Extended Rest House Rule

[techno]

Because I am not a big fan of the "6 hours of rest restores all HPs," I am considering the following house rule for extended resting:

Extended rest restores a number of healing surges equal to your Constitution modifier + 1 or 1, whichever is greater.

Does anyone see any issues/problems with this approach? Thanks.

 

[Aegir]

Aside from making extended rests that much more common? Not really.

So long as you're aware of the fact that all healing goes through surges - healing powers included - and that limiting a groups ability to recover them is akin to heavily limiting their ability to recover at all, then it shouldn't hurt anything.

 

[pukunui]

I don't have a problem with an extended rest restoring all of a character's healing surges. What I don't like is the full hp after a 6 hour rest bit. Maybe I could go back to a hp/lvl regained or something. Maybe a few hp/lvl? I'm going to try playing with the default rules before tweaking, so I'm just musing at the moment.

I am also thinking of allowing only one Extended Rest per 24 hours instead of per 12 hours.

 

[corwyn77]

I'm pretty sure you can already only take one extended rest per day.

 

[pukunui]

I'm pretty sure you can already only take one extended rest per day.

It's a little misleading. The header is "Once Per Day" but the following text reads "After you finish an extended rest, you have to wait 12 hours before you can begin another one."

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

It's a little misleading. The header is "Once Per Day" but the following text reads "After you finish an extended rest, you have to wait 12 hours before you can begin another one."

There is no conflicting rule here. You can still only rest once every 24 hour period. The text you quoted just means that you can't, 17.5 hours into a day, rest for six hours, have an encounter or two in a half hour span (blowing your daily powers in the process), then immediately rest another 6 hours to recover your daily powers because a new day has started.

 

[KKDragonLord]

I don't have a problem with an extended rest restoring all of a character's healing surges. What I don't like is the full hp after a 6 hour rest bit. Maybe I could go back to a hp/lvl regained or something. Maybe a few hp/lvl? I'm going to try playing with the default rules before tweaking, so I'm just musing at the moment.

I am also thinking of allowing only one Extended Rest per 24 hours instead of per 12 hours.

You may be interested in my house rule about vitality and wounds:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=226846

 

[FunkBGR]

Hey, one thing to note too -

The Extended Rest assumes you are actually Resting/Asleep/Not On Watch for 6 hours, not exactly consecutively though. It mentions how in a party of Five people (the average 4e party), each will get 1.5 hours of watch for the Extended Rest, bumping up the total resting time to 7.5 hours.

 

[pukunui]

There is no conflicting rule here. You can still only rest once every 24 hour period. The text you quoted just means that you can't, 17.5 hours into a day, rest for six hours, have an encounter or two in a half hour span (blowing your daily powers in the process), then immediately rest another 6 hours to recover your daily powers because a new day has started.

Midnight - 6am: Extended Rest 1
6am - 6pm: Whatever
6pm - Midnight: Extended Rest 2

Looks to me like you can do two in one day with the current rule. Granted, you wouldn't be able to do it every day (more like every other day and then only if your timing was perfect), but the point remains that it's still doable to take more than one Extended Rest in any given 24 hour period under the RAW.

You may be interested in my house rule about vitality and wounds:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=226846

That does look interesting but my players would probably say it's too complicated.

 

[Sashi]

Does anyone see any issues/problems with this approach? Thanks.

It's extra bookkeeping, and gives people with a low con a double-whammy, and will only actually be applicable in corner-cases.

Healing surges restore HP/4 per surge, your proposed house rule is functionally identical to the current rule for a constitution score of 16 or higher, rewarding high constitution. People with a high CON already get bonus surges, so you're giving people with high con a double bonus for their score. People with low CON will heal less during a rest, requiring that they spend additional surges to fully recover. This is a double penalty for having a low CON.

The classes that tend to have low con also tend to conserve their healing surges better, a wizard will rarely burn through all his surges in a normal adventuring day, and so the difference between "recover full health" and "recover 1/2 health and spend a surge or two" is if he has the surge to spare, which will be "usually", except for that one time that he's completely spent, and has to start the next day with less than full hit points (costing him surges through the next day, or requiring party resources be spent, and getting some grumbles for taking too much damage/not having a high enough CON).

This is just about the worst kind of house-rule: most of the time it's irrelevant, and sometimes someone gets screwed over.