My players are like "Ok, we fought? Long rest please" and recently I'm tring to stop that behavior and I'm trying to implement the adventure day idea in which several encounters may occur in one day.
I'm doing that by making encounters to occur in the middle of their longresting so I can swap their behavior a bit from long resting too much and trying to make they use the short rest. Should I allow them to recover hit dices even if they didn't explicit told they were making a short rest? Because their argument is like "hey, we have rested for a few hours, shoudn't we be allowed to recover some of the stuff?" I said "no. Tell me you were doing a short rest next time"
I'd explain that they get 1 long rest per 24 hours and remind them of Short Rest mechanics. If they INSIST they sleep for 8 hours, tell them they did, they can spend what hit dice they want and ONLY Short Rest abilities have refreshed. It's not an "I want to sleep for 8 hours every 4 hours" routine an they shouldn't be getting the benefits of a long after only a handful of hours.
Second option is that some places are not safe to try and long rest, so BOOM, Orc party wanders along as they try to rest. Make them pay for blowing the wad on the first thing they encounter, with a second, more challenging encounter as they settle in to rest mid-day. Players need to learn how the world works, and that there are timelines, (well you long rested so much, the BBEG packed up and left. If you'd been here 2 days ago like you were supposed to be according to Guard Darby, you'd have likely found him.
It's something they should learn now, because the next table won't be doing it, most likely.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Time limits on plots will help - with only 1 long rest per 24 hours, they won't have that many long rests available if they have to complete something within 3 days.
My players are like "Ok, we fought? Long rest please" and recently I'm tring to stop that behavior and I'm trying to implement the adventure day idea in which several encounters may occur in one day.
If there's no time pressure, choosing to take a long rest is just sensible. So put in time pressure. Perhaps the villains will finish their plans if the PCs delay. Perhaps they'll leave and take their treasure with them. Perhaps they'll spend that 24 hours building fortifications and deathtraps. Perhaps they'll just set up their watches so the next time the PCs poke their noses in the entire dungeon attacks at once.
I am with IamSposta on this. You do not need to reduce the effectiveness of the long rest or modify it in any way. Additionally, I would not recommend refusing to allow short rest hit point recovery if they fulfilled the requirements of a short rest because that can feel like retaliation and you do not want to invite a DM vs player dynamic.
Instead, I would encourage you to reinforce the concept of a living world. Things happen while resting and the players need to make strategic decisions on when they rest while out adventuring. The BBEG might get away, or that smuggling shipment might get smuggled, or any number of things that happen in the hours that short/long rests occur. I also encourage you to share this change with them beforehand rather than springing a failure on them too.
There are some locations that just aren't safe to rest. So if the party want a long rest in an unexplored area, a wilderness or otherwise they need to tell me how they're going to make it secure...I've never yet sprung an encounter on them as they slept, but that is an option.
Even if the area is secure, doesn't mean that they aren't going to encounter something while trying to rest.
Ticking clocks are good too as others have suggested,
That said, I don't think there's any reason that you should make them explicitly call for a short rest. It is polite of the players, but if that's the way the party are behaving, you know it and can anticipate them in future. A short rest though...as long as it is the right time length should always recover HP. If it doesn't it can create an imbalance. Sadly, it's part of the DM's skillset to plan encounters and sessions assuming players might call for short rests. In fact, I tend to arrange every encounter with full player health in mind...but that can backfire too.
Of course the old advice still holds true here. Talk to your players. Think about how we actually sleep. That's the reason behind the one long rest per day idea. In your scenario, they wouldn't have benefitted from that long rest anyway if they had already had a long rest that 24 hours. So, I'd say you made the right call. That said, without talking this through with the players and making it clear that their desire for frequent long rests is making it difficult for you to create immersive and fun encounters and session...you may run into more of these issues. So have a chat with them in the first fifteen minutes or so before the next session. There's no need for it to be confrontational, but it is worth taking the time to explain it and then ask the players if they have any issues around this. Most players tend to be on your side. You're a group or a team, so as long as you haven't bought into the toxic 'dm vs players' attitude, they'll understand and want to support you. At the end of the day they want the sessions to be fun as much as you do (I assume).
Bear in mind that a party of adventurers, on average, can handle six-eight moderate encounters. These do not have to be combat encounters. They can be sociable or exploratory encounters, and ones wherein the party can just sit a while.
Use logistics against them. Remind them to eat their rations. If they have Outlander, remind them of the conditions they can use that background feature. Count the minutes that go by planning, the hours spent resting, the days marching.
It was Ravenloft which made famous the idea of BBEGs having better things to do than wait for a party of adventurers to enter their lair and fight: your baddies are probably up to things besides twirling their moustache, brewing potions. Their minions are arming up, setting up defensive positions, scouting, and reporting back to their bosses.
Finally, them saying they want a long rest doesn't make it so. A long rest requires eight hours of uninterrupted light activity and sleep. That requires them taking off their armour, which requires time to don it again. It requires them to unpack and pack up their gear before setting out again. If they're not interrupted either your forces aren't looking hard enough or your players' characters are really smart. So interrupt their long rests, make them short rest, make them burn through their hit die and potions and spell slots. I'm not saying to do this all the time: do this when it makes sense, and do so when they're no longer in the habit about wanting to long rest all the time.
Above all else, as user Aquilain above me mentions, let them know about all of this before you implement it. If they don't like that sort of play they can talk with you about it, or can find another table that is much more forgiving about the resting rules. Remember the game is a cooperative effort, not an adversarial one, and it should be characters versus characters, not the DM versus the players.
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Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
Just to build on the “ticking clock” idea above, you might not want to go for the “you are on the clock” option your first run out of the gate - then they may come to expect “okay, if it is a ticking clock mission, then we have to move fast, otherwise we can go at our pace.”
So do not tell them it is a ticking clock mission the first time. Let them carry on as they have, then, when the arrive at where they are going, they find themselves 36 hours (or some time based on how many superfluous long rests they took) behind the event they were going to stop. This will give them the impression that every mission is a potential ticking clock mission, whether they know it or not.
(It also can cause some party drama if they feel they are being punished without warning, but it sounds like you have warned them a few times. You can explain to them that a living world is part of D&D’s charm. You can wait for a year in Skyrim or many other games and the same quest will still be there waiting; but in D&D, the world can evolve independent of the players or the game’s programmed code.)
Interrupted rests have always felt very passive-aggressive to me, and rather than convincing your party they don't need to rest, now they're down even more resources and thus more convinced they need to rest. In some areas it makes sense, in others it can feel very contrived, and in all cases you may have players that see it as the DM countering their choices rather than a natural consequence of their characters' actions.
Likewise, having ticking clock on every single adventure starts to feel pretty transparent and you might not always want urgent pacing for this leg of the story.
Both of these can be good tools, but they don't always solve the problem for me. I think this is a known weak spot in 5e's design and a lot of people expect to see some changes to resting mechanics in the upcoming revised core books.
One thing I've been trying lately is simply restricting long rests to civilization. You can't long rest in the wilderness, you can't long rest on a ship at sea, you can't long rest in a monster-infested dungeon. You can sleep for eight hours, but it's just a really long short rest. This allows me to run a two-week wilderness traversal as a single adventuring day, making travel a lot more interesting and strategic. In an extended dungeon, they might find a magical fountain or something that allows them the benefits of a long rest, or smaller boons that allow for recovery of a few spell slots/class abilities.
Obviously this is a thing you'd want to work out with your players beforehand, but so far mine have been pretty happy with the result.
Both of these can be good tools, but they don't always solve the problem for me. I think this is a known weak spot in 5e's design and a lot of people expect to see some changes to resting mechanics in the upcoming revised core books.
Honestly, the solution is to not design the game around multiple encounters per long rest, but I'm not sure how feasible that is without much deeper changes to the game system.
Both of these can be good tools, but they don't always solve the problem for me. I think this is a known weak spot in 5e's design and a lot of people expect to see some changes to resting mechanics in the upcoming revised core books.
My proposed fix is that a long rest should restore only half your character’s HP but all of their Hit Dice. (So the exact opposite of how it works now.) I have found that this change incentivizes short rests and encourages players to put off long rests as long as possible so as to not “waste” the resource of their Hit Dice. It has been very effective.
My proposed fix is that a Long test should restore only half your character’s HP but all of their Hit Dice. (So the exact opposite of how it works now.) I have found that this change incentivizes short rests and encourages players to put off long rests as long as possible so as to not “waste” on he resource of their Hit Dice. It has been very effective.
My experience is that, at least by tier 2, people don't rest to recover hit points, they rest to recover spell slots, and this has no effect.
Anyway, the basic options for solving the long rest problems are
Don't try. Just make every important battle super hard (50-100% of the daily budget). Be aware that this skews the balance between martial classes (who mostly either have unlimited uses or recover on a short rest) and spellcasters.
Make it so taking a long rest has costs that they're wary of paying. Time pressure is the traditional method (if you wait, bad thing X will happen), but you could also charge them a consumable resource of some sort.
My proposed fix is that a Long test should restore only half your character’s HP but all of their Hit Dice. (So the exact opposite of how it works now.) I have found that this change incentivizes short rests and encourages players to put off long rests as long as possible so as to not “waste” on he resource of their Hit Dice. It has been very effective.
My experience is that, at least by tier 2, people don't rest to recover hit points, they rest to recover spell slots, and this has no effect.
Multiple characters at zero hit points isn't hitting them hard enough? The problem is that tier 2 characters have a huge number of options for recovering hit points that are less limited than hit dice.
Make it so taking a long rest has costs that they're wary of paying. Time pressure is the traditional method (if you wait, bad thing X will happen), but you could also charge them a consumable resource of some sort.
That's what rations are! Players have to eat. I know some DMs don't like tracking consumables, but I've traditionally said if they don't have rations or other food, they're going to need to hunt, or buy food somewhere.
Multiple characters at zero hit points isn't hitting them hard enough? The problem is that tier 2 characters have a huge number of options for recovering hit points that are less limited than hit dice.
Oh? Because I just wrapped a campaign for 13th level PCs who absolutely used short rests for healing.
Make it so taking a long rest has costs that they're wary of paying. Time pressure is the traditional method (if you wait, bad thing X will happen), but you could also charge them a consumable resource of some sort.
That's what rations are! Players have to eat. I know some DMs don't like tracking consumables, but I've traditionally said if they don't have rations or other food, they're going to need to hunt, or buy food somewhere.
Absolutely. That’s one of the things people miss out on when they gloss over stuff like rations.
My players are like "Ok, we fought? Long rest please" and recently I'm tring to stop that behavior and I'm trying to implement the adventure day idea in which several encounters may occur in one day.
I'm doing that by making encounters to occur in the middle of their longresting so I can swap their behavior a bit from long resting too much and trying to make they use the short rest. Should I allow them to recover hit dices even if they didn't explicit told they were making a short rest? Because their argument is like "hey, we have rested for a few hours, shoudn't we be allowed to recover some of the stuff?" I said "no. Tell me you were doing a short rest next time"
I'd explain that they get 1 long rest per 24 hours and remind them of Short Rest mechanics. If they INSIST they sleep for 8 hours, tell them they did, they can spend what hit dice they want and ONLY Short Rest abilities have refreshed. It's not an "I want to sleep for 8 hours every 4 hours" routine an they shouldn't be getting the benefits of a long after only a handful of hours.
Second option is that some places are not safe to try and long rest, so BOOM, Orc party wanders along as they try to rest. Make them pay for blowing the wad on the first thing they encounter, with a second, more challenging encounter as they settle in to rest mid-day. Players need to learn how the world works, and that there are timelines, (well you long rested so much, the BBEG packed up and left. If you'd been here 2 days ago like you were supposed to be according to Guard Darby, you'd have likely found him.
It's something they should learn now, because the next table won't be doing it, most likely.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Time limits on plots will help - with only 1 long rest per 24 hours, they won't have that many long rests available if they have to complete something within 3 days.
If there's no time pressure, choosing to take a long rest is just sensible. So put in time pressure. Perhaps the villains will finish their plans if the PCs delay. Perhaps they'll leave and take their treasure with them. Perhaps they'll spend that 24 hours building fortifications and deathtraps. Perhaps they'll just set up their watches so the next time the PCs poke their noses in the entire dungeon attacks at once.
Hang a ticking clock over their heads. If the BBE will escape in an hour if they don’t act, then there’s no time for a rest.
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I am with IamSposta on this. You do not need to reduce the effectiveness of the long rest or modify it in any way. Additionally, I would not recommend refusing to allow short rest hit point recovery if they fulfilled the requirements of a short rest because that can feel like retaliation and you do not want to invite a DM vs player dynamic.
Instead, I would encourage you to reinforce the concept of a living world. Things happen while resting and the players need to make strategic decisions on when they rest while out adventuring. The BBEG might get away, or that smuggling shipment might get smuggled, or any number of things that happen in the hours that short/long rests occur. I also encourage you to share this change with them beforehand rather than springing a failure on them too.
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Location, Location, Location.
There are some locations that just aren't safe to rest. So if the party want a long rest in an unexplored area, a wilderness or otherwise they need to tell me how they're going to make it secure...I've never yet sprung an encounter on them as they slept, but that is an option.
Even if the area is secure, doesn't mean that they aren't going to encounter something while trying to rest.
Ticking clocks are good too as others have suggested,
That said, I don't think there's any reason that you should make them explicitly call for a short rest. It is polite of the players, but if that's the way the party are behaving, you know it and can anticipate them in future. A short rest though...as long as it is the right time length should always recover HP. If it doesn't it can create an imbalance. Sadly, it's part of the DM's skillset to plan encounters and sessions assuming players might call for short rests. In fact, I tend to arrange every encounter with full player health in mind...but that can backfire too.
Of course the old advice still holds true here. Talk to your players. Think about how we actually sleep. That's the reason behind the one long rest per day idea. In your scenario, they wouldn't have benefitted from that long rest anyway if they had already had a long rest that 24 hours. So, I'd say you made the right call. That said, without talking this through with the players and making it clear that their desire for frequent long rests is making it difficult for you to create immersive and fun encounters and session...you may run into more of these issues. So have a chat with them in the first fifteen minutes or so before the next session. There's no need for it to be confrontational, but it is worth taking the time to explain it and then ask the players if they have any issues around this. Most players tend to be on your side. You're a group or a team, so as long as you haven't bought into the toxic 'dm vs players' attitude, they'll understand and want to support you. At the end of the day they want the sessions to be fun as much as you do (I assume).
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
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Bear in mind that a party of adventurers, on average, can handle six-eight moderate encounters. These do not have to be combat encounters. They can be sociable or exploratory encounters, and ones wherein the party can just sit a while.
Use logistics against them. Remind them to eat their rations. If they have Outlander, remind them of the conditions they can use that background feature. Count the minutes that go by planning, the hours spent resting, the days marching.
It was Ravenloft which made famous the idea of BBEGs having better things to do than wait for a party of adventurers to enter their lair and fight: your baddies are probably up to things besides twirling their moustache, brewing potions. Their minions are arming up, setting up defensive positions, scouting, and reporting back to their bosses.
Finally, them saying they want a long rest doesn't make it so. A long rest requires eight hours of uninterrupted light activity and sleep. That requires them taking off their armour, which requires time to don it again. It requires them to unpack and pack up their gear before setting out again. If they're not interrupted either your forces aren't looking hard enough or your players' characters are really smart. So interrupt their long rests, make them short rest, make them burn through their hit die and potions and spell slots. I'm not saying to do this all the time: do this when it makes sense, and do so when they're no longer in the habit about wanting to long rest all the time.
Above all else, as user Aquilain above me mentions, let them know about all of this before you implement it. If they don't like that sort of play they can talk with you about it, or can find another table that is much more forgiving about the resting rules. Remember the game is a cooperative effort, not an adversarial one, and it should be characters versus characters, not the DM versus the players.
Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
- The Assemblage of Houses, World of Warcraft
Just to build on the “ticking clock” idea above, you might not want to go for the “you are on the clock” option your first run out of the gate - then they may come to expect “okay, if it is a ticking clock mission, then we have to move fast, otherwise we can go at our pace.”
So do not tell them it is a ticking clock mission the first time. Let them carry on as they have, then, when the arrive at where they are going, they find themselves 36 hours (or some time based on how many superfluous long rests they took) behind the event they were going to stop. This will give them the impression that every mission is a potential ticking clock mission, whether they know it or not.
(It also can cause some party drama if they feel they are being punished without warning, but it sounds like you have warned them a few times. You can explain to them that a living world is part of D&D’s charm. You can wait for a year in Skyrim or many other games and the same quest will still be there waiting; but in D&D, the world can evolve independent of the players or the game’s programmed code.)
As others said, location is important.
To simplify the solution: Wandering monsters.
Interrupted rest means no benefit of long rest.
Interrupted rests have always felt very passive-aggressive to me, and rather than convincing your party they don't need to rest, now they're down even more resources and thus more convinced they need to rest. In some areas it makes sense, in others it can feel very contrived, and in all cases you may have players that see it as the DM countering their choices rather than a natural consequence of their characters' actions.
Likewise, having ticking clock on every single adventure starts to feel pretty transparent and you might not always want urgent pacing for this leg of the story.
Both of these can be good tools, but they don't always solve the problem for me. I think this is a known weak spot in 5e's design and a lot of people expect to see some changes to resting mechanics in the upcoming revised core books.
One thing I've been trying lately is simply restricting long rests to civilization. You can't long rest in the wilderness, you can't long rest on a ship at sea, you can't long rest in a monster-infested dungeon. You can sleep for eight hours, but it's just a really long short rest. This allows me to run a two-week wilderness traversal as a single adventuring day, making travel a lot more interesting and strategic. In an extended dungeon, they might find a magical fountain or something that allows them the benefits of a long rest, or smaller boons that allow for recovery of a few spell slots/class abilities.
Obviously this is a thing you'd want to work out with your players beforehand, but so far mine have been pretty happy with the result.
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Honestly, the solution is to not design the game around multiple encounters per long rest, but I'm not sure how feasible that is without much deeper changes to the game system.
Communication with your players is key...just explain to them how the module(s) are designed around a limited number of rests.
Don't create a DM vs Players situation as that never goes well. Players can and will find a way to get a long rest if they really want to.
My proposed fix is that a long rest should restore only half your character’s HP but all of their Hit Dice. (So the exact opposite of how it works now.) I have found that this change incentivizes short rests and encourages players to put off long rests as long as possible so as to not “waste” the resource of their Hit Dice. It has been very effective.
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My experience is that, at least by tier 2, people don't rest to recover hit points, they rest to recover spell slots, and this has no effect.
Anyway, the basic options for solving the long rest problems are
Then you’re not hitting your PCs hard enough.
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Multiple characters at zero hit points isn't hitting them hard enough? The problem is that tier 2 characters have a huge number of options for recovering hit points that are less limited than hit dice.
That's what rations are! Players have to eat. I know some DMs don't like tracking consumables, but I've traditionally said if they don't have rations or other food, they're going to need to hunt, or buy food somewhere.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
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Oh? Because I just wrapped a campaign for 13th level PCs who absolutely used short rests for healing.
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Absolutely. That’s one of the things people miss out on when they gloss over stuff like rations.
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