Fivey: Rest Actions

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Expanding upon a comment from a previous blog post:

The idea is that the rest phase is an approximately 12-hour period each day where characters take turns sleeping and keeping watch. A rest action is a mini-downtime activity within the space of about 4 hours, during which characters can e.g. cook or craft or cure their wounds.

In other words, as a matter of abstraction, each 24-hour period is split into a day phase and a night phase. The day phase is when most of the interesting stuff happens; having just 12 hours to keep track of makes it easier to divvy up when it matters (usually, for travel—with hexes requiring 3, 4, or 5 hours to traverse). The night phase is an abstraction of the time that the party spends resting, after a long day of adventuring.

What do rest actions look like? I came up with some basic ones below. However, the idea is not to have a closed set of actions; it's just to provide structure and guidance for when the referee asks, "Is there anything you want to do before you turn in for the night?"

  • Tend Wounds: Restore hit points equal to d6 + your level.
  • Cook: Transform fresh ingredients into meals to feed the party, fulfilling the need to eat.
  • Scavenge: Gather small foods or small quantities of resources from the environment.
  • March: Get up to 4 additional hours of travel time. (Thank you Cosmic Orrery for chatting with me about this!)

I thought it would be interesting if tending to your wounds was a rest action: following the opt-in principle, it transforms healing overnight into an active choice made by the player. You don't just always heal hit points each night; when you spend a rest healing, you do so.

There is also a hidden clock logic: within the 12-hour night phase, there are 8 hours of sleep and 4 hours of each character taking a rest action. This means you have the choice of getting more granular with it if you choose, tracking hour by hour throughout the whole 24-hour period. By extension, we can decide that a full day of rest—32 hours, consisting of 16 hours of relaxed activity sandwiched between two 8-hour periods of rest—allows 4 rest actions should players choose to take them.

Given a long-enough stretch of time, however, a character might as well have infinite rest actions, so it's important that the possible actions don't matter if you're not going to be adventuring again any time soon. They're meant to punctuate day phases, not fill out the space between them. This distinguishes rest actions from more long-term downtime actions, which have greater implications for characters and their relations with the game-world. Rest actions are just meant to impose interesting and difficult decisions on players whose characters are pressed for time.

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