Refreshing Surges Con Mod per day instead of all
Why reduce the regain rate and not the number each person gets to start with? It servers the same function. Is requires less book keeping and makes combats more climatic. Experiment by starting with a 10% reduction and continue to increase the reduction until your group has a number that works.
buddhafrog
First Post
right on
Surges are one of my more serious problems with 4e (in my little experience). I am looking for a way to houserule and appreciate the OP. However, I agree -- it makes Constitution way too powerful. I like the 4/2 rule: 4 surges for "proper" rest, and 2 surges for unfavorable rest. Possibly, I'd even give 1 or 3 rests in mixed conditions. Love it. I think I'm going to use.
Surges are one of my more serious problems with 4e (in my little experience). I am looking for a way to houserule and appreciate the OP. However, I agree -- it makes Constitution way too powerful. I like the 4/2 rule: 4 surges for "proper" rest, and 2 surges for unfavorable rest. Possibly, I'd even give 1 or 3 rests in mixed conditions. Love it. I think I'm going to use.
Nifft
Penguin Herder
Absolutely.
The default 4e assumption seems to be: downtime should be down-played; multiple conflicts per day should be encouraged.
By limiting surge recovery, you're also limiting conflicts per day, or limiting conflicts per period-between-long-downtimes.
Hmm, maybe the right thing to do would be to add a new kind of very long Rest: "Rest to Recovery", or "R&R" if you will. This would function just like 4e's default Extended Rest, so we need to rename that. We'd end up with:
- Short Rest: 5 minutes, freely spend surges, regain Encounter powers
- Long Rest: 4-6 hours, regain all HP, regain X surges, regain all powers
- R&R: 2-4 days, regain all HP and surges, regain all powers, spend half your gold on ale & whores
Cheers, -- N
Holy Bovine
First Post
And this is easily solved with a DM who can pace his adventures properly. Not every day is filled with life threatening dangers. At the least weeks, if not months, should be passing for each level gained, imo and ime. I do agree that 30 days to 30 levels is ridiculous but just increasing the healing time between encounters/adventures isn't the way to go about solving it.
eamon
Explorer
This sounds like the most reasonable balanced approach to make things grittier by means of surge reduction.
I think there should be a difference between wardens and wizards in terms of surge regaining. Alternatively, you could regain (your max surges per day + 1d4) / 4, rounded down (which would effectively dither the surge regains and probably be a little more reasonable but more complex).
A DM can easily tweak this to account for nastier circumstances by imposing a penalty on the number of surges regained.
As it was previously stated, limiting surges recovered, limits the amount of combats per day.
How that improves the grittines is not clear to me.
For starters, it the amount of surges you have is a problem for what you want to do, then you rest more until you recover all your surges.
So instead of taking one rest, the party will rest two days.
How that improves the grittines is not clear to me.
For starters, it the amount of surges you have is a problem for what you want to do, then you rest more until you recover all your surges.
So instead of taking one rest, the party will rest two days.
buddhafrog
First Post
For me at least, the benefit of decreased surges is that it makes taking damage actually worrisome. This needs to be balanced so that PC's can recover adequately and strategically, but also so that they don't think they can just take their damage and move on. PC's who know they can win but still want to avoid unneeded damage play more cerebrally. I think this is more realistic.
Yes, you might have one less encounter per day and/or a slightly modified monster XP total, but having minimal lasting affects of damage, I feel, benefits the actual gameplay as well as the storyline.
Ok, I see.
But how can't you accomplish this with the normal rules but with these houserules you can?
I've made several adventures where there where more encounters than the party would be able to handle. So they had to choose which encounters to have, the consequences of doing each encounter, etc.
I can see how recovering less surges you can span a conflict between the party and enemies across long rests/days instead of solving them all in one day.
But that doesn't seem to be the core of gritty.
But how can't you accomplish this with the normal rules but with these houserules you can?
I've made several adventures where there where more encounters than the party would be able to handle. So they had to choose which encounters to have, the consequences of doing each encounter, etc.
I can see how recovering less surges you can span a conflict between the party and enemies across long rests/days instead of solving them all in one day.
But that doesn't seem to be the core of gritty.
buddhafrog
First Post
Yep, that would work as well. For me, I prefer a game where damage can carry over (I also am including body harm penalties instead of damage -- if player chooses this -- as someone else wrote on this forum). For me, this is a significant part of "gritty".
But your other point is important. It's what I prefer I suppose. I don't want to run 6/7 encounters per day. I prefer a game that is a little less combat heavy and more story-based and/or environmental-based.
Lastly, I generally like to make things as real as playable (for me, this is also "gritty"), and almost infinite regeneration just strikes an odd chord for me.
I'm sure others wouldn't want to play this way. I do.
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