Hey, I'm trying to have a calm, real dialogue. Asking you to maybe, just maybe, cut back on the cutting hyperbole.
Because I seriously cannot envision a campaign in which, over the course of anywhere between 10-20 levels, the characters are never, ever able to afford a short rest. Do the characters not have access to things like Leomund's tiny hut? Does every single foe they encounter have dispel magic or antimagic capabilities?
And I have yet to see these assertions widely made or assumed to be the norm.
If the party is traveling from Module City to the Horrible Ruins of Evildom and have a random encounter that ends up using a lot of resources (spells, healing, etc.) - isn't it reasonable to take a short rest to recover hit dice, fighters can get action surge back, warlocks get their spells back? Because if they encounter something else two hours later, they're fewked without it.
And again: I don't believe in having nice, sanded down edges for the characters. I also don't support the idea of a campaign world that's so dangerous that literally no place, no time is ever, ever safe for even an hour.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
I can absolutely understand there being portions of a campaign with that kind of terror/threat - especially if the party travels to another plane, or spends time in a haunted or cursed location, etc.
I'm just trying to imagine what a campaign in which you literally never have a chance to take a short rest is like at first level. How do the PCs even survive to level up if things are that dire and the threats are sleeplessly omnipresent?
(I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely having a hugely hard time wrapping my head around playing a D&D game in which the pace is relentless from 1st level to the upper tiers.)
And I agree with the base sentiment and made a similar argument to my brother about warlocks vs sorcerers before and why spell casting is better than pact magic. But the way she is going about it if they said hey you have 5 spells and get them back on a short rest and we assumed that AT SOME POINT people would take 1 short rest an adventuring day is not in anyway out of line. There are hit dice to recover health for a reason and people naturally have lunch breaks. At this point my whole thing Warlocks are close to what they need to be now. Mystic arcanum and a few invocations just need a little work, but the means she is using to frame her arguments are not doing her any favors at all.
Well, at the end of the day, short rests are entirely in the hands of a DM. Much like Inspiration mechanic. Yes, it's in the rules, it's codified, but nothing in the rules guarantees a consistent, predictable amount of short rests per day, and that can't be changed, that's story dependent. Having a significant part of your class power out of your control sucks.
Hey, I'm trying to have a calm, real dialogue. Asking you to maybe, just maybe, cut back on the cutting hyperbole.
Because I seriously cannot envision a campaign in which, over the course of anywhere between 10-20 levels, the characters are never, ever able to afford a short rest. Do the characters not have access to things like Leomund's tiny hut? Does every single foe they encounter have dispel magic or antimagic capabilities?
And I have yet to see these assertions widely made or assumed to be the norm.
If the party is traveling from Module City to the Horrible Ruins of Evildom and have a random encounter that ends up using a lot of resources (spells, healing, etc.) - isn't it reasonable to take a short rest to recover hit dice, fighters can get action surge back, warlocks get their spells back? Because if they encounter something else two hours later, they're fewked without it.
And again: I don't believe in having nice, sanded down edges for the characters. I also don't support the idea of a campaign world that's so dangerous that literally no place, no time is ever, ever safe for even an hour.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
and this is the thing. People AREN'T arguing this for warlock. They want the short rest thing to work, but not to need short rests outside of the normal short rest times. When the fighter needs his wounds bandaged because he is low and the like. Give the warlock enough resources that they ARENT begging for short rests outside the normal times it is taken, but still have the short rest recovery and you can have a unique class with unique abilities that doesn't slow down the adventuring day any more than someone casting detect magic ritual or bandaging the fighters wounds.
There's nothing wrong with either short rests or long rests. However, they really shouldn't be mixed unless you have have a strong means of enforcing the 'correct' ratio of rest types, and D&D just doesn't.
D&D could use ways of enforcing pacing, the current method causes problems that extend beyond spellcasting, but the solution One D&D seems to have decided on is eliminating short rest abilities. As such, killing off short rest spellcasting is expected.
Hey, I'm trying to have a calm, real dialogue. Asking you to maybe, just maybe, cut back on the cutting hyperbole.
Because I seriously cannot envision a campaign in which, over the course of anywhere between 10-20 levels, the characters are never, ever able to afford a short rest. Do the characters not have access to things like Leomund's tiny hut? Does every single foe they encounter have dispel magic or antimagic capabilities?
And I have yet to see these assertions widely made or assumed to be the norm.
If the party is traveling from Module City to the Horrible Ruins of Evildom and have a random encounter that ends up using a lot of resources (spells, healing, etc.) - isn't it reasonable to take a short rest to recover hit dice, fighters can get action surge back, warlocks get their spells back? Because if they encounter something else two hours later, they're fewked without it.
And again: I don't believe in having nice, sanded down edges for the characters. I also don't support the idea of a campaign world that's so dangerous that literally no place, no time is ever, ever safe for even an hour.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
First, a sincere thank you for this response. I get all of this, and it helps me get a grasp on where you're coming from.
My bottom line response is that they feel like time wasters to you. Which - fair! I've never experienced them that way and indeed, my warlock being able to regain all of their spells in an hour is viewed as a huge boon for the party, since every other caster has to wait 12+ hours or more (depending on where we are in the adventuring day) to get theirs back. Which means I'm in a better position to help fend off/defeat any baddies, planned or random, that come after us. I've never abused this and my DM has never felt the need to impose a hard limit on the # of rests because I don't abuse it.
To me, the need to rest doesn't feel like time wasted. It feels like an element of verisimilitude in the game. Even real life soldiers, even the elite ones, need to rest and take stock of the situation from time to time.
I'm not necessarily opposed to warlocks losing the short rest recharge but I am opposed to it in the context of this new build. Which I absolutely hate for multiple reasons.
And I agree with the base sentiment and made a similar argument to my brother about warlocks vs sorcerers before and why spell casting is better than pact magic. But the way she is going about it if they said hey you have 5 spells and get them back on a short rest and we assumed that AT SOME POINT people would take 1 short rest an adventuring day is not in anyway out of line. There are hit dice to recover health for a reason and people naturally have lunch breaks. At this point my whole thing Warlocks are close to what they need to be now. Mystic arcanum and a few invocations just need a little work, but the means she is using to frame her arguments are not doing her any favors at all.
Well, at the end of the day, short rests are entirely in the hands of a DM. Much like Inspiration mechanic. Yes, it's in the rules, it's codified, but nothing in the rules guarantees a consistent, predictable amount of short rests per day, and that can't be changed, that's story dependent. Having a significant part of your class power out of your control sucks.
Again complete aggrievance, this is why I had the fixing minor warlock issues thread. It was literally about saying half-caster warlock works with some tweaks mostly to invocations and was meant for ideas for that direction. It took me time, but I like this direction. I thank Yurie for the most recent post of taking a step back from hyperbole. When everyone is painting others with extreme brushes it misses the mark of either group and gets everyone no where.
The biggest issue with the half caster model: they delayed the warlocks spell progression to level 5 spells by 8 levels unless you spend your invocations on getting access to a spell earlier. But if I'm spending those invocations on one spell I can cast once per day that's just making the warlock a weak wizard not a warlock who's getting to pick things like eldritch sight or ghostly gaze or any of the things that flavored the class before.
Hey, I'm trying to have a calm, real dialogue. Asking you to maybe, just maybe, cut back on the cutting hyperbole.
Because I seriously cannot envision a campaign in which, over the course of anywhere between 10-20 levels, the characters are never, ever able to afford a short rest. Do the characters not have access to things like Leomund's tiny hut? Does every single foe they encounter have dispel magic or antimagic capabilities?
And I have yet to see these assertions widely made or assumed to be the norm.
If the party is traveling from Module City to the Horrible Ruins of Evildom and have a random encounter that ends up using a lot of resources (spells, healing, etc.) - isn't it reasonable to take a short rest to recover hit dice, fighters can get action surge back, warlocks get their spells back? Because if they encounter something else two hours later, they're fewked without it.
And again: I don't believe in having nice, sanded down edges for the characters. I also don't support the idea of a campaign world that's so dangerous that literally no place, no time is ever, ever safe for even an hour.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
and this is the thing. People AREN'T arguing this for warlock. They want the short rest thing to work, but not to need short rests outside of the normal short rest times. When the fighter needs his wounds bandaged because he is low and the like. Give the warlock enough resources that they ARENT begging for short rests outside the normal times it is taken, but still have the short rest recovery and you can have a unique class with unique abilities that doesn't slow down the adventuring day any more than someone casting detect magic ritual or bandaging the fighters wounds.
Which is why we could make warlocks better by granting additional spell slots at 5th, 9th, and 13th level.
Hey, I'm trying to have a calm, real dialogue. Asking you to maybe, just maybe, cut back on the cutting hyperbole.
Because I seriously cannot envision a campaign in which, over the course of anywhere between 10-20 levels, the characters are never, ever able to afford a short rest. Do the characters not have access to things like Leomund's tiny hut? Does every single foe they encounter have dispel magic or antimagic capabilities?
And I have yet to see these assertions widely made or assumed to be the norm.
If the party is traveling from Module City to the Horrible Ruins of Evildom and have a random encounter that ends up using a lot of resources (spells, healing, etc.) - isn't it reasonable to take a short rest to recover hit dice, fighters can get action surge back, warlocks get their spells back? Because if they encounter something else two hours later, they're fewked without it.
And again: I don't believe in having nice, sanded down edges for the characters. I also don't support the idea of a campaign world that's so dangerous that literally no place, no time is ever, ever safe for even an hour.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
Let me tell you about long rests 8 whole hours where you are doing nothing when you could be doing something useful.
I can absolutely understand there being portions of a campaign with that kind of terror/threat - especially if the party travels to another plane, or spends time in a haunted or cursed location, etc.
I'm just trying to imagine what a campaign in which you literally never have a chance to take a short rest is like at first level. How do the PCs even survive to level up if things are that dire and the threats are sleeplessly omnipresent?
(I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely having a hugely hard time wrapping my head around playing a D&D game in which the pace is relentless from 1st level to the upper tiers.)
Because you're assuming the cause of an accelerated pace is imminent physical danger.
Let me give you an example.
In a two-plus year campaign we wrapped up earlier this year, we discovered partway through that cultists were infiltrating and violently murder-sacrificing entire towns to try and fuel a madman's apotheosis into a god-like figure. We used what resources we had to send word ahead to people who could communicate rapidly, and we started riding hard and pushing the pace of travel between towns trying to reach the next one before it was assailed by those cultists and turned into a bloody abattoir full of infectious living razor blood. Did hours matter in that sequence? I legitimately do not know, but I know days certainly did. We were racing against a clock to try and save a town, and because we pushed hard and managed to send out the warnings we did, a town that would've otherwise ended up in that whole Living Razor Blood mess managed to identify the infiltrating cultists and cut down the sacrifice spell before it started, preserving the lives of hundreds of townsfolk and giving us some massive leads on figuring out the cultists' objective for doing so.
If we had meandered for weeks and weeks instead? If we'd wandered around exploring random holes in the map, spent half the day resting instead of traveling, wandered off to do random sidequests, and all that shit? That town would be dead and full of razor blood and we would've had to work much harder to figure out where to go next. And it would have been squarely and uncontestably our own ass fault.
Was there always a ticking clock over our heads? No. But hey - we also never knew when the next ticking clock would show up while we were between clocks, so there wasn't a lot of time to spare for faffing around doing random jank junk. Making effective use of our time is one of the reasons we managed to successfully conclude that campaign and take down the BBEG. That and one of the party members transforming temporarily into a Super Shoggoth that dealt something like 15d10 damage a turn, but he only still had that capability because we were judicious and canny with our adventuring so mleghme. At no point was "I wanna sit around for half the day playing the ukulele, badly" a serious option. Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like. There was, in short, D&D to be played. Short resting means stopping the D&D for an hour while everybody faffs around and sits on their *****, and nobody wants to do that instead of playing D&D.
and this is the thing. People AREN'T arguing this for warlock. They want the short rest thing to work, but not to need short rests outside of the normal short rest times. When the fighter needs his wounds bandaged because he is low and the like. Give the warlock enough resources that they ARENT begging for short rests outside the normal times it is taken, but still have the short rest recovery and you can have a unique class with unique abilities that doesn't slow down the adventuring day any more than someone casting detect magic ritual or bandaging the fighters wounds.
Which is why we could make warlocks better by granting additional spell slots at 5th, 9th, and 13th level.
So 7 at level 20 which with one short rest would match the current 14 1/2 caster model but they would all be level 5 spells. That could work, I still prefer a 5 minute ritual to regain slots once per day, maybe a 2nd time per day at 10th so the player can force a recharge with their own abilities. Still allow the short rests to do it, but at least 1 recharge in the players hands.
Because you're assuming the cause of an accelerated pace is imminent physical danger.
Let me give you an example.
In a two-plus year campaign we wrapped up earlier this year, we discovered partway through that cultists were infiltrating and violently murder-sacrificing entire towns to try and fuel a madman's apotheosis into a god-like figure. We used what resources we had to send word ahead to people who could communicate rapidly, and we started riding hard and pushing the pace of travel between towns trying to reach the next one before it was assailed by those cultists and turned into a bloody abattoir full of infectious living razor blood. Did hours matter in that sequence? I legitimately do not know, but I know days certainly did. We were racing against a clock to try and save a town, and because we pushed hard and managed to send out the warnings we did, a town that would've otherwise ended up in that whole Living Razor Blood mess managed to identify the infiltrating cultists and cut down the sacrifice spell before it started, preserving the lives of hundreds of townsfolk and giving us some massive leads on figuring out the cultists' objective for doing so.
If we had meandered for weeks and weeks instead? If we'd wandered around exploring random holes in the map, spent half the day resting instead of traveling, wandered off to do random sidequests, and all that shit? That town would be dead and full of razor blood and we would've had to work much harder to figure out where to go next. And it would have been squarely and uncontestably our own ass fault.
Was there always a ticking clock over our heads? No. But hey - we also never knew when the next ticking clock would show up while we were between clocks, so there wasn't a lot of time to spare for faffing around doing random jank junk. Making effective use of our time is one of the reasons we managed to successfully conclude that campaign and take down the BBEG. That and one of the party members transforming temporarily into a Super Shoggoth that dealt something like 15d10 damage a turn, but he only still had that capability because we were judicious and canny with our adventuring so mleghme. At no point was "I wanna sit around for half the day playing the ukulele, badly" a serious option. Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like. There was, in short, D&D to be played. Short resting means stopping the D&D for an hour while everybody faffs around and sits on their *****, and nobody wants to do that instead of playing D&D.
First, this sounds like a rad campaign!
Second: only armies of undead or constructs can move 24/7 without needing rest, food, and water. Even hyped-up cultists ready to drown the world in its own blood have to sleep and eat and poop. There's weather, geography, etc. I get the sense of urgency (and [this is sincere] I'm heartened that your adventurers are altruistic enough to want to save the world). Again: sometimes good guys and bad guys have to rest for a bit.
Third: honestly, this sounds like a campaign in which short rests would figure only very infrequently regardless. It sounds like there wasn't a preponderance of random encounters that resulted in combat (and spent resources), that you didn't have to worry about taking short rests because you could somewhat anticipate where and when the action would take place.
Fourth: not every campaign is like this. A lot of campaigns are basically faffing about, looking for the next ruin or mission or dragon. There might be only a loose over-arching plot due to DM laziness or table preference. The world may not be precipitously sliding to the literal Abyss but might be more humming along with its usual share of good and evil, overt and nuanced.
Fifth: when we take short breaks, that hour of game only takes a few minutes, at most, of real time.
I can absolutely understand there being portions of a campaign with that kind of terror/threat - especially if the party travels to another plane, or spends time in a haunted or cursed location, etc.
I'm just trying to imagine what a campaign in which you literally never have a chance to take a short rest is like at first level. How do the PCs even survive to level up if things are that dire and the threats are sleeplessly omnipresent?
(I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely having a hugely hard time wrapping my head around playing a D&D game in which the pace is relentless from 1st level to the upper tiers.)
Because you're assuming the cause of an accelerated pace is imminent physical danger.
Let me give you an example.
In a two-plus year campaign we wrapped up earlier this year, we discovered partway through that cultists were infiltrating and violently murder-sacrificing entire towns to try and fuel a madman's apotheosis into a god-like figure. We used what resources we had to send word ahead to people who could communicate rapidly, and we started riding hard and pushing the pace of travel between towns trying to reach the next one before it was assailed by those cultists and turned into a bloody abattoir full of infectious living razor blood. Did hours matter in that sequence? I legitimately do not know, but I know days certainly did. We were racing against a clock to try and save a town, and because we pushed hard and managed to send out the warnings we did, a town that would've otherwise ended up in that whole Living Razor Blood mess managed to identify the infiltrating cultists and cut down the sacrifice spell before it started, preserving the lives of hundreds of townsfolk and giving us some massive leads on figuring out the cultists' objective for doing so.
If we had meandered for weeks and weeks instead? If we'd wandered around exploring random holes in the map, spent half the day resting instead of traveling, wandered off to do random sidequests, and all that shit? That town would be dead and full of razor blood and we would've had to work much harder to figure out where to go next. And it would have been squarely and uncontestably our own ass fault.
Was there always a ticking clock over our heads? No. But hey - we also never knew when the next ticking clock would show up while we were between clocks, so there wasn't a lot of time to spare for faffing around doing random jank junk. Making effective use of our time is one of the reasons we managed to successfully conclude that campaign and take down the BBEG. That and one of the party members transforming temporarily into a Super Shoggoth that dealt something like 15d10 damage a turn, but he only still had that capability because we were judicious and canny with our adventuring so mleghme. At no point was "I wanna sit around for half the day playing the ukulele, badly" a serious option. Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like. There was, in short, D&D to be played. Short resting means stopping the D&D for an hour while everybody faffs around and sits on their *****, and nobody wants to do that instead of playing D&D.
Okay, that doesn't make sense for why you can't take a short rest but for some reason can take long rests where people faffs around and sits on their *****, but for 8 hours instead of one. If you are just running there and their are no encounters, you don't need either a short rest or a long one. If encounters occur along the way and the fighter is down hit points wouldn't one hour instead of 8 to patch him up be better as time is of the essence. Or do you just show up and watch the fighter get murdered in the first round of combat as patching people up is a waste of time. I'm pretty sure on a ship the warlock can watch the bare knuckle fights maybe bet on them and other light activity role playing and get a short rest on while others a fighting. Even if he is helping with sailing he can find a couple hours a day to take breaks. Sailors don;t work 24/7, they'd be dead from exhaustion if they tried to never take breaks. And you are stopping D&D for 2 minutes when you say hey lets take a short rest, spend your hit dice and recover resources. The game world stops for a hour, but if in a time crunch 1 hour is less than 8.
I can absolutely understand there being portions of a campaign with that kind of terror/threat - especially if the party travels to another plane, or spends time in a haunted or cursed location, etc.
I'm just trying to imagine what a campaign in which you literally never have a chance to take a short rest is like at first level. How do the PCs even survive to level up if things are that dire and the threats are sleeplessly omnipresent?
(I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely having a hugely hard time wrapping my head around playing a D&D game in which the pace is relentless from 1st level to the upper tiers.)
Because you're assuming the cause of an accelerated pace is imminent physical danger.
Let me give you an example.
In a two-plus year campaign we wrapped up earlier this year, we discovered partway through that cultists were infiltrating and violently murder-sacrificing entire towns to try and fuel a madman's apotheosis into a god-like figure. We used what resources we had to send word ahead to people who could communicate rapidly, and we started riding hard and pushing the pace of travel between towns trying to reach the next one before it was assailed by those cultists and turned into a bloody abattoir full of infectious living razor blood. Did hours matter in that sequence? I legitimately do not know, but I know days certainly did. We were racing against a clock to try and save a town, and because we pushed hard and managed to send out the warnings we did, a town that would've otherwise ended up in that whole Living Razor Blood mess managed to identify the infiltrating cultists and cut down the sacrifice spell before it started, preserving the lives of hundreds of townsfolk and giving us some massive leads on figuring out the cultists' objective for doing so.
If we had meandered for weeks and weeks instead? If we'd wandered around exploring random holes in the map, spent half the day resting instead of traveling, wandered off to do random sidequests, and all that shit? That town would be dead and full of razor blood and we would've had to work much harder to figure out where to go next. And it would have been squarely and uncontestably our own ass fault.
Was there always a ticking clock over our heads? No. But hey - we also never knew when the next ticking clock would show up while we were between clocks, so there wasn't a lot of time to spare for faffing around doing random jank junk. Making effective use of our time is one of the reasons we managed to successfully conclude that campaign and take down the BBEG. That and one of the party members transforming temporarily into a Super Shoggoth that dealt something like 15d10 damage a turn, but he only still had that capability because we were judicious and canny with our adventuring so mleghme. At no point was "I wanna sit around for half the day playing the ukulele, badly" a serious option. Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like. There was, in short, D&D to be played. Short resting means stopping the D&D for an hour while everybody faffs around and sits on their *****, and nobody wants to do that instead of playing D&D.
I’m well familiar with a ticking clock. I’ve used them as a DM, and I’ve played under them more times than I can count. Hell, I’m usually under one IRL quite a bit of the time too, and have been for much of my life. But sometimes ya just gotta take that short rest anyway. Sometimes ya just need a lunch break, and yeah that clock keeps on ticking, but sometimes ya just gotta let it tick. So the BBE’s plans progress for an hour while the party takes a siesta because the fighter, monk, and warlock need a breather. The campaign won’t suddenly go off into the stratosphere never to be seen again, the story will just be a little different than it would have been had the party not rested. That’s all. No real villagers would have died. You would have had to go find other different clues elsewhere, but ultimately you would have (likely) taken down the BBE anyway, and the campaign would have wrapped up anyway too. Things would have still happened, they woulda just happened a li’l differently is all. So when the warlock, fighter, or monk in your party asks to take a shorty to drop a 💩 and clear their head before proceeding, let ‘em, at least 1-2 times per day. The world won’t actually end. That’s not “half a day,” that’s a couple of hours tops. That’s okay.
Also, guess what. The BBE also needs to rest once in a while too. That’s right, the BBE needs to drop a 💩 from time to time too. They need to eat and sleep just like the PCs too. So it all comes out in a wash.
The biggest issue with the half caster model: they delayed the warlocks spell progression to level 5 spells by 8 levels unless you spend your invocations on getting access to a spell earlier. But if I'm spending those invocations on one spell I can cast once per day that's just making the warlock a weak wizard not a warlock who's getting to pick things like eldritch sight or ghostly gaze or any of the things that flavored the class before.
See this isn't actually true. We have done the experiments and the math here. At level 5 you would have 1 mystic arcanum the 2 "pact invocations" of your pact that have been rolled into the pact + 2 other invocations at 7 you could have 2 mystic arcanums and still the other part and at 9 you would still ONLY need 2 mystic arcanums and gain another invocation because you are unlocking 3rd level spells naturally at this point making the previous mystic arcanum from a 3rd level spell to a 5th level spell allowing you to have 3 invocations + your 2 "pact" invocations giving you the exact same number of invocations at level 9 as normal and still unlocking those spell. At level 11 you gain another mystic arcanum, which normally you would. You miss out on an invocation at 12, at level 13 you get another mystic arcanum as normal, but you can now recoup the lost invocation at 12 as you trade your previous level 4 for another invocation since you have unlocked 4th level spells at this level. Level 15 you another mystic level 17 you unlock 5th levels and trade the old 5th for a 9nth and get an additional invocation. These higher levels you lose out on a total of 1 invocation, but you don't lose out on invocations or spell progression until level 12 if you are taking mystic arcanum.
CAN THIS WORK??? Eldritch Blast does 1D10 damage and has no Spell casting modifier added to its damage. Book Of Shadows you can add your Warlock spellcasting ability modifier to the damage rolls of any cantrip you cast (E. BLAST) that doesn’t already have that modifier added to its damage roll (+3 to +5). Agonizing Blast adds spell casting modifier to the damage rolls of E. Blast.... So. Does this make E. Blast do 1D10+6 to 1D10+10 damage. If so. I can live without casting HEX.
"Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like."
Sounds like downtime to me, I'm sure the fate of the world didn't hang on whether or not you won a random bareknuckle brawl while sitting on your a***** on a boat for a week doing random jank to put off boredom. Sure there are instances in a campaign where short rests are not used, but that's hardly the rule unless you're in a campaign with 1 encounter per day in which case nobody in the party ever needs a short rest either.
And BTW I would bet duckets to doughnuts that while you were picking over the cultist's bodies for clues on where to go next or talking to the townsfolk to learn where to go next there would have been time for some of the party to take a SR...
CAN THIS WORK??? Eldritch Blast does 1D10 damage and has no Spell casting modifier added to its damage. Book Of Shadows you can add your Warlock spellcasting ability modifier to the damage rolls of any cantrip you cast (E. BLAST) that doesn’t already have that modifier added to its damage roll (+3 to +5). Agonizing Blast adds spell casting modifier to the damage rolls of E. Blast.... So. Does this make E. Blast do 1D10+6 to 1D10+10 damage. If so. I can live without casting HEX.
No, the whole point of the restriction in book of shadows is to prevent it from stacking.
CAN THIS WORK??? Eldritch Blast does 1D10 damage and has no Spell casting modifier added to its damage. Book Of Shadows you can add your Warlock spellcasting ability modifier to the damage rolls of any cantrip you cast (E. BLAST) that doesn’t already have that modifier added to its damage roll (+3 to +5). Agonizing Blast adds spell casting modifier to the damage rolls of E. Blast.... So. Does this make E. Blast do 1D10+6 to 1D10+10 damage. If so. I can live without casting HEX.
There's an answer to your own question.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Look.
Short rests are inherently, fundamentally, a waste of time. They actively feel bad. It's not about safe or unsafe, it's about giving up time you could actually be doing something useful with instead. Short resting is sitting around doing faff-all for an entire hour while whatever it is you were trying to do that resulted in you wanting/needing a short rest gets worse. Are there times where taking that hour to do faff-all isn't going to kill you? Of course. That doesn't stop short rests from feeling like a terrible waste of time and opportunity, like you're just giving up an hour to no benefit. The fact that certain classes need short rests to function well is a WEAKNESS, not a strength. Trying to forcefully cling to warlocks being cripplingly SuperHyperMegaUltra-overdependent on short rests because PaCt MaGiC iS uNiQuE!1! is bad for the class.
It means you don't have enough resources to do what you need to do without constantly having to beg your party to stop adventuring and sit on their ***** for an hour because you need some time to go take a powder, and eventually you're going to get sick of demanding short rests and/or your party is going to start resenting you for constantly interrupting their game with Powder Breaks. Especially if you're a Tome or Chain warlock that rarely needs the actual HP recovery and are forcing the party to constantly sit around Not Adventuring, Not Playing D&D, solely so you can cast half the spells you could otherwise cast if you were a proper spellcaster.
Why do people keep insisting this is a positive thing for warlocks, that warlocks should be restricted to two whole ass spells a day unless they can successfully bully, browbeat, bamboozle or beg their team into letting them take many multiple multitudinous powder breaks throughout the day?
Please do not contact or message me.
I can absolutely understand there being portions of a campaign with that kind of terror/threat - especially if the party travels to another plane, or spends time in a haunted or cursed location, etc.
I'm just trying to imagine what a campaign in which you literally never have a chance to take a short rest is like at first level. How do the PCs even survive to level up if things are that dire and the threats are sleeplessly omnipresent?
(I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely having a hugely hard time wrapping my head around playing a D&D game in which the pace is relentless from 1st level to the upper tiers.)
Well, at the end of the day, short rests are entirely in the hands of a DM. Much like Inspiration mechanic. Yes, it's in the rules, it's codified, but nothing in the rules guarantees a consistent, predictable amount of short rests per day, and that can't be changed, that's story dependent. Having a significant part of your class power out of your control sucks.
and this is the thing. People AREN'T arguing this for warlock. They want the short rest thing to work, but not to need short rests outside of the normal short rest times. When the fighter needs his wounds bandaged because he is low and the like. Give the warlock enough resources that they ARENT begging for short rests outside the normal times it is taken, but still have the short rest recovery and you can have a unique class with unique abilities that doesn't slow down the adventuring day any more than someone casting detect magic ritual or bandaging the fighters wounds.
There's nothing wrong with either short rests or long rests. However, they really shouldn't be mixed unless you have have a strong means of enforcing the 'correct' ratio of rest types, and D&D just doesn't.
D&D could use ways of enforcing pacing, the current method causes problems that extend beyond spellcasting, but the solution One D&D seems to have decided on is eliminating short rest abilities. As such, killing off short rest spellcasting is expected.
First, a sincere thank you for this response. I get all of this, and it helps me get a grasp on where you're coming from.
My bottom line response is that they feel like time wasters to you. Which - fair! I've never experienced them that way and indeed, my warlock being able to regain all of their spells in an hour is viewed as a huge boon for the party, since every other caster has to wait 12+ hours or more (depending on where we are in the adventuring day) to get theirs back. Which means I'm in a better position to help fend off/defeat any baddies, planned or random, that come after us. I've never abused this and my DM has never felt the need to impose a hard limit on the # of rests because I don't abuse it.
To me, the need to rest doesn't feel like time wasted. It feels like an element of verisimilitude in the game. Even real life soldiers, even the elite ones, need to rest and take stock of the situation from time to time.
I'm not necessarily opposed to warlocks losing the short rest recharge but I am opposed to it in the context of this new build. Which I absolutely hate for multiple reasons.
Again complete aggrievance, this is why I had the fixing minor warlock issues thread. It was literally about saying half-caster warlock works with some tweaks mostly to invocations and was meant for ideas for that direction. It took me time, but I like this direction. I thank Yurie for the most recent post of taking a step back from hyperbole. When everyone is painting others with extreme brushes it misses the mark of either group and gets everyone no where.
The biggest issue with the half caster model: they delayed the warlocks spell progression to level 5 spells by 8 levels unless you spend your invocations on getting access to a spell earlier. But if I'm spending those invocations on one spell I can cast once per day that's just making the warlock a weak wizard not a warlock who's getting to pick things like eldritch sight or ghostly gaze or any of the things that flavored the class before.
Which is why we could make warlocks better by granting additional spell slots at 5th, 9th, and 13th level.
Let me tell you about long rests 8 whole hours where you are doing nothing when you could be doing something useful.
Because you're assuming the cause of an accelerated pace is imminent physical danger.
Let me give you an example.
In a two-plus year campaign we wrapped up earlier this year, we discovered partway through that cultists were infiltrating and violently murder-sacrificing entire towns to try and fuel a madman's apotheosis into a god-like figure. We used what resources we had to send word ahead to people who could communicate rapidly, and we started riding hard and pushing the pace of travel between towns trying to reach the next one before it was assailed by those cultists and turned into a bloody abattoir full of infectious living razor blood. Did hours matter in that sequence? I legitimately do not know, but I know days certainly did. We were racing against a clock to try and save a town, and because we pushed hard and managed to send out the warnings we did, a town that would've otherwise ended up in that whole Living Razor Blood mess managed to identify the infiltrating cultists and cut down the sacrifice spell before it started, preserving the lives of hundreds of townsfolk and giving us some massive leads on figuring out the cultists' objective for doing so.
If we had meandered for weeks and weeks instead? If we'd wandered around exploring random holes in the map, spent half the day resting instead of traveling, wandered off to do random sidequests, and all that shit? That town would be dead and full of razor blood and we would've had to work much harder to figure out where to go next. And it would have been squarely and uncontestably our own ass fault.
Was there always a ticking clock over our heads? No. But hey - we also never knew when the next ticking clock would show up while we were between clocks, so there wasn't a lot of time to spare for faffing around doing random jank junk. Making effective use of our time is one of the reasons we managed to successfully conclude that campaign and take down the BBEG. That and one of the party members transforming temporarily into a Super Shoggoth that dealt something like 15d10 damage a turn, but he only still had that capability because we were judicious and canny with our adventuring so mleghme. At no point was "I wanna sit around for half the day playing the ukulele, badly" a serious option. Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like. There was, in short, D&D to be played. Short resting means stopping the D&D for an hour while everybody faffs around and sits on their *****, and nobody wants to do that instead of playing D&D.
Please do not contact or message me.
So 7 at level 20 which with one short rest would match the current 14 1/2 caster model but they would all be level 5 spells. That could work, I still prefer a 5 minute ritual to regain slots once per day, maybe a 2nd time per day at 10th so the player can force a recharge with their own abilities. Still allow the short rests to do it, but at least 1 recharge in the players hands.
First, this sounds like a rad campaign!
Second: only armies of undead or constructs can move 24/7 without needing rest, food, and water. Even hyped-up cultists ready to drown the world in its own blood have to sleep and eat and poop. There's weather, geography, etc. I get the sense of urgency (and [this is sincere] I'm heartened that your adventurers are altruistic enough to want to save the world). Again: sometimes good guys and bad guys have to rest for a bit.
Third: honestly, this sounds like a campaign in which short rests would figure only very infrequently regardless. It sounds like there wasn't a preponderance of random encounters that resulted in combat (and spent resources), that you didn't have to worry about taking short rests because you could somewhat anticipate where and when the action would take place.
Fourth: not every campaign is like this. A lot of campaigns are basically faffing about, looking for the next ruin or mission or dragon. There might be only a loose over-arching plot due to DM laziness or table preference. The world may not be precipitously sliding to the literal Abyss but might be more humming along with its usual share of good and evil, overt and nuanced.
Fifth: when we take short breaks, that hour of game only takes a few minutes, at most, of real time.
Okay, that doesn't make sense for why you can't take a short rest but for some reason can take long rests where people faffs around and sits on their *****, but for 8 hours instead of one. If you are just running there and their are no encounters, you don't need either a short rest or a long one. If encounters occur along the way and the fighter is down hit points wouldn't one hour instead of 8 to patch him up be better as time is of the essence. Or do you just show up and watch the fighter get murdered in the first round of combat as patching people up is a waste of time. I'm pretty sure on a ship the warlock can watch the bare knuckle fights maybe bet on them and other light activity role playing and get a short rest on while others a fighting. Even if he is helping with sailing he can find a couple hours a day to take breaks. Sailors don;t work 24/7, they'd be dead from exhaustion if they tried to never take breaks. And you are stopping D&D for 2 minutes when you say hey lets take a short rest, spend your hit dice and recover resources. The game world stops for a hour, but if in a time crunch 1 hour is less than 8.
I’m well familiar with a ticking clock. I’ve used them as a DM, and I’ve played under them more times than I can count. Hell, I’m usually under one IRL quite a bit of the time too, and have been for much of my life. But sometimes ya just gotta take that short rest anyway. Sometimes ya just need a lunch break, and yeah that clock keeps on ticking, but sometimes ya just gotta let it tick. So the BBE’s plans progress for an hour while the party takes a siesta because the fighter, monk, and warlock need a breather. The campaign won’t suddenly go off into the stratosphere never to be seen again, the story will just be a little different than it would have been had the party not rested. That’s all. No real villagers would have died. You would have had to go find other different clues elsewhere, but ultimately you would have (likely) taken down the BBE anyway, and the campaign would have wrapped up anyway too. Things would have still happened, they woulda just happened a li’l differently is all. So when the warlock, fighter, or monk in your party asks to take a shorty to drop a 💩 and clear their head before proceeding, let ‘em, at least 1-2 times per day. The world won’t actually end. That’s not “half a day,” that’s a couple of hours tops. That’s okay.
Also, guess what. The BBE also needs to rest once in a while too. That’s right, the BBE needs to drop a 💩 from time to time too. They need to eat and sleep just like the PCs too. So it all comes out in a wash.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
See this isn't actually true. We have done the experiments and the math here. At level 5 you would have 1 mystic arcanum the 2 "pact invocations" of your pact that have been rolled into the pact + 2 other invocations at 7 you could have 2 mystic arcanums and still the other part and at 9 you would still ONLY need 2 mystic arcanums and gain another invocation because you are unlocking 3rd level spells naturally at this point making the previous mystic arcanum from a 3rd level spell to a 5th level spell allowing you to have 3 invocations + your 2 "pact" invocations giving you the exact same number of invocations at level 9 as normal and still unlocking those spell. At level 11 you gain another mystic arcanum, which normally you would. You miss out on an invocation at 12, at level 13 you get another mystic arcanum as normal, but you can now recoup the lost invocation at 12 as you trade your previous level 4 for another invocation since you have unlocked 4th level spells at this level. Level 15 you another mystic level 17 you unlock 5th levels and trade the old 5th for a 9nth and get an additional invocation. These higher levels you lose out on a total of 1 invocation, but you don't lose out on invocations or spell progression until level 12 if you are taking mystic arcanum.
CAN THIS WORK??? Eldritch Blast does 1D10 damage and has no Spell casting modifier added to its damage. Book Of Shadows you can add your Warlock spellcasting ability modifier to the damage rolls of any cantrip you cast (E. BLAST) that doesn’t already have that modifier added to its damage roll (+3 to +5). Agonizing Blast adds spell casting modifier to the damage rolls of E. Blast.... So. Does this make E. Blast do 1D10+6 to 1D10+10 damage. If so. I can live without casting HEX.
"Even during shipboard travel there was stuff to do, interactions to be had, bareknuckle brawls to participate in, and the like."
Sounds like downtime to me, I'm sure the fate of the world didn't hang on whether or not you won a random bareknuckle brawl while sitting on your a***** on a boat for a week doing random jank to put off boredom. Sure there are instances in a campaign where short rests are not used, but that's hardly the rule unless you're in a campaign with 1 encounter per day in which case nobody in the party ever needs a short rest either.
And BTW I would bet duckets to doughnuts that while you were picking over the cultist's bodies for clues on where to go next or talking to the townsfolk to learn where to go next there would have been time for some of the party to take a SR...
No, the whole point of the restriction in book of shadows is to prevent it from stacking.
There's an answer to your own question.