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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7005324" data-attributes="member: 42582">I personally think it's rather hard to do resource attrition - especially hp attrition - as "the main game" in 4e. I agree with [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] that something else - some story thing - needs to be at stake.That said, there are RPGs out there that handle the short/long thing fairly easily: they have simple resolution (a la 4e skill chekcs), and then complex resolution (a la 4e's combat rules or a skill challenge), and the GM toggles between them as is appropriate to the dramatic weight of the situation.In 4e you could easily do something like this - use opposed checks, or just minions, to resolve combats, rather than engaging the hp and damage mechanics. You could even do something like allow the players to pay 1 HS (or 2 HS - whatever you think the right exchange rate is) to convert a standard creature of their level to a minion.I think we need to be careful, in our analysis, to avoid conflating the ingame situation with the at-the-table situation.In the fiction, the PCs look for a safe spot. At the table, in most 5e games I read about, it is the GM who decides whether or not the rest is interrupted. The GM is making pacing decisions. (Or, perhaps, outsourcing them to a random encounter table.) And what is forcing the players to make resource management decisions is not the in-fiction duration of the rest, but rather the decisions made by the GM about the pacing of challenges relative to recovery periods.A 4e GM can do this too. I'd suggest thinking about how you want to manage pacing first - including how you want to intersperse exploration and combat - and then worry about the question of how long, in the fiction, a rest takes.One thing to think about is that using "waves" of foes (which is what, in effect 5e is doing with its multiple encounters between rests) strengthens single-target attacks relative to AoEs. Which feeds into [MENTION=55664]ABDULa[/MENTION]lahazred's comment about controllers vs rangers: the latter (and other single-target strikers) will love the waves, the former not so much (in 5e, the use of "waves" in this fashion is one of the devices used to balance fighters against wizards - though often you'll see it expressed in "in fiction" terms of the fighter being able to fight "all day long" while the wizard has to choose how to ration the fireballs).My inclination for adjudicating this sort of stuff is as a skill challenge which has the upshot that enemies are "minionised".But if the goal is to speed things up, I'd be wary of bringing in too much buffing/prepping. That has always been a big part of my RM experience, and I remember sessions where basically the whole time was spent prepping and buffing for a plan that wasn't actually carried out until the next session!</blockquote>

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