D&D 5E Proposed House Rules for Supplies

[James Gasik]

I think you're being a bit too generous on interruptions to long rests. Were it me, I'd say a half-hour interruption means you're starting over.

I also wonder if there's space here to break supplies into two categories: edibles and other. This would allow the system you have to work for food and water (which on first glance it does quite well) but also allow you to say that foraging doesn't resupply things like ammunition and perhaps-esoteric spell components. As written right now, it implies the PCs can - if they look - find crossbow bolts and spell components and bowstrings just lying around in any unexplored wilderness hex, which seems a bit odd somehow.

I've watched enough movies with commando types improvising weapons and traps as well as capturing enemy weapons that being able to scrounge up ammo in the wilderness doesn't bother me. And well, many spell components are things you can find laying around anyways, plus I figure, there are probably alternatives that one can use in a pinch.

As for being generous about resting, my experience has been that if the party needs to rest, making them do without doesn't make the game any more fun. Sure, watching the players try and avoid and run from danger from time to time can be fun, but a lot of time there's a rock and a hard place, and no real way to go.

The only reason I have rules for interruptions at all is on the off chance the players want to try for a five minute workday or something equally silly, but I don't anticipate that happening. It hasn't in the current game, and these will be the people I'm running for.

When running a game with a good mix of exploration and combat, 5e's rest structure really breaks down. In my last session, my Wizard got hit by temporary amnesia and was rendered effectively useless by trying to read strange eldritch runes to solve a puzzle.

Given that all the enemies in our vicinity are deadly enough to need all hands on deck, we ended up having to hole up and rest without a single encounter so that I could recover!

I fully anticipate a lot of game days where not a lot happens, and the only reason you take a Long Rest at all is to avoid exhaustion. Not every hex on the map is going to have a single encounter, let alone 6-8, and there's a limit to how many of those you can cross in day anyways.

So I'm not really concerned about preventing people from taking rests due to time constraints for the most part. What I'm going for is more to get them thinking "hey, we need to cross 5 hexes. If there's no combat, that's 5 units of Supplies per character- more if we have to Short Rest. How are we going to do that, exactly?".

And it's not going to be hard to solve that problem, once they engage with it. Which I'm happy with, as long as they actually do engage with it.

 

[James Gasik]

I like everything other then some of the Strife Levels and the fact that the second kind of Specialized Supplies is only a chance of an additional short rest (I'd rather it just grant the short rest; it feels like a waste of time to have a chance to find something that is just another chance to find something).

Originally, I had it so that you automatically got an additional Short Rest available to you by consuming Quality Supplies. But that created a scenario where I could see someone only using a unit of expensive Supplies when they were pretty certain they'd need another Rest that day (this is also why I added other benefits).

Given that a Long Rest and 2 Short Rests consume four Units of Supplies, I figured having a 25% chance for each Unit to grant the bonus Rest is a better way to handle things.

What I haven't decided on is whether or not to allow someone who gets lucky to take more than 3 Rests, lol. I probably shouldn't, but then again, not every class gets large benefits for extra Rests either.

There's a lot of unknowns that I simply don't know if this will work the way I hope it will until I try it out in a live game.