UngeheuerLich
Legend
Maybe allow unlimited number of second winds and recharge an encounter power instead of any other benefits, a second wind would give.
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One Encounter Per Day
- Thread starter I'm A Banana
- Start date
filthgrinder
First Post
One of the main factors to look at is the party level and composition. This is pretty easy to do with a level 1 or 2 party. The main issue occurs with dailies and healing.
How much access to healing do they have? A low level party with one leader is usually limited power wise to 2 heals and then second winds (then if they have any low level potions, etc). As you level up, so you surgeless healing, more heals, temp hit points, and tons of stuff. I think most of the effectiveness of healing surges happens outside of combat, when they can be spent freely. Then they can be blown through without an issue. Inside an encounter, the access to healing surges is reduced. A fighter with 17 surges, but with only two party wide heals, and a second wind, still can only take the same damage in one encounter even if its part of a 7 encounter day or 1 encounter day.
The other end of the spectrum is dailies. Once you scale up in level, they will have more of these powers. Being able to use multiple dailies in a fight can be a big game changer. When I plan out an adventure for my current group, I like to give them a stiff challenge up front, and get them to burn off a daily off in front, and then a couple of easier ones to pepper them with shots, and then a tough final encounter. Higher level characters who can "go nova" with powers can quickly cut through even the toughest monsters.
How much access to healing do they have? A low level party with one leader is usually limited power wise to 2 heals and then second winds (then if they have any low level potions, etc). As you level up, so you surgeless healing, more heals, temp hit points, and tons of stuff. I think most of the effectiveness of healing surges happens outside of combat, when they can be spent freely. Then they can be blown through without an issue. Inside an encounter, the access to healing surges is reduced. A fighter with 17 surges, but with only two party wide heals, and a second wind, still can only take the same damage in one encounter even if its part of a 7 encounter day or 1 encounter day.
The other end of the spectrum is dailies. Once you scale up in level, they will have more of these powers. Being able to use multiple dailies in a fight can be a big game changer. When I plan out an adventure for my current group, I like to give them a stiff challenge up front, and get them to burn off a daily off in front, and then a couple of easier ones to pepper them with shots, and then a tough final encounter. Higher level characters who can "go nova" with powers can quickly cut through even the toughest monsters.
Okay, that changes things...
I don't think the encounter can be both "fast" and the only encounter of the day, if you want them to feel depleted in the end. PC's have so many resources at their disposal, running them out could require a 15+ round encounter. With 1 minute per PC and 5 minutes for DM, that's 10 minutes a round, resulting in a 2.5 hour encounter. The odds are, neither the players nor the DM can adhere to that speed, and it will be 3 hours or more. You'll need to use waves, it won't be much different than running 2-3 short encounters in terms of the time requirement.
But there is nothing wrong with the occasional massive encounter. I've been in a 20 round fight before, which was thoroughly enjoyable. If everyone at the table is having fun, I say who cares... Let the fight take as long as it may.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
For something in between Defcon's suggestion and simply leaving the characters untouched but facing a massive encounter:
Leave healing surges in. However, each day, a character starts with all encounter powers available but all daily powers not. Spending a surge lets you recharge an encounter power, mid encounter.
You start with your full set of dailys, but they cost surges to use. The first daily used during an encounter costs one surge. The second costs two. And so on. Pretty soon, that one surge to recharge an encounters starts to look good. (You still can't use each daily more than once per day.)
Each short rest nets you two surges (not repeatable between encounters). It also restores your encounter powers, as normal (is repeatable between encounters for funky non-encounter power use.) Each extended rest restores your surges. (May need to tweak the ratios. I'm only eyeballing it right now for sake of an example.)
Effects:
1. On those days when you fight 4 encounters, you can easily spread your full complement of dailys out over the day, recharge a few encounter powers, and if careful, even net a surge or two compared to RAW. The disadvantage to the players is that spiking dailys in an early fight is really going to bite for the later fightrs. When you fight only 1 encounter, you can unload all those dailys if you want, but it will leave you drained.
2. If the single fight is a signficantly tougher, the players have decisions to make, even if they know it is a single fight. 2 surges for a second daily at the right time might be better than recharging 2 encounters over two attacks. Or not. Either way, the party can burn surges to get through the fight quicker, not incidently making the fight shorter.
The biggest effect will be on encounter balance. But if you want to handle most of it on your end, this can be managed. Namely, single tough encounters can get out of hand quickly if you push too hard, because unloading all the dailys is so expensive. OTOH, waves are a bit easier to manage than normal, because of a built in way to recharge encounters that presumably scales with the damage the waves are dishing out.
Leave healing surges in. However, each day, a character starts with all encounter powers available but all daily powers not. Spending a surge lets you recharge an encounter power, mid encounter.
You start with your full set of dailys, but they cost surges to use. The first daily used during an encounter costs one surge. The second costs two. And so on. Pretty soon, that one surge to recharge an encounters starts to look good. (You still can't use each daily more than once per day.)
Each short rest nets you two surges (not repeatable between encounters). It also restores your encounter powers, as normal (is repeatable between encounters for funky non-encounter power use.) Each extended rest restores your surges. (May need to tweak the ratios. I'm only eyeballing it right now for sake of an example.)
Effects:
1. On those days when you fight 4 encounters, you can easily spread your full complement of dailys out over the day, recharge a few encounter powers, and if careful, even net a surge or two compared to RAW. The disadvantage to the players is that spiking dailys in an early fight is really going to bite for the later fightrs. When you fight only 1 encounter, you can unload all those dailys if you want, but it will leave you drained.
2. If the single fight is a signficantly tougher, the players have decisions to make, even if they know it is a single fight. 2 surges for a second daily at the right time might be better than recharging 2 encounters over two attacks. Or not. Either way, the party can burn surges to get through the fight quicker, not incidently making the fight shorter.
The biggest effect will be on encounter balance. But if you want to handle most of it on your end, this can be managed. Namely, single tough encounters can get out of hand quickly if you push too hard, because unloading all the dailys is so expensive. OTOH, waves are a bit easier to manage than normal, because of a built in way to recharge encounters that presumably scales with the damage the waves are dishing out.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
KM you might want to edit your OP because man, people are just not getting that you don't want to houserule the hell out of the game/do this as a campaign thing.
This is purely an encounter / monster design based question for KM.
Sometimes exploring around the edges of an idea is a way to spark back to what the poster really wants. Especially when, pace Mengu's last post, what the poster really wants is not necessarily possible.
But if KM wants, then those of us that think it isn't possible can just shut up and watch the replies dry up quickly. Doesn't matter to me.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
S'mon said:
Man, it's never a 15 minute adventuring day anymore.
From what [MENTION=65726]Mengu[/MENTION] said, it'd be a 3 hour adventuring day -- which is plennnnnnty long. 
Even in my home games, combats regularly clock in at an hour +, and honestly that's about enough combat in one 3-4 hour timeframe for me. To head from there right into another hour-long combat is exhausting. The main reason I want the party to feel like they can't press on is because I would like to drive home the fact that things were trying to kill them, and that it took all of their resources, and some luck, and some skill, to survive long enough to kill the other guys instead. This kind of tension is desirable. The emotional reaction is potent -- human beings process risk aversion very strongly, so forcing them to take on more risk, to take losses, is an effective way to drive the excitement of the encounter up.
I also like the fact that it zooms out the tactics of the game a little bit. Instead of being simply about combat optimization, the strategy of the game becomes also about when to fight, about the risk of pushing forward, about how to rest, about the dangers of wandering monsters...this is all great stuff that I want to get with my game. It's easy to go forward confidently with a short rest and all (or almost all) of your powers back. It's harder -- scarier -- when you are down to your last drop. Especially if you know your next encounter might be one of those encounters that drains you to your last drop.
This combos with the DM-side tension-raiser I have going of giving a cost to every extended rest nicely.
Since I don't always get in the 3-4 encounters advised in a day, I'm used to parties never using up their resources, and that's not something I'm prepared to have happen for long.
At the same time, of course, I don't want to give up the occasional dungeon slog, so a broad rule like "take away healing surges" isn't the best idea for my purposes. Balesir said:
I think that solution is really savvy, actually. That takes care of BOTH the "must deplete healing surges" and "must restore encounter powers" problems.
I might link it to the slaying of an elite or something, too (or just add in that additionally). Hmmm....Mengu said:
True, there's nothing wrong with it if everyone's having fun and it's a good occasional diversion.
But I'd like to use these more than occasionally, and since I get bored of having my whole session eaten up with combat pretty quickly, I'd also like to not have to take that amount of time.
It looks like it's mostly dailies throwing a wrench into this. Because of them, I clearly need more than a single encounters' worth of enemies (they can deal a lot of damage, and ensure a PC's survivability), but I clearly don't need the absurd level of HP such baggage would bring. Maybe there's an idea to be found in the minion mechanics, since they are attacks without much HP behind them. "Monsters Appropriate To Level" + double that in minions? Minions soak up the dailies? Hmm.....
Crazy Jerome said:
Hmmm...while I don't want to futz with the dailies so much, this is reminding me a lot of the idea of "surges" being things other than healing. Surges become a kind of Power Point or Mana Point pool with which to power daily powers. That's interesting on its own, even if it's not exactly what I'm looking for this time around, and it puts some interesting ideas about how to get them to spend extra surges in my mind...("Upgrade your Encounter Power! Spend a Surge!")
Rechan said:
Naah, it's cool. Even the ones talking about campaign-level alterations give me a clue as to where I'll need to make the most adjustments.
It's sounding like right now I need to peg the "quantity/quality of monsters" a little better. There's some awesome ideas for getting PC's to spend extra healing surges and for recharging them that I can use here (and keep more comin' if you got 'em!), but it looks like the monster ratio might need to be futzed with, since I don't want to take more than an hour or so (I guess about 5-7 rounds, given Mengu's rough math) for a combat like this, but I'll clearly need more than a "standard encounter" in order to provoke the use of dailies and encounter powers. Perhaps minions would be key? They add extra damage (a full monster's worth each!), but, at 1 hp, they generally don't stick around like a full monster might. Perhaps just adding raw damage? But then, what of PC dailies that deal big HP damage themselves, shouldn't the monsters have more HP to suck those up, so that they still last 5-7 rounds?
Crazy Jerome
First Post
Anything that forces a more natural spreading out of dailys, while being acceptably smooth for you and the players, will help:
I'd go with some such mechanic over a simpler but outright ban (such as 1 daily per encounter, period), because in a really tough fight, you could easily reach the point where even an increased cost was worth it. That decision will be interesting, if framed well.
- Charging surges.
- Accumulation of "daily points" during the encounter before a daily can be used, ala some of the Iron Heroes mechanics.
- More risk with using a daily, especially repeated in the same encounter (see Hero System side effect backlash, burnout, activation roll, etc.)
- "Exhaustion" save - Every daily after the first in an encounter, make a save at a cumulative -1 to the roll, or gain some bad condition.
- Good old action denial! First daily costs actions as written. Second costs an extra move to set up. Third costs and extra standard to set up.
I'd go with some such mechanic over a simpler but outright ban (such as 1 daily per encounter, period), because in a really tough fight, you could easily reach the point where even an increased cost was worth it. That decision will be interesting, if framed well.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Crazy Jerome said:
Interesting. I was going with the idea that I would need to do things to provoke them to use dailies early and often, since otherwise they might not bother to use them -- saving them up for a "big one" that never comes (or that goes down too fast when it does). But these suggestions (and others like them) seem to indicate that I might instead have a problem with LOTS of dailies.
I'd like to get players to use their dailies, rather than save them, and I'm not too worried about the "nova" effect -- if Round 1 is all everybody spamming daily attack powers, then that gives me leeway to introduce the big powerful monsters in rounds 2-7.
So I WANT them to use their dailies, I just want to have monsters that can survive them using dailies for about 7 rounds. On the surface, minions seem good for this, since all that extra damage is "wasted," though smart players won't bother to use them on the minions....which thus increases the damage the party is taking....hmm....
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