I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
pemerton said:Weekly, daily, per-5-minutes, etc.
Ah. Then yes, I don't believe healing powers need to pop back necessarily on the same cycle as all of your HPs. The necessary requirement for doing that is that you pay attention to how much your healing powers can heal the party. As of 5e's current playtest rules, it's pretty clear that if HP didn't all come back at the end of the day, that two clerics spending all of their magic might be able to heal one character up to full, meaning it could still take a few days to get the party up to full.
Not that I'd necessarily advocate for not changing the spells as they exist now, just that it shows how limited healing power can "speed up" the time taken to get to full hp without necessarily making it the same as healing everything overnight.
pemerton said:4e (at least prior to Essentials) doesn't make or need any assumptions about how many encounters can be dealt with in a given period between extended rests.
Page 104, 4e DMG.
It's not a hard-and-fast limit, but it is an expected average. It is the time frame in which the mechanics actually take place, at any rate: action points recharge after 2 encounters. This point is not arbitrary. It is based on expected rates of monster damage vs. PC HP and healing surges.
This was also taken into account in the Dungeon Delve book: 3 encounters per delve is not an arbitrary number.
4e characters ARE good survivors, and smart tactics and varying encounter vs. player types (especially throwing in risks that don't drain surges) and party member numbers are going to vary that rate, because that rate isn't stone-set, it's a guideline.
The PC's in your game seem like they should be gaining a level every day! Depending on how you use quest XP, at LUNCH! But in principle, the balance works for "days" of any length, as long as you know about how long your "day" is (and given math, you should).
pemerton said:Isn't this the Tomb of Horrors? Which many (not me, I'll admit) regard as the most classic of all D&D challenges.
It's a specific kind of D&D challenge featuring deathtraps, originally done in a convention setting. Using nigh-instant-death in your design and having a rotating player base meant that the goals of the design were different from your typical at-home D&D session: more like NetHack then like Xenoblade Chronicles.
pemerton said:For example, what story element explains how the lock got re-locked if the PCs go away and then come back tomorrow? Or if they spend the night camping in the room with the now-unlocked (but iron-spiked) door?
Well, in the first case, you could have whatever lives in the dungeon locks the door.
In the second case, it's a problem that they're camping for a week without consequence in the dungeon in the first place, but if for some reason they can, you can introduce some other challenge.
Don't think about "recharge" too literally. It doesn't dictate that this specific lock necessarily be available to unlock again, it just wants to manifest an equivalent obstacle, to keep the challenge between extended rests the same. So if they rest in this room with a now-unlocked door, you can introduce a locked door somewhere else in the dungeon. Or you can stick an extra goblin in the patrol. Or you can make the dwarf captive a little closer to death (requiring another Heal check to stabilize them). Or you can give the goblin chief a little more HP.
As long as you have a rough idea of how many dice rolls it takes to get the PC's from full to nearly-dead, you have a handy measure of how you can balance any differently-recharging resource.