No Rest: My Answer to the 15-minute Adventuring Day

[Paul Strack]

This seems to be a hot topic again. Here are the house rules I use in my campaign to keep the adventure moving forward. They've worked pretty well for my 6-month-long campaign and various one-shot adventures I've run.

No Rests: The Short Rest and Extended Rest are no longer part of the game and cannot be used. Resources recharge as follows:

• Encounter powers recharge at the beginning of each new encounter.
• After an encounter, you may spend any number of healing surges to regain hit points. Healing powers that were not used in the encounter may also be used at this point. Powers that improve healing during a "short rest" (such as the bard's song of rest) apply to this after-encounter healing.
• Daily powers recharge at the beginning of each day, when characters wake up in the morning.
• Healing surges only recharge at the beginning of an adventure. The DM may also choose to let PCs regain healing surges at an appropriate point in longer adventures.
• Characters begin each adventure with one action point. Encounters and milestones are counted for the entire length of the adventure for magic item use and gaining new action points.
• Skill challenges count as an encounter, but only for PCs who participate in the challenge. "Damage" in skill challenges generally comes in the form of lost healing surges.

The "fluff justification" for these rules is that healing surges represent serious damage and require extensive recuperation to recover, which can only occur between adventures.

One other change I've considered is making "daily" powers be "adventure" powers that recharge like healing surges. My players are not too bad about going nova in combat, however, so I haven't needed to do this. If my players were nova-happy, I'd probably make this change.

Note that I tend to run urban, event-driven adventures rather than dungeon crawls, with 2-3 combats total in an adventure (4-5 encounters including skill challenges).