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Dungeons & Dragonscomes with a large selection of optional rulesets, many of which have become so common that people no longer recognise them as optional. While feats and critical saves appear regularly, other optional rules are designed for specific styles of games and need to be used carefully.
Gritty realism modifies the way resting works in Fifth Edition, forcing players to take longer periods of downtime to recover from injuries. This means they won’t be able to sleep off a near-fatal stab wound without medical attention and spring back the next day at full strength. Here’s how it works and how to implement it.
Normal Resting Rules Vs. Gritty Realism
The normal rules for resting will be familiar to a lot of dungeon masters. Spending eight hours of downtime, typicallysleeping and performing basic maintenancelike cleaning gear and cooking, is enough to restore all of a character’s daily powers, hitpoints, spellslots, and half of their hit dice.
Spells likeLeomund’s Tiny Hutare designed around an eight-hour period, meaning you can oftenrest in dangerous territory such as dungeons and wilderness(although intelligent enemies will have ways to work around these protections).
Gritty Realism is an optional rule from theDungeon Master’s Guidethat modifies the timescales for taking a short and long rest.
Now,a short rest happens overnight, and a long rest becomes seven days of uninterrupted downtime (allowing for downtime activities but interrupted by combat).
With these rules,you’ll never be able to complete a long rest in hostile territory. Short rests remain an option, but you’re able to’t always use spells like Rope Trick and Tiny Hut because the spell slots to cast them won’t recover as quickly.
Alongside the Gritty Realism rules areoptional rules for ‘Epic Heroism.‘Here, a short rest takes five minutes, and a long rest takes one hour. Use this for lightning-fast campaigns wherethe entire adventure happens in a single day.
Tips For Working Gritty Realism Into Your Campaign
There are two ways that these optional rules can change a game’s playstyle, and both have different balance considerations.
The first is that players mightbuild characters designed to fight for longer without resting. The second is that they mightapproach encounters focusing on avoiding combatwhen possible. Neither outcome is bad, depending on the type of game you’re looking to run. Here are some tips for how to work it into your game:
Adjust Some ‘Daily’ Features
Some features, instead of listing short or long rests, are stated to recharge daily. AWizard’s Arcane Recovery lets them recover some spells on a short restonce per day.
Normally, this would mean the feature can be used once per long rest, butunder Gritty Realism rules, they can nowcast far more spells than a cleric, bard, or druid. Adjusting this to once per long rest can be healthy for the game.
Other features that include direct references to time can need some negotiating for how often they should be allowed. A Cleric’s Divine Intervention can only be activated again after seven days, which would now make it once per long rest.
Raising that to once per month or a similar increase in time can meanplayers will never use the feature for fear of needing it later.Talk your players through these rule changes and discuss what they feel would be appropriate.
Whether to apply this same ruling tomagical items that recharge each dawnis up to you: It can encourage players to rely on items that are otherwise forgettable or give the one player with a staff of fireballs an unhealthy lead over the party.
Allow Non-Combat Resolutions To Encounters
One of the big goals of this ruleset is to encourage players to choose carefully when they want to fight. As the Dungeon Master, you also need to make clear thatnon-combat solutions are available for the encounters you design.
A good way of doing this is to give players more options in character creation that aim towards non-combat roles. Here are a few suggestions:
Effect
Give Everyone A Free ‘Non-Combat’ Feat
An extra feat can ensure classes that are normally boring outside combat willalways have something to do.
Allow All Spellcasters To Use Rituals
The ability to cast a spell for free on a 10-minute timer is a lot when you may’t reliably restore spell slots. Allowing all spellcasters to use rituals and scribe scrolls ensures that bards and warlocks aren’t left behind compared to wizards and artificers.
Allow Downtime Training
The Player’s Handbook contains rules for picking up new skills, tools, and languages during downtime. The normal listed time is250 days of training to gain one proficiency, but you can safely cut thatto fit your estimate of how long the campaign will be.
Adjust The Class Balance To Your Group’s Taste
One of the great things about these variant rules is that they create new opportunities for both roleplay and gameplay-focused players.
That player who really wanted to play a monk but was put off by the fact the party never took short rests? They can nowplay a character that would otherwise not be viable.
The powergamer who had solved fifth edition D&D like a chess computer now has anew set of character creation puzzles to navigate, as they work out how the altered ruleset will let them make use of underappreciated feats.
The group’s roleplayer will have more reasons to find non-combat solutionssince a fight gone wrong can leave all the characters bedridden with injuries.
There are some standout classes that are rather wildly changed under the Gritty Realism rules, without taking a 7-day long rest and being subject to several short rests that last an entire day.
Stronger or Weaker
Much stronger
Monks
Stronger
Regains all ki points,but still needs to manage hitpoints and hit dice.
Subclass dependent
Bards
Weaker
Does not regain spell slots butcan use Song Of Rest to heal without using hit dice or spells.
Skill expertise and high charisma mean bards can still contribute when out of spells.
Wizards/Clerics
Much Weaker
Does not regain spell slotsor subclass features on a short rest.
If introducing Gritty Realism to an existing campaign, consider and discuss how it will impact the enjoyment of each player.
Perhapstry a few sessions to test the rules and see how well your table adapts to it. From there, you may decide whether to continue, reverse the rule changes, or make subtle adjustments.
Spellcasters Run Out Of Spells Too Quickly
Allow partial spell slot recovery.
Give all spellcasters a version of Wizard’s Arcane Recovery that can be used once per day. This allows them some more spell slots butensures high-level spells are still special and rare.
Seven Days Is Too Long In Character
Reduce long rests to one or two days.
This ruling lets you align the campaign time to a workweek, with thelong rest being the weekend.
Healing Runs Out Too Often
Reduce the cost of consumable potions and run fewer encounters.
Giving sources of slower healing (scrolls of Prayer of Healing, for example) allows players to heal outside combat but retain the need to eventually retreat and resupply.
Consider also that you may need toadjust the frequency of encountersto reflect the fewer resources the players have.
Use Other Optional Rulesets Alongside Gritty Realism
Increasing the time spent out of combat can achieve more if you find other activities to fill that non-combat time with.
Each book released has introduced new options for activities during downtime, from the expanded crafting rules in Xanathar’s Guide To Everything to the franchise mechanics from Acquisitions Incorporated.
Many of these form optional rulesets that have good compatibility with gritty realism. The Bastion mechanics introduced in unearthed arcana pair well with longer campaigns with lots of downtime: It ensures the players have enough time to manage their bases and makes the rewards provided from the base more meaningful.
The bastion offers a choice of the following features, often on a seven-day or 14-day timer:
How To Design A Campaign For Gritty Realism
Campaigns that carefully use time are good options for experimenting with variant rules such as gritty realism and item crafting.
Here are some examples of different ways a campaign can incorporate time-based mechanics into the storytelling and gameplay:
Benefits of Gritty Realism
Heist / Criminal Campaign
Time between heists can be used to reflectperiods of planning, preparation and allowing the heatfrom previous heists to die down.
Enemies such astown guards and rival gangs can become a bigger threatif the players aren’t able to easily recover from encounters.
Intrigue Campaigns
If it takes a week of rest to recover spell slots, there is a much greaterincentive to use skills and approaches that don’t rely on limited resources.
This favours political campaigns as it’s a lotharder to challenge everyone you dislike to duelsor dodge all the social encounters via mind-reading spells.
Military Campaign
Prolonged combats such as sieges will be less dominated by magic users throwing down meteors at 24-hour intervals. Dramaticbattles will have longer-lasting consequences, and opportunistic events such as night ambushes become much more impactful.
Limiting the availability of healing magic by increasing rest times also meansthe party won’t always be able to save injured and dying NPCs.
Dungeon Delving / Wilderness Exploration / Westmarch
Removing the ability to fully heal in enemy territoryencourages players to play tactically, plan escape routes, and return to townfor something other than handing in quests.
Campaigns With Downtime Activities
A typical adventuring day puts the characters back into exploration or combat too quickly to make use of many of the downtime rules.
If you want toincorporate features such as crafting, bastions, or training montages,the gritty realism rules give longer periods of downtime to use these mechanics.
Games With Ticking Clocks
Increasing the time needed to recover from combat allows you to make use of some DMing tricks that wouldn’t work as well otherwise.
Having deadlines on quests orrival factions advancing their own goalscan feel punitive if the deadlines are measured in hours.A ten-day deadline for a time-sensitive questis reasonable in character but has a good sense of urgency under these variant rules.
