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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 4736284" data-attributes="member: 59248">Taking things from the top, you're trying to run a variant game -- where each day/adventuring session consists of a very small (possibly one) number of challenging encounters.  That's cool -- you can do that with 4e.It does require attention to encounter design, though.Among other things, it means your players -should- be setting things up so they can healing nova -- running them out of healing abilities isn't really an important part of this variant (nor running them out of encounter powers/dailies).Are we reading the same thread?  I saw a number of good responses and overall a feeling that you couldn't have too much healing (including one discussing encounter designs where the encounter was an extra-long chain of lesser apparent encounters -- that's one of the good ideas, though far from the only one).Healing is great.  But even if you have unlimited healing, it's not the be all and end all; if you don't take the monsters down, you run out.I don't feel the difference re HP, personally.  Not really seeing the difference, actually--being at 1 hp is just (well, until you add "bloodied") like being at full hp, except that you fall over when you get hit.  So in 4e, surges are your health, hp are you distance from immediately losing.  Which -is- the big deal here; you don't have to run people out of surges/healing to make them sweat, in fact, you shouldn't have to.You do realize that PCs in 4e can just die, right?  When I play 4e, the question isn't "do I have the healing left to bring PC X back?"  It's "do I heal PC X who has lost 1/4 of her hp, and waste the ability/action/surge, or do I wait for her to be more damaged?  What's the chance of her getting knocked down and either killed or missing her action?"The way you make your PCs sweat (or, for that matter, kill them; if you want challenging encounters on this level, you pretty much have to kill PCs) isn't surge attrition; attrition is what tells the PCs that it's time to rest for the day; that's what surges are for--to provide a counterbalance to the "save all our dailies for the final encounter" push that daily powers encourage in games that are expected to hit a good number of encounters per day.  Instead, it's making sure that the monsters, if they let HP get too low and don't control the monsters properly, will kill someone; not bloody them, not knock them unconcious -- kill them.First, remember that a brute can kill a nearly undamaged controller on a crit.  They do that.Second, if the monsters are going up against a party of healers, they -aren't- going to just ignore the rogue who got knocked down and let her get healed -- they're going to keep pounding her until the brains come out.  Maybe they won't manage to quite do enough damage and a PC will get time to give her healing; mabye they will and the PCs will try to use their healing earlier (but you better believe they'll think they were challenged).  But fundamentally, 4e is about action economy and tempo; not running people out of abilities; they have -lots- of abilities, and the game isn't designed for them all to get used up in one encounter.  If they are going to, the encounter needs to be a bit tougher -- but a tough encounter will be tough even if they finish it off before they run out of encounter abilities and healing abilities; it's about risk, not about attrition.As I mention above, I think that healing surges are necessary to keep healing in check with unlimited "spells" per day -- in a game where attrition is a real issue (it shouldn't be if you're effectively running a day-sized encounter or two per session!)That said, I think it would be interesting to add some rituals that deal with the "out of surges" issue -- mabye somthing like:Health TransferenceHealingLevel 115 minutesTarget: Two willing charactersCost: (the cost of a L-5 item where L is the level of the recieving character)Effect: Transfer any number of healing surges between the two characters; character cannot have more healing surges after recieving this ritual than their maximum.Health ReplenishmentHealingLevel 310 minutesTarget: One characterCost: (the cost of a L-3 item where L is the level of the recieving character)Effect: The character regains a healing surge.I don't see any reason, in the right group, that you shouldn't be able to spend time and money to take a character from 0 healing surges to 1 (thus from "cannot get healing" to "can get a little healing"); I wouldn't be surprised if Wizards offered something like this at some point -- the key being that the cost for doing this must be significant (or parties will just switch over to doing this all the time, particularly if they also print rituals that regain dailies, etc--you want these to be such that they can let the party overspend for the crucial endgame fight, or where there can be scrolls of Health Reprlenishment left around in adventures that don't really give the party a chance to rest, but NOT where every party starts every fight at full power because the treasure they'll get in the fight will far more than exceed the cost of doing so (see: wands of cure light in 3e).</blockquote>

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