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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5151629" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes - Spiritual Attributes.4e has the potential for this - with diminishing healing surges but milestones attained. Unfortunately the game design perhaps doesn't make the most of them eg dailies that are more powerful after reaching a milestone. I'm not sure that action points are quite as ho-hum as KM suggests, but they're probably not enough on their own.My 4e game already has this to an extent, because enough of the PCs have encounter-duration abilities (stances etc) that they think about keeping on going to get the benefits of their buffs rather than resting and regaining hp but losing their buffs.Given the 5 minute cap on encounter durations in 4e this doesn't do anything to eliminate 15-minute adventuring days, but it gives an idea of the sorts of costs that can be applied to resting.At least a lot of us don't want a return to 1st ed AD&D play of the sort Dannyalcatraz is describing upthread. Rather than hoarding resources in that operational sort of way, maybe RW has it right - we want powers that become better when you use them later rather than earlier in the adventure. And this has to be correlated with the difficulty of the challenges being faced - if the later challenges are easy, but the powers better, than what should be dramatic becomes mundane. The conclusion to an adventure should be challenging enough that only last-ditch, edge-of-your-seat pulling-out-all-the-stops abilities are up to the task.HeroQuest addresses this in a resource-hoarding way, but the resources are purely metagame (Hero Points) and so it is quite different from AD&D play (where the resources are ingame elements like potions, spells, rations etc). It also puts a lot onto the shoulders of the GM, but not through wandering monsters but rather via the rules for setting difficulties based on the pass/fail cycle (the more player successes, the greater the difficulty of challenges - numerical difficulty is set first, and the GM narrates around the diffciulty to make the flavour fit). So players have a reason to conserve Hero Points early in the adventure when the difficulties are only modest, because they will need those Hero Points to overcome the concluding challenges.It would be hard to fit this sort of approach into D&D because D&D has more fiddly rules, with more detailed modelling of ingame elements and tactics, and so it becomes harder to do the pass/fail thing (I don't think the discussion of this in DMG2 works all that well - for example, how is it meant to relate to p 42, or the monster- and encounter-buidling rules?). And 4e remains too ambivalent in respect of those parts of the game that support pacing. Some PCs have Action Surge, other don't - so the value of an Action Point differs across PCs and across groups. Some PCs have Meliorating Armour, some don't - so the same for milestones more generally. And some dailies are very situational (eg Sorcerer Ice Javelins) and so support more of a swiss-army knife orientation than a last-ditch nova-ing orientation.I guess if I was starting with 4e, and wanted to improve its pacing, I'd look at making milestones worth more, and I'd get rid of sequences of encounters that can't realistically be completed on a single set of healing surges.</blockquote>

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