I'd even go so far as to argue that spellcasting should go the opposite way; currently spellcasters get two additional slots when they gain most new spell levels, but really they should just get one for fewer in total, with short rest recovery (and Wizards/Land Druids recovering more) so everyone's resources are a bit more similar in rest dependence, because when everyone needs short rests a group is more likely to take them, or at least be in the same situation when they choose not to.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Whatever the UA5 packet gave to the Warlock is irrelevant; it took away full casting progression. Sure, we get spell slots, and we can cast more spells per day total (other than at levels 1-4, I guess), but halving the progression is too much; spells become much less versatile (higher level spells too far away), and less impactful (lower level spells). It doesn't take a genius to figure out why nobody liked that.
This warlock was balanced in a way that only 1 short rest is needed to keep up with other full casters. In addition many classes are getting something they recover on a short rest. If your table is not taking at least 1 short rest then one of three things is happening. 1 you are only having one big combat per day, the system isn't really designed to handle that. 2 you aren't challenging your players enough for them to need to spend hit dice. Or 3 you have homebrewed an additional out of combat healing method that should have just been kept as a short rest so the game could function because out of combat mundane recovery is what a short rest is from a narrative and functional standpoint.
Honestly, if they weren't going to make Warlock's LR-based, they did the next best thing by giving everyone something back on a SR. (Well, except Rogues, but they' don't really need resources anyway.) I'm still annoyed by it but the new Warlock is at least a marginal improvement over 2014.
I really don't think we'll be seeing a new version of hexblade; it was always more a patch to pact of the blade than a patron, and I say this as somebody who's made my version of the hexblade patron a significant element of my game. (I did have to rebuild the patron from scratch to make it fit into a non-FR game, which is another reason I don't expect to see it again.)
I hope we do, because Xanathar's is officially legal for OneD&D (alongside Tasha's) so Hexblade is in the game. Errataing it and modifying Blade Pact to remove some of that redundancy is their best option. (And frankly, Warlocks being able to grab the entire WM system for the low price of a single invocation is more than a bit silly.)
They do not look as good to me to play. They've lost anything resembling flavor. I understand it, but I don't like it and I feel it's a downgrade. The problems that warlock had before have not been fixed, and the MC problems that warlocks caused have not been fixed.
I disagree, they have way MORE flavor now. Instead of my subclass defining me at 1st and 2nd level, I have a dozen invocations to choose from to customize my Warlock. Say I'm working towards Fiend - an Imp can show up at level 2 with the instructions I need to contact Mephistopheles now. Or I'm working toward Undying and my level 1 character discovers in a moment of peril that they're able to tank an ogre's greatclub with their face out of nowhere. Or I wake up one day Matrix-style, knowing kung-fu how to use armor and shields due to getting some First One Lessons in a vivid dream.
Warlocks are so much more customizable at levels 1 and 2 now, and the subclass feels like a culmination or the icing on the cake instead of the totality of my character in Tier 1.
Something to note about celestial healing is the new first level feat system. Taking magic initiate for spells from either cleric or druid or bard can get you a first level healing spell. Combine this with pact of the tome giving you an extra first level spell slot + the buffs to healing spells in general and at first level the new warlock is better at healing then the current celestial warlock at level 1. And if you don't want pact of the tome, 2d4+cha from healing word is still better than 2d6. Dont want to take magic initiate as your first level feat. Lessons of the first ones exist.
I truly believe the warlock benefits more from the system changes than any other caster.
Agreed, and this is a great point. Lessons of the First Ones -> Magic Initiate (or insert-other-level-1-feat-that-gives-free-castings-here) can really help the Warlock's ammunition at critical points in their career. Hopefully the Tasha's feature to swap out or invocations will still be accessible in One.
Whatever the UA5 packet gave to the Warlock is irrelevant; it took away full casting progression. Sure, we get spell slots, and we can cast more spells per day total (other than at levels 1-4, I guess), but halving the progression is too much; spells become much less versatile (higher level spells too far away), and less impactful (lower level spells). It doesn't take a genius to figure out why nobody liked that.
They didn't take it away though, they buried it in the Mystic Arcanum system. That presentation was an awful choice and they quickly learned why.
Had the MA been clearly visible on the right-hand side of the table, and weren't an Invocation tax, I have a feeling the new Warlock wouldn't have been ripped apart as much.
Whatever the UA5 packet gave to the Warlock is irrelevant; it took away full casting progression. Sure, we get spell slots, and we can cast more spells per day total (other than at levels 1-4, I guess), but halving the progression is too much; spells become much less versatile (higher level spells too far away), and less impactful (lower level spells). It doesn't take a genius to figure out why nobody liked that.
They didn't take it away though, they buried it in the Mystic Arcanum system. That presentation was an awful choice and they quickly learned why.
Had the MA been clearly visible on the right-hand side of the table, and weren't an Invocation tax, I have a feeling the new Warlock wouldn't have been ripped apart as much.
They buried it, meaning all the gains from extra invocations are lost because you need to spend them on MAs, and then these MAs for spells of level 3and 4 never ever get to scale up, and you only get the one per long rest... Weak and insulting trade-off. Even without invocation tax, "these never ever scale and you only get the one" felt like eugh. Just as an example, melee warlocks went from "I have a shield, can attack twice per attack action, and have haste ready for each fight on level five" to "I get haste once, maybe more on level 9, I guess? But at least Charisma for attacks is baked in now." Fireball went from "2 nearly every fight" to "1 per day, scaled never".
E.g. my vision of a SR/LR-recharge spell progression would be:
Level 1 : 1x 1st | recharge 1 ss level / SR Level 2: 2x 1st | recharge 1 ss level / SR Level 3: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd | recharge 2 ss level / SR Level 4: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd | recharge 2 ss level / SR Level 5: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd, 1x 3rd | recharge 3 ss level /SR Level 6: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd | recharge 3 ss level / SR Level 7: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd, 1x 4th | recharge 4 ss level / SR Level 8: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 1x 4th | recharge 4 ss level / SR Level 9: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 1x 4th, 1x 5th | recharge 5 ss level / SR Level 10: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th | recharge 5 ss level / SR Level 11: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th | recharge 6 ss level / SR Level 12: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th | recharge 6 ss level / SR Level 13: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th, 1 x 7th | recharge 7 ss level / SR Level 14: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th, 1 x 7th | recharge 7 ss level / SR ... ... You get the picture. Wizards & Land Druids could have their recovery feature instead be 1 use of the SR recovery that costs only 1 minute to do.
I like the progression, maybe at level 4 I would have him gain a 3rd level 1st slot, and have him regress again to 2 slots at level 11 as the cost of getting a 6th level slot (AND/OR decrease a space of that 1st level, upon reaching 18 if at that level the 2nd space of the 5th level is obtained, leaving 1-2 spaces of the 1st level for the fullcasters.). There are already several Feats that grant launch at 1st level, so this one having a cap at 3 wouldn't seem strange to me. And if you lose that 3rd 1st level slot from level 11, in characters with more than 10 levels you will see that 1/3 and a half spellcasters will have one more 1st level slot than full casters.
I wouldn't give Wizards & Land Druids a 1 minute SR cooldown, but instead would increase that cooldown to 3/4 of the class level (rounded up): [or if the recharge to the spell slots is 1/4 of the level, and 1/2 for those 2 exemptions, since 1/2 for all may be too much.]
Level 2 : recharge 2 ss level / SR Level 3 : recharge 3 ss level / SR Level 4 : recharge 3 ss level / SR Level 5 : recharge 4 ss level / SR Level 6 : recharge 5 ss level / SR Level 7 : recharge 6 ss level / SR Level 8 : recharge 6 ss level / SR Level 9 : recharge 7 ss level / SR Level 10 : recharge 8 ss level / SR Level 11 : recharge 9 ss level / SR Level 12 : recharge 9 ss level / SR Level 13 : recharge 10 ss level / SR Level 14 : recharge 11 ss level / SR Level 15 : recharge 12 ss level / SR Level 16 : recharge 12 ss level / SR Level 17 : recharge 13 ss level / SR Level 18 : recharge 14 ss level / SR Level 19 : recharge 15 ss level / SR Level 20 : recharge 15 ss level / SR
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out.
I don't think anybody's suggesting all casters become warlocks; but there has to be some middleground, because the current situation is that if you don't get enough short rests then the game sucks worse for some classes than others. It either needs to suck less for them, suck more for the others, or something in between which is what I expect most people suggesting changes actually want.
Warlocks having more resources but still getting some back on short rests means they're not as crippled when they don't get any (or enough), while other casters having fewer resources but getting some back on short rests mean they actually see more tangible benefits to short resting when they can. It's about evening things out a bit so everyone benefits or suffers more in common by taking more or less short rests, rather than some being penalised hard while others barely notice.
5e being setup such that Monks and Warlocks are completely crippled by a lack of short rests is exactly why changes were needed, but what they've done isn't really a proper solution as a once per day refresh still doesn't really even things out. It means you can give yourself a free short rest (or short rest-like) when nobody else wants one, which certainly makes it less bad, but the core problem is still there, the tipping point where you're starting to suffer for lack of short rests is now just somewhere else.
I had a pretty mixed opinion of the earlier Warlock UA being a half-caster, but while it wasn't my preferred solution I could see it being workable, but it seems that feedback was so overwhelmingly negative they didn't even consider trying to fix it (you'd think they'd have at least given it a go, Mystic Arcanum was really the most major problem with it, aside from a lot of other minor tweaks). It would have "solved" the Warlock slot issue in a way, though not my preferred one (I prefer for them to feel more unique, but that doesn't mean they have to go right back to being short rest bound, especially when we're still really only talking about two spell slots for most of a campaign, though at least they have some more free use stuff now). But if they'd stuck with it I bet it could have been made a lot better.
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I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I really think the invocation at level 1 thing combined with first level feats gives warlocks ample decision points right at one.
Miss the temp Hp of fiend... fiendish vigor and/or toughness exist. Want some charming, friends was changed to work much better, misty visions, mask of many faces and this isn't talking level 1 feats yet. Hexblade, take pact of the blade, hexblade felt like a bandaid to bladelock to begin with. Genie, take lucky or something that communicates the genie bending reality for you.
I enjoyed the playtest 5 warlock as well, but 7 is also a big improvement and has a lot going for it.
The big thing that diminishes the multiclassing is that all the "good feats" got changed to half feats and all the combat feats and strength or dex. So it is less important and less beneficial to use charisma on all attacks outside of full warlock with the exception of maybe bard, another full caster. So while nothing in the class changed to prevent it base system changes made it much less needed.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
Narratively it doesn’t make any more sense for Warlocks to not “officially” make their Pact until 3rd level than it does for Clerics to not “officially” have their Domain until then; both classes are strongly if not wholly defined by sourcing their magic from a particular being, and the “you’re working up to it” argument doesn’t really hold up for the same reason that Fighters aren’t treated as squires for their first two levels, Bards aren’t still considered apprentices, etc. Level 1 in a class is supposed to be a fully fledged character in all of the truly basic/core components of the class, which is why you pick all of your skills and get all of your other profs out of the gate. Now, mechanically I understand it can frontload the features too much, although the current Pact of the Blade format still leaves one of the biggest reasons to dip Warlock nearly unchanged.
Regarding Short Rests, imo part of the problem is honestly that people take “there’s no right way to play D&D” a little too far. As much as the game is freeform- which is definitely a positive- it’s still a hard RPG and therefore built around certain assumptions and checks and balances. One of those is that sequences of multiple encounters per Long Rest will be broken up by one or more Short Rests. This is not a fundamentally unreasonable assumption for game design; most video games use the same principle, particularly before a major fight. That short rests exist and are expected to be utilized at least once during most multi-encounter days is not a flaw. Now, the degree to which Monks and Warlocks can be handicapped without any Short Rests has proven to be a flaw, but the secondary refresh features are doing a lot to address that. That said, at least 1 Short Rest in a typical 3+ encounter day is not an unreasonable or unworkable baseline assumption for game design and balance purposes. Game features exist to be used, and if either of the table is choosing not to utilize them, then it’s not surprising if some elements of play start to break down.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
I would say it’s more a question of the encounters to rests ratio; 1 SR is a good patch sometime during a day of 3-4 reasonable encounters, but if you’re putting together a gauntlet that more closely resembles a FromSoft dungeon, there’s a certain point where you do need to start allowing more breaks or you’ll have more than just Monks and Warlocks running out of gas, particularly if are building up to a major fight. Just saying “needing more than 1 SR a day is bad” is simply too reductive when we’re talking about a sandbox system like D&D where the number of encounters per day is not a fixed component.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
I would say it’s more a question of the encounters to rests ratio; 1 SR is a good patch sometime during a day of 3-4 reasonable encounters, but if you’re putting together a gauntlet that more closely resembles a FromSoft dungeon, there’s a certain point where you do need to start allowing more breaks or you’ll have more than just Monks and Warlocks running out of gas, particularly if are building up to a major fight. Just saying “needing more than 1 SR a day is bad” is simply too reductive when we’re talking about a sandbox system like D&D where the number of encounters per day is not a fixed component.
I meant from a design perspective. Expecting EVERY table to have more than 1 short rest per day is bad because that doesn't cover the differences in play. There is a reason there isn't a hard limit of number of rests allowed per day. And that is good design too. Because exactly as you said.
Expecting at least 1 rest per day is reasonable and good design. Allowing for more is also reasonable and good design.
They buried it, meaning all the gains from extra invocations are lost because you need to spend them on MAs, and then these MAs for spells of level 3 and 4 never ever get to scale up, and you only get the one per long rest... Weak and insulting trade-off. Even without invocation tax, "these never ever scale and you only get the one" felt like eugh. Just as an example, melee warlocks went from "I have a shield, can attack twice per attack action, and have haste ready for each fight on level five" to "I get haste once, maybe more on level 9, I guess? But at least Charisma for attacks is baked in now." Fireball went from "2 nearly every fight" to "1 per day, scaled never".
You're preaching to the choir - tying casting progression to MAs which were tied to invocations was doomed to fail with the community, no argument here.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
I agree that Short Rests remaining an expectation rather than a nice to have is bad design, but the community shouted it down so here we are.
If they're going to be an expectation, more reasons for the rest of the party to benefit from them is the next best thing we can hope for.
Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
I would say it’s more a question of the encounters to rests ratio; 1 SR is a good patch sometime during a day of 3-4 reasonable encounters, but if you’re putting together a gauntlet that more closely resembles a FromSoft dungeon, there’s a certain point where you do need to start allowing more breaks or you’ll have more than just Monks and Warlocks running out of gas, particularly if are building up to a major fight. Just saying “needing more than 1 SR a day is bad” is simply too reductive when we’re talking about a sandbox system like D&D where the number of encounters per day is not a fixed component.
yes, the SR system is supposed to be need based.
SR and encounters are basically designed such that when the party needs a short rest, they can probably take it.
if you are purposefully removing their ability to SR, thats supposed to be accounted for in your design.
This is from the encounter design guidelines;
Sometimes an encounter features multiple enemies that the party doesn’t face all at once. For example, monsters might come at the party in waves. For such encounters, treat each discrete part or wave as a separate encounter for the purpose of determining its difficulty.
A party can’t benefit from a short rest between parts of a multipart encounter, so they won’t be able to spend Hit Dice to regain hit points or recover any abilities that require a short rest to regain. As a rule, if the adjusted XP value for the monsters in a multipart encounter is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day (see “The Adventuring Day,” below), the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts.
the point being, they literally assume in general after an encounter, players can SR if needed. If people fight a deadly fight, they will probably need to SR after, if they fight an easy fight, they may be able to go 4 easy encounters. Its not a hard and fast number, its supposed to be, you made it out that fight, are your resources good enough to continue? or do you need a rest.
And it makes sense. If you run a mile, and need to catch your breath, you catch your breath, if you can keep running, you keep running.
SR abilities are designed such that it fine if they have them in an encounter.
Hit DIce are designed such that you have a finite amount per day, essentially you can recover 100% of your hp roughly per day via SR.
Mechanically, If people SR after every encounter, the encounters will still be fair. Most groups won't need to, if you are giving them normal encounters, because they don't drain much resources.
Its just most people's expectation is based on narrative fiction. Medieval soldiers would be resting for an hour after a few 2 minute bursts of action.
Narratively it doesn’t make any more sense for Warlocks to not “officially” make their Pact until 3rd level than it does for Clerics to not “officially” have their Domain until then; both classes are strongly if not wholly defined by sourcing their magic from a particular being, and the “you’re working up to it” argument doesn’t really hold up for the same reason that Fighters aren’t treated as squires for their first two levels, Bards aren’t still considered apprentices, etc. Level 1 in a class is supposed to be a fully fledged character in all of the truly basic/core components of the class, which is why you pick all of your skills and get all of your other profs out of the gate. Now, mechanically I understand it can frontload the features too much, although the current Pact of the Blade format still leaves one of the biggest reasons to dip Warlock nearly unchanged.
I think their justification was that for new players it means they don't need to choose yet; and to be fair, how many experienced groups start at 1st-level? I haven't started that low a level in years, the only exception was to start a Strixhaven campaign as it felt appropriate to start out "from nothing" for a school adventure. But other than that most campaigns have started at 3rd-level, and we're tempted to start from 5th-level in future because all too often we've felt like we're just waiting for that 5th-level bump.
1st-level is great for learning the game as you've got fewer features to remember etc., but it's pretty restrictive of the types of characters you can play from the outset when you're all a bit weak and hopeless.
Again though it's a design issue; if they'd thought about this more during 5e's development they would have had everyone pick sub-class at 1st-level and designed classes around that, i.e- your 1st-level is proficiencies, sub-class feature and maybe spellcasting. But it's too late to do that and standardising around 3rd makes more sense since 1st- and 2nd-level sub-classes were the outliers.
Personally for pacts/domains I take that to mean you just haven't started to receive the full benefits; nothing prevents you from declaring who your patron/deity is before you've picked the appropriate sub-class after all, it just means you've not got anything unique to them mechanically yet. Also for Warlocks in particular, they usually start somewhere so you could just as easily roleplay the first two levels as being them as just some form of magic user prior to making the pact in exchange for greater powers.
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the point being, they literally assume in general after an encounter, players can SR if needed. If people fight a deadly fight, they will probably need to SR after, if they fight an easy fight, they may be able to go 4 easy encounters. Its not a hard and fast number, its supposed to be, you made it out that fight, are your resources good enough to continue? or do you need a rest.
And it makes sense. If you run a mile, and need to catch your breath, you catch your breath, if you can keep running, you keep running.
You're definitely not supposed to get a SR after every encounter. The expected encounter design was 6-8 per day, and only 2 short rests per day, so some encounters are happening back to back.
Narratively it doesn’t make any more sense for Warlocks to not “officially” make their Pact until 3rd level than it does for Clerics to not “officially” have their Domain until then; both classes are strongly if not wholly defined by sourcing their magic from a particular being, and the “you’re working up to it” argument doesn’t really hold up for the same reason that Fighters aren’t treated as squires for their first two levels, Bards aren’t still considered apprentices, etc. Level 1 in a class is supposed to be a fully fledged character in all of the truly basic/core components of the class, which is why you pick all of your skills and get all of your other profs out of the gate. Now, mechanically I understand it can frontload the features too much, although the current Pact of the Blade format still leaves one of the biggest reasons to dip Warlock nearly unchanged.
I think their justification was that for new players it means they don't need to choose yet; and to be fair, how many experienced groups start at 1st-level? I haven't started that low a level in years, the only exception was to start a Strixhaven campaign as it felt appropriate to start out "from nothing" for a school adventure. But other than that most campaigns have started at 3rd-level, and we're tempted to start from 5th-level in future because all too often we've felt like we're just waiting for that 5th-level bump.
1st-level is great for learning the game as you've got fewer features to remember etc., but it's pretty restrictive of the types of characters you can play.
Again though it's a design issue; if they'd thought about this more during 5e's development they would have had everyone pick sub-class at 1st-level and designed classes around that, i.e- your 1st-level is proficiencies, sub-class feature and maybe spellcasting. But it's too late to do that and standardising around 3rd makes more sense since 1st- and 2nd-level sub-classes were the outliers.
Personally for pacts/domains I take that to mean you just haven't started to receive the full benefits; nothing prevents you from declaring who your patron/deity is before you've picked the appropriate sub-class after all, it just means you've not got anything unique to them mechanically yet.
Dont forget that paladins get their power from their oath but haven't gotten that at level 1 for 10 years. This delay for warlocks and clerics is new for them not the game.
Narratively it doesn’t make any more sense for Warlocks to not “officially” make their Pact until 3rd level than it does for Clerics to not “officially” have their Domain until then; both classes are strongly if not wholly defined by sourcing their magic from a particular being, and the “you’re working up to it” argument doesn’t really hold up for the same reason that Fighters aren’t treated as squires for their first two levels, Bards aren’t still considered apprentices, etc. Level 1 in a class is supposed to be a fully fledged character in all of the truly basic/core components of the class, which is why you pick all of your skills and get all of your other profs out of the gate. Now, mechanically I understand it can frontload the features too much, although the current Pact of the Blade format still leaves one of the biggest reasons to dip Warlock nearly unchanged.
I think their justification was that for new players it means they don't need to choose yet; and to be fair, how many experienced groups start at 1st-level? I haven't started that low a level in years, the only exception was to start a Strixhaven campaign as it felt appropriate to start out "from nothing" for a school adventure. But other than that most campaigns have started at 3rd-level, and we're tempted to start from 5th-level in future because all too often we've felt like we're just waiting for that 5th-level bump.
1st-level is great for learning the game as you've got fewer features to remember etc., but it's pretty restrictive of the types of characters you can play.
Again though it's a design issue; if they'd thought about this more during 5e's development they would have had everyone pick sub-class at 1st-level and designed classes around that, i.e- your 1st-level is proficiencies, sub-class feature and maybe spellcasting. But it's too late to do that and standardising around 3rd makes more sense since 1st- and 2nd-level sub-classes were the outliers.
Personally for pacts/domains I take that to mean you just haven't started to receive the full benefits; nothing prevents you from declaring who your patron/deity is before you've picked the appropriate sub-class after all, it just means you've not got anything unique to them mechanically yet.
Dont forget that paladins get their power from their oath but haven't gotten that at level 1 for 10 years. This delay for warlocks and clerics is new for them not the game.
Oaths have some wiggle room, like Druid Circles; they’re more philosophical than directly representative of discrete beings, whereas a Warlock or Cleric is supposed to be very closely tied to their patron/deity as the direct source of their powers. I understand the mechanical reasoning behind the decision, but it bugs me some.
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Building the game around SR recovery also would reduce the power imbalance when some tables choose to only have 1 fight per day, since LR-recharge features are generally given 3x more uses than SR-recharge features which means they are disproportionately powerful when they don't have to be spread across multiple combats.
But building the game around SR-recharge would require massive decrease in spellslots which would mean the full-caster lovers would riot.
E.g. my vision of a SR/LR-recharge spell progression would be:
Level 1 : 1x 1st | recharge 1 ss level / SR
Level 2: 2x 1st | recharge 1 ss level / SR
Level 3: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd | recharge 2 ss level / SR
Level 4: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd | recharge 2 ss level / SR
Level 5: 2x 1st, 1x 2nd, 1x 3rd | recharge 3 ss level /SR
Level 6: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd | recharge 3 ss level / SR
Level 7: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd, 1x 4th | recharge 4 ss level / SR
Level 8: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 1x 4th | recharge 4 ss level / SR
Level 9: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 1x 4th, 1x 5th | recharge 5 ss level / SR
Level 10: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th | recharge 5 ss level / SR
Level 11: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th | recharge 6 ss level / SR
Level 12: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th | recharge 6 ss level / SR
Level 13: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th, 1 x 7th | recharge 7 ss level / SR
Level 14: 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 2x 3rd, 2x 4th, 1x 5th, 1 x 6th, 1 x 7th | recharge 7 ss level / SR
...
...
You get the picture. Wizards & Land Druids could have their recovery feature instead be 1 use of the SR recovery that costs only 1 minute to do.
Whatever the UA5 packet gave to the Warlock is irrelevant; it took away full casting progression. Sure, we get spell slots, and we can cast more spells per day total (other than at levels 1-4, I guess), but halving the progression is too much; spells become much less versatile (higher level spells too far away), and less impactful (lower level spells). It doesn't take a genius to figure out why nobody liked that.
Honestly, if they weren't going to make Warlock's LR-based, they did the next best thing by giving everyone something back on a SR. (Well, except Rogues, but they' don't really need resources anyway.) I'm still annoyed by it but the new Warlock is at least a marginal improvement over 2014.
I hope we do, because Xanathar's is officially legal for OneD&D (alongside Tasha's) so Hexblade is in the game. Errataing it and modifying Blade Pact to remove some of that redundancy is their best option. (And frankly, Warlocks being able to grab the entire WM system for the low price of a single invocation is more than a bit silly.)
I disagree, they have way MORE flavor now. Instead of my subclass defining me at 1st and 2nd level, I have a dozen invocations to choose from to customize my Warlock. Say I'm working towards Fiend - an Imp can show up at level 2 with the instructions I need to contact Mephistopheles now. Or I'm working toward Undying and my level 1 character discovers in a moment of peril that they're able to tank an ogre's greatclub with their face out of nowhere. Or I wake up one day Matrix-style, knowing
kung-fuhow to use armor and shields due to getting some First One Lessons in a vivid dream.Warlocks are so much more customizable at levels 1 and 2 now, and the subclass feels like a culmination or the icing on the cake instead of the totality of my character in Tier 1.
Agreed, and this is a great point. Lessons of the First Ones -> Magic Initiate (or insert-other-level-1-feat-that-gives-free-castings-here) can really help the Warlock's ammunition at critical points in their career. Hopefully the Tasha's feature to swap out or invocations will still be accessible in One.
They didn't take it away though, they buried it in the Mystic Arcanum system. That presentation was an awful choice and they quickly learned why.
Had the MA been clearly visible on the right-hand side of the table, and weren't an Invocation tax, I have a feeling the new Warlock wouldn't have been ripped apart as much.
They buried it, meaning all the gains from extra invocations are lost because you need to spend them on MAs, and then these MAs for spells of level 3and 4 never ever get to scale up, and you only get the one per long rest... Weak and insulting trade-off. Even without invocation tax, "these never ever scale and you only get the one" felt like eugh. Just as an example, melee warlocks went from "I have a shield, can attack twice per attack action, and have haste ready for each fight on level five" to "I get haste once, maybe more on level 9, I guess? But at least Charisma for attacks is baked in now." Fireball went from "2 nearly every fight" to "1 per day, scaled never".
I like the progression, maybe at level 4 I would have him gain a 3rd level 1st slot, and have him regress again to 2 slots at level 11 as the cost of getting a 6th level slot (AND/OR decrease a space of that 1st level, upon reaching 18 if at that level the 2nd space of the 5th level is obtained, leaving 1-2 spaces of the 1st level for the fullcasters.). There are already several Feats that grant launch at 1st level, so this one having a cap at 3 wouldn't seem strange to me. And if you lose that 3rd 1st level slot from level 11, in characters with more than 10 levels you will see that 1/3 and a half spellcasters will have one more 1st level slot than full casters.
I wouldn't give Wizards & Land Druids a 1 minute SR cooldown, but instead would increase that cooldown to 3/4 of the class level (rounded up): [
or if the recharge to the spell slots is 1/4 of the level, and 1/2 for those 2 exemptions, since 1/2 for all may be too much.]Level 2 : recharge 2 ss level / SR
Level 3 : recharge 3 ss level / SR
Level 4 : recharge 3 ss level / SR
Level 5 : recharge 4 ss level / SR
Level 6 : recharge 5 ss level / SR
Level 7 : recharge 6 ss level / SR
Level 8 : recharge 6 ss level / SR
Level 9 : recharge 7 ss level / SR
Level 10 : recharge 8 ss level / SR
Level 11 : recharge 9 ss level / SR
Level 12 : recharge 9 ss level / SR
Level 13 : recharge 10 ss level / SR
Level 14 : recharge 11 ss level / SR
Level 15 : recharge 12 ss level / SR
Level 16 : recharge 12 ss level / SR
Level 17 : recharge 13 ss level / SR
Level 18 : recharge 14 ss level / SR
Level 19 : recharge 15 ss level / SR
Level 20 : recharge 15 ss level / SR
Since we're rehashing the whole "everyone who doesn't use short rests is an ape" thing (god, aren't we sick of that already?), I'll just say this.
No amount of rules fiddling is going to make short rests feel good to some players. Players who avoid short rests have many possible reasons for doing so, and only a few of them can be partially ameliorated by rules fiddling. Some players don't like the narrative weirdness inherent to never having any trouble finding a spare hour to sit around and count dice no matter what, even in the deepest depths of an enemy stronghold. Some players don't like the above-table bookkeeping involved in short rests. And some players simply don't like feeling like their character can't handle even the most minor of Adventuring Exertions without wheezing into their bandana for a short rest.
Turning every single caster into the warlock wouldn't make people upset because of the loss in power, however the recharge math works out. It would make people upset because short rests are no god damned fun, and constantly having to interrupt your Adventuring Day to spend ten minutes counting dice sucks. Especially with session times trending ever downwards - it's been over a year since I've played a four-hour session of D&D, two hours is almost always what I get if even that, and I've seen plenty of evidence I'm not alone in that.
It's just not something everybody wants to do, and continually trying to coerce people into doing it isn't going to work. It really doesn't matter how "attractive" you make short rests. For some players, the fundamental idea in and of itself is flawed, will always be flawed, can never be repaired, and will always be nothing but a frustration and a pain point in the game's design.
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I don't think anybody's suggesting all casters become warlocks; but there has to be some middleground, because the current situation is that if you don't get enough short rests then the game sucks worse for some classes than others. It either needs to suck less for them, suck more for the others, or something in between which is what I expect most people suggesting changes actually want.
Warlocks having more resources but still getting some back on short rests means they're not as crippled when they don't get any (or enough), while other casters having fewer resources but getting some back on short rests mean they actually see more tangible benefits to short resting when they can. It's about evening things out a bit so everyone benefits or suffers more in common by taking more or less short rests, rather than some being penalised hard while others barely notice.
5e being setup such that Monks and Warlocks are completely crippled by a lack of short rests is exactly why changes were needed, but what they've done isn't really a proper solution as a once per day refresh still doesn't really even things out. It means you can give yourself a free short rest (or short rest-like) when nobody else wants one, which certainly makes it less bad, but the core problem is still there, the tipping point where you're starting to suffer for lack of short rests is now just somewhere else.
I had a pretty mixed opinion of the earlier Warlock UA being a half-caster, but while it wasn't my preferred solution I could see it being workable, but it seems that feedback was so overwhelmingly negative they didn't even consider trying to fix it (you'd think they'd have at least given it a go, Mystic Arcanum was really the most major problem with it, aside from a lot of other minor tweaks). It would have "solved" the Warlock slot issue in a way, though not my preferred one (I prefer for them to feel more unique, but that doesn't mean they have to go right back to being short rest bound, especially when we're still really only talking about two spell slots for most of a campaign, though at least they have some more free use stuff now). But if they'd stuck with it I bet it could have been made a lot better.
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I really think the invocation at level 1 thing combined with first level feats gives warlocks ample decision points right at one.
Miss the temp Hp of fiend... fiendish vigor and/or toughness exist. Want some charming, friends was changed to work much better, misty visions, mask of many faces and this isn't talking level 1 feats yet. Hexblade, take pact of the blade, hexblade felt like a bandaid to bladelock to begin with. Genie, take lucky or something that communicates the genie bending reality for you.
I enjoyed the playtest 5 warlock as well, but 7 is also a big improvement and has a lot going for it.
The big thing that diminishes the multiclassing is that all the "good feats" got changed to half feats and all the combat feats and strength or dex. So it is less important and less beneficial to use charisma on all attacks outside of full warlock with the exception of maybe bard, another full caster. So while nothing in the class changed to prevent it base system changes made it much less needed.
As much as we have argued. I actually completely agree with you. It is why my standard is "can it function with just 1 short rest"? Because at some point during the adventuring day the entire party is going to need to catch their breath, eat some food, and bandage their wounds regardless of how long that takes in game, be it an hour or 10 minutes that you can only do once per hour. But we don't want it to be excessive or kill the pace or constantly stopping to roll hit dice and the like. Once is fine, expecting more than that is not going to work for enough tables to be a good system.
Narratively it doesn’t make any more sense for Warlocks to not “officially” make their Pact until 3rd level than it does for Clerics to not “officially” have their Domain until then; both classes are strongly if not wholly defined by sourcing their magic from a particular being, and the “you’re working up to it” argument doesn’t really hold up for the same reason that Fighters aren’t treated as squires for their first two levels, Bards aren’t still considered apprentices, etc. Level 1 in a class is supposed to be a fully fledged character in all of the truly basic/core components of the class, which is why you pick all of your skills and get all of your other profs out of the gate. Now, mechanically I understand it can frontload the features too much, although the current Pact of the Blade format still leaves one of the biggest reasons to dip Warlock nearly unchanged.
Regarding Short Rests, imo part of the problem is honestly that people take “there’s no right way to play D&D” a little too far. As much as the game is freeform- which is definitely a positive- it’s still a hard RPG and therefore built around certain assumptions and checks and balances. One of those is that sequences of multiple encounters per Long Rest will be broken up by one or more Short Rests. This is not a fundamentally unreasonable assumption for game design; most video games use the same principle, particularly before a major fight. That short rests exist and are expected to be utilized at least once during most multi-encounter days is not a flaw. Now, the degree to which Monks and Warlocks can be handicapped without any Short Rests has proven to be a flaw, but the secondary refresh features are doing a lot to address that. That said, at least 1 Short Rest in a typical 3+ encounter day is not an unreasonable or unworkable baseline assumption for game design and balance purposes. Game features exist to be used, and if either of the table is choosing not to utilize them, then it’s not surprising if some elements of play start to break down.
I would say it’s more a question of the encounters to rests ratio; 1 SR is a good patch sometime during a day of 3-4 reasonable encounters, but if you’re putting together a gauntlet that more closely resembles a FromSoft dungeon, there’s a certain point where you do need to start allowing more breaks or you’ll have more than just Monks and Warlocks running out of gas, particularly if are building up to a major fight. Just saying “needing more than 1 SR a day is bad” is simply too reductive when we’re talking about a sandbox system like D&D where the number of encounters per day is not a fixed component.
I meant from a design perspective. Expecting EVERY table to have more than 1 short rest per day is bad because that doesn't cover the differences in play. There is a reason there isn't a hard limit of number of rests allowed per day. And that is good design too. Because exactly as you said.
Expecting at least 1 rest per day is reasonable and good design. Allowing for more is also reasonable and good design.
You're preaching to the choir - tying casting progression to MAs which were tied to invocations was doomed to fail with the community, no argument here.
I agree that Short Rests remaining an expectation rather than a nice to have is bad design, but the community shouted it down so here we are.
If they're going to be an expectation, more reasons for the rest of the party to benefit from them is the next best thing we can hope for.
yes, the SR system is supposed to be need based.
SR and encounters are basically designed such that when the party needs a short rest, they can probably take it.
if you are purposefully removing their ability to SR, thats supposed to be accounted for in your design.
This is from the encounter design guidelines;
the point being, they literally assume in general after an encounter, players can SR if needed. If people fight a deadly fight, they will probably need to SR after, if they fight an easy fight, they may be able to go 4 easy encounters. Its not a hard and fast number, its supposed to be, you made it out that fight, are your resources good enough to continue? or do you need a rest.
And it makes sense. If you run a mile, and need to catch your breath, you catch your breath, if you can keep running, you keep running.
SR abilities are designed such that it fine if they have them in an encounter.
Hit DIce are designed such that you have a finite amount per day, essentially you can recover 100% of your hp roughly per day via SR.
Mechanically, If people SR after every encounter, the encounters will still be fair. Most groups won't need to, if you are giving them normal encounters, because they don't drain much resources.
Its just most people's expectation is based on narrative fiction. Medieval soldiers would be resting for an hour after a few 2 minute bursts of action.
I think their justification was that for new players it means they don't need to choose yet; and to be fair, how many experienced groups start at 1st-level? I haven't started that low a level in years, the only exception was to start a Strixhaven campaign as it felt appropriate to start out "from nothing" for a school adventure. But other than that most campaigns have started at 3rd-level, and we're tempted to start from 5th-level in future because all too often we've felt like we're just waiting for that 5th-level bump.
1st-level is great for learning the game as you've got fewer features to remember etc., but it's pretty restrictive of the types of characters you can play from the outset when you're all a bit weak and hopeless.
Again though it's a design issue; if they'd thought about this more during 5e's development they would have had everyone pick sub-class at 1st-level and designed classes around that, i.e- your 1st-level is proficiencies, sub-class feature and maybe spellcasting. But it's too late to do that and standardising around 3rd makes more sense since 1st- and 2nd-level sub-classes were the outliers.
Personally for pacts/domains I take that to mean you just haven't started to receive the full benefits; nothing prevents you from declaring who your patron/deity is before you've picked the appropriate sub-class after all, it just means you've not got anything unique to them mechanically yet. Also for Warlocks in particular, they usually start somewhere so you could just as easily roleplay the first two levels as being them as just some form of magic user prior to making the pact in exchange for greater powers.
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You're definitely not supposed to get a SR after every encounter. The expected encounter design was 6-8 per day, and only 2 short rests per day, so some encounters are happening back to back.
Dont forget that paladins get their power from their oath but haven't gotten that at level 1 for 10 years. This delay for warlocks and clerics is new for them not the game.
Oaths have some wiggle room, like Druid Circles; they’re more philosophical than directly representative of discrete beings, whereas a Warlock or Cleric is supposed to be very closely tied to their patron/deity as the direct source of their powers. I understand the mechanical reasoning behind the decision, but it bugs me some.