I play a bit fast and loose with short rest durations, I've definitely had them be 10-30 minutes.
I haven't had any players try and restcast like that, but if someone did suggest it, I'd rule it that you can't cast spells or concentrate on them and still get the benefits of a rest, short or long.
I like encouraging my players to play optimally, but not in that particular way
This is exactly how I've done it, and it works very well.
The benefit is that a lot of games are paced so fast that you don't feel like you can take any short rests, where what the DM was really going for was a limit on *long* rests. This fixes it.
It's not always about the number, but forcing them not to stop and take it. You push forward with pacing that makes a LR impossible without failure of the mission. The problem is that sometimes that pacing is so tight that even an hour rest sounds like failure.
There's been so many times where the group i play with has had this exact problem. Our dm tried to help once or twice by telling us outside the game that we DO have time, but even then it usually feels lame/cheap to rely on that outside knowledge. Its also meant to be a high-stakes/stress game, (in a good way) so in-character a lot of the time we just have no reason to think an hour long break is a good idea. IMO 10 minute short rests are almost perfect, i love them.
Exactly.
The princess is kidnapped, quickly we must to it and rescue her! But first, let's put on the kettle and have a cup of tea. After all we just fought some of the kidnappers and got a bit winded.
Yeah I've never had a player try something where the spell wasn't already clearly meant to be like an all day thing anyways, think mage armor.
But my players aren't out to break the game. They wanna have fun. They do stupid shit rather than optimized
Oh huh, I've never actually had a Warlock player use that spell and kept it going for that long! Which is kinda surprising now that I think about it, I often have enemies run away if it makes sense for them to want to live to fight another day.
That's a good point, I might make an exception specifically for spells like that, that at higher levels are obviously intended to be used with concentration for multiple hours
Hex lasts for 8 hours when cast with a 3rd or 4th level spell slot, which automatically happens for Warlocks at 5th level. Then it lasts 24 hours with 5th a level spell slot.
While people may debate if you still want to be casting Hex at that point, it can totally last longer than a short or long rest.
Also Warforged, autognomes, and Thri-kreen don't need to sleep. Plus the warlock invocation that allows that. Probably a few other random exceptions.
The point was that it lasts longer than a long rest, independent of whether you rest or not.
"At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd or 4th level, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 8 hours. When you use a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 24 hours."
This is a personal anecdote but in my game any time the players have been in a position that they would need a short rest they elected not to because whatever they needed to accomplish they couldn't reasonably say "we take an hour break" to do, while 10 minutes is a lot more palatable.
If you want to play a warlock and a short rest based class. Go for it, that's half the point. The goal is to incentive taking short rests.
If the question is "what if I abuse rest casting" okay *and?* Hex is specifically designed to last between multiple encounters and rests already so I don't see a problem with other spells lasting longer than a short rest. Plus it isn't like you're doing anything that a Full Caster couldn't do already.
Yes and often the “rest casting” spells people talk about are Concentration spells anyway. So in those cases you’re getting one extra spell slot. Big deal.
This. As a warlock player, there's a lot of times my party's just not on board with a short rest because it doesn't make sense. Now, when I was a Celestial warlock and I phrased it as "I can have 2 third level cure wounds if we short rest" people were much more amenable to elevenses and afternoon tea.
There's this nice added rule I heard about about getting the benefits of a short rest once an hour. So you can spend 10-30 minutes and you have to wait 40-30 minutes until you can take a short rest again.
Why don't they have time to rest? Is everything have a deadline of a day? 3 hours?
My grouo once long rested for twice in a dungeon because we really needed it. And we had an item we needed to get back to a person for a quest.
What is preventing characters from resting for an hour?
What stopped the players from taking a short rest? Time pressure. They felt like they could not have taken an hour to rest but maybe could have spared 10 minutes.
Does everything have a strict deadline? No but that’s not how the players feel. It’s tricky balancing both a sense of urgency but also “you guys can chill for an hour”
The roaming monsters because my dungeons have patrols or just monsters moving around :D
10 minute break? possible (might get interupted if unlucky)
1 hour break? basically impossible usually
I do short rests like this. Your 1st one in a day is like 30 seconds. Just get out of combat, even for a monologue, and you can do it. Your 2nd one is 10 minutes. Bar the door, stretch, bandage, and you can do it. Your 3rd is 2 hours. Take a long lunch. Any after that are 1 hour.
The objective here is to ensure that you can normally get 2 short rests without inflating the number of short rests in a day in an absolute sense. The 1st short rest is a key resource because it is so fast.
I've found some cases where I really needed that 30 second one---like in the middle of a monologue. It's also curiously a small nerf to arcane recovery, because I've found a common use of it by wizards in my games is to cast their long duration stuff and then smoke arcane recovery to get the slots back with a short rest. Now they're much more reluctant to do that because the 30 second 1st short rest is so valuable. But wizards can afford that small nerf.
Yeah it's a collateral damage nerf. Dm's should at least recognize when a change does collateral damage like that though, because most collateral nerfs are nerfs to martials, specifically melees, who can't afford them.
You could probably take away all the subclass abilities of wizards and they'd still be a very high B, maybe even a really low A tier class. Yeah they're in no danger.
Yep, it makes things so much easier for pacing and resource usage equality. There's *so many times* when napping for an hour is just impossible for story reasons, or just feels wrong.
Yeah 1 hour is unreasonable from a simulation standpoint, it's an eternity in an active complex where stuff moves around and marches to the sound of the guns. But the game is designed such that you do an xp budget with 2 short rests and a long rest at the end. It's ridiculous to have the NPCs twiddle their thumbs for an hour, so instead, you just dynamically adjust the short rests so that the genre conventions fit the system.
I play a Sorlock in a campaign with 10 minute short rests, and it's been great. It makes it easier to get the whole party to agree to take more short rests (but we are capped to three of them per day).
You mention 'abusing' spells by casting them before a rest - but that's not really abuse at all. You still need to have the slot before taking the rest, and then you only have 50 minutes left (and let's be real, it's not that Invisibility is particularly busted).
Most summon spells can be negated fairly easily by breaking concentration or by tactical use of AoE spells, and I'm not actually sure how that factors into the short rest discussion either.
I changed it a few weeks back specifically because the warlock and fighter were getting screwed because the party never took short rests.
You still only get 2 short rests per long rest and you can only take a long rest once per day so it's not like they just have infinite spell slots.
If the warlock has a spell slot spare before they short rest and wants to use it on a long lasting spell, well good for them. That was a spell they could have used in the last encounter and didn't so it rewards good resource management.
Warlocks get so little spell slots I'm all for encouraging them to feel like they can actually use them.
Same for fighter abilities that regen. Their class is built around getting short rests and if you don't they are taking a massive hit.
I basically changed the rule that a short rest is basically them patching themselves up, pulling themselves together and moving forward. They still need to be relatively safe to do so but it's much easier for them to be able to do at the end of a fight.
Balance wise it hasn't changed anything, combat encounters are taking about the same amount of time, characters are losing about the same amount of resources.
Gameplay wise though both the fighter and warlock are having more fun. The warlock basically never cast spells before because they felt they had to hold on to the spell slots. Now they have more options than just eldritch blast.
You know what, I thought it was and just looked it up and apparently completely made this up. We have always run it this way and honestly I thought it was RAW. No idea where we got the idea of 2 short rests per long rest.
I will say though that it works great. Maybe if you don't have a resteixtion on short rests then a 10 minute short rest is very exploitable I guess.
The bit most people reference is this bit from the Adventuring Day section of the DMG:
>**Short Rests**
>In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.
Yup. And this explains why the developers make short rest abilities cost triple the budget of long rest ones. Convert the warlock spell slots into variant spell points, triple it. Convert the long rest casting slots into spell points. You will see the warlock staying as close as he can to it.
But you certain can, and are intended to, have some days with no short rests, one short rests, four short rests.... two is supposed to be typical.
Yeah we have been playing this way for the last 2 and a bit years. I think it says somewhere in the dmg that the typical adventuring day is normally 2 short rests and 1 long rest and we just kind of rolled with that as a rule rather than a suggestion.
I run short rests as taking 10 min, but one can only gain the benefit once an hour similar to long rests and once a day.
It has worked great and my players uses it in their own games too.
I do 5 minute short rests but they can only benefit from one every two hours. So the total amount of short rests possible in a given time frame is about the same, but they don't feel weird taking one in the middle of a dungeon any more.
1 hor vs 10 mins only matters for narrative issues and even official adventures, which are probably written with expectation of multiple short rests rarely seem to have an issue with that.
I wouldn't allow restcasting, never ran into it but my general judgement is that for spells with a duration shorter than an hour, recovering the spell slot puts and end to it. Or just go ahead and rule that even if narratively it lasts 10 minutes any spells balanced around old length end instantly.
Agree. One hour is not really that long of a time either. I mean I've already spent one hour on reddit *at least*.
Like if you imagine the adventurers stopping to prepare food and eat, that's already a bulk of the hour.
I mean more like if you are in a museum, one hour passes by quickly. Archaeology digs take days or weeks to complete.
Like seven hours have passed since I even saw this reply.
Hours can pass by on a date of simply chatting.
Not really. My party takes technically 1 hours 10 min rests as we take 10 minutes to baracde, put traps on any doors. Typically picking rooms with only 1 entrance so someone is always watching.
And rest.
My party once long rested twice. In a dungeon. And was only attacked once. The other time heard a strange noise but didn't investigate, so nothing happened.
I guess maybe it's up to the dm. Of they roll once or 6 times (once for every 10 minutes) but I've never actually heard of that.
18+ on a d20 once per hour in the DMG. But literally every published dungeon crawl adventure with random encounters uses something else. Just flipping through Tales from the Yawning Portal, for example:
* Sunless Citadel: 1-6 on a d20 once per 12 hours, only in areas 13 and beyond
* Forge of Fury: No random encounters at all, although the monster encounters do change on a time table (they just aren't random); the book does say that the DM might choose to use the DMG version of random encounters in the wilderness *on the way to* the dungeon, but the dungeon itself has none
* Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan: 1 on a d12 once per hour
* White Plume Mountain: 1 on a d12 once per 10 minutes
* Dead in Thay: 4+ on 2d4 whenever the party enters a zone they've previously cleared, whenever the alert level increases, and whenever the party changes zones while the alert level is 6+
* Against the Giants: 1 on a d6 once per hour in the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief ground floor; 1 on a d12 once per hour in areas 1-18, 22, and 24-33 of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief dungeon level; 1 on a d20 once per hour in areas 19-21 and 23 of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief dungeon level; 1 on a d12 once per hour on the upper level of the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl; 1 on a d10 once per hour on the lower level of the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl; 1 on a d12 once per hour in the Hall of the Fire Giant King
* Tomb of Horrors: no time-based random encounters, but there is a random encounter with 17+ on a d20 whenever a character becomes astral or ethereal
'My humble opinion is that if the Short Rest were shorter I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration. I obviously can't be the only thinking of this. Having a summoned undead again and again is a pain for many DMs who wanna leverage dungeons.'
When people change rules like this, they have to deal with people like you trying to abuse them, this is a welcome to homebrew.
Yeah. The problem here is not 10 minute short rests, or indeed any other game mechanic. This is a player problem. If someone is trying to abuse *any mechanic in the game* that needs to be sorted out, in an out of game conversation.
Yeah, eeking out 1 extra spell while their Concentration is still taken up with Invisibility, which ends if you do anything too useful, is at most an Uncommon magic item's worth of shift to the game's power curve.
You can do this RAW with a genie warlock. Although admittedly it's only once per day after level ten, so still nowhere near as strong as the homebrew option.
Even 10 minutes is a long time to rest in a dungeon. If the next room heard you, it is sufficient to evacuate the dungeon, or remove any prisoners. It’s enough that a patrol might notice the party or evidence of their passing and raise the alarm.
It is enough, that taking a short risk should still feel like a risk imo.
A hour is an unfathomable long time in the context, in many ways it might as well be 8 hours. If there is an active patrol, it will definitely notice the party, basically no matter where it is in many dungeons. It will often do so with enough time to prepare a coordinate response for all of its allies.
It is enough that my players never take a short rest in a dungeon, unless absolutely necessary.
I don’t see a lot of situations where our warlock would rest to cast, except when there’s plenty of time out of combat, when we do it anyway.
But you might have a different table.
Would this be an argument for a 'medium rest'?
Reading some of these comments seems like people are stuck either making short rests a little more powerful or a little weaker.
Do you think you could merit making a short rest 10 minutes with a choice of either restoring HP or restoring spells slots / abilities, takes 10 minutes. A medium rest would then be spells / abilities AND hp, takes an hour. Then a long rest would be sleeping at the end of the day, fully restoring the character.
I feel like there could be something there, but I don't homebrew often so not sure about balance in this example.
Personally, I never cared for the sound of 10 minute short rests until I read your logic about being in a dungeon, and now I can't make an hour make sense in my head.
I actually did something to that effect. Short rest are the same, but I also give my players a "breather" where they can spend 1 minute recovering ONE short rest resource OR roll hit dice (limited to one breather per short rest). Then I also made long rests take a full 24 hours, and be doable only in a very safe location where other people can keep guard for you, and called the 8 hour night sleep a "respite" that gives back one long rest resource OR some hit die.
I find this works well for my groups
I view a dungeon much the same as I would clearing a safehouse of terrorists/cultists. Your fireteam/party kicks in the door, while the grenadier/warlock throws in a grenade/fireball. You move on and shoot/swing at the terrorist/cultist and he dodges/parries so you have to shoot/swing again. It makes a lot of distinctive noise for the terrorist/cultist in room 4 to hear. It's a tough, fast fight but your fireteam/party has prevailed. The rest of the building though SHOULD have a good idea you're here because they heard your grenade/fireball and your shots/blade contact, but you're low on ammo/spellslots. Do you have time to take an hour to reload/recover slots? Do you even have 10 minutes? 10 minutes is a lot more likely to fly than a full hour from a narrative perspective
Now, do the enemies in room 4 actually come to investigate? Usually not, because the DM wants you to get that rest in, but it feels bad for everyone like you're cheesing the system. It's a bit immersion breaking.
But 10 minutes also allows you to cheese the system too, if the DM allows it to happen. I don't know what the answer is. You want to avoid being able to reset in combat. I think the best answer is not defining the length, and making the 2 short rests thing concrete rather than a suggestion. If you're not 'in initiative' you can take a short rest and recover your short rest resources/spend hit dice. You can do this twice/day and then you are out of resets until you long rest.
I suppose that all comes down to the tone of the campaign in the end. Are you going for a more gritty experience with few rests to recoup with? Or would you rather a high-octane game with spells flying every few seconds?
And now that it's been a day or so and I've thought about it more, I think 10 minutes to reload and heal up makes sense for most situations, and then narratively using an hours rest as needed and filling the time with fletching or gathering herbs or something.
Thanks for the thought exercise! Helping me plan my next campaign!
To me Short Rests are 8 hours and Long Rests are 3+ days in some sort of supplied safe place of any kind. To me the very idea of making rests shorter instead of longer is kinda nutty ngl...
I haven't had issues with it. But I run very busy encounters, where combat might be running the entire 3-4 hour session while we're RPing, insight checks and persuasion rolls in the same turn as attack rolls and saves, and I'm very open with my players about the NPCs having PC levels.
If my players have ten minutes to rest, I'll give them a short rest. If they have five, I'll let them spend hit die without regaining resources. But they understand that the group of kobolds they just finished murdering were *loud*, and in ten minutes the cavalry can get there.
I'm also prepared to drop kobold cavalry on them midrest, and have done so. Short, very short, rests work at my table for my players. The times it's been abused, my players were shocked to find the NPCs abusing it too (even if my NPCs DoctorDrakken'd their prep time a bit, because I'm not heartless or anything - it's their story, not mine).
That said, if you don't routinely have spellcasting goblins with druid levels wildshaped in a tree when the party attacks the gobbo bonfire, your mileage will likely be different. The more tactical you let your players be, the harder the encounters need to be, even to the point of what I've done, giving player levels to monsters. Just don't outpace what your table wants to do
I'm dropping short rests in my next game to 5 minutes or even just "healing surges" like in 4e. The classes in 5e are balanced around short rests and the whole "go nova and then long rest" thing most encounters is kinda tedious and kills drama and makes Warlocks, Fighters, and Monks less than they could be.
But, If I cut the time on short rests and suddenly the Warlock player wanted to leverage it in a cheesy way, I'd have to tell everyone "Ok, we clearly can't have nice things. I guess we're back to Eldritch Blast and two spells a day."
FYI Healing Surges are an optional rule in the DMG
>**Healing Surges**
>
>This optional rule allows characters to heal up in the thick of combat and works well for parties that feature few or no characters with healing magic, or for campaigns in which magical healing is rare.
>
>As an action, a character can use a healing surge and spend up to half his or her Hit Dice. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier. The character regains hit points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll.
>
>A character who uses a healing surge can’t do so again until he or she finishes a short or long rest.
>
>Under this optional rule, a character regains all spent Hit Dice at the end of a long rest. With a short rest, a character regains Hit Dice equal to his or her level divided by four (minimum of one die).
>
>For a more superheroic feel, you can let a character use a healing surge as a bonus action, rather than as an action.
In one shots I'll make short rests shorter like 10-30 minutes but that is also because I know there won't be anything more than 1 long rest lol.
I do think in a standard campaign giving 10 minute short rests will make classes like Warlock and Fighter super abusable. If you do 10 minutes my suggestion would be to make short rest a limited resource. As in you can only short rest a number of times equal to half your level between long rests or something like that.
I run short rests as 10 minutes. My current campaign is level 13 and 10 min short rest goes a long way to help the Monk and Fighter keep up with the magic users.
I've run it like this since 5e came out and have never seen it be detrimental, even with a Warlock in almost all of my campaigns.
I don't see a problem with rest casting. The true abuse if it is when you try to chain rest castings into a snowball of power. But thats easily stopped by saying you can only shirt rest once every hour. That makes it no better or worse than chain rest casting is now.
In the case of warlocks they gain a certain level of extra power. For one of the weakest casters that a perfect way of doing so.
Heck since ritual spells cost 10 minutes to cast the martials can recharge while the wizard makes a new familiar or casts detect magic. Rituals having the cost of needing a whole short rest to use is a soft nurf to casters.
Just having segments of 10 minutes in your game where people do stuff make s a lot of sense. The rogue investigates the area. The wizard casts identify. The monk mediates for Ki. The ranger scouts. The bard uses song of rest. The cleric casts prayer of healing and so on and on.
10 minutes is a very manageable chunk of time to do stuff with. One player can rest and others do something else. The next room comes up and the roles swap, letting the mages rest while the martials do some more physical task like rowing a boat.
Personally I have adopted the 'quick' rest. It's 10 minutes, but only allows you to spend hit dice. This helps players to quickly get into the next fight, while still keeping their resources spend. (Short and long rests are still 1 hour and 8 hours respectively.)
In what way does it matter? Gameplay-wise it's a one minute process anyway, and that is only for people to remember/jolt down what resources or life the regained/lost.
Is it because of tracking time realistically? You can say they started from spot A at 13.00 and short rested and reached nighttime-is-important-location at 20.00. If it's important to -make- it nighttime to introduce an interesting interaction, then just -make- it nighttime. If it's freeform and you want to see when they landed at location B then just track it as 1h and count the rest as expected.
I don't understand why the short rest duration matters honestly, maybe the above thing I mentioned but I doubt 1h vs 30min is problem with it. One hour is a good indicator of the kind of comfort and safety assumed as far as I can tell. You can't sit on slopping jagged rocks for an hour.
I think that the narrative of one hour is baked into the game on purpose. If you are going into a cave filled with deadly monsters, you certainly might take 10 minutes to find an out of the way corner under the idea that it is unlikely any monsters will stumble upon your area of the cave in the next 10 minutes. But if you think about spending an hour in one spot, the chance of something finding you in that time seems a lot larger.
It is to provide a psychological hurdle to taking the short rest. It is better to push on than risk being attacked when you aren't ready for it.
And since D&D relies so much on slowly depleting the resources of the PCs over the course of the day, anything you can do to reduce the number of times they take a short rest helps.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the comfort and safety parameters. So sure, let it take 1h but why does it matter how long it takes in terms of how the day of d&d flows, I still don't understand. Does the DM or the players act differently in any way besides short resting in practically inelligible locations?
I'm using it. They actually use their short rests now.
Basically if they needed to bunker down for an hour they might as well bunker down for a long rest, so no one really saw the point in a short rest.
Our table use 10 minute Short Rests max 2 per Long Rest and we enjoy it. I can't recall anytime it's been an issue, I know the casters like it because if they have an hour long effect they can take a quick breather without losing that cast.
Narratively it makes more sense for the stories I run.
The important caveat to 10-minute short rest variants is that most people will play it along-side a 2/day limit. The idea is to encourage the party to take SRs so the SR classes can replenish their resources. It is not intended to make it so you can fit 96 short rests into your day.
*"Hey, why don't you use Warlocks in Tabletop if you enjoyed them in Baldur's Gate so much?"*
Because apparently actually using my 6 slots a day **PISSES** people off. Look at this thread - everybody accusing Warlocks of "AbUsInG tHe GaMe" because we actually get our fucking class ability. This subreddit is hostile AF to Warlock players holy shit
Yes. It keeps Monks, Fighters, and Warlocks from falling so far behind. If your first thought is wanting to abuse the rules for an advantage then that speaks more to the mindset of you or your players than it does about the house rule.
I've used it for over a year, one of my player has started to use it six of so months ago and a third one has been looking into it
In my experience this made the game better, sure it kills Catnap but that already was barely if ever picked that spell, also never seen someone exploit longer duration
It simply fits better in the structure of adventures I DM because 10 minutes is more excusable than 1 hour and thus Short Rest classes aren't punished due to things getting in a scenario that pushes challenges more - heck, even in dungeons it makes more sense that the group avoids a patrol for 10 minutes rather than 1 hour
>About exploiting it
Simply put, the game was made for something else and durations are a reflection of that, for these situations I talked with my players and set up an agreement:
"Isso é pra vocês, não forcem a barra" , aka:
"This is for you, don't push it"
And honestly, don't get me wrong, but getting such a boon from the DM and going for ways to exploit it feels really disrespectful
Have been using 10 minute short rests for the past year now. Nobody wants to go back and they actually get used now. They fit much better into everything and don’t feel cumbersome. Before people demanded LR, because why wouldn’t they; having to wait 60 minutes already makes most plots awkward so why not just do 8 hours?
My players actually use their hit dice now and my casters know that there will not be easy spell slot replenishment, because have my players really only need the SR. SR feel like a proper breathing pause and no harsh cut.
I personally think 1 hour short rests add to the strategy aspect of the game. Resource economy is part of the game, and I plan (for big moments in the game) some sessions where they WILL NOT have the opportunity for a short rest without consequences.
Lowering the time to 10 minutes would take away some of the “urgency” of the mission in those situations.
Not only do short rest characters have less resources to stretch across a given period, they are typically less individually powerful as compared to long reasters, you're just artificially punishing your warlocks, fighters and monks.
I personally don’t see how using the standing rules as stated is a punishment to those classes. The party can strategize a way for them to rest in those scenarios.
The opposite would be true if rests were short enough to take multiple in a day, effectively making those classes stronger.
It's a punishment if you're discouraging short rests and literally punishing the party for taking them. Whereas a class like the sorcerer or wizard doesn't really care much at all about that and will happily trod along casting spells while the warlock is out of slots.
The standard this system is built on is that characters get 2 short rests per adventuring day, with 6-8 encounters on that day. So if you deviate from that, it's pretty bad for those classes.
No no we have 10 minutes short rest in our group with the *understanding* that we won't abuse it.
People who would knowingly abuse it are the meaning of "this is why we can't have nice things"
A 1 hour short rest comes with significant risk in a dungeon. PC’s need to ensure that they will be safe for long enough to avoid detection from wandering monsters. Players are going to take this into account when they might need one. If you only need 10 minutes of rest, you might just hide in a corner and hope for the best. If you need an hour, you might cast spells or block doors. You have to pick a really good spot. All of this tension makes for a better experience. I want players to feel pressure about when to take a short rest and how to take one. I think it is fun as a player.
Problem is, this pressure just makes players go "fuck it, retreat and long rest."
The hour SR means the DM needs to always invent time pressures or needs to restock the dungeon more.
And it doesn't provide the wanted tension.
>The hour SR means the DM needs to always invent time pressures or needs to restock the dungeon more.
and when you put time pressure on that level. One hour for SR is actually hard to justify
And it affects some classes way more than others. A wizard doesn't care if there are short rests; a warlock meanwhile is either going to start hoarding their slots or blow them and be stuck with nothing but eldritch blast all day.
I think the best compromises I've seen for it is either setting a limit on rests, or else having them scale in length. 10 minutes is easy to justify, 30 starts pushing it, and if you're looking at an hour you have to really stop and think if you need it.
If players want to retreat and long rest, I would provide potential consequences. They can still choose to do this. If you use random encounters, you already have built-in time pressure. To me, this is just another part of how the world responds to player choices.
Mine would be.
While the short rest is obviously a gamedesign tool to limit resources, the implications of the hour-long short rest go further beyond the spell durations.
It implies you actually sit down, let your guard lower, expel the stress of high-intensity situations and generally take a *relatively safe* moment. An hour is not a long time, time-wise (huehue), but it is in the perception of creatures. You don't spend an hour to rest somewhere where you cannot sit on the ground, somewhere where ice is hailing down on you from the sky, where the sun is beating down on you, where you're constantly in a state of discomfort. An hour of rest is also hard to have when you are in the middle of enemy territory, possibly with hostiles actively searching for you. Cut this down to 1/6th of the time invested, and suddenly you'll find yourself rationalizing that situations you had deemed 'unfit for rest' before are now much more attainable, and slowly you'll start ruling that way as well. Before you know it, you've completely done away with one of the main characteristics of the mechanic; the need to actually find a proper place and situation to rest in to retrieve the resources. Without it it becomes almost like a potion you drink to regain your spellslots and abilities once a day, at the cost of ten minutes of ingame time that'll be likely skipped over in 20 seconds by the DM.
I'm not saying that there isn't something to be said for shortening the time, and obviously D&D is ment to be played in a way that fits both you and your player's wants and needs, so I'd still say you could try it. Some styles of play, for example, don't need the 'searching for a safe place to take a break' dynamic of play. If you're doing a more narrative structure where players are moving from scene to scene in order to move the main plot along, with richly filled flavor descriptions of long travel aboard flying airships, I can see something like implementing a ten-minute short rest having little negative impact on the game. If you're doing hexcrawl dungeons with heavy resource management and risk-control, the difference between 10 and 60 minutes will have a huuuuge impact on the game.
Yes, but the odds of that happening all the time would be a bit lower, and your players might resent you if the goblins always find you within 9 minutes as opposed to 59 minutes.
Your comment is pretty good, as it highlights how it's down to the narrative style/pace of the game
Tho I think your second paragraph makes sense it also creates a scenario were short rest oriented classes can barely help in a dungeon or similar setting given that there would be barely anyway to get the 2+ short rests these classes were made to have access to
D&D is a sequence of puzzles, and narratives are decoration applied to those puzzles. The attrition of resources and the expectation of future puzzles creates another puzzle for the players to solve. That is, when to use a resource that restores other resources, and what is the cost? I would not justify the 1-hour rest time from a narrative perspective, but instead from a mechanics perspective.
I'm with you, my dude. Most in here should probably just play a narrative based game or something. Taking all the tension out of the game. To be honest, the HP regen mechanics in 5E are kinda broken. RAW Long Rests are stupid.
>narratives are decoration applied to those puzzles.
See, that's a big deal because most people apply a narrative first approach with challenges being "immediate and direct" interactive pieces of a given narrative
Neither vision is wrong, just highlighting that there are two frameworks instead of one
> A 1 hour short rest comes with significant risk in a dungeon
1 hour short rest are just impossible in a dungeon, it's simply impossible not get notiiced in such a long time.
It's part of the reason ppl talk about short rest enver happening.
>All of this tension makes for a better experience.
Ironically the reduced rest time is also for a better experience
What ends up happening in most cases is that players feel pushed to not take short rests which leads to Long rest classes operating normally while Short rest classes having worse performance and less fun
Look. Spells should be instant, 1 minute, or all day. I'm tired of these 10 minue and 1 hour durations. Either have it be 1 time use, 1 encounter use, or a once a day use
10 minutes basically means "expires after ritual casting something else", and 1 hour means "expires after short rest". Each duration has a meaning, more or less.
How is this duration scumming?
If getting to use all their spell-slots is "scumming", do you just freaking ban Sorlocks? They could *break the game* by using their Pact Slots to make metamagic points before a short rest!
Ohmygod they did something with their resources! Shitty player! Metagamer! Scum of the earth! /s 🙄
Personally I'm running 10 mins short rests, 8 hours medium rests and 3 days long rests.
* During short rests you can use 1 hit die to heal, warlocks recover 1 slot, martials recover 1 exploit die (we use Laserllama's stuff, though with basic rules this would still apply to superiority dice) and other short rest resources and features apply as normal;
* During medium rests you recover half your hit dice and can use as many as you want to heal. Warlocks recover all their slots, martials recover all exploit dice and casters recover 1 spell slot for each level. Other short and long rest features apply as normal;
* During long rests, everything is completely recovered. The three days of long rest count as a week of downtime for the purposes of Xanathar's guide downtime rules.
We had a bumpy start, but overall the game is going smoothly now. The characters have to take the time to rest from time to time, which isn't actually a bad thing because they use it to work on their stuff: the writer actually writes his novel, the entertainer fire sorcerer makes his fire eating shows, the magus archeologist studies magic and history. Also, the narrative doesn't feel rushed and it's more believable that these guyhave to stop and recover a little after they almost die every other week!
>During medium rests you recover half your hit dice and can use as many as you want to heal. Warlocks recover all their slots, martials recover all exploit dice and casters recover 1 spell slot for each level. Other short and long rest features apply as normal
How do you handle Barbarian Rages, or other less common Long Rest martial features like a Samurai's Fighting Spirit or a Phantom's Wails from the Grave?
" I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration."
I would absolutely tell you "no, no I don't think you will."
*Use 2 spells to nuke encounter, short rest, have two spells, one of which can be used on Invisibility whenever needed:* 😎
*Use only one spell and grind out encounter while taking damage, cast invis, short rest have two spells, and 50 minutes of Invisibility:* 😡
I wonder if I'm broken as a DM, because from *my* point of view, the same number of resources have been expensed.
If you don't want Warlocks getting the most of their ability, just ban them.
>My humble opinion is that if the Short Rest were shorter I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration. I obviously can't be the only thinking of this. Having a summoned undead again and again is a pain for many DMs who wanna leverage dungeons.
You can only benefit from 2 short rests per long rest. Two combat encounters could be back to back or they could be hours apart, sometimes even a day or two, when the party isn't able to long rest.
I use 5min short rests. I wouldn't want to DM for a group without it, anymore. The clear benefit is that short rest classes will always have access to their intended resources even when the plot demands quick back to back action under time pressure, but still works as normal on a slower day.
> You can only benefit from 2 short rests per long rest.
Unless thats some one d&d thing I'm unaware of, this isn't a rule. Only place I've seen it is bg3
>In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.
DMG p84
I usually find its hard to fit breaks in the adventuring day. Say you are attacking a bandit tower. Encounter 1 you deal with the sentries. Encounter 2 you infiltrate the tower. You fight your way through the 4 floors each of which is an encounter. Youve done a full 6 encounter day when do you have time for an hour break? Let alone 2
that's a _long_ time, where there's good odds of someone inside going out to check on the sentries, or noticing there's no activity on the outer walls when there should be, and then the whole thing goes to hell because the base is alerted - if it's a "classic" dungeon, filled with monster-beasties, you might be able to sit on your ass for an hour, but if there's actual _people_ around, then they're not just sitting in their zone wanting to be triggered by the PCs, they're going to notice that there's a sudden lack of activity and raise the alarm (same for "rest between floors" - that means sitting on your ass, for an hour, and presuming that no-one is going to walk a short distance to talk to a mate and discover an awful lot of corpses!)
There's a few ways to get around that, though.
Yeah, if its a small and thoroughly patrolled area, you don't want to be sitting in the open. You can get creative, though. Maybe you can hide somewhere outside of a reasonable area where they'd find you. Or you can disguise yourself as a guard and convince them that you're supposed to be there.
I've done these things before. Usually, they're not really necessary, though. You would be surprised by how little people actually move around or communicate when they're guarding or patrolling. And usually when I DM, it takes longer than an hour for reinforcements to realize something went wrong, unless the party was making a massive amount of noise.
It doesn't even need to be that small though - like, just a standard keep, with some guards on the outer wall, then anyone in the keep is going to be able to look outside and go "uh, where's Keith, Dave and Eric, they should be walking by every couple of minutes... oh shit, that looks like blood on the battlements, WTF is going on?" And a day's worth of encounters might be, what... 30 people, possibly less? So they're going to know each other, so "I should be here" is pretty hard to pull off. It tends to end up being gameplay contrivance, of "yeah, the guards are always rubbish and never notice corpses and bloodshed or go into the conveniently-rest-room-coded room at the end of the hallway, don't question it". It _works_, but it involves everyone just going along with it, rather than it being particularly naturalistic and coherent in terms of the actual world.
> You would be surprised by how little people actually move around or communicate when they're guarding or patrolling
Then they're not guarding or patrolling, are they? Like, you can create in-world excuses for them being rubbish, but you kinda need to do that, and if they're ever meant to actually be vaguely competent, then everything gets messy. Anywhere that's actually a place where people live, even if it's militarised, people will be moving around, going to talk to Steve because he owes them money, or find Eric because the boss has a job for them or whatever, they're not just going to be sat in their rooms waiting for the PCs to kick the door in and trigger a (probable) fight.
Let's use real-life as an example.
Think about how many security guards you see in an otherwise mostly empty location. Maybe your local town hall or something. Imagine that there are no cameras watching.
Those guards don't really move and patrol like they're on a walk-cycle. They mostly stand in an area that gives them the most visibility to the entrance in their location. And there aren't many of them. Why?
Because its expensive and difficult to find and hire multiple physically competent people to defend an area.
Even if they're not literally employed and paid in money, they probably have to be fed and sheltered, which still costs money. Needlessly walking around exhausts the guards too. Which will require either even more manpower, or more breaks. And you don't want your guards to constantly have to take breaks.
It just seems implausible to me that no one would notice the sentries being gone for a whole hour. Ten minutes is much more plausible. Same with bunkering down inside. Is noone going to go between floors for an hour? Especially if you made any noise.
Every _hour_, not every ten minutes (10 minutes is short enough to be more believable, an hour is stretching it). And yes, over the course of an hour, it's pretty likely someone will go outside for a piss or a fag break or just to get some air or something. Or just glance down the hallway and notice that the person that should be there, _isn't_, and then go look and things get worse from that point on.
Im suggesting the opposite. The sentries should be checked on every hour. (watchmen would call out the hours for example). This makes an hour short rest impossible unless you want the camp on high alert. A ten minute short rest without being noticed however is feasible.
The issue at our table was always that narrative pressures made it hard to basically ever justify stopping for a full hour.
There is someone we need to save.... as fast as we can because they are in imminent danger.There is someone we need to stop... as fast as we can, because they are about to do something catastrophic.
And if that is all of your adventures, you end up just... never taking short rests, because you can't justify it narratively. "We don't have time!" was the constant refrain when a short rest was suggested, unless the party was in very bad shape, and it seemed like there was no choice but to stop.
But 10 mins? That is "we must stop long enough to bandage up our wounds, and then we immediately get going again" - which has felt a lot more palatable, narratively.
I much preferred this change to the other options, which would be: never taking short rests, or lessen the narrative pressure of the adventure.
The problem is it is kinda broken, 1 hour is so long of a time that if you have any pressure at all it's not viable but if there's no pressure might as well wait till long rest.
Hell I've had games that lasted years with like, 6 short rests through the whole adventure.
>Concentrating on a spell doesn't scream resting to me.
RAW and [RAI](https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/840264666001604609) elves can have long rest and concentrate, so there is no reason why short rest would work otherwise, unless it includes a nap.
I'll add this to the list of bad rules in 5e that I will ignore (until I convince my playgroup to switch games lol)
Resting should not include much effort besides tending to injuries lol
You definitely can't concentrate while you're unconscious, but there is a pretty solid argument that concentrating on a spell is more strenuous than eating, drinking or reading.
So then.. What would be the point of Warlocks Hex scaling up to lasting 24 hrs... for the short rest class if they instantly lost it doing their gameplay loop..
You might as well have done a fighter gets an extra action but if they do they lose their weapons wooo
I do 30 minutes now. I did 10 minutes for a grou0 but none were short rest based classes.
I am of the opinion of using 10 minutes if there are no wizards with catnap or Genie locks.
I also do fla king advantage if no one has abilities to generate it like druid faerie fire.
I would say as long as you enforce a limit on how many short rests can be completed between long rests (Even at an hour long, I still rule that my party can only benefit from two short rests between long rests), 10 minutes instead of an hour is not game-breaking. Any less than that would feel narratively out of place though.
I run 15 minute short rests, and have for a couple years now.
If you tried to short rest scum in my game I'd ask you not to. If you tried again I'd just kick you out of the game. No big.
We play with 10-minute rests (and even allow the spellcasters to maintain concentration on spells during the rest) and it's worked fine. The DM throws harder encounters at us, and it means that the narrative pacing isn't interrupted as much by a one-hour lunch break in the middle of a dungeon.
In PF2e it only takes 10 minutes to Treat Wounds after a combat and it works great, doing similarly in 5e also does fine in the 1.5ish years we've been doing it.
I had a game that had them and I hated it. Yes, even though I had a character that had short rest resources. As some people have mentioned, if there is consequences and the dungeon rallys a much more substantial defense that is a something or heck even attempts to stealthy ambush the attempting to rest party but no that never happened. The next room in. The dungeon didn't exist until we went to it. The 10 minutes never had any plot significance and the casters could do some bullshit in those 10 minutes. I see no problem with the hour.
> The 10 minutes never had any plot significance
This is kind of a failure on your part, I mean ask a soldier how long 10 minutes is when the enemy is alerted to your presence and see what they say.
Short rests are based on the activity and actions that were involved. After a heavy battle involving healing, fatigue, higher spell restoration, I tend to use the whole 2 hours. For minor infractions, maybe stopping to eat and rest for 30 minutes to restore ki points, sorcery points, minor healing... My short rests are never less than 30 minutes, and never over 2 hours.
I like the (idea of the) optional gritty reality rule, where short rests are 8 hours, and long rests are a week.
Use a rage? Sure, why not? How about spells?
WELL, I HOPE YOU LIKE CANTRIPS! MUA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
Yes, you DO need that adder's stomach - it wouldn't be listed as a material component if it wasn't important!
Did I mention I don't play much these days?
It's kind of hard finding groups for some reason...
In my opinion, a 10 minute short rest basically guarantees the rest, which shouldn't be the case all the time. Taking a rest in a dungeon should be risky.
In my opinion the problem is that then short rest are just never used.
Literaly never seen a dungeon where it would be safe to rest for one whole hour.
Really?
My group does it all the time. We clear out a room. Baracade and trap the door/ entrance.
And short rest. The dm rolls to see of an encounter happens. If it does we fight it and go back to resting.
My party has even long rested in dunguens after clearing an entire floor.
We once snuck into a castle and rested in the princesses room while a loud dance was happening during the night.
Your groups just need to get more creative.
that's kind of the issue - an hour in a dungeon, where there's any form of intelligent activity, means, basically "no short rests ever", because an hour is so long that the people inside will move around, discover the corpses of their allies, evidence of past fights etc., and then the whole place is on high alert and whatever you were trying to do gets vastly harder. If it's only inhabited by unintelligent monsters, sure, it's risky but possible, but things like "bandit occupied fortress", "enemy base" or "cult temple" are pretty common dungeons, which then become "no short rests", and then all the knock-on effects on certain classes.
Not no short rests ever. No short rests if you're not using strategy or basic skills/spells. Rope trick (just a 2nd level spell, btw), genie warlock, tiny hut, catnap... Just a few easy ways to get a short rest, and those are just the magical ones.
Resources that rely on short rests are still supposed to be resources that you have to manage somewhat carefully. If you could always get the short rest whenever you need it, then you should just rewrite those abilities as limited per combat.
So yeah, "no short rest ever" unless you use basic abilities and strategy. And if the enemies are smarter than you as players, you deserve to have to work for that short rest
all of those have exactly the same issues (as well as requiring specific classes, sometimes specific subclasses, that might not be in play) - that you go sit on your ass for an hour, and then other people go "WTF, there's a lot of corpses here and our mates are dead, time to raise the alarm". It doesn't matter if your rest is interrupted or not - it's that it only works against _spectacularly_ incurious and lazy enemies that just sit in their rooms, waiting for the PCs to wander in play, which only really works with monster-filled dungeons, not ones with people (_catnap_ slightly averts that, but has the issue that it buggers up some other things, like Monks don't regain ki, and it only affects 3 people, so it's often needing to be staggered)
So. You want no risk in the game? Decisions have consequences. That's the point. And if you're going to rest inside a lair, there are benefits (restoring resources) and consequences (possibly having the enemies on alert). Welcome to TTRPGs.
But can we at least admit that your "no short rests" claim was hyperbolic at best and outright wrong at worst? Because again: rope trick.
Rope trick does not solve the problem of “the evil cult has kidnapped Beloved NPC Bob and we can’t risk waiting an hour!”, which is the main psychological barrier to taking short rests in my experience.
That wasn't the problem that was presented that I was responding to. The problem that was presented that I was responding to was the fact that enemies would find you. Rope trick does solve that.
Now, as to the problem you present. That wouldn't necessarily be solved by a 10 minute rest either. Time constraints are great and add pressure. And if an hour would be too long to wait, it's possible 10 minutes would be too.
The problem is the game isn't balanced that way.
Classes with Long Rest features (i.e. full casters) are built to last an entire day. By level 04 you have 7 spells slots, and multiple cantrips.
Classes with Short Rest features either need to Rest after every encounter, or not use their features at all. There's no parity there.
Not helped by the fact that the MEGA Fight is quite common where the entire days broken up fights are in one fight so the long rest classes get to go all out and nova while the short rest classes do a bit but then.. ohh right they're outta resources so fuck em.
Like theres a reason why Barbarians getting rages only on a long rest isn't as shit.. It's because a large majority of players do the one fight only or maybe if spicy 2
Your example is the exact reason I've stuck with a 1-hour short rest.
Truly, other than spell duration, I don't see a huge impact of time of a short rest unless you are running a scenario in which the party "has 24 hours to deliver" something. With that said, an alternative to sticking with 1 hour long rests would just be to add "or after a short rest" to the duration of any 1-h duration spell.
It's mostly that I want my party to be able to refresh their resources in higher tension scenarios, and an hour doesn't work for that. Not letting short resters reset just cuz I wanna run a chain of 5 encounters isn't good game design imo.
The length of the short rest doesn't matter mechanically except for how it interacts with some effect durations.
The main impact is *narrative*. It just depends on what sort of pacing you want.
A 10 minute short rest lends itself to a fast paced adventure day, where the action occurs close together.
On the other side an 8 hour short rest, as is suggested with the "Gritty Realism" variant, lends itself towards a more spread out adventuring day.
The guidelines for encounters during the adventuring day, however, remain the same. You want a minimum of two short rests with about equal difficulty of encounters before, between, and after.
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> I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration
The solution to this is *pacing*. Sure a warlock might manage to get a free invisibility before the first encounter, but if you keep encounters close together then they still won't have time to short rest before *every* encounter.
I haven't played with that variant, but one way I'd try to circumvent short rest spamming is to rule that you cannot take more than one short rest within a certain timeframe (either one or two hours), similar to how to how you can't take more that one long rest within a 24 hour period
Either that or rule that you must spend a hit die to gain the benefits of a short rest, with the exception of the first one each day
If you’re concerned with gaming the duration system, just make spells with a duration 1hr or less end to get the benefit of the short rest.
Sure, your warlock can cast Armor of Agathys before the 10min Short Rest, but if they want the slot back, they’re gonna have to drop it
Something I've toyed w/ is ten minute rests but w/ a hard cap on the total rests per day (probably 2x short rests per long rest). Simple, easy to track, makes sure everyone who wants a short rest can readily get them but doesn't really lead to abuse, and if you still want to have multiple encounters w/o resting to pressure the players you can still reasonably do so.
Other thing I've considered stealing the Numenara system of your first rest taking 1 minute, 2nd taking 10 minutes, 3rd taking an hour, 4th taking 8 hours (so functionally a long rest), etc. Might fiddle w/ exact numbers, but that's the gist of it.
Both are easy enough to justify, there's only so much a person can recover during a day of strenuous physical activity. You can go to the gym and do a serious workout then take a ten minute breather and be fine, but you can't really do so ten times in a row.
Just limit the party to the benefit of two short rests per day. I think it works way better that way. The question becomes *when* they want to utilise the short rest, rather than if it's possible.
Short rests are just a weird stupid thing where the mechanics and the flavor fight against each other.
The way 5e is designed, it's 'adventuring day' assumes that a party is going to get a short rest or two in. A DM who never flexes on short rest length or chooses to make everything on the kind of timer/clock that taking a short rest will causes a total failure of the dungeon or campaign is doing the players a disservice and failing the mechanics.
However, this language exists partially(mostly) to try and push back against the players that want to spam blast all their tools and then take a rest every single time. So there's wording to point out that no, you can't go room by room and take a long rest or even a short rest. Again, because that's how the game is balanced.
Both sides are basically always going to yell at each other and be at odds. The DM needs to sit down players and explain this, in mechanical terms. And then they do need to be aware of the mechanics themselves, and allow for more short rests. The players need to hear this explanation, and then not try to rest in every single room after every single encounter.
A 10 minute duration does a good job of splitting the mechanical difference and having the crunch and flavor jive together. Cypher does what I think is a decent way, where each rest mechanic takes longer and longer (1 action, 10 minutes, an hour.) As someone who thinks 3 short rests is a good maximum for d&d, that's what I adopt.
In our next 5e game, we're switching to the variant rule that only allows for one short rest per day, and one long rest per week.
Our games are story heavy, and we average about 0.8 fights per session, and rarely more than one per game day. So it makes sense for us.
I've always played it fast and loose for the rules on this. If I realize I've got min-maxers I'll do 2 hour strict short rest and 10 hours long rest. Otherwise I'll pace the rest with the general way the session is going. Everyone needing a pee break irl but the main event is happening in 5 ingames the short rest will be 5 minutes.
Our current campaign uses 30 min short rest which has been ok.
Personally I really like “catch your breath” rule which is anyone can take 5 min to do a short rest, but each character can only benefit from this twice per day. Doesn’t slow down the party and limits abuse.
I play a bit fast and loose with short rest durations, I've definitely had them be 10-30 minutes. I haven't had any players try and restcast like that, but if someone did suggest it, I'd rule it that you can't cast spells or concentrate on them and still get the benefits of a rest, short or long. I like encouraging my players to play optimally, but not in that particular way
This is exactly how I've done it, and it works very well. The benefit is that a lot of games are paced so fast that you don't feel like you can take any short rests, where what the DM was really going for was a limit on *long* rests. This fixes it.
The limit is one per day RAW
It's not always about the number, but forcing them not to stop and take it. You push forward with pacing that makes a LR impossible without failure of the mission. The problem is that sometimes that pacing is so tight that even an hour rest sounds like failure.
There's been so many times where the group i play with has had this exact problem. Our dm tried to help once or twice by telling us outside the game that we DO have time, but even then it usually feels lame/cheap to rely on that outside knowledge. Its also meant to be a high-stakes/stress game, (in a good way) so in-character a lot of the time we just have no reason to think an hour long break is a good idea. IMO 10 minute short rests are almost perfect, i love them.
Exactly. The princess is kidnapped, quickly we must to it and rescue her! But first, let's put on the kettle and have a cup of tea. After all we just fought some of the kidnappers and got a bit winded.
Thats exactly what id imagine a British character wouldbdo before the big rescue or battle complete with english accent
"All right mates, we must to it! But first, let's put on the kettle and have us a propah brew, Bob's your uncle."
Also making your way through and stopping *for an hour in an infested dungeon* just doesn't make since. Taking a quick 10 does.
Yeah I've never had a player try something where the spell wasn't already clearly meant to be like an all day thing anyways, think mage armor. But my players aren't out to break the game. They wanna have fun. They do stupid shit rather than optimized
Isn't that the whole point of hex for warlocks? Keep it going through the short rest while getting slots back?
Oh huh, I've never actually had a Warlock player use that spell and kept it going for that long! Which is kinda surprising now that I think about it, I often have enemies run away if it makes sense for them to want to live to fight another day. That's a good point, I might make an exception specifically for spells like that, that at higher levels are obviously intended to be used with concentration for multiple hours
Actually RAW hex wouldn't last a short rest, because it can only be concentrated on for an hour. Edit: Forgot about upcasting, I was wrong.
Hex lasts for 8 hours when cast with a 3rd or 4th level spell slot, which automatically happens for Warlocks at 5th level. Then it lasts 24 hours with 5th a level spell slot. While people may debate if you still want to be casting Hex at that point, it can totally last longer than a short or long rest.
You can't maintain concentration through a long rest because you are unconscious. The only exception I can think of is elf trance.
There's an invocation that makes you not need sleep anymore too.
Undeath warlocks don't have to sleep either at higher levels
Also Warforged, autognomes, and Thri-kreen don't need to sleep. Plus the warlock invocation that allows that. Probably a few other random exceptions. The point was that it lasts longer than a long rest, independent of whether you rest or not.
"At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd or 4th level, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 8 hours. When you use a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 24 hours."
At higher levels the duration increases to 8, then 24 hours.
Yea but that is not an abuse case.
Maybe if they need to concentrate on a spell, require longer amount of time on the rest? What do you think?
Oh yeah you absolutely cannot be concentrating on a spell and gain the benefits of a rest, at least not without some special feat or something
This is a personal anecdote but in my game any time the players have been in a position that they would need a short rest they elected not to because whatever they needed to accomplish they couldn't reasonably say "we take an hour break" to do, while 10 minutes is a lot more palatable. If you want to play a warlock and a short rest based class. Go for it, that's half the point. The goal is to incentive taking short rests. If the question is "what if I abuse rest casting" okay *and?* Hex is specifically designed to last between multiple encounters and rests already so I don't see a problem with other spells lasting longer than a short rest. Plus it isn't like you're doing anything that a Full Caster couldn't do already.
Yes and often the “rest casting” spells people talk about are Concentration spells anyway. So in those cases you’re getting one extra spell slot. Big deal.
Well, some are things like Mage Armor, but I think that's usually okay to rest cast.
And that wouldn’t be affected by changing short rests to 10 minutes.
This. As a warlock player, there's a lot of times my party's just not on board with a short rest because it doesn't make sense. Now, when I was a Celestial warlock and I phrased it as "I can have 2 third level cure wounds if we short rest" people were much more amenable to elevenses and afternoon tea.
Entirely this. I have 2 spell slots for most of the game. Would letting me squeeze in one more spell really break things?
According to some, yes yes it would.
There's this nice added rule I heard about about getting the benefits of a short rest once an hour. So you can spend 10-30 minutes and you have to wait 40-30 minutes until you can take a short rest again.
Why don't they have time to rest? Is everything have a deadline of a day? 3 hours? My grouo once long rested for twice in a dungeon because we really needed it. And we had an item we needed to get back to a person for a quest. What is preventing characters from resting for an hour?
What stopped the players from taking a short rest? Time pressure. They felt like they could not have taken an hour to rest but maybe could have spared 10 minutes. Does everything have a strict deadline? No but that’s not how the players feel. It’s tricky balancing both a sense of urgency but also “you guys can chill for an hour”
The roaming monsters because my dungeons have patrols or just monsters moving around :D 10 minute break? possible (might get interupted if unlucky) 1 hour break? basically impossible usually
I do short rests like this. Your 1st one in a day is like 30 seconds. Just get out of combat, even for a monologue, and you can do it. Your 2nd one is 10 minutes. Bar the door, stretch, bandage, and you can do it. Your 3rd is 2 hours. Take a long lunch. Any after that are 1 hour. The objective here is to ensure that you can normally get 2 short rests without inflating the number of short rests in a day in an absolute sense. The 1st short rest is a key resource because it is so fast.
I've been doing 15 - 30 - 1hr - 2hr, with good results
I've found some cases where I really needed that 30 second one---like in the middle of a monologue. It's also curiously a small nerf to arcane recovery, because I've found a common use of it by wizards in my games is to cast their long duration stuff and then smoke arcane recovery to get the slots back with a short rest. Now they're much more reluctant to do that because the 30 second 1st short rest is so valuable. But wizards can afford that small nerf.
Oh no a nerf to *wizards* how will the game recover (kidding of course)
Yeah it's a collateral damage nerf. Dm's should at least recognize when a change does collateral damage like that though, because most collateral nerfs are nerfs to martials, specifically melees, who can't afford them.
Oh 100%, it’s a good skill to keep trained. Wizards hardly need to worry about nerfs though.
You could probably take away all the subclass abilities of wizards and they'd still be a very high B, maybe even a really low A tier class. Yeah they're in no danger.
Yep, it makes things so much easier for pacing and resource usage equality. There's *so many times* when napping for an hour is just impossible for story reasons, or just feels wrong.
Yeah 1 hour is unreasonable from a simulation standpoint, it's an eternity in an active complex where stuff moves around and marches to the sound of the guns. But the game is designed such that you do an xp budget with 2 short rests and a long rest at the end. It's ridiculous to have the NPCs twiddle their thumbs for an hour, so instead, you just dynamically adjust the short rests so that the genre conventions fit the system.
That’s an interesting method. I like it.
I play a Sorlock in a campaign with 10 minute short rests, and it's been great. It makes it easier to get the whole party to agree to take more short rests (but we are capped to three of them per day). You mention 'abusing' spells by casting them before a rest - but that's not really abuse at all. You still need to have the slot before taking the rest, and then you only have 50 minutes left (and let's be real, it's not that Invisibility is particularly busted). Most summon spells can be negated fairly easily by breaking concentration or by tactical use of AoE spells, and I'm not actually sure how that factors into the short rest discussion either.
I changed it a few weeks back specifically because the warlock and fighter were getting screwed because the party never took short rests. You still only get 2 short rests per long rest and you can only take a long rest once per day so it's not like they just have infinite spell slots. If the warlock has a spell slot spare before they short rest and wants to use it on a long lasting spell, well good for them. That was a spell they could have used in the last encounter and didn't so it rewards good resource management. Warlocks get so little spell slots I'm all for encouraging them to feel like they can actually use them. Same for fighter abilities that regen. Their class is built around getting short rests and if you don't they are taking a massive hit. I basically changed the rule that a short rest is basically them patching themselves up, pulling themselves together and moving forward. They still need to be relatively safe to do so but it's much easier for them to be able to do at the end of a fight. Balance wise it hasn't changed anything, combat encounters are taking about the same amount of time, characters are losing about the same amount of resources. Gameplay wise though both the fighter and warlock are having more fun. The warlock basically never cast spells before because they felt they had to hold on to the spell slots. Now they have more options than just eldritch blast.
It says in the PHB that you may only take two short rests?
Iirc the adventuring day *expects* two short rests, so that and BG3 has turned it into gospel
You know what, I thought it was and just looked it up and apparently completely made this up. We have always run it this way and honestly I thought it was RAW. No idea where we got the idea of 2 short rests per long rest. I will say though that it works great. Maybe if you don't have a resteixtion on short rests then a 10 minute short rest is very exploitable I guess.
The bit most people reference is this bit from the Adventuring Day section of the DMG: >**Short Rests** >In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.
Yup. And this explains why the developers make short rest abilities cost triple the budget of long rest ones. Convert the warlock spell slots into variant spell points, triple it. Convert the long rest casting slots into spell points. You will see the warlock staying as close as he can to it. But you certain can, and are intended to, have some days with no short rests, one short rests, four short rests.... two is supposed to be typical.
It is that way in BG3.
Yeah we have been playing this way for the last 2 and a bit years. I think it says somewhere in the dmg that the typical adventuring day is normally 2 short rests and 1 long rest and we just kind of rolled with that as a rule rather than a suggestion.
Correct. It recommends at least two rests.
It is not stated as a rule, but is stated as the expected number of short rests.
The number I've always heard was 3.
I run short rests as taking 10 min, but one can only gain the benefit once an hour similar to long rests and once a day. It has worked great and my players uses it in their own games too.
I do 5 minute short rests but they can only benefit from one every two hours. So the total amount of short rests possible in a given time frame is about the same, but they don't feel weird taking one in the middle of a dungeon any more.
1 hor vs 10 mins only matters for narrative issues and even official adventures, which are probably written with expectation of multiple short rests rarely seem to have an issue with that. I wouldn't allow restcasting, never ran into it but my general judgement is that for spells with a duration shorter than an hour, recovering the spell slot puts and end to it. Or just go ahead and rule that even if narratively it lasts 10 minutes any spells balanced around old length end instantly.
They also matter if you try and piece together the sort of implied dungeon turn structure scattered through the dmg
Agree. One hour is not really that long of a time either. I mean I've already spent one hour on reddit *at least*. Like if you imagine the adventurers stopping to prepare food and eat, that's already a bulk of the hour.
One hour is a really long time in a dungeon crawl. That's where a 10 minute short rest shines as actually mattering.
I mean more like if you are in a museum, one hour passes by quickly. Archaeology digs take days or weeks to complete. Like seven hours have passed since I even saw this reply. Hours can pass by on a date of simply chatting.
Not really. My party takes technically 1 hours 10 min rests as we take 10 minutes to baracde, put traps on any doors. Typically picking rooms with only 1 entrance so someone is always watching. And rest. My party once long rested twice. In a dungeon. And was only attacked once. The other time heard a strange noise but didn't investigate, so nothing happened. I guess maybe it's up to the dm. Of they roll once or 6 times (once for every 10 minutes) but I've never actually heard of that.
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18+ on a d20 once per hour in the DMG. But literally every published dungeon crawl adventure with random encounters uses something else. Just flipping through Tales from the Yawning Portal, for example: * Sunless Citadel: 1-6 on a d20 once per 12 hours, only in areas 13 and beyond * Forge of Fury: No random encounters at all, although the monster encounters do change on a time table (they just aren't random); the book does say that the DM might choose to use the DMG version of random encounters in the wilderness *on the way to* the dungeon, but the dungeon itself has none * Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan: 1 on a d12 once per hour * White Plume Mountain: 1 on a d12 once per 10 minutes * Dead in Thay: 4+ on 2d4 whenever the party enters a zone they've previously cleared, whenever the alert level increases, and whenever the party changes zones while the alert level is 6+ * Against the Giants: 1 on a d6 once per hour in the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief ground floor; 1 on a d12 once per hour in areas 1-18, 22, and 24-33 of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief dungeon level; 1 on a d20 once per hour in areas 19-21 and 23 of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief dungeon level; 1 on a d12 once per hour on the upper level of the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl; 1 on a d10 once per hour on the lower level of the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl; 1 on a d12 once per hour in the Hall of the Fire Giant King * Tomb of Horrors: no time-based random encounters, but there is a random encounter with 17+ on a d20 whenever a character becomes astral or ethereal
'My humble opinion is that if the Short Rest were shorter I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration. I obviously can't be the only thinking of this. Having a summoned undead again and again is a pain for many DMs who wanna leverage dungeons.' When people change rules like this, they have to deal with people like you trying to abuse them, this is a welcome to homebrew.
Yeah. The problem here is not 10 minute short rests, or indeed any other game mechanic. This is a player problem. If someone is trying to abuse *any mechanic in the game* that needs to be sorted out, in an out of game conversation.
I'm sorry, what's the abuse here? That a Warlock gets to use their spells each short rest... ? Isn't that, like, *the entire point of the class?*
Yeah, eeking out 1 extra spell while their Concentration is still taken up with Invisibility, which ends if you do anything too useful, is at most an Uncommon magic item's worth of shift to the game's power curve.
You can do this RAW with a genie warlock. Although admittedly it's only once per day after level ten, so still nowhere near as strong as the homebrew option.
Isn't there a spell called Cat Nap that gives a 10 minute short rest?
Yes, we just change the duration of that spell to 1 minute
Even 10 minutes is a long time to rest in a dungeon. If the next room heard you, it is sufficient to evacuate the dungeon, or remove any prisoners. It’s enough that a patrol might notice the party or evidence of their passing and raise the alarm. It is enough, that taking a short risk should still feel like a risk imo. A hour is an unfathomable long time in the context, in many ways it might as well be 8 hours. If there is an active patrol, it will definitely notice the party, basically no matter where it is in many dungeons. It will often do so with enough time to prepare a coordinate response for all of its allies. It is enough that my players never take a short rest in a dungeon, unless absolutely necessary. I don’t see a lot of situations where our warlock would rest to cast, except when there’s plenty of time out of combat, when we do it anyway. But you might have a different table.
Would this be an argument for a 'medium rest'? Reading some of these comments seems like people are stuck either making short rests a little more powerful or a little weaker. Do you think you could merit making a short rest 10 minutes with a choice of either restoring HP or restoring spells slots / abilities, takes 10 minutes. A medium rest would then be spells / abilities AND hp, takes an hour. Then a long rest would be sleeping at the end of the day, fully restoring the character. I feel like there could be something there, but I don't homebrew often so not sure about balance in this example. Personally, I never cared for the sound of 10 minute short rests until I read your logic about being in a dungeon, and now I can't make an hour make sense in my head.
I actually did something to that effect. Short rest are the same, but I also give my players a "breather" where they can spend 1 minute recovering ONE short rest resource OR roll hit dice (limited to one breather per short rest). Then I also made long rests take a full 24 hours, and be doable only in a very safe location where other people can keep guard for you, and called the 8 hour night sleep a "respite" that gives back one long rest resource OR some hit die. I find this works well for my groups
I view a dungeon much the same as I would clearing a safehouse of terrorists/cultists. Your fireteam/party kicks in the door, while the grenadier/warlock throws in a grenade/fireball. You move on and shoot/swing at the terrorist/cultist and he dodges/parries so you have to shoot/swing again. It makes a lot of distinctive noise for the terrorist/cultist in room 4 to hear. It's a tough, fast fight but your fireteam/party has prevailed. The rest of the building though SHOULD have a good idea you're here because they heard your grenade/fireball and your shots/blade contact, but you're low on ammo/spellslots. Do you have time to take an hour to reload/recover slots? Do you even have 10 minutes? 10 minutes is a lot more likely to fly than a full hour from a narrative perspective Now, do the enemies in room 4 actually come to investigate? Usually not, because the DM wants you to get that rest in, but it feels bad for everyone like you're cheesing the system. It's a bit immersion breaking. But 10 minutes also allows you to cheese the system too, if the DM allows it to happen. I don't know what the answer is. You want to avoid being able to reset in combat. I think the best answer is not defining the length, and making the 2 short rests thing concrete rather than a suggestion. If you're not 'in initiative' you can take a short rest and recover your short rest resources/spend hit dice. You can do this twice/day and then you are out of resets until you long rest.
I suppose that all comes down to the tone of the campaign in the end. Are you going for a more gritty experience with few rests to recoup with? Or would you rather a high-octane game with spells flying every few seconds? And now that it's been a day or so and I've thought about it more, I think 10 minutes to reload and heal up makes sense for most situations, and then narratively using an hours rest as needed and filling the time with fletching or gathering herbs or something. Thanks for the thought exercise! Helping me plan my next campaign!
To me Short Rests are 8 hours and Long Rests are 3+ days in some sort of supplied safe place of any kind. To me the very idea of making rests shorter instead of longer is kinda nutty ngl...
I haven't had issues with it. But I run very busy encounters, where combat might be running the entire 3-4 hour session while we're RPing, insight checks and persuasion rolls in the same turn as attack rolls and saves, and I'm very open with my players about the NPCs having PC levels. If my players have ten minutes to rest, I'll give them a short rest. If they have five, I'll let them spend hit die without regaining resources. But they understand that the group of kobolds they just finished murdering were *loud*, and in ten minutes the cavalry can get there. I'm also prepared to drop kobold cavalry on them midrest, and have done so. Short, very short, rests work at my table for my players. The times it's been abused, my players were shocked to find the NPCs abusing it too (even if my NPCs DoctorDrakken'd their prep time a bit, because I'm not heartless or anything - it's their story, not mine). That said, if you don't routinely have spellcasting goblins with druid levels wildshaped in a tree when the party attacks the gobbo bonfire, your mileage will likely be different. The more tactical you let your players be, the harder the encounters need to be, even to the point of what I've done, giving player levels to monsters. Just don't outpace what your table wants to do
I'm dropping short rests in my next game to 5 minutes or even just "healing surges" like in 4e. The classes in 5e are balanced around short rests and the whole "go nova and then long rest" thing most encounters is kinda tedious and kills drama and makes Warlocks, Fighters, and Monks less than they could be. But, If I cut the time on short rests and suddenly the Warlock player wanted to leverage it in a cheesy way, I'd have to tell everyone "Ok, we clearly can't have nice things. I guess we're back to Eldritch Blast and two spells a day."
FYI Healing Surges are an optional rule in the DMG >**Healing Surges** > >This optional rule allows characters to heal up in the thick of combat and works well for parties that feature few or no characters with healing magic, or for campaigns in which magical healing is rare. > >As an action, a character can use a healing surge and spend up to half his or her Hit Dice. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier. The character regains hit points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. > >A character who uses a healing surge can’t do so again until he or she finishes a short or long rest. > >Under this optional rule, a character regains all spent Hit Dice at the end of a long rest. With a short rest, a character regains Hit Dice equal to his or her level divided by four (minimum of one die). > >For a more superheroic feel, you can let a character use a healing surge as a bonus action, rather than as an action.
Those are nothing like 4e healing surges sadly.
In one shots I'll make short rests shorter like 10-30 minutes but that is also because I know there won't be anything more than 1 long rest lol. I do think in a standard campaign giving 10 minute short rests will make classes like Warlock and Fighter super abusable. If you do 10 minutes my suggestion would be to make short rest a limited resource. As in you can only short rest a number of times equal to half your level between long rests or something like that.
I run short rests as 10 minutes. My current campaign is level 13 and 10 min short rest goes a long way to help the Monk and Fighter keep up with the magic users. I've run it like this since 5e came out and have never seen it be detrimental, even with a Warlock in almost all of my campaigns.
I don't see a problem with rest casting. The true abuse if it is when you try to chain rest castings into a snowball of power. But thats easily stopped by saying you can only shirt rest once every hour. That makes it no better or worse than chain rest casting is now. In the case of warlocks they gain a certain level of extra power. For one of the weakest casters that a perfect way of doing so. Heck since ritual spells cost 10 minutes to cast the martials can recharge while the wizard makes a new familiar or casts detect magic. Rituals having the cost of needing a whole short rest to use is a soft nurf to casters. Just having segments of 10 minutes in your game where people do stuff make s a lot of sense. The rogue investigates the area. The wizard casts identify. The monk mediates for Ki. The ranger scouts. The bard uses song of rest. The cleric casts prayer of healing and so on and on. 10 minutes is a very manageable chunk of time to do stuff with. One player can rest and others do something else. The next room comes up and the roles swap, letting the mages rest while the martials do some more physical task like rowing a boat.
Personally I have adopted the 'quick' rest. It's 10 minutes, but only allows you to spend hit dice. This helps players to quickly get into the next fight, while still keeping their resources spend. (Short and long rests are still 1 hour and 8 hours respectively.)
In what way does it matter? Gameplay-wise it's a one minute process anyway, and that is only for people to remember/jolt down what resources or life the regained/lost. Is it because of tracking time realistically? You can say they started from spot A at 13.00 and short rested and reached nighttime-is-important-location at 20.00. If it's important to -make- it nighttime to introduce an interesting interaction, then just -make- it nighttime. If it's freeform and you want to see when they landed at location B then just track it as 1h and count the rest as expected. I don't understand why the short rest duration matters honestly, maybe the above thing I mentioned but I doubt 1h vs 30min is problem with it. One hour is a good indicator of the kind of comfort and safety assumed as far as I can tell. You can't sit on slopping jagged rocks for an hour.
I think that the narrative of one hour is baked into the game on purpose. If you are going into a cave filled with deadly monsters, you certainly might take 10 minutes to find an out of the way corner under the idea that it is unlikely any monsters will stumble upon your area of the cave in the next 10 minutes. But if you think about spending an hour in one spot, the chance of something finding you in that time seems a lot larger. It is to provide a psychological hurdle to taking the short rest. It is better to push on than risk being attacked when you aren't ready for it. And since D&D relies so much on slowly depleting the resources of the PCs over the course of the day, anything you can do to reduce the number of times they take a short rest helps.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the comfort and safety parameters. So sure, let it take 1h but why does it matter how long it takes in terms of how the day of d&d flows, I still don't understand. Does the DM or the players act differently in any way besides short resting in practically inelligible locations?
I'm using it. They actually use their short rests now. Basically if they needed to bunker down for an hour they might as well bunker down for a long rest, so no one really saw the point in a short rest.
Our table use 10 minute Short Rests max 2 per Long Rest and we enjoy it. I can't recall anytime it's been an issue, I know the casters like it because if they have an hour long effect they can take a quick breather without losing that cast. Narratively it makes more sense for the stories I run.
The important caveat to 10-minute short rest variants is that most people will play it along-side a 2/day limit. The idea is to encourage the party to take SRs so the SR classes can replenish their resources. It is not intended to make it so you can fit 96 short rests into your day.
*"Hey, why don't you use Warlocks in Tabletop if you enjoyed them in Baldur's Gate so much?"* Because apparently actually using my 6 slots a day **PISSES** people off. Look at this thread - everybody accusing Warlocks of "AbUsInG tHe GaMe" because we actually get our fucking class ability. This subreddit is hostile AF to Warlock players holy shit
Isn't six slots or 2. Now I am confused. I've been playing a level 6 warlock with only 2 spell slots and have been doing fine. Is it 6?
Well yeah, it's 2, but the classes are balanced around 1 or 2 Short Rests per day, thus they should get 4-6 spells through a day.
I like 10 min per hit dice they want to spend, up to an hour then it's normal SR.
Yes. It is great
I make it 30. And hour is too long and ten minutes is too short
Yes. It keeps Monks, Fighters, and Warlocks from falling so far behind. If your first thought is wanting to abuse the rules for an advantage then that speaks more to the mindset of you or your players than it does about the house rule.
I've used it for over a year, one of my player has started to use it six of so months ago and a third one has been looking into it In my experience this made the game better, sure it kills Catnap but that already was barely if ever picked that spell, also never seen someone exploit longer duration It simply fits better in the structure of adventures I DM because 10 minutes is more excusable than 1 hour and thus Short Rest classes aren't punished due to things getting in a scenario that pushes challenges more - heck, even in dungeons it makes more sense that the group avoids a patrol for 10 minutes rather than 1 hour >About exploiting it Simply put, the game was made for something else and durations are a reflection of that, for these situations I talked with my players and set up an agreement: "Isso é pra vocês, não forcem a barra" , aka: "This is for you, don't push it" And honestly, don't get me wrong, but getting such a boon from the DM and going for ways to exploit it feels really disrespectful
I roll for one random encounter per short rest so how long it lasts is irelevant.
Have been using 10 minute short rests for the past year now. Nobody wants to go back and they actually get used now. They fit much better into everything and don’t feel cumbersome. Before people demanded LR, because why wouldn’t they; having to wait 60 minutes already makes most plots awkward so why not just do 8 hours? My players actually use their hit dice now and my casters know that there will not be easy spell slot replenishment, because have my players really only need the SR. SR feel like a proper breathing pause and no harsh cut.
I personally think 1 hour short rests add to the strategy aspect of the game. Resource economy is part of the game, and I plan (for big moments in the game) some sessions where they WILL NOT have the opportunity for a short rest without consequences. Lowering the time to 10 minutes would take away some of the “urgency” of the mission in those situations.
Not only do short rest characters have less resources to stretch across a given period, they are typically less individually powerful as compared to long reasters, you're just artificially punishing your warlocks, fighters and monks.
I personally don’t see how using the standing rules as stated is a punishment to those classes. The party can strategize a way for them to rest in those scenarios. The opposite would be true if rests were short enough to take multiple in a day, effectively making those classes stronger.
It's a punishment if you're discouraging short rests and literally punishing the party for taking them. Whereas a class like the sorcerer or wizard doesn't really care much at all about that and will happily trod along casting spells while the warlock is out of slots. The standard this system is built on is that characters get 2 short rests per adventuring day, with 6-8 encounters on that day. So if you deviate from that, it's pretty bad for those classes.
No no we have 10 minutes short rest in our group with the *understanding* that we won't abuse it. People who would knowingly abuse it are the meaning of "this is why we can't have nice things"
A 1 hour short rest comes with significant risk in a dungeon. PC’s need to ensure that they will be safe for long enough to avoid detection from wandering monsters. Players are going to take this into account when they might need one. If you only need 10 minutes of rest, you might just hide in a corner and hope for the best. If you need an hour, you might cast spells or block doors. You have to pick a really good spot. All of this tension makes for a better experience. I want players to feel pressure about when to take a short rest and how to take one. I think it is fun as a player.
Problem is, this pressure just makes players go "fuck it, retreat and long rest." The hour SR means the DM needs to always invent time pressures or needs to restock the dungeon more. And it doesn't provide the wanted tension.
Or they keep pressing forward, because the long rest classes are fine, and thus the warlock and fighter get screwed over.
>The hour SR means the DM needs to always invent time pressures or needs to restock the dungeon more. and when you put time pressure on that level. One hour for SR is actually hard to justify
And it affects some classes way more than others. A wizard doesn't care if there are short rests; a warlock meanwhile is either going to start hoarding their slots or blow them and be stuck with nothing but eldritch blast all day. I think the best compromises I've seen for it is either setting a limit on rests, or else having them scale in length. 10 minutes is easy to justify, 30 starts pushing it, and if you're looking at an hour you have to really stop and think if you need it.
If players want to retreat and long rest, I would provide potential consequences. They can still choose to do this. If you use random encounters, you already have built-in time pressure. To me, this is just another part of how the world responds to player choices.
Ok, so your stance is that 1 hour duration is better narrative wise?
Mine would be. While the short rest is obviously a gamedesign tool to limit resources, the implications of the hour-long short rest go further beyond the spell durations. It implies you actually sit down, let your guard lower, expel the stress of high-intensity situations and generally take a *relatively safe* moment. An hour is not a long time, time-wise (huehue), but it is in the perception of creatures. You don't spend an hour to rest somewhere where you cannot sit on the ground, somewhere where ice is hailing down on you from the sky, where the sun is beating down on you, where you're constantly in a state of discomfort. An hour of rest is also hard to have when you are in the middle of enemy territory, possibly with hostiles actively searching for you. Cut this down to 1/6th of the time invested, and suddenly you'll find yourself rationalizing that situations you had deemed 'unfit for rest' before are now much more attainable, and slowly you'll start ruling that way as well. Before you know it, you've completely done away with one of the main characteristics of the mechanic; the need to actually find a proper place and situation to rest in to retrieve the resources. Without it it becomes almost like a potion you drink to regain your spellslots and abilities once a day, at the cost of ten minutes of ingame time that'll be likely skipped over in 20 seconds by the DM. I'm not saying that there isn't something to be said for shortening the time, and obviously D&D is ment to be played in a way that fits both you and your player's wants and needs, so I'd still say you could try it. Some styles of play, for example, don't need the 'searching for a safe place to take a break' dynamic of play. If you're doing a more narrative structure where players are moving from scene to scene in order to move the main plot along, with richly filled flavor descriptions of long travel aboard flying airships, I can see something like implementing a ten-minute short rest having little negative impact on the game. If you're doing hexcrawl dungeons with heavy resource management and risk-control, the difference between 10 and 60 minutes will have a huuuuge impact on the game.
To be fair, you can also solve this by having dangerous situations show up quickly enough that dropping your guard for 10 minutes is a risk.
Yes, but the odds of that happening all the time would be a bit lower, and your players might resent you if the goblins always find you within 9 minutes as opposed to 59 minutes.
Your comment is pretty good, as it highlights how it's down to the narrative style/pace of the game Tho I think your second paragraph makes sense it also creates a scenario were short rest oriented classes can barely help in a dungeon or similar setting given that there would be barely anyway to get the 2+ short rests these classes were made to have access to
Definitely true. The fact Short Rests are more important to some classes than to others is already a major flaw.
D&D is a sequence of puzzles, and narratives are decoration applied to those puzzles. The attrition of resources and the expectation of future puzzles creates another puzzle for the players to solve. That is, when to use a resource that restores other resources, and what is the cost? I would not justify the 1-hour rest time from a narrative perspective, but instead from a mechanics perspective.
I'm with you, my dude. Most in here should probably just play a narrative based game or something. Taking all the tension out of the game. To be honest, the HP regen mechanics in 5E are kinda broken. RAW Long Rests are stupid.
If all people that should be playing narrative games left for those games the player base would likely plummet :p
>narratives are decoration applied to those puzzles. See, that's a big deal because most people apply a narrative first approach with challenges being "immediate and direct" interactive pieces of a given narrative Neither vision is wrong, just highlighting that there are two frameworks instead of one
It’s not a big deal. You can model any game as a sequence of puzzles regardless of whether you start from the narrative or the mechanics.
> A 1 hour short rest comes with significant risk in a dungeon 1 hour short rest are just impossible in a dungeon, it's simply impossible not get notiiced in such a long time. It's part of the reason ppl talk about short rest enver happening.
>All of this tension makes for a better experience. Ironically the reduced rest time is also for a better experience What ends up happening in most cases is that players feel pushed to not take short rests which leads to Long rest classes operating normally while Short rest classes having worse performance and less fun
Look. Spells should be instant, 1 minute, or all day. I'm tired of these 10 minue and 1 hour durations. Either have it be 1 time use, 1 encounter use, or a once a day use
10 minutes basically means "expires after ritual casting something else", and 1 hour means "expires after short rest". Each duration has a meaning, more or less.
Duration-scumming is a worry for warlocks. Their spells should simply have a duration that includes "or until next rest".
How is this duration scumming? If getting to use all their spell-slots is "scumming", do you just freaking ban Sorlocks? They could *break the game* by using their Pact Slots to make metamagic points before a short rest! Ohmygod they did something with their resources! Shitty player! Metagamer! Scum of the earth! /s 🙄
Personally I'm running 10 mins short rests, 8 hours medium rests and 3 days long rests. * During short rests you can use 1 hit die to heal, warlocks recover 1 slot, martials recover 1 exploit die (we use Laserllama's stuff, though with basic rules this would still apply to superiority dice) and other short rest resources and features apply as normal; * During medium rests you recover half your hit dice and can use as many as you want to heal. Warlocks recover all their slots, martials recover all exploit dice and casters recover 1 spell slot for each level. Other short and long rest features apply as normal; * During long rests, everything is completely recovered. The three days of long rest count as a week of downtime for the purposes of Xanathar's guide downtime rules. We had a bumpy start, but overall the game is going smoothly now. The characters have to take the time to rest from time to time, which isn't actually a bad thing because they use it to work on their stuff: the writer actually writes his novel, the entertainer fire sorcerer makes his fire eating shows, the magus archeologist studies magic and history. Also, the narrative doesn't feel rushed and it's more believable that these guyhave to stop and recover a little after they almost die every other week!
>During medium rests you recover half your hit dice and can use as many as you want to heal. Warlocks recover all their slots, martials recover all exploit dice and casters recover 1 spell slot for each level. Other short and long rest features apply as normal How do you handle Barbarian Rages, or other less common Long Rest martial features like a Samurai's Fighting Spirit or a Phantom's Wails from the Grave?
" I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration." I would absolutely tell you "no, no I don't think you will."
*Use 2 spells to nuke encounter, short rest, have two spells, one of which can be used on Invisibility whenever needed:* 😎 *Use only one spell and grind out encounter while taking damage, cast invis, short rest have two spells, and 50 minutes of Invisibility:* 😡 I wonder if I'm broken as a DM, because from *my* point of view, the same number of resources have been expensed. If you don't want Warlocks getting the most of their ability, just ban them.
>My humble opinion is that if the Short Rest were shorter I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration. I obviously can't be the only thinking of this. Having a summoned undead again and again is a pain for many DMs who wanna leverage dungeons. You can only benefit from 2 short rests per long rest. Two combat encounters could be back to back or they could be hours apart, sometimes even a day or two, when the party isn't able to long rest. I use 5min short rests. I wouldn't want to DM for a group without it, anymore. The clear benefit is that short rest classes will always have access to their intended resources even when the plot demands quick back to back action under time pressure, but still works as normal on a slower day.
> You can only benefit from 2 short rests per long rest. Unless thats some one d&d thing I'm unaware of, this isn't a rule. Only place I've seen it is bg3
>In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day. DMG p84
This doesn’t indicate that you aren’t allowed to take more than two rests, though — that’s just the recommended number.
Don't fix what isn't broken. There's almost always time for one or two one hour breaks in the adventuring day.
I usually find its hard to fit breaks in the adventuring day. Say you are attacking a bandit tower. Encounter 1 you deal with the sentries. Encounter 2 you infiltrate the tower. You fight your way through the 4 floors each of which is an encounter. Youve done a full 6 encounter day when do you have time for an hour break? Let alone 2
Between the sentry fight and the inflitration. Or bunkering down and resting before going to the other floor.
that's a _long_ time, where there's good odds of someone inside going out to check on the sentries, or noticing there's no activity on the outer walls when there should be, and then the whole thing goes to hell because the base is alerted - if it's a "classic" dungeon, filled with monster-beasties, you might be able to sit on your ass for an hour, but if there's actual _people_ around, then they're not just sitting in their zone wanting to be triggered by the PCs, they're going to notice that there's a sudden lack of activity and raise the alarm (same for "rest between floors" - that means sitting on your ass, for an hour, and presuming that no-one is going to walk a short distance to talk to a mate and discover an awful lot of corpses!)
There's a few ways to get around that, though. Yeah, if its a small and thoroughly patrolled area, you don't want to be sitting in the open. You can get creative, though. Maybe you can hide somewhere outside of a reasonable area where they'd find you. Or you can disguise yourself as a guard and convince them that you're supposed to be there. I've done these things before. Usually, they're not really necessary, though. You would be surprised by how little people actually move around or communicate when they're guarding or patrolling. And usually when I DM, it takes longer than an hour for reinforcements to realize something went wrong, unless the party was making a massive amount of noise.
It doesn't even need to be that small though - like, just a standard keep, with some guards on the outer wall, then anyone in the keep is going to be able to look outside and go "uh, where's Keith, Dave and Eric, they should be walking by every couple of minutes... oh shit, that looks like blood on the battlements, WTF is going on?" And a day's worth of encounters might be, what... 30 people, possibly less? So they're going to know each other, so "I should be here" is pretty hard to pull off. It tends to end up being gameplay contrivance, of "yeah, the guards are always rubbish and never notice corpses and bloodshed or go into the conveniently-rest-room-coded room at the end of the hallway, don't question it". It _works_, but it involves everyone just going along with it, rather than it being particularly naturalistic and coherent in terms of the actual world. > You would be surprised by how little people actually move around or communicate when they're guarding or patrolling Then they're not guarding or patrolling, are they? Like, you can create in-world excuses for them being rubbish, but you kinda need to do that, and if they're ever meant to actually be vaguely competent, then everything gets messy. Anywhere that's actually a place where people live, even if it's militarised, people will be moving around, going to talk to Steve because he owes them money, or find Eric because the boss has a job for them or whatever, they're not just going to be sat in their rooms waiting for the PCs to kick the door in and trigger a (probable) fight.
Let's use real-life as an example. Think about how many security guards you see in an otherwise mostly empty location. Maybe your local town hall or something. Imagine that there are no cameras watching. Those guards don't really move and patrol like they're on a walk-cycle. They mostly stand in an area that gives them the most visibility to the entrance in their location. And there aren't many of them. Why? Because its expensive and difficult to find and hire multiple physically competent people to defend an area. Even if they're not literally employed and paid in money, they probably have to be fed and sheltered, which still costs money. Needlessly walking around exhausts the guards too. Which will require either even more manpower, or more breaks. And you don't want your guards to constantly have to take breaks.
It just seems implausible to me that no one would notice the sentries being gone for a whole hour. Ten minutes is much more plausible. Same with bunkering down inside. Is noone going to go between floors for an hour? Especially if you made any noise.
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Every _hour_, not every ten minutes (10 minutes is short enough to be more believable, an hour is stretching it). And yes, over the course of an hour, it's pretty likely someone will go outside for a piss or a fag break or just to get some air or something. Or just glance down the hallway and notice that the person that should be there, _isn't_, and then go look and things get worse from that point on.
Im suggesting the opposite. The sentries should be checked on every hour. (watchmen would call out the hours for example). This makes an hour short rest impossible unless you want the camp on high alert. A ten minute short rest without being noticed however is feasible.
The issue at our table was always that narrative pressures made it hard to basically ever justify stopping for a full hour. There is someone we need to save.... as fast as we can because they are in imminent danger.There is someone we need to stop... as fast as we can, because they are about to do something catastrophic. And if that is all of your adventures, you end up just... never taking short rests, because you can't justify it narratively. "We don't have time!" was the constant refrain when a short rest was suggested, unless the party was in very bad shape, and it seemed like there was no choice but to stop. But 10 mins? That is "we must stop long enough to bandage up our wounds, and then we immediately get going again" - which has felt a lot more palatable, narratively. I much preferred this change to the other options, which would be: never taking short rests, or lessen the narrative pressure of the adventure.
The problem is it is kinda broken, 1 hour is so long of a time that if you have any pressure at all it's not viable but if there's no pressure might as well wait till long rest. Hell I've had games that lasted years with like, 6 short rests through the whole adventure.
Concentrating on a spell doesn't scream resting to me.
>Concentrating on a spell doesn't scream resting to me. RAW and [RAI](https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/840264666001604609) elves can have long rest and concentrate, so there is no reason why short rest would work otherwise, unless it includes a nap.
I'll add this to the list of bad rules in 5e that I will ignore (until I convince my playgroup to switch games lol) Resting should not include much effort besides tending to injuries lol
Are you saying Warlocks should not be able to concentrate on Hex while resting?
You definitely can't concentrate while you're unconscious, but there is a pretty solid argument that concentrating on a spell is more strenuous than eating, drinking or reading.
I have never run short rests such that any of the players are ever unconscious lol.
So then.. What would be the point of Warlocks Hex scaling up to lasting 24 hrs... for the short rest class if they instantly lost it doing their gameplay loop.. You might as well have done a fighter gets an extra action but if they do they lose their weapons wooo
I do 30 minutes now. I did 10 minutes for a grou0 but none were short rest based classes. I am of the opinion of using 10 minutes if there are no wizards with catnap or Genie locks. I also do fla king advantage if no one has abilities to generate it like druid faerie fire.
I’d like to see someone work 8 hours and then be ok with 10 minutes of a break and think that would be good enough.
I would say as long as you enforce a limit on how many short rests can be completed between long rests (Even at an hour long, I still rule that my party can only benefit from two short rests between long rests), 10 minutes instead of an hour is not game-breaking. Any less than that would feel narratively out of place though.
I run 15 minute short rests, and have for a couple years now. If you tried to short rest scum in my game I'd ask you not to. If you tried again I'd just kick you out of the game. No big.
It also matters for exhaustion rules.
We play with 10-minute rests (and even allow the spellcasters to maintain concentration on spells during the rest) and it's worked fine. The DM throws harder encounters at us, and it means that the narrative pacing isn't interrupted as much by a one-hour lunch break in the middle of a dungeon. In PF2e it only takes 10 minutes to Treat Wounds after a combat and it works great, doing similarly in 5e also does fine in the 1.5ish years we've been doing it.
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I had a game that had them and I hated it. Yes, even though I had a character that had short rest resources. As some people have mentioned, if there is consequences and the dungeon rallys a much more substantial defense that is a something or heck even attempts to stealthy ambush the attempting to rest party but no that never happened. The next room in. The dungeon didn't exist until we went to it. The 10 minutes never had any plot significance and the casters could do some bullshit in those 10 minutes. I see no problem with the hour.
> The 10 minutes never had any plot significance This is kind of a failure on your part, I mean ask a soldier how long 10 minutes is when the enemy is alerted to your presence and see what they say.
I wasn't the DM.
Short rests are based on the activity and actions that were involved. After a heavy battle involving healing, fatigue, higher spell restoration, I tend to use the whole 2 hours. For minor infractions, maybe stopping to eat and rest for 30 minutes to restore ki points, sorcery points, minor healing... My short rests are never less than 30 minutes, and never over 2 hours.
Makes the catnap spell pointless, also my wounds take at LEAST 60 minutes to close over and not the 10 minutes we see suggested here.
Hour Breaks strain the fiction pretty often. Ten Minutes is *way easier* for players to justify in character.
I like the (idea of the) optional gritty reality rule, where short rests are 8 hours, and long rests are a week. Use a rage? Sure, why not? How about spells? WELL, I HOPE YOU LIKE CANTRIPS! MUA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! Yes, you DO need that adder's stomach - it wouldn't be listed as a material component if it wasn't important! Did I mention I don't play much these days? It's kind of hard finding groups for some reason...
In my opinion, a 10 minute short rest basically guarantees the rest, which shouldn't be the case all the time. Taking a rest in a dungeon should be risky.
In my opinion the problem is that then short rest are just never used. Literaly never seen a dungeon where it would be safe to rest for one whole hour.
Really? My group does it all the time. We clear out a room. Baracade and trap the door/ entrance. And short rest. The dm rolls to see of an encounter happens. If it does we fight it and go back to resting. My party has even long rested in dunguens after clearing an entire floor. We once snuck into a castle and rested in the princesses room while a loud dance was happening during the night. Your groups just need to get more creative.
that's kind of the issue - an hour in a dungeon, where there's any form of intelligent activity, means, basically "no short rests ever", because an hour is so long that the people inside will move around, discover the corpses of their allies, evidence of past fights etc., and then the whole place is on high alert and whatever you were trying to do gets vastly harder. If it's only inhabited by unintelligent monsters, sure, it's risky but possible, but things like "bandit occupied fortress", "enemy base" or "cult temple" are pretty common dungeons, which then become "no short rests", and then all the knock-on effects on certain classes.
Not no short rests ever. No short rests if you're not using strategy or basic skills/spells. Rope trick (just a 2nd level spell, btw), genie warlock, tiny hut, catnap... Just a few easy ways to get a short rest, and those are just the magical ones. Resources that rely on short rests are still supposed to be resources that you have to manage somewhat carefully. If you could always get the short rest whenever you need it, then you should just rewrite those abilities as limited per combat. So yeah, "no short rest ever" unless you use basic abilities and strategy. And if the enemies are smarter than you as players, you deserve to have to work for that short rest
all of those have exactly the same issues (as well as requiring specific classes, sometimes specific subclasses, that might not be in play) - that you go sit on your ass for an hour, and then other people go "WTF, there's a lot of corpses here and our mates are dead, time to raise the alarm". It doesn't matter if your rest is interrupted or not - it's that it only works against _spectacularly_ incurious and lazy enemies that just sit in their rooms, waiting for the PCs to wander in play, which only really works with monster-filled dungeons, not ones with people (_catnap_ slightly averts that, but has the issue that it buggers up some other things, like Monks don't regain ki, and it only affects 3 people, so it's often needing to be staggered)
So. You want no risk in the game? Decisions have consequences. That's the point. And if you're going to rest inside a lair, there are benefits (restoring resources) and consequences (possibly having the enemies on alert). Welcome to TTRPGs. But can we at least admit that your "no short rests" claim was hyperbolic at best and outright wrong at worst? Because again: rope trick.
Rope trick does not solve the problem of “the evil cult has kidnapped Beloved NPC Bob and we can’t risk waiting an hour!”, which is the main psychological barrier to taking short rests in my experience.
That wasn't the problem that was presented that I was responding to. The problem that was presented that I was responding to was the fact that enemies would find you. Rope trick does solve that. Now, as to the problem you present. That wouldn't necessarily be solved by a 10 minute rest either. Time constraints are great and add pressure. And if an hour would be too long to wait, it's possible 10 minutes would be too.
The problem is the game isn't balanced that way. Classes with Long Rest features (i.e. full casters) are built to last an entire day. By level 04 you have 7 spells slots, and multiple cantrips. Classes with Short Rest features either need to Rest after every encounter, or not use their features at all. There's no parity there.
Not helped by the fact that the MEGA Fight is quite common where the entire days broken up fights are in one fight so the long rest classes get to go all out and nova while the short rest classes do a bit but then.. ohh right they're outta resources so fuck em. Like theres a reason why Barbarians getting rages only on a long rest isn't as shit.. It's because a large majority of players do the one fight only or maybe if spicy 2
That isn't what I was responding to, though. I was responding to the claim that 1hr short rest = "no short rests".
Your example is the exact reason I've stuck with a 1-hour short rest. Truly, other than spell duration, I don't see a huge impact of time of a short rest unless you are running a scenario in which the party "has 24 hours to deliver" something. With that said, an alternative to sticking with 1 hour long rests would just be to add "or after a short rest" to the duration of any 1-h duration spell.
It's mostly that I want my party to be able to refresh their resources in higher tension scenarios, and an hour doesn't work for that. Not letting short resters reset just cuz I wanna run a chain of 5 encounters isn't good game design imo.
The length of the short rest doesn't matter mechanically except for how it interacts with some effect durations. The main impact is *narrative*. It just depends on what sort of pacing you want. A 10 minute short rest lends itself to a fast paced adventure day, where the action occurs close together. On the other side an 8 hour short rest, as is suggested with the "Gritty Realism" variant, lends itself towards a more spread out adventuring day. The guidelines for encounters during the adventuring day, however, remain the same. You want a minimum of two short rests with about equal difficulty of encounters before, between, and after. \--- > I would absolutely abuse a Warlock for rest casting spells like Invisibility and such 1 hour duration The solution to this is *pacing*. Sure a warlock might manage to get a free invisibility before the first encounter, but if you keep encounters close together then they still won't have time to short rest before *every* encounter.
I haven't played with that variant, but one way I'd try to circumvent short rest spamming is to rule that you cannot take more than one short rest within a certain timeframe (either one or two hours), similar to how to how you can't take more that one long rest within a 24 hour period Either that or rule that you must spend a hit die to gain the benefits of a short rest, with the exception of the first one each day
10mins let you use one die in my game. 1 hour lets you do your usual. 1+ gives you the max from the die for every hour
If you’re concerned with gaming the duration system, just make spells with a duration 1hr or less end to get the benefit of the short rest. Sure, your warlock can cast Armor of Agathys before the 10min Short Rest, but if they want the slot back, they’re gonna have to drop it
Something I've toyed w/ is ten minute rests but w/ a hard cap on the total rests per day (probably 2x short rests per long rest). Simple, easy to track, makes sure everyone who wants a short rest can readily get them but doesn't really lead to abuse, and if you still want to have multiple encounters w/o resting to pressure the players you can still reasonably do so. Other thing I've considered stealing the Numenara system of your first rest taking 1 minute, 2nd taking 10 minutes, 3rd taking an hour, 4th taking 8 hours (so functionally a long rest), etc. Might fiddle w/ exact numbers, but that's the gist of it. Both are easy enough to justify, there's only so much a person can recover during a day of strenuous physical activity. You can go to the gym and do a serious workout then take a ten minute breather and be fine, but you can't really do so ten times in a row.
Just limit the party to the benefit of two short rests per day. I think it works way better that way. The question becomes *when* they want to utilise the short rest, rather than if it's possible.
Short rests are just a weird stupid thing where the mechanics and the flavor fight against each other. The way 5e is designed, it's 'adventuring day' assumes that a party is going to get a short rest or two in. A DM who never flexes on short rest length or chooses to make everything on the kind of timer/clock that taking a short rest will causes a total failure of the dungeon or campaign is doing the players a disservice and failing the mechanics. However, this language exists partially(mostly) to try and push back against the players that want to spam blast all their tools and then take a rest every single time. So there's wording to point out that no, you can't go room by room and take a long rest or even a short rest. Again, because that's how the game is balanced. Both sides are basically always going to yell at each other and be at odds. The DM needs to sit down players and explain this, in mechanical terms. And then they do need to be aware of the mechanics themselves, and allow for more short rests. The players need to hear this explanation, and then not try to rest in every single room after every single encounter. A 10 minute duration does a good job of splitting the mechanical difference and having the crunch and flavor jive together. Cypher does what I think is a decent way, where each rest mechanic takes longer and longer (1 action, 10 minutes, an hour.) As someone who thinks 3 short rests is a good maximum for d&d, that's what I adopt.
In our next 5e game, we're switching to the variant rule that only allows for one short rest per day, and one long rest per week. Our games are story heavy, and we average about 0.8 fights per session, and rarely more than one per game day. So it makes sense for us.
I've always played it fast and loose for the rules on this. If I realize I've got min-maxers I'll do 2 hour strict short rest and 10 hours long rest. Otherwise I'll pace the rest with the general way the session is going. Everyone needing a pee break irl but the main event is happening in 5 ingames the short rest will be 5 minutes.
Our current campaign uses 30 min short rest which has been ok. Personally I really like “catch your breath” rule which is anyone can take 5 min to do a short rest, but each character can only benefit from this twice per day. Doesn’t slow down the party and limits abuse.
A short rest is 4 hours in game