NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6235086" data-attributes="member: 6696971">1)  Increase encounter budgetting such that the default difficulty is n + 2 (rather than n) and BBEG fights are n + 5 (rather than n + 3 or 4).2)  Tax PCs with Healing Surge loss regularly.  Tax them 1 HS loss on every micro-failure of a Skill Challenge.  Tax the entire group 1 or 2 for every macro-failure of a Skill Challenge.  Also, make offers to them to augment effects or leverage p42 by spending surges.  This will give them a dynamic measure of control over the pacing of their aggregate surge expenditure/loss.  This augmented ablation of Healing Surges will induce a sense of tension and, sometimes, desperation.3)  Provide strict, and transparent, conditions required for Extended Rests.4)  Create a Disease Track that is tailored to your game's needs that serves as an injury track.  Every time a PC drops below 0, they are attacked by it.  If you want to make it more assertive, make the attack be Level + 5 versus Fort rather than Level + 3.  They lose a healing surge that they can't gain back until the injury is gone.  Perhaps they suffer a - 1 to speed or a - 2 to Fort.  It would be trivial to come up something to meet your collective groups' preferred aesthetic.Boom.  4e is now more deadly and you're using the tools built into the system and the various pacing mechanisms outlined in DMG2 to make it so.  Healing Surges are 4e's primary locus of "pressure".  Apply more pressure there (through various means) and the nature of gameplay will change dramatically.  Beware, however, too much pressure and not enough (transparent) strict trigger requirements for an Extended Rest and you may force your players into a "turtling" paradigm.  An easy thing to do is either (i) place an in-fiction impetus for the players to continue on or (ii) require a successful Skill Challenge to meet the Extended Rest prerequisites.</blockquote>

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