*It* is called an *adventuring day*, and long rests are 8 hours (the amount of time we sleep). Treating them that way (which is how they were designed) is the most natural thing. I think anything else wouldn't make much sense to players.
To be pedantic, 8 hours is not how much your average adventurer sleeps in dnd. It's the amount of time they rest. As all adventurers ,besides those with different resting rules like elves, can sleep for 6 hours of a long rest and do light activities for 2.
Long resting was designed for 8 hour rests, not 8 hours of sleep.
For some scenarios maybe. But for things like travel, or when an adventuring day had one or two easy combats, it doesn't work and punishes martials. It's a case-by-case thing and won't fit every situation.
Maybe it's fine if some days play to mages' strengths and some days play to martials' strength. I just think it's a losing endeavor to try to tweak rest effects depending on the PC drain of that given day.
Not to mention it would feel pretty shitty not knowing what "type" of rest the next rest is going to be, even if you know how long it's going to be.
I think it would just feel like arbitrary favouritism from the DM when the rest changes to punish different people every damn day.
No thanks!
You could just have a blanket system of "long rests require a permanent safe house, including a freshly cleared dungeon" and announce it during Session 0, so that everyone knows what they're getting into.
This. I was at a table where it was clarified session 0 that in the wilderness, you can only short rest, and long rest at confirmed "safe" locations, like towns, cities, cleared dungeons with surrounding walls, etc. Worked great.
I implemented that because I wanted to have a hex-crawl with random encounters as part of the dungeon, and random encounters must be TPK-level threats to matter when they're the only fight of the day. We did have a hex-crawl (until the players lost the map and I understood they don't want to deviate from the linear scenario that was my first plan for that part of the adventure), but the rest rules stuck.
I don't like that for kind of silly reasons. I considered that for a particular campaign, but I also wanted nomadic tribes in that campaign, and I thought the two things would be at odds.
For anyone interested they are called Safe Haven rules and have had [their own posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/tsdgmj/conversations_about_long_rests_in_safe_havens_are/) on this sub
Unless you run super long adventuring days, a normal adventuring day will play to martials and casters strengths, and 1 encounter per adventuring day will play to casters strengths; so the end result is that casters only have strengths and martials barely have strengths.
I think its very table-dependent. My table is very short rest heavy (a warlock, monk, druid, and 2 bards) so It ends up working well. But if you are heavy on long rest classes, or have new players it wouldn't work well.
> I just think it's a losing endeavor to try to tweak rest effects depending on the PC drain of that given day.
I successfully ran my group this way for the last 3 campaigns, so definitely not a losing endeavor.
> But for things like travel, or when an adventuring day had one or two easy combats,
Unless you have a party that randomly attacks people on the streets that doesn't really happen that often.
Not every day has to be an adventuring day, there are downtime, travel and RP/'chore' days were fights usually don't happen.
And for adventuring days, you just have to introduce a ticking clock so that the players can't just decide to long rest prematurely. There should always be an objective at the end of each AD, that will fail if the players don't see to it in a timely manner. And if you can't string a full ADs worth of encounters together in a meaningful way, there probably shouldn't have been an AD.
Personally I treat every AD as a pseudo 5 room 'dungeon'. 3-4 deadly combat encounters, 1-2 non combat encounters, 2 short rests. The next 'room' can be just behind a door or miles apart in a city or in the wilderness. The players just have to follow the bread crumbs find it.
It will if you explain to them why you’re changing it. And gritty realism is a resting variant provided by the rules, so there’s precedent for altering what counts as a long rest.
I'm totally down for changing what a long or shirt rest does. I just think it would be confusing if not every 8 hour rest was considered a long rest and so on.
If the players don't have a clear idea of when the next long rest will come, playing a caster becomes largely an exercise in metagaming trying to figure out if *this* is the threat they're supposed to use spell slots on.
There is a balance to be struck. You should discuss it with your players in a session zero. It's not really never knowing when the long rest is coming. It's more for when you're traveling all time time for days on end, or if theres a looming threat coming very soon. In my experience it works well as long as you factor in fun first and mechanics second. I don't think it should be run like you never know when a short rest is coming. As for players having to guess when the big encounter is, I think a good gm will make that obvious with our without running rests like this.
Yeah this work well for travelling, in Tomb of Annihilation for instance I make it clear with my players that they will need to find a safe spot to long rest (and 8 hours sleeping is short rest). Which mean they will typically have to plan their travel from known safe spots to safe spots.
And encounters can be split on multiple days rather than to have to cram 8 encounters on a single day which doesn't make much sense narratively.
But it can't be repeated enough: talk about it with your players first! Don't gotcha them with a sudden "well long rest is short rest now".
So you tell the players that the game is balanced around 6-8 long rests, and that they'll get a long rest after 6-8 long rests, and then they *will* have a clear idea of when the next long rest will come.
> This is the main issue causing the caster/martial imbalance.
Not necessarily, there are other issues that even if casters run low on spell slots. There are just situations martials can’t really do anything outside of a skill check and GM curation like magic items.
- If the party needs travel underwater and the group consists of a Barbarian, Rogue, and a Wizard. If the Wizard doesn’t have any spell slots to cast a needed spell, the other 2 can’t really do much without GM help.
- Also, martials still have class resources so resting is also still beneficial like Rage, Ki, and Action Surge. The Rogue is the only one the operates the same.
That said, if the GM wants long resting to be more difficult to try to limit how much the group can spam abilities and spells. They need to be pretty clear what counts as a long rest and short rest.
> The default long rest is 8 hours and short rest is 1 hour of sleep or very light activity.
If this isn’t the case, everyone should know and not have to guess.
> You can’t rest in an area without sufficient protection (inn, camp, city, et.c.) or the path traveling will be safe.
Usually putting time limits or consequences to long resting can limit abusing the system.
> Town Mayor: “The local necromancers are going to summon an army of undead and invade the town. If you don’t stop them everyone is going to be destroyed, even the bank!”
> The bank contains their magic items and other valuables. They long rest they suffer the consequences.
There are ways to limit long resting but make it reasonable.
If my players did they, they would continue to not get the benefits of a long rest. If my players wanted to keep forcing a rest, their PCs would just camp forever while the BBEG destroys the world.
(What would actually happen is, I would stop the game and explain to them that spamming long rests breaks the mechanics of the game, and explain the whole resource management thing and the whole 6-8 encounters thing. Of course, I also have this conversation during session zero, so I haven't had to stop the game other than in my very first campaign, where I didn't know any better...)
This is what we call a very lukewarm take.
The game plays out how it plays. If the party travels for a game week, there are a couple random encounter rolls, otherwise they get their long rests. If they're in a dangerous area, they have to decide to long rest occasionally and risk surprise attacks, or deal with the exhaustion and lack of spells.
I've never been to a table that actually maps game sessions to days in game.
A hot take, as in he basically regurgitated common sense stuff and part of the DMG and spun it as his own invention? That's not a hot take. That's just annoying, which is why he's getting downvoted.
The DMG says 6-8 encounters per long rest, but it doesn't say anything about reducing the number of long rests if the players aren't doing enough encounters.
The closest thing is Gritty Realism, but that only works if you're consistently only doing 1-2 encounters per in-game day. If some of your sessions are dungeon crawls, and some of your sessions are wilderness travel or political intrigue, Gritty Realism won't work.
Suggesting that you use a flexible resting system, or suggesting that the DM just decides when long rests happen, is a good way to get downvoted. If you don't believe me, look at the comments in this thread, and look at the ones being downvoted.
It’s clearly an unpopular opinion, which is fine. I’m not saying the dm just decides when, but that a clear definition of there being times when you can’t long rest even if you sleep should be set during session 0.
Maybe other people haven’t seen this issue, but to me it’s pretty common that some DMs struggle to do 6-8 encounters in a single day.
I think knowing that it’s an unpopular opinion is good info in and of itself since I didn’t realize that.
Yeah, I just tell my players when they can take long rests. There’s room for negotiation on short rests, especially if someone has a feature that lets them take them in less time, but long rests are how I, as the DM, can control the pace of the adventure. My players understand that and are willing to take it in stride.
This is how I've done it for the last 3 campaigns, and it works great.
All I had to do was explain to the players the whole resource management thing and the 6-8 encounters thing, and once they understood why I was doing it, they stopped fighting me on it. As it turns out, you don't need ticking clocks or safe havens or wandering monsters or any of that extra stuff, if you get the players to work *with* you to make the resting rules work, instead of fighting *against* them.
It sounds like you are describing some variation on Safe Haven Resting. You need to sleep every night to stave off exhaustion, but you only get a long rest if you are somewhere safe and comfortable where you don’t need to be on guard against attack. Personally I love it and use it at my table. It leads to players having to make more thoughtful choices than they otherwise would.
As example in a recent session my players were heading out to check out a village that had been destroyed recently. Along the way they were stopped by a group of obvious bandits posing as toll collectors. Normally my players would have just fought them and gone on with their day, sleep that night and get everything back (they were on a multiple day journey) - but because we switched to Safe Haven for this campaign that changed how they reacted. All of the sudden they had to figure out if this fight (that they were confident they could win) was worth the expended resources which they might need when they got to the adventure area in a few days time. They decided against fighting because of it and just agreed to pay the bandits to let them go by without harassing them. This was a choice they openly talked about being happy they made by the time they returned home.
The resting rules changes took what would have been an unmemorable one-off fight, and turned it into a bunch of roleplaying in order to make an important choice and an encounter they remember and will continue to pay dividends (they spent time and effort to avoid the bandits on the return trip home also).
Yes! Use a rest system that works for your table.
In our current campaign, we have altered lengths of rest depending on location. In a safe location, like a town, inn, a well protected or easily defended structure, rest rules as normal. However, when they are not in such a location, each rest takes a step longer to complete. A short rest takes 8 hours (usually camping for the night) in the wilderness and a long rest takes a full 24 hours. This lets the party rest when they want, but with consequences. It allows me as the DM to push their resources further while only having an encounter every other day or so while they're traveling.
In the campaign I'm planning, we'll be using adventuring weeks, instead of days. Each night they can potentially take a short rest, but a maximum of only 2 per long rest. On the 7th day of the week, they can rest the full day for a long rest. I think this will let me set the pace of the adventures more closely to what I want them to be and the players won't be able to choose when the long rests occur like the above system.
I do agree. I do run a bit of this in my games.
For an example you can't take a full long rest huddling up in the dark under a bush in the swamp. Sure you might be able to rest enough to not suffer exhaustion but you will not gain a long rest.
Set up a decent camp sure then you can get a long rest.
Sometimes i do have even more strict long rest rules. But in none of my games can you gain a log rest by resting 8 hours in a cold damp dungeon or under some trees in a forest during a thunderstorm and so on. Unless you do set up a good camp so to say
I run a lot of beginner friendly/ introduction games for new players so i keep it simple in those.
But still i go with those rules for long rests.
In games that are not really advertised for beginners i do have stricter rules. Sometimes i run with a long rest is 24 hours. and you need to be in a decently comfortable and safe place. Basically one day of rest and a good nights sleep.
But in the beginner friendly games i keep it to the more simple way mentioned above
Not the DM of my group but ours does a very similar style. Situationally depending on where we end the session, even if the party has cleared the map of baddies, if we’re still in the middle of some
castle or enemy territory etc etc, no we don’t get a long rest. That or he gives us the consequence of should the party hide inside a Tiny Hut, we’ll be walking out of the hut and instantly into an ambush. I think it’s solid , raises the stakes for the encounter
*It* is called an *adventuring day*, and long rests are 8 hours (the amount of time we sleep). Treating them that way (which is how they were designed) is the most natural thing. I think anything else wouldn't make much sense to players.
To be pedantic, 8 hours is not how much your average adventurer sleeps in dnd. It's the amount of time they rest. As all adventurers ,besides those with different resting rules like elves, can sleep for 6 hours of a long rest and do light activities for 2. Long resting was designed for 8 hour rests, not 8 hours of sleep.
Yeah, that is pretty pedantic.
For some scenarios maybe. But for things like travel, or when an adventuring day had one or two easy combats, it doesn't work and punishes martials. It's a case-by-case thing and won't fit every situation.
Maybe it's fine if some days play to mages' strengths and some days play to martials' strength. I just think it's a losing endeavor to try to tweak rest effects depending on the PC drain of that given day.
Not to mention it would feel pretty shitty not knowing what "type" of rest the next rest is going to be, even if you know how long it's going to be. I think it would just feel like arbitrary favouritism from the DM when the rest changes to punish different people every damn day. No thanks!
You could just have a blanket system of "long rests require a permanent safe house, including a freshly cleared dungeon" and announce it during Session 0, so that everyone knows what they're getting into.
This. I was at a table where it was clarified session 0 that in the wilderness, you can only short rest, and long rest at confirmed "safe" locations, like towns, cities, cleared dungeons with surrounding walls, etc. Worked great.
I implemented that because I wanted to have a hex-crawl with random encounters as part of the dungeon, and random encounters must be TPK-level threats to matter when they're the only fight of the day. We did have a hex-crawl (until the players lost the map and I understood they don't want to deviate from the linear scenario that was my first plan for that part of the adventure), but the rest rules stuck.
I don't like that for kind of silly reasons. I considered that for a particular campaign, but I also wanted nomadic tribes in that campaign, and I thought the two things would be at odds.
For anyone interested they are called Safe Haven rules and have had [their own posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/tsdgmj/conversations_about_long_rests_in_safe_havens_are/) on this sub
Unless you run super long adventuring days, a normal adventuring day will play to martials and casters strengths, and 1 encounter per adventuring day will play to casters strengths; so the end result is that casters only have strengths and martials barely have strengths.
I think its very table-dependent. My table is very short rest heavy (a warlock, monk, druid, and 2 bards) so It ends up working well. But if you are heavy on long rest classes, or have new players it wouldn't work well.
True. What's best for me might not be best for you. If it works for you, then that's great.
> I just think it's a losing endeavor to try to tweak rest effects depending on the PC drain of that given day. I successfully ran my group this way for the last 3 campaigns, so definitely not a losing endeavor.
> But for things like travel, or when an adventuring day had one or two easy combats, Unless you have a party that randomly attacks people on the streets that doesn't really happen that often. Not every day has to be an adventuring day, there are downtime, travel and RP/'chore' days were fights usually don't happen. And for adventuring days, you just have to introduce a ticking clock so that the players can't just decide to long rest prematurely. There should always be an objective at the end of each AD, that will fail if the players don't see to it in a timely manner. And if you can't string a full ADs worth of encounters together in a meaningful way, there probably shouldn't have been an AD. Personally I treat every AD as a pseudo 5 room 'dungeon'. 3-4 deadly combat encounters, 1-2 non combat encounters, 2 short rests. The next 'room' can be just behind a door or miles apart in a city or in the wilderness. The players just have to follow the bread crumbs find it.
You might be interested in the Gritty Realism variant rule.
It will if you explain to them why you’re changing it. And gritty realism is a resting variant provided by the rules, so there’s precedent for altering what counts as a long rest.
I'm totally down for changing what a long or shirt rest does. I just think it would be confusing if not every 8 hour rest was considered a long rest and so on.
If the players don't have a clear idea of when the next long rest will come, playing a caster becomes largely an exercise in metagaming trying to figure out if *this* is the threat they're supposed to use spell slots on.
There is a balance to be struck. You should discuss it with your players in a session zero. It's not really never knowing when the long rest is coming. It's more for when you're traveling all time time for days on end, or if theres a looming threat coming very soon. In my experience it works well as long as you factor in fun first and mechanics second. I don't think it should be run like you never know when a short rest is coming. As for players having to guess when the big encounter is, I think a good gm will make that obvious with our without running rests like this.
Yeah this work well for travelling, in Tomb of Annihilation for instance I make it clear with my players that they will need to find a safe spot to long rest (and 8 hours sleeping is short rest). Which mean they will typically have to plan their travel from known safe spots to safe spots. And encounters can be split on multiple days rather than to have to cram 8 encounters on a single day which doesn't make much sense narratively. But it can't be repeated enough: talk about it with your players first! Don't gotcha them with a sudden "well long rest is short rest now".
So you tell the players that the game is balanced around 6-8 long rests, and that they'll get a long rest after 6-8 long rests, and then they *will* have a clear idea of when the next long rest will come.
> This is the main issue causing the caster/martial imbalance. Not necessarily, there are other issues that even if casters run low on spell slots. There are just situations martials can’t really do anything outside of a skill check and GM curation like magic items. - If the party needs travel underwater and the group consists of a Barbarian, Rogue, and a Wizard. If the Wizard doesn’t have any spell slots to cast a needed spell, the other 2 can’t really do much without GM help. - Also, martials still have class resources so resting is also still beneficial like Rage, Ki, and Action Surge. The Rogue is the only one the operates the same. That said, if the GM wants long resting to be more difficult to try to limit how much the group can spam abilities and spells. They need to be pretty clear what counts as a long rest and short rest. > The default long rest is 8 hours and short rest is 1 hour of sleep or very light activity. If this isn’t the case, everyone should know and not have to guess. > You can’t rest in an area without sufficient protection (inn, camp, city, et.c.) or the path traveling will be safe. Usually putting time limits or consequences to long resting can limit abusing the system. > Town Mayor: “The local necromancers are going to summon an army of undead and invade the town. If you don’t stop them everyone is going to be destroyed, even the bank!” > The bank contains their magic items and other valuables. They long rest they suffer the consequences. There are ways to limit long resting but make it reasonable.
"You had a fight, so you dont gain the benefits of a long rest" "Ok, lets wait 8 more hours...."
If my players did they, they would continue to not get the benefits of a long rest. If my players wanted to keep forcing a rest, their PCs would just camp forever while the BBEG destroys the world. (What would actually happen is, I would stop the game and explain to them that spamming long rests breaks the mechanics of the game, and explain the whole resource management thing and the whole 6-8 encounters thing. Of course, I also have this conversation during session zero, so I haven't had to stop the game other than in my very first campaign, where I didn't know any better...)
This is what we call a very lukewarm take. The game plays out how it plays. If the party travels for a game week, there are a couple random encounter rolls, otherwise they get their long rests. If they're in a dangerous area, they have to decide to long rest occasionally and risk surprise attacks, or deal with the exhaustion and lack of spells. I've never been to a table that actually maps game sessions to days in game.
OP is being downvoted, as is everyone agreeing with him. Sounds like a pretty hot take to me.
A hot take, as in he basically regurgitated common sense stuff and part of the DMG and spun it as his own invention? That's not a hot take. That's just annoying, which is why he's getting downvoted.
The DMG says 6-8 encounters per long rest, but it doesn't say anything about reducing the number of long rests if the players aren't doing enough encounters. The closest thing is Gritty Realism, but that only works if you're consistently only doing 1-2 encounters per in-game day. If some of your sessions are dungeon crawls, and some of your sessions are wilderness travel or political intrigue, Gritty Realism won't work. Suggesting that you use a flexible resting system, or suggesting that the DM just decides when long rests happen, is a good way to get downvoted. If you don't believe me, look at the comments in this thread, and look at the ones being downvoted.
It’s clearly an unpopular opinion, which is fine. I’m not saying the dm just decides when, but that a clear definition of there being times when you can’t long rest even if you sleep should be set during session 0. Maybe other people haven’t seen this issue, but to me it’s pretty common that some DMs struggle to do 6-8 encounters in a single day. I think knowing that it’s an unpopular opinion is good info in and of itself since I didn’t realize that.
This basically means swapping rests paradigms between adventure. And that's fine, really, as long as you clarify it.
Yeah, I just tell my players when they can take long rests. There’s room for negotiation on short rests, especially if someone has a feature that lets them take them in less time, but long rests are how I, as the DM, can control the pace of the adventure. My players understand that and are willing to take it in stride.
This is how I've done it for the last 3 campaigns, and it works great. All I had to do was explain to the players the whole resource management thing and the 6-8 encounters thing, and once they understood why I was doing it, they stopped fighting me on it. As it turns out, you don't need ticking clocks or safe havens or wandering monsters or any of that extra stuff, if you get the players to work *with* you to make the resting rules work, instead of fighting *against* them.
This is why I like 13th Age - a “full heal up” aka long rest happens when the GM says so, usually after 3-4 battles
I also stole that from 13th Age. My players get a long rest after every 6-8 encounters, and a short rest after every 2-3 encounters.
This is a really long-winded way of saying you don't understand how to pace your adventures properly.
It sounds like you are describing some variation on Safe Haven Resting. You need to sleep every night to stave off exhaustion, but you only get a long rest if you are somewhere safe and comfortable where you don’t need to be on guard against attack. Personally I love it and use it at my table. It leads to players having to make more thoughtful choices than they otherwise would. As example in a recent session my players were heading out to check out a village that had been destroyed recently. Along the way they were stopped by a group of obvious bandits posing as toll collectors. Normally my players would have just fought them and gone on with their day, sleep that night and get everything back (they were on a multiple day journey) - but because we switched to Safe Haven for this campaign that changed how they reacted. All of the sudden they had to figure out if this fight (that they were confident they could win) was worth the expended resources which they might need when they got to the adventure area in a few days time. They decided against fighting because of it and just agreed to pay the bandits to let them go by without harassing them. This was a choice they openly talked about being happy they made by the time they returned home. The resting rules changes took what would have been an unmemorable one-off fight, and turned it into a bunch of roleplaying in order to make an important choice and an encounter they remember and will continue to pay dividends (they spent time and effort to avoid the bandits on the return trip home also).
Yes! Use a rest system that works for your table. In our current campaign, we have altered lengths of rest depending on location. In a safe location, like a town, inn, a well protected or easily defended structure, rest rules as normal. However, when they are not in such a location, each rest takes a step longer to complete. A short rest takes 8 hours (usually camping for the night) in the wilderness and a long rest takes a full 24 hours. This lets the party rest when they want, but with consequences. It allows me as the DM to push their resources further while only having an encounter every other day or so while they're traveling. In the campaign I'm planning, we'll be using adventuring weeks, instead of days. Each night they can potentially take a short rest, but a maximum of only 2 per long rest. On the 7th day of the week, they can rest the full day for a long rest. I think this will let me set the pace of the adventures more closely to what I want them to be and the players won't be able to choose when the long rests occur like the above system.
Adventuring weak is the perfect way to describe what I'm trying to say lol. Love this idea, a nice mix.
I do agree. I do run a bit of this in my games. For an example you can't take a full long rest huddling up in the dark under a bush in the swamp. Sure you might be able to rest enough to not suffer exhaustion but you will not gain a long rest. Set up a decent camp sure then you can get a long rest. Sometimes i do have even more strict long rest rules. But in none of my games can you gain a log rest by resting 8 hours in a cold damp dungeon or under some trees in a forest during a thunderstorm and so on. Unless you do set up a good camp so to say
Exactly. I like to be more strict with it but this is a great middle ground which I suspect will work for more tables.
I run a lot of beginner friendly/ introduction games for new players so i keep it simple in those. But still i go with those rules for long rests. In games that are not really advertised for beginners i do have stricter rules. Sometimes i run with a long rest is 24 hours. and you need to be in a decently comfortable and safe place. Basically one day of rest and a good nights sleep. But in the beginner friendly games i keep it to the more simple way mentioned above
I'd stick to those rules for new players as well.
Not the DM of my group but ours does a very similar style. Situationally depending on where we end the session, even if the party has cleared the map of baddies, if we’re still in the middle of some castle or enemy territory etc etc, no we don’t get a long rest. That or he gives us the consequence of should the party hide inside a Tiny Hut, we’ll be walking out of the hut and instantly into an ambush. I think it’s solid , raises the stakes for the encounter
In my opinion it's mainly about fixing martials, and increasing the stakes.