Over the past several years of 5e design, we’ve seen per-short-rest timing go away completely as a matter of new, official subclass design. This becomes much clearer in Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, in which many non-core races have been updated to operate on more uses, but per-long-rest instead. There are reasons that the design team is moving this direction, and I don’t believe I have any power to command that tide. That said, I think it’s the wrong move and I’d like to explain why.

My understanding of the motivation for this change is that characters who need short rests find themselves at odds with characters who don’t. When characters don’t get their union-negotiated coffee break, they’re not working according to the class’s design. In combination with the changes to NPC spellcasting, a lot of what we’re seeing is a move to make the player experience a little more predictable.

Without digressing all the way into predictability as a design idea, I think it’s a natural desire when writing an adventure to have as much of an idea as possible as to how the math might play out. I also think that natural desire is something to tread very carefully around, because it’s constraining emergent play. My feelings here are complicated: a low-probability save-or-die effect won’t necessarily feel great for the person that gets the short end of that stick. For example, the time I failed a Con save by 5+ in Tomb of Annihilation and got instantly petrified by a medusa. (It’s not like I didn’t know I was fighting a medusa and playing it high-risk by not averting my eyes, though.)

Short Rests

In the 2014 PH, classes and subclasses have a wide range of responses to short rests. Some get nothing but some hit points back–rogues, especially–while others get a core gameplay currency back, such as clerics’ Channel Divinity, monks’ ki points, warlocks’ Pact Magic, or fighters’ Action Surges and Second Winds (Battle Master fighters even more so). Personally I’ve been fine with how all of these have felt except for warlocks, and if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you already know everything about how I feel about warlocks.

Why aren’t people taking short rests, though? I don’t have polling information, but I have some educated guesses. In no particular order:

• A character with a 1-hr spell duration would like to get in another encounter or two before losing or recasting the spell. A 1-hr short rest is an obvious problem.
• A one-hour delay would give enemies in this area too much time to move against the party and prepare defenses, because the PCs have raised an alarm or the narrative put them under time pressure.
  • I want to stress that narratives with time pressure are generally a good thing. You just have to use them with care and intent when some characters desperately need short rests to function.
• It’s not a benefit to enough of the PCs for all of the players to even remember that it is an option.
• A location that is safe enough for a 1-hour rest often feels safe enough for an 8-hour rest, or a 24-hour rest if you’re embracing the 15-minute workday.

I feel like those are the two main valid reasons, and they amount to “an hour is bad for us” and “an hour is good for our enemies,” while the benefit to the party is distributed so unevenly.

At the same time, short rests play two more crucial roles, one mechanical and one more about tone and mood. On the mechanical side, the game should be pushing short rests and Hit Die healing, because that nonmagical healing can take so much pressure off spellcasting healers. This is only compounded by Life and Peace clerics having their incredibly strong healing features tied to Channel Divinity.

In terms of tone and mood, there’s so much to be gained from the characters needing to pause and recuperate rather than rolling right into the next encounter. I think the game should protect the sense that sometimes you’ve got to stop, bandage your wounds, and wait a bit, rather than every dungeon alternating between 6-18 seconds of fighting and up to a minute of walking down a hallway or opening the next door. Major dungeons might use up to 15-20 minutes of in-game time, unless you take a full long rest. I think this matters, and changing it pushes the game further from modeling the supporting fiction. If you have players willing to roleplay rest and conversation, so much the better.

Now, I don’t know anything more about how this content would get redesigned for the 2024 PH than anyone else. Wrong guesses here may come across as deeply uncharitable—the Design team is dedicated, hardworking, and clever. But any version I can picture of keeping the same features while shifting them from 1/short to PB/long promise to be an absolute mess. Currencies that are X/short, such as ki, changing to—for instance—3X/long promise to be even worse.

What’s so bad about this? I don’t know, do you remember 3e’s 15-minute workday? I don’t want to see Action Surge either go away, or get saved for the final boss fight, where the fighter uses it 3-4 rounds in a row. I don’t know that they’d do it that way, but a feature like the goliath’s Stone’s Endurance revision in MotM suggests that they might.

That is, it’s a substantial damage-mitigation feature with PB/long rest uses. There’s no reason not to use this feature up as fast as possible—it’s scarcely a choice point, and once you run out of your fun features, you have no recourse except a long rest. I feel like you’d want to parcel this out over the adventuring day. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from gaming, it’s that designers have to actively stop players from ruining their own fun. They will absolutely do the unfun but optimal thing and blame the designer that it’s boring.

There’s a huge benefit, in terms of adventure pacing and having a steady supply of the right number of decisions to make, to doling out micro-refreshes, then balancing fights so that the amount you spend on a normal encounter is more than you regain with that micro-refresh. Attrition, but one with less pressure to go for the full refresh early.

Another of the underlying questions of resting: how easy or hard does the DM make it to stop for one or eight hours, if you’re still inside the dungeon complex (or the adventure’s operational area generally)? What’s the line between following the narrative of a dangerous area full of things that want to stab or eat you and letting short-rest players use their cool stuff? This is an issue between OOC convenience and delivering on what’s established in the narrative.

Solutions

First, a disclaimer:

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” – Neil Gaiman (link here)

So, you know. Acknowledging the fundamental weakness of the rest of this post up front, but I’m not letting that stop me.

I think the answer is to lean harder on short rests as part of play.

• Right now there’s an optional rule for 5-minute short rests. Let’s try 15: pushed past the 10-minute-duration spells, but you could get more action out of your 1-hour-duration spells.
  • It’s my hope that more DMs feel like it’s okay to have no one enter the room you’re resting in for 15 minutes than for an hour, taking some pressure off the question of whether the DM is being a jerk to interrupt or prevent a short rest.
• Short rests work unevenly across classes. Some classes get almost everything, while rogues and sorcerers get nothing. Since the classes get a facelift anyway… let’s make some changes there.
  • Barbarians and sorcerers are relatively easy. Rogue subclasses may have PB/long rest effects, but getting those into the core of the class is a redesign of an incredibly tight game loop is so not happening. So I don’t know what to say about that.
  • Probably also mitigate the warlock’s total need for short rests. Again, my opinions here are not a secret.
• As a fallback idea, maybe include a new clause in short rests such that they refresh (or have a 5-6 on 1d6) chance to refresh a PB/long rest feature, or spell slots equal to Arcane Recovery.

Let’s remember how things work in the very most 15-minute-workday styles of 3.x, and not do that again. 4e solved the 15-minute workday with its approach to encounter powers and healing surges. 5e rejects the class cookie cutter of 4e that offers everyone the same number of at-will, encounter, daily, and utility powers, but retains healing surges so that your whole day isn’t locked to the cleric’s supply of cure wounds spells.

It would be smart to let the need for rests, both short and long, inform dungeon design a bit more. On one hand, it’s great for players to be guided by their own decision-making rather than getting railroaded by the dungeon, where possible. On the other, there’s give and take here—if there’s a way for the DM to signal that a place is safe and interruption isn’t a danger here, at least for right now, that lowers the bar to taking a rest by a lot without resorting to Leomund’s tiny hut (and thus engaging with “okay but does the enemy have access to dispel magic?” as a question of dungeon-wide encounter design).

I’ve talked about this in a long-ago post, but spaces in the dungeon that the PCs can upgrade from “ruined” to “comfortable resting space,” maybe granting a boost to their short or long rest effects, is great for getting PCs engaged with the dungeon terrain and actively using their tool proficiencies. Which means possibly tweaking the short rest rules to have a few more things that you can boost. I don’t know, there’s never a wrong time for a splash of temporary hit points.

Conclusion

To pull all of this together, I want short rests to actively support PCs continuing their adventuring while working within D&D’s traditional attrition-based tension. A lot of DMs are running just 1-2 bigger combats a day, and that’s to the detriment of strongly short-rest-focused classes, but I think that a full shift to making everything per-long-rest does not, in itself, push PCs toward more encounters per day. It leads PCs only use their most powerful options and ruin their own fun, and we have a whole edition that tests that use case.

There are ways to make that work and have it just be the PCs’ problem to ration out their uses, but to do that, you need every adventure to include time pressure so that the PCs can’t just grab another long rest. That’s what led 13^th Age into “four encounters or taking a campaign loss gets you a full heal-up,” which is workable on a mechanical level but divorces the full heal-up from the narrative. (Sorry, 13^th Age folks, that drives me nuts, and the game I play in observes it chiefly in the breach.)

---

You can now buy Under the Seas of Vodari in PDF!

Under the Seas of Vodari is a 300-page book that provides 5E/Fifth Edition material for both gamemasters and players to dive into a world full of action and adventure set beneath the waves of Vodari or your own campaign world. This book is a follow-up to The Seas of Vodari, a setting book filled with swashbuckling action and magical adventure. Dive into your first adventure today!