Copying this from a comment I made a few months ago, I’d like to try having an “adventuring week” rather than an “adventuring day”, i.e. have X encounters per in-game week(ish) rather than the same number per in-game day. The Gritty Realism variant rules basically provide this though I think the name really puts people off; I’m not trying to add realism, just make it so you can have actual meaningful resource-draining encounters as part of something like a week-long travel (currently I’d need to throw in so many encounters that it becomes tedious, or have one-encounter days which we all know the problems with!)
Has anyone tried Gritty Realism before, and if so how did you implement it and how did you find it? My main question would be:
- How many days did you have per long rest?
- I’m thinking probably three (so two short rests per long rest) but that’s more a guideline for me the DM when planning rather than mandating a minimum time between long rests.
- How long were your long rests and did they need to be in a “safe haven”?
- I think something like at least 24 hours of downtime in a safe-ish place (including two sleeps), though again it’s on me the DM to make sure safe havens are common enough.
- How did you adjust spell times?
- 1 minute stays as 1 minute, it’s meant to last a single combat
- 1 hour up to several hours, could last multiple combats but doesn’t persist after a short rest
- 8 hours up to several days, lasts most of the adventuring week (e.g. mage armour)
- 24 hours up to several days, at least as long as the adventuring week
Long Rest = NARRATIVE Week
…that can be five days, seven days, ten days: it varies to suit a narrative week of downtime, and is imprecisely enumerated by design, so it can’t be gamed with mechanical shenanigans like rest-casting…
…as for safe havens, i prefer coupling rest benefits to the fifth-edition lifestyle definitions…
WRETCHED - No rest benefits.
SQUALID - Staves Exhaustion only.
POOR - Short Rests only.
MODEST - Standard Long Rests (half hit-dice).
COMFORTABLE - Long Rests + all hit-dice.
WEALTHY - Half-duration Long Rests + all hit-dice.
ARISTROCRATIC - Wealthy Long Rest + Inspiration.…short rests are similarly a NARRATIVE shift (anywhere from six to ten hours) but also interact with exhaustion subject to the same lifestyle constraints: i.e. a WRETCHED night’s sleep requires an exhaustion check in the morning while a SQUALID short rest won’t, but you need to short rest in POOR or better conditions to recover from a level of exhaustion…
…as for effect durations, i simply bump everything greater than one round up by one level…
1 MINUTE = 10 MINUTES
10 MINUTES = 1 HOUR
1 HOUR = 8 HOURS
8 HOURS = 1 DAY
1 DAY = 1 WEEK
1 WEEK = 1 MONTH
1 MONTH = 1 SEASON…note that these duration adjustments do not apply to downtime activities, as the whole point of gritty realism is to foster more natural narrative pacing and downtime engagement is a big part of that…
…i’ll also note that some DMs couple gritty realism with slow natural healing (i.e. use your hit dice to heal) but i suspect that may throw off game balance and won’t advocate for it until i have personal experience that it works well…
I like the idea of using the lifestyles, generally good when you can use an existing mechanic instead of having to guess at how to implement a new one.
By “narrative week” do you just mean that the party have a week of downtime (just to do whatever downtime activities they want) and call that the long rest period?
…yep, basically they take a ‘week’ to long-rest and recover, including downtime activity, and the DM chooses the appropriate narrative moment to resume their uptime…
…also note that by these mechanics, exhaustion checks for forced marches happen after each additional six-to-ten hours travel without a short rest, which feels much better-balanced narratively…
If the DM is choosing how long the long rest takes then is there much reason to pay for the better lifestyle which gives a half-duration long rest?
Also do you apply similar things to the short rests? For example if they’re just camping in the woods then that’s probably squalid, but if they make some good rolls to find a nice location, forage some food etc then it could improve the situation.
…wealthy lifestyles have the benefit of recovering long-rest resources more quickly than a narrative week, which may be worthwhile depending upon how quickly the party wants to turn around their next adventuring week…
…yes, short rests are subject to the same lifestyle mechanics, which give tangible benefits to class or background features enabling rest improvements…
I’m currently running a campaign that involves a lot of exploration, travel and a dash of politics.
Cramming a full “adventuring day” of 6-8 encounters into each calendar day was just not feasible - “interesting days” will have one, maybe two encounters, occasionaly with several days of travel/downtime in between.
So I’ve adjusted to “SR = a night’s rest” and “LR = 24h of downtime” and it fixed the problem immediately.
A LR requires more creature comforts than a fire and a blanket, but if the party invest into supplies and hirelings, they can set up a “base camp” that allows a LR even in the wilderness.
As for spell duration: I’ve just set all spells that are supposed to cover most of an adventuring day (like Mage Armor) to last until the end of the next Long Rest and this has covered all problems so far. Remember to adjust the recovery of charge-based magical items, too.
This sounds like exactly what I’ve got in mind, cheers! Any other adjustments you made or pitfalls I should watch out for?
Try to hit the aforementioned 6-8 encircled per LR.
Apply common sense whenever you find a mechanic interacting weirdly with this.
Don’t spring an altered test model on your players unannounced.
I’m guessing it would have been the same situation if you had done the same number of combats per short and long rest for a normal adventuring day, do you think? Also how big a level difference are we talking?
If D&D had only been a series of fights, it would’ve been the same thing, but the revolt happened when one char was doing fun fun village stuff and exploring and social interaction while the other char was healing up from bloody wounds in an inn bed for a week. I think they were only like three or four levels apart.
Now we use https://idiomdrottning.org/oh-injury instead for our HP realism purps. (Basically HP is fatigue/hope/destiny.)
Ah OK, I wasn’t planning on using any of the slow healing / lingering injury rules, I’m not looking for “realism”, just to make the days a bit less busy. Also I don’t plan on having PCs end up more than 1 level off each other, how did you end up in that situation?
Damn, I’ve never heard of anyone playing that new characters have to start from level 1, you run a pretty brutal table!
…we’ve played with new characters starting from level one and it actually works rather nicely: they catch up extremely fast due to the geometric scaling of experience points at higher-level encounters…
Do the low-levels not find themselves completely overshadowed and very vulnerable? For instance a level 1 barbarian isn’t going to be able to do much tanking for a level 5 party if the monsters they’re facing can kill them in one hit, and a level 1 wizard won’t be solving many problems with their first level spells if everyone else has third level, right?
@smeg What I’ve done with other systems is to try and turn it a bit more narrative….
Each “episode” (hopefully game day) starts with a long rest. Each “scene” starts with a short rest. If your episode covers a week? One long rest. If you deliberately break one challenge into multiple fights? Still one scene, no rests.
…nice approach; that strikes a transparent compromise between hex / grid pacing for folks who appreciate videogamey dungeon crawls…
…the only concern i have is that it makes rests an overt game of DM-may-i, rather than a tool of player agency, even though careful narrative framing could reduce either approach to identical mechanics…
