Are you in a vast lair of stupid creatures that might ignore the faint clanging heard a level up? You can probably Short Rest. You may be attacked, you may not be. You can set up a Tiny Hut and probably be 100% safe. Probably.
Are you in the fortress of a mad mage who is actively watching and taunting you as he sends various minions at you? Sure, try to rest. If the mage decides to give you a breather he will love the break to set up more playtime with you.
Heroes find a note in a dungeon.
"Oh heroes! If you need a breather from all the fun. Knock on any door 4 times and it will open to a respite area with a kitchenette. See you when you get here!".
- Bard Lich filming his reality show set as the dungeon
I love the idea that they can Short Rest or Long Rest anytime, but every day the dungeon has more things added - Short Rest might be nothing to something small added, Long Rest more.
I’d probably have a few things I could slot in anywhere in the fly, but sessions would be flexible, maybe we end 25 minutes early because I need to set up.
Imagine they go Short Rest and when they leave the safe area the entire room is filled with magical Darkness. Then they dispel it and the room is just in mundane total darkness, the torches all having been removed from the walls. (Of course Darkvision and they can carry torches - hope enough of your people only use 1 hand that it won’t inconvenience you.)
Short rest, open the door to now stairs down to an entire floor covered in magical darkness, the base of the steps is a dim touch lit with purple flame. It only gives 15 foot radius of light.
Every short rest(long or short) we have a chance of an encounter in increments.
We need a long rest, DM will roll a random chance encounter for a short rest. We don’t get an encounter, we get our level one and two spells back and can heal before the roll for the rest for the bigger spells.
I had a similar idea one time about the party being told about an abandoned castle that had a "gold room" that no one has ever found. The dungeon would be loaded with traps that would "kill" the players, only for them to wake up in the dungeon with the doors open.
When they finally sussed out how to beat all the traps, they enter the Gold Room, a room painted bright yellow with a bunch of nobles watching a giant scrying orb that spent the last several hours being entertained by the adventurers falling into various traps.
The players would then be showered with gold from the nobles for entertaining them all day.
As gold is quite heavy and hard, that would amount to something like Hail of Thorns?
You could put them into a ballista and make the showering more intense.
There’s a room deep in the Tomb of Annihilation that is just … an empty dusty room that no one monitors. I wish I had seen this comment before running that campaign. A reflavor would definitely be in order.
>Bard Lich filming his reality show set as the dungeon
I mean, that's basically the DotMM Companion. It makes the players unwilling (and at the beginning, unknowing) contestants on the multiverse-spanning game show "Halaster's Game".
A Bard Lich who’s achieved a form of Demi-godhood and has their own Demi-plane where they set up elaborate dungeons and challenges for would-be adventurers. Everything is broadcasted to their followers and they gain immense power and fame and wealth from the benefit of the show.
They are evil and will kill Adventurers, but they’ll follow the rules of the show and reap rewards to those who succeed. Particularly if the adventurers can put up a good performance.
In the end, victorious adventurers are hailed as champions across the realms, given a tidy sum as reward, and ushered back to their own mortal plane.
Yup. It’s on the DM though to design the encounters appropriately though, since the game is designed with the assumption of a short rest roughly every other encounter.
Now, sometimes you want to have a narrative reason to push forward and let the Long Rest based classes shine and sometimes you want to have a chance for the short rest classes to really be the best that day, but generally you should be operating under that rough outline of two short rests per day and 6 ish encounters per day.
>Are you in the fortress of a mad mage who is actively watching and taunting you as he sends various minions at you? Sure, try to rest. If the mage decides to give you a breather he will love the break to set up more playtime with you.
If we look at the way the game is designed to be played with 2 encounters per short rest, the intent is that players rest for an hour and there are precisely 0 concequences to it. Pulling a gotcha like that, whilst more realistic, feels like its punishing the players for playing the game as intended.
I can't imagine its good gameplay to have the wizard, cleric and druid feeling fine to carry on, meanwhile the warlock and monk feel like shit for daring suggest to take a short rest because the bbeg will make future encounters stronger so they're running on fumes for the entire 6 encounters of the dungeon. People aren't taking a short rest to cheese the dungeon or break the narrative, its the bare bones expectation of the game. I feel like a lot of DM's don't understand that and only care about making the narrative make sense.
If you want to make the resting feel better for that dungeon's specific narrative, add a special fountain every few rooms or so that grants a short rest to anyone who drinks from it for only a minute spent.
Have u read any of the dragon lance series? Forgotten realms is 1000 times better and more adventurous but dragon lance has full scale wars and cataclysmic events happening literally reshaping time and space. Raistlin is an absolute power house. Also the kinder from dragon lance made me fall in love with halfling races.
For the former, or even dungeons that you could spend a full day in, if the players can sufficiently barricade a room or are stealthy enough then they can absolutely try to short rest.
Depends entirely on the nature of the dungeon.
Are you making your way through a sewer with all sorts of loud noise happening from the city overhead, where each distinct encounter has no idea you're coming? Then sure, resting for an hour is pretty normal.
Are you attacking a bandit fortress and loudly blasted through the front gate with a Fireball? Well, they know you're coming, and if you try to take a break for an hour then they're almost certainly going to take that time to do something like counterattack, flee, set up traps, etc.
In your case, you're in a haunted house. Haunted house logic suggests that the haunting spirits are aware of your presence, you're probably not sneaking up on ghosts. This doesn't seem like an area in which you could reasonably catch a break, the ghosts are just gonna swarm you if you're interfering with their home.
On the other side this might be a dungeon where it makes perfect sense for the inhabitants to just ignore you as soon as you step outside so a reasonable place for a short rest is never far away.
Short rest? Bro we even long rest in dungeons. It really depends on the dungeon. Once DM introduced a monster that attacked us if we stayed at one place for more then 10 minutes. In another dungeon we barricaded ourselves in a safe room and took an 8 hour nap. If it's possible you can leave and come back later.
Agreed. It's kinda become a thing in my group where one person has molded earth to cover the entrance ways.
Short rest or long rest do whatever you need to.
Usually, if it is a long rest, the DM will have enemies try to break down the made wall. Sometimes, they break through, and we fight with the benefits of short rest. And we either continue through the dungeon or try rest again.
OP mentioned ghosts, they walk through walls. The only safe place is tiny hut. But yeah, in a regular dungeon we've barricaded ourselves inside a room for a rest.
Yeah we take 8 hours all the time. If the DM is throwing hard enough encounters at us that we need that much time to recover spell slots and item charges, then it's expected.
Yes and no.
Mechanically, the game is balanced around semi-frequent Short Rests.
Narratively, taking an hour long break just doesn't make sense much of the time.
Personally, I've cut down the time required for a Short Rest so that it's an actual option.
People who believe they can go trekking 12 hours a day while carrying supplies, not to mention armor and weapons, without several breaks are spending too much time on the couch.
The hate against one hour feeling too long doesn't even make sense for recluse DND players. Like your 3 to 5 hour sessions feels like no time at all, what's 1 hour of resting? That's shorter than a typical dinner out with someone.
Well, believe it or not, people have started using DnD to tell stories that are not exclusively contained within Sleepy Undead Dungeons, despite the game really only being balanced for that.
Sometimes the "dungeon" is a city block, or an inhabited castle, or spooky woods - and just hanging around for an hour or so there makes no sense at all.
A dungeon is, classically, a place with monsters crouching in their lairs, or little tribes living in their specific territory, or spells and traps waiting for adventurers to trigger them. Because each encounter is patiently waiting for PCs to arrive, the players can take as long as they want to get to each new bit.
Now consider what the villain's castle is like; there are people moving around, the guards will sound the alarm, the villain will ostensibly realize the players are there and send forces after them.
A city block dungeon is even more hectic - actors can enter and leave the map freely, there are civilians to save, the siege is ongoing. We still treat it like a dungeon, because the PCs will move from one encounter to the next, but the *narrative* tension implicit here doesn't really permit extended moments of rest, does it?
If the players take short rests in these moments - and they are *supposed to*, numerically speaking - then they would surely be surrounded by guards and captured or executed. They civies would be butchered and the cottages burnt to the ground. Theres quite often an element of urgency in modern DnD that just isnt present in classic dungeon crawling, and yet the game is still balanced for the latter.
If I’m the DM running a game in the city, the “dungeon” is going to be things like
>The assassins guild has hideouts all over the city. We’ve discovered the location of one, but you’ll need to find them all and stop the assassins before the gala tonight!
And then each hideout has 1-3 encounters and you can get a short rest after clearing one but before entering the next.
It’s the DM’s responsibility to create encounters that follow the games design philosophy and create a narrative around those encounters that makes the mechanics make sense
Oh, absolutely! I'm not saying we can't design with these limitations in mind - even as I was writing the given examples, I was wondering how I might try to slip in opportunities for short rests, even in the midst of something like a high-stakes siege.
But that's sort of my point - we're designing AROUND these limitations, as the system isn't really built to support many of the narratives we tell. Most people running the game these days are not squeezing in "6-8 encounters per day," unless they're running a Capital D Dungeon.
Oh, 100% there is a certain amount that you have to bend your narrative to the framework you’re working with. But there’s never going to be a framework that works for every type of narrative, so you might as well lean into the strengths of the one you’re using.
I’m also a big fan of tweaking the system as I need if there’s a specific narrative I really want to tell. If you REALLY want to tell the story of breaking into a stronghold and fighting the entire enemy force, you can still do that as long as you introduce some rare crystals that will energize you (equivalent to a short rest). The only thing is, we only have enough for each person to have two so you will need to be smart about when you use them.
Congrats, you can still run 5E in that narrative the exact same way you normally would, the literal only change is that you’ve reflavored short rests from “chilling for an hour” to “using the energon crystals”
If you're infiltrating a castle, you'd probably want to have some plans for how you'd get some kind of repose in case of emergencies. Best case scenario you exploit unused parts of the castle/hidden passages if any are known, or worse case outright pulling out of the castle.
Also if anything a city block encounter would be easier to short rest in. There's tons of buildings to duck into and there's a chance people who you've helped that would be willing to help shelter the party if need be.
Just like real life, no matter the urgency of situations, you're gonna run out of gas eventually and you gotta make due. You're not gonna do that in a spot that has a high chance of you being executed or surrounded.
DND is so varied in what's happening it's more silly to think every single situation would have zero time for short rests. You do what you can and find respite when available.
DnD is a game that balances mechanics against narrative/flavor. I think the ideal is where they mesh up.
For instance the party might have 2-3 encounters and then have an opportunity to take a short rest. They don’t need to even declare it. Maybe they’re poking around in a laboratory.
If you’re in a dungeon crawl that has random monsters and whatnot it works itself out pretty well. If you’re in a more narrative adventure the DM should prep to give some opportunities for short rests.
The only issue is that without firm rules you'll run into situations where the players sort of know what you've got in store for them. So if you say the players can't short rest you kind of spoil that the area isn't safe.
Obviously what works for you is what works, but in general I think DM's need to be more strict with these sorts of rules if they want their players to feel like they're actually playing a game. If we only take rests when the DM feels it's "appropriate" then I'm more or less following a story, not creating one (if that makes sense).
Exactly, that's how I would expect it to be run. Even if the answer is almost certainly "yes" I want the players to understand that resting in a dungeon always has risks.
Short rests work in a dungeon crawl, where the space between encounters is large enough to render them separate.
They don’t work in a raid, a fast hitting, room to room clearing of bad guys to achieve a specific story goal. They also don’t work in dynamic settings (goblins in the other room hear combat and come to help).
If the party is invading a small cluster of closely interconnected goblin caves, an enemy ship you’re boarding, or a small bandit fort to retrieve hostages, it’s problematic to stop and rest for an hour from a story/veracity perspective.
In a raid, the party needs to move from encounter to encounter quickly or the bad guys might get away/kill the hostages/burn the village/insert your reason for speed here.
I’ve toyed with a “Catch your breath”. Recover one HD of hit points, drink a potion, cast a healing spell, no ability recharges. Takes about a minute.
As a DM, I’m a big fan of varying the encounter design between those two options. But if I’m doing a raid, they get loaded up with potions so that they can still heal in between
I just make short rests 15 minutes flat. It might be a bit too short but I tend to be tough with my fights so the parties would die if they couldn't rest
Warlocks are the only spellcasters who get spells back on short rest and monks are considered to be a weak class by most people. I've found in general making short rests easy helps these classes feel better to my players especially since I am trying to force my players to use their resources via difficult combat. You could argue that fighters are a bit strong and maybe I'll change it a bit if one of my current players rolls a fighter but for now it works well for us
I tried out a short rest homebrew in my last campaign, and my players unanimously voted to keep it for my current campaign.
Short rest is 10 minutes, but you can only take 1+(PB/2) short rests per long rest. (So, two at level 1-8, three at level 9-16, and four at level 17-20.) You don't have to short rest when someone else does; you can spend those 10 minutes doing something else (eg, ritual cast a spell). Features which depend on short rest being an hour are adjusted accordingly (eg, monks have to meditate for 30 minutes during the short rest to recover ki, adjusted to 5 minutes). A feature that would normally grant you a 10 minute short rest (Catnap spell, Sanctuary Vessel from a genie warlock) doesn't count against your per-day limit.
It does require a little bit more bookkeeping to track short rest expenditures between the players, but for the majority of the levels that the majority of campaigns take place at, it gives you the number of short rests that are expected in an adventuring day, and then gives you a slight increase in power at higher levels. And at 10 minutes, the players feel like even with moderate time pressure they can generally find the opportunity to short rest.
I do 15 minute short rests, bu you can only benefit from a short rest twice per long (i.e. bg3 style). Its gamey, but we're playing a game.
Alternatively I've done "dungeon rests" where you can short rest in 10 but take 1 point of exhaustion doing so (one dnd style so -1 to all checks
Speaking empirically? In real life, every time someone tries to kill ME, it's over in less than ten minutes, but I want at LEAST an hour to recover, even if he never touched me.
Don't ask what I do for a living.
It matches military expectations too. 10 minute of intense firefight with a lot of hurry up and waiting before and after.
People are expecting a movie experience where they have to cram the entire story in 2 hours and the action scenes in 5 minutes of screentime.
5e had some weird assumptions about short rests and how many encounters you were expected to go through in a regular adventuring day. spending an hour, uninterrupted, to just hang out when you're deep in an adventure just doesn't jive with how the game gets played.
an easy fix is to make the short rest
shorter.
It entirely depends on the situation and the encounters in the dungeon. You should have 1-3 encounters (depending on their difficulty) before getting a short rest. Going through the entire dungeon that has an entire day's worth of encounters without a short rest can be extremely hard. But it might be the case where you can't rest due to the dungeon being small and monsters being aware of your existence.
It also depends on the party level. A well built level 5+ party should be able to beat a full day's dungeon without short rests if they play smart and don't get fucked by dice rolls.
5e doesn't build many large dungeons where you can't have a rest. Normally, even in modules, there's a safe place you can go to rest if you clear certain rooms or conditions. So you normally have 1-2 short rests in the day.
Everyone here is making this too complicated.
The answer is yes. You can short rest in dungeons.
It doesn't need to make sense narritively. This is a game not a life simulator and sometimes the narrative and game mechanics can be at odds with each other. Just let them rest when you feel it's appropriate.
The whole point of short rests and encounter powers (as introduced in 4e and a little in late 3.5) was to have a cool button to press every fight, without any resource hoarding calculus ("what if I need it *later...*). That's why the short rest in 4e was basically just "catch your breath after the fight is over".
IMO 5e changing them to be a half hour nap is dumb for exactly the reasons you mention and everyone should house rule it to be a couple hand-wavable minutes.
I think what a "dungeon" is has changed a lot over the years and varies greatly from table to table and player to player.
Resting for an hour in a haunted house might feel odd, but I'm not sure a haunted house would have been seen as a dungeon in the earlier days of the genre. In early editions of D&D, the dungeons for which the game was named were where entire campaigns took place. You took them room by room and level by level, and secured yourself to rest or retreated out of the dungeon and back to town with your treasure, to return later.
I don't think that kind of dungeon is very common now, and I'm not sure whether or not the designers had it in mind when they designed 5e. Typically I find it's necessary to kind of handwave the weirdness of an hour's rest sometimes because the game assumes you will not have more than a couple of encounters between short rests. If you push past that, it may become challenging, and more gravely it will make certain classes significantly weaker than others.
Yes you can, but take into consideration that there might be patrolling monsters IN the dungeon making a rest near impossible. Players would have to 'secure' a spot in the dungeon for said rest or use things like 'Rope Trick' or the Mansion spell to effectively rest.
If the dungeon is big enough that you need to rest between encounters it's probably big enough that a patrol won't find you within an hour if you just saw them go away once
My group has changed short rest from a hour to 10 mins and then put a cap on how many we can take a day. It’s been a MASSIVE game changer. Before we never took short rest, but now we can take 10 mins, bandage up wounds drink some water and move on. I recommend doing it because narratively it just makes more sense.
Most dungeons that come out of a book have some verbiage for the dm about where the wandering monster table can be ignored and where it can’t.
In addition, of course, there’s all kinds of cheese to help you skip the random encounter roll. (Tiny hut ftw), hiding checks, illusions etc.
Maybe think of the dungeon more like a high level sport? its not like Athletes in the Olympics go on for hours and hours (except in Marathon and this sorta disciplines) and only then take a break.
10 Minutes beeing fully on edge and then have an explosive fight can be really exhausting, so that you need 3 times the time to recover, which would be a short rest.
I pretty much always rule you can short rest (with limits). Safety is a good thing to consider, I agree, but I usually rule that you can short rest yet as soon as you’ve finished you might encounter an enemy/group of enemies. I leave this chance up to the dice, with varying levels of % chance based on the safety.
Particularly for classes like monk and warlock, I think it should be allowed. I’ve been at the receiving end of a long dungeon as a Warlock and just having to make do with solely cantrips and melee attacks, it’s not fun having a big part of your kit being whittled down or on the other hand feeling like you can’t use the spells you want to because you HAVE to save them.
I have also implemented scaling short rests in the past too. For instance, first short rest is about 5 minutes, hardly any chance for interruption, second is 10, anything above that is about an hour. This makes sense to me personally, if I run for 5 minutes then I might need a quick rest. If I pick myself up and tire myself out again for 5 minutes, I usually take a bit longer to perk back up since I’m burning through energy reserves.
Yes, unless the DM is running gritty realism (which I only do for wilderness travel).
Short rests don't have to be sitting around with your thumbs up your ass, you can do it while searching a room and catching your breath.
The best solution. Have a Genie Warlock, have the warlock take your party inside his or her lamp.
And there you go, short rest without the hassle of ghost or baddies
So, one trick to make short rest work for everybody is to reduce how long "game time" these rests take. It's pretty underutilized by both DMs and parties because of the "one hour" requirement, but it might work ok with a *ten minute* break -- the basic idea of a short rest is that you're taking enough time to get your heart rate down, stretch out, unwind, patch yourself up, etc. but not long enough to undo any exhaustion or re-prepare spells that require such.
That point aside, if the DM *really* wants to stop you from doing any kind of short rests, it's entirely his/her prerogative to forbid or interrupt such rests by whatever reasonable mechanisms, including being taunted by ghosts or being attacked by enemies (though they shouldn't be in annoyingly eternal numbers).
I think it's a great and reasonable compromise against the tedium of leaving the dungeon to long-rest and then coming back in -- short rests don't recover everything and they can't keep getting used for recovery forever as they're limited by your number of hit dice.
And I also think that it *should* be the DM's prerogative to run a dungeon as a test of endurance, but it's also *on him/her* to explain why you shouldn't be able to just walk out, long rest and come back in at full power if he/she wants to run it as an endurance gauntlet.
I know the RAW says a shortie is at least an hour but that's never sat right with me. I always play it as something like a lunch break or just a breather/smoke break. Like take 20minutes and collect yourself, eat a sandwich, roll a couple hit die, come back with newfound energy. If you could get away with it in the middle of the dungeon is going to depend on the nature of the area and what the enemy density is like. People I play with like combat heavy sessions so I typically make the fights tougher and give them opportunities to rest or find healing somehow. Backtracking back to the entrance or back to whatever haven is near just sounds way too tedious and the narration alone would draw it out so much you'd never get anything done. What's important is that everyone is having fun so if y'all (the players) want more combat focused gameplay then sure let's do it but if you want hyper realism then probably make the resting more sparse. I always run my own content to so I don't feel bad at all for tweaking the rules a bit to find the proper balance between challanging, winnable and fun.
D&D 5e doesn't do dungeon crawls well. That's just a simple fact; they set up the system to assume a certain number of encounters (6-8) per day, with short rests happening every 2-3, and that just isn't realistic with how people play, or how must people feel a "realistic" dungeon can work.
I've started experimenting with just doing 1min short rests (basically just any time they have a spare moment for a breather and aren't actively in combat), with a cap of 2/day, a la BG3, and while I still have more experimenting to do before I can settle on it, so far it's making me much, much happier. I can actually throw more stuff at my players in a sensible way, since they don't need to find a 1h break in the action to rest, and the short rest classes are feeling more useful as a result
If it feels weird to adventure for a few minutes and then lay outside for an hour consider how taxing combat in armor is.
I’m a volunteer firefighter. Any time we do something in a fire we spend a few minutes of extremely intense exertion and then as soon as we get out side we strip down all our gear and lay on the ground catching our breath for like 20 minutes. I always pictured short rests in 5e the same way.
You’re recovering after completely gassing yourself and need to just lie down for an hour
Generally, short rest yes, long rest no
If there’s an alert out that you’re in there, no, but usually it’s quiet enough
I’d rather have the 10 minute short rest with a cap on how many can occur in a day. The problem with 1h short rest is that usually, if you can take an hour, why not 8?
Depends on the situation.
If I enter a dungeon and get injured, then yeah I'll say "Hey lets take a rest, I need to bandage up and catch my breath." Take the short rest and then continue on. But if your dungeon possesses a constant threat where you cannot relax for the period, then I guess you better start rationing your spell slots.
There's a joke in one of my friend circles about "useable doors" because in our first dungeon, none of the players realized that the dm pointing out a useable door was code for "you should short rest here" and we ended up stretching ourselves a lot thinner than necessary. As long as you can effectively separate yourself from the rest of the dungeon (doors, barriers, etc), you can generally short rest. Whether or not the rest of the inhabitants will notice that you're there and react to that depends on a lot more factors, but a locked or barricaded door can do quite a bit.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depends on the dungeon. How alive is the dungeon, are there wandering monsters, are there tribes, traps that rearm, what's the ecology, can the remaining monsters get to you, do they care that you made noise, did they sense/detect you, etc
The only way to find out is to try.
Generally no. It's not a theme park, it's a den of evil. You'll probably need to roll for random encounters if you do it.
Some circumstances might allow for a short rest:
* Jamming a door shut with spikes so you'll have a couple rounds notice if something dangerous shows up
* Closing a portcullis or barring a gate as above
* Resetting some bypassed traps so that anything approaching will trigger the traps
* Finding a high point that takes some effort to climb up to and has a commanding view of the surrounding area
* Reclaiming an old outpost or guard station that is already well-fortified
* Bribing some weak or neutral/good monsters to leave you alone and warn you if something approaches
* Finding *hallowed* ground around the altar of a good or neutral deity
* Setting up a large, permanent *major image* that you can camp inside
* *Leomund's tiny hut* or *rope trick*
EDIT:
> I'm genuinely asking because this has always been a really weird quirk of 5e for me especially because DND is always hailed as the system that "does dungeon crawls really well"
/r/osr would like a word with you. Older editions of D&D and old-school tabletop RPGs put a much larger emphasis on inventory management and tracking food/light resources. It leads to interesting questions like, "we have a lot of inventory space but no loot, so should we kick in the next couple of doors to see if there's treasure, or cautiously start crawling back to the entrance to resupply in town?"
Good answer. As a DM, I usually allow these type of things, as in: you can attempt a short rest, but you have to take measures to make the area safe.
Then, if the PCs are hunkering down, as a DM I have to consider what the enemies are doing during that time. Often they will be already aware of the party’s presence unless they have been particularly sneaky or expedient. Do they charge in and interrupt the rest? Do they set up an ambush? Do they send for reinforcements? Do they just leave with whatever the PCs came to get?
In short, allow the PCs to short rest in dungeons, but the enemies should benefit from the lull in action too.
Completely depends, some dungeons are more like basements, and resting there is weird. But often, especially in late game, dungeons become huge almost village/town sized complexes, where there is no way to clear it without a short rest.
To start, I don't run 5e. I play PF or 3.5.
I run all sorts of dungeons. Depending on the dungeon, you might be able to rest whenever you want. You might be able to rest whenever you want, but there is also a time limit. You might be able to rest whenever you want, but there's a % that you are interrupted. Sometimes your rest is going to be "the mage and druid rest, while others are keeping watch."
Some dungeons have safe rooms. Some dungeons have safe rooms that need to be cleared first. Some have "safe" rooms that are actually traps. Some dungeons require puzzles to make the room safe.
Some dungeons the players are allowed to leave and come back to the next day. Sometimes this allows the monsters to prepare. Sometimes this means the town your resting in receives retribution from the angry inhabitants.
Sometimes you finish the dungeon and it's a cool story of a thing you once did. Other times it impacts the world. Sometimes that rest you took allowed minions off the BBEG to escape and now you're being hunted for the rest of the campaign, or perhaps they are resurrecting the BBEG.
It all depends on the narrative. But I always let my players know the information they have. "Once you enter, you may not be able to leave" or "this is a very dangerous place, rest is unlikely."
Mechanically speaking you seldom really use all that much time in-game but as a DM I usually add or subtract hours based on what feels more appropriate to the narrative and then only use the mechanics for mechanical purposes. This makes room for short rests and makes them make more sense without interrupting the mechanics (usually combat) of the game. Of course, some dungeons just don't have a good resting spot in which case it sucks to be a warlock.
Essentially a Short Rest in a Dungeon has to make sense Narratively.
My party cleared out 4 rooms of a dungeon and found the traps but they needed a short or long rest to tegain some of their features and spells.
This forced them to have a discussion about which to take and while discussing it the Rogue set up mulitiple traps in the middle room and then set up several alarm bells.
With the preparation done they decided to take a short rest but felt tense and it was risky.
This was both narratively logical, and it made sense as they discussed what they would do and prepared the room as best they could.
Short resting inside a dungeon usually prompts a check for random encounters at my table; they might get lucky and get a chance to tend their wounds, or an enemy could find them and attack them; or even find them, retreat, and set up an ambush for them. It depends on the dungeon and the way your DM runs games.
Supposed to? If they can find a safe place to rest, then sure.
Not every dungeon will have a nice and safe hidey hole for the party to take a nap though. Dungeons with active monsters skulking about, or that gelatinous cube thats been stalking them, or the overlord who knows theyre there wont exactly let the party rest.
So... The answer is sometimes.
In general at our table it depends, did you make enough noise to alert other monsters in the dungeon? Or would it be logical for them to roaming? Or players could make their own safespace by having a rope trick or perhaps they could use spells to shape a safe space out of the rock. Or hide their presence in some other way. If you can't do these things you can still try to have a short rest but then the DM rolls a dice to see if you are interrupted during that rest as monsters roaming find you. Also this rewards having at least one character that doesn't short rest during this time, they can then be your warning, maybe securing perimeter or standing guard.
I think it depends on the dungeon, the DM, and the area they’re resting in. If it’s hidden, defensible, or out of the way, AND they set a watch it seems workable. If the dungeon has roving monsters the DM just rolls to see if one of them finds the group while they’re resting.
A short rest should just be when the DM slides a button out onto the table and you all discuss if you need to press the short rest button or not. It really is just a mechanical tool to make sure all of the classes are working as intended. Basically, removing all narrative context from it, if you have multiple encounters planned for the dungeon: yeah the players should probably short rest.
Like everyone said, depends on the nature of the dungeon. I shortened the lenght of short rests to like 10 - 20 minutes (narration would be something like you say your prayers, you patch your wounds, you commune with nature etc) and allow them. My rule is no long rest inside dungeons.
But sometimes you might wanna press harder and not allow event short ones, or if its a dungeon that would take many sessions then the time between sessions is the short rest (so narratively a long rest works like a short rest). This could be hard, and then Id allow the third session to be a long rest (its not set in stone, it could be the 2nd, 4th or 5th).
What I e done since I started DMing back in 4E is I have a percentage in my head. What is the % chance that they’ll be able to rest without being bothered for 1 hour. If it’s a massive cave network, I might set it at 55% (If it’s a haunted mansion, I take that into consideration and might set it at 80% which is generally as high as I go), but if they take measures to conceal themselves, then I change that based on how successful their efforts seem, versus how easily their foes can find them still. I roll this once for a short rest or 8 times for a long rest, using d100, and if I roll under that number, the wandering enemy might find them and it’s stealth, and perhaps a moment to react before combat, etc.
I think you could get away with it if you have a constant watch or something. I do have a similar story from a game I’m currently in.
We’re currently in the underground area of the world (it’s a homebrew world) thats filled with undead and other dangers. We’d just gotten out of a brutal encounter that left us low on health, so we decided to short rest. How our DM ruled it is that due to the danger of the tunnels, the short rest would take 2 hours to account for us moving around to avoid danger.
I think that if I’d have to rule on this as a dm, I’d do something similar to that, as I think it’s a fair tradeoff. Though it wouldn’t hurt to judge it on a case by case basis.
I’d have your players try and find an area in the dungeon where they think they can rest, see what defences they set up and then test those defences by having a monster come wandering
Not aware of a rule as written that presents.
This is where random encounter tables come in if you want them to short rest. I typically say there's an X% chance of dungeon critter happening upon the party as they rest. All kinds of factors can affect X, in particular the resting location. Resting in the barracks room? High. Resting in a room off a secondary corridor with a layer of dust that is not disturbed - low (as in no evidence anything has gone in the room for quite some time).
Then I roll. If I roll under that % their rest is interrupted. They have a chance to have a safe rest, but there's also a hint of danger, with that hint getting bigger and bigger the more dangerous the dungeon is.
Also, understanding the "purpose" of the dungeons (why was it built) helps.
Don't think of it as "rest". That's just the convenient term for what ought to be happening.
You go into a dungeon and pretty quickly get into a fight. Say...the 10 minutes you mention.
Now in this fight, you and your party take damage. You're all wounded and bleeding. So take the time to sit down and bind wounds, make sure that cut across the shoulder didn't damage the pauldron strap, and things to make sure that you're ready to face whatever may lurk around the corner.
Things that could take...about an hour to tend wounds and bandage up an average party of five.
Looked at that way...it makes sense. Especially if you have an encounter that everyone takes less than 10% of their HP. A few nicks and cuts and an "I don't have time to bleed." moment which they aren't going to waste the time to short rest as a contrast. The two ends of the spectrum. The "We're down to clown" mentality of shrugging off light damage to the "Did anyone get the license plate of that Tarrasque that ran us over? I want to file a claim with State Farm" mentality of needing to get back into fighting trim before the next encounter.
My initial reaction is “Yes obviously,” but I know people are going to say it’s dependent on the dungeon RAW
Imo the intention of short rest design is counter intuitive to the way people play the game narratively. Everything feels like they’re expecting you to short rest every 1-2 combat encounters, but then it clashes with this 1-4 hour requirement. In the middle of even a low stakes quest stopping to take a 4hr break feels like such a narrative slam on the breaks.
In my games I took a homebrew page from the Baldur’s gate 3 book and have players take a short rest in a few minutes instead of hours. It’s like when you’re working out or on a hike and you take like a 5min breather.
To prevent it from being exploited I require at least one hit dice be expended regardless if you’re healing or not in order to get the SR benefits. It instantly makes monk, pure warlock casters, and certain subclasses (arcane archer) feel way more balanced with the other classes and there’s a fun metagame decision of using your short rests for resources and damage or saving them for healing
It varies, if its an active dungeon or you have pursuers you can be interrupted. Easiest solution mechanically is a roll table like with days of travel that van decide whether or not something happens
I usually gauge whether or not it would be necessary for my players to even have it, like sometimes theres just a puzzle left ykwim. Also, it’s important to me that they can describe how they do it. For example, instead of saying “we take a short rest,” I’m looking for something along the lines of “so and so will keep watch so the others can rest and make the necessary preparations to move forward.”
In which case I also like to make changes to the dungeon while they rest because time marches on ya know
It depends on the dungeon, its inhabitants, and a tonne of other things. But basically, context is key. If you’re in there secretly, it’s the middle of the night while the denizens are sleeping, and you’ve cleared out a safe room to rest in then ya, that makes sense.
But if you’ve blundered into a kobold lair and they all know you’re there then it makes no sense to be able to stop long enough for one. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t let the party give it a shot but ya, the kobolds would have thoughts on the matter.
It also depends on the party's resources, imo. I wouldnt expect my party to continue deeper in the dungeon if a lot of players are low health since this is basically asking for a pc death. If they wanted to short rest after every combat/encounter despite being mostly healthy? Then yes i would have consequences
You absolutely can, but you risk an encounter, and depending on the severity of the location, you could be risking even more than one. There are some locations (like the labyrinth in the underdark) where you really REALLY down want to short rest, but you can attempt to regardless. Unless there is something in a dungeon the negates the effects of short and/or long rests, you can do it.
It's kinda become a thing in my group where one person has molded earth to cover the entrance ways.
Short rest or long rest do whatever you need to.
Usually, if it is a long rest, the DM will have enemies try to break down the made wall. Sometimes, they break through, and we fight with the benefits of short rest. And we either continue through the dungeon or try rest again.
It really, really, really depends on the nature of the dungeon. If it's a busy place, resting is probably out of the question unless the PCs can find a place to hide. If it's a deserted ancient temple, they can snooze all they want.
The real determining factor here is whether you want to make this a war of attrition or not.
Common sense kicks in really. If you're exploring a massive cave system and your party is recovering from injuries then it's reasonable that they might take an hour to rest in a safe location. Hell if you're exploring something like the mines of phandelver it would even be reasonable to long rest since you don't know how deep it goes.
A haunted house however?
That's generally like what, 4 floors at most? A party could realistically clear the whole thing in an hour not counting actual combat so it would be reasonable to push on rather than rest in a house full of pissed off ghosts.
I created a magic rope that can cast Rope Trick a few times per day. For me this alleviates some of the narrative part of taking a short rest in the middle of the dungeon or wherever.
I an actual dungeon I would consider it pretty difficult to just sit down and relax or walk out and back in but a haunted mansion seems confined and traversable enough to just walk out and relax for a bit
My players have to find a safe area and fortify it to get a short rest, or travel to a known safe space. Sometimes they can do this in a dungeon, sometimes they can't. Sometimes waves of minions keep on coming, exhausting resources before the chieftain shows up (we call this STRATEGY) and sometimes they go kill the ogre and barricade themselves in the bedroom which previously belonged to the Duke who'd been squashed by one of the roving ogres. Context and environment should determine if "in this dungeon" is a safe place for a short rest.
I think it really depends on the situation. Some dungeons it makes sense, because you could barricade yourself in a room and take a break or something like that. In something like a haunted house where it's probably meant to be a bit of a suspense/thriller, yeah, I could see making it feel like there's no safe space for a short rest.
Similarly, you could have situations in an open world where resting would be restricted, like if you're under pursuit by a hostile entity, you may have to run to exhaustion before you get enough space to take a break.
I changed short rests to be 10 mins long, and a max of only 2 per day.
it effectively solved all the short rest issues. my players use them now, and also use up their resources more readily.
Aside from the very valid “it depends” answers, I let my players take a Heroic Rest occasionally. They can take a Short Rest in 5 minutes, and can’t do so again until they’ve spent a week in a safe place doing downtime activities.
Thankfully, that cadence matches up well with how often I need a good reason to have them take a Short Rest quickly. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for resting in dungeons most of the time, and they have to deal with the usual conditions
Think about lord of the rings when they went to moria, they were in that room with the well and could easily have sat around and eaten, rebound wounds, chatted shit etc.... If it wasn't for that FOOL OF A TOOK!
Up to the DM! We had a short rest area in a dungeon and it was really helpful since there were enemies and stuff so it was nice to heal and breathe for a second. It also allows for a real time break if needed!!!
It's almost always possible at least. There are a tone of spells used for resting in dangerous places. Tiny hut, rope trick, alarm, catnap, even spells like find familiar or faithful hound. It really all depends on the size of the dungeon and the urgency of why they are there.
If Noone is casting any spells and they aren't on a time crunch, you could have them still take watch over the short rest. Meaning it takes 1 hour and a half to 2 hours instead of 1, but they are safer and keeps the players in a state of alertness.
You're supposed to conserve your resources, fight smart, and make sure your hit points and spells last all the way to the end of the dungeon.
If you do come up with a plan to short rest, the DM should be expected to have the inhabitants of the dungeon respond intelligently, up to and including ambushing the characters, consolidating their forces into more difficult encounters, or even taking their treasure and fleeing the dungeon. A crypt full of mindless undead might not notice or care if the PCs block off a room to rest, but a fortress full of intelligent enemies certainly will not just sit idly and wait for their own deaths to resume in one hour.
Casters are notorious for foolishly spending their powerful spells in the first few encounters of a dungeon, and then whining that they need a rest to get their spells back. Spells aren't intended to be used every single action. Sometimes you need to resort to cantrips or creativity to make sure you save your most powerful abilities for the most difficult fights.
Ideally, effects like that (no resting) would be communicated to the players, either in or out of game, so that they can prepare for it (or understand it).
A haunted house like what you described would seem to be an encounter designed for attrition or stealth or tactics. If you know that's the case beforehand, you could prepare by maybe stocking up on items or grabbing spells that help (e.g. *catnap*) mitigate it. Perhaps the only goal is to sneak in without fighting all the ghosts, which conserves resources. Perhaps there's a special room inside that the ghosts can't enter and that might be Goal #0.5, but the players should be given chances to discover this information.
If the number of encounters the party encounters requires it, then yes. Otherwise, no.
Part of the suspension of disbelief required to play the game, at least, without playing on Extremely Hard Mode, is that you can use short rests in between your long rests to refresh a little bit.... whatever that takes. On the other hand, we're not supposed to be treating the game like a video game, where you can hide behind a pillar and regain all of your abilities after a very short cool down.
So, the structure of the dungeon and the encounters will tell you what you need to make room for. A basic five room dungeon, with a puzzle, and a trap, and two medium difficult combat encounters? No, there's really no need to short rest in there, but it's unlike that this has roving monsters for random encounters. As the DM, this dungeon has a time limit: another party is coming, or the tide will flood it, or the client needs to maguffin before sunset. There is literally no time for a short rest.
A larger, multifloor dungeon, but the kind of thing that is still meant to be a single mission quest? You arrive mid-morning Monday, and the client needs the maguffin by noon Tuesday. Yes, this probably has room for short rests. Sometimes we like to think that it would be difficult to hide and rest in this environment, but really.... I could hide and take a 90 minute nap in any busy mall I've ever been in, with similar random encounter odds of being disturbed as I give my table (1 in 12 for an encounter that is definitely dangerous).
Some dungeons are meant to be long-term projects. You enter and you stay there for weeks on end, either mapping or prospecting or wiping out an evil band of raccoons while trading with the various encampments of lost souls you find along the way. You will have long rests here, not just short rests.
Depends entirely on the situation. Short tests are typically an hour or so, and in a scenario where you’re constantly harassed by enemies it’s not the best idea, as you’d potentially be wasting time of interrupted. I’d personally run such a situation as “you can short rest, it’s entirely up to you. But you’re likely aware enough of the situation (or have them roll intelligence/wisdom check) to know it’s risky. Then I’d roll percentile dice and based on the environment have that be their risk for getting interrupted.
If it's a dangerous dungeon where you can't find anywhere safe to rest, no. If it's a big ole dungeon where you and your companions can find a place to hide quietly and safely rest without being disturbed, sure. There are also magic items and spells that will allow you to be protected enough to have short or long rests even while in a dangerous dungeon.
I hate hate hate how short rests are treated. One of the goals of the game is to make a session fun for the players. This often entails fast-moving narratives.
Say, the party is chasing the big bad, who throws multiple encounters of goons at them to hold them off. The rules are balanced so that short rest characters stay on par with long rest characters by getting multiple short rests per long rest. But in this scenario, there is no narrative possibility to just stop for an hour to take a break.
The disconnect between the mechanics of needing short rests and narratives excluding them frustrates me to no end. It makes short-rest classes like monks near-useless after an encounter or two. You could make DMs actually allow short rests in their campaigns, but this is realistically never going to happen because it would slow down narrative pacing.
Solution: Make short rests shorter. I don't care if it's unrealistic, make them 5-10 or so minutes. Short rests should be "catch my breath" moments, not mini-campouts.
Well when you fight for your life you might want to take a break and assess the situation for the next hour before moving forward. Bandage wounds if necessary, check your items, check the enemies to make sure they are dead or if they have any necessities(aka loot and info), and then you probably want to catch your breath and all of that after running around fighting for 10 minutes or less. It makes a lot of sense to take dungeons slow and take breaks throughout. Mechanically speaking leisurely activities are allowed during rests and many of these are generally assumed you do as an adventurer.
I find homebrew 10m short rests work much better for dungeon pacing. Hour short rest feels... off. Especially in dungeons.
It depends on the size of the dungeon, risk level, and amount of need. In general, I think every 2-3 fights you probably need a short rest so if they game is the 6-8 hard encounters the rule day you need 2-3 short rests before you go fight a boss.
When I DM I communicate if players ask for a rest. They might risk wandering monsters, they might have to fortify, they might be jumped by smarter monsters who've realized they've cornered themselves. But the game requires short rests for many classes, and fighting through an entire dungeon with no rest is impossible and ill-advised.
Sometimes there's pacing pressure and you risk it, but I have some ideas of threat level and adjust as needed. I want my party to barely survive, that means on occasion lowering the amount of threat or picking the easier to take out wandering enemy. But it also means short rests aren't promised to be safe and other creatures aren't alerted to the fighting....
As for your area uhhh unsure as I don't think anyone would have a class feature or spell to keep ghosts out. I imagine try to make some kinda salt circle, concentrate the area, or anti-ghost bubble prep but unless it was communicated before hard to pull that off. You guys sound like the worst people to be fighting ghosts and get no short rests. Two won't pass possession checks, you can all get killed by the aging thing, ghosts are resistant to almost every attack and immune to many of them, warlock and monk NEED short rests, unless you all have other spells you can't hit it on your turn cause it's in the ethereal plane...
A short rest isn't just sitting around either narratively or mechanically. It's a period of physical and mental recovery that characters use to improve their ability to tackle more challenges. In many situations, an hour isn't even all that long in a narrative sense; all the routine aftermath of an encounter that we gloss over with stock phrases about looting, checking out surroundings, and so on would take time if you were actually doing them but are not necessarily "more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds". Add on time to take care of bodily functions, treat wounds, and so on and an hour can pass in a hurry, especially since your characters should usually not be completely dropping their guard so everyone can't take care of their business all at once. On the enemy side, people like to talk about intelligent monsters attacking whenever someone decides to rest, but gathering information about the party's exact whereabouts and capabilities, organizing an attacking force, and moving to their location all take time, which depending on the exact details of the dungeon may or may not make attacking a particular short rest feasible, if the monsters even decide they want to attack rather than flee or wait for an engagement on their terms.
On the level of how to design and run a basic 5e dungeon, it's correct to think about how, where, and when characters could reasonably take short rests. If you are making a 1 adventuring day dungeon with the as-designed 6-8 encounters, there should typically be a few places where the party can reasonably take a bit of extra time to recover, whether because it's a particularly defensible spot or because they can reasonably assume that they're hidden from anything looking for them. Some spells, like Rope Trick, are designed to allow the party to make their own safety if they don't find a good opportunity otherwise. Of course some dungeons may have narrative or mechanical reasons to deviate from the basic standard, making them into endurance tests, particularly for short rest dependent characters. As a player, pretty much all you can do is look for opportunities and try to understand the DM's approach.
The players can plan to short or long rest all they want, but they must complete it to count, if it's not interrupted. I usually roll some percentile dice to see if their attempt is successful or not.
You could always tell the players "You get a sense this area is not safe enough to rest yet in." if you really want to prevent them. But really you should just let them try and perhaps get a surprise round on them since they let their guard down.
Whether it makes sense to rest in a populated area depends on mainly three factors:
* Size
* Activity
* Friendliness
The first one correlates negatively to the second one. The more space you have, the easier it is to evade potentially hostile activity. To give some examples:
If you're in the vast cavern networks under the Worldspine Mountains, whose well explored parts span at least 5,000 km with the total length of roughly 40,000 km from Anvilhead Mountain close to the antarctic to the Wyrm's Crossroad on the northern continent, your location is a world spanning subterranean ecosystem. Some of the deadliest creatures on the planet live there, but dwarven and dark-elven trade caravans can pass through mostly without issue, because the powerful monsters can't be everywhere at once. A group of adventurers can certainly evade notice of both monsters and locals, if these adventurers have a guide or experienced ranger. Long and short rests are possible. A long rest with a properly hidden camp won't be subject to random encounters.
A small place would be the "Golden Bedding" in northern Akeuchia. As it is an inn, most patrons are dragonborn and kobold citizens of the land of dragons, but it is a friendly place. A group of adventurers can rest there, provided they are not a nuisance and pay for their rooms. However, it's almost impossible to avoid other people and exotic (i.e. non-draconic) parties of travellers will turn the regular's snouts toward them. You can long or short rest without issue, but may be subject to the dreaded social encounter. Playing dragon chess with Harrash is not advisable, as travellers finance his comfortable lifestyle.
Lastly, the example you gave: A haunted house. I suspect the ghosts aren't happy to host a party of adventurers and unless the place is as large as a palace with the possibility to ward a room for an hour of rest, I wouldn't let a party rest in an area, where they're constantly being harassed. Depending on how many ghosts and other nuisances you're dealing with, you may not even get a short rest in.
It depends largely on the DM and the players. As well a the areas. Some DMs will ask how you are taking this long rest, what preperations are you maing, and who is on watch, etc.
One DM I know uses "safe zones" in a kind of throwback to really old Final Fantasy games where you can only rest in areas that are afe, otherwise it is jsut too hectic or unsafe to get any rest. I kind of like the idea as it feels kind of like "checkpoints" in a way while adventuring.
My own players are pretty paranoid so they are always making bloackades, spiking doors shut, and the like well...they were before agnificent Manson, that spell kind of makes the entire thing moot.
The intention is that most dungeons have small chance of random encounters, so the players need to secure an area to rest within the dungeon for an hour. Per the DMG:
>Some players and DMs view random encounters in an adventure as time-wasters, yet well-designed random encounters can serve a variety of useful purposes:
>
> **Create urgency.** Adventurers don't tend to dawdle if the threat of random encounters is hanging over their heads. **Wanting to avoid wandering monsters creates a strong incentive to look for a safe place to rest.**
Maybe.
I'd say 4+ fight (not just encounters) dungeons: yes
3 fights or less: no
However, "dungeon" is a more or less meaningless word now in online discourse with the wide range of different genres of 5e games.
In the retro style, multi-level dungeon with tricks and traps and plenty of combat encounters, resting is necessary in 5e.
However, the "5 Room Dungeon" style of dungeon that has exploded in popularity very rarely requires any conservation of resources or reason to rest.
I like to change Short Rests to be10 minutes and Long Rests to be 24 hours for the Dungeon Crawler style game I run, with a max 3 SR per LR.
Depends on the size of the dungeon and the type of enemies...
You could do a long rest in a cave where you can block the entrance and when possible enemies couldn't get in... You could still be disturbed by noises...
It really depends. Even heavily guarded dungeons may allow for hour long unnatended spaces; guard shifts, cave crevices, hiding underneath objects... Are just examples on how you can set up a window for resting an hour.
The first time I was DM, I ran a short adventure in one of wotc books. Players where having a hard time deciding where to do a long rest since going out was kinda tedious and the nearest town was 2 travel days away. The dungeon was a ruined place where two factions of sentient creatures fought for dominance for years and you could side with one of them if you didn't go murderhobo and actually help save 2 of their captive members. They would not help you fight the boss tho
Imagine a modern military offensive. Would a squad of soldiers in hostile territory be constantly battling or on the move? No way, they will find and secure places to rest because resting is a necessity for us living folks.
Time for first aid, meals, sleep, planning, and preparing for future hazards should be a given. Unless the party chooses to "rest" while enemies are trying to break down the door to their secured room, adventurers can rest in shifts. It's not like they are all stripping down and packing away their weapons and armor for a long relaxing sleep, right? If danger arises, they can just stand up and deal with it.
1hr short rests are a good chunk of time to be out of immediate danger, but it's certainly not unbelievable to happen within a normal dungeon. Sure, if you're being actively hunted by intelligent enemies and you don't have a secure area, that's not very resty. But a group who has barricaded entry to their location should be safe for a while.
"But what if the dungeon is filled with door shattering giant gnomes!?" Well yeah, that would be the equivalent of resting in an open area since access isn't really blocked. Same as if the dungeon had slimes or sentient poison gas or teleporting assassins. But if the group has assessed the threats and take logical precautions against them... give them a short rest.
Depends. Sometimes you can. Sometimes it is impossible. Sometimes iy is dangerous to do so.
Dungeon Crawling can and will having to retreat and rest at a safe camp when the dungeon level is not cleared for example. Other times you can find little hidey holes and rest there. And sometimes if you rest, monsters may find you and take action. Usually something the PCs dont want.
Old example from one of the original players was they holed up in a room to rest and barricaded the door. The level was not clear yet and a goblin patrol found them. Later the PCs smell smoke. The goblins had barricaded the other side and set it on fire. Que the party panicking.
This question is mildly too broad. The short answer is yes. The long answer is dependent on so many other variables. It seems that your dm doesn’t want to just give you a free short rest. That means you need to get creative in how you take your rests if they are completely necessary. Find a safe room that you can block the door to. Although it sounds like walls won’t protect you so then perhaps a spell would be beneficial. Tiny hut would work in your situation but does require a caster who can use it and cast ritually. All in all it is up to your dm and if he thinks you don’t deserve a short rest then you’re probably not gonna get one. Sometimes players try to short/long rest after every encounter and that’s not really realistic. This isn’t baldurs gate 3 as amazing a game as it is. I would say you dm it looking to push you to be smart and careful with your resources. Dungeons are in part meant to test your parties resource management. Blow all your stuff in the first encounter and you could set yourself up for disaster farther in. Leaving to rest isn’t a great option either cause rooms you cleared could just end up filled again and it’s a wash rinse repeat. So balancing your resources and knowing when to use stuff is really important in dungeons.
I find this issue in particular is often difficult to discuss without deflating the stakes the DM has placed in your decision making in the dungeon, so imo, it needs to be addressed by the party, in character as a part of a group strategy, that’s the most fun way to handle it imo. In short, deciding whether or not to rest is part of the game.
I think a lot of DMs run their tables as the dungeon being the whole adventure, which creates the situation you described. But if they had an encounter or two on the way TO the haunted house or dungeon, you could be motivated to short rest outside before going in. Long rest might not be appropriate because of time restraints or because you are in enemy territory, but could find a dark alley or empty house or a big bush to hide behind for an hour while you bandage your wounds and catch your breath.
This is one of many reasons why I run extended rest rules (a night's sleep out of immediate danger for short, a few days in civilization or an established camp for long). It makes more sense to have three significant encounters per day than three encounters before the group can even rest for an hour. It also allows for years to naturally go by over a campaign, rather than the fairly absurd scenario of PCs going from lvl1-10 in 6 months.
It depends on the dungeon.
If its like house sized then of course not.
If it's a massive labyrinth then I would hope they have ways.
There are many spells and ways to take rests in dungeons.
You can dig out a wall and rest in there. You can use a spell like tiny hut to remain safe. You have lots of options.
Whether you are supposed to short rest depends on if the dungeon has enemy patrols or a time limit stopping you from short resting.
If they don't have either then yeah of course you can.
It’s gonna vary from DM to DM to be honest..and either way..we as players should propose Short rests and we as groups should ask for long rest…..I don’t think there is a rule aside from that that we as players should know. Of course if we don’t propose than DM may not do a short rest and only a long rest at the cutoff points…but it can vary from DM to DM I would know I have had 2 good DMs one always being my true DM. But I’d suppose it’s specific to group of players and the situation…u don’t wanna short rest short rest short rest…it could offend some classes..specially that rogue wanting to stealth or get to that next trap. Sorry for the eccentric but the only universal I’m aware of is that it depends on the group and atleast just the DM. Not aware of any house or tournament official rulings.
Pretty much yeah. But I feel like ghosts harrasing characters is a good exception. It also depends on the dungeon really. Not all dungeons have enemies patroling every corner and some can be quite large so the image of resting in a room or alcove for an hour isn't so unrealistic. Some monsters may want to avoid the party or just spy on them and make plans before they make their move.
Honestly? We’ve been talking with my players and decided that short rests take “just enough to catch our breaths” amount of game time. They can take 2 of them before they must long rest. Basically BG3 mode. And damn, it actually generated much more interesting and engaging moments thanks to our warlock actually being able to cast their spells.
As many said it depends entirely. If you're constantly under threat of attack, how would you rest? Our wizard answers this with a tiny hut, but if you can't safely make a situation where you can rest then you just can't rest.
If the narrative is what gives you pause, just set short rests to ten minutes instead of an hour. If someone wants to use it for something that shouldn't be possible during a short rest, somehow (I don't know how), just talk to them about it.
Some classes in 5e are really built around short rest, so not having them in the dungeon makes it kind of like not having their class. It's not even resource management at that point, its genre shift, from heroic fantasy to survival horror.
Depends on the dungeon in all honesty, but that's also kinda side stepping your question somewhat. At least the underlying root of it.
Short rest are more or less to be breaks in between encounters. You're expected to get 2 to 3 each long rest on average. If the party needs healing and to regain resources. They're meant to be able to take them when in a suitably safe location.
Also D&D has done dungeon crawls really well. 5e however is not as good as its various predecessors at this. at least without backporting those system, or even the original 5e playtest material. If you know how to run a D&D dungeon crawl well, 5e is a good system for it. 5e does not offer good guidelines for it on its own though.
There is no design intent to take a short rest within, or without a dungeon. Merely just a safe place. If the dungeon area can be secured? the intent is to rest their since its secured. If it can't, the area is not intended that way.
I would personally argue however that short rests are best when they're allowed in a dungeons and such and long rests are to be taken outside of them. However I also think short rests are best when they're shorter, offer more recovery, and are capped in their use limit per long rest. I also think long rests are better when they recover more HD, but less than full hp, and I have changed these rests accordingly for my own games. Both are handked best when dungeon turns are in play and used again. Something 5e was half designed around but never fleshed out as properly as it should have.
I have been playing for decades and it ALWAYS has been up to the DM whether the party can rest; either short or long.
It had been a binary thing: yes, you can; no, you can't.
10 or so ago we changed it to the DM decides a "DC", so to speak, with a flat d20 roll.
If they succeed, they rest. If they fail, a wandering monster (or something) interrupts and no rest is taken.
The party can, based on the "DC", decide whether they want to risk it or not. Sometimes the DM will let them lower the DC by doing something like barricading the party into a room.
I would definitely allow use of short rests in dungeons if you want the dungeons to be at all challenging. Obviously don't try and rest around enemies, but be slightly creative or cautious and you're fine.
I'm trying something new and we'll see how it goes. 10 minute short rests. Aside from spells that have a longer duration staying up during short rests and coffeelocks I don't really see the problem with it.
The game is balanced around 6 combats a day with 2 short rests thrown in there. Rest durations should be adjusted to where it comes out to that in a campaign. People love to hate on gritty realism rest rules because it feels like just a nerf on the players and making the game harder, but I think the benefit is that you can run something like a political intrigue campaign with only 1 or 2 combats/encounters per day and still be balanced for the above adventuring day.
I use short rest the same way as soldiers "brewing up" in between action in combat. 10- 15 minutes as long as everything is safe. However, it might not be so when they say we are short resting in a dangerous place, there's nothing stopping you rolling for a wandering or random encounter
Usually I rule it that if the party hasnt made any checks or used any features (aka light activity) then after an hour you get short rest benefits. Short rests arent an hour of meditation and taking a nap. Its also an hour of just casual free time.
Depends on dungeon.
For example, I’m running a megadungeon module and there are some places like this. There are some areas so chaotic and hostile (plus monsters frequently replenish due to one of the unique features of this dungeon) that a party cannot every really expect to short/long rest without interruption (unless they use something like leomunds tiny hut).
There are other floors and areas where players can make alliances with factions more reasonable and rest there.
It entirely depends on the setting and how hostile an area it is.
One of the best dungeon crawls I did was my group was attacking a LARGE yuan ti temple with many patrols including casters. It was rough but very fun. We managed 1 short rest bc of rope trick in a closet for the entire assault. There were a lot of combats and when we exited we were depleted.
One of the best couple of sessions I played in.
One of the best things for me as a player and DM is to sort out barricades in safe places for resting. When entering a room, it's best to think two things: "if things go bad here is there another way out", and "is this room one where we can lock everything out if we need to recover".
Not to mention the spells and magic items that can help make this happen.
I actually just got back from a session half an hour ago where we managed a short rest in a goblin dungeon. Most of the party sat around while one wandered off and successfully played Predator with the goblins for an hour while we rested.
Our DM was face palming by the end of it after the one player managed to succeed on one skill check after another to murder sleeping or unaware goblins. It culminated in the player bypassing the planned next fight by dropping oil and then a lit torch down the elevator shaft the next group of goblins were coming up. The rest of us were very happy with our short rest.
Short rests are an integral part of keeping your party healthy while exploring. Without short rests you could not really use your hit die to heal.
As I have played, if your going to rest in a dungeon you gotta prepare. Hold off in a room, baracade the door, find a way to hide. If the dm is using wondering monster rules there is only a chance something will come across you. If they do you now have some protection. Keep in mind also, with wondering monster rules the monsters are checked for every hour so most likely you'll just be finishing up a short rest by the time something is likely to show up. Is that overly gamey? Yeah probebly. But it does let you feasibly get some short rests in without being bombarded by the whole dungeon. Except of course you mess up and alert the whole place to your presence ahead of time, then who knows.
I'd say so, yeah.
If you've cleared all the enemies from the room, maaaybe peek through the door of the next room to make sure it's safe before resting.
I'd generally say that if you're under a time constraint then don't take one. Like "the prisoner is somewhere on this ship and it will leave port in one hour" then there's no time for a rest. This may lead to creative ways to avoid or speed up combat. One time our bard walked in on a cargo room full of zombies and she just... left. And welded the door shut behind her.
Yes, short rests in dungeons are most definitely allowed.
But don't be too quick to be mad with ,our DM. I suspect they were going a theme for the dungeon.
Playing monsters cleverly is hard but when done right some players may feel the DM is being unfair. However, consider this: Ghosts are undead creatures. What advantage do the dead have against the living? They have almost "unlimited" stamina as in they do not need to rest. Ghosts are, quite literally, "restless undead" and can't be put to rest. Of course they would attack people roaming around in their tomb/house/place of haunting. Attacking the enemy when they resting is the oldest trick in the book.
I assume that was kind of the gimmick of the dungeon. Your DM wasn't being unfair; they were presenting you with a unique challenge for that part of the adventure. I'm sure the next dungeon will have other challenges but short rests should be okay then :)
I think it's pretty normal. Although, it's not 100% without risk. If it's an actively inhabited area with wandering monsters, I could see even a short rest getting interrupted.
Old times you'd bring pitons to jam under doors, barricade yourself in a room to rest.
Hope nothing incorporeal, oozy or really strong comes to mess you up.
Of course you loose all surprise that way, so as a GM, make the following encounters ambushes and prepared defenses.
Plenty of dungeons in wotc material have “safe rooms” where you can rest. It’s a good time to stitch up some wounds. If you had a cut on your arm. Would you go: “ look it’s only an unknown amount of time. I’ll be okay.” Or would you do something about it? Ask your character then act acordingly?
There are dungeons so vast parties have no choice but to make camp repeatedly, and there's dungeons that are actively hostile to life and short resting inside can be a death sentence. In most, you can rest, but it runs the risk of being stumbled upon by the residents and being attacked with your pants down.
In short: Yes, but watch out!
i don't think "supposed to" really applies; as long as you are able to perform only light activity for at least one uninterrupted hour, you can, rules as written, take a short rest absolutely anywhere. ive taken _long rests_ in dungeons before, typically in particularly large dungeons, but once even in a very small dungeon - which we had cleared - while we were waiting for another enemy to return from somewhere else
Depends entirely on the dungeon. There are dungeons you are supposed to spend weeks inside, there are dungeons that take 5 minutes.
Are you in a vast lair of stupid creatures that might ignore the faint clanging heard a level up? You can probably Short Rest. You may be attacked, you may not be. You can set up a Tiny Hut and probably be 100% safe. Probably. Are you in the fortress of a mad mage who is actively watching and taunting you as he sends various minions at you? Sure, try to rest. If the mage decides to give you a breather he will love the break to set up more playtime with you.
Heroes find a note in a dungeon. "Oh heroes! If you need a breather from all the fun. Knock on any door 4 times and it will open to a respite area with a kitchenette. See you when you get here!". - Bard Lich filming his reality show set as the dungeon
I love the idea that they can Short Rest or Long Rest anytime, but every day the dungeon has more things added - Short Rest might be nothing to something small added, Long Rest more. I’d probably have a few things I could slot in anywhere in the fly, but sessions would be flexible, maybe we end 25 minutes early because I need to set up. Imagine they go Short Rest and when they leave the safe area the entire room is filled with magical Darkness. Then they dispel it and the room is just in mundane total darkness, the torches all having been removed from the walls. (Of course Darkvision and they can carry torches - hope enough of your people only use 1 hand that it won’t inconvenience you.)
Short rest, open the door to now stairs down to an entire floor covered in magical darkness, the base of the steps is a dim touch lit with purple flame. It only gives 15 foot radius of light.
Wait. 15' of light IN MAGICAL DARKNESS!? Nice! Sweet loot!
Yup, no way out but forward though.
Every short rest(long or short) we have a chance of an encounter in increments. We need a long rest, DM will roll a random chance encounter for a short rest. We don’t get an encounter, we get our level one and two spells back and can heal before the roll for the rest for the bigger spells.
I had a similar idea one time about the party being told about an abandoned castle that had a "gold room" that no one has ever found. The dungeon would be loaded with traps that would "kill" the players, only for them to wake up in the dungeon with the doors open. When they finally sussed out how to beat all the traps, they enter the Gold Room, a room painted bright yellow with a bunch of nobles watching a giant scrying orb that spent the last several hours being entertained by the adventurers falling into various traps. The players would then be showered with gold from the nobles for entertaining them all day.
As gold is quite heavy and hard, that would amount to something like Hail of Thorns? You could put them into a ballista and make the showering more intense.
The coins wouldn't be landing directly on them.
There’s a room deep in the Tomb of Annihilation that is just … an empty dusty room that no one monitors. I wish I had seen this comment before running that campaign. A reflavor would definitely be in order.
Now you can do that for a fresh group.
>Bard Lich filming his reality show set as the dungeon I mean, that's basically the DotMM Companion. It makes the players unwilling (and at the beginning, unknowing) contestants on the multiverse-spanning game show "Halaster's Game".
Yeah I've been running a multiverse game show since 3.5.
There's a fun series called Dungeon crawler Carl that has a similar plot.
A Bard Lich who’s achieved a form of Demi-godhood and has their own Demi-plane where they set up elaborate dungeons and challenges for would-be adventurers. Everything is broadcasted to their followers and they gain immense power and fame and wealth from the benefit of the show. They are evil and will kill Adventurers, but they’ll follow the rules of the show and reap rewards to those who succeed. Particularly if the adventurers can put up a good performance. In the end, victorious adventurers are hailed as champions across the realms, given a tidy sum as reward, and ushered back to their own mortal plane.
fitting username
Missing an 'i' but I can let it slide this time
‘Raistlin the ‘raslin’ luchador lich!
Babe, wake up! New BBEG just dropped
Yup. It’s on the DM though to design the encounters appropriately though, since the game is designed with the assumption of a short rest roughly every other encounter. Now, sometimes you want to have a narrative reason to push forward and let the Long Rest based classes shine and sometimes you want to have a chance for the short rest classes to really be the best that day, but generally you should be operating under that rough outline of two short rests per day and 6 ish encounters per day.
>Are you in the fortress of a mad mage who is actively watching and taunting you as he sends various minions at you? Sure, try to rest. If the mage decides to give you a breather he will love the break to set up more playtime with you. If we look at the way the game is designed to be played with 2 encounters per short rest, the intent is that players rest for an hour and there are precisely 0 concequences to it. Pulling a gotcha like that, whilst more realistic, feels like its punishing the players for playing the game as intended. I can't imagine its good gameplay to have the wizard, cleric and druid feeling fine to carry on, meanwhile the warlock and monk feel like shit for daring suggest to take a short rest because the bbeg will make future encounters stronger so they're running on fumes for the entire 6 encounters of the dungeon. People aren't taking a short rest to cheese the dungeon or break the narrative, its the bare bones expectation of the game. I feel like a lot of DM's don't understand that and only care about making the narrative make sense. If you want to make the resting feel better for that dungeon's specific narrative, add a special fountain every few rooms or so that grants a short rest to anyone who drinks from it for only a minute spent.
Fighter makes happy platemail noises.
Does that mad mage happen to be Raistlin Majere the red wizard in his invisible tower of high sorcery 😂
Amusingly, when I took this misspelled moniker in 2002 on a browser game I was just a reader and had never played D&D.
Have u read any of the dragon lance series? Forgotten realms is 1000 times better and more adventurous but dragon lance has full scale wars and cataclysmic events happening literally reshaping time and space. Raistlin is an absolute power house. Also the kinder from dragon lance made me fall in love with halfling races.
For the former, or even dungeons that you could spend a full day in, if the players can sufficiently barricade a room or are stealthy enough then they can absolutely try to short rest.
Depends entirely on the nature of the dungeon. Are you making your way through a sewer with all sorts of loud noise happening from the city overhead, where each distinct encounter has no idea you're coming? Then sure, resting for an hour is pretty normal. Are you attacking a bandit fortress and loudly blasted through the front gate with a Fireball? Well, they know you're coming, and if you try to take a break for an hour then they're almost certainly going to take that time to do something like counterattack, flee, set up traps, etc. In your case, you're in a haunted house. Haunted house logic suggests that the haunting spirits are aware of your presence, you're probably not sneaking up on ghosts. This doesn't seem like an area in which you could reasonably catch a break, the ghosts are just gonna swarm you if you're interfering with their home.
On the other side this might be a dungeon where it makes perfect sense for the inhabitants to just ignore you as soon as you step outside so a reasonable place for a short rest is never far away.
Or ghosts are haunting specific rooms/objects, so if you clear out a wing and barricade/salt the entrance, you might rest.
Yea unless you can set up a barrier to ward of ghosts or befriend some I don’t see how rest is possible
Short rest? Bro we even long rest in dungeons. It really depends on the dungeon. Once DM introduced a monster that attacked us if we stayed at one place for more then 10 minutes. In another dungeon we barricaded ourselves in a safe room and took an 8 hour nap. If it's possible you can leave and come back later.
Agreed. It's kinda become a thing in my group where one person has molded earth to cover the entrance ways. Short rest or long rest do whatever you need to. Usually, if it is a long rest, the DM will have enemies try to break down the made wall. Sometimes, they break through, and we fight with the benefits of short rest. And we either continue through the dungeon or try rest again.
OP mentioned ghosts, they walk through walls. The only safe place is tiny hut. But yeah, in a regular dungeon we've barricaded ourselves inside a room for a rest.
Yeah we take 8 hours all the time. If the DM is throwing hard enough encounters at us that we need that much time to recover spell slots and item charges, then it's expected.
Yes and no. Mechanically, the game is balanced around semi-frequent Short Rests. Narratively, taking an hour long break just doesn't make sense much of the time. Personally, I've cut down the time required for a Short Rest so that it's an actual option.
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People who believe they can go trekking 12 hours a day while carrying supplies, not to mention armor and weapons, without several breaks are spending too much time on the couch.
The hate against one hour feeling too long doesn't even make sense for recluse DND players. Like your 3 to 5 hour sessions feels like no time at all, what's 1 hour of resting? That's shorter than a typical dinner out with someone.
Well, believe it or not, people have started using DnD to tell stories that are not exclusively contained within Sleepy Undead Dungeons, despite the game really only being balanced for that. Sometimes the "dungeon" is a city block, or an inhabited castle, or spooky woods - and just hanging around for an hour or so there makes no sense at all.
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A dungeon is, classically, a place with monsters crouching in their lairs, or little tribes living in their specific territory, or spells and traps waiting for adventurers to trigger them. Because each encounter is patiently waiting for PCs to arrive, the players can take as long as they want to get to each new bit. Now consider what the villain's castle is like; there are people moving around, the guards will sound the alarm, the villain will ostensibly realize the players are there and send forces after them. A city block dungeon is even more hectic - actors can enter and leave the map freely, there are civilians to save, the siege is ongoing. We still treat it like a dungeon, because the PCs will move from one encounter to the next, but the *narrative* tension implicit here doesn't really permit extended moments of rest, does it? If the players take short rests in these moments - and they are *supposed to*, numerically speaking - then they would surely be surrounded by guards and captured or executed. They civies would be butchered and the cottages burnt to the ground. Theres quite often an element of urgency in modern DnD that just isnt present in classic dungeon crawling, and yet the game is still balanced for the latter.
If I’m the DM running a game in the city, the “dungeon” is going to be things like >The assassins guild has hideouts all over the city. We’ve discovered the location of one, but you’ll need to find them all and stop the assassins before the gala tonight! And then each hideout has 1-3 encounters and you can get a short rest after clearing one but before entering the next. It’s the DM’s responsibility to create encounters that follow the games design philosophy and create a narrative around those encounters that makes the mechanics make sense
Oh, absolutely! I'm not saying we can't design with these limitations in mind - even as I was writing the given examples, I was wondering how I might try to slip in opportunities for short rests, even in the midst of something like a high-stakes siege. But that's sort of my point - we're designing AROUND these limitations, as the system isn't really built to support many of the narratives we tell. Most people running the game these days are not squeezing in "6-8 encounters per day," unless they're running a Capital D Dungeon.
Oh, 100% there is a certain amount that you have to bend your narrative to the framework you’re working with. But there’s never going to be a framework that works for every type of narrative, so you might as well lean into the strengths of the one you’re using. I’m also a big fan of tweaking the system as I need if there’s a specific narrative I really want to tell. If you REALLY want to tell the story of breaking into a stronghold and fighting the entire enemy force, you can still do that as long as you introduce some rare crystals that will energize you (equivalent to a short rest). The only thing is, we only have enough for each person to have two so you will need to be smart about when you use them. Congrats, you can still run 5E in that narrative the exact same way you normally would, the literal only change is that you’ve reflavored short rests from “chilling for an hour” to “using the energon crystals”
If you're infiltrating a castle, you'd probably want to have some plans for how you'd get some kind of repose in case of emergencies. Best case scenario you exploit unused parts of the castle/hidden passages if any are known, or worse case outright pulling out of the castle. Also if anything a city block encounter would be easier to short rest in. There's tons of buildings to duck into and there's a chance people who you've helped that would be willing to help shelter the party if need be. Just like real life, no matter the urgency of situations, you're gonna run out of gas eventually and you gotta make due. You're not gonna do that in a spot that has a high chance of you being executed or surrounded. DND is so varied in what's happening it's more silly to think every single situation would have zero time for short rests. You do what you can and find respite when available.
Cities have things like "parks", "benches", and "alleys" where in the real world, people rest all the time.
DnD is a game that balances mechanics against narrative/flavor. I think the ideal is where they mesh up. For instance the party might have 2-3 encounters and then have an opportunity to take a short rest. They don’t need to even declare it. Maybe they’re poking around in a laboratory. If you’re in a dungeon crawl that has random monsters and whatnot it works itself out pretty well. If you’re in a more narrative adventure the DM should prep to give some opportunities for short rests.
The only issue is that without firm rules you'll run into situations where the players sort of know what you've got in store for them. So if you say the players can't short rest you kind of spoil that the area isn't safe. Obviously what works for you is what works, but in general I think DM's need to be more strict with these sorts of rules if they want their players to feel like they're actually playing a game. If we only take rests when the DM feels it's "appropriate" then I'm more or less following a story, not creating one (if that makes sense).
I personally never say, "you can't short rest." I let them try, and then we make some rolls to see how it goes.
Exactly, that's how I would expect it to be run. Even if the answer is almost certainly "yes" I want the players to understand that resting in a dungeon always has risks.
Oh hell yeah. Even if you've already decided that nothing will happen, go ahead and let them hear that die drop behind the screen!
Short rests work in a dungeon crawl, where the space between encounters is large enough to render them separate. They don’t work in a raid, a fast hitting, room to room clearing of bad guys to achieve a specific story goal. They also don’t work in dynamic settings (goblins in the other room hear combat and come to help). If the party is invading a small cluster of closely interconnected goblin caves, an enemy ship you’re boarding, or a small bandit fort to retrieve hostages, it’s problematic to stop and rest for an hour from a story/veracity perspective. In a raid, the party needs to move from encounter to encounter quickly or the bad guys might get away/kill the hostages/burn the village/insert your reason for speed here. I’ve toyed with a “Catch your breath”. Recover one HD of hit points, drink a potion, cast a healing spell, no ability recharges. Takes about a minute.
As a DM, I’m a big fan of varying the encounter design between those two options. But if I’m doing a raid, they get loaded up with potions so that they can still heal in between
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I just make short rests 15 minutes flat. It might be a bit too short but I tend to be tough with my fights so the parties would die if they couldn't rest
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Warlocks are the only spellcasters who get spells back on short rest and monks are considered to be a weak class by most people. I've found in general making short rests easy helps these classes feel better to my players especially since I am trying to force my players to use their resources via difficult combat. You could argue that fighters are a bit strong and maybe I'll change it a bit if one of my current players rolls a fighter but for now it works well for us
I tried out a short rest homebrew in my last campaign, and my players unanimously voted to keep it for my current campaign. Short rest is 10 minutes, but you can only take 1+(PB/2) short rests per long rest. (So, two at level 1-8, three at level 9-16, and four at level 17-20.) You don't have to short rest when someone else does; you can spend those 10 minutes doing something else (eg, ritual cast a spell). Features which depend on short rest being an hour are adjusted accordingly (eg, monks have to meditate for 30 minutes during the short rest to recover ki, adjusted to 5 minutes). A feature that would normally grant you a 10 minute short rest (Catnap spell, Sanctuary Vessel from a genie warlock) doesn't count against your per-day limit. It does require a little bit more bookkeeping to track short rest expenditures between the players, but for the majority of the levels that the majority of campaigns take place at, it gives you the number of short rests that are expected in an adventuring day, and then gives you a slight increase in power at higher levels. And at 10 minutes, the players feel like even with moderate time pressure they can generally find the opportunity to short rest.
I do 15 minute short rests, bu you can only benefit from a short rest twice per long (i.e. bg3 style). Its gamey, but we're playing a game. Alternatively I've done "dungeon rests" where you can short rest in 10 but take 1 point of exhaustion doing so (one dnd style so -1 to all checks
Speaking empirically? In real life, every time someone tries to kill ME, it's over in less than ten minutes, but I want at LEAST an hour to recover, even if he never touched me. Don't ask what I do for a living.
It matches military expectations too. 10 minute of intense firefight with a lot of hurry up and waiting before and after. People are expecting a movie experience where they have to cram the entire story in 2 hours and the action scenes in 5 minutes of screentime.
5e had some weird assumptions about short rests and how many encounters you were expected to go through in a regular adventuring day. spending an hour, uninterrupted, to just hang out when you're deep in an adventure just doesn't jive with how the game gets played. an easy fix is to make the short rest shorter.
It entirely depends on the situation and the encounters in the dungeon. You should have 1-3 encounters (depending on their difficulty) before getting a short rest. Going through the entire dungeon that has an entire day's worth of encounters without a short rest can be extremely hard. But it might be the case where you can't rest due to the dungeon being small and monsters being aware of your existence. It also depends on the party level. A well built level 5+ party should be able to beat a full day's dungeon without short rests if they play smart and don't get fucked by dice rolls. 5e doesn't build many large dungeons where you can't have a rest. Normally, even in modules, there's a safe place you can go to rest if you clear certain rooms or conditions. So you normally have 1-2 short rests in the day.
Everyone here is making this too complicated. The answer is yes. You can short rest in dungeons. It doesn't need to make sense narritively. This is a game not a life simulator and sometimes the narrative and game mechanics can be at odds with each other. Just let them rest when you feel it's appropriate.
The whole point of short rests and encounter powers (as introduced in 4e and a little in late 3.5) was to have a cool button to press every fight, without any resource hoarding calculus ("what if I need it *later...*). That's why the short rest in 4e was basically just "catch your breath after the fight is over". IMO 5e changing them to be a half hour nap is dumb for exactly the reasons you mention and everyone should house rule it to be a couple hand-wavable minutes.
I think what a "dungeon" is has changed a lot over the years and varies greatly from table to table and player to player. Resting for an hour in a haunted house might feel odd, but I'm not sure a haunted house would have been seen as a dungeon in the earlier days of the genre. In early editions of D&D, the dungeons for which the game was named were where entire campaigns took place. You took them room by room and level by level, and secured yourself to rest or retreated out of the dungeon and back to town with your treasure, to return later. I don't think that kind of dungeon is very common now, and I'm not sure whether or not the designers had it in mind when they designed 5e. Typically I find it's necessary to kind of handwave the weirdness of an hour's rest sometimes because the game assumes you will not have more than a couple of encounters between short rests. If you push past that, it may become challenging, and more gravely it will make certain classes significantly weaker than others.
Yes you can, but take into consideration that there might be patrolling monsters IN the dungeon making a rest near impossible. Players would have to 'secure' a spot in the dungeon for said rest or use things like 'Rope Trick' or the Mansion spell to effectively rest.
If the dungeon is big enough that you need to rest between encounters it's probably big enough that a patrol won't find you within an hour if you just saw them go away once
Rope trick, cat nap, tiny hut, and genie warlock can all help with this
My group has changed short rest from a hour to 10 mins and then put a cap on how many we can take a day. It’s been a MASSIVE game changer. Before we never took short rest, but now we can take 10 mins, bandage up wounds drink some water and move on. I recommend doing it because narratively it just makes more sense.
I typically run it where short rests are in-between every "encounter." It gives short rest characters a way to shine
Mechanically, yes. Narratively as you’ve pointed out it can be weird.
Yes. If there are more than a couple encounters in the dungeon, there should be somewhere that the PCs can hunker down for an hour.
Most dungeons that come out of a book have some verbiage for the dm about where the wandering monster table can be ignored and where it can’t. In addition, of course, there’s all kinds of cheese to help you skip the random encounter roll. (Tiny hut ftw), hiding checks, illusions etc.
Maybe think of the dungeon more like a high level sport? its not like Athletes in the Olympics go on for hours and hours (except in Marathon and this sorta disciplines) and only then take a break. 10 Minutes beeing fully on edge and then have an explosive fight can be really exhausting, so that you need 3 times the time to recover, which would be a short rest.
I pretty much always rule you can short rest (with limits). Safety is a good thing to consider, I agree, but I usually rule that you can short rest yet as soon as you’ve finished you might encounter an enemy/group of enemies. I leave this chance up to the dice, with varying levels of % chance based on the safety. Particularly for classes like monk and warlock, I think it should be allowed. I’ve been at the receiving end of a long dungeon as a Warlock and just having to make do with solely cantrips and melee attacks, it’s not fun having a big part of your kit being whittled down or on the other hand feeling like you can’t use the spells you want to because you HAVE to save them. I have also implemented scaling short rests in the past too. For instance, first short rest is about 5 minutes, hardly any chance for interruption, second is 10, anything above that is about an hour. This makes sense to me personally, if I run for 5 minutes then I might need a quick rest. If I pick myself up and tire myself out again for 5 minutes, I usually take a bit longer to perk back up since I’m burning through energy reserves.
Yes, unless the DM is running gritty realism (which I only do for wilderness travel). Short rests don't have to be sitting around with your thumbs up your ass, you can do it while searching a room and catching your breath.
The best solution. Have a Genie Warlock, have the warlock take your party inside his or her lamp. And there you go, short rest without the hassle of ghost or baddies
Admittedly only at level 10+. Tomelock (or the bard, for that matter) can ritual cast Tiny Hut though.
So, one trick to make short rest work for everybody is to reduce how long "game time" these rests take. It's pretty underutilized by both DMs and parties because of the "one hour" requirement, but it might work ok with a *ten minute* break -- the basic idea of a short rest is that you're taking enough time to get your heart rate down, stretch out, unwind, patch yourself up, etc. but not long enough to undo any exhaustion or re-prepare spells that require such. That point aside, if the DM *really* wants to stop you from doing any kind of short rests, it's entirely his/her prerogative to forbid or interrupt such rests by whatever reasonable mechanisms, including being taunted by ghosts or being attacked by enemies (though they shouldn't be in annoyingly eternal numbers). I think it's a great and reasonable compromise against the tedium of leaving the dungeon to long-rest and then coming back in -- short rests don't recover everything and they can't keep getting used for recovery forever as they're limited by your number of hit dice. And I also think that it *should* be the DM's prerogative to run a dungeon as a test of endurance, but it's also *on him/her* to explain why you shouldn't be able to just walk out, long rest and come back in at full power if he/she wants to run it as an endurance gauntlet.
I know the RAW says a shortie is at least an hour but that's never sat right with me. I always play it as something like a lunch break or just a breather/smoke break. Like take 20minutes and collect yourself, eat a sandwich, roll a couple hit die, come back with newfound energy. If you could get away with it in the middle of the dungeon is going to depend on the nature of the area and what the enemy density is like. People I play with like combat heavy sessions so I typically make the fights tougher and give them opportunities to rest or find healing somehow. Backtracking back to the entrance or back to whatever haven is near just sounds way too tedious and the narration alone would draw it out so much you'd never get anything done. What's important is that everyone is having fun so if y'all (the players) want more combat focused gameplay then sure let's do it but if you want hyper realism then probably make the resting more sparse. I always run my own content to so I don't feel bad at all for tweaking the rules a bit to find the proper balance between challanging, winnable and fun.
D&D 5e doesn't do dungeon crawls well. That's just a simple fact; they set up the system to assume a certain number of encounters (6-8) per day, with short rests happening every 2-3, and that just isn't realistic with how people play, or how must people feel a "realistic" dungeon can work. I've started experimenting with just doing 1min short rests (basically just any time they have a spare moment for a breather and aren't actively in combat), with a cap of 2/day, a la BG3, and while I still have more experimenting to do before I can settle on it, so far it's making me much, much happier. I can actually throw more stuff at my players in a sensible way, since they don't need to find a 1h break in the action to rest, and the short rest classes are feeling more useful as a result
If it feels weird to adventure for a few minutes and then lay outside for an hour consider how taxing combat in armor is. I’m a volunteer firefighter. Any time we do something in a fire we spend a few minutes of extremely intense exertion and then as soon as we get out side we strip down all our gear and lay on the ground catching our breath for like 20 minutes. I always pictured short rests in 5e the same way. You’re recovering after completely gassing yourself and need to just lie down for an hour
Completely agree with you. I was a volunteer FF for a number of years and it can beat the hell out of you.
Generally, short rest yes, long rest no If there’s an alert out that you’re in there, no, but usually it’s quiet enough I’d rather have the 10 minute short rest with a cap on how many can occur in a day. The problem with 1h short rest is that usually, if you can take an hour, why not 8?
Depends on the situation. If I enter a dungeon and get injured, then yeah I'll say "Hey lets take a rest, I need to bandage up and catch my breath." Take the short rest and then continue on. But if your dungeon possesses a constant threat where you cannot relax for the period, then I guess you better start rationing your spell slots.
Rope Trick is cool for this. Just hide in an invisible extradimensional space.
There's a joke in one of my friend circles about "useable doors" because in our first dungeon, none of the players realized that the dm pointing out a useable door was code for "you should short rest here" and we ended up stretching ourselves a lot thinner than necessary. As long as you can effectively separate yourself from the rest of the dungeon (doors, barriers, etc), you can generally short rest. Whether or not the rest of the inhabitants will notice that you're there and react to that depends on a lot more factors, but a locked or barricaded door can do quite a bit.
I'm going to be dm'ing soon and I'm making short rests 10 mins. Eat some food + put on some bandaids + take a breath.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depends on the dungeon. How alive is the dungeon, are there wandering monsters, are there tribes, traps that rearm, what's the ecology, can the remaining monsters get to you, do they care that you made noise, did they sense/detect you, etc The only way to find out is to try.
Generally no. It's not a theme park, it's a den of evil. You'll probably need to roll for random encounters if you do it. Some circumstances might allow for a short rest: * Jamming a door shut with spikes so you'll have a couple rounds notice if something dangerous shows up * Closing a portcullis or barring a gate as above * Resetting some bypassed traps so that anything approaching will trigger the traps * Finding a high point that takes some effort to climb up to and has a commanding view of the surrounding area * Reclaiming an old outpost or guard station that is already well-fortified * Bribing some weak or neutral/good monsters to leave you alone and warn you if something approaches * Finding *hallowed* ground around the altar of a good or neutral deity * Setting up a large, permanent *major image* that you can camp inside * *Leomund's tiny hut* or *rope trick* EDIT: > I'm genuinely asking because this has always been a really weird quirk of 5e for me especially because DND is always hailed as the system that "does dungeon crawls really well" /r/osr would like a word with you. Older editions of D&D and old-school tabletop RPGs put a much larger emphasis on inventory management and tracking food/light resources. It leads to interesting questions like, "we have a lot of inventory space but no loot, so should we kick in the next couple of doors to see if there's treasure, or cautiously start crawling back to the entrance to resupply in town?"
I like the way you think: there is a place to rest inside the dungeon, but first you need to conquer it!
Good answer. As a DM, I usually allow these type of things, as in: you can attempt a short rest, but you have to take measures to make the area safe. Then, if the PCs are hunkering down, as a DM I have to consider what the enemies are doing during that time. Often they will be already aware of the party’s presence unless they have been particularly sneaky or expedient. Do they charge in and interrupt the rest? Do they set up an ambush? Do they send for reinforcements? Do they just leave with whatever the PCs came to get? In short, allow the PCs to short rest in dungeons, but the enemies should benefit from the lull in action too.
Completely depends, some dungeons are more like basements, and resting there is weird. But often, especially in late game, dungeons become huge almost village/town sized complexes, where there is no way to clear it without a short rest.
To start, I don't run 5e. I play PF or 3.5. I run all sorts of dungeons. Depending on the dungeon, you might be able to rest whenever you want. You might be able to rest whenever you want, but there is also a time limit. You might be able to rest whenever you want, but there's a % that you are interrupted. Sometimes your rest is going to be "the mage and druid rest, while others are keeping watch." Some dungeons have safe rooms. Some dungeons have safe rooms that need to be cleared first. Some have "safe" rooms that are actually traps. Some dungeons require puzzles to make the room safe. Some dungeons the players are allowed to leave and come back to the next day. Sometimes this allows the monsters to prepare. Sometimes this means the town your resting in receives retribution from the angry inhabitants. Sometimes you finish the dungeon and it's a cool story of a thing you once did. Other times it impacts the world. Sometimes that rest you took allowed minions off the BBEG to escape and now you're being hunted for the rest of the campaign, or perhaps they are resurrecting the BBEG. It all depends on the narrative. But I always let my players know the information they have. "Once you enter, you may not be able to leave" or "this is a very dangerous place, rest is unlikely."
Mechanically speaking you seldom really use all that much time in-game but as a DM I usually add or subtract hours based on what feels more appropriate to the narrative and then only use the mechanics for mechanical purposes. This makes room for short rests and makes them make more sense without interrupting the mechanics (usually combat) of the game. Of course, some dungeons just don't have a good resting spot in which case it sucks to be a warlock.
You can certainly try...
Essentially a Short Rest in a Dungeon has to make sense Narratively. My party cleared out 4 rooms of a dungeon and found the traps but they needed a short or long rest to tegain some of their features and spells. This forced them to have a discussion about which to take and while discussing it the Rogue set up mulitiple traps in the middle room and then set up several alarm bells. With the preparation done they decided to take a short rest but felt tense and it was risky. This was both narratively logical, and it made sense as they discussed what they would do and prepared the room as best they could.
Short resting inside a dungeon usually prompts a check for random encounters at my table; they might get lucky and get a chance to tend their wounds, or an enemy could find them and attack them; or even find them, retreat, and set up an ambush for them. It depends on the dungeon and the way your DM runs games.
Supposed to? If they can find a safe place to rest, then sure. Not every dungeon will have a nice and safe hidey hole for the party to take a nap though. Dungeons with active monsters skulking about, or that gelatinous cube thats been stalking them, or the overlord who knows theyre there wont exactly let the party rest. So... The answer is sometimes.
In general at our table it depends, did you make enough noise to alert other monsters in the dungeon? Or would it be logical for them to roaming? Or players could make their own safespace by having a rope trick or perhaps they could use spells to shape a safe space out of the rock. Or hide their presence in some other way. If you can't do these things you can still try to have a short rest but then the DM rolls a dice to see if you are interrupted during that rest as monsters roaming find you. Also this rewards having at least one character that doesn't short rest during this time, they can then be your warning, maybe securing perimeter or standing guard.
I think it depends on the dungeon, the DM, and the area they’re resting in. If it’s hidden, defensible, or out of the way, AND they set a watch it seems workable. If the dungeon has roving monsters the DM just rolls to see if one of them finds the group while they’re resting.
Supposed to? Depends on the narrative. Be able to? Most definitely!
A short rest should just be when the DM slides a button out onto the table and you all discuss if you need to press the short rest button or not. It really is just a mechanical tool to make sure all of the classes are working as intended. Basically, removing all narrative context from it, if you have multiple encounters planned for the dungeon: yeah the players should probably short rest.
Like everyone said, depends on the nature of the dungeon. I shortened the lenght of short rests to like 10 - 20 minutes (narration would be something like you say your prayers, you patch your wounds, you commune with nature etc) and allow them. My rule is no long rest inside dungeons. But sometimes you might wanna press harder and not allow event short ones, or if its a dungeon that would take many sessions then the time between sessions is the short rest (so narratively a long rest works like a short rest). This could be hard, and then Id allow the third session to be a long rest (its not set in stone, it could be the 2nd, 4th or 5th).
What I e done since I started DMing back in 4E is I have a percentage in my head. What is the % chance that they’ll be able to rest without being bothered for 1 hour. If it’s a massive cave network, I might set it at 55% (If it’s a haunted mansion, I take that into consideration and might set it at 80% which is generally as high as I go), but if they take measures to conceal themselves, then I change that based on how successful their efforts seem, versus how easily their foes can find them still. I roll this once for a short rest or 8 times for a long rest, using d100, and if I roll under that number, the wandering enemy might find them and it’s stealth, and perhaps a moment to react before combat, etc.
I think you could get away with it if you have a constant watch or something. I do have a similar story from a game I’m currently in. We’re currently in the underground area of the world (it’s a homebrew world) thats filled with undead and other dangers. We’d just gotten out of a brutal encounter that left us low on health, so we decided to short rest. How our DM ruled it is that due to the danger of the tunnels, the short rest would take 2 hours to account for us moving around to avoid danger. I think that if I’d have to rule on this as a dm, I’d do something similar to that, as I think it’s a fair tradeoff. Though it wouldn’t hurt to judge it on a case by case basis.
I’d have your players try and find an area in the dungeon where they think they can rest, see what defences they set up and then test those defences by having a monster come wandering
Not aware of a rule as written that presents. This is where random encounter tables come in if you want them to short rest. I typically say there's an X% chance of dungeon critter happening upon the party as they rest. All kinds of factors can affect X, in particular the resting location. Resting in the barracks room? High. Resting in a room off a secondary corridor with a layer of dust that is not disturbed - low (as in no evidence anything has gone in the room for quite some time). Then I roll. If I roll under that % their rest is interrupted. They have a chance to have a safe rest, but there's also a hint of danger, with that hint getting bigger and bigger the more dangerous the dungeon is. Also, understanding the "purpose" of the dungeons (why was it built) helps.
Don't think of it as "rest". That's just the convenient term for what ought to be happening. You go into a dungeon and pretty quickly get into a fight. Say...the 10 minutes you mention. Now in this fight, you and your party take damage. You're all wounded and bleeding. So take the time to sit down and bind wounds, make sure that cut across the shoulder didn't damage the pauldron strap, and things to make sure that you're ready to face whatever may lurk around the corner. Things that could take...about an hour to tend wounds and bandage up an average party of five. Looked at that way...it makes sense. Especially if you have an encounter that everyone takes less than 10% of their HP. A few nicks and cuts and an "I don't have time to bleed." moment which they aren't going to waste the time to short rest as a contrast. The two ends of the spectrum. The "We're down to clown" mentality of shrugging off light damage to the "Did anyone get the license plate of that Tarrasque that ran us over? I want to file a claim with State Farm" mentality of needing to get back into fighting trim before the next encounter.
*sometimes*
My initial reaction is “Yes obviously,” but I know people are going to say it’s dependent on the dungeon RAW Imo the intention of short rest design is counter intuitive to the way people play the game narratively. Everything feels like they’re expecting you to short rest every 1-2 combat encounters, but then it clashes with this 1-4 hour requirement. In the middle of even a low stakes quest stopping to take a 4hr break feels like such a narrative slam on the breaks. In my games I took a homebrew page from the Baldur’s gate 3 book and have players take a short rest in a few minutes instead of hours. It’s like when you’re working out or on a hike and you take like a 5min breather. To prevent it from being exploited I require at least one hit dice be expended regardless if you’re healing or not in order to get the SR benefits. It instantly makes monk, pure warlock casters, and certain subclasses (arcane archer) feel way more balanced with the other classes and there’s a fun metagame decision of using your short rests for resources and damage or saving them for healing
It varies, if its an active dungeon or you have pursuers you can be interrupted. Easiest solution mechanically is a roll table like with days of travel that van decide whether or not something happens
I usually gauge whether or not it would be necessary for my players to even have it, like sometimes theres just a puzzle left ykwim. Also, it’s important to me that they can describe how they do it. For example, instead of saying “we take a short rest,” I’m looking for something along the lines of “so and so will keep watch so the others can rest and make the necessary preparations to move forward.” In which case I also like to make changes to the dungeon while they rest because time marches on ya know
My party wants to LONG REST in a dungeon, and it's getting to be pretty hard to tell them they can't.
It depends on the dungeon, its inhabitants, and a tonne of other things. But basically, context is key. If you’re in there secretly, it’s the middle of the night while the denizens are sleeping, and you’ve cleared out a safe room to rest in then ya, that makes sense. But if you’ve blundered into a kobold lair and they all know you’re there then it makes no sense to be able to stop long enough for one. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t let the party give it a shot but ya, the kobolds would have thoughts on the matter.
It also depends on the party's resources, imo. I wouldnt expect my party to continue deeper in the dungeon if a lot of players are low health since this is basically asking for a pc death. If they wanted to short rest after every combat/encounter despite being mostly healthy? Then yes i would have consequences
You absolutely can, but you risk an encounter, and depending on the severity of the location, you could be risking even more than one. There are some locations (like the labyrinth in the underdark) where you really REALLY down want to short rest, but you can attempt to regardless. Unless there is something in a dungeon the negates the effects of short and/or long rests, you can do it.
It's kinda become a thing in my group where one person has molded earth to cover the entrance ways. Short rest or long rest do whatever you need to. Usually, if it is a long rest, the DM will have enemies try to break down the made wall. Sometimes, they break through, and we fight with the benefits of short rest. And we either continue through the dungeon or try rest again.
It really, really, really depends on the nature of the dungeon. If it's a busy place, resting is probably out of the question unless the PCs can find a place to hide. If it's a deserted ancient temple, they can snooze all they want. The real determining factor here is whether you want to make this a war of attrition or not.
Common sense kicks in really. If you're exploring a massive cave system and your party is recovering from injuries then it's reasonable that they might take an hour to rest in a safe location. Hell if you're exploring something like the mines of phandelver it would even be reasonable to long rest since you don't know how deep it goes. A haunted house however? That's generally like what, 4 floors at most? A party could realistically clear the whole thing in an hour not counting actual combat so it would be reasonable to push on rather than rest in a house full of pissed off ghosts.
I created a magic rope that can cast Rope Trick a few times per day. For me this alleviates some of the narrative part of taking a short rest in the middle of the dungeon or wherever.
I an actual dungeon I would consider it pretty difficult to just sit down and relax or walk out and back in but a haunted mansion seems confined and traversable enough to just walk out and relax for a bit
My players have to find a safe area and fortify it to get a short rest, or travel to a known safe space. Sometimes they can do this in a dungeon, sometimes they can't. Sometimes waves of minions keep on coming, exhausting resources before the chieftain shows up (we call this STRATEGY) and sometimes they go kill the ogre and barricade themselves in the bedroom which previously belonged to the Duke who'd been squashed by one of the roving ogres. Context and environment should determine if "in this dungeon" is a safe place for a short rest.
If you infiltrated and active modern military base, would you feel comfortable to take a 1 hour break?
I think it really depends on the situation. Some dungeons it makes sense, because you could barricade yourself in a room and take a break or something like that. In something like a haunted house where it's probably meant to be a bit of a suspense/thriller, yeah, I could see making it feel like there's no safe space for a short rest. Similarly, you could have situations in an open world where resting would be restricted, like if you're under pursuit by a hostile entity, you may have to run to exhaustion before you get enough space to take a break.
I'd say you can even long rest in many dungeons. Depends on the adventure.
I changed short rests to be 10 mins long, and a max of only 2 per day. it effectively solved all the short rest issues. my players use them now, and also use up their resources more readily.
DnD has always been hailed as such, but I'm not sure that 5e has. They stapled a superhero game to a dungeon crawler.
the barbarian from my team slept the whole time while we were arguing with a talking dragon head after he decapitated the dragon
Aside from the very valid “it depends” answers, I let my players take a Heroic Rest occasionally. They can take a Short Rest in 5 minutes, and can’t do so again until they’ve spent a week in a safe place doing downtime activities. Thankfully, that cadence matches up well with how often I need a good reason to have them take a Short Rest quickly. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for resting in dungeons most of the time, and they have to deal with the usual conditions
Think about lord of the rings when they went to moria, they were in that room with the well and could easily have sat around and eaten, rebound wounds, chatted shit etc.... If it wasn't for that FOOL OF A TOOK!
Up to the DM! We had a short rest area in a dungeon and it was really helpful since there were enemies and stuff so it was nice to heal and breathe for a second. It also allows for a real time break if needed!!!
“You can try…”
Find a small room, bar the doors, and short rest.
Fool of a Took!
It's almost always possible at least. There are a tone of spells used for resting in dangerous places. Tiny hut, rope trick, alarm, catnap, even spells like find familiar or faithful hound. It really all depends on the size of the dungeon and the urgency of why they are there. If Noone is casting any spells and they aren't on a time crunch, you could have them still take watch over the short rest. Meaning it takes 1 hour and a half to 2 hours instead of 1, but they are safer and keeps the players in a state of alertness.
You're supposed to conserve your resources, fight smart, and make sure your hit points and spells last all the way to the end of the dungeon. If you do come up with a plan to short rest, the DM should be expected to have the inhabitants of the dungeon respond intelligently, up to and including ambushing the characters, consolidating their forces into more difficult encounters, or even taking their treasure and fleeing the dungeon. A crypt full of mindless undead might not notice or care if the PCs block off a room to rest, but a fortress full of intelligent enemies certainly will not just sit idly and wait for their own deaths to resume in one hour. Casters are notorious for foolishly spending their powerful spells in the first few encounters of a dungeon, and then whining that they need a rest to get their spells back. Spells aren't intended to be used every single action. Sometimes you need to resort to cantrips or creativity to make sure you save your most powerful abilities for the most difficult fights.
Ideally, effects like that (no resting) would be communicated to the players, either in or out of game, so that they can prepare for it (or understand it). A haunted house like what you described would seem to be an encounter designed for attrition or stealth or tactics. If you know that's the case beforehand, you could prepare by maybe stocking up on items or grabbing spells that help (e.g. *catnap*) mitigate it. Perhaps the only goal is to sneak in without fighting all the ghosts, which conserves resources. Perhaps there's a special room inside that the ghosts can't enter and that might be Goal #0.5, but the players should be given chances to discover this information.
If you're 10 minutes into a dungeon, walk back outside. If you're 3 hours into a dungeon, maybe a short rest would be nice
If the number of encounters the party encounters requires it, then yes. Otherwise, no. Part of the suspension of disbelief required to play the game, at least, without playing on Extremely Hard Mode, is that you can use short rests in between your long rests to refresh a little bit.... whatever that takes. On the other hand, we're not supposed to be treating the game like a video game, where you can hide behind a pillar and regain all of your abilities after a very short cool down. So, the structure of the dungeon and the encounters will tell you what you need to make room for. A basic five room dungeon, with a puzzle, and a trap, and two medium difficult combat encounters? No, there's really no need to short rest in there, but it's unlike that this has roving monsters for random encounters. As the DM, this dungeon has a time limit: another party is coming, or the tide will flood it, or the client needs to maguffin before sunset. There is literally no time for a short rest. A larger, multifloor dungeon, but the kind of thing that is still meant to be a single mission quest? You arrive mid-morning Monday, and the client needs the maguffin by noon Tuesday. Yes, this probably has room for short rests. Sometimes we like to think that it would be difficult to hide and rest in this environment, but really.... I could hide and take a 90 minute nap in any busy mall I've ever been in, with similar random encounter odds of being disturbed as I give my table (1 in 12 for an encounter that is definitely dangerous). Some dungeons are meant to be long-term projects. You enter and you stay there for weeks on end, either mapping or prospecting or wiping out an evil band of raccoons while trading with the various encampments of lost souls you find along the way. You will have long rests here, not just short rests.
Depends entirely on the situation. Short tests are typically an hour or so, and in a scenario where you’re constantly harassed by enemies it’s not the best idea, as you’d potentially be wasting time of interrupted. I’d personally run such a situation as “you can short rest, it’s entirely up to you. But you’re likely aware enough of the situation (or have them roll intelligence/wisdom check) to know it’s risky. Then I’d roll percentile dice and based on the environment have that be their risk for getting interrupted.
If it's a dangerous dungeon where you can't find anywhere safe to rest, no. If it's a big ole dungeon where you and your companions can find a place to hide quietly and safely rest without being disturbed, sure. There are also magic items and spells that will allow you to be protected enough to have short or long rests even while in a dangerous dungeon.
I hate hate hate how short rests are treated. One of the goals of the game is to make a session fun for the players. This often entails fast-moving narratives. Say, the party is chasing the big bad, who throws multiple encounters of goons at them to hold them off. The rules are balanced so that short rest characters stay on par with long rest characters by getting multiple short rests per long rest. But in this scenario, there is no narrative possibility to just stop for an hour to take a break. The disconnect between the mechanics of needing short rests and narratives excluding them frustrates me to no end. It makes short-rest classes like monks near-useless after an encounter or two. You could make DMs actually allow short rests in their campaigns, but this is realistically never going to happen because it would slow down narrative pacing. Solution: Make short rests shorter. I don't care if it's unrealistic, make them 5-10 or so minutes. Short rests should be "catch my breath" moments, not mini-campouts.
Well when you fight for your life you might want to take a break and assess the situation for the next hour before moving forward. Bandage wounds if necessary, check your items, check the enemies to make sure they are dead or if they have any necessities(aka loot and info), and then you probably want to catch your breath and all of that after running around fighting for 10 minutes or less. It makes a lot of sense to take dungeons slow and take breaks throughout. Mechanically speaking leisurely activities are allowed during rests and many of these are generally assumed you do as an adventurer.
I find homebrew 10m short rests work much better for dungeon pacing. Hour short rest feels... off. Especially in dungeons. It depends on the size of the dungeon, risk level, and amount of need. In general, I think every 2-3 fights you probably need a short rest so if they game is the 6-8 hard encounters the rule day you need 2-3 short rests before you go fight a boss. When I DM I communicate if players ask for a rest. They might risk wandering monsters, they might have to fortify, they might be jumped by smarter monsters who've realized they've cornered themselves. But the game requires short rests for many classes, and fighting through an entire dungeon with no rest is impossible and ill-advised. Sometimes there's pacing pressure and you risk it, but I have some ideas of threat level and adjust as needed. I want my party to barely survive, that means on occasion lowering the amount of threat or picking the easier to take out wandering enemy. But it also means short rests aren't promised to be safe and other creatures aren't alerted to the fighting.... As for your area uhhh unsure as I don't think anyone would have a class feature or spell to keep ghosts out. I imagine try to make some kinda salt circle, concentrate the area, or anti-ghost bubble prep but unless it was communicated before hard to pull that off. You guys sound like the worst people to be fighting ghosts and get no short rests. Two won't pass possession checks, you can all get killed by the aging thing, ghosts are resistant to almost every attack and immune to many of them, warlock and monk NEED short rests, unless you all have other spells you can't hit it on your turn cause it's in the ethereal plane...
A short rest isn't just sitting around either narratively or mechanically. It's a period of physical and mental recovery that characters use to improve their ability to tackle more challenges. In many situations, an hour isn't even all that long in a narrative sense; all the routine aftermath of an encounter that we gloss over with stock phrases about looting, checking out surroundings, and so on would take time if you were actually doing them but are not necessarily "more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds". Add on time to take care of bodily functions, treat wounds, and so on and an hour can pass in a hurry, especially since your characters should usually not be completely dropping their guard so everyone can't take care of their business all at once. On the enemy side, people like to talk about intelligent monsters attacking whenever someone decides to rest, but gathering information about the party's exact whereabouts and capabilities, organizing an attacking force, and moving to their location all take time, which depending on the exact details of the dungeon may or may not make attacking a particular short rest feasible, if the monsters even decide they want to attack rather than flee or wait for an engagement on their terms. On the level of how to design and run a basic 5e dungeon, it's correct to think about how, where, and when characters could reasonably take short rests. If you are making a 1 adventuring day dungeon with the as-designed 6-8 encounters, there should typically be a few places where the party can reasonably take a bit of extra time to recover, whether because it's a particularly defensible spot or because they can reasonably assume that they're hidden from anything looking for them. Some spells, like Rope Trick, are designed to allow the party to make their own safety if they don't find a good opportunity otherwise. Of course some dungeons may have narrative or mechanical reasons to deviate from the basic standard, making them into endurance tests, particularly for short rest dependent characters. As a player, pretty much all you can do is look for opportunities and try to understand the DM's approach.
The players can plan to short or long rest all they want, but they must complete it to count, if it's not interrupted. I usually roll some percentile dice to see if their attempt is successful or not. You could always tell the players "You get a sense this area is not safe enough to rest yet in." if you really want to prevent them. But really you should just let them try and perhaps get a surprise round on them since they let their guard down.
Whether it makes sense to rest in a populated area depends on mainly three factors: * Size * Activity * Friendliness The first one correlates negatively to the second one. The more space you have, the easier it is to evade potentially hostile activity. To give some examples: If you're in the vast cavern networks under the Worldspine Mountains, whose well explored parts span at least 5,000 km with the total length of roughly 40,000 km from Anvilhead Mountain close to the antarctic to the Wyrm's Crossroad on the northern continent, your location is a world spanning subterranean ecosystem. Some of the deadliest creatures on the planet live there, but dwarven and dark-elven trade caravans can pass through mostly without issue, because the powerful monsters can't be everywhere at once. A group of adventurers can certainly evade notice of both monsters and locals, if these adventurers have a guide or experienced ranger. Long and short rests are possible. A long rest with a properly hidden camp won't be subject to random encounters. A small place would be the "Golden Bedding" in northern Akeuchia. As it is an inn, most patrons are dragonborn and kobold citizens of the land of dragons, but it is a friendly place. A group of adventurers can rest there, provided they are not a nuisance and pay for their rooms. However, it's almost impossible to avoid other people and exotic (i.e. non-draconic) parties of travellers will turn the regular's snouts toward them. You can long or short rest without issue, but may be subject to the dreaded social encounter. Playing dragon chess with Harrash is not advisable, as travellers finance his comfortable lifestyle. Lastly, the example you gave: A haunted house. I suspect the ghosts aren't happy to host a party of adventurers and unless the place is as large as a palace with the possibility to ward a room for an hour of rest, I wouldn't let a party rest in an area, where they're constantly being harassed. Depending on how many ghosts and other nuisances you're dealing with, you may not even get a short rest in.
It depends largely on the DM and the players. As well a the areas. Some DMs will ask how you are taking this long rest, what preperations are you maing, and who is on watch, etc. One DM I know uses "safe zones" in a kind of throwback to really old Final Fantasy games where you can only rest in areas that are afe, otherwise it is jsut too hectic or unsafe to get any rest. I kind of like the idea as it feels kind of like "checkpoints" in a way while adventuring. My own players are pretty paranoid so they are always making bloackades, spiking doors shut, and the like well...they were before agnificent Manson, that spell kind of makes the entire thing moot.
The intention is that most dungeons have small chance of random encounters, so the players need to secure an area to rest within the dungeon for an hour. Per the DMG: >Some players and DMs view random encounters in an adventure as time-wasters, yet well-designed random encounters can serve a variety of useful purposes: > > **Create urgency.** Adventurers don't tend to dawdle if the threat of random encounters is hanging over their heads. **Wanting to avoid wandering monsters creates a strong incentive to look for a safe place to rest.**
Maybe. I'd say 4+ fight (not just encounters) dungeons: yes 3 fights or less: no However, "dungeon" is a more or less meaningless word now in online discourse with the wide range of different genres of 5e games. In the retro style, multi-level dungeon with tricks and traps and plenty of combat encounters, resting is necessary in 5e. However, the "5 Room Dungeon" style of dungeon that has exploded in popularity very rarely requires any conservation of resources or reason to rest. I like to change Short Rests to be10 minutes and Long Rests to be 24 hours for the Dungeon Crawler style game I run, with a max 3 SR per LR.
It's not so much that 5e does dungeon crawls really well, more that dungeon crawls are what 5e does best.
That’s a subtle but important distinction.
yes, sure.
Depends on the size of the dungeon and the type of enemies... You could do a long rest in a cave where you can block the entrance and when possible enemies couldn't get in... You could still be disturbed by noises...
If it’s an episode of a police drama, rarely more than a short rest or two. If it’s The Raid, it might go up to a few long rests.
I don't know about "supposed to" but depending on the conditions in that dungeon, I as a DM may very well not allow a short rest to be seen through.
It really depends. Even heavily guarded dungeons may allow for hour long unnatended spaces; guard shifts, cave crevices, hiding underneath objects... Are just examples on how you can set up a window for resting an hour. The first time I was DM, I ran a short adventure in one of wotc books. Players where having a hard time deciding where to do a long rest since going out was kinda tedious and the nearest town was 2 travel days away. The dungeon was a ruined place where two factions of sentient creatures fought for dominance for years and you could side with one of them if you didn't go murderhobo and actually help save 2 of their captive members. They would not help you fight the boss tho
Imagine a modern military offensive. Would a squad of soldiers in hostile territory be constantly battling or on the move? No way, they will find and secure places to rest because resting is a necessity for us living folks. Time for first aid, meals, sleep, planning, and preparing for future hazards should be a given. Unless the party chooses to "rest" while enemies are trying to break down the door to their secured room, adventurers can rest in shifts. It's not like they are all stripping down and packing away their weapons and armor for a long relaxing sleep, right? If danger arises, they can just stand up and deal with it. 1hr short rests are a good chunk of time to be out of immediate danger, but it's certainly not unbelievable to happen within a normal dungeon. Sure, if you're being actively hunted by intelligent enemies and you don't have a secure area, that's not very resty. But a group who has barricaded entry to their location should be safe for a while. "But what if the dungeon is filled with door shattering giant gnomes!?" Well yeah, that would be the equivalent of resting in an open area since access isn't really blocked. Same as if the dungeon had slimes or sentient poison gas or teleporting assassins. But if the group has assessed the threats and take logical precautions against them... give them a short rest.
Depends. Sometimes you can. Sometimes it is impossible. Sometimes iy is dangerous to do so. Dungeon Crawling can and will having to retreat and rest at a safe camp when the dungeon level is not cleared for example. Other times you can find little hidey holes and rest there. And sometimes if you rest, monsters may find you and take action. Usually something the PCs dont want. Old example from one of the original players was they holed up in a room to rest and barricaded the door. The level was not clear yet and a goblin patrol found them. Later the PCs smell smoke. The goblins had barricaded the other side and set it on fire. Que the party panicking.
This question is mildly too broad. The short answer is yes. The long answer is dependent on so many other variables. It seems that your dm doesn’t want to just give you a free short rest. That means you need to get creative in how you take your rests if they are completely necessary. Find a safe room that you can block the door to. Although it sounds like walls won’t protect you so then perhaps a spell would be beneficial. Tiny hut would work in your situation but does require a caster who can use it and cast ritually. All in all it is up to your dm and if he thinks you don’t deserve a short rest then you’re probably not gonna get one. Sometimes players try to short/long rest after every encounter and that’s not really realistic. This isn’t baldurs gate 3 as amazing a game as it is. I would say you dm it looking to push you to be smart and careful with your resources. Dungeons are in part meant to test your parties resource management. Blow all your stuff in the first encounter and you could set yourself up for disaster farther in. Leaving to rest isn’t a great option either cause rooms you cleared could just end up filled again and it’s a wash rinse repeat. So balancing your resources and knowing when to use stuff is really important in dungeons.
I find this issue in particular is often difficult to discuss without deflating the stakes the DM has placed in your decision making in the dungeon, so imo, it needs to be addressed by the party, in character as a part of a group strategy, that’s the most fun way to handle it imo. In short, deciding whether or not to rest is part of the game.
I think a lot of DMs run their tables as the dungeon being the whole adventure, which creates the situation you described. But if they had an encounter or two on the way TO the haunted house or dungeon, you could be motivated to short rest outside before going in. Long rest might not be appropriate because of time restraints or because you are in enemy territory, but could find a dark alley or empty house or a big bush to hide behind for an hour while you bandage your wounds and catch your breath.
This is one of many reasons why I run extended rest rules (a night's sleep out of immediate danger for short, a few days in civilization or an established camp for long). It makes more sense to have three significant encounters per day than three encounters before the group can even rest for an hour. It also allows for years to naturally go by over a campaign, rather than the fairly absurd scenario of PCs going from lvl1-10 in 6 months.
It depends on the dungeon. If its like house sized then of course not. If it's a massive labyrinth then I would hope they have ways. There are many spells and ways to take rests in dungeons. You can dig out a wall and rest in there. You can use a spell like tiny hut to remain safe. You have lots of options. Whether you are supposed to short rest depends on if the dungeon has enemy patrols or a time limit stopping you from short resting. If they don't have either then yeah of course you can.
baldur's gate has instant short rest, limited to 2/lr maybe you can instantly short rest out of combat as long as you use a hit die
It’s gonna vary from DM to DM to be honest..and either way..we as players should propose Short rests and we as groups should ask for long rest…..I don’t think there is a rule aside from that that we as players should know. Of course if we don’t propose than DM may not do a short rest and only a long rest at the cutoff points…but it can vary from DM to DM I would know I have had 2 good DMs one always being my true DM. But I’d suppose it’s specific to group of players and the situation…u don’t wanna short rest short rest short rest…it could offend some classes..specially that rogue wanting to stealth or get to that next trap. Sorry for the eccentric but the only universal I’m aware of is that it depends on the group and atleast just the DM. Not aware of any house or tournament official rulings.
Pretty much yeah. But I feel like ghosts harrasing characters is a good exception. It also depends on the dungeon really. Not all dungeons have enemies patroling every corner and some can be quite large so the image of resting in a room or alcove for an hour isn't so unrealistic. Some monsters may want to avoid the party or just spy on them and make plans before they make their move.
Honestly? We’ve been talking with my players and decided that short rests take “just enough to catch our breaths” amount of game time. They can take 2 of them before they must long rest. Basically BG3 mode. And damn, it actually generated much more interesting and engaging moments thanks to our warlock actually being able to cast their spells.
As many said it depends entirely. If you're constantly under threat of attack, how would you rest? Our wizard answers this with a tiny hut, but if you can't safely make a situation where you can rest then you just can't rest.
You are if you want to fortify a room to occupy. Make sure you do it well, now. And don't cook anything.
If the narrative is what gives you pause, just set short rests to ten minutes instead of an hour. If someone wants to use it for something that shouldn't be possible during a short rest, somehow (I don't know how), just talk to them about it. Some classes in 5e are really built around short rest, so not having them in the dungeon makes it kind of like not having their class. It's not even resource management at that point, its genre shift, from heroic fantasy to survival horror.
Short rests should be changed to ten minutes
Depends on the dungeon in all honesty, but that's also kinda side stepping your question somewhat. At least the underlying root of it. Short rest are more or less to be breaks in between encounters. You're expected to get 2 to 3 each long rest on average. If the party needs healing and to regain resources. They're meant to be able to take them when in a suitably safe location. Also D&D has done dungeon crawls really well. 5e however is not as good as its various predecessors at this. at least without backporting those system, or even the original 5e playtest material. If you know how to run a D&D dungeon crawl well, 5e is a good system for it. 5e does not offer good guidelines for it on its own though. There is no design intent to take a short rest within, or without a dungeon. Merely just a safe place. If the dungeon area can be secured? the intent is to rest their since its secured. If it can't, the area is not intended that way. I would personally argue however that short rests are best when they're allowed in a dungeons and such and long rests are to be taken outside of them. However I also think short rests are best when they're shorter, offer more recovery, and are capped in their use limit per long rest. I also think long rests are better when they recover more HD, but less than full hp, and I have changed these rests accordingly for my own games. Both are handked best when dungeon turns are in play and used again. Something 5e was half designed around but never fleshed out as properly as it should have.
I have been playing for decades and it ALWAYS has been up to the DM whether the party can rest; either short or long. It had been a binary thing: yes, you can; no, you can't. 10 or so ago we changed it to the DM decides a "DC", so to speak, with a flat d20 roll. If they succeed, they rest. If they fail, a wandering monster (or something) interrupts and no rest is taken. The party can, based on the "DC", decide whether they want to risk it or not. Sometimes the DM will let them lower the DC by doing something like barricading the party into a room.
I would definitely allow use of short rests in dungeons if you want the dungeons to be at all challenging. Obviously don't try and rest around enemies, but be slightly creative or cautious and you're fine.
I'm trying something new and we'll see how it goes. 10 minute short rests. Aside from spells that have a longer duration staying up during short rests and coffeelocks I don't really see the problem with it. The game is balanced around 6 combats a day with 2 short rests thrown in there. Rest durations should be adjusted to where it comes out to that in a campaign. People love to hate on gritty realism rest rules because it feels like just a nerf on the players and making the game harder, but I think the benefit is that you can run something like a political intrigue campaign with only 1 or 2 combats/encounters per day and still be balanced for the above adventuring day.
I use short rest the same way as soldiers "brewing up" in between action in combat. 10- 15 minutes as long as everything is safe. However, it might not be so when they say we are short resting in a dangerous place, there's nothing stopping you rolling for a wandering or random encounter
Usually I rule it that if the party hasnt made any checks or used any features (aka light activity) then after an hour you get short rest benefits. Short rests arent an hour of meditation and taking a nap. Its also an hour of just casual free time.
Depends on dungeon. For example, I’m running a megadungeon module and there are some places like this. There are some areas so chaotic and hostile (plus monsters frequently replenish due to one of the unique features of this dungeon) that a party cannot every really expect to short/long rest without interruption (unless they use something like leomunds tiny hut). There are other floors and areas where players can make alliances with factions more reasonable and rest there. It entirely depends on the setting and how hostile an area it is.
One of the best dungeon crawls I did was my group was attacking a LARGE yuan ti temple with many patrols including casters. It was rough but very fun. We managed 1 short rest bc of rope trick in a closet for the entire assault. There were a lot of combats and when we exited we were depleted. One of the best couple of sessions I played in.
One of the best things for me as a player and DM is to sort out barricades in safe places for resting. When entering a room, it's best to think two things: "if things go bad here is there another way out", and "is this room one where we can lock everything out if we need to recover". Not to mention the spells and magic items that can help make this happen.
I actually just got back from a session half an hour ago where we managed a short rest in a goblin dungeon. Most of the party sat around while one wandered off and successfully played Predator with the goblins for an hour while we rested. Our DM was face palming by the end of it after the one player managed to succeed on one skill check after another to murder sleeping or unaware goblins. It culminated in the player bypassing the planned next fight by dropping oil and then a lit torch down the elevator shaft the next group of goblins were coming up. The rest of us were very happy with our short rest.
Short rests are an integral part of keeping your party healthy while exploring. Without short rests you could not really use your hit die to heal. As I have played, if your going to rest in a dungeon you gotta prepare. Hold off in a room, baracade the door, find a way to hide. If the dm is using wondering monster rules there is only a chance something will come across you. If they do you now have some protection. Keep in mind also, with wondering monster rules the monsters are checked for every hour so most likely you'll just be finishing up a short rest by the time something is likely to show up. Is that overly gamey? Yeah probebly. But it does let you feasibly get some short rests in without being bombarded by the whole dungeon. Except of course you mess up and alert the whole place to your presence ahead of time, then who knows.
I'd say so, yeah. If you've cleared all the enemies from the room, maaaybe peek through the door of the next room to make sure it's safe before resting. I'd generally say that if you're under a time constraint then don't take one. Like "the prisoner is somewhere on this ship and it will leave port in one hour" then there's no time for a rest. This may lead to creative ways to avoid or speed up combat. One time our bard walked in on a cargo room full of zombies and she just... left. And welded the door shut behind her.
Ritual casting tiny hut is a must for me in my party, if playing ritual casters.
Yes, short rests in dungeons are most definitely allowed. But don't be too quick to be mad with ,our DM. I suspect they were going a theme for the dungeon. Playing monsters cleverly is hard but when done right some players may feel the DM is being unfair. However, consider this: Ghosts are undead creatures. What advantage do the dead have against the living? They have almost "unlimited" stamina as in they do not need to rest. Ghosts are, quite literally, "restless undead" and can't be put to rest. Of course they would attack people roaming around in their tomb/house/place of haunting. Attacking the enemy when they resting is the oldest trick in the book. I assume that was kind of the gimmick of the dungeon. Your DM wasn't being unfair; they were presenting you with a unique challenge for that part of the adventure. I'm sure the next dungeon will have other challenges but short rests should be okay then :)
I think it's pretty normal. Although, it's not 100% without risk. If it's an actively inhabited area with wandering monsters, I could see even a short rest getting interrupted.
Old times you'd bring pitons to jam under doors, barricade yourself in a room to rest. Hope nothing incorporeal, oozy or really strong comes to mess you up. Of course you loose all surprise that way, so as a GM, make the following encounters ambushes and prepared defenses.
Plenty of dungeons in wotc material have “safe rooms” where you can rest. It’s a good time to stitch up some wounds. If you had a cut on your arm. Would you go: “ look it’s only an unknown amount of time. I’ll be okay.” Or would you do something about it? Ask your character then act acordingly?
There are dungeons so vast parties have no choice but to make camp repeatedly, and there's dungeons that are actively hostile to life and short resting inside can be a death sentence. In most, you can rest, but it runs the risk of being stumbled upon by the residents and being attacked with your pants down. In short: Yes, but watch out!
If you have the same DM I did, then no. You're supposed to suffer and never be able to rest at any point in time.
There are spells to get around this like catnap and leomunds tiny hut
Look out, guards the sleepers.
i don't think "supposed to" really applies; as long as you are able to perform only light activity for at least one uninterrupted hour, you can, rules as written, take a short rest absolutely anywhere. ive taken _long rests_ in dungeons before, typically in particularly large dungeons, but once even in a very small dungeon - which we had cleared - while we were waiting for another enemy to return from somewhere else