The primary problem is that dnd 5e was made to be a dungeon crawler, and most people play it like a narrative driven rules light game.
Pathfinder 2e does all of this far better, sadly it lacks the pop culture awareness of D&D.
What they don’t acknowledge is that the long rest problem is something of a self-inflicted wound.
No shit. Players don’t actually enjoy holding onto their powers all day. They want to use their cool powers.
Some small, vocal, minority of players really enjoy the resource management game. Most people want to do cool shit every turn, not use a hand crossbow or shoot a cantrip. Spells-per-day has sucked the entire time I’ve played D&D, which admittedly is only 3.0 onwards. It has always caused pacing problems.
Back when D&D 5e was being playtested, its early designs openly said that the recommended number of encounters between long rests was four - or as few as two if you throw some particularly challenging fights in there.
They fucked up changing that.
There are also many other ways powers and abilities could work that aren’t based on spells-per-day. D&D probably won’t adopt them. The population of people in the hobby also has a survivorship bias- most people enter through D&D, so the people who stick around are mostly people who find its quirks acceptable. Who knows how many players bounced off because they looked at this system and saw “I can cast my cool spells twice? That’s it?”
thinking back to ad&d and not being able to cast fireball because SOMEONE didn’t buy bat shit from the bat shit monger at the market
Some small, vocal, minority of players really enjoy the resource management game
Do they? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone defending it. At least not with the excessive amount of combat 5e assumes. 4e handled it much better, by making a very clear differentiation between powers you’re meant to use a limited number of times per encounter, ones you should only use in big combats, and the bread-and-butter powers that you can rely on all day. When all your powers are coming from the same single pool of resources that only refreshes daily, or at best with a significant 1 hour rest.
I don’t have any studies to back it up so I might be wrong. I wonder if anyone’s done any rigorous investigation into this. An old DND group never agreed with me when I’d bring up the topic, but they might have been more “it is what it is stop rocking the boat” than an active support for the concept.
I’m pretty sure if you went into a DND space and suggested rebalancing the game so it’s not resting on (pun intended) powers per day, you’d get a lof of push back. Maybe I’ll go post a poll somewhere later.
I’ve also met a few players who have somehow never considered any other way things could be. I had a friend in college I tried to get to play a world of darkness game. Powers in those games are either unlimited use, or bound by a renewable resource like blood. He was like “this sounds totally broken yo”.
I’m pretty sure if you went into a DND space and suggested rebalancing the game so it’s not resting on (pun intended) powers per day, you’d get a lof of push back
Back on /r/dndnext on Reddit, complaining about the “adventuring day” expectations of 5e was very commonplace. You wouldn’t often see people calling for a different paradigm, but you would almost never see people advocating for the exact way 5e does it.
Hm you’re right I do remember some of that.
I remember a lot of people calling for the “gritty realism” variant, which I feel like is just making the problem worse. If I recall that one changes long rests into a week (in a safe place) and short rest into a day.
I don’t think I ever saw anyone advocate for the heroic variant, that changes short rests to like a minute and long rests to an hour. That’s more like how players actually want to play, I think.
Neither of those actually change the core problem.
Personally I’d get rid of the whole per rest idea. Like, make wizard spells sequences- each round you channel more varied and powerful options open up. Sorcerer spells are risky, and if you flub the check you get a misfire. Warlocks spend stats to cast, and recover with a patron appropriate ritual. Just off the top of my head. There are so many more options than “check off the spell slot and the spell works”.
Your ideas are good ones for a game, but IMO not for D&D (or D&D-likes, such as my current preferred RPG of Pathfinder). Expendable resources is pretty core to the identity of D&D I think.
As I think I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, 4e does a much better job of the resource tracking than 5e, by specifically declaring which resources are daily and which are encounter, and allowing them to refresh automatically by encounter. Pathfinder 2e is also a lot better than D&D 5e, which its equivalent of a short rest being only 10 minutes, and with far, far fewer limited resources outside of spell slots (daily) and focus spells (10 minute).
Expendable resources is pretty core to the identity of D&D I think.
I think this is true to an extent.
For new players, or people who just know about D&D without playing it much, I don’t think spells-per-day would be in their list of core features. If I asked my non-rpg friends what they think is core to D&D, they’d probably say like “pretending to be an elf or dwarf”, “fantasy worlds with kings and dungeons and dragons”, and maybe “you roll a d20 and if it comes up 20 that’s a crit!”. Few to none of them would say “You can cast cool spells, but only twice and then you have to go to bed”. They likely expect a wizard to do wizardy stuff on the regular, which is contrary to D&D’s model of “a few times, and then you’re spent”. I really, truly, do not think spells-per-day is on a casual player’s wish list.
For more enthusiast players, probably. But as discussed, a lot of them don’t actually like it. There’s the posts on reddit trying to fix the issue are pretty common, as you said. There are some players who probably like D&D for what it is, rather than what they’re forcing it to be, but I don’t think they’re the majority.
And yet, for many of those players who don’t like this thing that is arguably core to D&D’s identity, they refuse to play another game. That’s what always drives me crazy. Like, if you want an easy narrative game, PbtA and Fate are just right there. PF2e I’m told is good if you want D&D but the rules work. But people keep playing D&D and keep having the same problems.
(Also people who take D&D and try to turn it into a modern day game about secret vampires doing political intrigue: I cannot be friends with them. Vampire is right there! come on!)
There is also a flip side to this, DMs that let their players rest too often.
If your players are using up all their resources on the first battle or two, don’t let them rest. You don’t have to destroy them, but give them one more battle when they’re low on resources.
Next time they’ll hopefully use their resources better. If not… Do it again.
As a DM if you’ve miscalculated, double that monsters HP. Or if you’re about to overrun them, cut it in half.
A common “solution” I see is throwing one really really big monster at the players. This can work, but has the downside of killing players in nearly one hit, which isn’t satisfying.
I don’t agree that the blame here rests on GMs “letting their players rest”. It’s a more fundamental issue with campaign styles not meshing with the way the system is designed. (Or more to the point: the system not being designed to be optimal for the style of campaign that the majority of the audience wants to play.) “Don’t let them rest…give them one more battle” is not advice that works well very often in a strongly narratively-driven game where GMs generally avoid excessive random encounters.
There is also a flip side to this, DMs that let their players rest too often.
I used to play in a group where we rotated who was DM’ing every couple weeks. Two of the DMs were very generous with their rests. I didn’t really like it, because that doesn’t feel like D&D to me. Also as a short rest class (Warlock), it’s irritating that I get my two whole spells, maybe four if we short rest, but the wizard blows his load on two fights instead of the recommended 5.
When it was my turn, and I threw them in a longer dungeon without easy resting options, there was weeping.
As a DM if you’ve miscalculated, double that monsters HP. Or if you’re about to overrun them, cut it in half.
I know people do this, but I kind of don’t like it. I don’t really like the HP and other stats shifting around based on gut feel. Feels like we should just write a book if we’re going to fudge it.
I prefer systems with more transparency, anyway. D&D is wacky about “how much HP does this knight have? Could be 20. Could be 200.” When I was playing a nWoD game, it was nice to know that any human is probably going to have about 7 health levels.
That is EXACTLY me. Two generous DMs, and me who caused weeping.
I knew it was a change so it wasn’t gauntlet after gauntlet, it was a slow introduction. As a DM you get better at planning and as players they get better at planning.
In terms of shifting HP, sometimes it’s 4 guards, sometimes it’s 8. Having more token on the floor can be harder to manage, but more HP is easier to manage. And if course HP can be anything. More armor. Resistance to elements, etc. HP is just the more hidden stat.
As a DM if you’ve miscalculated, double that monsters HP. Or if you’re about to overrun them, cut it in half.
I don’t really care for this advice. I see it given a lot, but in my opinion it takes agency away from the players and gives the GM even more power than usual to direct the narrative.
If you’re doing it all the time, then yes it’s a problem and the DM should plan encounters better. However if you see a battle going wrong it’s a quick and easy fix.
If the players attack the castle, and you’ve said the guards are strong, but they’re about to go down in one hit, beef them up.
Especially, as it relates to the article, if you find players using all their resources and trivializing everything.
If the players are using their resources to smash through strong guards, and the GM covertly buffs them to counteract that fact, then that is precisely the point I am making about it undermining the players’ agency. The players decided to burn those abilities on those guards. Let them trivialize them. That’s why they used the resources. That was their decision.
The GM robs them of that agency by changing it behind the scenes, without telling them, and becomes the sole arbiter for how an encounter is “supposed” to play out.
No, my point is that I said “strong guards” but in fact they were not (until buffed).
The point of the linked article is that players are finding too many encounters trivial because they have too many long rests. If the DM isn’t providing the right level of encounters, doubling HP is an easy quick fix.
Obviously it’s a balance. If you always double HP, improve your planning. Don’t always take away or invalidate a players decision.
Doubling HP is not an easy fix; it’s a lazy cheat. That’s my point.
If you’re truly disappointed as a GM at how weak your strong guards were, say that to your players. “Wow, I messed that one up. Can you all please give me five minutes while I reevaluate the next encounter?”
