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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4280254" data-attributes="member: 18017">If that's a feature, there should be guidelines telling you to use it. Is there something in the DMG that talks about how you should adjust the difficulty of encounters that happen under extreme time pressure so that the PCs are assumed not to take short rests between fights? (Or, for that matter, how to bump up the difficulty of wilderness encounters in which conserving your daily is less of an issue because you expect to need to sleep before the next day of adventuring anyway?) That's not a rhetorical question - being a playtester means I've often lost track of what is and isn't in there.Here's an actual play-based argument that it's a bug:Our party is in hot pursuit of a group of dog-men who've taken a villager captive. We fight a series of battles as they send out assault teams to delay us, or sentries that they've posted outside the cave where they've taken the girl. At no point do we feel like we can risk her being killed while we take five and have a smoke break, so we press on. Finally we make it into the altar where they're about to sacrifice her to advance their vile designs.Narratively, this is the most exciting encounter of the series. Mechanically, it's the dullest. We've blown all our interesting encounter powers, so the combat is a long grind of either this at-will or that one. We're on the edge of death, so that's exciting, but we didn't get there in the way 4e assumes. No one is even close to out of healing surges; we're just lacking the encounter powers (second wind, healing word, etc) that would let us tap their surges. So the sturdy defender doesn't benefit from having more healing surges than the frail wizard; both are equally on the edge of dying. And when we do drop, there's no dramatic battlefield revival; no one can use the Heal skill to let the fallen use their second wind, because we've all used up our second wind.This final battle was awesome roleplaying because we had to race against time to reach it, and fight a bunch of lesser encounters as part of the buildup. But it really felt like, moment to moment, the system was punishing us for acting in-character.</blockquote>

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