Short Rests in Combat

Like many of you, I have a deep appreciation for 5E. It is a clean, modern implementation of D&D 4E, born out of 4E's Essentials line of books and revised by some legendary designers.

But a class feature allowing you to take a short rest in the middle of combat is just...

This means the system is so broken that nobody cares about what happens past the 10th level. You can't die; combat is auto-win-press-the-button, and now you get to press a button, heal up, and teleport out of the dungeon with all your loot.

I can go over to the dragon's treasure horde and shove it into my bag of holding. It is a short rest. After we are done, teleport us out. We have what we came for, including the captured princess. The divine pause button has been pressed. Even if this is patched to allow "no hostile actions," it is insanely, grossly, game-endingly overpowered.

Being able to "freeze frame" your enemies at the 10th level is so broken narratively that this insanely overpowered power will circumvent every end boss fight.

Here is another scary thought.

Evil 10th-level clerics with the same power.

The evil cleric walks up to you, divine intervention is cast, takes all your stuff, and your party does not wake up, ever. No one even finds your character's bodies.

It's just dumb.

I am sticking with Level Up and Tales of the Valiant.

At least with these 5E implementations, a community of testers was consulted, and their input and feedback were considered. You don't get these "game killers" dropped on you in the official rulebook, with little or no testing or input. More house ruling and more "not in my game" lists of broken content.

The ink is already on the page. They will likely have to patch this and invalidate your hardcovers again. Trust me, every 4E book was like this, too. With their processes, this has always been a systemic problem at Wizards, with the only exception being the original 2014 D&D and the all-star team that worked on the original 5E, who are all gone now.

It is a mess, and I bet it will be patched soon.