That is an extremely horrible rule. Wizard casts stoneksin. Ask the wizard, when do you get stoneskin back. Answer is... I have no idea. I'll be able to memorize the spell again at some indeterminate point in the future after I've killed some specific but unknown monsters that I have yet to find, but until then no matter how much I study my spellbook I can't cast that spell ever again. Also until then, my broken arm won't mend. Ever. Nor will healing potions function. Ever. No, my players would definitely quit if I pulled that on them.
It depends on heavy use of milestones and very goal-oriented plots as well as a certain play style for the players. You've established your players wouldn't stand for it in two different posts. At this point, you're ranting about what
someone else's group feels works
in their game, and the person who brought the topic up said that it wouldn't work for all groups anyway.
What's your point here? That it's a bad rule? If it was a bad rule that didn't work for the group, it wouldn't be popular with them. We already know that you don't like it and feel your group would react badly to its introduction, and I've already said I don't really like it myself. You're not really saying anything new here.
I recommend giving players infinite healing surges. The fact that healing potions won't work because of some resource that has no parallel to reality has been used up powering magic items or crafting things or because you simply had a bad night's sleep is so blatantly stupid it makes me want to kick kittens. That and epic rares, but that's a different rant.
Non-infinite healing surges keep them from running headlong into encounter after encounter with only their use of dailies as a check on their carnage. They also make a convenient way to meter out the amount of physical, tactical risk that certain classes would take, a nice mechanism to hang some magic tricks on, and are part of a rules system that
by design bears about as much resemblance to reality as BattleTech's does. Probably less, actually, since BattleTech at least acknowledges that things break.
Surges also lead to the situation of the GM pushing players off a cliff. "Sorry guys, you have to fight the BBEG now, I know you're all hurt and out of surges, but it's a 99% chance of a TPK or the world is destroyed and you all die anyway. Guess you guys are a bunch of losers for not taking the Unicorn's Horn power." Just wonderful. Healing surges are the worst mechanic I've seen in a game EVER.
If the GM actually throws them into a situation like
that after running them through that much of a ringer, the GM has officially screwed up. I know I dismissed the idea that you softball them, but the goal is to be challenging and interesting, not engineer a TPK. Trust me, I can hand out TPKs right, left, and center if I want to, but if it's not a deliberately antagonistic dungeon crawl,
that's not the point of the game. Have them find out they've been chasing a decoy, give them another option to wreck things, have the World Serpent restore their resources because the world is on the line, break the game for a moment and ask if they mind going out in a blaze of glory, etc. There's any number of ways to handle that without making it a no-win scenario.
(Taking an extended rest right there and then isn't a good one, though - if you do that right outside the dragon's cave, said dragon is going to do its dead level best to kill each and every one of you in the middle of the night while you're all asleep. A coup de grace with the breath weapon sounds nice, doesn't it? See the "fatal stupidity" clause in my last post.)
Alternately instead of having the first 5 encounters simply being easy grinds to burn up surges so the 6th encounter is actually challenging, you just give the players challenging and fun encounters.
Or, you know, you could do that anyway without completely wrecking part of the balance between roles and classes, the way we measure how much the characters have taken in a day, and some of what part of the magic system is hung on. I certainly try to. This isn't a zero sum game, where we can either have healing surge limits or interesting encounters.
As it is, for most encounters the DM isn't sure if the players will be going into the encounter with surges left or not. Balance, meet window, window, meet balance, jump balance jump, out the window! So either the DM has to re-balance every encounter when it happens based on what state the party is in going in to it or not, or hey, here's an idea, infinite healing surges and the DM has a MUCH better idea of how strong the party will be for each encounter. My god healing surges are a HORRIBLE mechanic. Worst, mechanic, EVER.
Yeah, at full strength other than their dailies and magic item uses. So how are we supposed to occasionally set up situations where they have to do something hard on limited resources? Wave our magic wands and make it so? That's an even worse idea and most players are going to balk. Some of them are going to balk
a lot.
The levels of monsters and the idea of challenging encounters are built to factor in forcing the use of healing surges from time to time. If the party has to spend a surge or so per character in a given fight, that's fine and you should see slightly less than that in a normal encounter as opposed to a hard one. Finally, you're assuming that the GM isn't free to adjust things on the fly. Any GM who is hopelessly wedded to their plans and won't adapt if an encounter just went wrong and sapped way too much of the characters' resources needs to review just what they're doing, because they're doing it
wrong.
And of course, sometimes, yes, the characters need to be slapped around, slapped around
hard, backs against the wall, and given the choice of running, fighting, or holding their ground in what might be a futile last stand because their resources are gone and they are on the ropes. It's not about killing the party off (unless you're deliberately trying to have your own personal Thermopylae), it's about giving them a scare, letting them have the roleplaying opportunity of staring death in the eye and watching it stare back, and being forced to recognize that sometimes, ultimate victory is too expensive, or it's just time to back off. That's not just combat, it's roleplaying, it's storytelling, and it fits the motif of heroism a lot better than people who retreat for five minutes and come back at full strength.
