Great choice for a topic. I wasn't familiar with this optional set of rules. I'll suggest it to our DM. It seems reasonable that the DM could choose to toggle this on and off at certain points in the campaign. To me, it seems like playing under normal rules until sub-classes kick in, then switching to gritty realism would work.
Definitely something you can play around with. If you start with Gritty Realism as the baseline, you can have areas or artifacts that allow normal resting for a period of time. You can tie the resting type to geography, how close they are to the BBEG's lair, lots of options.
A part of me feels like 6-8 encounters per long rest is absolutely insane if a long rest is just 8 hours. It's a lot easier to pace an adventuring week than an adventuring day, in my opinion.
I liked the idea but the week-long rest was way too long for the style I was striving for, so I kept the 8 hour Short Rest, and the Long Rest now last 1 whole day. This combined with Spell Points variant rule (also some minor tweaks to some classes like a couple of ki points to the monk) and the variant healing rule makes long rest harder to achieve while exploring but more important when going back to town.
I actually use a version of this myself. I called it Traveling Fatigue. Whenever the party is on the road, or any place away from civilization, the extended times you use are implemented. This sort of gives the world a slight more connection to society and the uses of its services, and forces the players to make something more of travel than "you go from A to B, now what"
Without having played it, I like the idea of combining a gritty long rest (1 week) to restore accumulated wounds and exhaustion with a form of heroic short rests (10 minutes) to represent how battle and HP is just a rush of adrenaline. It makes short rests quick and easy to justify outside of slow dungeon crawl environments, it's perfect for ritual spells and "huddle up, team, what's our next move?" moments, while not pretending you can sleep off just falling out of a skyscraper. I would personally feature more exhaustion in such games, but with some variant of the 6 levels. I like the idea of a -1 penalty to your d20s for each level, and then accumulating other penalties in a more logical "You're getting slower" manner - but it could be any variant that's a bit less unusable (preferably also easier to remember) than the current 6. For mine, adding "you can't take reactions" and then "choose an action or bonus action" would fill in for the slots now missing from the disadvantage being replaced with the static penalty. Otherwise, barring using more exhaustion, a *good* injury table with non-permanent effects, dealt by crits and dropping to 0, that could be removed with a week of rest is another way to add to the sense of both superhuman feats and very human weaknesses. Even superman eventually needs time to rest from a battle that's on HIS level.
I like the idea of using this for traveling, and say the players can only get a long rest in when they spend the night in an Inn. So when on the road, no long rests until the group reaches the next town, or cottage to grant them shelter for the night. This places granting long rests in the hands of the GM. And only spells like Mordenkainens Magnificent Mansion could give players the ability to grant them the comforts of having a long rest in 8 hours.
One thing that's a drawback from "Gritty Realism" are the lengths of Spells. Mage Armor that lasts for most of the Adventuring Day is now only a sliver of the week. Gritty Realism doesn't take this into account, and so is a possible unintended side effect. Some similar alternatives or minor balances to GR could be done such as: - Trimming down the length of Long Rests. Someone else in the comments mentioned bringing it down to a full 24 hours. I personally think a Weekend is viable period, or 60 hours. If you start on the evening of Friday, you'll be ready Monday Morning. What inspired me to do this is that in the standard rules, a Long Rest is 8 times the length of a short rest, so if those ratios are maintained, it'd be 8 hour Short Rests and 64 hour Long Rests. I then rounded down to 60 hours or 2.5 days. - Another system I've seen pop up a lot is the Rally System. Run Gritty Realism as normal, but then if the Party really needs to work overtime, they can declare a Rally and return to normal rests for a predetermined amount of time. For every day they Rally, they'll gain a level of exhaustion, which will hit all at once by the end of the Rally Period. You cannot Rally while Exhausted. - Another popular way to balance Long Rests is the Safe Haven system. Basically, you can only Long Rest in predetermine points of civilization. This makes the world more dangerous and foreboding, and individual towns become all the more important. Now when the party helps defend a town from a Dragon, for example, even if it's narratively or politically insignificant, they also gain the D&D equivalent of Dark Soul's Bonfire. - A fourth way is to tie Rests to Resources. Maybe you don't want to perform a Hex Crawl or be super crunchy with Survival, but you do want the Party to pay some mind to some of the more sparsely used mechanics. By requiring X pounds of Rations in order to take a Long Rest, now when players venture out into the wilderness, they have a limited supply keeping them going, and for every day adventuring they spend away from civilization, is another day closer to being resourcefully stranded. In addition, the more rations they bring with them the less loot from dungeons they can carry, or the less equipment they can pack. This one is especially potent with Variant Encumberance. That said, it's not perfect. Spells like Goodberry and Tenser's Disk does make many of these side mechanics naught. The balance change of having Goodberry consume it's Material Components is an easy fix, but Tenser's Ritual tag does make things more... complicated. Of course, you can do all of these in combination. Maybe you want the Weekend Long Rests, but also provide the players the option to Rally if need be. Maybe you'll have Safe Havens tied to the Weekend Rests, or give a price to Rally Rests that don't exist normally. Rests are very finicky in the current rules, and so I've been fiddling with them from the start. I've liked the idea of Pure GR, but when I proposed it to my players, a warm reception they did not give.
ngl, i like the idea of longer rest times, but maybe a short rest being 2-3 hours and long rest being 13-15 hours, this way its more realistic. a player cant just take a short rest during combat because that's kinda insane. Also you might have to wait a while and expend energy to take a long rest after a short one, this is because you will still have low torpidity and not be able to fall asleep. id still honestly incorporate this into my sessions.
I recommend what Ive used for a while, with a short rest being a night's rest and a long rest being two consecutive relaxing short rests. My campaign isn't even intrigue or anything, it's just that 6-8 encounters per day is utterly ridiculous so I have 1-2 encounters per day and a long rest every 2-3 days
Gritty realism really depends on how you want to use it, if you want to use it to encourage more downtime and non combat activities it is wonderful. If you want it to make pc's slow down and be more conservative, prevent quick use of resources, or make it more "dark souls" like, it fails. Zee Bashaw puts it best when he said "if a party wants to rest, they are going to rest". This is because making a rest take longer does not result in solving the desired issue. This is similar to the Goodberry problem, many DM think it is a bad spell and ban it because it is OP, it is not OP if you look at resource v. healing benefit, it is considered OP because it eliminates need for rations, which can be fixed by modifying that effect or the way it is implemented without banning the spell. DM should really think of what their desired outcome is before implementing these rules or they may be unsatisfied with the actual outcome.
My group just started a game using the gritty realism. Its an alturnate earth steampunk ish game focuse more on the narrative. Its already shaping out to be a good game
The way I've seen it used is to make the game more intense. The characters don't have time to catch their breath. The pace of combat isn't slowed down much.
I don't do this often, but can I bring something up that's unrelated to the video topic? I often find that the audio on your videos (I've seen maybe 3 or 4 so far) is very low, to the point that I have to multiply the volume by two or three times to clearly hear anything. I don't know if it's a thing of note to anyone else, but it's my belief that, if possible, upping the output by a bit would be an improvement to the overall presentation as well as create an even more pleasant viewing experience! Thank you for the time, and I understand if it's not feasible-just wanted to run it by you. Now, back to the topic: Sounds interesting... I like the idea of more time for downtime in particular. World interaction! Pacing is also pretty important, so I'll keep it in mind if there's ever a desire for a less game-y feel at the table.
Personally I tend to switch rest times around with my players. We started with 24h long rest (needing a comfortable environment) and 5-15 minutes short rest. We did that because short rests are kind of meant for semi tense situations as in dungeons and stuff where I felt like you most of the time don't have an hour (I can still say they get interrupted when I don't want them to have one...) and we are kind of measuring around 6+- encounters per long rest with around two short rests in the middle. This was mostly to allow travel to be meaningful. But now they are going into the underdark where it might be unrealistic to have a chill day to relax and restock so we're gonna shorten the time needed. After all it's just game mechanics for balancing how much happens between rests. There are some considerations one should make (most 8h spells will usually last throughout a usual adventuring day - 1h spells through 2 encounters and 10 min spells through two back to back encounters) when stretching the rest timing since some other times are written for the standard way but other than that with reasonable players... It works quite well I must say :)
I use a variant of gritty realism where every 7th short rest counts as a long rest. That way I can still use the Adventuring Week model without lowering the stakes by players having to consistently take a week off.
What if, during a long rest, you roll a d8 and what you roll is what day of the rest is interrupted, or if they rest up faster. 8 would be nothing happens
Seems a little harsh to have a 7/8 chance of your long rest being interrupted. What if instead every member of the party rolls and you also roll in secret. If anyone matches your roll, their character gets a complication that interrupts the long rest on that day.
I feel like gritty realism _almost_ gets it right, but there are problems Normally, a long rest is 8 times longer than a short rest, but with gritty realism, a long rest is 21 times longer, this heavily favors short rest classes I feel like a better version of gritty realism would be to borrow the natural HP recovery from 3.5e, where 8 hours is still enough to reset all class features, but hit points recover at a rate of 1+level per day Buff that a bit to account for 5e only recovering half your hit dice on a long rest instead of all of them, and you have a more realistic rest system Off the top of my head, I’d say that on an 8 hour long rest, you recover thrice your character level in HP, maybe there can be like 1 or 2 hit dice rolled for free, so higher HP classes don’t get as shafted Or maybe just making it a flat 1/4 of your HP maximum, to keep it simple
The discrepancy in how much the rests are multiplied by is a very good point. Might be why "a couple of days in comfort" always felt like a better fit to me.
I don't like the argument that gritty realism buffs short rest features, because it doesn't. What it does is nerf all features that recharge on a rest, but the long rest ones get nerfed way harder, so it seems like short rest features get a buff. I personally think it swings too far, making long rest features too weak. I'm working on a system I'm calling rest&recovery. It keeps the standard short and long rests, except long rests don't recover hit points, only up to half your hit dice (but, you can spend hit dice at the start of a long rest before it recovers them) There's also recovery, which takes much longer and recovers all hit points, exhaustion, and lingering effects that a rest can't deal with. You're also limited to a number of long rests equal to your level before you need a recovery.
I can see looking at it from that angle. If you keep to several encounters a day instead of using the opportunity to spread them out, it would definitely function as a nerf. I think the only things that are otherwise affected are effects that last 1 or 8 hours, because they don't go as far. Introducing a third rest for full recovery is a good idea as well.
Great choice for a topic. I wasn't familiar with this optional set of rules. I'll suggest it to our DM. It seems reasonable that the DM could choose to toggle this on and off at certain points in the campaign. To me, it seems like playing under normal rules until sub-classes kick in, then switching to gritty realism would work.
Definitely something you can play around with. If you start with Gritty Realism as the baseline, you can have areas or artifacts that allow normal resting for a period of time. You can tie the resting type to geography, how close they are to the BBEG's lair, lots of options.
"i definitely need a full week of rest to regain all my spell slots"
you might just be constantly exhausted
A part of me feels like 6-8 encounters per long rest is absolutely insane if a long rest is just 8 hours. It's a lot easier to pace an adventuring week than an adventuring day, in my opinion.
I think it's a holdover from the dungeon delving roots of the game. Exploring a "dungeon" is really the only time that pacing seems natural.
I liked the idea but the week-long rest was way too long for the style I was striving for, so I kept the 8 hour Short Rest, and the Long Rest now last 1 whole day. This combined with Spell Points variant rule (also some minor tweaks to some classes like a couple of ki points to the monk) and the variant healing rule makes long rest harder to achieve while exploring but more important when going back to town.
I actually use a version of this myself. I called it Traveling Fatigue. Whenever the party is on the road, or any place away from civilization, the extended times you use are implemented. This sort of gives the world a slight more connection to society and the uses of its services, and forces the players to make something more of travel than "you go from A to B, now what"
I've personally done a version where short rest is 8 and long rest depends on how comfortable you are vs how beat up. So yeah, definitely agree.
Without having played it, I like the idea of combining a gritty long rest (1 week) to restore accumulated wounds and exhaustion with a form of heroic short rests (10 minutes) to represent how battle and HP is just a rush of adrenaline. It makes short rests quick and easy to justify outside of slow dungeon crawl environments, it's perfect for ritual spells and "huddle up, team, what's our next move?" moments, while not pretending you can sleep off just falling out of a skyscraper.
I would personally feature more exhaustion in such games, but with some variant of the 6 levels. I like the idea of a -1 penalty to your d20s for each level, and then accumulating other penalties in a more logical "You're getting slower" manner - but it could be any variant that's a bit less unusable (preferably also easier to remember) than the current 6. For mine, adding "you can't take reactions" and then "choose an action or bonus action" would fill in for the slots now missing from the disadvantage being replaced with the static penalty.
Otherwise, barring using more exhaustion, a *good* injury table with non-permanent effects, dealt by crits and dropping to 0, that could be removed with a week of rest is another way to add to the sense of both superhuman feats and very human weaknesses. Even superman eventually needs time to rest from a battle that's on HIS level.
I like the idea of using this for traveling, and say the players can only get a long rest in when they spend the night in an Inn. So when on the road, no long rests until the group reaches the next town, or cottage to grant them shelter for the night. This places granting long rests in the hands of the GM. And only spells like Mordenkainens Magnificent Mansion could give players the ability to grant them the comforts of having a long rest in 8 hours.
One thing that's a drawback from "Gritty Realism" are the lengths of Spells. Mage Armor that lasts for most of the Adventuring Day is now only a sliver of the week. Gritty Realism doesn't take this into account, and so is a possible unintended side effect.
Some similar alternatives or minor balances to GR could be done such as:
- Trimming down the length of Long Rests. Someone else in the comments mentioned bringing it down to a full 24 hours. I personally think a Weekend is viable period, or 60 hours. If you start on the evening of Friday, you'll be ready Monday Morning. What inspired me to do this is that in the standard rules, a Long Rest is 8 times the length of a short rest, so if those ratios are maintained, it'd be 8 hour Short Rests and 64 hour Long Rests. I then rounded down to 60 hours or 2.5 days.
- Another system I've seen pop up a lot is the Rally System. Run Gritty Realism as normal, but then if the Party really needs to work overtime, they can declare a Rally and return to normal rests for a predetermined amount of time. For every day they Rally, they'll gain a level of exhaustion, which will hit all at once by the end of the Rally Period. You cannot Rally while Exhausted.
- Another popular way to balance Long Rests is the Safe Haven system. Basically, you can only Long Rest in predetermine points of civilization. This makes the world more dangerous and foreboding, and individual towns become all the more important. Now when the party helps defend a town from a Dragon, for example, even if it's narratively or politically insignificant, they also gain the D&D equivalent of Dark Soul's Bonfire.
- A fourth way is to tie Rests to Resources. Maybe you don't want to perform a Hex Crawl or be super crunchy with Survival, but you do want the Party to pay some mind to some of the more sparsely used mechanics. By requiring X pounds of Rations in order to take a Long Rest, now when players venture out into the wilderness, they have a limited supply keeping them going, and for every day adventuring they spend away from civilization, is another day closer to being resourcefully stranded. In addition, the more rations they bring with them the less loot from dungeons they can carry, or the less equipment they can pack. This one is especially potent with Variant Encumberance. That said, it's not perfect. Spells like Goodberry and Tenser's Disk does make many of these side mechanics naught. The balance change of having Goodberry consume it's Material Components is an easy fix, but Tenser's Ritual tag does make things more... complicated.
Of course, you can do all of these in combination. Maybe you want the Weekend Long Rests, but also provide the players the option to Rally if need be. Maybe you'll have Safe Havens tied to the Weekend Rests, or give a price to Rally Rests that don't exist normally. Rests are very finicky in the current rules, and so I've been fiddling with them from the start. I've liked the idea of Pure GR, but when I proposed it to my players, a warm reception they did not give.
I think you'll be pleased with tomorrow's video. It discusses time.
ngl, i like the idea of longer rest times, but maybe a short rest being 2-3 hours and long rest being 13-15 hours, this way its more realistic. a player cant just take a short rest during combat because that's kinda insane. Also you might have to wait a while and expend energy to take a long rest after a short one, this is because you will still have low torpidity and not be able to fall asleep. id still honestly incorporate this into my sessions.
I recommend what Ive used for a while, with a short rest being a night's rest and a long rest being two consecutive relaxing short rests.
My campaign isn't even intrigue or anything, it's just that 6-8 encounters per day is utterly ridiculous so I have 1-2 encounters per day and a long rest every 2-3 days
My DM uses this. He also removed concentration, since the limited resources prevent over buffing.
Removing concentration is a BOLD choice.
Gritty realism really depends on how you want to use it, if you want to use it to encourage more downtime and non combat activities it is wonderful. If you want it to make pc's slow down and be more conservative, prevent quick use of resources, or make it more "dark souls" like, it fails. Zee Bashaw puts it best when he said "if a party wants to rest, they are going to rest". This is because making a rest take longer does not result in solving the desired issue. This is similar to the Goodberry problem, many DM think it is a bad spell and ban it because it is OP, it is not OP if you look at resource v. healing benefit, it is considered OP because it eliminates need for rations, which can be fixed by modifying that effect or the way it is implemented without banning the spell. DM should really think of what their desired outcome is before implementing these rules or they may be unsatisfied with the actual outcome.
My group just started a game using the gritty realism. Its an alturnate earth steampunk ish game focuse more on the narrative. Its already shaping out to be a good game
The way I've seen it used is to make the game more intense. The characters don't have time to catch their breath. The pace of combat isn't slowed down much.
I don't do this often, but can I bring something up that's unrelated to the video topic? I often find that the audio on your videos (I've seen maybe 3 or 4 so far) is very low, to the point that I have to multiply the volume by two or three times to clearly hear anything. I don't know if it's a thing of note to anyone else, but it's my belief that, if possible, upping the output by a bit would be an improvement to the overall presentation as well as create an even more pleasant viewing experience! Thank you for the time, and I understand if it's not feasible-just wanted to run it by you.
Now, back to the topic: Sounds interesting... I like the idea of more time for downtime in particular. World interaction! Pacing is also pretty important, so I'll keep it in mind if there's ever a desire for a less game-y feel at the table.
The task of dialling in (or up) the audio continues. Thanks for letting me know.
Sorry for the bother! Thank you, you're welcome~
Personally I tend to switch rest times around with my players. We started with 24h long rest (needing a comfortable environment) and 5-15 minutes short rest. We did that because short rests are kind of meant for semi tense situations as in dungeons and stuff where I felt like you most of the time don't have an hour (I can still say they get interrupted when I don't want them to have one...) and we are kind of measuring around 6+- encounters per long rest with around two short rests in the middle. This was mostly to allow travel to be meaningful. But now they are going into the underdark where it might be unrealistic to have a chill day to relax and restock so we're gonna shorten the time needed. After all it's just game mechanics for balancing how much happens between rests. There are some considerations one should make (most 8h spells will usually last throughout a usual adventuring day - 1h spells through 2 encounters and 10 min spells through two back to back encounters) when stretching the rest timing since some other times are written for the standard way but other than that with reasonable players... It works quite well I must say :)
You can always extend the duration of spells to suit your preferred pacing. Arguably, spellcasters could use reining in a little anyway. :-D
I use a variant of gritty realism where every 7th short rest counts as a long rest. That way I can still use the Adventuring Week model without lowering the stakes by players having to consistently take a week off.
6-8 hard encounters a day?? Nah 4 maybe and then full tpk. Forever dms and homebrew not counted for typical parties of course
What if, during a long rest, you roll a d8 and what you roll is what day of the rest is interrupted, or if they rest up faster. 8 would be nothing happens
Seems a little harsh to have a 7/8 chance of your long rest being interrupted. What if instead every member of the party rolls and you also roll in secret. If anyone matches your roll, their character gets a complication that interrupts the long rest on that day.
@@RulesandRulings I do this but we roll a d12.
More chance of not being interrupted, and more love for the poor d12
I feel like gritty realism _almost_ gets it right, but there are problems
Normally, a long rest is 8 times longer than a short rest, but with gritty realism, a long rest is 21 times longer, this heavily favors short rest classes
I feel like a better version of gritty realism would be to borrow the natural HP recovery from 3.5e, where 8 hours is still enough to reset all class features, but hit points recover at a rate of 1+level per day
Buff that a bit to account for 5e only recovering half your hit dice on a long rest instead of all of them, and you have a more realistic rest system
Off the top of my head, I’d say that on an 8 hour long rest, you recover thrice your character level in HP, maybe there can be like 1 or 2 hit dice rolled for free, so higher HP classes don’t get as shafted
Or maybe just making it a flat 1/4 of your HP maximum, to keep it simple
The discrepancy in how much the rests are multiplied by is a very good point. Might be why "a couple of days in comfort" always felt like a better fit to me.
I don't like the argument that gritty realism buffs short rest features, because it doesn't. What it does is nerf all features that recharge on a rest, but the long rest ones get nerfed way harder, so it seems like short rest features get a buff. I personally think it swings too far, making long rest features too weak.
I'm working on a system I'm calling rest&recovery. It keeps the standard short and long rests, except long rests don't recover hit points, only up to half your hit dice (but, you can spend hit dice at the start of a long rest before it recovers them) There's also recovery, which takes much longer and recovers all hit points, exhaustion, and lingering effects that a rest can't deal with. You're also limited to a number of long rests equal to your level before you need a recovery.
I can see looking at it from that angle. If you keep to several encounters a day instead of using the opportunity to spread them out, it would definitely function as a nerf. I think the only things that are otherwise affected are effects that last 1 or 8 hours, because they don't go as far. Introducing a third rest for full recovery is a good idea as well.