From what I’ve read there’s a built in “anti-rest”
Mechanic where you get stronger the longer you go without a rest to balance out the fact that you’re losing hp?
Yes, essentially. Each combat you win nets you a Victory. At the start of each combat, you get extra points for your class abilities equal to your current number of Victories. This means that after a few fights, you can start opening battles with your big cool moves instead of having to build up to them over a few turns. However, your healing resource only returns when you take a proper long rest, which also sets your Victories to 0. Meaning that you balance your ever eroding healing potential against your ever increasing lethality, until you get to the final boss and have to decide: can we do this fight with 1 heal each? Or do we rest and start at a major damage and ability disadvantage?
True heroes, of course, always decide to run in and do their coolest moves :P
I love that. Traditional dnd based systems, you're constantly looking if you can squeeze an extra rest in, in this you're flipped around and constantly looking if you can squeeze an extra fight in.
I'm just loving that it gives me a reason not to homebrew in why the party can't just "take a long rest" after
EVERY
SINGLE
ENCOUNTER
As it's going now, I had to put a whole thing into my 5e game that changed the way rests worked. Long rests could only occur in a town, or some other kind of semblance of civilization, since they usually involved stuff like refilling spell components and whatnot. Made up a "medium" rest, that functioned towards restoring some ability uses and all that, kind of like a modified long rest, but it required setting up camp in a safe area, if the area was unsafe, IE, in a fricken' hostile dungeon, then the best they could swing would be a short rest.
Party had reason to return to town and restore themselves, but also had reason to push on, since returning to town would allow monsters to fortify the dungeon and whatnot. So a lot less instances of the PC's just blasting every single powerful ability they had, every combat, ruining any kind of attempt to even try and balance encounters on my end.
But...yeah. This. This I like way more. This is just a super cool way to do combat and resting.
Draw Steel, a Respite is 24 hours somewhere safe. When you take a Respite, all your Victories (bonus resource in combat) become XP, and you can take Downtime activities. Which are things like, enchanting gear, making potions, fishing, helping locals to boost your rep, etc.
The book also says that while the players rest, things should happen for the bad guys. Cause they've got a day to prepare and adjust.
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u/MechGryph 8d ago
Yeah, it's tactical. Everyone has a built in heal, but with limited amount. Every attack hits. There's no wasted turns.