Dailies "Fix" --> The Long Rest

[Sadrik]

This idea is to address several issues with the concept of daily powers.

Long Rest
A long rest allows you to recover your daily powers without taking an extended rest.
✦ Duration: A long rest is about 1 hour long.
✦ No Limit per Day: You can take as many short rests per day as you want.
✦ No Strenuous Activity: You have to rest during a long rest. You can stand guard, sit in place, ride on a wagon or other vehicle, or do other tasks that don’t require much exertion.
✦ Spend Healing Surges: After the first 5 minutes, you can spend as many healing surges as you want (see “Healing,” page 293). If you run out of healing surges, you must take an extended rest to regain them.
✦ Encounter Powers: After the first 5 minutes, you renew your encounter powers, so they are available for your next encounter.
✦ Using Powers while You Rest: If you use an encounter power during a long rest, you need another 5 minutes of rest to renew it so that you can use it again.
✦ Daily Powers: At the end of a long rest, you regain all your daily powers.
✦ Interruptions: If your long rest is interrupted, you need to rest another hour to get the complete benefits of a long rest.

Short Rest
A short rest allows you to renew your encounter powers and spend healing surges to regain hit points.
SHORT REST
✦ Duration: A short rest is about 5 minutes long.
✦ No Limit per Day: You can take as many short rests per day as you want.
✦ No Strenuous Activity: You have to rest during a short rest. You can stand guard, sit in place, ride on a wagon or other vehicle, or do other tasks that don’t require much exertion.
✦ Renew Powers: After a short rest, you renew your encounter powers, so they are available for your next encounter.
✦ Spend Healing Surges: After a short rest, you can spend as many healing surges as you want (see “Healing,” page 293). If you run out of healing surges, you must take an extended rest to regain them.
✦ Using Powers while You Rest: If you use an encounter power (such as a healing power) during a short rest, you need another short rest to renew it so that you can use it again.
✦ Interruptions: If your short rest is interrupted, you need to rest another 5 minutes to get the benefits of a short rest.

Extended Rest
Once per day, you can gain the benefits of an extended rest.
EXTENDED REST
✦ Duration: An extended rest is at least 6 hours long.
✦ Once per Day: After you finish an extended rest, you have to wait 12 hours before you can begin another one.
✦ No Strenuous Activity: You normally sleep during an extended rest, though you don’t have to. You can engage in light activity that doesn’t require much exertion.
✦ Regain Hit Points and Healing Surges: At the end of an extended rest, you regain any hit points you have lost and any healing surges you have spent.
✦ Powers: At the end of an extended rest, you regain all your encounter powers and daily powers.
✦ Action Points: At the end of an extended rest, you lose any unspent action points, but you start fresh with 1 action point.
✦ Interruptions: If anything interrupts your extended rest, such as an attack, add the time spent dealing with the interruption to the total time you need to
spend in the extended rest.

 

[Belaugured DM]

What issues does this fix if I might ask? From what I have seen all this does is make Dailies more available without an extended rest. Is that what the issue youre trying to address is?

 

[keterys]

Eh... this makes it really easy to nova one encounter, rest to get dailies back, repeat. It also overemphasizes powers that give free healing over ones that cost surges - for example, Mass Cure Light Wounds could be used every 1 hour with this method, even though you're limited by healing surges for most encounter healing.

 

[Shieldhaven]

My solution to this problem is... very different.

Reset Dice

Earn reset dice by bringing snacks, completing a character journal for the previous session, completing a character background (one-time reward of 2 dice), or anything else we agree upon.

Spend reset dice to refresh expended Encounter powers and Daily powers. An encounter power is refreshed on a roll of 3 or better on 1d6. A Daily power is refreshed on a roll of 5 or better on 1d6. There is no limit to how many times you may reset dice you may roll in a single round. Inspiring Words, Healing Words, and similar powers are treated as encounter powers. The current ruling is that reset dice cannot restore spent healing surges.

These rules have now been in place for over a dozen sessions, and I feel like they work pretty well. Of course, players stopped writing journals as soon as I introduced this option; I don't know how I'd feel about it if everyone picked up four or more dice per session. In my current setup, any player earning reset dice grants all players an equivalent number of reset dice. The players like saving them up, and then burning them when things start to get ugly. This lets them blow right past the normal limits on all kinds of powers, but it doesn't really matter. Since they always have a few reset dice tucked away, players don't feel like they should stop adventuring just because they're out of dailies - they have a pretty good shot at getting them back.

Haven

 

[Sadrik]

What issues does this fix if I might ask? From what I have seen all this does is make Dailies more available without an extended rest. Is that what the issue your trying to address is?

Yes, I like the idea of powers that revolve around the encounter rather than the day. What this HR does is say:
If you are in a quick succession of encounters, need to get somewhere fast or otherwise cannot break for an hour you would be limited to the short rest. But if you have a chance you can get back your dailies if you want.

It makes the dailies more useful, if you miss with it you can try again in the next encounter. If you have the time you can use them more often, if you do not have the time you will be limited to your encounter powers more. I want the players to have as many options available to them as possible and this is a way that we don't have a 1 encounter adventuring day. Well, we used our dailies, time to take an extended rest.

Now we can continue to adventure with an "hour break" ie "break for lunch", "break for dinner" rather than simply taking a 5 minute breather.

 

[Sadrik]

Eh... this makes it really easy to nova one encounter, rest to get dailies back, repeat. It also overemphasizes powers that give free healing over ones that cost surges - for example, Mass Cure Light Wounds could be used every 1 hour with this method, even though you're limited by healing surges for most encounter healing.

Yes, novaing is already happening with an extended rest right after so this should not change much. Now we will "break for lunch" and hit the adventuring trail again.

Is allowing the use of cure light wounds that big of a deal? The could instead take an extended rest and reset their surges and heal up completely. If they want to take multiple hour long breaks to use multiple cure light wounds it seems a bit suboptimal of a strategy to say the least. Perhaps provide an example, to illustrate?

 

[Sadrik]

My solution to this problem is... very different.

Complex, swingy and lots of rolling. Have you played with this yet?

 

[Alex319]

Complex, swingy and lots of rolling. Have you played with this yet?

Well...

These rules have now been in place for over a dozen sessions, and I feel like they work pretty well.

 

[Sadrik]

Well...

I read it earlier and then came back to respond and I did not read it again. What do you think of the proposal in the original post?

 

[Alex319]

It doesn't seem overly complicated, and I'm not sure what you mean by being "swingy." As for the overall effects, that really seems to depend on how many reset dice you give out. The only real issue that I can see if that if you give out too many reset dice, then people could recharge their powers a lot - this would especially be a problem with Dailies. (Remember Veteran's Armor from AV, which allowed a player to spend an AP to recharge a daily, and was so overpowered that the effect had to be errataed out.) On average it takes three reset dice to recharge a Daily. This is especially powerful with certain particularly powerful dailies like Rain of Steel. But the power boost depends a lot on what powers the players have, how many reset dice you give out, and how the players use them. And if they start blowing through encounters too easily because of all the powers, then you can always just make the monsters tougher or cut back on the number of dice you give out.

It might be a good idea to specify that the reset dice roll cannot be altered by any effect that allows you to alter a die roll. (I can't off the top of my head think of any ability out so far that would allow rerolling an arbitrary die roll, but just in case one comes out or I'm forgetting something, you wouldn't want to have a situation where someone has an encounter power that lets them reroll a die, so they take several short rests after an encounter and each time use a reset die to recharge a Daily and reroll it if they fail, nearly doubling the effect of each reset die.)