D&D 4E 4e and 1 combat a day

[Dausuul]

If you're only having one encounter per day for plot reasons, change "Daily" powers to "Weekly" powers (or "per X days" or "per adventure" etc).

Geoff.

This seems like the best solution to me. Just spread out the "day" over the course of an adventure; instead of a few hours' sleep, an extended rest now requires a week or so of uninterrupted leisure.

Or, heck, just keep playing as written. Combat will be a little edgier due to the limited amount of healing mojo available, but otherwise it should be fine.

 

[JDillard]

I would recommend two things directed relating to your problems: one for the DM and one for you and your fellow players. And then one thing in general for the whole group.

For the players:

Make an effort to intentionally limit yourselves. Treat combat the same way you'd treat RP. Would your characters intentionally use their best, most powerful spells every time, immediately when they get in a fight? Or would they be more careful, knowing that you don't waste your best when it's not needed. Maybe in an hour you might get jumped by something much harder, and find yourself regretting expending everything on that bunch of mooks.

You can pretty easily make it an easy, very in-character sort of decision to not use your best, right away, all the time.

For the DM:

Mix it up a bit. One long, hard, boring combat every session means that players are always going to treat it as such, and react as such.

What if the DM actually made what I mentioned above happen? Give the players a fairly easy (but maybe not obviously easy, from the get-go) fight. Let them burn out their dailes and when the fight's over in fifteen, twenty minutes no big deal. Then, a short while later (and not an extended rest's worth of time) something bigger and badder ambushes you (maybe a nasty solo?).

This will help, on an in-game level, drive in the ideas mentioned above.

For the group:

Why is combat taking so long, and being so boring? 4e combat is *very* different from 3e combat. If you're having the same problems with it, then there may be some out of game issues coming up.

Are people having trouble with the rules? They're pretty easy, you might want to have them spend time making a quick re-read between games.

Are people goofing off during combat and slowing things down? Well, you can either try and ask them to stop (because they're making game less fun) or if it's a bigger problem and they really don't want the combat... don't do combat. If what the group really wants is RP and nobody really likes the combat part then tell the DM, and just don't do it. Don't include it in the adventure of whatever.

Hope that helps.

 

[James McMurray]

If you're only having one encounter per day for plot reasons, change "Daily" powers to "Weekly" powers (or "per X days" or "per adventure" etc).

Geoff.

Geoff beat me to it, and many others got to the "me too" button before me. The one thing I'll add is that if you want to keep the math right, you'll need to make dailies and surge replenishment tied to X encounters rather than picking an arbitrary number of days. My understanding is that 4e expects 3 - 4 fights per day, so if you're having one a day and bump dailies to once per 4 days, then when you have a story-based reason to go through 2 fights a day instead of one, you'll be looking at possible TPKs on days 3 and 4, because the challenge increased drastically but the dailies didn't refresh as intended.

Or the GM can just continue to increase the challenge of the encounters. Eventually he'll probably settle on a reasonable percentage of the encounter's XP value to tack on to every fight to make up for it. Or he'll use the guidelines in the DMG, which talk about levels of challenge that require the use of dailies to succeed.

 

[TheLordWinter]

Need to speed up 4th edition combat? Two words:

More. Minions.

If you look at the Lord of the Rings films, 4th edition combat can be run in a style similar to the Battle of Helms Deep. What seems to be limitless hordes of enemies, but whom you can tear through individually with relative ease.

In addition, suggest to your DM to incorporate more skill challenges into the combats themselves - perhaps trying to solve a riddle while fleeing enemies with superior numbers so that some PCs can focus on combat, others can focus on non-combat and you can create a more seamless blend.

 

[VanRichten]

Wandering monsters. Very 1e.

Has existed through all forms of D&D. Not just 1E.

 

[erik_the_guy]

You can do 5 or 6 combats in a day without doing too many in one session. Do about 2 combats a session, with a milestone at the end of the session. They don't have to be large combats, but if a particularly difficult combat comes up, you can use your dailys then.
You do not have to end the day or take an extended rest at the end of every session.

 

[Bialaska]

(1) Make fights easier. The players need to feel "Hey, we can take another one like this!". If they don't, then they won't continue.

Well, that is provided that another combat is planned in the adventure. I have run adventures that had very little to no combat, taking place in the city, involving investigation (often aided by divinations and enchantments), where there was a small fight at the end, after the players had spent several days in-game (and a session or two out-of-game) doing the legwork.

I don't really think the issue here is a matter of 'hey, we can do one more, let's find some monster to beat rater than rest' as it is an issue of keeping the amount of violent confrontations to a minimum and spending time on other things (such as RP, investigation, partying, drinking beers in the local inn, etc).

 

[Tony Vargas]

One option is to make 'days' more abstract. Put a whole adventure on a single 'day' with anything from a few minutes to overnight counting as a 'short rest,' and re-charging encounter powers, but surges, dailies and the like re-setting only between adventures. Chop your story arc into as many or few 'adventures/days' as you like. The problem is that encounters are prettymuch drama/story-driven, but days are arbitrarily 24 hrs. Just change that, and you're back to playing the game 'normally.'

Alternately, you can just not sweat it. While one-encounter days were devestating to game balance in 3e, in 4e, they're less of an issue. Every class has about the same number of daily vs encounter powers, so no one's going to dominate or suck because of the structure. Players will get more use out of thier dailies, but won't be fully utilizing thier encounter powers (especially healing/inspiring words) or healing surges. Generally, though, it's more fun to have different sorts of challenges, to have some 'days' where you face an unusual number of challenges, others where you face few or one more difficult one.

If more than one encounter per day strain's your players' willing suspension of disbelief, though, then just adjust the rules about what constitutes a mechanical 'day,' to fit the narrative.

 

[Agamon]

Some people don't understand the OP, it seems. It's not that the DM is trying to make it so the group has one hugemongous fight every session and then they have to rest as a result. The group as a whole only wants a game where combat isn't at the forefront, and therefore the only see a fight about once per session. Because the fighting is rare, they don't fight more than once per day (obviously no delves into monster-laden dungeons), they use what they have at their disposal each time they fight.

To actually answer the question, I don't see a problem with this. Negate the fights that lead up to the main fight and just make each fight a big fight. Or not, and just have the heroes kick some butt. I don't think D&D requires multiple fights per day, it just assumes a dungeon environment and allows for that.

 

[Agamon]

If you're only having one encounter per day for plot reasons, change "Daily" powers to "Weekly" powers (or "per X days" or "per adventure" etc).

Wow, that is a good idea.