One fun option is that the short rest requires heavy drinking/smoking, the kind that results in the inebriation tables in the 1e DMG or the  expanded one from the HM4e DMG.   You could also lean on the sanity rules in the 5e DMG with imbibing offering some protections or otherwise.  

The "tonic" can be race specific: fire water for dwarves, elven wine for elves, "pipeweed" for hobbits etc, with humans (and half) being able to partake in any,  This may not be the flavor best suited for a game with kids, however, THIS, IS, THERPGSITE!

The OSR option would be to get rid of the 'short rest' altogether.

Quote from: RPGPundit;893820The OSR option would be to get rid of the 'short rest' altogether.

So since 5e is the OSRied official D&D, and you were obviously such a spiritus movens of the game, why was it implemented in the first place?

Quote from: Rincewind1;893822So since 5e is the OSRied official D&D, and you were obviously such a spiritus movens of the game, why was it implemented in the first place?

I'm guessing that it was a carry over of 4e healing surges. Though I only played 4e once in 2008 so my memory is a bit hazy.

Quote from: Teazia;892431The "tonic" can be race specific: fire water for dwarves, elven wine for elves, "pipeweed" for hobbits etc, with humans (and half) being able to partake in any,  This may not be the flavor best suited for a game with kids, however, THIS, IS, THERPGSITE!

That takes me back to when I associated a lot of fantasy, including Tolkien, with headshops and stoners. There was a headshop here called The Wizard's Lair... enter through a stone tunnel to emerge in a castle courtyard under a sky of blacklight/neon stars and planets. The counter guy turned me on to some great comics and the trippy Greyfax Grimwald books.
Man, it's like a laser light show going off in my head! Definitely a flavor of fantasy I hadn't thought of in quite a while.

Quote from: Krimson;893852I'm guessing that it was a carry over of 4e healing surges. Though I only played 4e once in 2008 so my memory is a bit hazy.

Which was to help parties with low healing potential get past the 15 Minute Work Day thing that became super popular in 3e, but was also an issue (but not to the same extent) in 2e.

In 5e it's to help parties keep going, instead of panicking whenever the party realizes that the Magic Go Juice was running low.

I kind of like the suggestion made earlier about limiting the short rest to once a day and the long rest to once a week, though I think for the time being I am going to stick to RAW. I already have OSR players and 5e feels like D&D to me. I wouldn't be averse to adding house rules to OSRify it if my players wanted it, but they'd have to want it. I'm guessing at some point I might have to try and incorporate the Mentzer Monster Reaction Chart, aka my favorite table in D&D ever, since we used to use that for everything, including diplomacy.

Quote from: Krimson;893948I kind of like the suggestion made earlier about limiting the short rest to once a day and the long rest to once a week, though I think for the time being I am going to stick to RAW.

It is an official option in the 5e DMG, BTW. A good idea for wilderness or urban games; I'm not sure it works for dungeon crawling - I expect in a crawl everyone just retreats to town whenever a short rest would be needed and long rests instead.

My 5e Primeval Thule GM keeps most resource recovery as standard, but slow healing to: overnight to spend hd as per short rest, 1 week to recover all hp & 1/2 hd as per long rest, and you (either caster or recipient) need to spend hd to benefit from healing spells. This works pretty well in play, I think the Fighter still comes out a bit underpowered but that's always going to be a problem if you don't have long crawly adventure days.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;892357Well, the fireball issue is simply one of hit point inflation. In OD&D a fearsome troll had an average of 20-24 hit points. That 28 average damage is looking pretty great now! The 5E Troll with its 84 average hit points just gets mad and charges the wizard.

Old school big gun spells (fireball, lightning bolt, flame strike, etc) used to just take shit OUT. The 5E big guns can only take out the weakest of creatures.

Of course the 5E wizard doesn't need more XP to advance and isn't nearly as fragile as the old school counterpart so it kind of balances out.

I agree with what you've said here.

(1) 5E does have a different HP scale, so this makes the base fireball spell less valuable.
(2) There is a nice trade-off, in that I would get lots of damage-dealing cantrips but I lose some of the big-gun value.

My point was mostly in reference to the notion that posters (and my own game group) have that fireball is this awesome spell in spite of the fact that the numbers would suggest otherwise. It's still a decent spell, but not as impressive as it was in older editions.

Quote from: Simlasa;893870That takes me back to when I associated a lot of fantasy, including Tolkien, with headshops and stoners. There was a headshop here called The Wizard's Lair... enter through a stone tunnel to emerge in a castle courtyard under a sky of blacklight/neon stars and planets. The counter guy turned me on to some great comics and the trippy Greyfax Grimwald books.
Man, it's like a laser light show going off in my head! Definitely a flavor of fantasy I hadn't thought of in quite a while.

Happy to serve.  I think 5e is pretty well done overall, the flavor is even OSR but in a corporate sanitized way, backwards looking through a soft lens, informed by the energy that erupted DCC, but with all the dirt and esoterica scrubbed away.  A bit like how 2e core was and became (although many of the campaign settings kept this somewhat).  Beyond the mechanics, a bit of headshop is great addition to the 5e game.

Quote from: Teazia;894654Happy to serve.  I think 5e is pretty well done overall, the flavor is even OSR but in a corporate sanitized way, backwards looking through a soft lens, informed by the energy that erupted DCC, but with all the dirt and esoterica scrubbed away.  A bit like how 2e core was and became.

Interesting analogy, thanks.
I think for a game that wants to dominate the RPG marketplace and be extremely accessible to the largest number of people, a degree of corporate blandness is probably advisable. So many people take offence so easily these days - in 1989 TSR was trying to appease the conservative Angry Mothers From Heck who objected to demons & devils as Satanism, now it's more the leftists, especially feminists who will object to dwarves with cleavage, naked succubi art, or half-orcs who are the product of rape.

Quote from: Rincewind1;893822So since 5e is the OSRied official D&D, and you were obviously such a spiritus movens of the game, why was it implemented in the first place?

Because while 5e is strongly influenced by OSR concepts, it was never meant to be something to appeal only to the OSR.  The official rules needed to have a broad brush to support a variety of playstyles.
So you see, in the DMG, several options for making the game more old-school, and most importantly (and one of the things I most emphasized in my Consulting) the game is set up in such a way that it is very easy to radically change the default rules to alter the style of play you want.  This is one of the big differences in 5e versus earlier WoTC editions.  3.x for example, had so many intertwining rules related to things like feats, that if you wanted to ban certain feats it would often require going over all the feats to try to figure out what needed to change, and then altering some of the basic class abilities, etc. etc.
In 5e, it's WAY easier to just take a scalpel to the rules and chop or change anything you don't like, and still have a game that will run without bugs.