Dealing with Healing Surges

[Tony Vargas]

Is the only way to deal with this hit them with multiple combats a day?

Yes. The party should be able to face 3 or more combats per day, and would not be challenged at all by 1/day combats, since they could 'nova' with all thier dailies every time.

If so I feel like I'm in trouble because I enjoy playing a more urban style game and have normally only one fight in a campaign day.

What you can do is arbitrarily re-define the adventuring 'day.' Decide on plot points or a number of milestones that must be reached before a new 'day' begins. A 'day' could thus be weeks or months - or one very hectic action-packed hour. Instead of representing rest, exactly, these 'days' would represent renewed morale when you make tangible progress, or stiffened resolve when you discover a new enemy - that kind of thing. You could still require characters to sleep or take a 'long rest' each 24-hour day, or spend a healing surge on an 'all nighter' of some kind, to keep calendar days and sleep meaningful and maintain a hint of verisimilitude.

You could even drop the pretense (or, rather, take the pretense to a new level) and go all storyteller: call encounters 'scenes' and days 'acts.' For all that 4e is catching a lot of flack for being a miniatures game or a board game, it's actually very character focused (the stats of monsters are driven by how they'll interact with the PCs, not by what thier abilities logically should be), and, with a minor tweek like the above, could be downright story-driven.

 

[fba827]

Or (since the healing surges per day assumes several encounters) perhaps just cut the number of healing surges per class down (by half or 2/3s or 3/4 whatever)... though, depending on your players, it may have the unintended side effect of making them more paranoid to need to extended rest after everything.

 

[Reed]

at most we run 2 encounters a session/day otherwise we spend the whole night in combat.

so we switched it up so you heal your con mod in healing surges a day and don't recover HP unless you spend a healing surge. it works well for us.

 

[Reed]

at most we run 2 encounters a session/day otherwise we spend the whole night in combat.

so we switched it up so you heal your con mod in healing surges a day and don't recover HP unless you spend a healing surge. it works well for us.

 

[Regicide]

In 4e, it shouldn't matter how many surges the PCs have, because there are only limited ways to ACCESS those surges during battle.

Which can be gotten around in various ways.

The healing surge mechanic simply doesn't work for anything outside of doing a dungeon crawl of 6 encounters. Out of healing surges? Rest. Can't rest... why not? If every single day the adventurers can't rest because the DM feels they aren't sufficiently pressured by encounters it starts to feel really artificial really quickly and the players get disinterested. "Well guys, we've only had 3 encounters today, we won't be allowed to rest so... lets yell loudly to get the required wandering monster encounter over with already."

To the OP, the players aren't supposed to fear monsters. They're supposed to butcher massive amounts of creatures and make it to level 30, even death isn't supposed to stop them. If the fights are too easy, gradually make them harder until the players are having fun. Add a couple weaker NPCs to the fight, give the opponents the ability to use a healing surge themself etc.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I have to kind of disagree with the group thought here.

As do I.

The entire point of healing surges is so that you don't have to have multiple combats a day. They allow PCs to have a daily resource of healing while keeping an encounter resource for healing. The designers were able to limit healing per encounter to an amount they thought would have enough tension, while maintaining the ability to use the same resources throughout the day, without being able to blow through all of them and have to rest after one encounter. See: 5 minute adventuring day.

So, if I throw one encounter at the PCs, they can use X healing surges. If I throw a second encounter at them, they can use the same amount of healing surges. Yes, I've taken them to the brink where they don't have any, but it is hardly expected. And, really, if you have 4 encounters per day, and during the 4th encounter, the PCs each have 2 healing surges remaining, the last combat, the PCs are basically going to have the same amount of healing available as they had in the first combat.

I don't see why all the focus in this thread is on having to have multiple combats in a day. It's perfectly possible, and it works really well, but it isn't a requirement. It won't break your game if you only have one encounter a day most days.

 

[Montague68]

I'm afraid I'm not following the OP. Having one fight a day isn't a problem, just adjust the difficulty of the encounters upward to account for the characters always being at full hp and having access to dailies - elite and solo enemies are great for this. The healing surges shouldn't be a problem unless you are allowing unlimited use of them by the characters, in which case you might have misread the rules.

As for characters gaming the system to rest constantly in between fights, if that's what they want to do allow it. The Dungeon Master can always escalate encounters, and if they want to give potential enemies a tremendous advantage by being that predictable, by all means give them enough rope to hang themselves.

 

[DM_Blake]

I agree with Keenath.

Unlimited surges gives them the ability to use a few each fight over multiple fights. They can still only use a few surges each encounter though, unless you're giving them backpacks full of potions - a clear "no-no" in your style of campaign.

Another factor that might make them fear no monster is that they can nova their dailies. This has been said, but the people saying it are almost unanimous that you are making a mistake having just one encounter in a day.

I also like city adventures, or wilderness adventures. It's hard to reconcile that the 5 days of travel on the road from Tarnaq to Mar'Delenne will be frought with 25 encounters. How would merchants, or even military patrols, ever survive?

Yeah, maybe POL is like that, with constant danger between the L's. But I don't play POL. My world is more civilized, more orderly.

Which means if I want a kobold skirmish on day two and bandits on day 5 of that road trip, I will have to deal with novas and with the PCs have more surges than they can possibly use.

Which means either turning the kobolds into trolls, or having many dozens of kobolds, or turning day two into a slug fest with 4 or 5 encounters literally coming out of the woodworks.

None of those answers is really satisfying.

It's no different in city adventures. OK, so today the PCs will get into a brawl in a tavern. But, to make it a challenge, they also must face a vampire before dawn, rescue an orphan from wererats in the sewers right after breakfast, bust up a gang of thieves after lunch, and help the city guards turn back a marauding band of ogres before dinner - now they're ready for the tavern brawl to be challenging.

How can anyone live in a city this dangerous?

/sigh...

So the only satisfying answer, to me, is to break up the routine in lots of ways.
1. Some encounters are bigger than the look at first. Maybe the kobolds send in 8 or 9 minions and a leader to test the defenses while the other dozen kobolds are hiding. The players go nova, wipe out the expeditionary force, then the rest of them burst out of hiding. Not even a short rest here.
2. Maybe sometimes the kobolds and the bandits attack on the same day. Too bad the PCs used their dailies on the easy kobolds this morning...
3. Sometimes using trolls instead of kobolds really is an option. Make them earn the victory, blasting every daily, encounter, and surge ability they can muster, and still having to wake up half the party from near-death when it's over.
4. Sometimes the enemy skirmishes. Hit and run. Ride by, pelt the group with arrows, run away and scatter. Watch the PCs heal, then skirmish again. Sometimes skirmish at the 3 or 4 minute mark, interrupting the short rest.
5. Sometimes the extended rest gets interrupted - no dailies are recovered. Even more humorous if it happens right before dawn, say, at the 7th hour or so - now the PCs have to fight some harmless little minion, or trivial encounter, but there is no time to lay down for another 8 hours, so better be careful today. Maybe should have saved some dailies from yesterday rather than going more nova than they had to...
6. Maybe there's some EvilGuy (tm) who knows about PCs, knows they're becoming a danger to him, and knows how the world he lives in works (dailies, surges, etc.) as well as the PCs do. Maybe he deliberately arranges timely interruptions to their happy schedule, deliberately depriving them of resting opportunities, deliberately tempting them to blow dailies and burn surges on the EvilGuy's (tm) weaker forces, all the while saving up the main strike force to swoop in and TPK while their resources are depleted (he plans the TPK of course, because he's an EvilGuy (tm), but hopefully your PCs foil his plans).

Doing all of this stuff, and mixing it up, will quickly teach your players to save their dailies.

I'm not saying do this all the time. Don't change your campaign style. Have your one encounter some days. Just mix this kind of stuff into it so the players never really know if today is a One-Encounter-Go-Nova day, or just the beginning of a Three-Days-No-Sleep-Save-Your-Dailies marathon.

After all, nobody recruits a pitcher who can only throw fast balls. Gotta pitch them some curves and knuckles and sliders and change-ups or they'll keep knocking your monsters out of the park.

 

[KarinsDad]

The real issue with one combat per day is the ability for the PCs to burn all their daily powers on that one fight, which naturally means they can deal 25 or 30% more damage than in a fight where they're being more conservative. Maybe you're seeing low damage totals not due to surging but because the monsters fall quickly to daily power usage.

The surge tally shouldn't be what makes them 'fear no monster'. Have you checked that you're building your encounters correctly? An on-level fight is X monsters of level Y (where your party is X characters of level Y), or a group of monsters with the same XP total, or a single solo monster of the appropriate level (though you have to be a little careful with that if you don't have exactly 5 PCs). If you're throwing easy fights, it's no wonder the PCs win handily.

He is building them correctly according to the DMG. But, a correct build in 4E assumes conservation of Daily powers due to multiple encounters per day.

Without that, a single same level encounter is extremely weak by definition in 4E.

With one encounter per day, it's the same as:

1) Converting Daily powers to Encounter powers.
2) Having an Action Point for every encounter.
3) Able to use limited powers like Lay on Hands without significant daily limitations.

That's a totally different paradigm. It almost doubles the strength of the party.

Even the concept of throwing more difficult encounters at the party is measurably weaker than doing so normally due to the fact that the PCs are totally fresh for ALL encounters.


Increasing the difficulty of the encounters is not the solution (since the PCs will always be 100% fresh for them).

Throwing occassional multi-encounter days at the PCs, especially ones with weaker foes early on and stronger foes later on, is the solution. The DM has to train the players that using up all of their dailies in the first encounter can and will have consequences. Not every time, but sometimes.

The reason the problem exists is that the DM changed the balance of the encounters per day and trained his players that using up all of their daily powers is the right thing to do. The DM has to untrain them of the behavior that he himself trained.

 

[Keenath]

Which can be gotten around in various ways.

Such as what? Blowing all your cash on potions of healing? Yeah, that's a good plan...

The healing surge mechanic simply doesn't work for anything outside of doing a dungeon crawl of 6 encounters. Out of healing surges? Rest.

No, you missed the point of healing surges. The point is that you aren't trying to make sure the PCs run out of surges every day. The point is that each fight becomes a sort of self contained event, with a limited quantity of healing available -- limited by effects that LET YOU USE a surge, not limited by NUMBER OF REMAINING SURGES. You're EXPECTED to enter every combat at full HP, and it doesn't make a difference whether your character sheet says you have 6, 8, or 10 surges left.

The whole idea of surges is to make it impossible to spend all your curing capability in a single combat, thus avoiding the "HP Nova" problem. Every combat is starting from pretty much the same place in terms of potential HP. The "surges per day" limit is, as I said, only a way to stop the PCs from being infinite combat engines who never need to rest. It puts a limit on the number of combats per day that the party can handle, but rarely comes into play as an actual limit on in-battle healing.


Look, suppose I, as DM, arbitrarily double your surges-per-day. You have 16 instead of 8 per day. You spend four over the course of a few combats; you have 12 left instead of 4. Now I dump you in combat with a dragon. What difference do those extra 8 surges make? You can only use four or so at the very maximum in a given fight, so what GOOD do those extra 8 surges do? If you get dropped and nobody has any more ways to make you spend a surge, you're just as close to death as somebody who gets dropped with 0 surges left. The fact that your character sheet says "8" is pretty much irrelevant until the combat ends and you can take a short rest.


As far as dailies go, that's where your real issue might be. Five dailies across ~50 rounds of combat is not much of a big deal. Five dailies in 10 rounds is a major power dump. I'd just throw encounters 1 or 2 levels higher to account for it, and let it go with that.