I'm going to just repost what I said in a different thread.

Long resting requiring resources now opens up the possibility of having narrative decisions based around this in the future, that wouldn't have had anywhere near as much of an impact under the old system.

Find a beggar asking for food on the road? You could give it to them, but you might need it for a long rest later too. Or one of your party members may know a spell that provides that food for them. Or there could be a situation later on where your whole inventory gets temporarily taken, and you'll have to go through a gauntlet of fights while scrounging only enough resources to long rest once or twice before you get everything back. The latter scenario would not be possible at all under the old system, outside of disabling the ability to long rest entirely.

On the other hand, this also opens up the possibility of introducing rewards that can alleviate any resource pressure rather than simply new gear. If you had a choice between something that lowered the supply requirement to rest by about half that would be useful for the entire game, or a new piece of equipment that you might end up replacing later, I wouldn't be surprised if more people actually opted for the former than the latter. DnD isn't exactly 100% about combat, which may seem ironic coming from someone like me who was laser focused on combat analysis before.

One has always gotta think about how the mechanics interact with each other, instead of examining them in a vacuum.

In actual practicality, I don't think this long rest resource thing will really change things all that much. You can probably still just steal everything you need from merchants. Some people who are really bothered by it should be thankful that they didn't go for the Pathfinder WotR solution, which was to take out rations entirely and replace it with a 'corruption' mechanic that results in stat penalties and an assumed immediate game over for resting too much in non-safe zones without returning to the main hub area for that chapter (and in actual practice, you'd hit the first stat penalty point for resting 3+ times in a single dungeon, which is pretty lenient).

Last edited by Saito Hikari; 09/07/21 02:30 AM.