rite once a week to refresh those 4ths and 5ths.

And so on. Pretty much any solution could work, given the right flavor justification; the important thing is getting the buy-in from the players so that they know that you're deliberately going for a "these more powerful options are more limited so you have to rely on this other stuff instead" style and don't get pissed off about the limitations or try to figure out ways around it or the like.

Agreed that having both short rest and long rest-based classes is a big mistake in 5e and that the proper solution is to err on the side of short rests rather than long rests.
[...]
Shifting most things to short rests makes the prep for either type of adventure basically the same, which is a huge win. I think a 5- or 10-minute short rest works just fine so long as the number of SRs you can take is not infinite.

I don't see a strong reason to make HP strictly long rest-based. I think healing all or half your HP on a SR and just having less total HP to start with would work just fine.
[...]
I have not experimented with in-combat resting much. I have magic-types who can spend a round re-channeling if they run out of juice to get another drop 1/SR, and soldiers who get Second Wind healing and such, but nothing universal. It's a good design space to explore, though.

Way back on the Wizards forums in the leadup-to-4e era, I remember someone suggested that an interesting way to try to avoid novas and 5-minute-workday issues would be to expand the thing where wizards can prep up to 1/4 their total spells in 1/4 the normal time by cutting down all recoverable PC resources--HP, spell slots, turn undead uses, everything--to 1/5 normal (rounded up) and then have those refresh on a per-encounter schedule plus some sort of 1/day "take an instant short rest"-type ability, so that the stereotypical 4-encounter day would give them slightly less than 1/4 their total resources for each encounter plus an extra bit for emergencies or downtime usage or whatever, and things scaled naturally to 1-encounter and 6-encounter days as well.

It obviously wouldn't be balanced if you literally just cut things into fifths and called it a day, but the basic idea of figuring out what you want people to be able to do in a given encounter, given them that much at once, and then add on some extra to allow for tactical and pacing variations could be promising.

[Thaluikhain]

Though that'd change the power balance relative between classes depending on how close to certain locations the adventure was set, which may or may not be a good idea. Though, it might explain why the DMPC character of a zillion levels is scary enough to boss the PCs around, but doesn't want to go on the quest themselves.

Yeah, like I alluded to, that setup only worked as well as it did because the campaign was almost entirely wilderness-based with a very "clearing out the frontier"/"delving into the unknown" kind of feel and a total buy-in for that campaign style from the players, so the players acknowledged that the PCs could stay in the city the whole time and stay topped up on magic but deliberately chose to venture forth instead.

In a scenario where large parts of the campaign would take place in the same city (or at least near a source of refreshing spells), a different basis for recovering things would be needed.

I sorta like the idea of keeping it the same, and just having the game play rather differently in urban areas compared to "here be dragons" parts of the map, but that could be a real mess to work out.

[JonSetanta]

Contrary to limiting daily resources even more as if devolution back to Level 1 D&D 1e was a good thing, I came to the conclusion that more varied-usage, unlimited and at-will or at least some sort of ritual for the more powerful effects is a better direction.

However, a more sensible cap on how exponential abilities such as most spells would also be needed.

Example: a Mage has the "Fire" spell.
They can do cantrip-like things, short range and touch range average damage, a utility effect, a defense, and an area attack that can be boosted by spending a renewable resource that also has a "you can't deal more than 10 per level" cap.
Such a thematic yet optionally swappable (with a month of retraining) ability is better than learning a different spell for each of those choices, and to compare by RAW the vanilla Wizard can also ironically switch, mix, or dump/replace it all with Ice or Lightning after 8 hours of sleep.

Maybe I read too much manga but I'd rather host or play in a system and setting that resembled Negima or Fairy Tail any day rather than another Tolkien or Vance novel.

[Thaluikhain]

Another random idea, what about having "The Winds of Magic" or whatever blow at different rates, so for a bit you're wandering round doing gritty realism and when that gets boring everybody is tossing around fireballs and running up walls (the fighters requiring power boosts of some sorts as well).

Alternatively, magic stuff only works in the dark or whatever, so nights, underground and dense fog are when/where the monsters play.

[deaddmwalking]

Another random idea, what about having "The Winds of Magic" or whatever blow at different rates, so for a bit you're wandering round doing gritty realism and when that gets boring everybody is tossing around fireballs and running up walls (the fighters requiring power boosts of some sorts as well).

Robert Asprin's Myth series while intended to be tongue-in-cheek is actually a pretty good vision of a pseudo-medieval world connected to multiple dimensions. Magic is a big part of the story, and there are invisible ley lines that run through the air/earth/water. While there are no mechanics described, the narrative description is a little like being connected to a watersource. A bigger hose lets you 'fill up' faster. Wizards usually set up shop at an intersection of major ley lines. Higher level wizards are better at 'filling up' from a small source compared to low-level wizards. Setting up a similar 'background magic level' would potentially allow you to determine how much magic you could recover with a short rest.

Alternatively, magic stuff only works in the dark or whatever, so nights, underground and dense fog are when/where the monsters play.

That would be a major narrative change that doesn't allow you to tell the types of stories you expect to tell.

[JonSetanta]

Another random idea, what about having "The Winds of Magic" or whatever blow at different rates, so for a bit you're wandering round doing gritty realism and when that gets boring everybody is tossing around fireballs and running up walls (the fighters requiring power boosts of some sorts as well).

Alternatively, magic stuff only works in the dark or whatever, so nights, underground and dense fog are when/where the monsters play.

Interesting.

Also, Ambient Magic As A Finite Resource.

The presence of items in populated areas drains the energy needed to renew spellcaster abilities, or at least dampens it while they are in urban and metro areas.

The further into the wilds, the underground, the mountains, the woods they go, the most powerful the spells get and the faster they renew.

[Zaranthan]

Alternatively, magic stuff only works in the dark or whatever, so nights, underground and dense fog are when/where the monsters play.

I ran a one shot based on aWoD where everyone was vampires and it worked out like this. People caught in daylight ducking into dark alleys and abandoned warehouses to have their blood magic duels exactly like an episode of 90s Urban Action Show #17.

[Thaluikhain]

Interesting.

Also, Ambient Magic As A Finite Resource.

The presence of items in populated areas drains the energy needed to renew spellcaster abilities, or at least dampens it while they are in urban and metro areas.

The further into the wilds, the underground, the mountains, the woods they go, the most powerful the spells get and the faster they renew.

There was a fantasy series that a barely remember where dragons were a problem, but the dragons were eating up all the random magic so when the humans were able to start killing them, random magic monsters could pop up unexpectedly.

I ran a one shot based on aWoD where everyone was vampires and it worked out like this. People caught in daylight ducking into dark alleys and abandoned warehouses to have their blood magic duels exactly like an episode of 90s Urban Action Show #17.

Yeah, came up with that idea when thinking of my Victorian Vampires thingy. London was covered in fog/smog 1 day in 6, so that also was interesting.

I think it'd also work with non-magic humans, having to get to safety before darkness falls and the monsters come out, or alternatively going all Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth on them while they are helpless during the day.

[JonSetanta]

Well.uote if you can find or remember the title, please share asap!


For my homebrew I've written up a dozen different "magic methods" that are automatically learned (1) with the first Spell acquired by a character.
If the Mage class is added, the character may add another.
All spell users may addd yet another every 5 levels later.

Typical fantasy tropes such as:
Gesture (somatic)
Vox (verbal... In the form of singing, screaming, or chanting)
Blood (drains Health)
Hermetic (Stamina pool is "invested" into spells ahead of time Vancian style, but cast time is reduced as runes are conjured)
Artifice
Alchemy (think FMA where things are converted into other things in equal exchange)
Ocular (for those Cyclops from X-Men, Darkseid, Gorgon, or otherwise Beholder imitators)
Aura (typical anime flashy lights and terrain effects are difficult to hide)

Stacking them while casting boosts spells.

But as of mention here of "night magic" I think some kind of theme where the spells are reduced in potency when in bright light yet slightly enhanced in dim or complete darkness, there's plenty of tasty monster tropes to be had.