Over the years, D&D has often been spoken of as a game that employs Attrition. One that makes its boss fights difficult by having its players dwindle in resources over a handful of encounters prior to the major fights. When you enter a dragon’s lair, you might expect to fight whelps, kobolds, lizardfolk, or other monsters before you get to the main event. Oftentimes, it feels impossible to find a moment to use the game’s mechanics for recovery in these situations. Players might think, “If we rest for an hour in this room, won’t it be likely that some of the dragon’s minions happen across us? Maybe they escape our notice and warn the dragon! We can’t afford to rest.” And it isn’t an unfair thought.
But to some degree these rests and the resources they recover are an important part of how each class is balanced in the game. Classes with bigger hit die are getting more hit points back; for Fighters, Action Surge absolutely rules, and getting it back on a short rest is part of their ability to maintain their throughput throughout the day whereas a full caster likely isn’t getting many of their spell slots back (if any) on a short rest.
However, if the party is in a dangerous location with enemies abound, how should a DM determine how risky a rest is? If there’s never a gamble, why does it require as much time as it does? If it is a gamble, why are they so important for the game’s balance? There’s a place where the verisimilitude of the world brushes up against the mechanics of the game here.
Let’s see if we can’t reduce that friction a bit.
Why is a Short Rest an hour long?
Across forums and boards on the internet, one of the first things it seems many DMs will do is reduce the duration of a short rest. If it’s only 15 minutes, the party will feel like they’ve got a better chance of remaining undetected; of being able to move on before their enemies can react to where they’ve set up. Hell, I’ve got that Heroic Vignettes mechanic I’ve used a few times to achieve something similar.
There’s a reason they settled on an hour, though, right? They could’ve written it to be 15 minutes in the book if they wanted. I think it’s primarily to mitigate the duration of buffs from spells and items. There’s a handful of effects that last longer than an hour; for the most part, however, that’s the full duration of a spell. So, completing a Short Rest is likely to end any such effects.
It also gives the enemies enough time to react in some way. Maybe they don’t come after the party; the heroes have likely set up some kind of barricade or otherwise improved their position. Even if they haven’t, it’s a reasonable assumption for their adversaries to have. Their foes, however, may not be caught unawares any longer, even if the party eliminated every opponent in their battles so far. There’s always some sneak or sorcery that might allow the monsters that information, after all.
I think, ultimately, for the sake of the rules it makes sense to codify a Short Rest as taking an hour to complete. However, as DMs, I think we might be better served if we consider a Short Rest to take approximately an hour. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Maybe even contingent on how beat up the party even is. That gives us a little leeway. Maybe the party binds some minor wounds and it’s not even half an hour in the world of the game, but mechanically, it still removes those effects that wouldn’t last beyond an hour.
Should we apply this idea to Long Rests?
I think, in some cases, we should! For all the talk about attrition over the years, I’ve personally had some of the most dynamic and engaging encounters when my party is fresh from a Long Rest. At the time of writing, my table is battling in the climax of the Tyranny of Dragons campaign I’ve been running; I didn’t run them through a dungeon before it, and it’s been a blast so far (we had to end the session only two rounds in, it’s been a wild fight)!
In a previous campaign, my party managed to sneak a rest within a dragon’s lair with the aid of some clever spells and a very high deception roll, and they fought the dragon fully rested. Now, it certainly requires a bit more work on the DM’s side; that dragon was accompanied by an abishai and a handful of whelps, her CR was a bit higher than the party might otherwise encounter at their level, and she used her flight to remain out of reach when she got low, forcing the party to deal with those minions before pursuing her.
When your party is at their full effectiveness, you can hit them with the biggest challenges, things they might not be able to handle otherwise. However, there’s still a lot of value in forcing encounters after the party’s been run ragged.
Denying Rests
My job lends itself to throwing on some music or playing some videos as background noise. As a result, earlier this year, I rewatched Critical Role’s Calamity miniseries. Both now and when it originally aired, one thing that really surprised me was that the party never took a rest. There was simply never time for one.
However, the party in the game wasn’t actually going to get a whole lot from a Short Rest. They were lousy with full casters; their only martials were a Rogue (who dodged the most damaging moment in the campaign) and a paladin (which doesn’t get much back on a Short Rest). Healing would’ve been the most significant part of any rest the party might’ve achieved, and in the end, they pulled through without one.
Evoking that level of desperation, of making hard choices when the chips are down, that’s worth pursuing. It just needn’t be the goal of every adventure. In fact, a mixture of this style of breakneck dungeon, one with plenty of rests, or major encounters just after a rest gives everyone their chances to shine; to make their choice of class feel that much more impactful. Take it as one more thing to consider when planning adventures in the long term.
As always, thanks for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.
Ben Stovall Blog 
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