No Extended Rest until 2 milestones - Question

[Rechan]

I've seen a houserule mentioned before that I sorta like the idea of, but I had a question about it.

To repeat the house rule: PCs cannot take an extended rest until they have reached two milestones.

This helps cut into the "Fifteen minute adventuring day", but more importantly, it pushes players to be careful about their healing surges, and puts things on edge when they have so few left after the 3rd encounter. Healing Surges, after all, are 4e's "Resource" that needs to be managed, outside of Daily powers - so it forces some management on that front.

However, my question

What happens when the PCs only have 1-2 fights in one day? For instance, they are on a journey and get ambushed. Or for whatever purpose, they simply don't have 4 encounters in one day.

I find it hard to rationalize that they wouldn't be able to "rest", simply because they didn't have the allotment of fights. And, this would likely be caused by the DM for plot purposes - that because the DM isn't throwing enough monsters at them, the PCs dont' get their surges/dailies back. When they do reach the 2 milestones, it may be unrealistic for the story for the Pcs to rest at that point. (They are ambushed on a journey, then reach their destination, get into 3 fights, and should press on, but need that rest). In this situation, it just spaces the 5 minutes of the 15 minute work day over several days.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I believe the designer who proposed that rule stated that it wasn't realistic but rather a useful gamist tool. IIRC, he did say that if the PCs had an extended rest in a comfortable location (like a town) he might waive the 2 milestone requirement, but that the requirement itself had more to do with the challenge and pacing of the game than anything else.

Use of this house rule is a contract between the DM and players (for increased challenge/fun).

On a side note, if your party is drained of resources after 4 encounters, you may be using too many hard encounters (I mean no offense by this, it's simply been my experience that my group has always been able to handle more than 4 encounters in a day, when the need arises). If you don't wish to lower the average difficulty of your encounters I'd suggest you internalize that "encounters come in 4s" for pacing purposes. That way, you don't throw the party into 3 hard encounters while traveling to the "Dungeon of Horrors" (which would prompt them to enter the dungeon for a single encounter and then rest).

It seems to me that this house rule could help you eliminate the "15 minute workday" but that it requires a careful eye towards pacing to actually achieve that goal.

 

[keterys]

Jonathan Tweet, who made the house rule, specifically created it for a campaign in which there might be days or weeks between fights for his PCs. The PCs are quite capable of resting, spending surges, getting encounter powers back, but they just can't 'poof' heal to full, and get back their extended rest powers.

I know a DM that actually only allows an extended rest once per _adventure_. The only trick is to basically rename "Daily" powers to something else.

 

[CapnZapp]

Exactly. If you can accept that a power duration is "one encounter" rather than a fixed time in minutes and seconds, you can accept that extended rests have to do more with adventure pacing and drama than minutae like how many hours since you last slept.

Shame WotC went for such a hardwired rule. If they instead said time between extended rests is up to the DM or adventure writer (or indeed, as you're onto, made it a function of the number of encounters played) you'd have a game that works equally well in a dungeon as in a political game or for months-long sea voyages.

All of that can be resolved, though. The real problem is something else:

How being out of surges is a completely different game than regular D&D, one noone wants to play.

The penalty for running out of surges is, put simply, devastating. If the PCs bungles earlier encounters or the DM miscalculates the strength of the opposition, it quickly leads to TPKs.

It really is a horrendously broken rule, and if it were differently, it might be quite feasible to do as you suggest, to set a cap on how often you can make extended rests (without having to add in more or less artificial story-driven reasons).

 

[keterys]

I've had some very interesting D&D combats with people who were out of surges...

 

[Obryn]

I encourage my players to go two milestones, but there are times when it's just not practical...

Again, it's just a contract between my players and me, not a rule. I enforce it when I need to, and don't when I think it won't be any fun.

Actually, my players drive the action very well on their own... If someone burns a lot of dailies but everyone else is fine, they basically say, "Nope; ration yourself better next time. We're moving on."

-O

 

[CapnZapp]

What I'm saying is that for my group not to resent this rule, the penalties for running out of surges need to be relaxed.

A penalty of some sort (because you're exhausted and in pain) would be appropriate. That all of a sudden your healing spells and potions heal only 1 hp is ridiculously punitive.

There must be a middle ground between the current rules for those who have surges and the current rules for those who don't.

If such a middle ground is found, I think the four encounters per extended rest rule could be great.

 

[CapnZapp]

I encourage my players to go two milestones, but there are times when it's just not practical...

Again, it's just a contract between my players and me, not a rule. I enforce it when I need to, and don't when I think it won't be any fun.

Actually, my players drive the action very well on their own... If someone burns a lot of dailies but everyone else is fine, they basically say, "Nope; ration yourself better next time. We're moving on."

-O

Yeah, but it would have been nice if the rules covered this. Instead of you having to rely on your players to voluntarily abstain from safety and seeking out danger even when they don't have to.

By the way, the interaction of Dailies work great. I have no issue there. WotC really succeeded in making Dailies "a nice perk" but without overly punishing those who run out and still have to move on.

I just wish the situation with healing surges were more similar to the situation with dailies...

 

[Starfox]

The Feng Shui game, one of the quoted inspirations for 4e, had "session" as a limit on what 4e terms long rest. You regained Fortune points (somewhat like action points), wounds points etc each session. A session was one table session, tough there was a note that if you played a very long time or it made dramatic sense, the GM could declare a "new session" in the middle of a long session.

 

[Eric Finley]

CapnZapp - if you want to avoid the sudden discontinuity at zero surges (or at least minimize and postpone it), you could try splitting their surges into two batches. The first batch, equal to two-thirds of their surges, are normal. Then take the remaining surges, double their number, and mark 'em as "weak surges" - weak surges heal half as much (including any bonuses such as Healer's Lore & Healing Word, etc). Takes two weak surges to pay for anything which has a healing surge as a cost (unless that non-healing application can also be halved meaningfully, DM's discretion). Surges spent come off the full surges first, and only then do you move to weak surges.

That'll at least extend things while making the later-day parts closer to the edge.

As an alternate method to the "two milestones" rule... you could also try basing it on level instead. Work out the halfway point (in XP) between level A to level B. Every rest is just a rest; nights in bed are nothing special (although I might make the Restful Bedroll's ability, perhaps boosted to "one surge worth" of temp HP, a reward for actually resting in a proper bed). But your first rest after levelling up, or after reaching the half-level point, counts as an extended rest instead.

Or try this: At an extended rest, roll 1d6 per encounter in the previous day. You recover daily powers (if you have them) on a schedule something like this: If you roll any 1s, you recover your L1 daily (and, if you have one, your L2 daily util). If you roll any 2s, you recover your L5 daily (and, if applicably, L6 daily util). And so forth. Each six you roll recovers 1/3rd of your total surges.