Gritty Realism Resting - Inactive

Resting Variant Rules

Short Rest

• Takes eight (8) hours or one (1) night to complete.
• During this time, a character spends at least six (6) hours sleeping and up to two (2) hours performing light activity (eating, talking, reading, attuning to items, etc.
• If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity (such as one (1) hour of walking, combat, spellcasting, or other adventuring activities)
• Characters can spend one (1) or more Hit Dice at the end of the rest to recover hit points up to their maximum.
• Abilities and items that recover on a Short Rest are reset.

Long Rest

• Requires a "safe" location in an inn, home, or equivalent where a character can relax.
• During this time, characters can participate in Downtime Activities, which includes things like recuperating, research, pit fighting, and more.

FLUFF

Gritty Realism Resting* is a variant rule from the DMG that changes short rests to an 8-hour night's sleep and a long rest requires 3 non-adventuring days in a "safe" location. (DMG actually puts long rests at a full week of downtime, but that's a long time.)

Why use Gritty Realism? So glad you didn't ask. Here's some reasons:

Pacing

Fuck D&D, but it's technically "balanced" around "6-8 encounters per adventuring day". That's some work that makes every day have to be a a fucking ancient dragon to keep things interesting. It's easier if players find themselves low on resources in dangerous territory and have to cautiously find their way home rather than hiding out for one afternoon and being back to full capability. It also means I can have more high level (spellcaster) NPCs while keeping them grounded since they can be stingy little fucks.
I was in a mood while typing. Maybe I'll clean up the wording. Probably I won't.

Downtime

The real bread and butter even if it's also pacing. Forcing you to not "adventure" for 3+ days raises the opportunity to for characters to engage in downtime activities (and RP, I guess). Downtime is your character's time that can be spent doing anything that isn't adventuring such as carousing the town for shopping, crafting items , and other "fun" activities.

Special Considerations

• Recovery - Hit Dice and Exhaustion can take more than one long rest to fully recover, which is a long time with Gritty Realism. To make up for this, long rests restore all hit dice and exhaustion.
• Spell Preparation - I'm happy with resources taking longer to refresh, but prepared spells are in a weird spot. I'd still allow prepared spells to be swapped out during short rests at the start of the day.