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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5752551" data-attributes="member: 2067">So, this is an idea that has come out of me looking at adventure-based game design, and how to achieve a game that focuses on the whole adventure, rather than the encounters in the adventure.One of the "big problems" with adventure pacing in 3e or 4e is that the party can retreat to rest at any time, recover in a day or two, and come back to the dungeon loaded for bear. There isn't any price for resting, and there is great incentive to rest, even when there may be a price, since getting back your highest-level resources and all of your HP is generally worth whatever price your DM may put in place. It's possible to add a "time cost" to your adventures, but that trick only works a few times before it becomes kind of old hat -- if EVERY MacGuffin needs to be retrieved within 3 days, it's just frustrating, not necessarily exciting. Similarly, wandering monsters can be used, but suffer from kind of the same dilemma: used repeatedly, they become more of an annoyance than a threat. This is less of a problem in older editions because it takes a long time to recover your lost HP -- long enough that most groups stop short of it -- but it can be a problem in certain kinds of game there, too.So without changing your e-of-choice too dramatically, I was thinking of how to make resting less of a player choice, and more of a DM choice: the DM determines when you can rest for the day.The DM may do this by placing "campsites" in a dungeon (or adventure), places or points where the party can safely lie down one long rest. Depending on your favored edition, there may be better guidelines for this (forex, in 4e, placing a "campsite" roughly for every 2-3 encounters is probably best, and you might want to place a "rest stop" every encounter, so that they can take a Short Rest). Of course, the party can sleep whenever they want to, but they don't regain spells or HP for doing it. They only regain those at a "campsite." Each campsite can be used once, and then it goes away.Campsites could take the form of safe areas in a dungeon, or of inns along a bandit-covered highway, or quiet sylvan glades in the wilderness. After stopping for a rest, however, the campsite can't be used again: now the bandits/monsters/dragons/whatever have tracked you here, and will know where to find you if you stay there again.This is a pretty game-focused solution, I understand, but I don't think it's impossible to justify in the world of the game, the idea being that safe places are rare, and only safe for a few nights before they're unsafe again. Of course, the party can always "quit" the adventure, running back to a safe haven for a full recovery in the middle of their adventure, but that means the adventure is automatically failed, and that if they come back to the problem later, it will have repaired, resupplied, and changed around, just as they have.Anyway, do you think it's a viable idea? Putting the "rests" in the DM's hands, rather than allowing the players to tell you when they're taking a rest, helps ensure that a DM can keep a party on their toes, and if the game has good guidelines for when these rests should be, a DM can make an educated decision about where to sprinkle them in his adventure or dungeon.</blockquote>

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