One Encounter Per Day

[Rechan]

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....

This goes back tot he "Monster with phases" style encounter. Also means monsters like trolls that need a specific attack to shut off their regen/kill them. Doesn't matter if it's hit with a daily unless that daily does fire/acid damage, etc.

You want the PCs to know that waves are coming, right? So an elite with some minion friends is there first, but it boasts that its allies will be hre any second, or PCs see them on the horizon, etc?

Having PCs daily focus-fire an elite in the first round if they know more are coming would be a wise tactic, assuming they know that more elites/bigger things are coming. Or they save all their big guns...

Do you have a general level you're looking at? How many daily powers od your PCs have?

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]

I think it's doable without house rules, though whether or not you can pull it off in the time you would a normal 4e combat is another matter.

The sticking points are healing surges, HP/attrition, and sustained daily powers.

Looks like you've already reached the same conclusion about healing surges that I was going to offer. Your average 5 PC party might be able to draw on 15 surges of healing with everything they've got; but the party probably has net 35+ healing surges. So reducing the party to almost 0 surges in one encounter is impossible barring extraordinary circumstances. OTOH this also gives you a barometer of how much punishment they can take before they have no way to access surges still remaining. Hence extra opportunities to spend healing surges built into the encounter.

You've also got the high HP of 4e monsters magnifying as you increase the number of monsters in the encounter. Easily leading to grindy fights. Somewhere a blogger posted about "accelerants" in 4e combat, and while it's a souless term, it captures the functionality of damaging terrain well - it serves to beat down the monsters faster. You could reduce monster HP instead if you don't mind house rules, but the "accelerants" do add a cool factor when the players realize that interacting with the combat environment can have big payoffs.

Last thing is that, as everyone who has participated in Lair Assaults can attest, sustainable powers will sway the balance of fights, and often in ways that simply upping number of monsters won't address. Depending on your groups composition this may or may not be an issue, but I've definitely seen a flaming sphere used to devastating effect against a 3 in 1 encounter.

You know...having some kind of "break/transition point" or two in te midst of fighting could solve all these issues in one fell swoop. At a narratively opportune moment - say the next wave of beasties - all ongoing effects end (unless it's a unique hazard the DM rules otherwise), including conditions on PC/monsters, wall spells and summonings, any powers which read "until the end of the encounter". I would also give each PC a choice to go on the defensive or the offensive (or other option) at this point: On the defensive they can spend a healing surge, reposition, bar a door, take hostages, and so forth. On the defensive they could unlock a high-damage terrain power, maybe recharge an encounter attack power, sneak into flanking, head monsters off at the pass, set a trap, and so forth. It would be last anywhere from a round to a minute, but not a full round.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Well, if piling on dailys in a single encounter in a day is a desired action, too, then I see some tension that might be unresolvable:

1. Use lots of dailies, regardless of number of encounters.
2. Have the possibility that a single fight can drain resources enough to feel threatening, while keeping the fight reasonably short.
3. Have the possibility that several fights in a day can also happen, with the players preferring to spread resources across those fights.

I don't think you can get all three, at least not without some fairly extensive house rules.

We get something approaching #2 and #3 by convention/social contract which makes #1 not a very good option. That is, the players don't know if there will be a single fight, two, or more than four. And many fights don't necessarily push the party to their limits, at least not objectively. However, this uncertainity about what will happen makes some lesser fights subjectively feel as if the party was pushed to their limits.

There's nothing magical about that, as people have been pulling that stunt since Basic D&D days, at least. And since we want the feeling, but not necessarily the reality of being pressed, there ends up being no appreciable trade-off for us--not using most dailys in a single fight in a given day is no big deal. We play that day relatively quickly, and get on to the next day where more dailys may be used in more fights. As long as dailys are getting used during the session, the game world calendar doesn't matter.

I suggested the surge idea because it is a way of reinforcing that dynamic mechanically. I'm seldom opposed to reinforcing what we want to do anyway, as long as it isn't too fiddly.

I think you've got to either have house rules, or figure out which one of those three things you want to relax on.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Crazy Jerome is right. And to really hit what he says home, I'll adapt the old business adage and rewrite it to what you're hoping to accomplish with a single encounter between extended rests.

You want this game style to:

1) not have house rules
2) use most of a PC's resources
3) take less than an hour

Now... pick two.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm pretty confident that everything from recharging with surges to ignoring the per-encounter XP budget qualifies as a "house rule" already. I've got no problem even inventing new monsters and encounters that use this "one encounter per day" model, as long as I can get the balance right. I assumed there'd be a bunch of monster design house ruling, at least.

I don't want to change much or anything on the players' side, really. I'm open to whatever works on the DM's side to accomplish the goal, but it wouldn't be a campaign-wide change, just a change in an individual encounter.

Also means monsters like trolls that need a specific attack to shut off their regen/kill them. Doesn't matter if it's hit with a daily unless that daily does fire/acid damage, etc.

Hmm...maybe link the daily use to spending surges to heal. "When you use a daily, you can also spend a healing surge." That might also keep the dailies fairly well spaced out in the encounter, so that the party won't use them until they need them.

1. Use lots of dailies, regardless of number of encounters.
2. Have the possibility that a single fight can drain resources enough to feel threatening, while keeping the fight reasonably short.
3. Have the possibility that several fights in a day can also happen, with the players preferring to spread resources across those fights.

Well, it's more like:

1. I want the option to introduce a single encounter that sucks up ALL the party's resources in about an hour of table-time (about 5-7 rounds, I guess)
2. I want the option to NOT do that, too. In the same campaign. Without making the characters re-write their sheets.

That doesn't seem like it should be impossible.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Well, it's more like:

1. I want the option to introduce a single encounter that sucks up ALL the party's resources in about an hour of table-time (about 5-7 rounds, I guess)
2. I want the option to NOT do that, too. In the same campaign. Without making the characters re-write their sheets.

That doesn't seem like it should be impossible.

Then I think you need some new monster classification that is rather orthogonal to the minion, standard, elite, solo dimension. You need monsters that can take hits like a solo, dish it out like mulltiple standards--yet have a plausible reason why they can't focus fire (whether mechanical or story).

Crude version for illustration -- The Single Encounter Enhancer Template: When applied, a monster can make up to five attack per round, but never more than one attack on the same target. However, it emits an aura that allows the effects of short rests to occur after every third action.

Less crudely, a template that had a twisted form of ranged vampirism, where the creature drains hits points steadily, but at certain points it triggers the ability use surges on those drained. This is similar to the zone ideas that were suggested by someone earlier, simply attached to the monsters instead. I suppose you could also do this with some form of twisted magic. (Sufficiently twisted that the players wouldn't want to use it. Perhaps using it causes all kinds of slow side effects, like the 1E ghost aging on steroids. Or you get a Dark Crystal vibe going.)

Edit again: Girl Genius type idea--so wacky, it just ... might ... work! You change absolutely nothing about the encounter itself, whatsoever. But in the location, carried by the creatures, activated by a curse, whatever--a "resource bomb" goes off as the encounter starts. Boom, everyone loses down to only having a few surges left. There is a small chance that some modest hit point damage is done, a daily gets drained, magic item uses are stunted, and so on. In effect, this bomb acts as if you just played out 3 earlier standard encounters, with more or less average results. (I went easy on the dailys, since you said you wanted to keep those largely intact.) The single encounter of the day is really the last encounter of the day--the most interesting one.

To be nicer/meaner (depending on you and the players exactly which this is), you might tie avoiding the effects of the bomb to a skill challenge. It isn't something that you can totally avoid, but complete success with a skill challenge limits it to only losing the surges, while failure progressively takes away the other stuff.

 

[S'mon]

Edit again: Girl Genius type idea--so wacky, it just ... might ... work! You change absolutely nothing about the encounter itself, whatsoever. But in the location, carried by the creatures, activated by a curse, whatever--a "resource bomb" goes off as the encounter starts. Boom, everyone loses down to only having a few surges left. There is a small chance that some modest hit point damage is done, a daily gets drained, magic item uses are stunted, and so on. In effect, this bomb acts as if you just played out 3 earlier standard encounters, with more or less average results. (I went easy on the dailys, since you said you wanted to keep those largely intact.) The single encounter of the day is really the last encounter of the day--the most interesting one.

Some kind of Necrotic effect might work here. An undead-heavy campaign with surge -draining undead.

This is all going to take a lot of work though. I really don't think the OP has a clear idea of what he wants, or the huge square peg/round hole issues he's raising for the 4e system. The 4e designers put a lot of effort into NOT doing exactly what he wants to achieve.

 

[MrBeens]

Using surges as a resource to power abilities is not a great idea, as not all characters are even.
Wizards don't have many surges, but Wardens do. Wardens/Barbarians also have fire and forget dailies that last the whole encounter that overwrite each other, so the character with the most surges won't get to use their powers as they are designed.

The problem is that the game is designed around spreading the part and character resources over the course of a day.
You cannot have an encounter that really pushes a party to the limit in the space of time it would take for a normal encounter without heavily house ruling the game.

The OPs best bet is to not allow extended rests every session - it removes the horrible burden of breaking encounter design principles, you don't have to come up with convoluted new rules for party resources, players get to use their powers and abilities as they were designed too, the players get to manage their resources properly as opposed to just unloading everything every fight (in higher levels they probably will never get to use half of their powers).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't want to change much or anything on the players' side, really. I'm open to whatever works on the DM's side to accomplish the goal, but it wouldn't be a campaign-wide change, just a change in an individual encounter.

You don't have to get all elaborate to handle a single-encounter day. You do have to consider how the relative value of resources changes, and you have to consider your party make-up, and your player's styles.

First, what changes:

1. Healing Surges don't really matter - the players won't be able to spend 'em all before they die.
2. Surge /triggers/ do. Non-surge healing, normally very valuable, is not particularly better than triggering a surge.
3. Encounters are Dailies and Dailies are Encounters. You get to use Encounters /once/. You get to use Dailies /once/. Monsters are already built this way, they typically exist for only one encounter, anyway. If your style leans heavily towards single-encounter days, expect PCs to lean towards Daily utilities over encounter ones. PCs (like certain Essentials subclasses) who lack dailies or who horde them will underperform, perhaps radically.
4. 'Until the end of the Encounter' is forever. Powers - PC or item or monster - that last 'until the end of the encounter' might as well be always-on. They become much more valuable.

Second, that doesn't really matter (much). PCs still get a mix of dailies and encounters - they can't trade in encounters for dailies (except utilities, assuming dailies are available at a given class/level). PCs still have more surges than triggers. PCs still have to worry that there might be a second encounter. All you really have to do is up the challenge enough that it's tough, even with dailies flying around like crazy. You don't have to compress a days worth of challenges into a single encounter to do that. You don't absolutely have to use waves (though it can be a fine aproach, keeping things from feeling too grindy and keeping the early rounds from being too lethal). IMX with this, a party can certainly handle double it's usual experience budget (which is comparable to level+4). Breaking it into waves allows the party to handle more. Giving the enemy any terrain or tactical advantages makes it much harder. (Lair Assault, for instance, is a level+5 encounter, in waves, with very nasty terrain.)

1. I want the option to introduce a single encounter that sucks up ALL the party's resources in about an hour of table-time (about 5-7 rounds, I guess)

1. Surges are generally thought of as resources - you really can't think of them that way in a single-encounter day. Surge-triggers are resources. Encounters & Dailies are aproximately equivalent resources. Hit points are resources. Aside from that, yes, you can make a very challenging, resource-depleting, single-encounter day.
   
   
   

   [*] I want the option to NOT do that, too. In the same campaign. Without making the characters re-write their sheets.

No worries, there. However much you tap them out in a single encounter, they'll be OK after a short rest. Not 100%, but back to full hps, encounters re-charged, and able to handle modest (at level) challenges.

 

[S'mon]

Surges are generally thought of as resources - you really can't think of them that way in a single-encounter day. Surge-triggers are resources. Encounters & Dailies are aproximately equivalent resources. Hit points are resources. Aside from that, yes, you can make a very challenging, resource-depleting, single-encounter day.

It's almost impossible playing 4e RAW to suck up all PC Healing Surges in a single encounter, which is what the OP says he wants to do. A campaign built around surge-draining undead is the only option I can think of - apparently by RAW if you get hit by surge-drainers while on 0 surges apparently you just take the regular hp damage, so that works.

Trying to think up a very simple house rule to have a similar effect: How about any PC can spend a healing surge anytime as a move action? It's going to make for long grindy combats, but it does allow for all surges to be used up in one fight.