Effects of changing Short and long rests?

[MoonSong]

Yes just like that. I'm about to start DMing a game of 4e, but we as a group want to go Old school style. Then I remembered someone up here mentioned it was possible to houserule a short rest to be a night long and a long rest to be a week-long one. I propossed this rule but was met with excepticism, because that would turn encounter powers into dailies and it would derail the whole thing more than we are comfortable with; so instead I propossed to have this apply to hit points and surges only. Is this viable?

Also does any of you have more suggestions on how to make 4e more old-schooly? (not in the dungeoncrawling sense, but the mood general mood - magic items being special and not taken for granted, combat as war, some battles are best being avoided and so on)

 

[Ferghis]

I see nothing wrong with short rests only letting you recover a few encounter powers (maybe a third of them? Or one per tier?), and extended rests only recovering a similar number of daily powers and a third or half of your maximum surges. Personally, I wouldn't push it much farther than that, since otherwise players will want to take extended rests at every opportunity.

 

[Klaus]

Changing short rests to be 8 hours and long rests to be 7 days, you move the "per day" limit of encounters a party can have to "per week". PCs become more mindful of how many powers they deploy, and to whether or not to use Second Wind (it is now a 1/day thing). Attrition becomes a thing, with even "easy" encounters draining resources that could be needed later in the day. As long as you have that in mind, you should be good to go.

To compensate things a bit, I'd allow PCs to spend Action Points to regain Encounter Powers. That way you give the PCs some staying power. The main benefit of that is not that they can face more encounters, it's that you can throw harder encounters at them without worrying about a TPK.

 

[MoonSong]

Changing short rests to be 8 hours and long rests to be 7 days, you move the "per day" limit of encounters a party can have to "per week". PCs become more mindful of how many powers they deploy, and to whether or not to use Second Wind (it is now a 1/day thing). Attrition becomes a thing, with even "easy" encounters draining resources that could be needed later in the day. As long as you have that in mind, you should be good to go.

To compensate things a bit, I'd allow PCs to spend Action Points to regain Encounter Powers. That way you give the PCs some staying power. The main benefit of that is not that they can face more encounters, it's that you can throw harder encounters at them without worrying about a TPK.

Oh, but the plan is to let action points and power recharge schedules as normal, just changing the rate HP and surges are regained. Encoutner powers and dailies are too fun to just pointlessly restrict

 

[pemerton]

I think if you seperate the power recovery cycle from the healing cycle, you may have knock-on consequences that stretch the limits of the game.

Whether that's good or bad is a different question of course.

But, for instance, Cure Light Wounds (daily surgeless healing) is currently balanced against daily surge recovery. Slow down the relative rate of surge recovery and CLW gets comparatively stronger.

My own experience would suggest keeping action points and short rests (enc power recovery + surge expenditure) on their normal (5 minute) cycle, but changing the cycle for extended rests (daily power recovery + surge recover) to something longer is easy and has zero knock-on effects in terms of the mechanical balance of the various elements of PC build.

 

[MoonSong]

Well, like I said the problem we had with just moing the general recovery rate from minutes to days and from days to weeks was that it leads to the Hoarding of Dailies and encounter powers become the new dailies in their place or the opossite the party becomes so motivated to take long rests they'll be less likely to adventure at all.

By separating only the healing rate I allow them to be at their full offensive power but at the same time it allows for some degree of attrition, which allows for even a single fight against a bunch of 2nd level goblin minions to be meaningful (planning on adjusting xp given to account for this).

And is it so bad that Cure Light wounds becomes stronger? as things are almost nobody but someone who just enjoys healing people for it's own sake uses it (basically nobody but scrubs like me), it is a standard action so not likely to see use in combat, and outside of combat nobody needs it unless he/she runs out of surges, at which point is easier to just take the extended rest for the whole party. (Notice I hadn't considered this particular interaction, but sounds good)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Yes just like that. I'm about to start DMing a game of 4e, but we as a group want to go Old school style. Then I remembered someone up here mentioned it was possible to houserule a short rest to be a night long and a long rest to be a week-long one. I propossed this rule but was met with excepticism, because that would turn encounter powers into dailies and it would derail the whole thing more than we are comfortable with; so instead I propossed to have this apply to hit points and surges only. Is this viable?

Also does any of you have more suggestions on how to make 4e more old-schooly? (not in the dungeoncrawling sense, but the mood general mood - magic items being special and not taken for granted, combat as war, some battles are best being avoided and so on)

I don't think that would work well. I think you're better off putting restrictions on when you can take an extended rest. I don't think it's good for the game to keep offense but have weak defenses. You end up with overly scared players whose PCs hunker down and won't move forward.

Also use "pacing" encounters (formerly known as random encounters).

 

[pemerton]

the problem we had with just moing the general recovery rate from minutes to days and from days to weeks was that it leads to the Hoarding of Dailies and encounter powers become the new dailies in their place or the opossite the party becomes so motivated to take long rests they'll be less likely to adventure at all.

<snip>

And is it so bad that Cure Light wounds becomes stronger? as things are almost nobody but someone who just enjoys healing people for it's own sake uses it (basically nobody but scrubs like me), it is a standard action so not likely to see use in combat, and outside of combat nobody needs it unless he/she runs out of surges, at which point is easier to just take the extended rest for the whole party.

I agree that CLW is not for combat use except in emergencies (administering a healing potion to a dying friend is also a standard action), but in my campagin out-of-combat surgeless healing is valuable, and often the whole party can't just take an extended rest whenever it likes - they have to find somewhere reasonable of resting.

And on the hoarding of dailies, I think that's a somewhat desirable outcome - or not necessarily hoarding, as such, but treating dailies as a valuable tactical resource.

The flip side of an approach that makes CLW relatively stronger is that it makes Healing Word and its ilk relatively weaker, as the PCs no longer have the surges avaiable to take advantage of ingame healing. The paladin is also likely to have more LoH available (WIS per day) than surges to fuel them.

By separating only the healing rate I allow them to be at their full offensive power but at the same time it allows for some degree of attrition, which allows for even a single fight against a bunch of 2nd level goblin minions to be meaningful (planning on adjusting xp given to account for this).

[MENTION=1165](Psi)SeveredHead[/MENTION] has given one take on this.

My feeling is that, if you increase the ratio of dailies available per unit of monster threat, you may tend to reduce both the tactical and the heroic pacing elements that I tend to find in 4e combat. I don't think that would be very appealing for me or my group, but maybe that would contribute to an "old school" experience.

Another way to get that experience might be to leave the recovery rates roughly what they are - or, at least, not to decouple surge recovery from daily recovery - but to clamp down on healing in combat, eg by changing minor action heals into standard action.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Easy peasy. I do it all of the times. Just make sure that you're using one Encounter of XP-critters, spread out amongst whatever encounters you have in a day.

Doing it just on the HP and Surges is essentially like having them recover a Daily ability after each Encounter. It's not tremendous game-breaker.

There's also This, though it's slightly more involved.

Much of the trepidation here seems misplaced.

There is a reason 4e does what it does, and it's related to weakening the impact of a rest (so that it's not something worth stopping the adventure for). This idea runs counter to that, but not every table has a problem with the 15-minute-workday or with PC's hoarding dailies even WITHOUT the 4e-style rest paradigm. So in other words, if you're not too worried about players being more cautious and defensive, if, indeed, that's a GOOD thing from your perspective, you should go with it.

Letting them heal Dailies with an extended rest just means they'll go nova more often, and you might need to toss a few more monsters into your daily XP budget to account for it, or just let them have a strong offense but a slow regen rate, it's really not a big deal.

Clearly, you want a game where the PC's are more cautious and considered, where there's more long-term attrition. It's doable, without throwing off the balance, if you want it. It will have the result of making PC's more cautious and considered. This is probably not a problem if that is your goal.

 

[CM]

My Fallout-universe game uses these rules:

Extended rest only lets you recover half your healing surges (+1 if trained in Endurance) and does not restore any HP automatically - you need to spend surges to heal.

I suppose you could put a cap on the number of surges you can spend per extended rest to draw out the length of recovery time, but I like a more brisk pace.

Yes, it will increase the value of surgeless healing, but that's pretty rare as-is.