Combats and Ressources (again...) - How to condense Adventures

[Tony Vargas]

It just feels more "natural" for my sense of story progression that the party roams through the mountain pass, finds a cult of morally ambigous dwarves, helps them to collect the relics of an unchained elemental titan, slay the orc raiders and finally confront the titan and banish him into the depths of the underdark.

- 5 encounters: roaming the tunnels, defending against orc raiders and travelling about 15 miles
- the party is mostly drained of ressources
- end of the day and long rest
- 5 encounters: freeing dwarven cultists from orcs, storming the orc's base, going back and binding the stone titan
- the party is mostly drained of ressources
- end of the day and long rest

Why am I eager to stick to the two-day solution? Because if think that it gives the whole endevour a bit more grandness. Its not only a modest tunnel pass that can be crossed in two hours but a dwarven ruin of quite a scale.

How important is being drained of resources and resting to the pacing? Could it just be that a day or two increments because time has passed, it does take time to travel 15 miles through the mountains.

I would like to present the party with the first threat, the orcs and the dangers of the tunnel, on the first day. Then day get a feeling for the tunnels, can make a campsite snuggled up against some dusty bones. On the second day they see that the orcs aren't the only (and not even the worst) threat and could decide to help against the stone titan. This partitioning of the story and its elements is important to me in order to let the adventurers and the players breathe a bit. ..

Well, this is at least what I wanted to accomplish. Hope that I could make myself clear. (And I also appreciate the previous input.)

I could see breaking it up something like:

roams through the mountain pass: set-up/Skill Challenge (or interspersed simpler skill challenges to get from place to place if you want more detail). For one big challenge, each failure gets you an 'orc raider' encounter. Success locates the dwarves before they tangle with orc raiders and you can help the, and gets you the information they can provide. Failure, you reach the dwarves after an orc raid and they're on edge.

For multiple smaller challenges, it can be more sandboxy, the party roams about, a Complexity 1 challenge gets them from place to place without issues and when they approach a potential combat they can decline it. One failure, healing surge from mishaps or exhaustion. Two failures, the combat can't be avoided. Three and the potential encounter becomes an ambush.

I'd prefer the one big Skill Challenge.

finds a cult of morally ambigous dwarves: social encounter (SC if there are 'stakes,' otherwise, RP & skill checks or just RP & narration as you set up the rest of the adventure).

**Now, at this point, they've been walking around a mountain pass all day, and resting is fine, even if they haven't used resources.**

helps them to collect the relics of an unchained elemental titan: Tougher Skill Challenge, minor fights with Orcs (like equal number of minions or something, they fight for one round, then scatter, if any get away, that's another failure, if you stop all of them, that's a success) on each of the first two failures. Three failures means the jig is up, and you face the Orcs with no long rest. Success means you collect the relics you need to banish the Titan and the orcs are none the wiser.

slay the orc raiders: Series of combats. If you completed the SC successfully, you can rest before you take them on, and hunt them down, destroying them in detail one group at a time before they can organize a defense. If you fail, they're alerted & hunting you, and you have to skirmish with them, until you can get away.

Either way, that'd be the second rest, and if they failed the challenge they probably need it. The next 'day,' they have to fight through any remaining orcs and...

and finally confront the titan and banish him into the depths of the underdark.

Combat + Skill Challenge. Point of the combat being to survive long enough to finish the challenge that banishes the Titan.

 

[Randomthoughts]

How can I reduce the amount of encounters to about 5 without destroying the ressource balance? I wouldn't want to make it too easy by simply cutting half of the encounters - the group will have too many HS left at the end of an adventuring day. Should I restrict long rests? Or should I houserule that they only heal a lower number of HS?

Tl;dr: I want to press more adventuring into fewer combats without making it too easy for my party too survive. How does one do this?

Im wrestling with the same issue in my recent 4e campaign. My group plays about once a month for 4-6 hours. We tend to fit in 1-2 full blown tactical combats with SCs and role-playing filling the rest.

You might want to experiment with changing extending rests to require being in town/refuge (not in the wild or a dungeon) for a few days. It's a solution you've probably heard before but so far it's worked well for me given my group's play style.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app

 

[Rolenet]

Cricket, I really see two issues here.

A) Resource managment. This one's easy as pie. Use the Tweet fix: simply ban Extended Rest outright until the second milestone. This is basically the technique used in the Encounter Program back then. I have used for three full campaign and it works fine.
Don't try to justify it through rest limits such as "You can't rest here". Just state that sufficient heroics needs to have been performed before you can recover.
Don't tie ER to sleep. The PCs can camp, sleep, but it does not count as an ER until the second milestone. This is also the only way to fix "on the road" adventures. If your players are outraged, give them some token rest: one HS, a fresh AP... But they'll understand how it makes their power choices more relevant.

B) Shorter fights. Harder. First, use tough monster (i.e. MM3 and later). Pre-MM3 encounters require too many monsters to challenge the PCs, dragging the fight.
Second, cut down their hp by about 20%, especially after level 15.
Lastly, re-pace the adventure by forming chunks of 4 combat encounters (two milestones) plus a SC/trap encounter. Discard the uninspired ones.
As long as you control ERs, the PCs won't run over your encounters.
In the end, it can't do miracles, though! D&D4 is still a combat game (but that's for another thread!)

 

[Garthanos]

.
Don't try to justify it through rest limits such as "You can't rest here".

Oh but I enjoy making certain places dangerous to express their nature... not specifically to require the resource management and if they put enough effort (rituals and skill challenge class activity) in to getting around the deserts tribulations they might get a rest without them dust storms and similar forcing them to wait till they hit an oasis.

 

[Rolenet]

Oh but I enjoy making certain places dangerous to express their nature...

Ah yes, my bad, what I meant is that if you try to justify the 2-milestone limit in-game, then it may come out as very artificial, sometimes. "Errr.... you can't sleep here... it's... too damp!"

But in the situation you describe (a frequent one, considering I'm DMing Dark Sun currently!), for me that would be a skill challenge situation to avoid fatigue, rather than a limit on ER (which is "hard-coded").

 

[Tony Vargas]

Oh but I enjoy making certain places dangerous to express their nature... not specifically to require the resource management and if they put enough effort (rituals and skill challenge class activity) in to getting around the deserts tribulations they might get a rest without them dust storms and similar forcing them to wait till they hit an oasis.

Definitely. For the whole Heroic Tier of the campaign I'm finishing out now, the party was doing a lot of sailing, and the general rule was, long rests only in port when you could take on fresh food & water. In Paragon, they picked up some resources, like the Solace Bole ritual, that let them overcome that at times. Now, at Epic, the ship is so kitted out that they can not only take extended rests without breaking a journey, they have a magical greenhouse/meditation-room ('cabin,' y'lubber!) in the ship that can give a specific long rest benefit in only an hour.

It's kinda cool how it's worked out, as the feel has shifted with the Tiers, something I've taken pains to make work in other aspects of the campaign.

 

[Garthanos]

Definitely. For the whole Heroic Tier of the campaign I'm finishing out now, the party was doing a lot of sailing, and the general rule was, long rests only in port when you could take on fresh food & water. They picked up some resources, like the Solace Bole ritual, that let them overcome that at times. Now, at Epic, the ship is so kitted out that they can not only take extended rests without breaking a journey, they have a magical greenhouse/meditation-room ('cabin,' y'lubber!) in the ship that can give a specific long rest benefit in only an hour.

It's kinda cool how it's worked out, as the feel has shifted with the Tiers, something I've taken pains to make work in other aspects of the campaign.

Sounds Great.... and organic.

 

[Rolenet]

[MENTION=6779743]Vargas[/MENTION], but I suppose you had some rule or mechanism to restrict ERs nonetheless during the Epic tier?

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=32852]The Fighter-Cricket[/MENTION]

I've only skimread some of the longer posts, so apologies if I'm duplicating: but in your 2-3 enc, rest, 2-3 enc scheme the easiest thing to do would be for the players to get no mechanical benefit for the overnight rest.

You could do this by sheer fiat, like 13th Age does; or you could add in some element (inclement weather, say), that prevents the PCs resting. Or you could adopt the fairly common idea that an extend rest only works at a Rivendell-like haven, and not when you're camping out.

EDIT: And now I've seen that I am doubling up, with [MENTION=6874615]Rolenet[/MENTION] post 13.

 

[S'mon]

In 4e I don't think there is any point trying to force the PCs to have 5 encounters before a long rest. The system is not really designed for attrition, healing surges are the only thing that attrites and the consequences of going into battle with 0 surges are so severe that players will try very hard to avoid it. IME the system works fine if the PCs never come close to running out of surges. The 28-30 encounter HPE series never seem to bother with pacing around resource recovery, they seem to pretty much assume at-will long rests.

That said, you could do what I do now & have PCs recover only 1/4-1/3 of surges per long rest. That way you can have 2-3/rest/2-3 with recovery of dailies (never that big a deal IME) plus some attrition of surges risk. Maybe resting in the Stonefang tunnel isn't comfy enough for full surge recovery.