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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 5228203" data-attributes="member: 5890">If your PCs are finding that spending 2 surges at a time with no additional bonus added to them on a regular basis at the expense of a standard action is a good thing, then there are a few things out of whack.1. Your PCs are being overly cautious with their adventuring day or spending their dailies too recklessly (leading to them resting because they're out of dailies, not surges).2. Your PCs are not being pressured during encounters, and have all the time in the world to kill their foes.One solution is to simply use more dangerous encounters. Don't use higher level monsters, that just leads to grind boredom. Use more monsters, and stick to high damaging monsters (ie - avoid soldiers). Start at level+1 as the basic encounter and go from there.The other solution is to introduce reasons that a 3 fight workday is a bad thing, or that spending a standard action during a fight isn't feasable.The 3 fight workday is easy: simply introduce a time pressure. Realistically, almost no adventure is going to be totally free of time constraints. It doesn't have to be a particularly tight deadline either: just having a deadline will make your players actually consider fighting on and risking a bit. It doesn't need to be explicit (finish the dungeon in 7 days, or the prisoners die!) either: it can be as simple as giving the PCs some indication that the creatures are responding to a dungeon (or whatever) incursion in a sensible manner (like moving the good loot somewhere else, or simply doing something while the PCs rest, like finding them and ambushing them at night).Making spending a standard action a serious cost isn't too hard: basically it comes down to encounter structure. Terrain that requires the PCs to keep moving (conveyor belts, thin ice, water currents, even conventional difficult terrain) will swallow up actions, as will dazing, slowing, stunning (use very sparingly), monsters who use hit-and-run tactics, monsters who inflict really nasty conditions that MUST be saved against soon (petrification), monsters who grab (and follow it up with something nasty) etc etc.In short, if you need to use your standard action, you can't afford to lose it second winding.</blockquote>

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