Rest Mechanics, Encounter Design and Narrative: A diatribe
Jun 15, 2015 15:17:44 GMT -8
Post by lowkeyoh on Jun 15, 2015 15:17:44 GMT -8
This post is going to a little rambly and a little ranty. This was originally going to be an email but stu said no more long emails. I’d love for people to read it anyway despite the length because I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on these matters.
I’m going to use some math and hypothetical characters. For the sake of ease, everyone is 5th level, has an 18 in their most relevant stat, 16 in their second most relevant stat, and 14s in everything else. Everyone has 16 AC. They took the average on their HP rolls. They have no magic items.
I’m going to start this hot mess by saying that I really like 5th edition. I really do. It fixed a lot of my problems with 3.P. I love concentration forcing you choose what spell is really worth keeping up. I love Advantage/Disadvantage replacing fiddly numbers. I love spell slot scaling instead of spells scaling to level. I love proficiency and general skills over micromanging BAB and an exhaustive skill list. I love stat based saves instead of the main three. I love a lot about fifth edition. But I don’t love rest and encounter design.
If you are unaware, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition is balanced around the idea that an adventure day will consist of six to eight encounters, two of which should be deadly. Anyone who has thrown a ‘deadly’ rated combat at their party only to find the heroes blow right though it has experienced this. The reason that happens is because there’s supposed to be six more fights. Deadly doesn’t mean deadly by itself. Deadly means deadly in the context of the adventure day. The D&D5e balance also assumes you take two short rests, one a third of the way through the day and one two thirds of the way through the day. One day, two short rests, six encounters, long rest.
I don’t like encounter design and rest because I think they inhibit a GM from telling a story and challenging their players at the same time. With the way the game balanced I think doing one precludes the other. To challenge players you have to exhaust their resources and make them afraid they don’t have the wherewithal to survive the encounters they find themselves in. The main resource they care about is HP. The spells they use, the attacks they use, the potions they drink are all ways to preserve their HP. The faster you finish a fight, the less the enemy attacks you, the less HP damage you take. In a hitpoint attrition system damage is healing. If a big bad is on the map for fewer rounds it loses the chance to attack and deal damage. Killing a dragon in two rounds instead of ten denies it eight rounds to deal HP damage to allies.
If the players go to sleep at night at half HP, the Paladin hasn’t used Lay on Hands at all, the healer has several spell slots left, the mage has slots still, and no one used their potions, did you really challenge them? If you’re not exhausting the resources they need to survive are you challenging them? If you aren’t challenging your players then why are you making them fight? If fights are a foregone conclusion that the players are going to win aside from maybe crazy dice rolls or insane crits, then why are you going through the motions of making them wave their swords around as you all knock off HP from their total?
My main beef about rest is that I don’t think HP should recover overnight. If you get wounded the solution should just be a quick bedtime and bam all better. I know what you’re thinking “just use the variant healing rules, that fixes the problem,” Well no it doesn’t. The variant healing rules state that players don’t recover HP overnight but instead have to spend their hit dice to recover HP. A die of N sides is going to statistically roll [N+1]/2. A player spends all their hit dice on night one, recovers half of them in their sleep. Short rests for half their hit dice during the day. Recovers the other half sleeping the second day. That means our 5th level wizard who short rests in the morning has spent 10d6 by the morning of the third day. A fighter has spent 10d10.
Our wizard has (6+4+4+4+4+[5*2]) HP from taking the average roll and adding CON hp at the end. That’s 32 HP. Average roll means he recovers 35 HP. Our fighter has (10+6+6+6+6+[3*5]) HP or 49 HP. Average roll means he recovers 55 HP. Fighter also gets 18 1d10+5 heals per day, but we’ll talk more about that later.
So we’ve gone from getting all HP back on a rest to statistically likely to get back all your HP after two nights rest. But that doesn’t matter because no one is going to need to use hit dice to get their HP back because of magical healing.
Magical healing means that a day’s rest is going to be more or less sufficient to top everyone off to full HP. If the players can dedicate a day to resting and healing their wounds, they are going to in the clear. Even if the healer just blows the rest of their spell slots at the end of the day before bed chances are that the players are going to be fine.
This is a chart of how much healing a character can do in a day.
If you don’t care about how these numbers are determined, you can skip to the next paragraph. A full spell caster just leaning on Cure Wounds has four 1st level spell slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots. That’s 16d8+[9*4] HP of healing which averages to 108 from Clerics, Bards, Sorcerer/Wizards with a feat, and Druids. Life clerics heal 34 extra HP though Disciple of Life and have 25 HP to spend though their Channel Divinity which they get every short rest. Paladins get less spells. Four 1st level spells and two 2nd level spells. We’ll also call Charisma a secondary stat to Strength which leaves them with 8d8+[3*6] which is an average of 54 HP in healing to which we add 25 HP in Lay on Hands to get a total of 79 HP per day. Rangers don’t get the lay on hands, which leaves them at 54 HP for straight Cure Wounds. More effectively they’ll use Goodberry with their 1st level slots for 40 HP and then Cure for 4d8+[6*2] averaging 70 HP per day. Druids will probably follow suit and use first level spells on Goodberry and then use Cure Wounds in second and third level slots for 12d8+20 averaging 74 damage for a total of 114 HP.
Fighters can heal themselves 1d10+5 HP per short rest which translates to 11 HP 18 times a day and a total of 198 self healing.
Let’s consider a party of five. A d6 Caster, two d8 damage dealers, and two d10 tanks for the sake of example. That means we have [6+4+4+4+4+(5*2)] + [8+5+5+5+5+(5*2)] + [8+5+5+5+5+(5*2)] + [10+6+6+6+6+(5*3)] + [10+6+6+6+6+(5*3)] HP for the Party. Our sample party has 206 HP to bring all five from 0 to full health. Spending hit dice means the party recovers 117 HP. A Paladin could top everyone off after a single day’s rest.
By not allowing players to heal on a long rest what are you really doing? What is the game gaining? That it takes two nights + a short rest for them to hit dice their HP back to max? That it takes a night’s rest + magical healing to get people back on their feet? In order for the “no HP recovery on a long rest” to be meaningful you have to force the party into combat every day otherwise they’ll just spend a day licking their wounds and be at the pinnacle of health the next time you want them to face bad guys.
So how do you challenge a party? You either put them in combat every day so they never get that day of rest to heal their wounds or you challenge them within a single day. It would seem challenging them within the bounds of a single day would indeed be the intended design of the system.
So have them fight everyday or challenge them within a single day to tax their resources. Are either of these options satisfying narratively? If the players get jumped by bandits en route to another town, in order to put pressure on the party and make them feel like there’s consequence, I either need to: A) make them the strongest or most numerous bandits in the world or B) there needs to be six more encounters that day. Which makes a great story, doesn’t it. You adventurers leave town for Scunthorpe and you travel for six days uneventfully until the seventh day in which you were ambushed eight times and nearly killed by highwaymen even though you’re all fifth level badasses and then you traveled six more days without event. That seventh day sure was exciting, though, right? Or You adventurers leave town for Scunthorpe and get ambushed by bandits every day for two weeks.
This doesn’t sound like a great story. The limitations of the system are impacting the story that can be told, and that’s exactly what we were trying to avoid in the first place with these rules. So in order to challenge players, you have to do so within the confines of a single day.
So we have the framework of time span. Giving players a single day off means they’ll recover to the point where you’re essentially starting from scratch, so for challenge’s sake we’re dealing with designing out a single day of combat.
An answer pops into the forefront and seems obvious. Just have one, large, challenging combat. Well, there’s issues with this. The big one is ‘is this fair to my players.’ Of the core classes, three class’ primary class abilities function on short rests (Fighter, Monk, Warlock), seven function on long rests (Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Sorcerer, and Wizard), and Rogues and Rangers primary class functions are static.
By having a single combat in a day you are over emphasizing Long Rest classes and making them shine way brighter than Short Rest classes.
Let’s compare some classes. Paladins and Fighters are comparable. Assuming we’re comparing the same fighting style between the two classes, no use comparing Great Weapon Fighters to Protection Paladins. So if we’re comparing like weapon users then they’re going to be the same damage on regular attacks. The difference between the two classes is the fact that Paladins have spells whereas Fighters have two abilities; Action Surge and Second Wind.
The baseline for damage for Paladins is Divine Smite. Their other spells are mostly either trading damage for utility (Thunderous Smite, Wrathful Smite) or trading upfront damage for potential damage (Searing Smite, Divine Favor, Hunter’s Mark for Vengeance, Bless) The problem with the potential damage spells is that they are all concentration based, so you cast Bless and then can’t use Smite Spells, or cast Searing Smite and it wears off when you cast Divine Favor. Also, as a front line warrior concentration is going to matter a great deal. Searing Smite can deal more than Divine Smite in damage as long as they keep failing saves and you keep passing your concentration checks. Then there are spells like Shield of Faith, where you can’t really judge the damage increase received from a 10% increase to the odds of attacks missing you. So because Divine Smite is the only ability useable while concentrating on other spells and because modeling situational based damage involving saving throws is going to complicate things for the purposes of calculating potential damage we are going to convert all of a Paladin’s spell slots to Divine Smites.
A 5th level Paladin is sitting on 14d8 worth of Smites assuming they’re not fighting outsiders or undead. That’s 63 damage that nothing but Angels are resistant to delivered over three rounds, two if you dual wield or have Polearm Master. A Paladin also has 25 hitpoints in Lay on Hands. Both of those figures are per day. Conversely a Fighter gets an extra action and 11 healing (1d10+level[5]) every short rest. Let’s say Fighter is Sword and Board and so action surge gets two attacks for 2d8+8 damage, or 17. So Paladin gets 63 damage and 25 healing and Fighter gets 17 damage and 11 self healing. But if you get into three fights with short rests in between the numbers become Paladin 63/25 to Fighter 51/33.
Monks and Rogues are similar. Whereas Monks have to spend Ki to do things like Dodge, Dash, or Disengage Rogues get to Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a bonus action every six seconds of every day, forever. Monks gets extra attack but Rogues have sneak attack. However Monks are limited by the action economy as all their abilities function on a bonus action. So in our 5th level example, Monk gets two attacks and can bonus action for another attack or Flurry for two attacks. Rogues get two attacks and sneak attack which always gets better. But Monks have Qi and Qi comes back on short rests. The same problem as above comes up. One fight a day means a monk gets to spend 5 Qi to contribute to combats. Three fights a day means 15 Qi. Monks effectiveness goes up per fight where as a Rogue is static between fights.
Warlocks and Wizards. This is no contest. Warlocks get two 3rd level spell slots. Wizards have four 1st level spell slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots with Arcane recovery for another 3rd level slot or three 1st level slots. Just dumping all of those spells into Chromatic Orb, that’s 39d8 or 176 worth of damage. Warlocks get two spell slots to a wizards ten to twelve. Again, three fights and now it’s six 3rd level slots to ten/twelve slots of mixed levels.
Other classes have Short Rest abilities too and by not giving short rests between combats you are scaling back the effectiveness of those abilities.
There’s another problem with the one big fight and that’s balancing the fight itself. Remember how we mentioned Paladins were sitting on an average of 63 damage that can be unleashed in three turns on top of their normal damage [6d8+24 is 61] which means you have one big bad and he get’s slapped with Faerie Fire and in three turns a Paladin deals 124 damage to it. Your mage casts three chromatic orbs for 8d8 damage. That’s another 36 damage and we’re hoping the big bad doesn’t have an elemental weakness. Now in order to make a Dragon or a Demon or some big bad ass thing that’s going to challenge the party it has to have 300 HP because it’s representative of what should be five combat encounters. And it has to have the damage output of five combat encounters too. Our party of five 5th level PCs has a collective HP total of 200, so now you have to do 200 damage over six to ten rounds. What if you crit? What if you accidentally kill a PC? Now it’s a TPK.
If you compare that mess to a collection of small skirmishes. Let’s just say a banshee. Banshee uses a wail, it deals 3d6 damage and knocks people who fail a save on their ass. You’re not going to kill the party with one banshee, they’ll eviscerate it. But the wizard might fire off a spell, and the healer might do some healing. Then when they get jumped by thugs, they’ll mow them down. But that’s a little more damage and a little more healing. Wolf attack. And now it’s the big badass dude. He only has 100 HP because the party isn’t at full capacity.
Is this a better way of approaching challenging players? I think it is. It might not be. But I think the multi fight adventure day is a more challenging and leads to the use of all the players resources to overcome fights. When was the last time your players used the ‘Help’ action? Or your Fighter took and used Protection fighting style? When was the last time your Bard passed Bardic Inspiration to your spell casters because they were going to cast a spell that requires an attack roll and spell slots are too important for you to not hit? In fact, the rogue is also going to go and use the ‘Help’ action to give you advantage to make sure that precious spell hits. Last time your Fighter said ‘don’t heal me, I can second wind. Go heal _____ instead.’ I have a feeling if your players knew they were going to be truly taxed by combat not only would they use all their abilities, they'll use more obscure tactics as well.
But we’re still back at square one. Challenging the players in a way that highlights their strengths and is tough but fair takes multiple combats per day. Multiple combats a day outside of a dungeon crawl or war makes for a pretty contrived story. Rate of healing doesn’t matter in a world where magical healing exists because the players are going to determine the rate at which they seek out danger. Unless you take the option of staying in town and resting for a few days to gather strength by attacking them with assassins out to personally slay them every day or the players are always on a extremely tight deadline where rest is impossible, they will be in tip top shape when they do go out and seek danger. One big fight makes sense narratively because one fight is easier to justify than seven but it’s a mechanically poor choice because it’s going to take a very long time to slog through and your capacity to balance it well is diminished.
The problem is you have three systems that are working against each other: narrative, encounter design, and rest mechanics. Faithfully following two of these systems compromises the other and until now we haven’t talked about actually changing the rest mechanic, but that is the cornerstone of the problem, is it not? That a night’s rest resets everyone back to full effectiveness. So what if it didn’t? Well the main effect would be that you could have many fights days or even weeks apart and it would effectively be on the same ‘rest day’ which means that you could experience a balance that is closer to what was originally designed.
So how do we do this? Well in my eyes there are two ways. First is to redefine what constitutes a long rest. The second is a gamey handwave that doesn’t really reflect anything specifically narratively but comes from a place of ‘we’re just going to do it this way because it works better’
The first implementation is the “Gritty Rest Rules” in the DMG. Essentially, short rests take 24 hours and long rests take seven days. This is ok. It solves the issue of fights on back to back days being on different ‘rest intervals’ but does little to combat the idea of “I’m out of spells, we have to rest until I’m useful again”
Another implementation is to keep things as they are, but change what it takes for a long rest to count. A long rest must be 8 hours of comfortable sleep plus 8 hours in a place of power relevant to your class. Divine casters need to visit a temple or place of worship or at the very least a place moderate religious importance and spend a day praying. Druids need to spend time in nature. Bards need to be library or tavern learning new songs and tales. Wizards need to be in a library or place of magical importance. After spending time somewhere relevant than a comfortable rest brings back your powers. This stops the problem of ‘let me just eight hour snooze real fast then I’ll be back with all my power.’ You’re making a full rest more than just sleeping which means it can’t be used just anywhere.
My personal favorite option is just pulling the recovery rules out of 13th Age. Look at these rules. Long rests happen every four fights. Maybe three, maybe five. They’re not tied to sleeping at all. You get your magic back when you’ve earned it back. Personally this is my favorite option. The rules I implement are thus: Short rests just happen between fights given you have enough time to bandage wounds and catch your breath. A day’s rest lets you spend hit dice for HP. Hit Dice come back at a rate of one per day. Rage, Spells, Wild Shape usage, Cleric Domain Abilities, etc come back when I say they do. You have to be heroic to get your heroic powers back.
So what do you think?
I’m going to use some math and hypothetical characters. For the sake of ease, everyone is 5th level, has an 18 in their most relevant stat, 16 in their second most relevant stat, and 14s in everything else. Everyone has 16 AC. They took the average on their HP rolls. They have no magic items.
I’m going to start this hot mess by saying that I really like 5th edition. I really do. It fixed a lot of my problems with 3.P. I love concentration forcing you choose what spell is really worth keeping up. I love Advantage/Disadvantage replacing fiddly numbers. I love spell slot scaling instead of spells scaling to level. I love proficiency and general skills over micromanging BAB and an exhaustive skill list. I love stat based saves instead of the main three. I love a lot about fifth edition. But I don’t love rest and encounter design.
If you are unaware, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition is balanced around the idea that an adventure day will consist of six to eight encounters, two of which should be deadly. Anyone who has thrown a ‘deadly’ rated combat at their party only to find the heroes blow right though it has experienced this. The reason that happens is because there’s supposed to be six more fights. Deadly doesn’t mean deadly by itself. Deadly means deadly in the context of the adventure day. The D&D5e balance also assumes you take two short rests, one a third of the way through the day and one two thirds of the way through the day. One day, two short rests, six encounters, long rest.
I don’t like encounter design and rest because I think they inhibit a GM from telling a story and challenging their players at the same time. With the way the game balanced I think doing one precludes the other. To challenge players you have to exhaust their resources and make them afraid they don’t have the wherewithal to survive the encounters they find themselves in. The main resource they care about is HP. The spells they use, the attacks they use, the potions they drink are all ways to preserve their HP. The faster you finish a fight, the less the enemy attacks you, the less HP damage you take. In a hitpoint attrition system damage is healing. If a big bad is on the map for fewer rounds it loses the chance to attack and deal damage. Killing a dragon in two rounds instead of ten denies it eight rounds to deal HP damage to allies.
If the players go to sleep at night at half HP, the Paladin hasn’t used Lay on Hands at all, the healer has several spell slots left, the mage has slots still, and no one used their potions, did you really challenge them? If you’re not exhausting the resources they need to survive are you challenging them? If you aren’t challenging your players then why are you making them fight? If fights are a foregone conclusion that the players are going to win aside from maybe crazy dice rolls or insane crits, then why are you going through the motions of making them wave their swords around as you all knock off HP from their total?
My main beef about rest is that I don’t think HP should recover overnight. If you get wounded the solution should just be a quick bedtime and bam all better. I know what you’re thinking “just use the variant healing rules, that fixes the problem,” Well no it doesn’t. The variant healing rules state that players don’t recover HP overnight but instead have to spend their hit dice to recover HP. A die of N sides is going to statistically roll [N+1]/2. A player spends all their hit dice on night one, recovers half of them in their sleep. Short rests for half their hit dice during the day. Recovers the other half sleeping the second day. That means our 5th level wizard who short rests in the morning has spent 10d6 by the morning of the third day. A fighter has spent 10d10.
Our wizard has (6+4+4+4+4+[5*2]) HP from taking the average roll and adding CON hp at the end. That’s 32 HP. Average roll means he recovers 35 HP. Our fighter has (10+6+6+6+6+[3*5]) HP or 49 HP. Average roll means he recovers 55 HP. Fighter also gets 18 1d10+5 heals per day, but we’ll talk more about that later.
So we’ve gone from getting all HP back on a rest to statistically likely to get back all your HP after two nights rest. But that doesn’t matter because no one is going to need to use hit dice to get their HP back because of magical healing.
Magical healing means that a day’s rest is going to be more or less sufficient to top everyone off to full HP. If the players can dedicate a day to resting and healing their wounds, they are going to in the clear. Even if the healer just blows the rest of their spell slots at the end of the day before bed chances are that the players are going to be fine.
This is a chart of how much healing a character can do in a day.
| Cleric | 108 |
| Life Cleric | 142 |
| Druid | 114 |
| Paladin | 79 |
| Ranger | 70 |
| Bard/Sorcerer | 108 |
| Wizard | 133 |
| Fighter to Self | 198 |
If you don’t care about how these numbers are determined, you can skip to the next paragraph. A full spell caster just leaning on Cure Wounds has four 1st level spell slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots. That’s 16d8+[9*4] HP of healing which averages to 108 from Clerics, Bards, Sorcerer/Wizards with a feat, and Druids. Life clerics heal 34 extra HP though Disciple of Life and have 25 HP to spend though their Channel Divinity which they get every short rest. Paladins get less spells. Four 1st level spells and two 2nd level spells. We’ll also call Charisma a secondary stat to Strength which leaves them with 8d8+[3*6] which is an average of 54 HP in healing to which we add 25 HP in Lay on Hands to get a total of 79 HP per day. Rangers don’t get the lay on hands, which leaves them at 54 HP for straight Cure Wounds. More effectively they’ll use Goodberry with their 1st level slots for 40 HP and then Cure for 4d8+[6*2] averaging 70 HP per day. Druids will probably follow suit and use first level spells on Goodberry and then use Cure Wounds in second and third level slots for 12d8+20 averaging 74 damage for a total of 114 HP.
Fighters can heal themselves 1d10+5 HP per short rest which translates to 11 HP 18 times a day and a total of 198 self healing.
Let’s consider a party of five. A d6 Caster, two d8 damage dealers, and two d10 tanks for the sake of example. That means we have [6+4+4+4+4+(5*2)] + [8+5+5+5+5+(5*2)] + [8+5+5+5+5+(5*2)] + [10+6+6+6+6+(5*3)] + [10+6+6+6+6+(5*3)] HP for the Party. Our sample party has 206 HP to bring all five from 0 to full health. Spending hit dice means the party recovers 117 HP. A Paladin could top everyone off after a single day’s rest.
By not allowing players to heal on a long rest what are you really doing? What is the game gaining? That it takes two nights + a short rest for them to hit dice their HP back to max? That it takes a night’s rest + magical healing to get people back on their feet? In order for the “no HP recovery on a long rest” to be meaningful you have to force the party into combat every day otherwise they’ll just spend a day licking their wounds and be at the pinnacle of health the next time you want them to face bad guys.
So how do you challenge a party? You either put them in combat every day so they never get that day of rest to heal their wounds or you challenge them within a single day. It would seem challenging them within the bounds of a single day would indeed be the intended design of the system.
So have them fight everyday or challenge them within a single day to tax their resources. Are either of these options satisfying narratively? If the players get jumped by bandits en route to another town, in order to put pressure on the party and make them feel like there’s consequence, I either need to: A) make them the strongest or most numerous bandits in the world or B) there needs to be six more encounters that day. Which makes a great story, doesn’t it. You adventurers leave town for Scunthorpe and you travel for six days uneventfully until the seventh day in which you were ambushed eight times and nearly killed by highwaymen even though you’re all fifth level badasses and then you traveled six more days without event. That seventh day sure was exciting, though, right? Or You adventurers leave town for Scunthorpe and get ambushed by bandits every day for two weeks.
This doesn’t sound like a great story. The limitations of the system are impacting the story that can be told, and that’s exactly what we were trying to avoid in the first place with these rules. So in order to challenge players, you have to do so within the confines of a single day.
So we have the framework of time span. Giving players a single day off means they’ll recover to the point where you’re essentially starting from scratch, so for challenge’s sake we’re dealing with designing out a single day of combat.
An answer pops into the forefront and seems obvious. Just have one, large, challenging combat. Well, there’s issues with this. The big one is ‘is this fair to my players.’ Of the core classes, three class’ primary class abilities function on short rests (Fighter, Monk, Warlock), seven function on long rests (Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Sorcerer, and Wizard), and Rogues and Rangers primary class functions are static.
By having a single combat in a day you are over emphasizing Long Rest classes and making them shine way brighter than Short Rest classes.
Let’s compare some classes. Paladins and Fighters are comparable. Assuming we’re comparing the same fighting style between the two classes, no use comparing Great Weapon Fighters to Protection Paladins. So if we’re comparing like weapon users then they’re going to be the same damage on regular attacks. The difference between the two classes is the fact that Paladins have spells whereas Fighters have two abilities; Action Surge and Second Wind.
The baseline for damage for Paladins is Divine Smite. Their other spells are mostly either trading damage for utility (Thunderous Smite, Wrathful Smite) or trading upfront damage for potential damage (Searing Smite, Divine Favor, Hunter’s Mark for Vengeance, Bless) The problem with the potential damage spells is that they are all concentration based, so you cast Bless and then can’t use Smite Spells, or cast Searing Smite and it wears off when you cast Divine Favor. Also, as a front line warrior concentration is going to matter a great deal. Searing Smite can deal more than Divine Smite in damage as long as they keep failing saves and you keep passing your concentration checks. Then there are spells like Shield of Faith, where you can’t really judge the damage increase received from a 10% increase to the odds of attacks missing you. So because Divine Smite is the only ability useable while concentrating on other spells and because modeling situational based damage involving saving throws is going to complicate things for the purposes of calculating potential damage we are going to convert all of a Paladin’s spell slots to Divine Smites.
A 5th level Paladin is sitting on 14d8 worth of Smites assuming they’re not fighting outsiders or undead. That’s 63 damage that nothing but Angels are resistant to delivered over three rounds, two if you dual wield or have Polearm Master. A Paladin also has 25 hitpoints in Lay on Hands. Both of those figures are per day. Conversely a Fighter gets an extra action and 11 healing (1d10+level[5]) every short rest. Let’s say Fighter is Sword and Board and so action surge gets two attacks for 2d8+8 damage, or 17. So Paladin gets 63 damage and 25 healing and Fighter gets 17 damage and 11 self healing. But if you get into three fights with short rests in between the numbers become Paladin 63/25 to Fighter 51/33.
Monks and Rogues are similar. Whereas Monks have to spend Ki to do things like Dodge, Dash, or Disengage Rogues get to Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a bonus action every six seconds of every day, forever. Monks gets extra attack but Rogues have sneak attack. However Monks are limited by the action economy as all their abilities function on a bonus action. So in our 5th level example, Monk gets two attacks and can bonus action for another attack or Flurry for two attacks. Rogues get two attacks and sneak attack which always gets better. But Monks have Qi and Qi comes back on short rests. The same problem as above comes up. One fight a day means a monk gets to spend 5 Qi to contribute to combats. Three fights a day means 15 Qi. Monks effectiveness goes up per fight where as a Rogue is static between fights.
Warlocks and Wizards. This is no contest. Warlocks get two 3rd level spell slots. Wizards have four 1st level spell slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots with Arcane recovery for another 3rd level slot or three 1st level slots. Just dumping all of those spells into Chromatic Orb, that’s 39d8 or 176 worth of damage. Warlocks get two spell slots to a wizards ten to twelve. Again, three fights and now it’s six 3rd level slots to ten/twelve slots of mixed levels.
Other classes have Short Rest abilities too and by not giving short rests between combats you are scaling back the effectiveness of those abilities.
There’s another problem with the one big fight and that’s balancing the fight itself. Remember how we mentioned Paladins were sitting on an average of 63 damage that can be unleashed in three turns on top of their normal damage [6d8+24 is 61] which means you have one big bad and he get’s slapped with Faerie Fire and in three turns a Paladin deals 124 damage to it. Your mage casts three chromatic orbs for 8d8 damage. That’s another 36 damage and we’re hoping the big bad doesn’t have an elemental weakness. Now in order to make a Dragon or a Demon or some big bad ass thing that’s going to challenge the party it has to have 300 HP because it’s representative of what should be five combat encounters. And it has to have the damage output of five combat encounters too. Our party of five 5th level PCs has a collective HP total of 200, so now you have to do 200 damage over six to ten rounds. What if you crit? What if you accidentally kill a PC? Now it’s a TPK.
If you compare that mess to a collection of small skirmishes. Let’s just say a banshee. Banshee uses a wail, it deals 3d6 damage and knocks people who fail a save on their ass. You’re not going to kill the party with one banshee, they’ll eviscerate it. But the wizard might fire off a spell, and the healer might do some healing. Then when they get jumped by thugs, they’ll mow them down. But that’s a little more damage and a little more healing. Wolf attack. And now it’s the big badass dude. He only has 100 HP because the party isn’t at full capacity.
Is this a better way of approaching challenging players? I think it is. It might not be. But I think the multi fight adventure day is a more challenging and leads to the use of all the players resources to overcome fights. When was the last time your players used the ‘Help’ action? Or your Fighter took and used Protection fighting style? When was the last time your Bard passed Bardic Inspiration to your spell casters because they were going to cast a spell that requires an attack roll and spell slots are too important for you to not hit? In fact, the rogue is also going to go and use the ‘Help’ action to give you advantage to make sure that precious spell hits. Last time your Fighter said ‘don’t heal me, I can second wind. Go heal _____ instead.’ I have a feeling if your players knew they were going to be truly taxed by combat not only would they use all their abilities, they'll use more obscure tactics as well.
But we’re still back at square one. Challenging the players in a way that highlights their strengths and is tough but fair takes multiple combats per day. Multiple combats a day outside of a dungeon crawl or war makes for a pretty contrived story. Rate of healing doesn’t matter in a world where magical healing exists because the players are going to determine the rate at which they seek out danger. Unless you take the option of staying in town and resting for a few days to gather strength by attacking them with assassins out to personally slay them every day or the players are always on a extremely tight deadline where rest is impossible, they will be in tip top shape when they do go out and seek danger. One big fight makes sense narratively because one fight is easier to justify than seven but it’s a mechanically poor choice because it’s going to take a very long time to slog through and your capacity to balance it well is diminished.
The problem is you have three systems that are working against each other: narrative, encounter design, and rest mechanics. Faithfully following two of these systems compromises the other and until now we haven’t talked about actually changing the rest mechanic, but that is the cornerstone of the problem, is it not? That a night’s rest resets everyone back to full effectiveness. So what if it didn’t? Well the main effect would be that you could have many fights days or even weeks apart and it would effectively be on the same ‘rest day’ which means that you could experience a balance that is closer to what was originally designed.
So how do we do this? Well in my eyes there are two ways. First is to redefine what constitutes a long rest. The second is a gamey handwave that doesn’t really reflect anything specifically narratively but comes from a place of ‘we’re just going to do it this way because it works better’
The first implementation is the “Gritty Rest Rules” in the DMG. Essentially, short rests take 24 hours and long rests take seven days. This is ok. It solves the issue of fights on back to back days being on different ‘rest intervals’ but does little to combat the idea of “I’m out of spells, we have to rest until I’m useful again”
Another implementation is to keep things as they are, but change what it takes for a long rest to count. A long rest must be 8 hours of comfortable sleep plus 8 hours in a place of power relevant to your class. Divine casters need to visit a temple or place of worship or at the very least a place moderate religious importance and spend a day praying. Druids need to spend time in nature. Bards need to be library or tavern learning new songs and tales. Wizards need to be in a library or place of magical importance. After spending time somewhere relevant than a comfortable rest brings back your powers. This stops the problem of ‘let me just eight hour snooze real fast then I’ll be back with all my power.’ You’re making a full rest more than just sleeping which means it can’t be used just anywhere.
My personal favorite option is just pulling the recovery rules out of 13th Age. Look at these rules. Long rests happen every four fights. Maybe three, maybe five. They’re not tied to sleeping at all. You get your magic back when you’ve earned it back. Personally this is my favorite option. The rules I implement are thus: Short rests just happen between fights given you have enough time to bandage wounds and catch your breath. A day’s rest lets you spend hit dice for HP. Hit Dice come back at a rate of one per day. Rage, Spells, Wild Shape usage, Cleric Domain Abilities, etc come back when I say they do. You have to be heroic to get your heroic powers back.
So what do you think?
