If you or you’re players are finding travel (exploration or long overland) boring or unchallenging you can add a bit of a sense of urgency or danger with a simple house rule.

You must take long rests and sleep, as normal, while traveling over long distances. However, you do not gain the other benefits of a long rest, like removal of a level of exhaustion, regaining lost hit points, regaining spent hit dice, or regain spent spell slots.

In spirit, this is to emulate how difficult it is to heal and feel totally refreshed while “on the road”. We see this when we travel in our real lives and in movies, books, stories, and shows, when characters say something like, “They’re stable. But we must get them to __________ soon or they won’t make it.”

I'm not sure you've thought this through.  How does a PC regain spell slots, HP, etc., without a long rest?  This really punishes the spell casting classes.

There are other rules that make getting HP and spells back a little more difficult you may wish to look into.

My real question is are you sure making travel a challenge to that degree is going to make your game more fun?

Have you tried multiple small encounters during the traveling day to cause your players not to burn all their spells at the first sign of trouble?

I'm not sure you've thought this through.  How does a PC regain spell slots, HP, etc., without a long rest?  This really punishes the spell casting classes.

Thanks for the feedback. They aren’t meant to regain spell slots and HP. That’s the whole point. If find many small encounters seem “tacked on” and boring. It maintains the “fire your big guns, then rest” style of play. Yes. You’re right. Long rest characters suffer from this house rule.

There are other rules that make getting HP and spells back a little more difficult you may wish to look into.

I’ll take the suggestion! Care to point me in the direction?

My real question is are you sure making travel a challenge to that degree is going to make your game more fun?

It has so far. Planning the travel became very important. Activities while traveling became very important. Each encounter becomes much more impactful. 

Have you tried multiple small encounters during the traveling day to cause your players not to burn all their spells at the first sign of trouble?

When using this house rule every hit to a party member has great impact. Even a lone bear can be a big deal. A single rockslide can be devastating. It makes the management of character resources very critical without having the party “randomly” encounter 3 beholders every day to exhaust their resources mechanically.  

I'm thankful you took these observations in the spirit in which they were offered.

I did a search on "Long rest" and the second page had a thread about this topic titled "Alternative healing to Long rest" or something near that.  The discussion mentions something titled "Gritty Realism", which I believe is an alternate homebrew set of rules to address the same issue.

At some point everyone needs a standard way to regain HP, spell slots, and other limited resources (Bardic Inspiration, Paladins Healing Points, ...).  So how often do you think you should factor that in?  In AD&D, we rolled one Hit-Die at the end of every day (or first thing in the morning) and added that number of hit points back into our pool, and all "Spell Slots" were refilled.  This took a long time to recover from any serious combat and the DMs of that era were not averse to throwing one or two "wandering monsters" at us each day, even on travel periods, so you were always under strength in HP somewhere in the party.  We used a lot more healing magic back then, and we spent a lot of treasure on healing potions.

I think I could enjoy a "gritty travel" flavor, but I am pretty certain I am not in the mainstream on this.  But I also enjoy regular camping, so discussing camping would be fun.  It wouldn't take long for that to become, "... and we set up camp like before."  Likewise, I know several tricks for setting up "early warning devices" that would give us a little help protecting ourselves in the wilderness during a long rest.  I think characters should have to remove their armor and sleep in nothing stronger than a gambeson (AC=+1) so if they were attacked during the night they could get a shield and have an AC of Gambeson+Shield+Dex (if they were proficient with shields).  A night time encounter would compromise their long rest, if I understand the RAW properly, because it would interrupt the long rest.  So the party would either lose a part of a day while they started their long rest period over again, or they would have to tough it out for a day having only the benefit of a short rest.  This would make my Bard Characters more important as support players providing Song of Rest.

Concerning the last bullet, I thought your crew might have a real problem if you instituted this approach, so I wanted to offer an alternative that would get the players to consider that burning all their spells on modest threats would be unwise.  Again, back in AD&D a low level caster had only one or two spell slots so they didn't use those spells in the first encounter of the day unless it looked essential.  So I think looking for methods to get the casters to hold back a little are understandable.

Just remember your players have to think it will be fun.  Good luck.

You bet! If I couldn't handle opinions, thoughts, suggestions, experiences, or criticism it would be my fault for posting on an open forum. LOL!

I like the Gritty Realism optional rule...

GRITTY REALISM
This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long
rest of 7 days. This puts the brakes on the campaign,
requiring the players to carefully judge the benefits
and drawbacks of combat. Characters can't afford to
engage in too many battles in a row, and all adventuring
requires careful planning.
This approach encourages the characters to
spend time out of the dungeon. It's a good option for
campaigns that emphasize intrigue, politics, and
interactions among other NPCs, and in which combat is
rare or something to be avoided rather than rushed into.

 ...but my goal is to pinpoint this kind of rest feature only while traveling. You are right, this kind of "tempo" in a game is not for everyone. I'll bet it's for very few players. I happen to be one that enjoys this kind of play. As a side note along with this, I don't use random encounters, per say. I come up with encounters, hopefully that have meaning, interesting elements, or even story points for a main plot or side plot. Characters can still not find these, ignore these, or bypass them, but I avoid rolling again and again on random encounter tables and throwing a lot of little combats in randomly.

Have you used any of these at your table in 5E?! It sounds like maybe, or maybe suggested it but it was voted down.

I'm in my second game of 5e (while the first one is also going on at another table).  In the first game, the other players wouldn't allow the game to slow down.  They want to gain levels, earn gold and find epic magical items.

The second game is slow paced.  This DM likes to record what day of the month it is, because he says he is incorporating what happens in this game into the peripheral events in his other games.  I'm just not that talented or engaged to track multiple games together.

Given the fairly good rolls we have had, I think we could have used the Gritty Realism rules without much difference in the second game.  Most of the combat happened when we went looking for it, not while we traveled from one place to another, although I can specifically recall two combats that happened on the road; one with bandits and one with giant spiders and some crazy wizard.

The idea would be to not travel for a day, barely escape an avalanche, sleep, be fully restored, travel some more, fight a pack of wolves, sleep, be fully restored, repeat, repeat, repeat.

It's not meant to slow down the game, not even the travel part. It's meant to make travel dangerous, interesting, narrative, and dramatic without the DM having to throw an entire "adventuring day" at the party each day.

Hello!  I really like this idea.  I've been trying to wrap my head around a rest system that could actually demonstrate that travel is dangerous (at least for lower tier characters), and that it's not like going on a cruise OR overly abstract.  I've played in a lot of games over the past 5 years and have never liked that we get to recoup all our strength before entering the dungeon (or worse, take a long rest INSIDE an occupied dungeon!); this looks like a reasonable solve.

Maybe one augmentation: you can do the 'travel long rest', and while it won't count as a real long rest, you can roll any hit dice you'd like to spend with advantage at the end of it.

I figure this + some local-specific random encounter tables for the road could help you add some nice upfront experience, keep the sense of risk alive, and even potentially foreshadow what's coming.

I'd be curious to know how well this is received at the table!  I plan on using it, but I won't be up to DM for at least another year in my local group ;)

Thanks for sharing.

I did a similar thing in my game when the party was sailing on a ship between islands. Each island-hop took several days, and I wanted to throw in a few encounters. Of course one encounter a day is typically a blowout as the party unloads everything, and multiple encounters each travel day tends to get in the way of the story and have players asking "what exactly was it that we were doing again?"

So I just said they can't gain the benefits of a long rest while on the ship, and each leg of the trip basically equated to a "full day of adventuring" in mechanical terms.

I thought it worked out really well. It made the party motivated to check out each island so they could secure a place to rest, and it allowed me to challenge them a bit with resource attrition without completely sidelining the primary goals of the party for several sessions. It also made PC choices regarding detours or obstacles a lot more impactful.

One thing to note - several magic items recharge at dawn. It felt wrong to prevent those too, and consequently the couple rechargeable items the party had felt quite a bit more powerful in this situation.

At any rate, I was happy with how it turned out and will probably use something like this going forward when the party needs to travel long distances.

Thanks for sharing -- this sounds promising to me!  I think it is fair for the dawn items to recharge, and honestly, based on how you describe it, it sounds like those particular items are far more appreciated.

One question -- did you allow hit dice to regenerate along the way?

Thanks again.

I did not. A weeklong trip with four encounters along the way was meant to challenge the party in the same way a single day with four encounters would.

Makes sense.  Thanks!