In this post I am will spell out the experimental home rule, subject to refinement and further change, that I would like to implement in my next game to define four levels of rests:
Goals of This Rule
Before delving into the specifics, a few words on what I am trying to achieve with these changes:
- Allow non-ritual casters to gain something while a caster does his thing,
- Make hit dice a bit easier to use,
- Make hit dice more valuable,
- Make ht dice harder to recover,
- Eliminate miracle healing via sleeping a bit with your head on a rock.
I believe what I will outline below achieves the above without introducing many unintended consequences or complications.
Breather
This new type of rest is intended to support goals 1, 2, and 3.
A breather is an uninterrupted (no combat, no side tasks) 10 minutes rest, characters can borrow up to half of one benefit of a short rest from their next short rest, rounded down.
Examples: Use 1/4 (rounded down) of their hit dice -or- a warlock might choose to recover 1/2 of their spell slots -or- a monk might recover 1/2 of expended Ki point, etc. In all cases the benefit claimed during a Breather must be returned at the next longer rest and no more than one Breather can be taken between longer rests.
Short Rest
Nothing changes other than deducting any benefit used during a preceding breather.
Long Rest
This change to Long Rest goes to goal 3, 4, and 5. The healing benefits of a long rest are:
- Characters do not receive an automatic full heal,
- They may spend all of their available hit dice, (RAW)
- They recover no more than 1/2 their total hit die, (RAW)
- Do not recover levels of exhaustion and,
- May not resolve other conditions at the DM's discretion.
This is essentially the Slow Natural Healing option from RAW. Quoting just the last part of RAW: This optional rule prolongs the amount of time that characters need to recover from their wounds without the benefits of magical healing and works well for grittier, more realistic campaigns.
Excluding exhaustion recovery from a standard long rest makes the bone numbing condition harder to clear and thus longer lasting.
The houserule changes to Long Rest are thus:
- Do not receive an automatic full heal,
- Do not recover levels of exhaustion and,
- May not resolve other conditions at the DM's discretion.
Full Rest
A Full Rest is an extended, comfortable, safe rest, perhaps at an inn, homestead, or other secure camp site. Those three adjectives are intended as follows:
- Extended - at least 12 hours.
- Comfortable - area used for the long rest must provide comforts appropriate to those taking the rest. A typical noble likely requires a nice bed and some good food, a peasant perhaps just a straw mattress, mutton, and some quiet, a barbarian could enjoy a dry(ish) cave and small camp fire. The idea being this is comfort relative to an individual.
- Safe - The area must provide the feeling of safety and security. Maintaining a watch, being prepared for combat, are the antithesis of this. Huddling inside a Tiny Hut with hostiles outside also does not qualify.
After completing a full rest, characters
gain 1 hit die of temporary hit points in addition to complete health
and other recovery functions of a RAW long rest.
In addition to a full nights sleep, some activity is allowed, preparing meals, light exercise, reading, and similar.
Exhaustion Risk
If characters push too long, too hard without a break, they risk levels of exhaustion. Borrowing from the forced march rules
of the PHB: For each additional hard day without a break beyond two days, each character
must make a Constitution saving throw at the end of the day. The DC is
10 + 1 for each day past 3 days. On a failed saving throw, a character
suffers one level of exhaustion. This can result in exhaustion cropping up on day 4 of an extended expedition.
Hard day means a day of significant sustained effort. Eight hour days of marching, ready for combat, carrying a full set of of adventuring gear qualify as hard days. Traveling for eight hours, with most gear on a pack animal or cart, or riding an appropriate transport for a fair part of the day, and being able to rest in relative safety is not a hard day.
This house rule intends to reward the use of pack animals and/or travel at a slower pace.
Rules Speak Statement
Now, to put this into a concise form for inclusion in my house rules document:
Four distinct levels of rest are being used.
- Breather is an uninterrupted (no combat, no side tasks) 10 minutes rest, characters can borrow up to half of one benefit of a short rest from their next short rest, rounded down.
- Short Rest - No change, other than repaying any Breather benefits.
- Long Rest - Characters do not full heal. They may spend all of their hit dice. They recover no more than 1/2 their total hit die at the end of the rest. Long rests do not recover levels of exhaustion and may not resolve other conditions at the DM's discretion.
- Full Rest - An extended (12 hour), comfortable, safe rest. At the end of the Full Rest characters gain 1 hit die of temporary hit points.
Extended Activity Exhaustion Risk - If characters push too long, too hard without a break, they risk levels of exhaustion. For each additional hard day without a break beyond two days, make a CON saving throw at the end of the day. The DC is 10 + 1 for each day past 3 days. On a failed saving throw, a character suffers one level of exhaustion.
Revised 12/09/20
This post has generated some discussion, which has lead me to want to revise and clarify a bit. I am doing that now, changing the above insitu rather than posting a third article on this topic or adding a revision addendum here.The most significant changes being elaboration on what qualifies as a long rest and crisping of the extended activity risk rule to not require a full rest to avoid exhaustion, just a break in pace.
I'm going to paste comments that were made in Discord into this and other similar threads, so I can keep the thoughts strait. This comment is from Jon 12/02:
ReplyDeleteThe rest rules are interesting, but I worry about the idea of weakening a long rest to the point where it doesn't effectively do much of anything. It doesn't recover exhaustion, leading to possible scenarios where you can be exhausted for several days in game (and maybe multiple session even ... ew). It also obliterates the berserker barbarian, since they give themselves exhaustion when they use their ability and they'll be out for days before they can recover.
Also, it means that any expedition from a town that lasts longer than a few days can lead to exhaustion and exhaustion stacking. It takes very few fails before your character is effectively dead in the water ... no movement speed to speak of, can't pass ability checks, can't attack, etc.
ReplyDeleteJonathan Martin
3:36 PM (2 minutes ago)
to me
These rest rules are certainly thought provoking. In theory, these should lead to a grittier experience that’s a whole lot more punishing and they should absolutely crank up the danger a few degrees. I’ve got some thoughts I’ll outline here. Ultimately this is a **very** core mechanic of D&D. Changing how rests work changes everything about the campaign in a very fundamental way. So I may be a bit critical because I would want to discuss these ideas until we have something we like.
1) New modes of rest: my first and most immediate thought about the new modes of rest was whether or not we *need* these. Let’s be honest, we don’t short rest enough as is. In the rules, some classes really benefit from short rests and some just only use short rests for the hit dice recovery (occasionally). Short rests already have a bit of an issue where you either take too many or too few based on the number of short rest dependent characters in your party. Adding yet another increment of rest is... superfluous? I don’t think I’ve had even a handful of times where I wished I could get rest when I had 10 minutes but not an hour available. And the full rest has another rider that makes it a bit more complicated to implement. You said that different characters with different backgrounds require different levels of comfort to benefit from a full rest. Do you expect the snobby nobleman to rely on regular access to 5 star accommodations, while the Barbarian just finds a cozy rock? It actually leads to my second point.
2) This system is going to feel unfair for the players. It’s going to feel that way in a lot of ways. Some players with poorer luck are going to be stacking exhaustion to near lethal levels because they can’t roll dice well. Some players are going to get a full rest when we camp for the night while their companions will not. Then the companion who didn’t heal and recover hit dice and is currently nearing death will then have to roll for exhaustion.. and you know he’s going to increase his level. Each stack of exhaustion takes yet another day of full rest to heal. So if you thought the 10 gold nightly charge for a fancy hotel was punishing, wait until you end up spending 50 gold because you were carried there on a stretcher while the rest of your party is just dandy and chipper. That’s going to feel utterly terrible. Then we have the trouble of seeing new quests in the area we are currently exploring... but wait, 2 of us have 4 stacks of exhaustion and are begging for their end to come swiftly as they hobble brokenly about. We can’t afford to go do the cool quest and plot hook. Also it takes at least 3 days to travel here, so we may never come back. Just getting here involves exhaustion saves, let alone questing. And do we even need to cover how badly it’s going to feel when someone’s character DIES at a camp when they roll their 6th failed exhaustion save while trying to make their way back to town to rest in the only 5 star hotel within 200 miles?
3) Players just don’t like doing things unless they can get the most out of it. Suppose we took a breather, for some reason. Each player takes something they kinda need and we go back to adventuring. Well, now no ones going to want a short rest. Everyone who took anything is going to get a much more diminished benefit from their next short rest. No D&D party does this. They’d just wait for their next long rest. Oh... looks like we’ve arrived again at that problem with short rests... now we basically won’t take 2 of them per day (when the DMG recommends like 3-4). Borrowing rewards from a future short rest basically guarantees that we won’t be taking a short rest. We’ll hold out for the long. Oh, and since we aren’t replenishing resources, we’ll take more damage and burn through hit dice faster... oh boy. Our noble wizard can’t replenish hit dice until we travel 2 weeks back to down to stay at that inn he spends every copper he makes at. Yikes. Also, he’s stopped moving entirely and he’s nearing death from exhaustion.
Delete4) This is more complicated and the benefits that this system brings (greater challenges, grittier fantasy, etc) don’t really outweigh their downsides of making the players *feel* awful. Like this adds a lot more complexity to a system that should be clear.
5) Sorcerer, Barbarian, Artificer, and Fighter, congratulations, most of this system won’t bother you as much. Making Daily Constitution saves to avoid utterly shutting down and becoming a useless wreck to the most debilitating condition in the Player’s Handbook? Well, add your proficiency bonus to your likely already high CON mod. DC 10 saves will seem trivial when you have +6 at character creation to the save. The noble wizard, meanwhile, has a +2. Which, given his stat array, means he is giving it a high priority. Oh, let’s not forget that monks get proficiency too.. well everyone can if they spend a feat. And spending a feat to stop being penalized isn’t exactly how most people want to spend their feats.
6) How do we adjudicate the warlock invocation, Aspect of the Moon. What about the undying warlock’s 10th level ribbon that makes them no longer require sleep? How about elves who simply need to kneel and meditate 4 hours a day. Does it really benefit them so much more to meditate in a gilded throne room than a campfire bivouac? How about the catnap spell? If we take a breather then use catnap to grant a number of party members a short rest over 10 minutes, do they lose nearly all the benefit of their short rest *and a 3rd level spell slot* because they borrowed their benefits earlier in their last breather? What about warforged who don’t even need sleep? How do we treat things like the potion of watchful sleep? That potion is supposed to let you remain alert during a long rest... but long rests lost much of their potency if they can’t recover exhaustion. What do bedrolls even do if not grant you restful sleep on the go? Does a long rest become a full rest if the rester buys a comfy tent and spends a modicum more time sleeping? What about the Circle of Dreams Druid’s class feature built around making long rests safer? Believe me, I can go on. There are a lot of things built around the mechanics of long rests that become much weaker if long rests become weaker.
Delete7) We already have ways to increase the danger without a complete overhaul of rests in D&D. Removing the full heal from a long rest done in an unsafe area is certainly a good option (though your cleric will utterly despise this. Nothing worse than getting your spell slots back and being basically forced to spend them all immediately to heal a party who isn’t ready to leave a quest zone despite being at single digit hit points. Healing in D&D is too weak to replace long rest healing.) We can also increase the amount of encounters the players experience within the “adventuring day”. We can up the CR threshold and up encounters to deadly.
8) Ultimately, this new system looks like it would *expand* rest options. In practice, it would severely limit the number of times we actually take rests. If you don’t get hit dice back, short rests stop happening. Oh, and we’re not limited to 1 long rest per session... it’s **DAYS** of time in game, which can span months of play. Can you imagine being out of hit dice for the 5th session in a row? Oh, and you also have 3 levels of exhaustion, so it’s been 12 real world hours since you could pass ability checks or do ANYTHING you built your character to do. That’s not just punishing, it’s deeply unfun. A player in this position won’t be taking any short rests. Hell, they won’t be accepting quests or doing anything but trying to get back to the hotel and grumbling each night they are asked to make yet another exhaustion save (that also happens to be growing increasingly difficult each night).
The Tl;DR version of all that wall of text above:
DeleteTweaking the rest rules is a very dangerous game. The players will feel like its unfair, they'll under use rests, you'll end up with no "noble" background characters (because those who did pick that background will have died to exhaustion a warning to the rest). It unfairly benefits certain classes with CON proficiency and ultimately it leads to a gaggle of useless, exhausted heroes incapable of passing ability checks, landing attacks, or doing anything remotely heroic because they're a hair's breadth from death due to not having a pillow for a week and a half. If that wasn't bad enough, the times you mentioned involve multiple sessions of gameplay. I don't think any D&D player *wouldn't* shudder at the thought of having disadvantage on all attack rolls, saving throws and half speed over the course of multiple sessions played over weeks of gameplay time.... whereby each day the party rests (necessary to recharging abilities) you make that dreaded CON save again... with disadvantage... and its progressively harder... knowing each time you inch closer to death... but worse, you becoming increasingly more useless each night. That sounds completely miserable. And frighteningly possible... er... likely. Just a few days from down and some bad luck on the rolls.
Changing the rest rules is ultimately changing the pace of your game. If you plan to have less combat than the suggested 2 encounters -> short rest -> 2 encounters -> long rest, then you could change the rest rules to slow down the pace of the game. Just ... y'know... never run a dungeon. They don't work if you can't rest there AND you can't rest on the travel to and from the dungeon.
There are problems with 5e's rest rules. Unfortunately, those rules are baked into the fundamental aspects of game design and balance. Changing them is disastrous. No one will enjoy slowly dying of exhaustion after weeks of feeling useless and unable to participate in any aspect of play because their character is crippled exhaustion. And Mathematically, when you ask for the party to all roll dice, someone is almost certain to fail. Make this dice roll a daily thing that they need to do if they ever want to use any of the class feature's that their character was built around and you'll quickly find yourself with a party that doesn't want to quest... it's frankly too exhausting. And they'll turn down plot hooks looking for a nice bed to nap in. I just don't think these changes will improve anything.
That is a lot of thoughts. I'm thinking this isn't worth doing. I can just implement Slow Natural Healing per RAW and have most of what I am looking for.
ReplyDelete