i gennerally dont like the realism argument in D&D. Sure my character can not climb a mountain with his plate armor despite the fact that plate armor does not weigh that much and does not limit movement a lot, but a dragon is able to fly with its body weight and size, a rogue can dodge a fireball centered on him commpletly while not moving a bit and a barbarian can fall from 500 feet and survive with just a little scratch. My biggest problem with "realism" in d&d is that its the dms view of realism and often not how it is. Most people that i dm and play with dont even know that greatsword dont weigh that much.
It's all about setting and tone. For instance, in a wuxia game I would allow the miraculous dodge. In a more grounded game the rogue would be diving behind objects or other creatures to dodge the fireball.
I’m an old dude from the 80s & 90s, & let me tell you, i was shocked at how generous 5e is with healing & death saves, not to mention spells and feats. The old game _needed_ more healing & _a_ death save & a _couple_ more spells & _some_ fighter feats, but whoa Nelly. We hardly bothered with encumbrance or supplies, tho. Things were gritty enough when you could still be killed by orcs at 5th level.
My players still bring 10' poles along on adventures. They know I won't make them roll for something they specifically check for in an intelligent manner. So, risk dice, or use brains, your choice. :D
We need to push for more record keeping low levels should feel dangerous you just started your adventure you aren't gonna be battle ready when you get ambushed in your sleep it's why spells like tiny hut or rope trick exist, I'm not saying track food while in a settlement but preparing for an adventure is a big aspect that's often ignored people typically just skip past exploration and go right to the goblin cave
I feel the one of the problems that D&D struggles with is the wide swing between the heroic and the gritty in the rules, with a large gap in the middle. My last group tried to tackle this by going with a middle ground approach. We changed short rest to only giving one hit die maximum back, with the option to roll a medicine check to maximize the die, and we changed long rest to read like the old short rest, also with the ability to max dice. kept regaining hit dice as written. We did track basic ranged ammo during a fight, but it was assumed that basic ammo re-filled after the fight, between reclaiming shot rounds, or looting. We did track water and food, but between really high wisdom scores and pack kancks , we rarely ran out of supplies, but when we did, it hurt! I think we also had it where if you wore metal armor during the day, you started with 1 level of fatigue. ( we used the A5e rules splitting exhaustion into fatigue and strife)
I think that part of the resting rules changes is because the DMG implies that one in-game day should have 6-8 normal encounters and a number of games only see 1 or 2 encounters per day (and according to the two tables on pages 82 and 84, these would have to be deadly encounters). The balance is to make the classes that rely on long rests (usually spellcasters (except warlock)) to burn there resources so that the classes that rely on short rests can shine (fighters, monks and warlocks). And yes, I know that barbarians are in this weird spot of having a very limited resource that resets on a long rest and the '24 rules are trying to fix this.
There's a lot of tools that make the record keeping easier now. I'm not fond of the record keeping side of things, but with Fantasy Grounds, and other automated tools, it is a lot easier, and I can focus on the challenge and problem solving that I do enjoy. And yes, you can use a VTT just to keep records when you play face to face and when you are a player not the DM.
My two second opinion is that 5e rules were made with characters heavily in favour, the writers realized this broke the game, wasn't fair, so they wrote Gritty Realism alternate rules to "fix" this. It didn't. I like logistics and encumbrance rules. These add a dimension to the game to make it challenging to the players. There is no challenge if you can do anything, carry everything, never run out of supplies, never tire, can't die, and deal enormous amounts of damage. In my opinion, THIS is why campaigns grow stale and die. The fun of being a virtual demi-god wanes pretty quickly. So, we then must add more powers, more treasure, more feats, greater abilities, and outrageous challenges and DM rulings to bring back the spark. Hmm, I seem to have read this before in some book somewhere. Sorry, longer than a two second opinion. Great video. Thanks for this.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Never apologize about a long opinion. I'm always excited to read them. :) I feel like your point here explains why 4e didn't land nearly as well as 5e. It just had too much of that "I'm a demigod" going on.
Im planning a campaign using the Valikan Clans book from Ghostfire games, and I'm tinkering with how much of the grit rules I want to use. What I have so far is that Long Rests take 3 days, variable encumbrance, and thermal modifiers I.E. dress warmly. This video is right up my alley!
Excellent video. I used a rule where going to 0 HP for any reason gave a level of exhaustion, accelerating the death spiral even if your are healed or stabilized repeatedly in a battle. Even with D&D Beyond keeping track of the exhaustion levels, my players did not care for it. It simply ruined the fun of adventuring for them. So I had to pull that rule back. Lesson is even if your players verbally agree to a particular rule, take it for a test spin and see if they REALLY can live and play with it.
This is always great advice. Frankly, people are great at knowing what they enjoy, but as a species, we kind of suck at guessing what we WILL enjoy until we experience it. Trial runs are best.
Gritty Realism (DMG p267) is a trick rule, in that what benefit it grants the table is already within the DM and player's control without the rule, and what actual effect is does have mechanically is just de-valuing the longer duration spells as they are now less likely to be in effect over multiple encounters (being the rule's intent is for spacing out encounters over greater amounts of time). What I mean by the DM and players already having the benefit of the rule without even touching the variant is they are in control of how often encounters occur and how regularly rests are taken. - If the players want more encounters between rests they can say "we continue adventuring, and will rest later." - if the players want fewer encounters between rests they can go "after that fight, we look for an area to take a rest" - If the DM wants there to be more encounters between rests, they can just move the encounter locations closer together, give some means of getting between them quicker, or just not having the clock move so fast minutes instead of hours are between them. - If the DM wants less encounters between rests; they can just say there are less encounters. Slow Natural Healing (also on DMG p267) is the better option. Don't change the timescale; change the actual recovery mechanic. With this, the DM and players are actually encouraging a different play dynamic. For the DM; your adventuring day goal is "get the players to each spend over half their hit dice". Doing that means the players start off each day with less health (forcing spell slot and potion consumption), meaning the adventure is running on an attrition model. You can use weaker monsters more readily since a single weapon hit is close to 1 hit dice in value, compared to rest mechanics that heal to full meaning any amount of damage is only one long rest away from not mattering and only deadly encounters pose a real risk. With any amount of damage actually mattering now, players are incentivised to be mindful of even taking weak hits. It's not just a case of "can I get the enemy to 0 hp before they get me to 0 hp?" but becomes "how do I beat the encounter while taking as little damage as possible?" since their available hit dice actively represents how long they can go adventuring between needing safe resting back in town. I've been using this rule for a few years (* with one small addition) and it has helped a lot, since my party never truly out levels lower CR threats, I can still use adventures and campaigns from many different level ranges without needing to buff encounters to account for my players in the +15 level range. * the additional change I use is you must spend at least 1 hit dice to take a short rest (this dice restores hp as normal, you just don't get a short rest if you don't spend dice). It cuts down on short rest cheese like coffeelocks, or fighters/monks spamming for self heals. They still can but now with a soft cap, so it's kept under reasonable control.
One of the things that occurred to me when I read the Gritty Realism rule was that the duration of spells would need to be adjusted as well. A spell with a duration of 8 hours is obviously intended to last through multiple encounters and/or most of the adventuring day. If you're playing with Gritty Realism and you want anyone to take that spell you'll need to increase it's duration. The problem with Slow Natural Healing is it doesn't increase how long it takes spellcasters to recover spell slots and that's the real issue, the ability of spellcasters to burn through their most powerful spells in a single encounter because that's the only encounter the party will have that day.
The advantage of Gritty realism is that it allows stories that'd otherwise be impossible to tell in the standard resource system, like a longer wilderness journey with encounters broken up over days instead of hours. It also makes it so the DM doesn't constantly have to think of contrived excuse #641 of why the PCs can't take 8 hours to rest. Having a ticking clock can be exciting but it gets old if every single mission is nothing but "okay bad guys are doing their ritual in 6 hours, go stop them." And pretty much if you want to use the resource depletion system the way the designers intended it, you'll need to constantly invent the ticking clock of the week. With a full week for a long rest, pretty much all the kinds of bad things that could happen, like monsters getting reinforcements, setting up traps, relocating or just general bad stuff happening. Many more things make far more sense in the narrative, because a week is a significantly longer time period and enforces a natural reluctance for players not to want to full rest. Slow natural healing is just annoying TBH since it just leads to a bunch of rolls you have to deal with after the rest. And if casters can get their spells back it doesn't do much to curb power. It's mostly just a nerf to fighters but casters are at full power and I really don't think the game needs that.
@@studentofsmith The spell slot recovery isn't so much an issue with Slow Natural Healing, but one of encounters. Like said before; the hit dice limit and damage carrying over between days is a resource strain. Characters with healing spells will start to have to dedicate more resources to recovery when you run the party's hit dice low, meaning they will have less slots to freely throw around in the day. You just have to put more encounters that put a similar strain on non-healing casters. Not all encounters need to be combat. As long as it requires a resource consumption to resolve; it's an encounter (also the trick to easily having 7+ encounters in a day). Encourage utility spells, and put uses for them more often into the game. The players get an active sense of progress and achievement, but will also functionally have less slots to throw around in combat achieving the same end result.
I dont think I've ever been in a 5e game that keep track of rations, arrows/Bolts. While I myself love that I got some immidiate backlash when I asked my players if they'd be willing to track those for a campaign.
have you tried ammunition dice? Like you start with 1d12 and each time you shoot, you roll that dice. On a one, you drop it a level (1d10) and so forth.
You probably shouldn't track ammo in any game that has cantrips. Half of the party already has unlimited ammo and you are just punishing the martials further.
You're not alone. Lots of people don't like bookkeeping. Some even see it as a punishment instead of being part of the game, or compare martials to spellcasters to find a reason to avoid it. Finding the right balance for your own group is pretty much the key of it all.
lovely video! I feel like, when talking about rules for long distance travel (miles/km), you either need really tight and “gritty” rules applied to a world/regional map or no rules at all where the DM simply fast travel skips ahead to where you want to go. For the Aid 5E project, I made a deep dive into an alternative long distance travel rule, including mounts, vehicles, and walking travel (intended for gridded regional maps of 1 to 5 miles per hexagon with Curse of Strahd like sandbox Game style). The Alternative leans more towards realism then normal 5E travel rules, as Core rules simply state an amount of hours you can travel in each day, while AID 5E base your travel limit on a new passive stat called “march Limit” which determine the amount of miles a creature can travel before starting to get exhausted between resting. These alternative rules help DMs like myself move hidden monster tokens that travel around the same world map as my players do. This helps in determining how to hunt them, escape from them, reach a location before them and whether or not they even are able to run away from or catch a creature. Can also help determine the movement of a character that occasionally split the party.
I find that you can change the emphasis of a game to lean towards gritty with two simple changes to resting that aren't length. 🧐 1) A character cannot benefit from more than two Short Rests before needing a Long Rest. (This also breaks Coffeelocks) 2) Long Rests do not recover Hit Points. You can, however, spend Hit Dice to recover HP. Even Hit Dice you've just recovered. 🤕 This makes it take several days to fully recover from serious battle wounds, if you don't rely on healing magic, without making things difficult to track. 😁👍
I do the same! Where did you get the two rest idea? I've been doing that for a while and can't remember if its an optional rule or read it somewhere in reddit.
@imemmag This is just stuff I made up for my own table while sitting in my garage, smoking cannabis. If other people came up with it too, awesome! That counts as validation. 😁👍
My main success with Gritty D&D has been by keeping levelling very slow and after level one, dividing all future hit points gained through levelling by 3. Combat is terrifying for everyone, as the enemies HP aren't reduced. However, I did allow the medicine skil with the Healer featl to heal one Hit Dice (the level one HD) once per target every Long Rest.
I prefer "realistic" settings, some workarounds tho. But a survival campaign (or a section of campaign), eg. Dark Sun/scorched Earth settings, you have to track rations and water. If away from civilization, general and specialist survival skills, rations, stockpiles are a must
Short rests already are 1 hr: “A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds.” What did you mean to say at 0:43?
I think he misspoke on accident. The gritty realism rule he's referring to is 1-day short rests and 1-week long rests. He even mentions the 1-week long rest part.
I made an attempt to run Rime of the Ice Maiden with 3 of my most attentive and creative players. I told them we would be using some gritty rules, and they agreed. Nobody ever kept track of water, rations, or arrows. We ended up ditching the rules because none of them were enjoying it, and i wouldnt have had fun keeping track of it for them. Now i know my players better.
Personally, I love realism in roleplay and problem solving (the exciting stuff) but not with chores and monotony (the uneventful stuff). Example: Giving a rogue advantage on descending a tower with rope because he made a slip knot around a railing so that he would lower more gradually, NICE REALISM! Having the rogue fall behind because he had to take time to wind up and pack away said rope, BORING REALISM.
In my experience stress and tension in a story unfolds when there is scarcity. Mainly ressources and time. If a party always has all the time it needs or all the ressources, the game runs the risk of getting boring. Or the DM has to come up with more and more deadly opponents or situations to challenge the party. I personally like to play dangerous situations like when your friend is hanging on a rope over a chasm and you are trying to pull him up before the rope breaks.
Is a one of the rare players that can respect having to keep track of the extra bookkeeping but I admit I am a rare case. I also find most people are incapable of being called out in front of other people when they do something wrong like getting a rule wrong or being reminded their bookkeeping should be empty of resources by this point.
Call outs can be a tough art to master. I find proposing it as a question helps me to bridge the gap and let people discover their bookkeeping mistakes for themselves works for many.
My big problem with encumbrance is that the PHB doesn't tell you what regular items weigh. It's just weapons and armor. It all but requires using an app or website that has the items weights recorded.
The adventuring gear table in the PHB has weights listed for all the items there. Anything else that gets come up with obviously needs a DM to help out by making it up.
I require my players to track anything consumable during play. I hold verisimilitude very high in my games, and I believe that removing your armor to sleep, having to purchase more bolts/arrows/ball bearings/bullets when you come back to town to be a vital part of the reward structure. Now, when it comes to encumbrance, I get rather loose and just try to maintain a rough estimate of when someone has hit their threshold for carrying capacity; so just don't be that guy collecting weapons and armor and expecting to have it on you at all times in my game. I do this because I believe that rules are codified for a reason and to change them without considering the many pitfalls can actually have negative consequences. For instance, I don't know many other games who actually track ammunition and rations; it's just been handwaved away. But I do know many tables where players won't even consider purchasing potions or scrolls, because why spend their piles of gold on one use items when they can just go buy a long term magical/mechanical advantage? Now, the obligatory "play how you want to play" is always applies. But our players are what we make them as DMs. Put a bunch of enemies that only attack immediately... and we get murder hobos. Handwave daily rations and water, and when they finally do get to an inhospitable environment; they'll just complain that it's not fun. All things in moderation of course! Expose them to other differing ways to play in gentle ways and you may just start getting players interested in actually exploring the world (the background scene you've painted for them). I get that players want to be heroes, and I want them to be as well. But heroes aren't made by always succeeding. That's a omnipotent deity. Setbacks are crucial to proper narrative flow, and they shouldn't be something that we as DMs narrate. Roll for random encounters while they sleep, have them attacked without their armor on or their weapon in immediate reach. Have those wolves attack, knock prone, and start dragging the PC sentry out into the brush while on their watch LOL. But don't forget to include a Killmoulis in your random night encounters as well! We wouldn't want to mold our players into Heroic Murder Hobos who only Long Rest in the safety of a well paid establishment now would we?
@@HappyCatholicDane I disagree. I don’t FORCE anyone to sleep without armor. They just don’t get the benefits of a long rest. It’s a choice. Most choose to take sentry rotations where they are armed and armored and they do just fine. But I would challenge your views on “just another way to hurt Martials” with “it’s not a matter of punishment; but an avenue of choice”. It’s kind of absurd that such things are looked at as punishments to begin with. So player characters should always be under a state of advantage? And when it comes to Caster OP Martial Underpowered… I think it’s mainly a false flag argument. While yes, many spells should be rebalanced at higher levels; most tables don’t get to high levels ever. Thus this imbalance is never commonly realized. However from 1-10, Martials (and more specifically half caster hybrid multi classes) are far more OP than a caster simply through resource and action economy alone. Also, while I’m not a “viable sample” size alone; my experiences are that most players will say casters are OP; but they still ALWAYS choose melee to play. Which means the “stereotypical go to argument” doesn’t really reflect reality. Most will play melee, perhaps take a dip for mechanics, and be one of the biggest wrecking balls around. Alas, I don’t think we’ll ever see any true balance. Mostly because the DM side of things are not what the game is developed around (mostly player options to make $$$). And I don’t the designers will ever truly support dnd beyond level 14 in any meaningful way.
I have had players ask for grittier games. But they usually complain that it's too gritty. I prefer to run more lighthearted games. So do my players even if they ask for serious and gritty.
Good on you for knowing what you enjoy. Most people know what they DO enjoy, but are terrible at figuring out what they WILL enjoy, which is how you end up with requests for serious and gritty, and complaints about too much seriousness and grittiness, from the same group. Learn what they DO enjoy, and serve it up. :)
Gritty realism does not affect difficulty unless you increase the number of encounters between rests. It only makes more game time pass between rests, and we skip over game time passing during play, so a day becomes a week and nothing really changes. Except going through more rations.
I would have to disagree there. The gritty realism changes the circumstances under which you CAN rest, which means if two situations are the same under the two different rules set, one group can rest, and the other cannot. It does functionally work out to more encounters between rests, but unless you're changing scenarios to have less encounters possible in an area, gritty realism is harder.
@@DM-Timothy - You said the same thing I did: Increasing the number of encounters between rests increases the difficulty, and leaving it the same does not. You can adjust the difficulty regardless of how long it takes to rest, so Gritty Realism does not change the difficulty unless you increase the number of encounters between rests.
@@sleepinggiant4062 Hmm.. We obviously have differing points of view again. Leaving the situation the same (aka not adjusting, for instance, the module you're running) and changing to Gritty, increases difficulty. Likewise, I do concur with you that adding encounters, or removing them, changes difficulty, regardless of your Gritty or normal rules for rest.
There was a general consensus a while ago that combat took too long to simulate due to these types of rules. Now we're going to turn around and make non-combat parts of the game take a long time to simulate? That might be the single biggest issue with players embracing this type of play.
Yup. The old verisimilitude vs. power fantasy argument. I always try to put story first, with a minimum of tedious bookkeeping. If survival and supply issues fit into the narrative, I just go for it and put in a scene or two on the journey to reflect it. No need to track every crumb of lembas IMO. Same with encumbrance. If the players are looting everything, down to the socks of their slain enemies, their travel speed will be impaired. Should you track every piece of loot? Hell, no. Just tell them the donkey carrying the stuff is having a hard time, before you let it collapse a few miles down the road. It's a game of collaborative storytelling, not your tax declaration. 😉
Major disagree. The only one of these common optional rules that increases the amount of things to track is variant encumbrance. The ""gritty realism"" resting rule in particular really just doesn't. It's the exact same as regular resting, it's just harder to make happen. All it does is make it easier for the GM to actually make several encounters in a single "adventuring day" happen, instead of the crybaby wizard going to sleep every 2 fights.
What the resting rule also does is makes playing a non-warlock spell caster almost pointless. If you need to make your spell slots last for days then your going to be using nothing but cantrips encounter after encounter. Boring...
@@Jacob-sb3su It's got nothing to do with restraint. This rule affects classes that rely on long rest much harder than ones that don't. Basically it castrates them. A low level wizard with 2 or 3 spells per day becomes 2 or 3 per WEEK! That might be fun for some but for me, and I suspect most players, it's like watching paint dry. Don't get me wrong, I'm an old school player that's been playing the game for 40 years. I like adding some realism just not this one specific optional rule. My group tracks encumbrance (easy because we play on Fantasy Grounds), we don't sleep in armor, we track food, water and ammo, we need to spend hit dice to heal even on long rest, etc... but this rule... Hell no!
Gritty? Play 1E or BECMI. Or Warhammer FRPG. Or any of the grim-dark OSE clones. 5E isn’t made for gritty. It’s made for easy play from levels 1-10 that bogs down to slog after that. The sweet spot is 4-8 or so. But I dare 5E players to go without subclasses
I like making adjustments to my favorite game to push toward a theme, personally, but it's definitely true that there are games that encapsulate certain feels SUPER well. Thanks for your comment.
Compared to what we're used to, it certainly can. It makes more sense when you think of recovering from twisting an ankle and compare that to the sucking gut wound your character is sleeping off, but this IS still a game we're playing. Both styles of play have their place for the right group.
@@DM-Timothy I don't mind the hit point part so much. I get and like that. But, I don't like the idea it takes a week to refresh spells and other abilities to anyone who wasn't hurt or incapacitated.
I despise verisimilitude arguments. Not only is it entirely subjective, it also completely ignores genre conventions which are the bedrock of storytelling. Even the most gritty story isn't fully realistic nor does it "make sense" to everyone.
Fair stance. Realism and Verisimilitude are very different things, but I've not heard people arguing about genre before, which makes a certain degree of sense. It could be argued I suppose that a gritty game is a different genre than a more high-fantasy one, and perhaps that's what people are actually fighting to find, that more Conan-the-barbarian Sword and Sorcery vibe, vs the fantasy of Forgotten Realms. I love both, personally, lol.
Seen a poll and 60% of players preferred the best style of play, RAI. We don't want our rules messed with, we just want DMs to create the story/world (if you're not using FR and why would you not?) Gritty = tedium + not fun + slows down the game.
@elowin1691 how many tables run his rules? I play 5 of them and none of them use tedium to "make the game fun". We get bags of holding by 5th level. What encumbrance? 😆 🤣 😂
@elowin1691 our DM literally said, I don't care how many arrows you have or how much food you have. I assume you are competent adventurers who stock up on food rations. Instead of slowing down the game, make the battles more challenging. Give us more opportunities for meaningful RP and not just small talk. That makes the game fun. Allow the players to build/take over a base of operations. Now that's fun. Counting arrows would drive me up the wall.
I'd be curious about the polls source and the like. Regardless, I suspect players indeed feel this way in large numbers. Just not all players, or all the time, or in all implementations.
i gennerally dont like the realism argument in D&D. Sure my character can not climb a mountain with his plate armor despite the fact that plate armor does not weigh that much and does not limit movement a lot, but a dragon is able to fly with its body weight and size, a rogue can dodge a fireball centered on him commpletly while not moving a bit and a barbarian can fall from 500 feet and survive with just a little scratch. My biggest problem with "realism" in d&d is that its the dms view of realism and often not how it is. Most people that i dm and play with dont even know that greatsword dont weigh that much.
It's all about setting and tone. For instance, in a wuxia game I would allow the miraculous dodge. In a more grounded game the rogue would be diving behind objects or other creatures to dodge the fireball.
Totally fair point.
I’m an old dude from the 80s & 90s, & let me tell you, i was shocked at how generous 5e is with healing & death saves, not to mention spells and feats. The old game _needed_ more healing & _a_ death save & a _couple_ more spells & _some_ fighter feats, but whoa Nelly.
We hardly bothered with encumbrance or supplies, tho. Things were gritty enough when you could still be killed by orcs at 5th level.
Ikr. Stack of 10 feet sticks to aid with traps too
I hear you, for sure. My 2e days were full of fear. lol
My players still bring 10' poles along on adventures. They know I won't make them roll for something they specifically check for in an intelligent manner. So, risk dice, or use brains, your choice. :D
We need to push for more record keeping low levels should feel dangerous you just started your adventure you aren't gonna be battle ready when you get ambushed in your sleep it's why spells like tiny hut or rope trick exist, I'm not saying track food while in a settlement but preparing for an adventure is a big aspect that's often ignored people typically just skip past exploration and go right to the goblin cave
I'll admit, I miss the planning for adventuring bookkeeping. But I'm a nerd, so there's that...
I feel the one of the problems that D&D struggles with is the wide swing between the heroic and the gritty in the rules, with a large gap in the middle. My last group tried to tackle this by going with a middle ground approach. We changed short rest to only giving one hit die maximum back, with the option to roll a medicine check to maximize the die, and we changed long rest to read like the old short rest, also with the ability to max dice. kept regaining hit dice as written. We did track basic ranged ammo during a fight, but it was assumed that basic ammo re-filled after the fight, between reclaiming shot rounds, or looting. We did track water and food, but between really high wisdom scores and pack kancks , we rarely ran out of supplies, but when we did, it hurt! I think we also had it where if you wore metal armor during the day, you started with 1 level of fatigue. ( we used the A5e rules splitting exhaustion into fatigue and strife)
I think that part of the resting rules changes is because the DMG implies that one in-game day should have 6-8 normal encounters and a number of games only see 1 or 2 encounters per day (and according to the two tables on pages 82 and 84, these would have to be deadly encounters).
The balance is to make the classes that rely on long rests (usually spellcasters (except warlock)) to burn there resources so that the classes that rely on short rests can shine (fighters, monks and warlocks).
And yes, I know that barbarians are in this weird spot of having a very limited resource that resets on a long rest and the '24 rules are trying to fix this.
There's a lot of tools that make the record keeping easier now. I'm not fond of the record keeping side of things, but with Fantasy Grounds, and other automated tools, it is a lot easier, and I can focus on the challenge and problem solving that I do enjoy. And yes, you can use a VTT just to keep records when you play face to face and when you are a player not the DM.
Great point, and great use of a VTT, too!
My two second opinion is that 5e rules were made with characters heavily in favour, the writers realized this broke the game, wasn't fair, so they wrote Gritty Realism alternate rules to "fix" this. It didn't. I like logistics and encumbrance rules. These add a dimension to the game to make it challenging to the players. There is no challenge if you can do anything, carry everything, never run out of supplies, never tire, can't die, and deal enormous amounts of damage. In my opinion, THIS is why campaigns grow stale and die. The fun of being a virtual demi-god wanes pretty quickly. So, we then must add more powers, more treasure, more feats, greater abilities, and outrageous challenges and DM rulings to bring back the spark. Hmm, I seem to have read this before in some book somewhere. Sorry, longer than a two second opinion. Great video. Thanks for this.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Never apologize about a long opinion. I'm always excited to read them. :) I feel like your point here explains why 4e didn't land nearly as well as 5e. It just had too much of that "I'm a demigod" going on.
Im planning a campaign using the Valikan Clans book from Ghostfire games, and I'm tinkering with how much of the grit rules I want to use. What I have so far is that Long Rests take 3 days, variable encumbrance, and thermal modifiers I.E. dress warmly. This video is right up my alley!
Excellent video. I used a rule where going to 0 HP for any reason gave a level of exhaustion, accelerating the death spiral even if your are healed or stabilized repeatedly in a battle. Even with D&D Beyond keeping track of the exhaustion levels, my players did not care for it. It simply ruined the fun of adventuring for them. So I had to pull that rule back. Lesson is even if your players verbally agree to a particular rule, take it for a test spin and see if they REALLY can live and play with it.
This is always great advice. Frankly, people are great at knowing what they enjoy, but as a species, we kind of suck at guessing what we WILL enjoy until we experience it. Trial runs are best.
Gritty Realism (DMG p267) is a trick rule, in that what benefit it grants the table is already within the DM and player's control without the rule, and what actual effect is does have mechanically is just de-valuing the longer duration spells as they are now less likely to be in effect over multiple encounters (being the rule's intent is for spacing out encounters over greater amounts of time).
What I mean by the DM and players already having the benefit of the rule without even touching the variant is they are in control of how often encounters occur and how regularly rests are taken.
- If the players want more encounters between rests they can say "we continue adventuring, and will rest later."
- if the players want fewer encounters between rests they can go "after that fight, we look for an area to take a rest"
- If the DM wants there to be more encounters between rests, they can just move the encounter locations closer together, give some means of getting between them quicker, or just not having the clock move so fast minutes instead of hours are between them.
- If the DM wants less encounters between rests; they can just say there are less encounters.
Slow Natural Healing (also on DMG p267) is the better option. Don't change the timescale; change the actual recovery mechanic. With this, the DM and players are actually encouraging a different play dynamic.
For the DM; your adventuring day goal is "get the players to each spend over half their hit dice". Doing that means the players start off each day with less health (forcing spell slot and potion consumption), meaning the adventure is running on an attrition model. You can use weaker monsters more readily since a single weapon hit is close to 1 hit dice in value, compared to rest mechanics that heal to full meaning any amount of damage is only one long rest away from not mattering and only deadly encounters pose a real risk.
With any amount of damage actually mattering now, players are incentivised to be mindful of even taking weak hits. It's not just a case of "can I get the enemy to 0 hp before they get me to 0 hp?" but becomes "how do I beat the encounter while taking as little damage as possible?" since their available hit dice actively represents how long they can go adventuring between needing safe resting back in town.
I've been using this rule for a few years (* with one small addition) and it has helped a lot, since my party never truly out levels lower CR threats, I can still use adventures and campaigns from many different level ranges without needing to buff encounters to account for my players in the +15 level range.
* the additional change I use is you must spend at least 1 hit dice to take a short rest (this dice restores hp as normal, you just don't get a short rest if you don't spend dice). It cuts down on short rest cheese like coffeelocks, or fighters/monks spamming for self heals. They still can but now with a soft cap, so it's kept under reasonable control.
One of the things that occurred to me when I read the Gritty Realism rule was that the duration of spells would need to be adjusted as well. A spell with a duration of 8 hours is obviously intended to last through multiple encounters and/or most of the adventuring day. If you're playing with Gritty Realism and you want anyone to take that spell you'll need to increase it's duration. The problem with Slow Natural Healing is it doesn't increase how long it takes spellcasters to recover spell slots and that's the real issue, the ability of spellcasters to burn through their most powerful spells in a single encounter because that's the only encounter the party will have that day.
The advantage of Gritty realism is that it allows stories that'd otherwise be impossible to tell in the standard resource system, like a longer wilderness journey with encounters broken up over days instead of hours. It also makes it so the DM doesn't constantly have to think of contrived excuse #641 of why the PCs can't take 8 hours to rest. Having a ticking clock can be exciting but it gets old if every single mission is nothing but "okay bad guys are doing their ritual in 6 hours, go stop them." And pretty much if you want to use the resource depletion system the way the designers intended it, you'll need to constantly invent the ticking clock of the week.
With a full week for a long rest, pretty much all the kinds of bad things that could happen, like monsters getting reinforcements, setting up traps, relocating or just general bad stuff happening. Many more things make far more sense in the narrative, because a week is a significantly longer time period and enforces a natural reluctance for players not to want to full rest.
Slow natural healing is just annoying TBH since it just leads to a bunch of rolls you have to deal with after the rest. And if casters can get their spells back it doesn't do much to curb power. It's mostly just a nerf to fighters but casters are at full power and I really don't think the game needs that.
@@studentofsmith The spell slot recovery isn't so much an issue with Slow Natural Healing, but one of encounters.
Like said before; the hit dice limit and damage carrying over between days is a resource strain. Characters with healing spells will start to have to dedicate more resources to recovery when you run the party's hit dice low, meaning they will have less slots to freely throw around in the day.
You just have to put more encounters that put a similar strain on non-healing casters. Not all encounters need to be combat. As long as it requires a resource consumption to resolve; it's an encounter (also the trick to easily having 7+ encounters in a day). Encourage utility spells, and put uses for them more often into the game. The players get an active sense of progress and achievement, but will also functionally have less slots to throw around in combat achieving the same end result.
I dont think I've ever been in a 5e game that keep track of rations, arrows/Bolts. While I myself love that I got some immidiate backlash when I asked my players if they'd be willing to track those for a campaign.
have you tried ammunition dice? Like you start with 1d12 and each time you shoot, you roll that dice. On a one, you drop it a level (1d10) and so forth.
The gruops dnd play Ive been part of didnt exactly have gritty play but rations, ammo, potions and water were always limited. And THAT I appreciated👌
You probably shouldn't track ammo in any game that has cantrips. Half of the party already has unlimited ammo and you are just punishing the martials further.
You're not alone. Lots of people don't like bookkeeping. Some even see it as a punishment instead of being part of the game, or compare martials to spellcasters to find a reason to avoid it. Finding the right balance for your own group is pretty much the key of it all.
lovely video! I feel like, when talking about rules for long distance travel (miles/km), you either need really tight and “gritty” rules applied to a world/regional map or no rules at all where the DM simply fast travel skips ahead to where you want to go.
For the Aid 5E project, I made a deep dive into an alternative long distance travel rule, including mounts, vehicles, and walking travel (intended for gridded regional maps of 1 to 5 miles per hexagon with Curse of Strahd like sandbox Game style). The Alternative leans more towards realism then normal 5E travel rules, as Core rules simply state an amount of hours you can travel in each day, while AID 5E base your travel limit on a new passive stat called “march Limit” which determine the amount of miles a creature can travel before starting to get exhausted between resting. These alternative rules help DMs like myself move hidden monster tokens that travel around the same world map as my players do. This helps in determining how to hunt them, escape from them, reach a location before them and whether or not they even are able to run away from or catch a creature. Can also help determine the movement of a character that occasionally split the party.
I find that you can change the emphasis of a game to lean towards gritty with two simple changes to resting that aren't length. 🧐
1) A character cannot benefit from more than two Short Rests before needing a Long Rest. (This also breaks Coffeelocks)
2) Long Rests do not recover Hit Points. You can, however, spend Hit Dice to recover HP. Even Hit Dice you've just recovered. 🤕
This makes it take several days to fully recover from serious battle wounds, if you don't rely on healing magic, without making things difficult to track. 😁👍
I do the same! Where did you get the two rest idea? I've been doing that for a while and can't remember if its an optional rule or read it somewhere in reddit.
@imemmag This is just stuff I made up for my own table while sitting in my garage, smoking cannabis. If other people came up with it too, awesome! That counts as validation. 😁👍
@@imemmag I took that idea from bg3 lol
@@oj3730 I've barely played the intro. 🤷
@@owenveighey1765 take the time to play it, it's very good
My main success with Gritty D&D has been by keeping levelling very slow and after level one, dividing all future hit points gained through levelling by 3. Combat is terrifying for everyone, as the enemies HP aren't reduced. However, I did allow the medicine skil with the Healer featl to heal one Hit Dice (the level one HD) once per target every Long Rest.
Woah, that does sound like a terrifying setting!
I prefer "realistic" settings, some workarounds tho. But a survival campaign (or a section of campaign), eg. Dark Sun/scorched Earth settings, you have to track rations and water. If away from civilization, general and specialist survival skills, rations, stockpiles are a must
Short rests already are 1 hr: “A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds.” What did you mean to say at 0:43?
I think he misspoke on accident. The gritty realism rule he's referring to is 1-day short rests and 1-week long rests. He even mentions the 1-week long rest part.
@@williamgordon5443 Thanks, didn't know the short rest gritty standard.
William got me. Sorry if I was confusing!
I made an attempt to run Rime of the Ice Maiden with 3 of my most attentive and creative players. I told them we would be using some gritty rules, and they agreed. Nobody ever kept track of water, rations, or arrows. We ended up ditching the rules because none of them were enjoying it, and i wouldnt have had fun keeping track of it for them. Now i know my players better.
Learning about your players is SO key. Good on you for recognizing what your table needs and rolling with it.
Personally, I love realism in roleplay and problem solving (the exciting stuff) but not with chores and monotony (the uneventful stuff).
Example:
Giving a rogue advantage on descending a tower with rope because he made a slip knot around a railing so that he would lower more gradually, NICE REALISM!
Having the rogue fall behind because he had to take time to wind up and pack away said rope, BORING REALISM.
Great example of doing "realism" right!
In my experience stress and tension in a story unfolds when there is scarcity. Mainly ressources and time. If a party always has all the time it needs or all the ressources, the game runs the risk of getting boring. Or the DM has to come up with more and more deadly opponents or situations to challenge the party. I personally like to play dangerous situations like when your friend is hanging on a rope over a chasm and you are trying to pull him up before the rope breaks.
Scarcity is definitely one lever of good tension building. Love the rope example, too!
Is a one of the rare players that can respect having to keep track of the extra bookkeeping but I admit I am a rare case. I also find most people are incapable of being called out in front of other people when they do something wrong like getting a rule wrong or being reminded their bookkeeping should be empty of resources by this point.
Call outs can be a tough art to master. I find proposing it as a question helps me to bridge the gap and let people discover their bookkeeping mistakes for themselves works for many.
My big problem with encumbrance is that the PHB doesn't tell you what regular items weigh. It's just weapons and armor. It all but requires using an app or website that has the items weights recorded.
The adventuring gear table in the PHB has weights listed for all the items there. Anything else that gets come up with obviously needs a DM to help out by making it up.
I like realism or verisimilitude but with as less bookkeeping as possible.
I don't think you're alone. :D
I require my players to track anything consumable during play. I hold verisimilitude very high in my games, and I believe that removing your armor to sleep, having to purchase more bolts/arrows/ball bearings/bullets when you come back to town to be a vital part of the reward structure. Now, when it comes to encumbrance, I get rather loose and just try to maintain a rough estimate of when someone has hit their threshold for carrying capacity; so just don't be that guy collecting weapons and armor and expecting to have it on you at all times in my game.
I do this because I believe that rules are codified for a reason and to change them without considering the many pitfalls can actually have negative consequences. For instance, I don't know many other games who actually track ammunition and rations; it's just been handwaved away. But I do know many tables where players won't even consider purchasing potions or scrolls, because why spend their piles of gold on one use items when they can just go buy a long term magical/mechanical advantage?
Now, the obligatory "play how you want to play" is always applies. But our players are what we make them as DMs. Put a bunch of enemies that only attack immediately... and we get murder hobos. Handwave daily rations and water, and when they finally do get to an inhospitable environment; they'll just complain that it's not fun. All things in moderation of course! Expose them to other differing ways to play in gentle ways and you may just start getting players interested in actually exploring the world (the background scene you've painted for them).
I get that players want to be heroes, and I want them to be as well. But heroes aren't made by always succeeding. That's a omnipotent deity. Setbacks are crucial to proper narrative flow, and they shouldn't be something that we as DMs narrate. Roll for random encounters while they sleep, have them attacked without their armor on or their weapon in immediate reach. Have those wolves attack, knock prone, and start dragging the PC sentry out into the brush while on their watch LOL. But don't forget to include a Killmoulis in your random night encounters as well! We wouldn't want to mold our players into Heroic Murder Hobos who only Long Rest in the safety of a well paid establishment now would we?
Forcing players not to sleep in armor, is just another way of hurting the martials. Same with drowning them or similar.
@@HappyCatholicDane I disagree. I don’t FORCE anyone to sleep without armor. They just don’t get the benefits of a long rest. It’s a choice.
Most choose to take sentry rotations where they are armed and armored and they do just fine.
But I would challenge your views on “just another way to hurt Martials” with “it’s not a matter of punishment; but an avenue of choice”.
It’s kind of absurd that such things are looked at as punishments to begin with. So player characters should always be under a state of advantage?
And when it comes to Caster OP Martial Underpowered… I think it’s mainly a false flag argument. While yes, many spells should be rebalanced at higher levels; most tables don’t get to high levels ever. Thus this imbalance is never commonly realized.
However from 1-10, Martials (and more specifically half caster hybrid multi classes) are far more OP than a caster simply through resource and action economy alone.
Also, while I’m not a “viable sample” size alone; my experiences are that most players will say casters are OP; but they still ALWAYS choose melee to play. Which means the “stereotypical go to argument” doesn’t really reflect reality. Most will play melee, perhaps take a dip for mechanics, and be one of the biggest wrecking balls around.
Alas, I don’t think we’ll ever see any true balance. Mostly because the DM side of things are not what the game is developed around (mostly player options to make $$$). And I don’t the designers will ever truly support dnd beyond level 14 in any meaningful way.
I have had players ask for grittier games. But they usually complain that it's too gritty.
I prefer to run more lighthearted games. So do my players even if they ask for serious and gritty.
Good on you for knowing what you enjoy. Most people know what they DO enjoy, but are terrible at figuring out what they WILL enjoy, which is how you end up with requests for serious and gritty, and complaints about too much seriousness and grittiness, from the same group. Learn what they DO enjoy, and serve it up. :)
Gritty realism does not affect difficulty unless you increase the number of encounters between rests. It only makes more game time pass between rests, and we skip over game time passing during play, so a day becomes a week and nothing really changes. Except going through more rations.
I would have to disagree there. The gritty realism changes the circumstances under which you CAN rest, which means if two situations are the same under the two different rules set, one group can rest, and the other cannot. It does functionally work out to more encounters between rests, but unless you're changing scenarios to have less encounters possible in an area, gritty realism is harder.
@@DM-Timothy - You said the same thing I did: Increasing the number of encounters between rests increases the difficulty, and leaving it the same does not.
You can adjust the difficulty regardless of how long it takes to rest, so Gritty Realism does not change the difficulty unless you increase the number of encounters between rests.
@@sleepinggiant4062 Hmm.. We obviously have differing points of view again. Leaving the situation the same (aka not adjusting, for instance, the module you're running) and changing to Gritty, increases difficulty. Likewise, I do concur with you that adding encounters, or removing them, changes difficulty, regardless of your Gritty or normal rules for rest.
This is a great take and so true -you sir are a man of great wisdom I tell ye.
You're way too kind. lol. Thank you!
There was a general consensus a while ago that combat took too long to simulate due to these types of rules. Now we're going to turn around and make non-combat parts of the game take a long time to simulate? That might be the single biggest issue with players embracing this type of play.
Entirely plausible. Record keeping is rarely people's favorite part of the game. (there are notable exceptions, me among them...)
Yup. The old verisimilitude vs. power fantasy argument. I always try to put story first, with a minimum of tedious bookkeeping. If survival and supply issues fit into the narrative, I just go for it and put in a scene or two on the journey to reflect it. No need to track every crumb of lembas IMO. Same with encumbrance. If the players are looting everything, down to the socks of their slain enemies, their travel speed will be impaired. Should you track every piece of loot? Hell, no. Just tell them the donkey carrying the stuff is having a hard time, before you let it collapse a few miles down the road. It's a game of collaborative storytelling, not your tax declaration. 😉
Well said.
Major disagree. The only one of these common optional rules that increases the amount of things to track is variant encumbrance.
The ""gritty realism"" resting rule in particular really just doesn't. It's the exact same as regular resting, it's just harder to make happen. All it does is make it easier for the GM to actually make several encounters in a single "adventuring day" happen, instead of the crybaby wizard going to sleep every 2 fights.
What the resting rule also does is makes playing a non-warlock spell caster almost pointless. If you need to make your spell slots last for days then your going to be using nothing but cantrips encounter after encounter. Boring...
@@dabeef2112 god forbid a spellcaster exercises restraint
@@Jacob-sb3su It's got nothing to do with restraint. This rule affects classes that rely on long rest much harder than ones that don't. Basically it castrates them.
A low level wizard with 2 or 3 spells per day becomes 2 or 3 per WEEK! That might be fun for some but for me, and I suspect most players, it's like watching paint dry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an old school player that's been playing the game for 40 years. I like adding some realism just not this one specific optional rule. My group tracks encumbrance (easy because we play on Fantasy Grounds), we don't sleep in armor, we track food, water and ammo, we need to spend hit dice to heal even on long rest, etc... but this rule... Hell no!
Fair stance. :)
I thought there was a Virtual Boy in the background, but it was just three candles. Goddam Virtual Boy…
I actually don't know who or what a Virtual Boy is... No one is surprised by this, of course...
@@DM-Timothy Nintendo’s second evilest creation.
Another great video. Thank you.
Thank you! :) I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Anything that adds more bookkeeping is a negative to me.
You're not alone there! I'm a bookkeeping nerd as a player, but to each their own.
Gritty? Play 1E or BECMI. Or Warhammer FRPG. Or any of the grim-dark OSE clones.
5E isn’t made for gritty. It’s made for easy play from levels 1-10 that bogs down to slog after that. The sweet spot is 4-8 or so.
But I dare 5E players to go without subclasses
I like making adjustments to my favorite game to push toward a theme, personally, but it's definitely true that there are games that encapsulate certain feels SUPER well. Thanks for your comment.
7 days for a long rest sounds ridiculous.
Compared to what we're used to, it certainly can. It makes more sense when you think of recovering from twisting an ankle and compare that to the sucking gut wound your character is sleeping off, but this IS still a game we're playing. Both styles of play have their place for the right group.
@@DM-Timothy I don't mind the hit point part so much. I get and like that. But, I don't like the idea it takes a week to refresh spells and other abilities to anyone who wasn't hurt or incapacitated.
@@randymyer2996 I can understand that, for sure. Separating the two by using Natural Healing rules is a solid option.
I despise verisimilitude arguments. Not only is it entirely subjective, it also completely ignores genre conventions which are the bedrock of storytelling. Even the most gritty story isn't fully realistic nor does it "make sense" to everyone.
Fair stance. Realism and Verisimilitude are very different things, but I've not heard people arguing about genre before, which makes a certain degree of sense. It could be argued I suppose that a gritty game is a different genre than a more high-fantasy one, and perhaps that's what people are actually fighting to find, that more Conan-the-barbarian Sword and Sorcery vibe, vs the fantasy of Forgotten Realms. I love both, personally, lol.
Seen a poll and 60% of players preferred the best style of play, RAI. We don't want our rules messed with, we just want DMs to create the story/world (if you're not using FR and why would you not?)
Gritty = tedium + not fun + slows down the game.
Lmao
@elowin1691 how many tables run his rules? I play 5 of them and none of them use tedium to "make the game fun". We get bags of holding by 5th level. What encumbrance? 😆 🤣 😂
@elowin1691 our DM literally said,
I don't care how many arrows you have or how much food you have. I assume you are competent adventurers who stock up on food rations. Instead of slowing down the game, make the battles more challenging. Give us more opportunities for meaningful RP and not just small talk. That makes the game fun. Allow the players to build/take over a base of operations. Now that's fun. Counting arrows would drive me up the wall.
I'd be curious about the polls source and the like. Regardless, I suspect players indeed feel this way in large numbers. Just not all players, or all the time, or in all implementations.