Changing the Duration of a Rest

[Quickleaf]

That's a pretty good point. The lack of consistency over multiple adventures might be a bit of an issue, though it's one that I think can be solved fairly efficiently in practice (DMs can easily change the pacing, and two tournament or Encounters-style public adventures need not necessarily have consistency between them).

It is a monkey wrench in the elegance of it though, that's for sure. Hm.

I get where you were coming from with the idea - to provide an elegant adjustable dial for folks who like different styles on the dungeon crawl / overland LotR style adventure spectrum. That's a great objective.

I'm wondering if part of the way of achieving that adjustable dial is to de-couple wounds from HP? I don't know, maybe "wounds" are an optional dial and act like lingering conditions/diseases in 4e? That way HP can recover quickly while wounds take longer to heal.

Akin to what D'Karr suggests only with more bite.

 

[Quickleaf]

In my experience, people seem to either use a single adventure path (at which point the Extended Rest time is constant throughout) or they actually put in some amount of effort to customising the adventure to fit their campaign (at which point they can speed up, or slow down, the pace for many adventures; or justify it with a specific magic effect)

It would be a problem for people who use lots of unconnected adventures, with different settings and tones, without customising them, but whether that's an issue worth worrying about depends how common such people are.

I'm assuming that all Forgotten Realms adventures would use one pace, all Dungeon Crawler adventures would use the same pace, etc.

Assembling a campaign from unconnected adventures has been common since modules were produced. It may not be yours or my preferred way of gaming, but plenty of folks do just that.

 

[Serendipity]

If they're going to shoehorn this "extended rest" type thing into the game, then this is how I would prefer it be implemented, but I think it should remain optional.

 

[Mark CMG]

Whatcha think?

I like the idea of an optional injury rule system that an overlay HP.

 

[D'karr]

Akin to what D'Karr suggests only with more bite.

I've implemented a "house ruled" format for long term injuries too (broken bones, etc.) It is more brutal so it's used very sparingly because I want it to actually mean something.

If everything always ends up wounding and injuring you, the system loses its appeal as a long term campaign system.

I want PCs to spend their time adventuring, not on bed rest.

 

[Mark CMG]

I've implemented a "house ruled" format for long term injuries too (broken bones, etc.) It is more brutal so it's used very sparingly because I want it to actually mean something.

If everything always ends up wounding and injuring you, the system loses its appeal as a long term campaign system.

I want PCs to spend their time adventuring, not on bed rest.

My system is simple. If you go below 50% of your HP, you roll on a minor injury table. If you go below 75% of your HP, you roll on a major injury table. Results on the each table specify the injury, the penalties borne while the injury persists, and time required to heal. You can sustain both a minor and major injury, or even multiple injuries of each type, if you fight on with such injuries after raising your HP and then going below a threshold again. Only very high level healing can override results from the injury table and sometimes only to a certain degree.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

You can make such variance seem a lot less punative if you tie good and bad things to it. This is another trick that I picked up from Burning Wheel which happens to make changing the time required for rests more interesting. The BW version isn't tied to healing, though the applications to D&D healing I think are obvious. (BW injuries are serious things that put you out of commission for weeks, months, or even years--a different tone entirely.)

In BW, you have a "resource" stat that largely substitutes for managing wealth. Each resource period, each character must check against resources to maintain their lifestyle--failure generally costing them resources and success maintaining or even gaining. A great haul of treasure gives you a handful of one-time bonuses to such rolls. The group can set the resource cycle period however they want for that campaign. Test every week, and you are playing a heavy social/mercantile game. Set it once a year, and you can ignore for stretches at a time. Most games will set it for a month or a season. But note what happens here. A resource cycle is a chance to gain, to apply that treasure, to advance in the world. It's also a chance to get the moneylenders clamoring for your head, for the baron to demand service, etc. So the length of the period is "how often do we want to deal with this stuff, positive and negative alike?"

With short and extended rests, you can get some of that same feeling by making the rests have costs besides simply using time. This can be simple and abstract costs (pay so much per month for basic food and upkeep) or can be as elaborate as the group wants to detail--buying every last medicinal brandy by the silver piece. The trick to making this work, however, is that if you set "extended rest" at "once per day", then you pay the cost every day, whether you needed the rest to get back wounds and spells or not. Suddenly, you might see some interest in setting to "week" or "adventure" or whatever fits the tone of the game. Or alternately, if the group still wants once per day, perhaps they like the challenge of gaining enough gold to maintain that rapid pace.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION]
But it's the same upkeep cost it just depends whether they're billed weekly, monthly, etc.

Or are you suggesting there would be some kind of active check for "time passes" where, for example, you could roll "01 - a relative dies and your presence (at a place out of the way from your urrent quest) or resources (400 gold should do the trick) are needed"?
And are you suggesting that such events should happen more frequently in a game where the time scale is compressed?

 

[Incenjucar]

For 4E, one of the posters here, Aegeri, simply used a system where resting in an uncomfortable environment, such as a dungeon, reduced their maximum healing surges by one each night, cumulative, making 15-minute work days often a suicidal idea. I believe a week of proper rest was required to get each surge back, but I'm not perfectly sure on that.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Personally -- and I'm mostly just speaking for me -- I don't like add-on injury or tacked-on attrition systems.

We have an attrition system that represents injury already. It's called hit points. Perhaps you have heard of them.

I'd like them to do that job better, and struck upon the idea that it's fairly trivial to just change "an extended rest is 6 hours of sleep" to "an extended rest is a week without strenuous activity," and that this helps achieve that feel.

Surges are related in that I'd rather just have hit points do the job of being the attrition system that represents injury. In fact, I'm kind of pondering doing away with surges and just giving the PCs in my new 4e game equivalent HP's -- so if you had a surge value of 10 and 8 healing surges, you'd just get 80 bonus HP. But I'm a tinkerer.

At any rate, the various injury/attrition systems don't seem like bad ideas, they just seem a bit redundant to me personally.