Short Rests have long been a problem in DnD 5e. The game was designed around the idea that most parties would get 2 short rests every day, regenerating resources for some classes in a way that effectively triples their uses. But a lot of tables don't play that way. Their stories don't fit that mold. This leads to a lot of dissatisfaction with classes that depend on the Short Rest.
It's clear from the UA releases we have seen that Short Rests aren't going away in the next edition. They are mentioned in some abilities and feats, and in the description of a Long Rest. What they have not shown us yet though, is rules for the Short Rest itself. So it appears that it might be up for a change of some sort.
So how could they fix it?
They could make it shorter - say 10 minutes. This helps more parties find time in an adventuring day to take them. But it causes a different problem, one where everyone rests after every encounter. That would make short rest abilities even stronger. They effectively become 'Per Encounter' abilities. And the story might feel unnatural as everyone sits around every time a Warlock casts one spell.
How do you stop that? You could limit it so that no one can benefit from more than two Short Rests a day. That might work. The Long Rest mechanic already has a similar limitation of one per 24 hour period. Then a party could agree on when they would take their two short rests each day. It feels a little forced, but it might satisfy more people.
Another solution might just be a Optional rule. Something in the books that recognizes the problem and offers some solutions for DMs to use. Give it some credibility by being 'official.'
An Optional rule might be something as simple as just tripling every Short Rest use of an ability. Instead of one Second Wind per short rest, you just get 3 per day.
What do you think? Is there any other way you can imagine to make Short Rests work for more tables? Because it is a problem, and they aren't going to scrap the idea altogether.
At our tables there are usually two things that get in the way of just stopping for an hour.
1) The Ticking Clock. When there is pressure to complete a task or goal, stopping for an hour seems like a bad option. This isn't always a thing, but it happens often enough that it is worth noting.
2) Safe Space. An hour just sitting in one spot doing nothing is a long time in a hostile environment and can be really risky. Finding that random "save spot" in the dungeon can feel a little forced. Again, not always, but still.
Then if time isn't an issue and danger isn't an issue then why not long rest. Sure, you can only take one long rest in a single 24 hour period, but the benefits of a long rest help everyone in the party equally.
Which brings up another issue with short rest mechanics. Not all classes gain equal value from a short rest. That shouldn't be a big deal but we have all been on a long trip and either been that one person that had to make frequent stops or been with someone that has. Now imagine if those pit stops took an hour each time. (for the record I am required to make frequent stops for health reasons, I still find it annoying.)
I think your best bet is Stegodorkus' idea of 10 minute short rests. And they are right, it would need to have an limit (even if arbitrary) and I would suggest 2 per long rest.
Edit: Long Rest/Short Rest mechanics seem very video gamey to me anyway. Sure there needs to be recovery rules, but being able to heal completely from being dropped in a vat of acid, hit by lightning and eaten by a purple worm, just by getting 8 hours of sleep is kind of ridiculous. Fell down 50 feet into a pit of rusty spikes? No worries you will be perfectly fine in the morning!
Well I am not yet in belief that short rest ability recovery will be in the same form it currently is.
The only class we have seen with a short rest recovery ability is the bard, and it is not till level 7 and it is only on his bardic inspiration, which we could argue is a "minor" effect of the bard. If short rest abilities are all minor things we won't have the issue we have now. The issue now is almost entirely with Monks, Warlocks and Moon Druids. Because they rely so much more on these short rest recovery abilities to be good. I am always surprised that the fighter doesn't suffer as much even all of its abilities are short rest as well, but it is because of how strong the fighter can be "at will" that prevents it from having the same issues, though they are still present. If Warlocks, Monks and Moon druids can do their "main thing" with long rest recovery and have short rest recovery be for some secondary minimal thing it will be less of an issue. However, I suspect you are correct, and I am also 100% sold on the 10 minute short rest thing by default.
Currently when I run short rests I do what I call "cinematic rests" because my campaigns can vary in style as they go along I vary the rests accordingly. If it is a standard adventuring dungeon crawl day it will be normal about 4 Hard to deadly encounters with opportunities for 2 or 3 short rests before the end of the adventuring day. If it is a more social based adventure there may be 1 encounter a day, but time will feel less restful for the players so a short rest will be 8 hours and a long one will be 2 whole days by the end of the week they will have probably had about 4 hard encounters 3 short rests and a long rest in there somewhere. Finally, if they are in a war raging battlefield where every second feels like eternity 5 minutes is a short rest and an hour is most definitely a long rest. It is all basically dependent on the pace of the game and has worked out every time.
Edit: an example of how this short rest thing is not so clear cut. Several of the epic boon feats used to have a "short rest recovery" and they were changed to "Short rest or WHEN YOU ROLL INITIATIVE". Imagine this being a recovery method that is rolled into more than just epic boons. Imagine the fighter recovers their action surge and second wind on a short or long rest or when they roll initiative. Imagine the monk recovers all of its ki every time it rolls initiative. The short rest issue at that point is solved for those classes and the only one that remains is the Warlock.
I personally prefer the asynchonous 10 minute short rest to "when initiative is rolled" because the later feels extremely gamey to me and means encounters are required to be combat encounters and abilities are limited to being used in combat. Monks and fighters getting more ways to use their abilities outside of combat would be nice, and having mechanics that support them doing so is important. E.g. having the Shadow monk pick a fight with some sewer rats so they can regain ki to cast Pass without Trace feels really dumb.
The main problem with Short Rest as they currently are is that the whole party needs to agree to them. I've seen in my own games that this leads to the fully healthy wizard pushing to continue while the Barbarian has 10 hp left. Shortening the duration so that one member of the party can say "While the Rogue is loojing for disarming the trap, I take a SR" would solve a lot of problems without slowing the game down for characters who don't need SRs.
[Though TBH only 3 classes in the game don't get anything back on a SR so parties realky ought to be more in favour of tfem than they currently are.]
So I went through the 1DnD UA documents and did a search for every mention of a Short Rest tied to an ability:
Class Features -
Bard - Font of Bardic Inspiration (level 7)
Ranger - Tireless (level 11)
Rogue - Stroke of Luck (level 18)
Feats - Musician, Inspiring Leader
Epic Boons - Energy Resistance, Dimensional Travel, Luck (the last two also replenish on initiative)
And then there is the mention in Long Rests. Under the section about interrupting the rest. The worrying part is that it says you gain the benefit of a Short Rest if you rested for at least 1 hour. So the Short Rest might not change much at all. We'll have to see.
Some classes currently depend on Short Rest mechanics much more than others.
Very little dependency- Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard
Dependency higher based on subclass - Fighter (Arcane Archer, Battle Master, Rune Knight) + Second Wind, Action Surge
Dependency based on a key feature that powers many subclass features - Bard (Bardic Inspiration), Cleric (Channel Divinity), Druid (Wild Shape), Paladin (Channel Divinity)
Classes highly dependant an Short Rests - Monk, Warlock
I could see them making some changes inside classes.
Fighters getting Second Wind and Action Surge on Short Rest OR initiative makes sense. There subclass features could work the same way potentially.
For Clerics, Druids, and Paladins, I could see them getting more uses per Long Rest. But Bards didn't get anything like that for Bardic Inspiration. Those dice are key to featues in most of their subclasses, but they still have to Short Rest to get them back starting level 7.
Channel Divinity for Clerics is currently once per rest at level 1 (meaning you're intended to get 3 uses a day), 2 per rest at level 6 (6 uses per day), and 3 per rest at level 18 (9 uses per day).
Channel Divinity for Paladins is once per rest (or 3 times a day)
Wild Shape is 2 uses per rest (or an assumed 6 per day at level 1)
Maybe Channel Divinity and Wild Shape will be PB × per Long Rest, but they'll get a Short Rest recovery feature at a higher level. This would align them with the new Bards. But I'm not sure how well that will affect balance since they are pretty different in their effect for each class.
Monks and Warlocks will take the most work. If they don't drastically change, and the other classes become more independent from Short Rests, then Monks and Warlocks will be even more of the odd ones out.
If Short Rests remain the same as 5e, and nothing else changes, it's a big missed opportunity. If they remain the same, but most classes change to not rely on them as much, then the ones that still do need Short Rests will feel even worse for it. If Short Rests get fixed, then they can have complete design freedom to give everyone something to do during the time.
Golaryn makes a good point that Rests are highly dependant on DMs creating realistic adventures. Ticking clocks are fine, but get exhausting to everyone if done all the time. Safe 'save point' rooms are tough to make feel natural. Some DMs want to run stories of court intrigue for example, where there is no good reason not to rest quite frequently. Others like only having one big battle in a day, where classes with Short Rest mechanics lose a lot of their power. Even running the game with the expected 6-8 encounters and two Short Rests takes a lot of planning to make it feel realistic and not forced.
Aquilontune is right that there is a big discrepancy between how much different classes and even subclasses depend on Short Rests. (I tried to break them down in my post above this.) It makes it more difficult for everyone. I love your idea of cinematic rests. It sounds like it makes for fun games. It's unfortunate that it's probably too dependant on an experienced DM to be something they could make official.
Agilemind, I agree that not every ability works with refreshing on initiative. It makes sense for some things that only apply in combat. But for things like Warlock spells, I'd rather them have slots left after combat for utility spells and social situations. I think more classes need things to do outside of combat. An Initiative refresh is okay for a patch, but only in some cases. Other times it's either silly, or has the opposite of the intended effect. I do love the idea that a character can rest for 10 minutes while another character casts a ritual or disarms a trap. I need to think about that more...
And yeah, I never understood why some parties are so resistant to a Short Rest when the time and location allows. You would think everyone would want all their allies at their full potential more often. And it's not like the rest actually takes up an hour of real life game time. We just handwave most of it with a short summary and some bookkeeping. It's an odd phenomena.
Also looking at the healer feat and the durable feat players have more ways of burning through their hit die without short rests. Long rests do give you all your hit die back now. This means there's a larger amount to spend.
Just to say it kind of rebalances the whole healing aspect making it hard to judge.
I for one like the distinction of some classes being short rest dependant while others can enjoy the long day. It gives a design concept for dms to switch things up. Generally not encouraging either way but every now and then allowing alot or a little depending on the current storyline.(with proper signals of course)
Now if I were designing the game from the ground up I would say all classes should have one of each: an Unlimited feature, a short rest feature, and a "class resource". Also each would have a locked in feature and a daily customizable one.
If you have an hour to sit on your hindus and faff about doing dick-all, either you don't need a short rest or you have time for a long one. The idea that threats just stop being threatening for an hour while you faff off, or that the death cult will obligingly stop trying to complete its malignant ritual for an hour while the heroes take a potty break, is ridiculous. Short rests make no god damned sense outside of the niche scenario of a Dungeon Delve with absolutely no time constraints whatsoever, which is simply not the game most people play anymore. If you're playing R5e as an OSR dungeon crawler with no plot? Then sure, short rests work fine. In any other circumstance, you either have time for a long rest or you don't have time for a short.
That's an interesting point about Hit Dice, Roscoeivan. They did say that they wanted to come up with more ways to use them in the game. Which is probably why the Long Rest recovers all of them. But there have only been a few examples of new ideas so far.
I wonder if we will see a lot more in future UAs. Like Fighters being able to spend Hit Dice for Second Wind or Action Surge whenever they want. Or Warlocks and Monks being able to burn them to get back spell slots and Ki... That would be one way to make everyone a little more even.
I like your concept of mixing things up each adventure day to give each class a chance to shine. And I agree, giving every class a mixture of features would go a very long way to fixing this problem. Too bad we haven't seen that yet.
The way I fixed Short Rests was actually by fixing Long Rests. I made it so that every Long Rest only restores half your HP, but all of your Hit Dice. That encourages people to want to Short Rest to spend their renewable resource of Hit Dice since they won’t auto regen all HP after a Long Rest.
If you have an hour to sit on your hindus and faff about doing dick-all, either you don't need a short rest or you have time for a long one. The idea that threats just stop being threatening for an hour while you faff off, or that the death cult will obligingly stop trying to complete its malignant ritual for an hour while the heroes take a potty break, is ridiculous. Short rests make no god damned sense outside of the niche scenario of a Dungeon Delve with absolutely no time constraints whatsoever, which is simply not the game most people play anymore. If you're playing R5e as an OSR dungeon crawler with no plot? Then sure, short rests work fine. In any other circumstance, you either have time for a long rest or you don't have time for a short.
None of this is even remotely true.
Short rests are great. Extreme time pressure I think isn't super common, but "today is better than tomorrow" is near-universal, which means that being able to take a short rest but not a long rest is going to happen extremely often. When there is a time pressure, the party have to weight that against the benefits of a rest, which is working as designed.
The actual bigger problem is that it's increasingly common for parties to face just one encounter in an entire day, and luckily the game provides an easy solution for that pacing as well in the Gritty Realism resting rules (don't let the name fool you; it's a great variant for simply slower-paced games, though I may recommend tweaking it so that 'a weekend' counts as a long rest rather than a whole week).
Well, yes and no Yurei. Short Rests work perfectly fine in a lot of games, even with ticking clocks. The only thing that matters is how much time you set on the clock. If every evil cult has to be stopped in the next five minutes, then no it doesn't allow for short rests.
But if you have 12 hours to stop them, that's too soon for a Long Rest, but enough time for a Short Rest or two. And it allows you to have many varied encounters along the way. Your party is aware of the clock, but keeps running into road blocks they didn't expect. They know they can't face the final battle too weak. They have enough time to rest and recover, but only briefly. And only then are they down to the literal 11th hour to pull off a victory. It gives you more chances for cool fights and other encounters along the way, lets every class do their thing, and maintains the drama of the time limit in the end.
But yes, a lot of tables don't play that way. For a number of different reasons I imagine. Maybe setting up a lot of smaller combats takes too long. Maybe their story doesn't have enough beats. Maybe they're streaming the game and it's easier to do one big boss battle per show. Whatever the reason, that's exactly why Short Rests are a problem, and why I brought up this thread. The game would be better if everyone could play the stories they have in mind without making some classes unbalanced because of it.
From what I've seen online, many tables seem to find 1-3 encounters a day to be more natural. They could write stories with room for a Short Rest between each encounter if they have 3 a day. But that can be hard to feel natural, and any fewer than 3 and it all falls apart. They could have a house rule that just triples the number of uses any class gets from abilities that recover on a Short Rest. Fighters could get 3 Action Surge a day. Warlocks could get 6 spell slots. But that's not RAW. It's better, but not exactly balanced. They could do recovery on rolling initiative, turning all short rest abilities into 'encounter' abilities. That's even better, but has some weird side effects for non-combat encounters.
The best thing to do would be fix Short Rests. Either get rid of them, make every class benefit from them, make no class need them too much, or just change them to make them easier to fit into any game. WotC doesn't look like they are getting rid of them. And the classes we've seen don't make much use of them. So that leaves either removing them from most class features across the board, or fixing them.
I don't even know if they'll do that. But I'm hoping they do. I think 10 minutes with some limits per day might work. It does feel a little forced. But there is some logic in only being able to really nap so much before you're not getting anymore benefit from it. Unfortunately the text for Long Rests seems to indicate it will still be an hour.
So they need to think of something else. Or many tables will have the same old problems with it for years to come.
That's an interesting take, IamSposta. I'll have to think about it. I like that it encourages more characters to rest, but do you find that they all just spend the first few hours of a day using Hit Dice to heal? Wouldn't that bring them right back to the start? With full health but half their dice?
Agree with the above, most of the games I run are ~3 encounters per in-game day with 1 short rest, it just makes a nice story flow of introduction, rising tension, and climax without having the story beat drag on. Urgent ticking clocks are very rare in my game, rather there is an on going threat of undetermined urgency. E.g. a military that kidnapped kids and is brain washing them to become soldiers, or investigating a murder and catching the murderer, or finding a lost mining party - sure in each of these cases its better to stop them sooner than later as every day that goes by involves risk of more evil happening or a worsening of the problem, but one hour here or there isn't critical and it may even be advantageous / necessary to wait until a specific time of day for the climax.
Well, yes and no Yurei. Short Rests work perfectly fine in a lot of games, even with ticking clocks. The only thing that matters is how much time you set on the clock. If every evil cult has to be stopped in the next five minutes, then no it doesn't allow for short rests.
I think the scenarios that Yurei is describing is less 'The bomb will go off in 6 hours' and more 'Someone nefarious is doing nefarious deeds right now. Stop them ASAP'. With the second scenario, you don't know how long you have to stop them before they do the nefarious thing, and an hour is a long time to spend having lunch. Sure, you could take your short rest, but you don't know what kind of lead that will give your antagonist. And I guess that's supposed to be part of the whole narrative and meaningful decisions, but every group I've played with, when faced with this scenario, always choose 'go go go no time for stopping'.
Well, yes and no Yurei. Short Rests work perfectly fine in a lot of games, even with ticking clocks. The only thing that matters is how much time you set on the clock. If every evil cult has to be stopped in the next five minutes, then no it doesn't allow for short rests.
I think the scenarios that Yurei is describing is less 'The bomb will go off in 6 hours' and more 'Someone nefarious is doing nefarious deeds right now. Stop them ASAP'. With the second scenario, you don't know how long you have to stop them before they do the nefarious thing, and an hour is a long time to spend having lunch. Sure, you could take your short rest, but you don't know what kind of lead that will give your antagonist. And I guess that's supposed to be part of the whole narrative and meaningful decisions, but every group I've played with, when faced with this scenario, always choose 'go go go no time for stopping'.
Sure, but those situations should be very rare. Normally they come at the end of an adventuring day, with a number of other encounters along the way. Even most action movies don't start the first scene with the bomb ticking. That comes at the climax. The heroes have spent the whole first part of the movie learning about the problem, investigating it, fighting some thugs, chasing the villain at high speeds, infiltrating the enemy base, fighting more thugs and some mini-boses, and so on. Only then does the villain reveal there is a bomb. That's when the heroes don't have time left to rest.
An adventure day should include all of those kinds of encounters. Even a social encounter usually expends some resources. Getting up a cliff might use a spell or two. A scenario where a villager runs into the tavern and interrupts dinner screaming 'The cultists are across town about to complete a ritual in 30 minutes!' would be very unusual.
Yes, heroes want to hurry and stop terrible things from happening. But the journey usually takes more than an hour. I think Agilemind describes a more common style of story.
Well, yes and no Yurei. Short Rests work perfectly fine in a lot of games, even with ticking clocks. The only thing that matters is how much time you set on the clock. If every evil cult has to be stopped in the next five minutes, then no it doesn't allow for short rests.
I think the scenarios that Yurei is describing is less 'The bomb will go off in 6 hours' and more 'Someone nefarious is doing nefarious deeds right now. Stop them ASAP'. With the second scenario, you don't know how long you have to stop them before they do the nefarious thing, and an hour is a long time to spend having lunch. Sure, you could take your short rest, but you don't know what kind of lead that will give your antagonist. And I guess that's supposed to be part of the whole narrative and meaningful decisions, but every group I've played with, when faced with this scenario, always choose 'go go go no time for stopping'.
I’ve had groups so beat up that they decided to stop because they basically had to to spend hit dice or else risk a TPK. Sometimes that’s the tough dilemma the party has to face.
If you have an hour to sit on your hindus and faff about doing dick-all, either you don't need a short rest or you have time for a long one. The idea that threats just stop being threatening for an hour while you faff off, or that the death cult will obligingly stop trying to complete its malignant ritual for an hour while the heroes take a potty break, is ridiculous. Short rests make no god damned sense outside of the niche scenario of a Dungeon Delve with absolutely no time constraints whatsoever, which is simply not the game most people play anymore. If you're playing R5e as an OSR dungeon crawler with no plot? Then sure, short rests work fine. In any other circumstance, you either have time for a long rest or you don't have time for a short.
None of this is even remotely true.
Short rests are great. Extreme time pressure I think isn't super common, but "today is better than tomorrow" is near-universal, which means that being able to take a short rest but not a long rest is going to happen extremely often. When there is a time pressure, the party have to weight that against the benefits of a rest, which is working as designed.
The actual bigger problem is that it's increasingly common for parties to face just one encounter in an entire day, and luckily the game provides an easy solution for that pacing as well in the Gritty Realism resting rules (don't let the name fool you; it's a great variant for simply slower-paced games, though I may recommend tweaking it so that 'a weekend' counts as a long rest rather than a whole week).
Does no one ever travel (except by teleport) anymore? I'm in location #1, get clues & punch bad guys. Learn that bad guy group #2 is a ways over there, take a short rest while riding the horses / ship / spelljammer to way over there. Also, when do you eat lunch / talk to contacts / troll gamer forums? Is running 16 hour combat marathons really the norm?
I feel like the real issue is that, while some classes regain resources on a short rest, not all of them do. More specifically, if all you regain is HP and you may not even be hurt or only slightly hurt, why would you want to take a short rest? At best you're in a situation where either one or two people are slowing the party down for nappies while the rest is raring to go or has no reason to stop. At worst you simply aren't getting anything from it and the resources you do need just don't get replenished. I'm most familiar with sorcs; but a generic sorc doesn't get any real benefits from a short rest until level freaking 20 (and it's only 4 sorc points... On a level 20 character). Divine Soul and storm sorc get something, but the latter only at level 18. As casters they try to avoid damage as well. So if you have a sorc in the group, unless they're a divine soul, the only thing they could get from a short rest is HP; which they may not have even lost.
I feel confident in saying this likely true for most classes/subclasses. They simply don't get anything from a short rest. So why would they want to take one? You'd do better just giving a post-battle recovery/rest.
In 4th edition, where short rests were introduced, a short rest was only 5 minutes -- but that meant they had to be very careful to not have any effects based on a short rest that encouraged taking multiple short rests in succession. For example, there wouldn't be any short rest mechanics that gave 'free' healing (like, say, 5th edition (life cleric) preserve life, (fighter) second wind, (mercy monk) hand of healing, (celestial warlock) cure wounds) or that produced effects that lasted more than 5 minutes (warlock casting a long duration spell, such as hex). That's possible but a pretty big adjustment.
Let's face it, short rests are unrealistic. When you're clearing a dungeon, its denizens will quickly notice that several rooms starting from entrance have less guards and more bloodstains than they're supposed to. Not to mention that if someone's slaying in the next room, you usually notice that. When you're trying to stop the BBEG from activating his doomsday thingy, you don't pause because there's a risk of him activating doomsday thingy any moment. When you're escaping a torture chamber or any other place you'd rather escape, you don't stop because the guards are chasing or looking for you. Only in low pace scenarios like intrigue or lengthy expeditions, you might have time to rest for an hour, but you don't usually need that as you rarely fight more than once per day in those scenarios.
Then, different classes have different dependency levels. I know the pain of playnig a warlock and nagging for short rest after every combat, while my druid buddy didn't give a damn. It gets annoying fast.
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Short Rests have long been a problem in DnD 5e. The game was designed around the idea that most parties would get 2 short rests every day, regenerating resources for some classes in a way that effectively triples their uses. But a lot of tables don't play that way. Their stories don't fit that mold. This leads to a lot of dissatisfaction with classes that depend on the Short Rest.
It's clear from the UA releases we have seen that Short Rests aren't going away in the next edition. They are mentioned in some abilities and feats, and in the description of a Long Rest. What they have not shown us yet though, is rules for the Short Rest itself. So it appears that it might be up for a change of some sort.
So how could they fix it?
They could make it shorter - say 10 minutes. This helps more parties find time in an adventuring day to take them. But it causes a different problem, one where everyone rests after every encounter. That would make short rest abilities even stronger. They effectively become 'Per Encounter' abilities. And the story might feel unnatural as everyone sits around every time a Warlock casts one spell.
How do you stop that? You could limit it so that no one can benefit from more than two Short Rests a day. That might work. The Long Rest mechanic already has a similar limitation of one per 24 hour period. Then a party could agree on when they would take their two short rests each day. It feels a little forced, but it might satisfy more people.
Another solution might just be a Optional rule. Something in the books that recognizes the problem and offers some solutions for DMs to use. Give it some credibility by being 'official.'
An Optional rule might be something as simple as just tripling every Short Rest use of an ability. Instead of one Second Wind per short rest, you just get 3 per day.
What do you think? Is there any other way you can imagine to make Short Rests work for more tables? Because it is a problem, and they aren't going to scrap the idea altogether.
At our tables there are usually two things that get in the way of just stopping for an hour.
1) The Ticking Clock. When there is pressure to complete a task or goal, stopping for an hour seems like a bad option. This isn't always a thing, but it happens often enough that it is worth noting.
2) Safe Space. An hour just sitting in one spot doing nothing is a long time in a hostile environment and can be really risky. Finding that random "save spot" in the dungeon can feel a little forced. Again, not always, but still.
Then if time isn't an issue and danger isn't an issue then why not long rest. Sure, you can only take one long rest in a single 24 hour period, but the benefits of a long rest help everyone in the party equally.
Which brings up another issue with short rest mechanics. Not all classes gain equal value from a short rest. That shouldn't be a big deal but we have all been on a long trip and either been that one person that had to make frequent stops or been with someone that has. Now imagine if those pit stops took an hour each time. (for the record I am required to make frequent stops for health reasons, I still find it annoying.)
I think your best bet is Stegodorkus' idea of 10 minute short rests. And they are right, it would need to have an limit (even if arbitrary) and I would suggest 2 per long rest.
Edit: Long Rest/Short Rest mechanics seem very video gamey to me anyway. Sure there needs to be recovery rules, but being able to heal completely from being dropped in a vat of acid, hit by lightning and eaten by a purple worm, just by getting 8 hours of sleep is kind of ridiculous. Fell down 50 feet into a pit of rusty spikes? No worries you will be perfectly fine in the morning!
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Well I am not yet in belief that short rest ability recovery will be in the same form it currently is.
The only class we have seen with a short rest recovery ability is the bard, and it is not till level 7 and it is only on his bardic inspiration, which we could argue is a "minor" effect of the bard. If short rest abilities are all minor things we won't have the issue we have now. The issue now is almost entirely with Monks, Warlocks and Moon Druids. Because they rely so much more on these short rest recovery abilities to be good. I am always surprised that the fighter doesn't suffer as much even all of its abilities are short rest as well, but it is because of how strong the fighter can be "at will" that prevents it from having the same issues, though they are still present. If Warlocks, Monks and Moon druids can do their "main thing" with long rest recovery and have short rest recovery be for some secondary minimal thing it will be less of an issue. However, I suspect you are correct, and I am also 100% sold on the 10 minute short rest thing by default.
Currently when I run short rests I do what I call "cinematic rests" because my campaigns can vary in style as they go along I vary the rests accordingly. If it is a standard adventuring dungeon crawl day it will be normal about 4 Hard to deadly encounters with opportunities for 2 or 3 short rests before the end of the adventuring day. If it is a more social based adventure there may be 1 encounter a day, but time will feel less restful for the players so a short rest will be 8 hours and a long one will be 2 whole days by the end of the week they will have probably had about 4 hard encounters 3 short rests and a long rest in there somewhere. Finally, if they are in a war raging battlefield where every second feels like eternity 5 minutes is a short rest and an hour is most definitely a long rest. It is all basically dependent on the pace of the game and has worked out every time.
Edit: an example of how this short rest thing is not so clear cut. Several of the epic boon feats used to have a "short rest recovery" and they were changed to "Short rest or WHEN YOU ROLL INITIATIVE". Imagine this being a recovery method that is rolled into more than just epic boons. Imagine the fighter recovers their action surge and second wind on a short or long rest or when they roll initiative. Imagine the monk recovers all of its ki every time it rolls initiative. The short rest issue at that point is solved for those classes and the only one that remains is the Warlock.
I personally prefer the asynchonous 10 minute short rest to "when initiative is rolled" because the later feels extremely gamey to me and means encounters are required to be combat encounters and abilities are limited to being used in combat. Monks and fighters getting more ways to use their abilities outside of combat would be nice, and having mechanics that support them doing so is important. E.g. having the Shadow monk pick a fight with some sewer rats so they can regain ki to cast Pass without Trace feels really dumb.
The main problem with Short Rest as they currently are is that the whole party needs to agree to them. I've seen in my own games that this leads to the fully healthy wizard pushing to continue while the Barbarian has 10 hp left. Shortening the duration so that one member of the party can say "While the Rogue is loojing for disarming the trap, I take a SR" would solve a lot of problems without slowing the game down for characters who don't need SRs.
[Though TBH only 3 classes in the game don't get anything back on a SR so parties realky ought to be more in favour of tfem than they currently are.]
So I went through the 1DnD UA documents and did a search for every mention of a Short Rest tied to an ability:
Class Features -
Bard - Font of Bardic Inspiration (level 7)
Ranger - Tireless (level 11)
Rogue - Stroke of Luck (level 18)
Feats - Musician, Inspiring Leader
Epic Boons - Energy Resistance, Dimensional Travel, Luck (the last two also replenish on initiative)
And then there is the mention in Long Rests. Under the section about interrupting the rest. The worrying part is that it says you gain the benefit of a Short Rest if you rested for at least 1 hour. So the Short Rest might not change much at all. We'll have to see.
Some classes currently depend on Short Rest mechanics much more than others.
Very little dependency- Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard
Dependency higher based on subclass - Fighter (Arcane Archer, Battle Master, Rune Knight) + Second Wind, Action Surge
Dependency based on a key feature that powers many subclass features - Bard (Bardic Inspiration), Cleric (Channel Divinity), Druid (Wild Shape), Paladin (Channel Divinity)
Classes highly dependant an Short Rests - Monk, Warlock
I could see them making some changes inside classes.
Fighters getting Second Wind and Action Surge on Short Rest OR initiative makes sense. There subclass features could work the same way potentially.
For Clerics, Druids, and Paladins, I could see them getting more uses per Long Rest. But Bards didn't get anything like that for Bardic Inspiration. Those dice are key to featues in most of their subclasses, but they still have to Short Rest to get them back starting level 7.
Channel Divinity for Clerics is currently once per rest at level 1 (meaning you're intended to get 3 uses a day), 2 per rest at level 6 (6 uses per day), and 3 per rest at level 18 (9 uses per day).
Channel Divinity for Paladins is once per rest (or 3 times a day)
Wild Shape is 2 uses per rest (or an assumed 6 per day at level 1)
Maybe Channel Divinity and Wild Shape will be PB × per Long Rest, but they'll get a Short Rest recovery feature at a higher level. This would align them with the new Bards. But I'm not sure how well that will affect balance since they are pretty different in their effect for each class.
Monks and Warlocks will take the most work. If they don't drastically change, and the other classes become more independent from Short Rests, then Monks and Warlocks will be even more of the odd ones out.
If Short Rests remain the same as 5e, and nothing else changes, it's a big missed opportunity. If they remain the same, but most classes change to not rely on them as much, then the ones that still do need Short Rests will feel even worse for it. If Short Rests get fixed, then they can have complete design freedom to give everyone something to do during the time.
Golaryn makes a good point that Rests are highly dependant on DMs creating realistic adventures. Ticking clocks are fine, but get exhausting to everyone if done all the time. Safe 'save point' rooms are tough to make feel natural. Some DMs want to run stories of court intrigue for example, where there is no good reason not to rest quite frequently. Others like only having one big battle in a day, where classes with Short Rest mechanics lose a lot of their power. Even running the game with the expected 6-8 encounters and two Short Rests takes a lot of planning to make it feel realistic and not forced.
Aquilontune is right that there is a big discrepancy between how much different classes and even subclasses depend on Short Rests. (I tried to break them down in my post above this.) It makes it more difficult for everyone. I love your idea of cinematic rests. It sounds like it makes for fun games. It's unfortunate that it's probably too dependant on an experienced DM to be something they could make official.
Agilemind, I agree that not every ability works with refreshing on initiative. It makes sense for some things that only apply in combat. But for things like Warlock spells, I'd rather them have slots left after combat for utility spells and social situations. I think more classes need things to do outside of combat. An Initiative refresh is okay for a patch, but only in some cases. Other times it's either silly, or has the opposite of the intended effect. I do love the idea that a character can rest for 10 minutes while another character casts a ritual or disarms a trap. I need to think about that more...
And yeah, I never understood why some parties are so resistant to a Short Rest when the time and location allows. You would think everyone would want all their allies at their full potential more often. And it's not like the rest actually takes up an hour of real life game time. We just handwave most of it with a short summary and some bookkeeping. It's an odd phenomena.
Also looking at the healer feat and the durable feat players have more ways of burning through their hit die without short rests. Long rests do give you all your hit die back now. This means there's a larger amount to spend.
Just to say it kind of rebalances the whole healing aspect making it hard to judge.
I for one like the distinction of some classes being short rest dependant while others can enjoy the long day. It gives a design concept for dms to switch things up. Generally not encouraging either way but every now and then allowing alot or a little depending on the current storyline.(with proper signals of course)
Now if I were designing the game from the ground up I would say all classes should have one of each: an Unlimited feature, a short rest feature, and a "class resource". Also each would have a locked in feature and a daily customizable one.
If you have an hour to sit on your hindus and faff about doing dick-all, either you don't need a short rest or you have time for a long one. The idea that threats just stop being threatening for an hour while you faff off, or that the death cult will obligingly stop trying to complete its malignant ritual for an hour while the heroes take a potty break, is ridiculous. Short rests make no god damned sense outside of the niche scenario of a Dungeon Delve with absolutely no time constraints whatsoever, which is simply not the game most people play anymore. If you're playing R5e as an OSR dungeon crawler with no plot? Then sure, short rests work fine. In any other circumstance, you either have time for a long rest or you don't have time for a short.
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That's an interesting point about Hit Dice, Roscoeivan. They did say that they wanted to come up with more ways to use them in the game. Which is probably why the Long Rest recovers all of them. But there have only been a few examples of new ideas so far.
I wonder if we will see a lot more in future UAs. Like Fighters being able to spend Hit Dice for Second Wind or Action Surge whenever they want. Or Warlocks and Monks being able to burn them to get back spell slots and Ki... That would be one way to make everyone a little more even.
I like your concept of mixing things up each adventure day to give each class a chance to shine. And I agree, giving every class a mixture of features would go a very long way to fixing this problem. Too bad we haven't seen that yet.
The way I fixed Short Rests was actually by fixing Long Rests. I made it so that every Long Rest only restores half your HP, but all of your Hit Dice. That encourages people to want to Short Rest to spend their renewable resource of Hit Dice since they won’t auto regen all HP after a Long Rest.
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None of this is even remotely true.
Short rests are great. Extreme time pressure I think isn't super common, but "today is better than tomorrow" is near-universal, which means that being able to take a short rest but not a long rest is going to happen extremely often. When there is a time pressure, the party have to weight that against the benefits of a rest, which is working as designed.
The actual bigger problem is that it's increasingly common for parties to face just one encounter in an entire day, and luckily the game provides an easy solution for that pacing as well in the Gritty Realism resting rules (don't let the name fool you; it's a great variant for simply slower-paced games, though I may recommend tweaking it so that 'a weekend' counts as a long rest rather than a whole week).
Well, yes and no Yurei. Short Rests work perfectly fine in a lot of games, even with ticking clocks. The only thing that matters is how much time you set on the clock. If every evil cult has to be stopped in the next five minutes, then no it doesn't allow for short rests.
But if you have 12 hours to stop them, that's too soon for a Long Rest, but enough time for a Short Rest or two. And it allows you to have many varied encounters along the way. Your party is aware of the clock, but keeps running into road blocks they didn't expect. They know they can't face the final battle too weak. They have enough time to rest and recover, but only briefly. And only then are they down to the literal 11th hour to pull off a victory. It gives you more chances for cool fights and other encounters along the way, lets every class do their thing, and maintains the drama of the time limit in the end.
But yes, a lot of tables don't play that way. For a number of different reasons I imagine. Maybe setting up a lot of smaller combats takes too long. Maybe their story doesn't have enough beats. Maybe they're streaming the game and it's easier to do one big boss battle per show. Whatever the reason, that's exactly why Short Rests are a problem, and why I brought up this thread. The game would be better if everyone could play the stories they have in mind without making some classes unbalanced because of it.
From what I've seen online, many tables seem to find 1-3 encounters a day to be more natural. They could write stories with room for a Short Rest between each encounter if they have 3 a day. But that can be hard to feel natural, and any fewer than 3 and it all falls apart. They could have a house rule that just triples the number of uses any class gets from abilities that recover on a Short Rest. Fighters could get 3 Action Surge a day. Warlocks could get 6 spell slots. But that's not RAW. It's better, but not exactly balanced. They could do recovery on rolling initiative, turning all short rest abilities into 'encounter' abilities. That's even better, but has some weird side effects for non-combat encounters.
The best thing to do would be fix Short Rests. Either get rid of them, make every class benefit from them, make no class need them too much, or just change them to make them easier to fit into any game. WotC doesn't look like they are getting rid of them. And the classes we've seen don't make much use of them. So that leaves either removing them from most class features across the board, or fixing them.
I don't even know if they'll do that. But I'm hoping they do. I think 10 minutes with some limits per day might work. It does feel a little forced. But there is some logic in only being able to really nap so much before you're not getting anymore benefit from it. Unfortunately the text for Long Rests seems to indicate it will still be an hour.
So they need to think of something else. Or many tables will have the same old problems with it for years to come.
That's an interesting take, IamSposta. I'll have to think about it. I like that it encourages more characters to rest, but do you find that they all just spend the first few hours of a day using Hit Dice to heal? Wouldn't that bring them right back to the start? With full health but half their dice?
Agree with the above, most of the games I run are ~3 encounters per in-game day with 1 short rest, it just makes a nice story flow of introduction, rising tension, and climax without having the story beat drag on. Urgent ticking clocks are very rare in my game, rather there is an on going threat of undetermined urgency. E.g. a military that kidnapped kids and is brain washing them to become soldiers, or investigating a murder and catching the murderer, or finding a lost mining party - sure in each of these cases its better to stop them sooner than later as every day that goes by involves risk of more evil happening or a worsening of the problem, but one hour here or there isn't critical and it may even be advantageous / necessary to wait until a specific time of day for the climax.
I think the scenarios that Yurei is describing is less 'The bomb will go off in 6 hours' and more 'Someone nefarious is doing nefarious deeds right now. Stop them ASAP'. With the second scenario, you don't know how long you have to stop them before they do the nefarious thing, and an hour is a long time to spend having lunch. Sure, you could take your short rest, but you don't know what kind of lead that will give your antagonist. And I guess that's supposed to be part of the whole narrative and meaningful decisions, but every group I've played with, when faced with this scenario, always choose 'go go go no time for stopping'.
Sure, but those situations should be very rare. Normally they come at the end of an adventuring day, with a number of other encounters along the way. Even most action movies don't start the first scene with the bomb ticking. That comes at the climax. The heroes have spent the whole first part of the movie learning about the problem, investigating it, fighting some thugs, chasing the villain at high speeds, infiltrating the enemy base, fighting more thugs and some mini-boses, and so on. Only then does the villain reveal there is a bomb. That's when the heroes don't have time left to rest.
An adventure day should include all of those kinds of encounters. Even a social encounter usually expends some resources. Getting up a cliff might use a spell or two. A scenario where a villager runs into the tavern and interrupts dinner screaming 'The cultists are across town about to complete a ritual in 30 minutes!' would be very unusual.
Yes, heroes want to hurry and stop terrible things from happening. But the journey usually takes more than an hour. I think Agilemind describes a more common style of story.
I’ve had groups so beat up that they decided to stop because they basically had to to spend hit dice or else risk a TPK. Sometimes that’s the tough dilemma the party has to face.
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Does no one ever travel (except by teleport) anymore? I'm in location #1, get clues & punch bad guys. Learn that bad guy group #2 is a ways over there, take a short rest while riding the horses / ship / spelljammer to way over there. Also, when do you eat lunch / talk to contacts / troll gamer forums? Is running 16 hour combat marathons really the norm?
I feel like the real issue is that, while some classes regain resources on a short rest, not all of them do. More specifically, if all you regain is HP and you may not even be hurt or only slightly hurt, why would you want to take a short rest? At best you're in a situation where either one or two people are slowing the party down for nappies while the rest is raring to go or has no reason to stop. At worst you simply aren't getting anything from it and the resources you do need just don't get replenished. I'm most familiar with sorcs; but a generic sorc doesn't get any real benefits from a short rest until level freaking 20 (and it's only 4 sorc points... On a level 20 character). Divine Soul and storm sorc get something, but the latter only at level 18. As casters they try to avoid damage as well. So if you have a sorc in the group, unless they're a divine soul, the only thing they could get from a short rest is HP; which they may not have even lost.
I feel confident in saying this likely true for most classes/subclasses. They simply don't get anything from a short rest. So why would they want to take one? You'd do better just giving a post-battle recovery/rest.
In 4th edition, where short rests were introduced, a short rest was only 5 minutes -- but that meant they had to be very careful to not have any effects based on a short rest that encouraged taking multiple short rests in succession. For example, there wouldn't be any short rest mechanics that gave 'free' healing (like, say, 5th edition (life cleric) preserve life, (fighter) second wind, (mercy monk) hand of healing, (celestial warlock) cure wounds) or that produced effects that lasted more than 5 minutes (warlock casting a long duration spell, such as hex). That's possible but a pretty big adjustment.
Let's face it, short rests are unrealistic. When you're clearing a dungeon, its denizens will quickly notice that several rooms starting from entrance have less guards and more bloodstains than they're supposed to. Not to mention that if someone's slaying in the next room, you usually notice that. When you're trying to stop the BBEG from activating his doomsday thingy, you don't pause because there's a risk of him activating doomsday thingy any moment. When you're escaping a torture chamber or any other place you'd rather escape, you don't stop because the guards are chasing or looking for you. Only in low pace scenarios like intrigue or lengthy expeditions, you might have time to rest for an hour, but you don't usually need that as you rarely fight more than once per day in those scenarios.
Then, different classes have different dependency levels. I know the pain of playnig a warlock and nagging for short rest after every combat, while my druid buddy didn't give a damn. It gets annoying fast.