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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8283943" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK. I'm not sure whose view you are proposing this contrasts with.In the context of the OP, a key impetus for the conflict is that players have some control over the circumstances in which their PCs confront the obstacles. If players have no such control - that is, if the GM gets to decide when/how the players confront obstacles, with what resource suite available, etc - then the conflict the OP points to doesn't arise.A RPG which exemplifies that second sentence is Prince Valiant: the GM has sole control over both framing and recovery.A RPG which comes fairly close to exemplifying that second sentence is 4e D&D: the GM has the bulk of control over framing and a lot of control over extended rest recovery. In 4e, the core of the players' decision-making about how to overcome obstacles is within the context of the encounter. There are some constraints on GM authority, arising from a mixture of convention and in-fiction logic. For instance, if the players conserve a daily resource in encounter A, then they get to carry it forward to encounter B; conversely, if they expend it then the GM has a degree of power to present encounter B which the players will have to confront without that daily resource. But if an encounter in which the daily is used is the epic climax, and there is no in-fiction rationale that would preclude an extended rest, then the players may reasonably factor the likelihood of an extended rest into their decision-making about the use of daily resources.But in the sort of situation the OP raises, the 4e GM is pretty free to deny the extended rest (through various ways of manipulating the fiction) and force the players to proceed on the strength of their remaining daily resources plus encounter powers. This is not the hosing in 4e that it might be in other versions of D&D because of the balance of character effectiveness across the two categories of resources (daily and encounter) in 4e. I take [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] to think that the pressure is greater in 5e (and in AD&D and 3E) because of the centrality to resource recovery and hence character effectiveness in those systems of long rests, and because in those systems the players also have more capacity to control the pacing of rests and recovery independently of the GM; and of course long rests - taking longer in the fiction - create more scope for the GM to manipulate/adjust the fiction "off screen" (as many posts in this thread have suggested s/he should do).</blockquote>

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