10 Ways To Keep Your Players From Resting
Header Art: Manual of the Planes (2008) by Wizards of the Coast/Franz Vohwinkel
It takes a lot to get your players to burn through their resources. An adventuring day, roughly, includes half a dozen encounters to drain those resources. This slow triage of resources is completely undone by the party taking a long rest and regaining all spent resources. While this is good, cause then you can throw more nonsense at the party, it isn’t always something you want. Sometimes you just want your party to push forward to the next encounter, the final set piece where they will face off against the BBEG!
Part of why you might want the party to push forward, instead of constantly resting, is because if the party is drained of their resources, the encounter math for CR actually works a bit better. They can’t just nova the encounter, but rather have to make tactical choices and specifically reserve special spells or powers for the final fight.
So how do you keep your party moving on when all they want to do is take a nap for 8 hours?
1) Once Per Day
First and foremost, characters can only gain the benefit of a long rest once per 24 hours, and requires them to sleep for at least 6 of the 8 hours in a long rest. Per the Player’s Handbook:
A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity — at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity — the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.
Chapter 8: Adventuring - Player’s Handbook
This means that you can just remind the players that they would be sitting in a room for the next 23 hours while they slowly wait to take their long rest and how boring that would be. If the players are adamant about taking a long rest 1 hour into their adventuring day, have them roleplay what they are doing, have a few conversations, and more. You don’t want to drag the game to a halt, but you do want them to understand that what they are doing is very boring and just because they say “we take a long rest” doesn’t mean it is instant for their characters.
But, this brings us to our second point…
2) Talk to the Table
Part of playing the game is about being able to manage your resources, especially if you are playing a resource-dependent class like a wizard, bard, or warlock. Other classes, like fighters and rogues, can get away from relying on resources as much, but they still benefit from taking long rests and short rests.
When players choose to long rest after every encounter or two, they are specifically avoiding the resource management part of this game - which then creates the problem that the game becomes ‘unbalanced’. While a GM can then just add more monsters to their encounters to ‘balance’ the game again, ultimately that makes encounters take longer, creates further imbalances that the game didn’t intend, and just encourages the party to keep long resting after every encounter because each encounter requires them to. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that can only be stopped by outsider prevention.
By talking to your table, you can ask them to stop long resting so much. That the game wasn’t intended for that and, if they do stop, you can go back to balancing encounters correctly. Break down the fourth wall and tell the party that the encounters are always going to be built to challenge them and that it doesn’t matter if they long rest, because it won’t erase that challenge. If they handle an adventuring day as the game intends, then you, as the GM, have an easier time creating encounters, and the game will be more enjoyable.
Most people, and by extension most players, want to help others out. By talking to them directly about the problem that constantly long resting causes, then the table can come to an understanding. Most likely, players don’t always know the full rules or what it takes to create encounters and dungeons. A lot of people just don’t have the same experience that a GM will have when it comes to running games.
If you don’t have a table problem with long resting, but simply want to find in-game ways of keeping your party from long resting, that brings us to our next points…
3) Time Pressure
When your party enters an area, give them a countdown. Perhaps they only have two days before the villain finishes their plans, the haunted house will devour the innocents in 24 hours, the kobold raid will begin in a week. While the party doesn’t necessarily know the exact consequences of waiting too long like if the villain finishes their plan, they do know that there will be a consequence.
This time pressure should be known to the party and not a lie from you to them. If you tell the party they have 36 hours to solve a problem, but you only give them 12 hours, then they will not believe you the next time - ignoring the time pressure because in their mind it doesn’t matter.
The reverse is also true. If you tell them that the kobold raid will happen in 2 days, but then you hold off the raid for a week because the party decided to do another side quest first, then you are telling the players that they can do what they want and that your time pressures aren’t real.
Keep your time pressures exact, precise, and always fulfill the consequence. This will ensure that the party respects the time pressure and does their best to complete the task within the time pressure, unless they don’t think the consequence is that big of a deal - like opening a portal to the Abyss.
4) Wandering Monsters
Long resting takes a long time, especially when you consider that the party is probably deciding on a long rest long before they can begin the process of long resting. If they stop at 5pm, but their long rest is when they go to sleep that night around 10pm, that is an extra 5 hours of just staying in one spot.
This is especially true if their movements haven’t been covert and there are a pair of dead goblins in the room right outside their chosen spot. Wandering monsters may be looking for the party or they might simply stumble across the party and try to alert their dungeon of monsters to the party’s location.
Once the dungeon knows where the party is, the dungeon can assemble a strong task force to locate the party and annihilate them. This means that the party has to take a lot of steps to ensure their protection and that they will get six hours of sleep plus two hours of light activity. While they can have an hour of ‘stuff’, per the rules, if they are moving around a lot in a dungeon, they are quickly going to burn through that hour and not complete their rest.
5) Regional Effects
Many monsters have Legendary Actions, but many also have Lair or Regional Effects that can cause quite a bit of trouble for an adventuring party. A black dragon causes all water sources within a mile to become fouled, which means the party won’t have drinking water while they are in the area. This can prevent them from gaining the full benefits of a long rest as they don’t have suitable rations - while dehydration and starvation aren’t covered in the basic rules, a GM can easily say that you can’t complete a long rest unless you have suitable rations available.
Other Regional Effects can force creatures to make a save or not finish a long rest as they suffer horrific nightmares, their rations rot away, non-magical healing (like finishing a rest would provide) is only half effective, and more. This encourages the party to get in and get out quickly, accomplishing their goals as soon as they can.
6) Hostile Terrain
To properly rest, you need to be able to sleep for six hours - which is going to be hard to do if you are forced to sleep in six inches of water. By creating terrain that is true to the dungeon, but is also a major inconvenience that requires resources to properly rest in, you can ensure that your players will only take a rest when they have to.
This could include fast-growing plants with sharp brambles that prevent the entire party from getting a full rest since it isn’t a light activity to constantly be destroying them throughout the night. The entrance to the mine collapsed and the party has limited air. Then again, six inches of water means that no one is getting sleep unless they can find a saferoom that you create, meaning there is only a single place they can rest in a dungeon… which could be known to the inhabitants of the dungeon who like to leave lots of traps there.
Hostile terrain can be fixed, but only if the party has the proper resources to work against it. A wall of stone could stop the plants as the wall becomes permanent, but now the party has to break through the wall and everyone knows where they are resting. Water can be pushed aside with a cantrip, but it requires the caster to constantly be casting the spell and they don’t get a long rest while everyone else can. Stale or poisonous air allows you to sleep in it, but you have to make a save at the end of the long rest or lose out on half your hit points, wake up with exhaustion, or have the poisoned condition for 24 hours.
7) Spells
Several spells can make life easier for characters, like tiny hut, but monsters have access to just as many spells too. A tiny hut can be dispelled and a horde of monsters charge in, dream spells can interrupt the sleep of adventurers, and more.
By using such spells carefully, counteracting the party’s attempts at resting, you can force them to push forward and deal with whatever threat it is that is stopping them. If a wizard is dispelling their tiny hut, they are now motivated to find the wizard and kill them so that they can rest - this forces them to have more encounters than they might like, but still enough encounters to fulfill a full adventuring day.
8) Prepared Defenders
If the party spends even just eight hours resting, not including all the downtime they spend waiting to take their long rest, the defenders of a dungeon have plenty of time to reset traps, build up defenses, bring in new allies, and more. Traps can be reset or placed outside the party’s resting area, more building material can be brought in to defend key areas in a dungeon, and spellcasters can prepare new spells to directly counter what spells the party uses.
This is a great time for monsters to go out and investigate where the party has been, learn how they fight, and then build specific defenses that stop the party from using their normal tactics. If a wizard casts lots of fireballs, the enemy spellcaster picks up a protection from energy spell. If the rogue is good at disabling traps, well now traps are protected by ranged combatants that force the party to activate the trap to reach the ranged combatants or spend several rounds getting hit by arrows while the rogue tries to disable the trap.
In this situation, it is good to specifically state to the table that the monsters are learning to fight against the party and the party’s tactics.
9) Limited Boons
To encourage your players to carry out a mission quickly, you can grant them special magic items or supernatural boons that will only last for a day, a week, 48 hours, or any other specific time. If the party wants to keep their special powers or abilities, they have a time limit that they self-impose on themselves to complete their task.
This is similar to time pressures, but the consequence isn’t that the bad guy wins, but rather that the party sees themselves losing out on using their powers. This can go a long way in encouraging the party to go just one more encounter, especially if someone is really excited about using their power and wants to use it as many times as they can.
Of course, once they lose their limited boon or magic item, then they are going to lose their main motivation for pushing forward. In this case, you’ll have to use the other methods here to encourage them to keep pushing. This can be circumvented by providing ways of ‘recharging’ their special abilities or magic items, like draining the soul of twenty creatures with a CR of 5 or higher. Or they have to reach a magic fountain that is six encounters into a dungeon, forcing them to push just a little bit more to keep their item activated.
10) Limited Items
There is only so much that the party can carry with them into a dungeon. Rations, arrows, potions of healing, magic items, and more will slowly be depleted, with the longer the party in the dungeon, the less they have. While most tables don’t track individual rations or arrows as a general practice, it can be very handy to track those individual resources when you are in dungeons and there is no easy way to restock.
Though, different resources are going to create different focuses. If the party is in danger of running out of rations, they will have to push themselves to take on more risk so they can finish sooner. If they are about to run out of arrows, they may want to spend a few hours crafting arrows or looking for arrows in the area instead of pushing forward.
Think about what resources the party is limited on, and if they were forced to track it, how that would affect their play style. If it would encourage them to push forward, then ensure it is a focus. If it would make them hesitant to move forward, like not having any potions of healing, then don’t place a focus on them not finding that item. Put more of those items in so that it encourages them to push forward.
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