Is the 15 minute adventuring day now the 90 minute adventuring day?

[Voss]

I think the healing surges will dictate resting (slightly) more than the dailies. When someone gets down to 1 or 2 surges, they're going to want to rest. After all, you're going to worry about random encounters during the 6 hour rest period at that point.

So I'd guess about 3-4 encounters (which is better than my previous speculation on 2-3 encounters)

 

[helium3]

A 90 minute adventuring day covers an action movie pretty well. A 15 minute adventuring day requires 'padding' to fill out a half hour (but really 22 min) show.

Uhhhh. But in a 90 minute action movie, there's usually a lot of stuff going on between scenes that isn't shown because it's boring. Not always, but usually.

 

[keterys]

Sounds about right - a lot of it depends how much AoE gets thrown or how tactically unsound your ranged folks are.

Well, or if they have no defenders.

Both of those will sap your resources much more quickly, and from where you have them the least available. That said, if your wizard gets hit only rarely, him using a couple surges when someone turns on him instead of the fighter? Meh, sure, whatever.

I mean, the wizard has 6 healing surges for 5 hp each, while the fighter has 13 for 8 each... that's a pretty big healing differential.

 

[Nymrohd]

Well a group that works well together in tactical combat may well manage 4-6 encounters per day. Anything more than that would be a stretch of the adventuring day. Setting up camp, searching rooms, taking a break to eat, all these take quite a lot more time than combat does. And with 4E combat seemingly lasting many times longer than 3E ones did, combat will be a rather larger part of the adventuring day.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Story/Encounter Design

We're veering off into a different subject here. A DM can make a scenario as easy or as hard as necessary, but which of these constitutes a good story or adventure? I mean, in theory, the encounters should build up to a climax of some sort; starting off with the toughest battle right off the bat makes the story kind of flat afterward.

As a general rule, the combats in a game should serve some purpose and increase in difficulty as the characters approach the final objective. It is, of course, possible to design the encounter in any way you like to get whatever your desired result is.

It's a matter of expectations again - if you hammer the point home once, especially early in the process of learning the game - it will stick. Players are naturally paranoid. Sap them of their healing surges over several small encounters and don't give them an opportunity to take an extended rest. There is no reason an extended rest has to be a guaranteed "right" of the players.

 

[Stalker0]

The other factor to consider when looking at resting is....what are the drawbacks to resting in 4e?

For example, parties are normally more vulnerable when they rest. How much more vulnerable is it in 4e? Is being ambushed really a bad thing, or not so much. How hard is it to wake up and fight when your sleeping?

 

[hong]

This is probably why they deliberately made healing into a per-encounter ability for the cleric. This way you can't blow your entire load of healing in one fight, causing you to camp for the rest of the day.

 

[Hypersmurf]

This is probably why they deliberately made healing into a per-encounter ability for the cleric. This way you can't blow your entire load of healing in one fight, causing you to camp for the rest of the day.

But remember, he can also use his healing twice in a short rest, as long as people's healing surges hold out. If people are willing to take three short rests - 15 minutes down time - the cleric can use his twice-per-encounter ability six times.

Outside of combat, you can blow through a character's entire stack of healing surges in the time it took the rogue to thoroughly search a room in 3E.

-Hyp.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I am more than willing to concede that healing is more spread out in 4E and can't all be blown as easily as in 3.x. The point I was getting at is that there is still a limit on the total adventuring day based on the number of Healing Surges available to the party. These Surges can be spread fairly evenly per encounter but the max limit is still there. Judging from playtest reports (including playtesters, D&DXP and ENWorld scenarios) it seems that for most parties they can go about 4 encounters +/- 2 encounters). This is still probably a little more than 3.x, which can also be much more variable.

Overall though the 15 minute day still seems to be around, but more like 30 minutes. Obviously this an be varried based on strength of encounter and willingness to interupt the rest by the DM, but these are factors that apply to both systems.

 

[HeinorNY]

With Healing Surges though I can’t see parties pushing on if they run out. With the pre-gens we see the number of Surges running from 6-13 depending on the characters. In order for a battle to be at least somewhat challenging I would think that each character would likely have to use at least one if not two or three Surges to either get though the battle or heal up completely after the battle. If characters don’t take at least some damage it probably wasn’t that challenging (in 3.x characters could go all day if the challenges never did much damage either). Given the number of Surges it would seem to me like after 3-4 battles most characters would be out of Healing Surges and need to take the 6 hour rest to recharge Surges.

I don't get it. If the number of healing surges run from 6-13, and you consider that if each character needs to use at least 1 surge per encounter, from where did you get 3-4 encounters per day? Based on your logic, we get at least 6 encounters. And that's already a good number.

But I think your logic is completely flawed:
"I would think that each character would likely have to use at least one if not two or three Surges to either get though the battle or heal up completely after the battle."
If they need to use two surges, that means they got bloodied.
So all characters need to get bloodied in every combat in order for it to be a good challenge? I don't think so. That's too much damage. And also badly distributed damage. Controllers and strikers, IMO, are not supposed to get so much damage as defenders and leaders. An encounter where the Defender and the Leader got bloodied , the striker lost 1/3 HP and the controller wasn't even bruised, was a nice encounter.

3.5 considered an encounter to be balanced and challeging if it drained 20% of the character resources (HP, spells, magic item uses, etc). One healing surge heals 25% of the character's total HP. So if, based on your idea, each character needed to use one, two or even three surges per encounter, that means spending 25%, 50% and 75% of characters resources per battle, and only HP resources. Even if 4E changes that math, it's still way beyond! As I said, too much damage per encounter.

The base of all your argument is wrong.

I believe Defenders' surges will end before the other characters surges. They take more punishment, they are meant to take more damage. The number of encounters the party will be able to face per day will probably be limited by their surges, and they have a lot of it.

The amount of encounters will be based on the capacity to keep the defenders in shape.