Dealing with Healing Surges

[MeMeMeMe]

Alternatively, so you don;t have to change the way you play, do the following:
Youy get the equivalent of one Extended Rest at the end of each week, for free. In addition, once per week, you can take a 6 hour Rest & Recuperate action to get the same benefit. You can't gain this benefit through normal nightly sleeping - it must be a part of a day spent holed up somewhere safe to lick your wounds.

This changes the game to match your pace, and also still gives players the ability to take an extended rest (once) if they feel they are out of their depth.

 

[TheNovaLord]

TBH honest it sounds like you are playing the wrong game system

We generally have been having 4-7 'encounters' a day with usually no more than:
2-3 unavaoidable combats
0-2 avoidable combats
1-2 skill challenges
0-1 trip/trick/puzzle
1-3 shorter skill/social interactions

4e isnt suited to 1 combat per day
you need the city to be more dangerous or use a different system

 

[icarusfallz]

I'm interested, how many encounters per day are a good idea? I find that my players always want to extended rest after any fight hard enough to use their Daily powers, so if there's a long string of normal or easy encounters they just keep going.

Sometimes you can just not let them rest. If they try to rest when you are not ready for it, maybe something even worse than they just beat finds them. A group that stops to "recharge" after every fight is kinda metagaming. The world does not stop turning because you stop to camp.

Alternately, set a timeline for your story. If the dragon is going to eat the princess at dawn, and they have stopped to rest after every fight on the way to the lair, they are likely to find a satisfied dragon asking the fighter to borrow his sword for a toothpick.

 

[IanArgent]

Every so often, it can be fun to play in an encounter that is intended to have the party pull out all the stops. My DM just ran one of these for us; and boy howdy were we scared. I am reasonably sure the fighter was out of surges at the end, a few HP from being down for most of the fight, and we were all out of non-at-will resources.

That having been said, normally you should be running 3-5 encounters between long rests. The lower the encounter #, the higher the XP budget for each. Just be careful of increasing the level of the enemies at one end, or swamping the PCs under minions at the other...

 

[Jhaelen]

Well, that is a bit difficult to solve if you don't like upping the number of encounters per day or don't want every encounter to be overpowering.

You may want to experiment with reducing healing surges and turning daily powers into weekly powers or maybe use a roll to decide if a given daily is regained similar to the recharge mechanism of monsters. You may also want to do something about action points.

 

[Mengu]

I don't think increasing the level of your encounters is the way to go. When all your encounters are level+3 or level+4, players will know what to expect from each encounter, and it still won't be a big challenge. If you increase it any more, you are running a high risk of total party kill. The game is really designed around multiple encounters between extended rests, and resource management throughout those encounters.

Alternatively, so you don;t have to change the way you play, do the following:
Youy get the equivalent of one Extended Rest at the end of each week, for free. In addition, once per week, you can take a 6 hour Rest & Recuperate action to get the same benefit. You can't gain this benefit through normal nightly sleeping - it must be a part of a day spent holed up somewhere safe to lick your wounds.

This changes the game to match your pace, and also still gives players the ability to take an extended rest (once) if they feel they are out of their depth.

I think this would be an elegant solution for your style of play.

 

[Cadfan]

Healing surges are limited in two ways.

1. Daily limit. If you have 7 healing surges, then once you run out you really can't afford to keep adventuring. At that point, the only healing you can receive is when you're dying- you can be stabilized and reset to 1 hp.

2. Per encounter limit. This is the one that creates tension. If you have a second wind, a healing potion, and a cleric who can cast Healing Word twice per encounter, then the absolute maximum you can heal is four times. And two of those came from the cleric, meaning that if you use them no one else can. And one of them cost you your standard action.

Its the latter that creates the tension.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

I'd say increasing the difficulty of the encounters, or making that "one fight a day" into a running fight with several phases, basically stringing several encounters together, would be pretty good options.

 

[Keenath]

I have to kind of disagree with the group thought here.

In 4e, it shouldn't matter how many surges the PCs have, because there are only limited ways to ACCESS those surges during battle. You have one Second Wind (which costs a standard action for non-dwarves), potions (which cost significant money), and leader powers (most of which are encounter based and in short supply).

There's not much of a 'health nova' issue because having 12 surges doesn't help if you can only use 3 per battle (and that's if the cleric ignores everyone else's needs). The system is designed to be largely day-independent. Surge count is a way to curtail the "we can adventure forever!" problem that's the inverse of the 3.5 "five minute workday" issue, and I believe it was Dave Noonan who commented that if your party could be trusted not to abuse it, you could pretty much do away with the daily surge count without hurting anything.

The real issue with one combat per day is the ability for the PCs to burn all their daily powers on that one fight, which naturally means they can deal 25 or 30% more damage than in a fight where they're being more conservative. Maybe you're seeing low damage totals not due to surging but because the monsters fall quickly to daily power usage.


The surge tally shouldn't be what makes them 'fear no monster'. Have you checked that you're building your encounters correctly? An on-level fight is X monsters of level Y (where your party is X characters of level Y), or a group of monsters with the same XP total, or a single solo monster of the appropriate level (though you have to be a little careful with that if you don't have exactly 5 PCs). If you're throwing easy fights, it's no wonder the PCs win handily.

However, if healing really is the issue, make sure you are enforcing the limits on use of healing surges. If the cleric is using more than 2 Healing Words per fight, or if you have people Surging without giving up their action to do so (except dwarves), or if you have people using Second Wind more than once per fight, that could cause the problem.


If none of those are a problem, I guess I'd just ask, what is it that makes you think things aren't right? Is it just that they go to bed with 10 surges still in the box? So what? If the cleric is out of Words and I've used my second wind and I have no potions and I'm down to 5 HP, I'm just as close to dying as the guy with 5 HP and no healing surges left. The fact that I have 10 sitting over there doesn't help me, because I have to get out of the fight alive before I can rest and use those to recover my HPs.

 

[Dragonbait]

IME, if the group has 1 leader with an ability to heal someone, each PC can do 1 Second Wind/day and 2 will be able to use a healing surge + 1d6 + (variable) with the help of a cleric, warlord, or artificer. Any fight could be a TPK, even at the appropriate level. I think that you are being too cautious with them.