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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4731985" data-attributes="member: 82106">Hmmmm, yeah, basically the players are sacrificing the long term durability of the party in order to be able to hit point nova. The reality is of course that the party is actually WEAKER overall than they would be if they used some of those feats to acquire ways to do more damage, etc. but by doing an extended rest after practically every encounter they are avoiding paying the price. It is the same problem, in essence, that any DM has with any party, if given a choice the players will always extended rest since it doesn't take any more table time to do that than a short rest.The answer IS of course making sure they somehow pay for taking an extended rest. It is only a matter of how you do that, preferably without it appearing to be overly heavy handed. The direct way is just to make some really hard encounters that challenge the party despite all the healing they have, but the problem with that of course is the plain logic to them will be "Oh, encounters are so difficult we MUST rest all the time.", which will probably be true in that case...Anything you do has to be something you can pull off again and again too, since they will surely revert back to the same strategy if it is a one-time thing. I guess the real question you have to ask yourself is "is there something the party is giving up any way to access by doing this?" That is the thing you want to make them miss. They need to be wondering if maybe they used that feat slot for something else or reserved more of their surges that life would be easier for them. Or they need to be wondering if they were able to extended rest less often if there would be some compensatory reward for having a tougher time beating each individual encounter.One general approach would be to find some reason why they REALLY want to get milestones. That is the one thing they're missing out on. Unfortunately milestones give an ephemeral reward that may not actually be of any certain value to a party. At best a milestone is generally only as good as an extended rest. The ONLY rule that makes a milestone really valuable is the death penalty rule. So... I don't, so far, see a real route out of this maze that seems satisfactory. Maybe "make the encounters harder" really is the only decent strategy overall. It WON'T stop the party from using this strategy of theirs, but it will challenge them. I mean it has been this mantra of 4e DMs that there is this holy grail of abolishing the 15 minute adventuring day, but so what? Is it really that much of a problem? Once in a while DO put them in a time-press type situation, or a gauntlet situation where they just cannot rest, and the rest of the time just give them a real big tough challenging fight that they can barely win despite their resilience.Of course you can explain the whole dilemma to the players. Maybe they'll voluntarily modify their strategy, but that does seem supremely meta-gamey. In essence what you have is a 4e design failure in action. The 4e designers forgot a cardinal mantra of RPG design, if you create a potentially abusable resource and try to limit the abuse by some kind of rationing, players WILL find a way to make an end run around the limits. In this case it seems in 4e that is all too easy!</blockquote>

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