An alternative to gritty realism?

[Belzique]

The short of it is that my group and I often end up with 5 minute adventuring days. This in turn amplifies a caster/martial balancing issue that we have. Gritty realism is unfortunately not an option for us with how we play. Honestly we should probably just be using another system, but everyone at the table loves 5e so I'm looking for ways to amend this.

I've been thinking and I'm now considering switching all casters to a spell point system and giving them half the normal spell points while spell level and slot level progression remains the same. For example a level 8 wizard would have 22 spell points instead of 44. They could still only cast two 4th level spells per day but at 6 spell points each that's not a very appealing option. Each spell slot spent on utility is now less damage done in combat and vice versa, prompting more use of skills, or at least less liberal use of spells to solve all problems.

Any glaring problems with this idea that I might be missing? Maybe reducing the spell points by half is too much and I should consider reducing it by a third or something instead?

[denthor]

NPC interactions. If they want something make them ask for it in town it is not on the shelves just there. Make them hunt for someone to make the item. Have NPC ask them to make items.

[TIPOT]

I'm not sure how cutting down on the resources of the players spellcasters would help with the problem of a 5 minute adventuring day. Surely that would just exacerbate the problem? They'd need to rest more often to regain spells.

Generally the trick to stopping 5 minute adventuring days is to give taking too long a cost in someway. Either by giving the enemies time to prepare for/ambush the party or make it so the quest they're on will fail if they don't hurry.

[Keltest]

I'm not sure how cutting down on the resources of the players spellcasters would help with the problem of a 5 minute adventuring day. Surely that would just exacerbate the problem? They'd need to rest more often to regain spells.

Generally the trick to stopping 5 minute adventuring days is to give taking too long a cost in someway. Either by giving the enemies time to prepare for/ambush the party or make it so the quest they're on will fail if they don't hurry.

Agreed. If theyre spending ten times as much time resting as adventuring, make taking a long time result in missed rewards and failed quests, and generally harder adventures overall. Give them an appreciation for conserving resources.

[Belzique]

I'm not sure how cutting down on the resources of the players spellcasters would help with the problem of a 5 minute adventuring day. Surely that would just exacerbate the problem? They'd need to rest more often to regain spells.

Generally the trick to stopping 5 minute adventuring days is to give taking too long a cost in someway. Either by giving the enemies time to prepare for/ambush the party or make it so the quest they're on will fail if they don't hurry.

We usually have some sort of time frame and long rests can only be taken once every 24 hours, so the number of rests wouldn't change as they cannot postpone problems. It's just that our campaigns rarely take us into dungeons or other environments where there's an opportunity to present the recommended ~8 encounters. We're often in towns or traveling on roads, where anything more than 1-2 encounters per day really just breaks immersion.

[Protolisk]

Can I ask why gritty realism just doesn't work? Because if you mostly have a combat per day and travel a lot, then the short rest per day schema works pretty well to stop the short rest vs long rest class disparity.

[Belzique]

Can I ask why gritty realism just doesn't work? Because if you mostly have a combat per day and travel a lot, then the short rest per day schema works pretty well to stop the short rest vs long rest class disparity.

Because we're still so fast paced that a week off doesn't really work. Also I'm afraid that it'll make it so that there are too many short rests between long rests. We also kind of like the 1 hour short rest mechanic.

[TIPOT]

Because we're still so fast paced that a week off doesn't really work. Also I'm afraid that it'll make it so that there are too many short rests between long rests. We also kind of like the 1 hour short rest mechanic.

An option could be to increase how long just a long rest takes and not change short rests? Say it takes a day of downtime. It means they can't do it when they're travelling somewhere easily or in an urgent situation.

[jjordan]

It might help to define the problem a little better. It sounds like you've got a situation where the casters are going nova on the first encounter. This means they do a ton of damage burning through their spells and the martials don't get to do a lot of damage and the casters then demand a long rest to recover. Is that accurate?

Some solutions to this might include:

-Adding a time-limit to the scenario. E.G. Racing to reach the next town to warn them before the big threat reaches them. This discourages players from taking a long rest and forces them to redefine combats. Maybe they need to avoid/flee more often.
-Assign experience to the group, not individuals. That way the casters are not rewarded for structuring the day for brief encounters followed by long rests.
-Prevent the casters from long resting. This has a greater effect on them than it does on the martials. Traumatic encounters can give them nightmares that prevent resting. Those kobold archers might be peppering them with random arrows all night long. Maybe they're knee-deep in the swamp water and can't find a place to rest.
-Have the enemy casters throw a couple of impressive looking illusions at them and after the casters have wasted their big spells on the illusions have the real threats come in.

[Belzique]

An option could be to increase how long just a long rest takes and not change short rests? Say it takes a day of downtime. It means they can't do it when they're travelling somewhere easily or in an urgent situation.

Maybe, but then I'm afraid the short rest classes would become too powerful.

It might help to define the problem a little better. It sounds like you've got a situation where the casters are going nova on the first encounter. This means they do a ton of damage burning through their spells and the martials don't get to do a lot of damage and the casters then demand a long rest to recover. Is that accurate?

Well yes, but also that other encounters that are not combat are usually navigated with magic instead of skills, making mundanes fall behind there as well.

Some solutions to this might include:

-Adding a time-limit to the scenario. E.G. Racing to reach the next town to warn them before the big threat reaches them. This discourages players from taking a long rest and forces them to redefine combats. Maybe they need to avoid/flee more often.
-Assign experience to the group, not individuals. That way the casters are not rewarded for structuring the day for brief encounters followed by long rests.
-Prevent the casters from long resting. This has a greater effect on them than it does on the martials. Traumatic encounters can give them nightmares that prevent resting. Those kobold archers might be peppering them with random arrows all night long. Maybe they're knee-deep in the swamp water and can't find a place to rest.
-Have the enemy casters throw a couple of impressive looking illusions at them and after the casters have wasted their big spells on the illusions have the real threats come in.

-Like I said, we usually have some time pressure, but I dislike this as a solution because we can't always be in a hurry.
-We use milestone leveling because we have long downtime ingame between levels.
-I could do more of this, but the martials need their long rest also because they're the ones who take the most damage and therefore need hit points back.
-That's a good idea for the occasional combat encounter, but the issue is also with noncombat encounters.

Not that I don't appreciate all the ideas, but I'm still left wondering whether my OP idea wouldn't work?

[Bosh]

To quote Gygax "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANING CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." I players have unlimited time to accomplish what they want to accomplish then the game falls apart in so many ways. Time should be a precious resource that's spent grudgingly because bad **** happens if you waste it.

[TripleD]

What are your dungeons like? Are you engineering them towards multiple encounters wth drawbacks for retreating early?

[jjordan]

Not that I don't appreciate all the ideas, but I'm still left wondering whether my OP idea wouldn't work?

Sorry, I honestly don't know how that would work and would need to defer to people with more experience.

[Sparky McDibben]

I'm a little confused. I am interpreting this to mean you have enough time pressure out of combat that you don't want to ratchet it up in combat?

Also, can you give us some more information? Party composition would be helpful, and what non-combat challenges are your casters nerfing?

We're trying to help, but I think all of us are a bit confused. The usual solution to a 5-minute adventuring day is to lengthen the day, not nerf the party's resources. This stems from play culture, mainly. Think about how you would react if the DM told you your abilities would be reduced by a factor of two. It's sticky wages, man.

[Kane0]

As DM, tell them when they get the benefits of a rest (short or long) instead of letting them get the benefits whenever they get 8 hours of rest.

Yes, they rested for 8 hours. No, they did not get the benefits of a long rest. Why? Because the DM said so, and the DM is having trouble balancing the game around them always having their long rests.

[micahaphone]

how about you modify how long a long rest is, but keep a short rest at gritty? Like, long rest only occurs after 24 hours of not actively adventuring, and/or if you're resting in an inn, or house, or other actual lodging.

[Belzique]

To quote Gygax "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANING CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." I players have unlimited time to accomplish what they want to accomplish then the game falls apart in so many ways. Time should be a precious resource that's spent grudgingly because bad **** happens if you waste it.

I guess that's one of our problems, we don't like to be in a hurry constantly. Like I said it could be that D&D isn't a suitable system for our playstyle but no one wants to change systems.

What are your dungeons like? Are you engineering them towards multiple encounters wth drawbacks for retreating early?

When they do enter dungeons (or dungeon-like settings) this isn't too much of an issue, it's just that the majority of our play happens outside of such settings due to miscellaneous reasons.

As DM, tell them when they get the benefits of a rest (short or long) instead of letting them get the benefits whenever they get 8 hours of rest.

Yes, they rested for 8 hours. No, they did not get the benefits of a long rest. Why? Because the DM said so, and the DM is having trouble balancing the game around them always having their long rests.

That's where the martial problem partially comes in. Often they need the long rest as much as the casters due to lost hit points, and I want to tone down casters only.

how about you modify how long a long rest is, but keep a short rest at gritty? Like, long rest only occurs after 24 hours of not actively adventuring, and/or if you're resting in an inn, or house, or other actual lodging.

I think this was suggested earlier in the thread, and my issue with that is that then I'm afraid short rest classes would become too powerful (mostly warlock). And also the hit points thing.

I'm a little confused. I am interpreting this to mean you have enough time pressure out of combat that you don't want to ratchet it up in combat?

Also, can you give us some more information? Party composition would be helpful, and what non-combat challenges are your casters nerfing?

We're trying to help, but I think all of us are a bit confused. The usual solution to a 5-minute adventuring day is to lengthen the day, not nerf the party's resources. This stems from play culture, mainly. Think about how you would react if the DM told you your abilities would be reduced by a factor of two. It's sticky wages, man.

We usually have time limits on quests, so the group cannot just stop to long rest at any time. The problem is the number of encounters per day as we more often than not have 1-2 encounters per day instead of ~8, mostly because we are far more often in settings where a large amount of encounters per day is immersion-breaking (towns, established roads, etc).

Due to this the casters both tend to nova as well as suggest magic as a solution to mundane problems. This has been a problem across 4 (at least) campaigns and party compositions so this is a universal problem for us, but as an example: If they had to reach a 3rd-story window and had a thief rogue the wizard would probably still cast fly. I guess what I want is to make leveled magic more expensive, so they will prefer to have the rogue climb, or use cantrips more like have Mage Hand secure a grappling hook or something.

I agree that it might not be very cool to have the resources reduced, but I'm hoping it'll make the more martial-prone players happy while the caster-prone players will welcome the challenge.

[Sparky McDibben]

We usually have time limits on quests, so the group cannot just stop to long rest at any time. The problem is the number of encounters per day as we more often than not have 1-2 encounters per day instead of ~8, mostly because we are far more often in settings where a large amount of encounters per day is immersion-breaking (towns, established roads, etc).

Due to this the casters both tend to nova as well as suggest magic as a solution to mundane problems. This has been a problem across 4 (at least) campaigns and party compositions so this is a universal problem for us, but as an example: If they had to reach a 3rd-story window and had a thief rogue the wizard would probably still cast fly. I guess what I want is to make leveled magic more expensive, so they will prefer to have the rogue climb, or use cantrips more like have Mage Hand secure a grappling hook or something.

I agree that it might not be very cool to have the resources reduced, but I'm hoping it'll make the more martial-prone players happy while the caster-prone players will welcome the challenge.

I think I understand where you're coming from. On one hand, you want a way to reduce the gap between how the two groups (casters and martials) contribute to play outside of the dungeon. One option is to start imposing drawbacks for using magic that feel realistic. Let's take your example of the wizard casting fly. Well, compared to the rogue, that wizard isn't going to blend in worth squat, right? So have them both make Stealth checks. Remember, Stealth covers not just sound, but sight, smell, etc. So if the wizard is kvetching because they aren't making any noise, remind them that seeing someone float up 20 feet is going to draw more attention than the rogue scaling a rock wall with their bare hands, precisely because the rogue has been trained to do this.

Another option to make spellcasting more expensive is to include that in the worldbuilding. In the Midnight campaign setting for 3e, for example, they had these trippy familiars who hunted mages down by smelling magic. Like, they had a constant detect magic up and they could track you by your spells. Maybe you don't go that drastic, but what if court wizards have magic-detecting familiars in the area for this campaign? Or glyphs of warding on strategic windows (like the kings, etc) which cast dispel magic? Good luck with that Dex save. In other words, you change the cost of magic by making it less anonymous. Maybe spellcasters can try to scrutinize spell residue up to [X] days later and find out an "arcane fingerprint," so now Nystul's magic aura, nondetection, et alia, become a much stronger part of the game? In other words, it's less about "I've got a spell for that!" and more "I've got a spell that can help, but it effectively paints a big sign that says 'Gandalf was here.'" I think that was a line in Fellowship, right? Gandalf didn't want to use magic to start a fire because he was worried about drawing attention? Maybe my memory's going.

On the other hand, you feel hamstrung by verisimilitude because your adventures aren't taking place in a traditional dungeon. In other words, how do you cram 8 encounters into a town? Simple! You make the town not a town. Towns are safe, right? Or at least they're supposed to be. They're where you go to heal, rest, and be wooed by your fans. So how do you take this and turn it into an adventure. Well, you have to pull them out of the safe part of town. You have to get them away from what they know and into where they are on unfamiliar ground. See, the secret to urban adventures is that they're just a different kind of dungeon. The rooftops can be every bit as dangerous as the forest when archers are taking cover behind chimneys. So, to get the party out of their safe space, you either have to have something they want, or have pissed them off, preferably both.

My favorite is "you just got pickpocketed, and they're getting away." Only the pickpocket doesn't really want to get away; he's the bait. He's there to lure the party into an ambush by leading them into the sewers, or through the catacombs, or over the rooftops. The party has to deal with the ambush quickly because their money is still moving, but that money leads them into another ambush. My general rule is three; after the third ambush gets sprung and defeated the pickpocket will likely drop the gold and skedaddle, leaving the party lost somewhere in town where they don't have any allies, and the cops are more easily bribed. They've been reduced in resources and the bad guys have more minions on the way. Who do they turn to for aid? That's how you make a dungeon out of a town. Same deal on the road - you break an easy ambush, ride along, and get hit by the hard ambush about a mile later, now that you're all confident you've burned through the only encounter. Or, someone major images a unicorn off the road. Or a broken-down wagon. Etc.

Maybe their enemies have picked up on the "go-nova" strategy and flood the zone of the initial encounter with freelancer muscle, expecting the PCs to chew through them easily. Then comes the hard fight afterward, with magical support and bad guys smart enough to kill the cleric first.

Anyway, as for random encounters, you've got two fixes. 1, run harder fights. 2, build more interesting monsters.

Hope this helps!

[Darkstar952]

This may or may not be useful to you to adapt to your needs.

I personally run gritty realism with a slight adjustment, players are limited to 2 or 3 short rests between long rests. They get to choose when to spend them, so just sleeping overnight while travelling doesn't automatically count as a short rest. This gives them a resource to manage and keeps things like warlocks in check a little if that is a concern.

I have then also added a new category of rest that I have named a "Heroic Rest", it allows them to gain the benefits of a short rest in only 15 minutes of downtime. One hour after taking this type of rest each character gains 2 points of exhaustion. This represents them pushing themselves beyond their normal limits and is useful when the narrative requires them to push on but they are tapped and need a short rest, but comes with a cost than they are then in need of a Long Rest due to the exhaustion.

So far this has worked very well for our group.

[ChildofLuthic]

So my game consists of expeditions through perilous terrain to find treasure, and I wanted to be able to design the whole route like a single dungeon, with 6-8 combat encounters. To make this happen without letting my players take a long rest between every encounter (or every 2-3 encounters), I made my own version of gritty realism. A short rest is a full nights sleep that may be broken up by taking watch. A long rest is 24 hours of downtime where no one is keeping watch, wearing armor, etc. - I think I said it has to (or at least should) take place in a safe town.

A week downtime seems unrealistic to me, but this really makes sense on an intuitive level. Players can still take breaks along the path, but each rest is an investment, and doesn't reset every resource. Short rest classes are a little more powerful, and long rest classes are a little more cautious about using their resources.

[Amechra]

Quick question for you, Belzique - how many of your combat encounters are Deadly? I'm guessing most of them, if not all of them, otherwise your martials would not need long rests as much as the casters do, unless they're all Paladins (Barbarians can't nova with Rage, and Rangers are best off if you don't burn through all of their spell slots all willy-nilly). Harder fights drain resources from everyone (by design), while easier fights + out of combat encounters should primarily drain casters.

Then you could, I dunno, make every other night's rest count as a Long Rest mechanically. So it'd go something like Day 1 → Short Rest → Day 2 → Long Rest.

---

The million-dollar question, though... are your players also unhappy with the current state of affairs? Or are they all playing casters and reveling in the UNLIMITED POWER?

[Monster Manuel]

I think part of the issue is that the solution to the 5-minute workday (introduce more encounters separated by short rests) doesn't work for this campaign. It's just the sort of storyline where only one major event happens in most given days. It's telling that Belzique says that more than 1-2 encounters per day breaks immersion for the group.

In other words, the main problem for this group is that the 5-minute workday WORKS for them, it's just that it sucks for the short-rest-dependent classes. It's not a case of the casters going nova in one encounter, and then needing to rest for the day, it's more a matter of there only being one encounter for that day, so they casters are able to nova without consequence. Do I have that right?

I agree with the point TIPOT made; halving the resources of casters with the truncated spell point system from the OP would just make the problem worse, not better, in most cases. The casters run out of resources faster, so they just have to rest sooner. If this game is built around the idea of one or maybe 2 encounters in a day, this won't actually be the case, but I don't know if it makes that much of a difference. Are the casters really blowing through ALL of their spells? The fight is probably over before they have had a chance to blow through all of their spells...if they're only using up 50% of their total available spells in their 1-encounter nova, then cutting their available spells by 50% isn't really going to hurt that much. They won't really feel the pinch of the reduced spell slots (or points, if you go with your homebrew solution) until the 2nd or 3rd encounter, when they are running on fumes. And, you can't often justify having a 2nd or 3rd encounter in the day, so it's a wash.

The solution might not be to nerf casters, but to buff short-rest classes. Double the amount of uses of Second Wind, or the Monk's Ki. Give the Warlock some extra slots. Let them nova along with the casters. In a 3-6 encounter-per-day sort of game, this would be overpowered. But if you're planning for only one encounter, why not?

[micahaphone]

Monster Manuel is probably right. Especially if you don't want to use some form of gritty rest. One version I've seen in places of well-done homebrew (Compendium of Forgotten Secrets) is to give short rest classes 3x the resources (equivalent to a day w/ 2 short rests) and no resource regeneration on a short rest.

It does muck with balance a bit, and I'm not sure about a warlock having that many high tier spell slots or a monk having enough ki to do everything they ever wanted in a fight, but if you're already deviating from the game's system by having only 1 encounter a day, then hey why not.

[Aussiehams]

As mentioned earlier extend the encounters. 3 or 4 waves of enemies can be a believable encounter, (maybe more believable if they're intelligent creatures), and will up the challenge.

[Tzun]

I would echo what Darkstar suggested. It may be a bit gamey but you could just say that you can't recharge long rest dependant abilities until short rest dependant abilities have been recharged at least 2 or 3 times.

Something completely different and extreme would be to decouple the recharging of abilities from the resting mechanic and come up with another mechanic where after a certain number of encounters, your short rest dependant abilities just auto recharge and then your long rest dependant abilities recharge only after you've recharged your short rest abilities 2 or 3 times. This avoids one of the problems with gritty realism, namely what do you do in a dungeon crawl where you're certainly not going to be able to rest for a week and should also solve the 5 min work day issue. Now how you would have it make sense in the game world, I don't know.

[Teaguethebean]

Because we're still so fast paced that a week off doesn't really work. Also I'm afraid that it'll make it so that there are too many short rests between long rests. We also kind of like the 1 hour short rest mechanic.

A very simple fix is to make long rests only achievable in stable living condition. They would need to set up a full camp in the wilds to take a long rest making adventuring the next day near impossible without up and ditching very expensive gear. This would force them to settle for short rests while traveling.

[Imbalance]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I though "gritty realism" is alt-mode. So, wouldn't the alternative be "smooth escapism" and isn't that basically what the standard fantasy amounts to, as published? Have you tried that?

I promise I'm not trolling; this comes out of genuine curiosity as to how your group ended up in this predicament.

[Man_Over_Game]

The short of it is that my group and I often end up with 5 minute adventuring days. This in turn amplifies a caster/martial balancing issue that we have. Gritty realism is unfortunately not an option for us with how we play. Honestly we should probably just be using another system, but everyone at the table loves 5e so I'm looking for ways to amend this.

I saw the same exact problem you did, and more:

• Shorter adventuring days means intense difficulty in a single fight. Since you have to fit 100% of a day's resource loss in a single fight (instead of the optimal 25% in 1 out of 4), any flaw in balance is 4x as big. Enemies are either 4x harder or 4x easier, with the middle ground being impossible to hit.
• A lack of Short Rests impede on many resources, including Hit Dice (which is a specific nerf to melee characters).

My solution is just to stick a Short Rest in the middle of combat.
Have it trigger when a specific event happens. Have some kind of major mechanical change occur from the trigger so that the fight doesn't get stale. Balance numbers/mechanics to accommodate how things went in the first half.

• Example Trigger: Boss hits 50% HP, the first assault was cleared, the Prince was successfully raised from the dead
• Example Mechanics: Boss grows barbed tentacles from his wounds, the enemies are now assaulting from below instead of above, the Prince brings back the cultists you killed
• Example Adjustments: Boss tentacles use either 1d6 die or 1d10, and increase/decrease AC based on how easy his first form was.

This allows you to adjust a scenario mid-fight, while also allowing your Short Rest/Melee characters to have great value in important fights. Now, Warlocks excel at long-term adventuring AND slaying multi-form bosses!

I have an extensive writeup on the proposal as my Adrenaline Surge mechanic.

[Dark.Revenant]

5th Edition is designed to work best when you Short Rest between every 2 encounters and Long Rest between every 6-8 encounters, assuming a distribution of encounters between Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly difficulty. Adjust the length and frequency of your rests accordingly. If you only run Deadly encounters, you'd ideally have a pattern looking like Encounter - Short Rest - Encounter - Short Rest - Encounter - Long Rest.

If this creates contrived conditions for when rests occur, so be it. If they want to play 5e, they'll just need to deal with 5e's design paradigms.

[Belzique]

suggestions about magic

Those are very good ideas, and would be especially fitting in the setting our next campaign will take place. I'm going to consider this, thanks.

suggestions about combat

I'll also keep this in mind. My problem is obviously not days where they do nothing, that's fine, it's when they do do something it needs to be enough encounters. Waves and layering opponents might just be what I need to do.

This may or may not be useful to you to adapt to your needs.

I personally run gritty realism with a slight adjustment, players are limited to 2 or 3 short rests between long rests. They get to choose when to spend them, so just sleeping overnight while travelling doesn't automatically count as a short rest. This gives them a resource to manage and keeps things like warlocks in check a little if that is a concern.

I have then also added a new category of rest that I have named a "Heroic Rest", it allows them to gain the benefits of a short rest in only 15 minutes of downtime. One hour after taking this type of rest each character gains 2 points of exhaustion. This represents them pushing themselves beyond their normal limits and is useful when the narrative requires them to push on but they are tapped and need a short rest, but comes with a cost than they are then in need of a Long Rest due to the exhaustion.

So far this has worked very well for our group.

It's certainly excellent to hear suggestions that have been tested in play. I'm not sure that such a flexible resting system would work for us, but the Heroic Rest mechanic is pretty cool. I'll probably consider that regardless of everything else to be honest.

Quick question for you, Belzique - how many of your combat encounters are Deadly? I'm guessing most of them, if not all of them, otherwise your martials would not need long rests as much as the casters do, unless they're all Paladins (Barbarians can't nova with Rage, and Rangers are best off if you don't burn through all of their spell slots all willy-nilly). Harder fights drain resources from everyone (by design), while easier fights + out of combat encounters should primarily drain casters.

Then you could, I dunno, make every other night's rest count as a Long Rest mechanically. So it'd go something like Day 1 → Short Rest → Day 2 → Long Rest.

We prefer a living world, so it really varies greatly how difficult the fights are. The players are definitely kept on their toes though, and regularly get into fights where 2-3 out of 5 are unconscious and the rest barely finish the fight. I'd say on average it's hard difficulty, so I guess it's maybe less that the martials "need" the hit points as much as they just "want" them as much as the casters want their slots back.

The million-dollar question, though... are your players also unhappy with the current state of affairs? Or are they all playing casters and reveling in the UNLIMITED POWER?

Basically all playing casters now. 2 out of 4 of the old crew have tried martials and in no uncertain terms made it clear that they very much disliked it and went back to casters. One member of our group is new and appears to want to take a "martial classes exclusively" approach to the game, and I don't think she realizes the problem simply because she's new.

I think part of the issue is that the solution to the 5-minute workday (introduce more encounters separated by short rests) doesn't work for this campaign. It's just the sort of storyline where only one major event happens in most given days. It's telling that Belzique says that more than 1-2 encounters per day breaks immersion for the group.

In other words, the main problem for this group is that the 5-minute workday WORKS for them, it's just that it sucks for the short-rest-dependent classes. It's not a case of the casters going nova in one encounter, and then needing to rest for the day, it's more a matter of there only being one encounter for that day, so they casters are able to nova without consequence. Do I have that right?

Basically yes. That's a nice way of putting it.

I agree with the point TIPOT made; halving the resources of casters with the truncated spell point system from the OP would just make the problem worse, not better, in most cases. The casters run out of resources faster, so they just have to rest sooner. If this game is built around the idea of one or maybe 2 encounters in a day, this won't actually be the case, but I don't know if it makes that much of a difference. Are the casters really blowing through ALL of their spells? The fight is probably over before they have had a chance to blow through all of their spells...if they're only using up 50% of their total available spells in their 1-encounter nova, then cutting their available spells by 50% isn't really going to hurt that much. They won't really feel the pinch of the reduced spell slots (or points, if you go with your homebrew solution) until the 2nd or 3rd encounter, when they are running on fumes. And, you can't often justify having a 2nd or 3rd encounter in the day, so it's a wash.

The solution might not be to nerf casters, but to buff short-rest classes. Double the amount of uses of Second Wind, or the Monk's Ki. Give the Warlock some extra slots. Let them nova along with the casters. In a 3-6 encounter-per-day sort of game, this would be overpowered. But if you're planning for only one encounter, why not?

Well the nova is only half the problem, the other is that because they have so many spell slots they jump to magic as a solution for everything. Changing fighters to 3x short rest resources wouldn't change that.

I promise I'm not trolling; this comes out of genuine curiosity as to how your group ended up in this predicament.

Playing style / story telling style I guess? Like I say, when we do hit the dungeons this isn't an issue, it's just that we for some reason are in civilization a lot as well and then it becomes one.

I saw the same exact problem you did, and more:

• Shorter adventuring days means intense difficulty in a single fight. Since you have to fit 100% of a day's resource loss in a single fight (instead of the optimal 25% in 1 out of 4), any flaw in balance is 4x as big. Enemies are either 4x harder or 4x easier, with the middle ground being impossible to hit.
• A lack of Short Rests impede on many resources, including Hit Dice (which is a specific nerf to melee characters).

My solution is just to stick a Short Rest in the middle of combat.
Have it trigger when a specific event happens. Have some kind of major mechanical change occur from the trigger so that the fight doesn't get stale. Balance numbers/mechanics to accommodate how things went in the first half.

• Example Trigger: Boss hits 50% HP, the first assault was cleared, the Prince was successfully raised from the dead
• Example Mechanics: Boss grows barbed tentacles from his wounds, the enemies are now assaulting from below instead of above, the Prince brings back the cultists you killed
• Example Adjustments: Boss tentacles use either 1d6 die or 1d10, and increase/decrease AC based on how easy his first form was.

This allows you to adjust a scenario mid-fight, while also allowing your Short Rest/Melee characters to have great value in important fights. Now, Warlocks excel at long-term adventuring AND slaying multi-form bosses!

I have an extensive writeup on the proposal as my Adrenaline Surge mechanic.

I believe I've seen your proposal before and as a former WoW player it is very attractive, I just keep forgetting to do it, thanks for reminding me. A short rest between phases would also make a lot of sense. It'd be a good combo with the Heroic Rest option Darkstar mentioned.

Something completely different and extreme would be to decouple the recharging of abilities from the resting mechanic and come up with another mechanic where after a certain number of encounters, your short rest dependant abilities just auto recharge and then your long rest dependant abilities recharge only after you've recharged your short rest abilities 2 or 3 times. This avoids one of the problems with gritty realism, namely what do you do in a dungeon crawl where you're certainly not going to be able to rest for a week and should also solve the 5 min work day issue. Now how you would have it make sense in the game world, I don't know.

This is an interesting idea. It'd be simple enough to tie magic to the stars/astronomy and have it so that magical powers and health are restored on some sort of fixed cycle. I'm going to look into this, thank you for the suggestion.