Is the adventuring day longer in 4th Ed?

[Tony Vargas]

We were feeling a bit of time preassure in KotS, and went 8 encounters (plus two trap encounters) in one 'day.' We finally gave up and rested because some of us were down to one or two surges.

While dailies are nice to have, surges are the real limiter. But, you usually can't use more than a few surges in a single encounter, so it's only when you're down to one or two that you've got a real problem that says rest /now/. Thus you can generally go multiple encounters with no pressing need to rest.

Plus, you accumulate action points, and resting when most of the party has more than one action point actually loses you something. The more you get out of action points (humans with action surge, Warlord's commanding presence, paragon action benefits, etc), the stronger the impulse will be to hit milestones and earn action points.

 

[Ruzak]

We like that 4e allows us to have only one encounter in a day when the story calls for it. This usually happens when the PCs are traveling for days, and have an encounter every day or so. That one encounter can still be challenging without upping the difficulty too much. This edition seems to work well for both long and short days.

 

[Iron Sky]

From my experience (at least with my groups), players will save their dailies for the tough fights.

If you throw at them tough fights they will spend their dailies and probably will want to rest afterwards.

So, the question is really up to the DM.

If you want the "short adventuring day" to keep happening, just throw lots of tough fights.

If you don't, throw some easy/moderate fights first.

^^ This has been my experience. If our DM throws "standard" (read: cakewalk) fights at us, we could probably get through 10 in a day. Some we don't even get through all of our encounter powers(level 6 btw). If the DM throws a tough fight at us, the dallies come out, healing surges get blown through, and basically the party gets worn out.

Few parties will want to risk running into another tough fight with no dallies and some players with 1-2 healing surges. That's when players die.

 

[the Jester]

My group seems able to handle a much heavier adventuring day in 4e- six encounters was pretty out of the question in 3.5, but in 4th edition it's pretty standard if the party is working a dungeon or something similar.

 

[Minigiant]

Overall the adventuring days is longer. This is because to the resource shift from class feature and powers to survial and defense (HP, surges). In past editions, moke of your offense class features for nonbasic warriors were very powerful and limited in usage. Your "unlimited" attacks were too weak to win meaningful battles until you were rich enough to win via items. But 4th edition increased your base strength with encounter and at-will powers. Then parties can actually win a decent fight without going nova with offense. This made HP (and surges) the new limiting factor. Now the day ends when your surges goes low or all your party's high damage dailies run out.

 

[babinro]

I guess it varies on the group. My party seldom goes more than 2 battles without a full rest since they always want their daily's again. The action point isn't encouraging enough to keep them adventuring.

I typically force them to do one more due to 'surprise' encounters...but you can only do so many of those before they become 'expected'. All and all, we easily run into the 5 minute work day that exists in 3E...but the mechancs in 4E definitely allow players to adventure for a longer period of time without delay if they choose to.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Compared to 3.5, does your group adventure longer before calling it a day?

Short answer would be yes. The longer answer is that it can be longer if your party wants it to be longer, but there is still a temptation to rest to get back your dailies if most of your group has used them.

I moved to the other side of the DM screen and I am letting someone else take a shot at being the DM right now. In my 3.5 games, (and really every D&D game I ran in both 2nd and 3rd edition), I like to set up tactically challenging fights. Unless I as the DM specifically prepare a situation where I can force multiple encounters, I am only going to see one challenging encounter per adventuring day. In prepared dungeon environments in a module, I may get more than that, but the pacing is generally one fight per day.

Getting into the first session of Keep on the Shadowfell, We went through 4 encounters, triggering 2 milestones. The party had a Ranger, a Rogue, a Warlord (me), all of the fights were reasonably challenging (as in they were not cakewalks). People took damage, and the fights went on for a few rounds. Some combats ended with people pretty badly torn up. But after the fights, between Healing surges and the Warlords Inspiring word ability, everyone was at or near full HP after each fight.

The primary difference is that after any fight, the only things you lose for the day are spent healing surges and any Daily abilities you used in the fight. And while they are powerful, the Daily abilities are not so awesome that the presence or absence of one greatly affects your general combat effectiveness.

I expect that in a 4th edition game, the party will only need to rest when the following happens.

1) They use all or most of their healing surges for the day
2) Everyone has used their daily powers up.

Now, not everyone is going to fire off their daily in every encounter. And for melee capable classes with 9 or 10 + Con modifier, and the low end being 6+Con, that generally means your players are going to have to eat about two and a half times their starting HP in damage over the course of the day before they need to rest.

So my conclusion is this. In earlier editions, it was the DM who had to act to ensure there were multiple encounters in an adventuring day. In 4th edition, the plyaers are more likley to push the pace.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[wedgeski]

One of my groups is quite conservative and I saw even them push into their 5th encounter recently. Five encounters before resting. I believe it was a record.

 

[amysrevenge]

I think the difference between "nova" and... whatever the opposite of nova is, "un-nova" in 4E is much smaller than in previous editions.

In 3.x, a wizard going nova will blast off his top few levels of spells, and same with the cleric, bard, druid, etc. After one nova, the casters are left with a tiny fraction of their ability remaining - maybe 20% effectiveness, or even less (of course melee types, assuming limitless wands of CLW, are at ~100% effectiveness at the start of any given battle lol).

In 4E, characters entering the encounter after a "nova" will be missing a few dailies (that aren't that much better than Encounters) and maybe a magic item daily. They still possess a significant fraction of their firepower, maybe 80% of their effectiveness, or more.

 

[Minigiant]

I think the difference between "nova" and... whatever the opposite of nova is, "un-nova" in 4E is much smaller than in previous editions.

In 3.x, a wizard going nova will blast off his top few levels of spells, and same with the cleric, bard, druid, etc. After one nova, the casters are left with a tiny fraction of their ability remaining - maybe 20% effectiveness, or even less (of course melee types, assuming limitless wands of CLW, are at ~100% effectiveness at the start of any given battle lol).

In 4E, characters entering the encounter after a "nova" will be missing a few dailies (that aren't that much better than Encounters) and maybe a magic item daily. They still possess a significant fraction of their firepower, maybe 80% of their effectiveness, or more.

Yeah that's how I see it. In 3.X if you don't use your highest spells, rages, smites, and other day based powers; you are at about 50% strengh and can only win biased chump fights. In 4e, when you hold or run out of dailies, you are still about 75-80% strong abd cab stil finish decent encounters.