Short-Rests in Pathfinder 2e?


Prerelease Discussion


I saw threads about resonance, and how it can potentially shorten adventuring days, as they limit the use of potions and wands (including the cure light wound ones). Starting tabletop games from 5e, there was a mechanic called short rests, which allowed the party to spend an hour to spend hit dice (they served as a resource in that game) to heal up without the need for consumables or magic items. There were abilities in that recharged on short-rests,such the warlock pact-magic spellslots and fighter superiority dice, and even class abilities that buffed the short-rest healing.

I remember starfinder having 10 minute short-rests for stamina, but since 2e won't have stamina, do you think Paizo will try something similar for hp in Pathfinder 2e? It will help greatly with adventuring times, and it (hopefully) won't require resonance for it. It will also give the heal skill another area to shine in.


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10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know. I have always liked the idea.

So far, I have seen nothing to indicate that such a mechanic is present in PF2E. If it were included in the game, I imagine that the rest would consume resonance (similar to how healing surges work in 4e, hit die work in 5e, and how resolve works in Starfinder).


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Excaliburproxy wrote:

10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know. I have always liked the idea.

So far, I have seen nothing to indicate that such a mechanic is present in PF2E. If it were included in the game, I imagine that the rest would consume resonance (similar to how healing surges work in 4e, hit die work in 5e, and how resolve works in Starfinder).

I guess from that perspective, it would make sense, since resonance does sound a lot like resolve in their use outside of healing (magic item activation for the former and certain class abilities for the later).

Still, it just seems a bit strange for charisma to influence your ability to heal, even it is indirectly. I guess if it is your force of personality inspiring you and others to heal through a short rest, then maybe?


I don't expect non-magical healing to use Resonance, and magical options that don't rely on items won't use Resonance either.
(will tend to primarily use spell slots or spell points)
There will be plenty of ways to heal in a 10 minute break, but 'short rest' won't be structural mechanic AFAIK.


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If they had a short rest mechanic, I'd actually expect it to go the other way: Short rests don't heal, but give a back a spell point to classes with them. But I don't feel like they'd do that, because it would throw off a lot of things. If they're too short, then you short rest all the time, and Spell point mechanics are largely meaningless. If they're too long, you have tension between the classes who use spell points and those who don't.

But as a concept, I do actually really like short rests, as a way to structure the adventuring day. It makes it so you don't have to have the "We're nearly at the end of this dungeon, but our party is out of resources, so do we trudge on, and maybe we'll just die, or do we go out and camp, with all the metagame baggage that entails" But I don't know that it works in PF.


I hope not. I like a tight resource attrition work day in my TTRPG.


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I like short rests. I do think they should take more time if you try to do them more than once. So maybe a 30 minute short rest the first time, 1 hour the second time, 2 hours the third time. After that you don't get any benefit and have to take a long rest.


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Fuzzypaws wrote:
I like short rests. I do think they should take more time if you try to do them more than once. So maybe a 30 minute short rest the first time, 1 hour the second time, 2 hours the third time. After that you don't get any benefit and have to take a long rest.

A staggered duration short rest system is interesting. My biggest issue with short rests in 5e is that their usefulness varies widely from class to class.


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Grognardy Dangerfield wrote:
I hope not. I like a tight resource attrition work day in my TTRPG.

Short rests don't remove resource attrition. What they do is make multiple resource windows that different classes interact with differently.

For example, in 5e, a Warlock gets all their spells back on a short rest, but they only have 2 spell slots on levels 2-10. If you average 2 encounters between short rest opportunities, that's 1 spell per encounter. I played a warlock for 10 levels, and a couple times there were days where I had 4 encounters without a rest, short or long.

A GM can still have a very heavy hand in influencing the availability of rests, and resource management can become critical.


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Fuzzypaws wrote:
I like short rests. I do think they should take more time if you try to do them more than once. So maybe a 30 minute short rest the first time, 1 hour the second time, 2 hours the third time. After that you don't get any benefit and have to take a long rest.

While I like 5e's system for healing from short rests being tied to your level and your class's hit die(basically if you are lvl 5 wizard, you have 5 1d6s you can roll to heal), your suggestion sounds like a good offset for multiple short rests a day, and is more practical to prevent short rest recharge abilities (if those exist in pf2e) from being abused.


Irontruth wrote:
Grognardy Dangerfield wrote:
I hope not. I like a tight resource attrition work day in my TTRPG.

Short rests don't remove resource attrition. What they do is make multiple resource windows that different classes interact with differently.

For example, in 5e, a Warlock gets all their spells back on a short rest, but they only have 2 spell slots on levels 2-10. If you average 2 encounters between short rest opportunities, that's 1 spell per encounter. I played a warlock for 10 levels, and a couple times there were days where I had 4 encounters without a rest, short or long.

A GM can still have a very heavy hand in influencing the availability of rests, and resource management can become critical.

I hear ya but it doesn't look like there is any 5E warlocks in PF2 development and I hope it stays that way. Unlimited scaling cantrips, spell point pools, and skill feats just make short rest unnecessary in pf2.


I would hope not. Personally, it seems even sillier and less thematic than setting up camp after every few battles as was allegedly popular in PF1.


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I only used the 5e Warlock as an example. Without pulling out my book, I think at least 7 of the classes have something that refreshes on a short rest. The concept is pretty central to 5E.

And it makes sense too, instead of saying X/day uses, you say "once until you short or long rest" and that averages out to about twice a day, but the interesting factor is that it is actually less reliable. So you actually have MORE resource attrition than with pathfinder 1E's 3+STAT times per day, or classes that have an ever increasing X/day abilities. After a few levels in Pathfinder, paladins just smite every fight.

Smite in 5E is very different, a closer approximation would be Channel Divinity (Smite just adds bonus damage, the Channel in 5e is closer in power level to Pathfinder Smite though). Channel Divinity is usable once per short or long rest. Even at high levels, it's highly effective, but you only get 1-2 uses per day, versus a Pathfinder paladin which gets 4 smites by 10th level, meaning you often use one every fight (until you know you have to save one or two for a big fight).

It might be that the concept is unncessary in PF2, but your core complaint that short rests are antithetical to resource attrition is false. They actually give the GM greater control of resources and the ability to push a party to it's resource limit more easily.


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I think there will be some recovery mechanics for exploration mode. I don't think there will be spell slot recovery. HP recovery and affliction removal will likely get a look in. I think limited spell point recovery may be possible, but I am leaning towards not being included.


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Crayon wrote:
I would hope not. Personally, it seems even sillier and less thematic than setting up camp after every few battles as was allegedly popular in PF1.

People do stop to eat and relax and recover their stamina, even when hiking or spelunking or performing field archeology.

To use another example, John McClain even takes short rests several times during Die Hard.

Sovereign Court

Irontruth wrote:

I only used the 5e Warlock as an example. Without pulling out my book, I think at least 7 of the classes have something that refreshes on a short rest. The concept is pretty central to 5E.

And it makes sense too, instead of saying X/day uses, you say "once until you short or long rest" and that averages out to about twice a day, but the interesting factor is that it is actually less reliable. So you actually have MORE resource attrition than with pathfinder 1E's 3+STAT times per day, or classes that have an ever increasing X/day abilities. After a few levels in Pathfinder, paladins just smite every fight.

Smite in 5E is very different, a closer approximation would be Channel Divinity (Smite just adds bonus damage, the Channel in 5e is closer in power level to Pathfinder Smite though). Channel Divinity is usable once per short or long rest. Even at high levels, it's highly effective, but you only get 1-2 uses per day, versus a Pathfinder paladin which gets 4 smites by 10th level, meaning you often use one every fight (until you know you have to save one or two for a big fight).

It might be that the concept is unncessary in PF2, but your core complaint that short rests are antithetical to resource attrition is false. They actually give the GM greater control of resources and the ability to push a party to it's resource limit more easily.

I can see that, but I guess my complaint wasn't clear. I dont want control as GM, I want the PCs to be in control of their resources and fate. The PCs decide to move on, not whether the GM allows them a breather or not.

A secondary complaint is the stretched to 6-8 encounters per adventuring day in 5E. Thats too much for me. I know I can adjust that as GM, but id rather the core assumptions work without having to fall back on oberoni.


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As the player you're still choosing when to use your resources. I don't see how having a second resource window to manage changes that. It actually increases the amount of resource attrition that is happening, and give the group (players and GM) an opportunity to reset only one part of the resources instead of having to reset all of them or nothing.

It's like saying you prefer manual shift cars over automatics, and your favorite car manufacturer releases a new 6-speed manual (compared to their old 5-speed manual), and complaining that you don't like it cause the automatic also has 6-speeds.

As a player, having a second, shorter resource window that gives back some stuff, but not everything, is very useful. It helps maintain a semblance of pace during the day, it reinforces the concept that our characters are a little "winded" from however many encounters have just happened, but we aren't so pressed for time that we HAVE TO GO RIGHT NOW! In the campaigns I've played so far it has been an interesting discussion for the party to have. Sometimes it involves negotiating with the GM too, requiring a little effort to secure a safe place to have our hour of rest before we continue on.

It is a very grognardy thing to be opposed to this. It really does what you want, but it's new, so you don't like it. If your core complaint was "It's new, and I hate new things" I wouldn't argue with you.

This isn't me committing an Oberoni Fallacy. Nothing in 5e REQUIRES you to have 6-8 encounters per day. It is a suggestion, not a hard and fast rule. Encounters and how challenging they are is something a GM always has to work at tweaking to ensure that they satisfy the needs and desires of their group. I was co-GMing a campaign that lasted three years recently using Pathfinder. After over 15 years with 3.X, both my co-gm and I were very comfortable with the rules. The campaign involved so warfare scenarios and we had an ad hoc system of how to run a battle, but it involved generating 3 separate encounters that we would run simultaneously, and generating them on the fly. Often times I didn't even look up stat blocks, I just jotted down a couple notes on HP, attack bonus, and AC, making up whatever stats I needed as they came up, even for spellcasters. The players had a blast.

We recently had a campaign crash and burn, the former co-gm tried running in 5e, but he's not used to it yet, and our group is bad about consistency in showing up. There are about 10 people in the group, about 6 are consistent, but often times it's 4 out 6, plus 1-2 from the other 4. Without knowing how to balance encounters, he just couldn't plan it out well and didn't know how to prep the game, so he cancelled it.


We had a 'short rest' in Starfinder, I woudnt be surprised if we got something similar here

Sovereign Court

Irontruth wrote:


It is a very grognardy thing to be opposed to this. It really does what you want, but it's new, so you don't like it. If your core complaint was "It's new, and I hate new things" I wouldn't argue with you.

No it doesnt do what I want it to do. I currently play in a 5E game and I do not like short rests out of experience with them. It oddly effects separate classes differently, and doesn't feel cohesive. I feel like I have to weigh in on player decisions more than I prefer as a GM. I do not like that part especially. I want an adventure day to start and finish without any rest mechanic in between. Its easier for the group to make decisions, and easier to design adventures as a GM that way, IMO.

Yeah thats grognardy because its the time tested way and just my preference. I agree, short rest does still allow resource attrition mechanics, albeit in a different paradigm. I apologize for misrepresenting my position originally.


I too will like to see short rest in PF2, I think 1 hour is a good compromise. Actually, PF1 introduced short rest in Mythic sort of, Recuperation allowed you to expend one mythic point and rest for 1 hour to regain hit points and use of class features limited times per day, one of my favorite abilities.


I'd like a short rest, but I'm not sure I'd like a 5e style short rest.

I'd rather things that recover on short rests have a rate at which they recharge, like healing 1 HP in ten minutes or whatever. Also, I'd like it if only one recovered at a time, so if a monk gets wounded in a fight they could rest and bandage wounds for a rest to recover hitpoints, or meditate and recover spell points, but to do both requires twice the time. In this way, classes with fewer pools have an advantage of not needing to decide if they want health or spell points if time is short, as opposed to simply benefiting less from short rests.

Also, I have heard rumors about hero points in PF2, maybe these could recover over a small break (assuming they are universal resources).


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Fuzzypaws wrote:
I like short rests. I do think they should take more time if you try to do them more than once. So maybe a 30 minute short rest the first time, 1 hour the second time, 2 hours the third time. After that you don't get any benefit and have to take a long rest.

I think this is actually a really great idea.

I'd maybe want to start the first rest time lower (as low as the 4e/Starfinder 10 minute rest) and then maybe start stepping things up even faster; like, your rests could go 10 minutes=>1 hour=>3 hours=>sleep. That essentially would allow players to feel like they are almost going to be guaranteed at least one rest time during the day since it would be silly to interupt players every 10 minutes generally and then the longer rests end up being more at GM fiat since there are far more things that can go wrong over 1 to three hours.


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Excaliburproxy wrote:
10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know.

I first saw the concept in the 1980 version of the DragonQuest RPG, published by SPI.

DQ tracked health as ENDURANCE and FATIGUE. You lost FATIGUE first, then ENDURANCE. Lose all your END and you're dead. Lose all your FAT and you're tired. You could short rest (have a meal, nap, etc) and get back FATIGUE.

You could consider D&D/PF hit points earned after your first level to be FATIGUE for the comparison.


Chance Wyvernspur wrote:
Excaliburproxy wrote:
10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know.

I first saw the concept in the 1980 version of the DragonQuest RPG, published by SPI.

DQ tracked health as ENDURANCE and FATIGUE. You lost FATIGUE first, then ENDURANCE. Lose all your END and you're dead. Lose all your FAT and you're tired. You could short rest (have a meal, nap, etc) and get back FATIGUE.

You could consider D&D/PF hit points earned after your first level to be FATIGUE for the comparison.

That is pretty neat. Starfinder mostly uses that system too. I've never really looked at Dragonquest.


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One other feature that short rests provided in 4e (and provides the same function in SF) was a clear break to an encounter. Instead of the sometimes wonky working in 3.- of "this lasts until the end of the encounter", that phrase had an actual, specific meaning in 4e. In fact, I rather dislike how much time short rests take up in 5e because I'm mentally still stuck on a short rest as "calm down, catch your breath, okay go" instead of "brunch" as presented in 5e.

But I digress. That specific function in both 4e and SF isn't needed in PF2, because exiting encounter mode is a specific thing you can do. I imagine some of the benefits of short rests, healing up, refereshing minor abilities, casting longer spells, etc, are available any time you enter exploration mode, but ONLY in that mode.

Oh bother. They've said exploration mode is for things measured in hours, didn't they? I guess hour long short-rests might functionally be a thing, even if they don't call it that.


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Theres no formal short rest mechanic. I asked Jason Buhlman at the UK games expo.


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Fuzzypaws wrote:
Crayon wrote:
I would hope not. Personally, it seems even sillier and less thematic than setting up camp after every few battles as was allegedly popular in PF1.

People do stop to eat and relax and recover their stamina, even when hiking or spelunking or performing field archeology.

To use another example, John McClain even takes short rests several times during Die Hard.

Or the Fellowship after they escape Moria, who actually halt twice, once as soon as they're out of bowshot and then again once they've got some distance away when Frodo and Sam are struggling to keep up.


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Maybe PF2 will have something to the effect of a short rest as an option for an exploration mode activity.
That will have the opportunity cost of not doing something else useful/beneficial during that exploration phase.

So while the rouge is searching for traps the wizard could maybe do "recollect thoughts" to give him back a few spellpoints or whatever.

I would find that even better that short rests because there is a downside for the character too and the other characters aren't forced to "rest" too.


Fuzzypaws wrote:
Crayon wrote:
I would hope not. Personally, it seems even sillier and less thematic than setting up camp after every few battles as was allegedly popular in PF1.

People do stop to eat and relax and recover their stamina, even when hiking or spelunking or performing field archeology.

To use another example, John McClain even takes short rests several times during Die Hard.

People retire for the day and go to sleep too. What point are you trying to make? In any case, if the PCs do so to dress wounds, prepare meals, hide from enemies or otherwise do something useful it's one thing. Using it as a recharge mechanic for class abilities just raises the 5-minute workday meme to ridiculous new heights.

Edit: For the sake of full disclosure, I never watched those movies as I find Bruce Willis' attempts at serious acting to be rather tiresome...

Liberty's Edge

I would LOVE to see Paizo put something to the effect of a Short Rest into the Core Rules, but I actually prefer they make it more involved. I know many groups don't care to track things like needing to Eat, Drink, or Count Encumbrance, but I always thought there should be some Conditions in place to affect Characters who disregard Self-Care, Cleaning, proper Eating and Rest.

Go ahead and make it an optional Rule-System, but the short rest mechanic is something that has improved the quality of life at the table for MANY different RPGs.

For example; During a Short Rest (30 Minutes) a player may regain 1+1 HP/Con Modifier if they refrain from strenuous activity such as combat or making any Skill Checks. The PC may consume food and drink during this time to Heal an additional HP = Character Level. A character may rest in this fashion 3 times each day.


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Elegos wrote:
Theres no formal short rest mechanic. I asked Jason Buhlman at the UK games expo.

I don't think there's anything called a short rest in Starfinder either. But for something that doesn't exist, spending a resolve point to regain your stamina functions an awful lot like it.


I know 5e's short rests also functioned to recharge some class abilities, but I digress, I was mostly going towards the part where you can spend hit dice to roll them for healing. It seems unlikely that they would incorporate short rest recharge abilities. I probably shouldn't have mentioned that part earlier. It just that 1 hp per 10 minutes is way too slow unless it can get heavily augmented by the heal skill.


Excaliburproxy wrote:
10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know. I have always liked the idea.

Minor nitpick, but short rests in D&D 4e are actually five minutes.

And "until the end of the encounter" abilities actually last five minutes. Which is quite clever, because it means you do not need to bother tracking them since you are never going to get to 500 combat rounds, but they definitely run out if you take a short rest.

Since they seem to be getting rid of CLW spam for being unthematic, I really hope they give us something viable to replace it. 4e-style short rests (for hp restoration - they are probably not going to introduce encunter powers, although presonally I would be fine with that too) are one such thing, but they could go a different route.

In my (admitedly limited) experience with 5e, the problem with 1 hour short rests is that it in almost all cases where it was naratively justifyable to stop for an hour, you could stop for longer than that, whereas a 5 minutes breather after a tough fight is plausible just about anywhere/anytime. I can count the number of times we successful took a short rest in 5e on my thumbs (and I'm not sure I need both of them).

_
glass.

Liberty's Edge

glass wrote:

Minor nitpick, but short rests in D&D 4e are actually five minutes.

And "until the end of the encounter" abilities actually last five minutes. Which is quite clever, because it means you do not need to bother tracking them since you are never going to get to 500 combat rounds, but they definitely run out if you take a short rest.

100 rounds in a minute? 1 round is 0.6 seconds in D&D 4e?

Wow!

Leaving that aside.

From what I get (I can be wrong) moving from combat to exploration mode at the end of a fight move the clock ahead by 10 minutes, so you have the time to gather the loot, bandage wound, catch your breath, apply healing magic without the need to count rounds and so on.
Spells with a duration of rounds (and probably even those with a duration of minutes) will end, removing the need to track them between encounters.

I suppose that a fight will not end if the people in this room is dead but someone escape of it the next room is occupied and the creatures there are reacting to what the PCs did. It will end when there is a clear divide.

That would remove the meaning from a 10 minutes short rest. It is already built into the system.

A 1 hour short rest while in exploratory mode would be another matter. It will be enough time to eat, recover some hit point, maybe change the items linked by resonance and get some spellpoint back.
The benefits the PCs get should be chosen carefully to avoid advantaging some class against the others, but it can be a good mechanic.

Thematically, in books, we see that often, moments where the characters talks, eat, rest to recover stamina or simply to avoid marching during the hottest hours. In movies it is often glossed over as the movie length is way shorter than most novels.

With a careful selection of the benefits and some clear guidelines of when it is appropriate and possible to take a short rest it could become a good mechanic.


Diego Rossi wrote:

From what I get (I can be wrong) moving from combat to exploration mode at the end of a fight move the clock ahead by 10 minutes

Really hope that isn't a hardest rule. Might as well just say some spell durations are until the end of the encounter.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Diego Rossi wrote:

[

From what I get (I can be wrong) moving from combat to exploration mode at the end of a fight move the clock ahead by 10 minutes, so you have the time to gather the loot, bandage wound, catch your breath, apply healing magic without the need to count rounds and so on.

Where do you get any of this from? I think I missed a post somewhere that mentioned anything like this.


Diego Rossi wrote:
100 rounds in a minute? 1 round is 0.6 seconds in D&D 4e? Wow!

Oops. Well, fights are not going to get to 50 round either.

_
glass.


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John Lynch 106 wrote:
Diego Rossi wrote:

From what I get (I can be wrong) moving from combat to exploration mode at the end of a fight move the clock ahead by 10 minutes

Really hope that isn't a hardest rule. Might as well just say some spell durations are until the end of the encounter.

Reminds me of the oooold D&D, like Original and 1E where you always rounded up fight duration to the next turn (1 Turn was 10 minutes) even if the fight took 3 rounds. The rest of that time would be used for looting and resting and such.

Granted, specific timekeeping down to the exact minute of the day was encouraged in those editions for things like tracking enemy movement through dungeons and such.


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glass wrote:
Diego Rossi wrote:
100 rounds in a minute? 1 round is 0.6 seconds in D&D 4e? Wow!

Oops. Well, fights are not going to get to 50 round either.

_
glass.

I don't know about that. I've had a lot of fights go to 50 rounds.

Then again, that mostly only happened in WotR, and only because my group has taken up a strategy of "swatting", where they cast as many buffs as possible and then try to clear the entire dungeon before they wear off, saving looting and slower actions for after the dungeon is clear (it works surprisingly well).

And that's honestly part of why I'm not super-fond of "encounter" powers -- they pretty much guarantee a specific resource runs out at the end of an encounter, so there's no reward for a party that spends resources in order to clear a room as swiftly as possible before proceeding to the next (and therefore no reason not to take the most cautious approach possible, and rest after every encounter). This can really bog the game down.

That said, I'd be pretty cool with a short rest mechanic. Especially a 5-10 minute one, for pretty much the same reason as you argued earlier. Plus, while a ten-minute rest can be excusable in a situation where you're in a hurry, an hour can be a huge chunk of time. I'd rather give the PCs the option to rest between encounters but still give them a full day's worth of marching, if that's what they're willing to put in.

Themetricsystem wrote:
For example; During a Short Rest (30 Minutes) a player may regain 1+1 HP/Con Modifier if they refrain from strenuous activity such as combat or making any Skill Checks. The PC may consume food and drink during this time to Heal an additional HP = Character Level. A character may rest in this fashion 3 times each day.

...Not gonna lie, I'm really tempted to steal this. My players might riot, but making people actually want to track food might be nice.


I remember reading in the wizard blog that they get a feat allowing them to re-prepare their spells by taking a 10 minute rest. Perhaps that points to there being a concept of short rest.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

After the magic item blog from yesterday (which actually turned more into a "resonance is this exact mechanic" type of blog), I think some sort of short-duration resting mechanic which restores hit points (and maybe even some spells) is really needed to avoid escalating the 15 minute adventuring day problem already present in PF1E.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
wizzardman wrote:
Then again, that mostly only happened in WotR, and only because my group has taken up a strategy of "swatting", where they cast as many buffs as possible and then try to clear the entire dungeon before they wear off, saving looting and slower actions for after the dungeon is clear (it works surprisingly well).

That is also something which high-level characters can easily do at high levels in a non-mythic game. I somewhat curbed that by limiting the number of buffs on a character to three (except the ones the character can cast her-/himself).

Liberty's Edge

magnuskn wrote:
After the magic item blog from yesterday (which actually turned more into a "resonance is this exact mechanic" type of blog), I think some sort of short-duration resting mechanic which restores hit points (and maybe even some spells) is really needed to avoid escalating the 15 minute adventuring day problem already present in PF1E.

As I noted in the item thread, I'm not sure this follows. All evidence supports healing being fairly readily available in various ways that make this sort of thing unnecessary in this specific regard.


Personally, I am a little wary of a rest mechanic. I'm not saying it couldn't work, but one of the good things about original d&d was the fact that your hp got depleted throughout the adventuring day, giving you a sense of impending room and making even trivial encounters a true danger. With the introduction of cheap healing, every encounter could be met at full hp (although not always with a full spell complement) meaning that only tough encounters mattered. The introduction of resonance restores the balance, but I would be gutted if short rests tipped it back again.


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Excaliburproxy wrote:
10 minute short rests actually originated in 4e dnd as far as I know. I have always liked the idea.

Ayup, 4e is the first D&D to have short rests. They're 5 minutes; long enough to mutually exclude any combat length, and short enough to fit seemlessly into the adventuring day. I like the idea, and I like how it plays. :)

4e did a whole lot of great things that gamers who start with 5e are liable to not know.


wizzardman wrote:
...Not gonna lie, I'm really tempted to steal this. My players might riot, but making people actually want to track food might be nice.

And you open up the possibility for food and drink with special properties to become treasure items.

But short-rest mechanics, while handy, aren't a substitute for adventure planning and pacing. Not every story needs it, which can provide the relief your players need from bookkeeping food. Short-rests might facilitate a dungeon crawl, but a solid dose of long dungeon crawls might be boring regardless of how resources are replenished.


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Gavmania wrote:
Personally, I am a little wary of a rest mechanic. I'm not saying it couldn't work, but one of the good things about original d&d was the fact that your hp got depleted throughout the adventuring day, giving you a sense of impending room and making even trivial encounters a true danger. With the introduction of cheap healing, every encounter could be met at full hp (although not always with a full spell complement) meaning that only tough encounters mattered. The introduction of resonance restores the balance, but I would be gutted if short rests tipped it back again.

The key there is to use some other resource as well. 4e uses healing surges that allow you to heal about 2-3 times your full hp in a day (and most magic healing is deducted from that as well). 5e has Hit Dice that do much the same thing, except they "only" let you heal about your full hp, they're generally not used as a cost for other things, and they take two days to restore fully.

Starfinder also uses a short-rest mechanic, with Resolve Points being the consumed resource and said Resolve points also being used to power certain character abilities and in order to stabilize in combat. Starfinder also differentiate between Stamina Points (which do get restored on a rest) and Hit Points (which generally require magic, medical attention, and/or proper rest to recover).

The problem with the pure wand-of-CLW-less attrition model is that encounters become easy and somewhat boring in themselves. Playing out a fight against some guards in order to see whether you lose ten (great!), twenty (OK!), or thirty (Bad!) percent of your hp is kind of dull. It is what 3e/PF1 are balanced around, but it's dull.

Adding cheap, nigh-infinite healing to that makes it boring in the other direction. It means that every fight is either pointless (because you recover your hp directly afterward) or a life-or-death affair where you want to spend as many resources as possible, which then means you're likely to want to rest to restore non-hp resources (spells, X/day abilities).

Mechanics like short rests combined with healing surges and abilities that can be reset on a short rest mean you can still do exciting dangerous combats, allow PCs to get ready for the next one, and still have a measure of attrition. Properly calibrated, they give you the best of both worlds.


I'm not saying that some healing isn't necessary, or even desirable, just that if it doesn't happen (e.g. if there is not enough to fully heal between encounters), it's not the end of the world. Parties can carry on if at ~75% health, or rest/return if at ~25% health (conditions permitting). It's no big deal unless your gm is a douche and refuses you the chance to rest/recuperate. Most GMs would allow this (especially if you have an unlucky encounter that drains most of your resources).


Staffan Johansson wrote:


The problem with the pure wand-of-CLW-less attrition model is that encounters become easy and somewhat boring in themselves. Playing out a fight against some guards in order to see whether you lose ten (great!), twenty (OK!), or thirty (Bad!) percent of your hp is kind of dull. It is what 3e/PF1 are balanced around, but it's dull.

Adding cheap, nigh-infinite healing to that makes it boring in the other direction. It means that every fight is either pointless (because you recover your hp directly afterward) or a life-or-death affair where you want to spend as many resources as possible, which then means you're likely to want to rest to...

I think that's generally a problem with HP based resource management. Low-risk encounters already have issues with potentially being boring. If HP is the primary resource at risk, they're worse -- with readily available healing, they're a waste of time; without readily available healing, they're a waste of time and HP. If the only risk an encounter provides is death (right then or later), then players tend to view them as irritants, and the game becomes less fun.

My general solution to that is to play down HP resource management, and play up resource management in other areas. Fifteen mooks down the corridor, standing in your way, is somewhat less annoying when you have an active (rather than passive) resource you can use to remove them, and you're trying to limit how much of that active resource you're using up.

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