You're correct, assuming that a combat is over in the 3-4 rounds that it should be. I think I'd have been more clear had I said "enough rounds of combat in a day" to bleed those resources. Now, the designers DID design around non-combat encounters eating into spell slots too, but that rarely happens. I rarely want to cast invisibility, when I have a rogue that can just roll stealth in the party for example.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
You're correct, assuming that a combat is over in the 3-4 rounds that it should be.
Six combats that actually involve 3-4 rounds of active combat (i.e. PCs are attacking and being attacked) is probably a TPK in 5e; most opponents durable enough to survive for 3-4 rounds of attacks by PCs also do enough damage to drop one or more PCs in that time period, and while that still favors the PCs on any one fight, six fights is definitely going to push those limits.
It's just hard to run a realistic, story-driven campaign where every fighting day is a series of 4-6 combats. Especially during something like overland travel, no one wants to put the story on pause while they grind through dozens of encounters on the 2-week march through dangerous country to the duke's palace. So a lot of people end up having 1-2 encounter days where the party just steamrolls through, or they try hard to stick to the advised format and throw in a lot of "filler."
This is why I like to have more control over when and how the party gets to rest. If you're camping, that's a short rest. So the two-week overland trip can be effectively one adventuring day. A night at an inn? Long rest. A big dungeon with 12+ encounters? I'll drop in a couple places where the party can gain the effects of a long rest - drinking from a magic fountain, freeing an imprisoned unicorn, whatever is thematic for the adventure.
This is why I like to have more control over when and how the party gets to rest. If you're camping, that's a short rest. So the two-week overland trip can be effectively one adventuring day. A night at an inn? Long rest. A big dungeon with 12+ encounters? I'll drop in a couple places where the party can gain the effects of a long rest - drinking from a magic fountain, freeing an imprisoned unicorn, whatever is thematic for the adventure.
If you decide to not care about D&D as simulation, I'd toss the concept of time gating for resting. You get a long rest when you reach a long rest waypoint, which are placed far enough apart to make life challenging. For a lot of published adventures one per chapter works decently; if you're using xp (which is typically slower than waypoint leveling) it's generally appropriate to allow 2-3 long rests per level.
Few years ago i used Slow Healing Variant Rule in my GREYHAWK campaign and what it did is essentially put more reliance on healing spells to fill the void until some PC took the Healers feat to compensate.
Hmm, I guess I need to phrase my thoughts better. I want to restrict Spell slots in a way such that the Caster's Spell Slots are Strained the same way the Barbarians Hit Points are affected by the Slow Natural Healing Rule. I want most Long Rests to End with the Players at 95% Resources, and only after they have that close call, near death experience for them to be limping for a day at like 65% Resources. I want a system to make it so they aren't guaranteed to get all of there spell slots back. Kind of like how Magic items don't regain all there charges each day.
The simplest approach then would be:
When taking a long rest, for each expended spell slot (and/or other expended ability) roll a 1d4, on a 3 or a 4 you regain that expended spellslot / resource. For fairness, you should probably extend this method to all long rest resources - hit dice, rages, species abilities, spellslots, etc...
This has the advantage of being very easy to tweak if it isn't working well for your group by changing the threshold for regaining the resources, which could even be done situationally - e.g. if the party rests safe in their home base they regain everything, resting in a campsite is a 50:50 chance to regain any particular resource, resting inside a building/shelter is a 75% chance to regain, whereas resting in a super dangerous local only has a 25% to regain expended resources.
The downsides of this method would be character-to-character variability, one player could get unlucky and their character is crippled while another character in the party is at full power. Also it would take a LONG time to do the bookkeeping at higher levels.
Alternatively you could simply have the casters add up their total spellslot power : e.g. 4x1st + 3x2nd + 2x3rd = 16 total spellslot power. And only allow them to regain half of their total spellslot power each long rest - e.g. 8 for this 5th level caster. This avoids the randomness, but does allow casters to always regain their highest spellslots / most powerful spells - I dunno if this is desireable or not for you.
TBH, the former method would really annoy many of my parties since we have some players who get very annoyed at rolling badly so having a few bad rolls cripple their character for an entire adventuring day would make them very grouchy. The second method, I would expect all the casters to just regain spellslots from highest level downward, this would make all the casters play more like warlocks but without a viable sustained damage option (a la Agonizing Blast). So, I'd expect all the casters to just start MCing into warlock.
It's just hard to run a realistic, story-driven campaign where every fighting day is a series of 4-6 combats. Especially during something like overland travel, no one wants to put the story on pause while they grind through dozens of encounters on the 2-week march through dangerous country to the duke's palace. So a lot of people end up having 1-2 encounter days where the party just steamrolls through, or they try hard to stick to the advised format and throw in a lot of "filler."
Hence the "travel montage" most narrative formats just skip over travel in a handful of scenes, D&D should be no different IMO. If the party is travelling on marked roads there probably shouldn't be any combat encounters along that travel period. Marked roads are typically well travelled and patrolled by guards otherwise trade would be nearly impossible. Even in "dangerous" terrain you likely wouldn't have a combat encounter every day. There's plenty of survivalist TV shows where they live for weeks in uninhabited wilderness without ever seeing a big predator or having a close encounter with any dangerous animals. The biggest threats during travel historically have always been rain, wind, cold, floods, and starvation, not getting attacked by animals.
That's part of why I think that gritty realism actually makes a bit more narrative sense and takes a bit of the load off the DM for coming up with so many new battles. I kinda wish my DM would try it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Honestly, I run healer's kit dependency. You'd be surprised how effective it is. Though I limit short rests to two per adventuring day and a long rest per adventuring day.
I'm curious though, why do you say that Slow Natural Healing handicaps Barbarians? That hasn't been my experience. In fact I can't think of a real play reason that it should beyond 'the barbarian is most likely to take damage'. In which case - that's kinda the point. Just like other classes have to rethink their approach to combat under slow natural healing, so to does the barbarian who has to learn that unless they want to die they've got to learn NOT to just rush straight into battle.
The biggest thing to remember though is that D&D 5e isn't built for challenging players. Nor is it build for 'balance'. It is biased in the players' favour on purpose. To be clear there's no judgement of that here. Just a statement of how the game appears to be designed. In a similar way, 5.5e was designed almost entirely without consideration for DMs from what I've seen in play and in reading the books.
If you want to achieve what you say you do - well you're the DM. Your world works the way you say it does. Just make it known among players that at any time the DM could use their fiat and they aren't guaranteed to always get all their spell slots back. Heck, work it into the world itself - maybe the magical weave has begun to be affected somehow and so magic 'recharging' has been affected. Maybe you work it into the phases of the moon. Spell slots don't recharge at all during a new moon. They recharge 25% on a crescent moon, 50% on a half moon, and 100% on a 3/4 moon and full moon. Tying it into the world in which you're playing makes it feel like theres a *reason*. And it will open up new tactics and options if they know how they'll be affected. When there's a time pressure maybe sometimes they're not going to be able to wait it out until a full moon to take on the latest quest. However, sometimes they'll be able to take a longer period of downtime and recover properly before heading out.
In a similar way, 5.5e was designed almost entirely without consideration for DMs from what I've seen in play and in reading the books.
I'm not sure what you're getting that from; a lot of things are just unchanged, and a reasonable number of things (particularly encounter building and spellcaster stat blocks) are simplified. They did eliminate a lot of DM's toolbox rules, but frankly a lot of the toolbox options in 2014 were quite marginal so removing them might just be another attempt at DM simplification.
Incidentally, the encounter building rules are quite capable of challenging the players if you're using multiple monsters, since they killed off the group size multiplier and generally increased monster lethality more than they increased PC power.
I'm struggling a bit with the premise of slowing down healing in D&D, especially given how I typically run my games.
My sessions usually involve about two combats, with players taking a long rest between sessions. I've found that when the party starts their "adventuring day" (or session) at full health, everyone seems to have more fun. It also allows me to design harder, more impactful encounters, which I believe makes for a more engaging experience for both myself and the players.
To me, intentionally having players operate in a "less than optimal" state feels counterintuitive. Is the goal simply to make encounter design easier for the DM? If so, I worry that could become boring for everyone involved.
This feels similar to the argument against allowing certain spells or magic items because they make the game "too easy." I'd argue that such elements don't make the game easy; rather, they challenge the DM to raise the difficulty and create more dynamic scenarios. In turn, players get to feel genuinely powerful and strategic when they utilize their abilities and resources effectively.
I'm curious to hear other perspectives, but I lean towards empowering players and then scaling the challenges to match, rather than limiting their resources.
To me, intentionally having players operate in a "less than optimal" state feels counterintuitive. Is the goal simply to make encounter design easier for the DM? If so, I worry that could become boring for everyone involved.
There's two basic issues.
Traditionally, resource management is a component of D&D, and at least since 3e there was an attempt to formalize that with encounter building guidelines that were set up for multiple encounters per day (prior to 3e, encounter building guidelines mostly didn't exist). In practice this has never worked well.
When different classes have different recovery mechanics for their key resources, class balance winds up heavily influenced by length of day.
Why would a DM want to set up these limitations (heal & slots) on the players? What is the big picture end game? A DM can always use bigger monsters, that retreat, thereby doing damage and absorbing spell slots yet by not dying don't give XPs for advancement. Creating time limits so the party can't rest. All of that gets the same result of minimal spell slot and/or HP recovery.
Probably personal bias/experience, but I am a bit wary playing under a DM that wants to create homebrew limits on players.
Hmm, I guess I need to phrase my thoughts better. I want to restrict Spell slots in a way such that the Caster's Spell Slots are Strained the same way the Barbarians Hit Points are affected by the Slow Natural Healing Rule. I want most Long Rests to End with the Players at 95% Resources, and only after they have that close call, near death experience for them to be limping for a day at like 65% Resources. I want a system to make it so they aren't guaranteed to get all of there spell slots back. Kind of like how Magic items don't regain all there charges each day.
The simplest approach then would be:
When taking a long rest, for each expended spell slot (and/or other expended ability) roll a 1d4, on a 3 or a 4 you regain that expended spellslot / resource. For fairness, you should probably extend this method to all long rest resources - hit dice, rages, species abilities, spellslots, etc...
This has the advantage of being very easy to tweak if it isn't working well for your group by changing the threshold for regaining the resources, which could even be done situationally - e.g. if the party rests safe in their home base they regain everything, resting in a campsite is a 50:50 chance to regain any particular resource, resting inside a building/shelter is a 75% chance to regain, whereas resting in a super dangerous local only has a 25% to regain expended resources.
The downsides of this method would be character-to-character variability, one player could get unlucky and their character is crippled while another character in the party is at full power. Also it would take a LONG time to do the bookkeeping at higher levels.
Alternatively you could simply have the casters add up their total spellslot power : e.g. 4x1st + 3x2nd + 2x3rd = 16 total spellslot power. And only allow them to regain half of their total spellslot power each long rest - e.g. 8 for this 5th level caster. This avoids the randomness, but does allow casters to always regain their highest spellslots / most powerful spells - I dunno if this is desireable or not for you.
TBH, the former method would really annoy many of my parties since we have some players who get very annoyed at rolling badly so having a few bad rolls cripple their character for an entire adventuring day would make them very grouchy. The second method, I would expect all the casters to just regain spellslots from highest level downward, this would make all the casters play more like warlocks but without a viable sustained damage option (a la Agonizing Blast). So, I'd expect all the casters to just start MCing into warlock.
You should never be able to simply multiclass into warlock. At least in my games, a character has to find a patron, receive combat training from someone, etc. to multiclass. You can't simply manifest a pact with an eldritch entity. It takes work.
Alternatively you could simply have the casters add up their total spellslot power : e.g. 4x1st + 3x2nd + 2x3rd = 16 total spellslot power. And only allow them to regain half of their total spellslot power each long rest - e.g. 8 for this 5th level caster. This avoids the randomness, but does allow casters to always regain their highest spellslots / most powerful spells - I dunno if this is desireable or not for you.
So After Crunching Numbers for several different Spell Slot Recovery Rules. This is closest to what I settled on.
Slow Natural Magic Recovery: A Spellcaster Recovers Spells equal to Half of their Total Spell Slots Levels plus the Result of a Proficiency Bonus Die. (Rounded Down)
So some reasons I liked this Spread of Spell slots recovered are:
Easy to Understand
It scales Nicely with Power Level
At Level 1 All Spellcasters still get 100% of their slots back
In Tier 1, (When Spellcasters are most vulnerable) they still have a chance to get 100% back, but its not guaranteed. so they started learning to conserve some spell slots.
In Tier 2, The Full Casters are still getting on average 66% of their slots Back, while the (Spell Slot Hungry) Half and Partial Casters still have a chance of getting back up to full.
In Tier 3 and above, Full Casters should be experts of Managing Spell Slots at this point (Getting more than enough for their High Level Slots) Meanwhile the Half Casters have hit the point where they should be managing their slots. And Partial Casters still get most of their very limited slots back.
Total Spell Levels (Spell Slots x Slot Levels)
Half Total Slot Levels + PB Dice (Round Down)
Level
Full Caster
Half Caster
Partial Caster
Full Caster
Half Caster
Partial Caster
1 (d4)
2
2
-
3
3
-
2
3
2
-
4
3
-
3
8
3
2
6
4
3
4
10
3
3
7
4
4
5 (d6)
16
8
3
11
7
5
6
19
8
3
13
7
5
7
23
10
8
15
8
7
8
27
10
8
17
8
7
9 (d8)
36
16
8
22
12
8
10
41
16
10
25
12
9
11
47
19
10
28
14
9
12
47
19
10
28
14
9
13 (d10)
54
23
16
32
17
13
14
54
23
16
32
17
13
15
62
27
16
36
19
13
16
62
27
19
36
19
15
17 (d12)
71
36
19
42
24
16
18
76
36
19
44
24
16
19
82
41
23
47
27
18
20
89
41
23
51
27
18
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
You're correct, assuming that a combat is over in the 3-4 rounds that it should be. I think I'd have been more clear had I said "enough rounds of combat in a day" to bleed those resources. Now, the designers DID design around non-combat encounters eating into spell slots too, but that rarely happens. I rarely want to cast invisibility, when I have a rogue that can just roll stealth in the party for example.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Six combats that actually involve 3-4 rounds of active combat (i.e. PCs are attacking and being attacked) is probably a TPK in 5e; most opponents durable enough to survive for 3-4 rounds of attacks by PCs also do enough damage to drop one or more PCs in that time period, and while that still favors the PCs on any one fight, six fights is definitely going to push those limits.
It's just hard to run a realistic, story-driven campaign where every fighting day is a series of 4-6 combats. Especially during something like overland travel, no one wants to put the story on pause while they grind through dozens of encounters on the 2-week march through dangerous country to the duke's palace. So a lot of people end up having 1-2 encounter days where the party just steamrolls through, or they try hard to stick to the advised format and throw in a lot of "filler."
This is why I like to have more control over when and how the party gets to rest. If you're camping, that's a short rest. So the two-week overland trip can be effectively one adventuring day. A night at an inn? Long rest. A big dungeon with 12+ encounters? I'll drop in a couple places where the party can gain the effects of a long rest - drinking from a magic fountain, freeing an imprisoned unicorn, whatever is thematic for the adventure.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
If you decide to not care about D&D as simulation, I'd toss the concept of time gating for resting. You get a long rest when you reach a long rest waypoint, which are placed far enough apart to make life challenging. For a lot of published adventures one per chapter works decently; if you're using xp (which is typically slower than waypoint leveling) it's generally appropriate to allow 2-3 long rests per level.
Few years ago i used Slow Healing Variant Rule in my GREYHAWK campaign and what it did is essentially put more reliance on healing spells to fill the void until some PC took the Healers feat to compensate.
The simplest approach then would be:
When taking a long rest, for each expended spell slot (and/or other expended ability) roll a 1d4, on a 3 or a 4 you regain that expended spellslot / resource. For fairness, you should probably extend this method to all long rest resources - hit dice, rages, species abilities, spellslots, etc...
This has the advantage of being very easy to tweak if it isn't working well for your group by changing the threshold for regaining the resources, which could even be done situationally - e.g. if the party rests safe in their home base they regain everything, resting in a campsite is a 50:50 chance to regain any particular resource, resting inside a building/shelter is a 75% chance to regain, whereas resting in a super dangerous local only has a 25% to regain expended resources.
The downsides of this method would be character-to-character variability, one player could get unlucky and their character is crippled while another character in the party is at full power. Also it would take a LONG time to do the bookkeeping at higher levels.
Alternatively you could simply have the casters add up their total spellslot power : e.g. 4x1st + 3x2nd + 2x3rd = 16 total spellslot power. And only allow them to regain half of their total spellslot power each long rest - e.g. 8 for this 5th level caster. This avoids the randomness, but does allow casters to always regain their highest spellslots / most powerful spells - I dunno if this is desireable or not for you.
TBH, the former method would really annoy many of my parties since we have some players who get very annoyed at rolling badly so having a few bad rolls cripple their character for an entire adventuring day would make them very grouchy. The second method, I would expect all the casters to just regain spellslots from highest level downward, this would make all the casters play more like warlocks but without a viable sustained damage option (a la Agonizing Blast). So, I'd expect all the casters to just start MCing into warlock.
Hence the "travel montage" most narrative formats just skip over travel in a handful of scenes, D&D should be no different IMO. If the party is travelling on marked roads there probably shouldn't be any combat encounters along that travel period. Marked roads are typically well travelled and patrolled by guards otherwise trade would be nearly impossible. Even in "dangerous" terrain you likely wouldn't have a combat encounter every day. There's plenty of survivalist TV shows where they live for weeks in uninhabited wilderness without ever seeing a big predator or having a close encounter with any dangerous animals. The biggest threats during travel historically have always been rain, wind, cold, floods, and starvation, not getting attacked by animals.
That's part of why I think that gritty realism actually makes a bit more narrative sense and takes a bit of the load off the DM for coming up with so many new battles. I kinda wish my DM would try it.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Honestly, I run healer's kit dependency. You'd be surprised how effective it is. Though I limit short rests to two per adventuring day and a long rest per adventuring day.
I'm curious though, why do you say that Slow Natural Healing handicaps Barbarians? That hasn't been my experience. In fact I can't think of a real play reason that it should beyond 'the barbarian is most likely to take damage'. In which case - that's kinda the point. Just like other classes have to rethink their approach to combat under slow natural healing, so to does the barbarian who has to learn that unless they want to die they've got to learn NOT to just rush straight into battle.
The biggest thing to remember though is that D&D 5e isn't built for challenging players. Nor is it build for 'balance'. It is biased in the players' favour on purpose. To be clear there's no judgement of that here. Just a statement of how the game appears to be designed. In a similar way, 5.5e was designed almost entirely without consideration for DMs from what I've seen in play and in reading the books.
If you want to achieve what you say you do - well you're the DM. Your world works the way you say it does. Just make it known among players that at any time the DM could use their fiat and they aren't guaranteed to always get all their spell slots back. Heck, work it into the world itself - maybe the magical weave has begun to be affected somehow and so magic 'recharging' has been affected. Maybe you work it into the phases of the moon. Spell slots don't recharge at all during a new moon. They recharge 25% on a crescent moon, 50% on a half moon, and 100% on a 3/4 moon and full moon. Tying it into the world in which you're playing makes it feel like theres a *reason*. And it will open up new tactics and options if they know how they'll be affected. When there's a time pressure maybe sometimes they're not going to be able to wait it out until a full moon to take on the latest quest. However, sometimes they'll be able to take a longer period of downtime and recover properly before heading out.
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?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
I'm not sure what you're getting that from; a lot of things are just unchanged, and a reasonable number of things (particularly encounter building and spellcaster stat blocks) are simplified. They did eliminate a lot of DM's toolbox rules, but frankly a lot of the toolbox options in 2014 were quite marginal so removing them might just be another attempt at DM simplification.
Incidentally, the encounter building rules are quite capable of challenging the players if you're using multiple monsters, since they killed off the group size multiplier and generally increased monster lethality more than they increased PC power.
I'm struggling a bit with the premise of slowing down healing in D&D, especially given how I typically run my games.
My sessions usually involve about two combats, with players taking a long rest between sessions. I've found that when the party starts their "adventuring day" (or session) at full health, everyone seems to have more fun. It also allows me to design harder, more impactful encounters, which I believe makes for a more engaging experience for both myself and the players.
To me, intentionally having players operate in a "less than optimal" state feels counterintuitive. Is the goal simply to make encounter design easier for the DM? If so, I worry that could become boring for everyone involved.
This feels similar to the argument against allowing certain spells or magic items because they make the game "too easy." I'd argue that such elements don't make the game easy; rather, they challenge the DM to raise the difficulty and create more dynamic scenarios. In turn, players get to feel genuinely powerful and strategic when they utilize their abilities and resources effectively.
I'm curious to hear other perspectives, but I lean towards empowering players and then scaling the challenges to match, rather than limiting their resources.
There's two basic issues.
Why would a DM want to set up these limitations (heal & slots) on the players? What is the big picture end game? A DM can always use bigger monsters, that retreat, thereby doing damage and absorbing spell slots yet by not dying don't give XPs for advancement. Creating time limits so the party can't rest. All of that gets the same result of minimal spell slot and/or HP recovery.
Probably personal bias/experience, but I am a bit wary playing under a DM that wants to create homebrew limits on players.
You should never be able to simply multiclass into warlock. At least in my games, a character has to find a patron, receive combat training from someone, etc. to multiclass. You can't simply manifest a pact with an eldritch entity. It takes work.
So After Crunching Numbers for several different Spell Slot Recovery Rules. This is closest to what I settled on.
Slow Natural Magic Recovery: A Spellcaster Recovers Spells equal to Half of their Total Spell Slots Levels plus the Result of a Proficiency Bonus Die. (Rounded Down)
So some reasons I liked this Spread of Spell slots recovered are: