Café de Nuit

So...
A lot of people complain that Ravenloft can't work in 5e cause the PCs quickly grow too powerful to be scared of ordinary monsters. We can obviously use stronger monsters, but then you're no longer playing the relatively low-fantasy setting most of Ravenloft is supposed to be.

This has a point. (Even WoTC agrees - that's why they made the 'survivor' stat blocks.)

The thing is, 5e often feels more powerful than that ought to be for everything. Every class get complained about for that. Even in more epic settings.
And the reason is very simple:
It's balanced for more encounters.
Your players start powerful, but as their resources dwindle over the course of an in-play day and fatigue is creeping over, they'll struggle more and have to use their powers sparingly.
The thing is, the writers' sense of how to balance this came from playtesting the edition in a huge dungeon crawl, meaning 5e is balanced for 8 encounters a day - which nobody ever does, other than in a huge dungeon crawl.

So assuming you aren't about to convert Thoughts of Darkness or anything (Hmmm.... Maybe as I'm already in my Bluetspur homebrew phase...), what can you do?

My CR calculator advises me to just double the CR. But again, what if I want to run a campaign where even relatively weak monsters can be horrifying?

So.
Turns out this genius called Dadi made up for his homebrew low-fantasy campaign an alternative system for resting in DND:

8 hours of rest including at least 6 hours of sleep etc (basically what's normally considered a long rest) gives you a 'night's rest' with the benefits of a short rest.
To get the benefits of a long rest - what the system calls a 'good rest' you have to either take 3 consecutive nights rests at the same location, or take 1 night's rest in what's called a 'safe haven' - a place that feels safe and comfortable enough for your character to be able to fully relax and recover.

If you want more details, watch the video in the link:

Beyond the balance fix, I like this system for a narrative reason:
It makes 'reaching a safe place' a goal with a mechanical reward.

Like... Anyone read LoTR? The Hobbit?
If you read between the lines, you realise that the real beats of tension and relief aren't about whether or not the characters win the encounter - they're about whether or not they make it to safety afterwards. After weeks of running for their lives in the wilderness, making it to Rivendel is awesome not only because it's the beautiful elvish estate, but because is a place where for once you can sleep in an actual bed in an actual room with no fear of the spooky wraiths coming for you.

Faster-paced literature like Percy Jackson doesn't bother with showing the results of exhaustion, but to avoid them the heroes would have to find where to rest in an unfamilliar city. Reuniting with an ally or making a new one can earn them a magical shelter, and accepting hospitality without asking questions might get them into a trap.

But in RPG, you don't actually feel that. The wilderness is where interesting gameplay stuff happens - safe places are where nothing happens. If we wanted to rest we could just make camp.

But if you play a system where sleeping on the ground in the middle of the forest isn't mechanically the same as staying around for long enough to get comfortable in your little camp or coming back home, where you make you have to make it to a safe haven before you can heal or remove exhaustion effectively...
Suddenly your players feel this urgency. The weariness of running from danger to danger for weeks. The temptation to enter what might be a trap for the chance of a warm bed and meal. The eternal gratitude for an NPC who simply gave them a place to stay.