Yearlong Resting

Have you ever realized that the epic adventure you played over the course of years of actual time has actually lasted way less time in the game's world? Did recognizing that your characters have gone from level 1 to 15 in months of in-game time make it feel less epic and more like a guide for quick leveling in World of Warcraft? Maybe you'd like your legacy to live on in adventurers who you raise.

This is an idea of mine that hopes to fix all that, returning the campaigns that air of grandness that they deserve. It might not be developed for now, but that's because I don't know yet if it's worth developing. Please, entertain me for a moment as I try to sell you on an offer of long rests taking months, if not years, to finish.

Time keeps marching onward. The world needs heroes, and chances are you're not gonna be around forever. You're likely not adventuring every day, so how about you invest some of that free time in the next generation?
Art is drawn for the game Artifact, by Magali Villeneuve.

Variant Rule: Yearlong Resting

Using this variant rule, a short rest takes 8 hours of sleep, and a long rest takes 3d12 months of downtime. Any abilities that describe altering your sleep during a long rest, such as the Trance racial trait of the elves, instead alter your short rest in the same way. After a long rest, all of the character's hit dice are replenished instead of one half.

Why

The main goal of this rule is to provide a natural way for long durations of time to pass between the adventures to enhance its feeling of epicness. In the game as written, it's not worth it for the players to invest their resources or time into some long-term goal because of the adventures that span mere days. But with this rule, the heroes get some breathing space between significant adventures, letting them invest their time in various activities: whether it's crafting new equipment, building a house, training their successors, starting a family, learning new languages or tool sets, working a fairly normal job, or something completely different is up to the player. Once the adventure calls for it, the characters gather together once more to venture out and do what has to be done in a matter of several days.

Another important factor that this rule brings into the game is the age of the characters. How many times have you actually seen a character's age increase over the course of a campaign without using supernatural abilities such as the ghost's Horrifying Visage? With this rule in play, your characters will get older as their level increases, and the players realize rather quickly how their character will progress over the course of the campaign into becoming older and older. Once they get too old, they start to consider who to pass their art to next - should they raise a child of their own? Or perhaps they could find a competent promising young individual to train into becoming an adventurer. Their riches and their equipment are suddenly not theirs alone, nor does it belong to their adventuring party necessarily. What if whatever they leave behind could be inherited by someone they personally chose? Or they could just try their luck and keep chugging those potions of longevity.

A nice advantage that comes as a side-effect is a fact that players can more easily join and leave this campaign, or try out new characters. Usually, a player whose character dies introduces their new character in the next session, which can feel rather off. An established adventuring party mourns the loss of one of their own, only to walk into the nearest tavern, and let the first person who looks at them join their cause for no in-world reason. If the longer rests are available, players can describe how they got to meet this character in their downtime, months after the loss of their friend, and how they slowly but certainly accept the newcomer.

When doesn't the Yearlong Resting work?

This rule isn't meant for the games with time-sensitive plots. If the villain plans to destroy a kingdom important to the players within six months, it would be rather difficult (and kind of unfair) for the players to try saving it. You can give it a go if you really wish to, but I do not recommend it.

Additionally, during the lower levels (especially 1 and 2), the game can feel especially boring for the spellcasters who get to cast 2-3 leveled spells per adventure. While previously I claimed that this is the issue of the Gritty Realism variant rule that this house rule is based on, now I recognize that it is a weak spot of the house rule. Personally, I would either skip the first two levels of the game and start my players' characters at 3rd level or use Gritty Realism/regular resting rules until the player characters reach level 3.

Considerations

I've pondered this for a time and had a couple of discussions with others regarding this house rule. Here are my attempts to address some of the common concerns and issues that arose, in no particular order.

• Short-lived Races. What can one do about races that have a lifespan of fewer than 100 years? The solutions here would boil down to three options: either the DM doesn't change anything, or they alter all of the races to have a lifespan of at least 100 years, or they give players with such characters a reward during one of their adventures in the form of a magic item, blessing, supernatural gift, or some other kind of reward that increases their lifespan or lowers their age somehow.
• Old Characters. Players are heavily disincentivized from playing old characters since they're much more likely to die during the campaign. I see this as a plus since it always seemed to me ridiculous that an old studied wizard some player made up for their first session only knows 6 spells and a handful of cantrips when they begin adventuring. If you wish to let the players do this, though, consider implementing rewards that boost their lifespan or make them younger, as described in the previous bullet point.
• Hit Dice. It felt to me silly to have the characters regain only half of their hit dice after several years spent not adventuring. I'd probably bump this number up to all of the dice, but I wouldn't be surprised if any of you choose to ignore it.
• Long Rest Spellcasting. For narrative purposes, I would let the players cast their leveled spells even if they lack their spell slots during the long rest. As long as it's not abused just for the sake of powergaming, I'd be down with the players making a new teleportation circle or a couple of magic mouths between adventures free of charge (but not free of the expensive Material components).
• Downtime Activities. The current rules assume mostly that the downtime will last a couple of days, with some exceptions being crafting equipment or learning new languages. If this house rule were to be implemented, it would need a rework of the downtime rules to let the players perform the same downtime activities over long stretches of time with little to no (mechanical, not narrative) complications. This should include things such as building a house, starting a village, or creating a family of their own.
• Character Catching Up. In the case of a death, the player could choose to use their character's student or relative to use as the next adventurer. It is however likely that this character didn't reach as high of a level as someone who went out adventuring regularly. If this rule were to be more fleshed out, it should be considered whether they are going on adventures of their own, how to determine their starting level, and how they catch up to the party. When it comes to catching up, I usually have the character level up upon finishing every long rest until they match the highest-level party member. Of course, this assumes that all other characters are of the same level, and one can play the game with characters of wildly different levels, but it's easier this way.
• The Intensity of Adventures. The characters go out on an adventure for roughly three days and come back to unwind from them for months. During this time, they don't go on any intense adventures, but that doesn't mean they can't adventure at all. A character could go out to hunt some feeble creatures in their free time, whether it's to earn money or for sport. The important keyword here is intense. If it's a call to a major adventure that the players might want to play out, it might not make for a good adventure. At the same time, the DM should consider the fact that downtime is a time for calmness, which means that none of their players' adventures should be mediocre in order to keep the campaign interesting. The DM should keep increasing the importance and stakes of the quests that their players do outside of their downtime.
• 3d12. I chose the 1d12 because it felt like the most thematic die to represent a fraction of a year, with 12 sides representing vaguely the 12 months in a year. If your calendar uses more or fewer months, feel free to adjust the die's size to whatever fits your needs. On average, a roll of 3d12 will yield a result of 19.5 years, which can feel like a lot or too little to some DMs out there. You can adjust the number of dice, altering thus the minimum, the maximum, and the average number of months that passes between the adventures. I chose to go with 3 dice because it gives plenty of space for downtime between the adventures.
• Villain. Of course, someone who wrote a cookbook about them (yet to bind it into a single document) would think of the villains too. If you wish to have an overarching baddie, the most obvious ideal choice would be a creature that lives for centuries, such as a lich, a dragon, a vampire, or something different along those lines.

But What about the Numbers?

Mechanically, it is identical to the Gritty Realism variant rule, so if there's any question regarding the encounter balancing or resource management, search or the commentary on that about whether this incentivizes short rest classes or makes rogues into gods.

What I'd rather focus on is the complaint that this will make the actual campaign last way too long before the players make any progress. For this, I made a handy table that I'd like to share with you.

To keep things short, I followed the guidelines in DMG regarding the Adventuring Day XP budget and combined those with the required XP for leveling beyond the 1st level, which gave me a rough estimate for the number of adventuring days (and thus long rests) between each level up. Turns out, most of these take 1 or 2 adventuring days, with the only exceptions being going from level 5 to level 6, and going from level 8 to level 9 which take 3 adventuring days each. In other words, even if we assumed that each adventuring day will happen over the course of 3 sessions, you'll get a level-up on average once every 6 sessions (1.5 months of real time if you play weekly, 3 months if you play once every two weeks).

The Easier Option

As /u/BladeBotEU has pointed out to me before I started writing all of this down, a much simpler option would be to make leveling up take much longer instead of long rests. But I hoped to get some discussion going mainly regarding my idea, to see if it's worth working into a proper document or not, instead of taking someone else's idea that they already use and running with it to the public.

An even easier option would be to announce a time skip every now and then, but that feels rather forced to me as a DM unless the players request it for some reason. I've never personally seen a group of players request that their party takes a break for several years, but I've heard at least one person tell me about it.

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I felt this is a neat enough idea to write an article about really quickly. I was mostly inspired by an animated indie series Tales of Alethrion that's all about an epic fantasy adventure that weaves its epic tales and complex relationships over the course of decades. Maybe one day I could make this a core aspect of my own RPG instead of trying to push it into D&D, but until then this is all I can offer. An idea, a bunch of recommendations and considerations, and if I get enough feedback on this, maybe a written supplement on this in the future.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!