Stopping the "extended rest after every encounter"

[generalhenry]

It's always been best to fight at full strength.

And the solution as always been to provide a strong narrative to drive the players.

 

[lordkiwi]

You can fix it in the story easily enough, or OOC, but another option is to provide the players with a balancing factor...

After 1 Milestone all their daily powers do +[1W] damage (or similar)
After 2 Milestones they do +[3W] damage (or similar)
At 3 Milestones and onwards they can choose a single daily power to refresh.

They still need to worry about healing surges and, to some extent, daily power consumption, but wouldn't you like to do +[3W] with your big attack against the boss? Especialy if you make the end scenes a little tougher to compensate for the potential increased player power.

It'd need balancing, but it could work.

Lord Kiwi,

 

[generalhenry]

it weakens the narrative to have the players get stronger.

 

[lordkiwi]

it weakens the narrative to have the players get stronger.

In narratives, the Protagonist almost always gets stronger.

The most obvious examples are most popular Anime, where the more they get beat up the bigger attacks they do, but it's also the case in films, novels and most other stories.

i.e. The shot a Protagonist couldn't make in training at the start of the film is garenteed to hit when he makes it at the end while injured and stressed.

If anything the normal D&D way of getting weaker the longer you fight, while realistic, makes for weaker climax scenes because you don't have the resources left to deal with the final encounter if it's too big.

Lord Kiwi,

 

[deleteme123456]

In narratives, the Protagonist almost always gets stronger.

The most obvious examples are most popular Anime, where the more they get beat up the bigger attacks they do, but it's also the case in films, novels and most other stories.

i.e. The shot a Protagonist couldn't make in training at the start of the film is garenteed to hit when he makes it at the end while injured and stressed.

If anything the normal D&D way of getting weaker the longer you fight, while realistic, makes for weaker climax scenes because you don't have the resources left to deal with the final encounter if it's too big.

Lord Kiwi,

Or maybe the anime characters are just saving their dailies for the BBEG.

 

[lordkiwi]

Or maybe the anime characters are just saving their dailies for the BBEG.

That is one way of looking at it, but if you want to encourage players to do that, instead of resting between every fight, why not mechanically reinforce it?

 

[generalhenry]

Or maybe the anime characters are just saving their dailies for the BBEG.

Exactly, watch any anime and they always but some some brand new attack at the end, and use their action point that turn too.

 

[deleteme123456]

Well, after reading this entire thread and other suggestions in the House Rules forum, I'm setting the bar at 4 encounters per day ("hard" as classified by level +2 counts double) Less than that and you earn less XP, 5 or more and you get a small amount of bonus XP (to all encounters that day). They're immune from penalty if they have a good plot reason for stopping early, but not if they just mismanaged their resources.

I appreciate the comments that the narrative could drive this, but short of making the bad guys win, game over, I'm not sure that making the encounters more difficult will really accomplish anything. And yes, they might be a little more difficult if you're missing 10% of your experience all the time (3 encounters), but you should be able to make that up with a 5-encounter day once you learn to manage resources better.

 

[generalhenry]

why not mechanically reinforce it?

because it encourages rat slaying.

The players would seek out easy encounters to up their dailies for the BBEG.

 

[Keenath]

I really think this will self-correct over time without any punishment or encouragement on your part. People aren't used to 4th edition yet, and are still going to be thinking in terms of 3.x characters, where a level 1 guy can easily die in one or two good hits, and a wizard without his ONE SPELL is kind of worthless.


So far, it sounds like you've only had a few encounters, so give them some time to get used to the idea that 1st level characters are Big Damn Heroes even before they level up. If you feel you need to do something, I'd just speak to them out of character and say, "Y'know, guys, let's move this thing along. You're tough enough to do this even without daily powers, and it's not very heroic to go run home after every fight. Show some courage, here. They're just kobolds."