Reworking the Adventuring Day, OR Alternate Daily Resources - ideas appriciated

[Xethreau]

The Problem

In my campaign style, I not not usually run more than a few encounters per adventure. In fact, I usually do not run adventures, per say. How it usually goes is:

1) Mission select
2) Go to place
3) Deal with RP and Skill challenges
4) Combat encounter
5) Go back to step 3 or 2, if necessary
6) Task resolution? (go back to step 3 if necessary)

And that is what an adventuring day looks like at my table. But that is because my campaigns usually involve a lot of over-land travel and RP, and very little dungeon exploration. So what happens is that usually characters have too many healing surges and daily powers per encounter. We sure do not have a 5-minute adventuring day, but we also almost never reach milestones.


The Fix

I realized that if I have too many daily combat resources, then the party needs to be able to expend those resources during the other parts of the adventuring day. Now, I have a few ideas for this, but I need some help populating ideas, and editing them. Here is what I have so far:

Daily Powers:
- Rituals: Expend a daily power to fuel a ritual of the power's level* or lower. You do not pay the ritual's component cost. This does not work for Creation rituals that produce permanent items.
- Calling a Favor: Expend a daily power; you instead channel your energy into calling a favor from a contact, and gain 2 expendable items of the power's level* or lower -- or another item/service of equivalent value. You do not regain the power until you use or sell the items/service, even if you take an extended rest. You must be within reasonable proximity of a reasonably connected contact to do this.
- Whip Something Up: Expend a daily power; you focus on crafting with what you have on-hand. Perform an alchemy recipe or creation ritual to produce a consumable item of the power's level* or lower. You do so twice, without paying the component cost (you may change rituals/recipie if you desire, so long as the items produced meet the level restriction.) You do not regain the power until you use or sell the items, even if you take an extended rest.
- Spontaneity: Expend all your daily powers; your luck completely changes. Draw a non-combat purple card** from the deck, and play it immediately. If you cannot play it immediately, keep it face down, show it to your DM, and shuffle it back in the deck; redraw until you find one that can be played. You cannot do this if you have already used any of your daily powers. For each daily power sacrificed after the fourth, draw an additional purple card; you choose between all the applicable purple cards drawn in this way.

* If the daily power with no indicated level, it counts as the level at which you obtained the feature.
** Or whatever kind of bonus cards you use at your table.

Healing Surges
- Rituals: You may pay 2 healing surge to reduce the component cost of the ritual you are casting by half. You may do this once per ritual.
- Expedited Travel: You and yours travel overland faster - the overland traveling speed of the party becomes lowest traveling member's speed +2. When you arrive at your destination, you and all player characters traveling with you begin play with 1 fewer healing surges per day traveled.
- Push Yourself: When you make a skill or ability check, you may roll twice and take the better result. This costs 2 healing surges.
- Extra Exertion: When you make a skill or ability check and fail, you may add +2 to the roll and take the new result. This costs 1 healing surge. You may do this as many times as you like per check.
- Empower Assault: When you hit with an attack, you may lose up to 3 healing surges. The damage dice are brutal X, where X is the number of surges you lost.
- Protective Prayer: When you are out of combat, you may pay 1 healing surge to reduce the number of healing surges drained from you by enemy attacks by 1 until the end of your next rest.

Item Powers
... I am conflicted if I want alternate means to spend item powers or not. I am leaning towards no.

And of course, I am open to criticism and other ideas! I think this ought to work pretty well for my own campaign, and I hope that we can all help make this work even better for all of us!

 

[Wednesday Boy]

So what happens is that usually characters have too many healing surges and daily powers per encounter.

What we've done to deal with this is require X number of encounters ( I think our GM sets it at 5 or 6.) before a long rest can be taken.

 

[Ferghis]

I use a carrot method. You don't have to take a game-mechanic extended rest when you rest for the night. You have to declare specifically that you are taking an extended rest.

Every encounter but the first one after an extended rest counts as a milestone. It takes 5 (or whatever) milestones to gain a level.

Players tend to not take extended rests unless they really have to.

 

[fba827]

this may be a bit oversimplistic, but what if you change the narrative of the mechanics.

'extended rest benefits' only happen after an adventure
thus, they still need sleep at night, but the surges and daily powers and other daily resources don't 'recharge' until they rest inbetween quests.. (this also means milestones would accumulate until the extended rest)

 

[fba827]

addendum to my last post --
looking over your list of suggested fixes more closely...

a) as an outsider, it seems like a lot of house rules to potentially have to reference during the game and something i might consider a bit too much. but obviously my opinion doesn't matter on that part since that is a personal feeling sort of thing that you and your group should decied what is too much

b) in general you do seem to be hitting it... need to find a way to convert existing daily resources (surges, daily powers) in to things like skill checks or story elements since that is what your PCs are more involved in

c) if you didn't go with the healing surge options you listed, you could try halving each PC's number of surges

d) one that gives me pause is the whip something up. just seems like getting an item for a daily power is a bit much. particularly since some items will have daily powers and properties of their own

e) spontaneity might need to take in to account the number of daily powers (or combined total of levels of daily powers expended). of course i don't know much about the purple card method so i don't know what to suggest, but maybe something like 'expend all daily powers. for each daily power expended this way, you can pick one card and of those cards pick one' thus allowing a player some choice for being willing to sacrifice more daily powers at the start rather than sacrificing one much later on.

f) expedited travel may be unnecessary as it is very similar to a bardic ritual in phb2. if you have a bard with rituals a very similar thing could be achieved using the ritual options rather than needing a whole separate rule just for that

 

[GreyICE]

Long-term fatigue conditions accumulated in battle. I would do something like:

Fatigue - For every 2 healing surges you spend in or after battle (round down) you roll an Endurance check (Medium difficulty). Failure means you gain a level of fatigue. Each level of Fatigue reduces your maximum Healing Surge total by 1. Fatigue dissipates at the rate of 1/2 levels per cycle.


This should reduce the amount of healing surges used significantly, while hopefully not penalizing the defender too much (as Endurance on the Defender should be significantly higher than everyone else, and also Endurance is a mostly useless skill, so this is a great way to salvage it).

Daily - Use of a Daily power incurs one level of Fatigue.

Items - Use of an item Daily Power has a 5%/10% chance of expending the item's innate magic. (Roll of a 1 on a D20 has a certain level of symmetry). Expended items retain their bonuses and additional powers, but lose their daily power. (Optional: Expended items may be reforged, possibly as a quest.)


You'll find your party shepherding their resources MUCH more carefully, with minimal disruption to the core mechanics. Long-term consequences may build up over several campaign cycles, and I think you'll find your party being a lot more conservative with their efforts. I don't know how their risk/reward evaluation mechanisms are (if they're risk-adverse you may need to tweak the Daily bit in order to let them use Daily powers in the first place, maybe every Daily after the first costs Fatigue?) but if they're reasonable people they should use their powers when they need them, but ONLY when they need them - power and item spam leads to them losing those powers and items in later encounters (pretty much like a standard game).

 

[Xethreau]

Thanks everybody for your thoughts so far. I have considered altering the definition of "Extended Rest," such as to being a week/weekend's worth of R&R, instead of 6 hours sleep. Simultaneously though, I am not sure if I am comfortable with doing that... But it would make healing/damage more realistic, and make daily powers more like "adventure" powers. So that's a cool idea. I will swing it, vs. this system, by my players.

Thank you fba827 for your thoughts on the system presented. Here are my counter-thoughts.

d) one that gives me pause is the whip something up. just seems like getting an item for a daily power is a bit much. particularly since some items will have daily powers and properties of their own.

I meant to say "consumable item;" as written, you are absolutely correct, and I am correcting it ASAP. Now, I had half a mind to allow one to spend all daily powers to create a non-consumable magic item for free, but I did not like that one bit. Instead of granting more options on the adventure path, the thing encouraged adventurers to stay indoors and become master-smiths and such. No me gusta.

e) spontaneity might need to take in to account the number of daily powers (or combined total of levels of daily powers expended). of course i don't know much about the purple card method so i don't know what to suggest, but maybe something like 'expend all daily powers. for each daily power expended this way, you can pick one card and of those cards pick one' thus allowing a player some choice for being willing to sacrifice more daily powers at the start rather than sacrificing one much later on.

From what I have seen of the Purple Cards (or Turnabouts as I call them), the effects are 30% of the time nothing less than world-changing. One of my PCs from the last game was born from the Turnabouts. Someone's turnabout allowed them to narrate the result of a history check, inventing a dragonborn general of some renown, and someone played one immediately after to "reveal" that said general was dead PC's father. So, the ability to gain an extra use of Turnabout, especially when rewards and wide-reaching-ness scale with level, I think is worth all one's daily powers. Though, you may be right about it being a bit much past level 12. Maybe a "For each daily sacrificed after the 4th, draw one more turnabout, and choose between the ones drawn."

f) expedited travel may be unnecessary as it is very similar to a bardic ritual in phb2. if you have a bard with rituals a very similar thing could be achieved using the ritual options rather than needing a whole separate rule just for that

You make a good point, but I partially designed this power for use with non-bards, PC's leading large groups over land, or PC's traveling alone overland. The idea behind it had to do with a forced march, that extra persistence that can make the difference when lives are at stake. The "not creating an extra rule" is admirable, except for when the original rule has a prerequisite of "bard" in it. Though I admit that the chant's ruling of +2 speed is superior to +[x] percentile.

 

[S'mon]

I think 4e works very well with big, rare, cinematic, EL+4 battles, the PCs blowing through lots of dailies, and minimal resource management. There are a very few 'broken' dailies that can act as I-win buttons if you only have 1 fight between extended rests, eg Moment of Glory or pre-errata Visions of Avarice, but compared to other editions of D&D it's a very minor issue.