Pacing & daily powers/surges

[Garmorn]

You could avoid the surge reduction by just doing lots of combats between extended rests. For example, I think that house rule would be a decent way to do 'one extended rest _per adventure_'. The game can actually be much better paced if your surges and 'dailies' are per cinematic unit, but you don't get completely screwed by going into combats at 1 hp.

OK, this has gotten me confuesed? How short are your adventures? How do you define them? If I said only 'one extended rest _per adventure'.

My group would get up and leave since most of my adventures take place over several days. Sure there is lots of days where they are just trying to find/go to some place but some times the can go 5 to 6 days with 3 or more combats and not complete the adventure because the now have to go some where else.

 

[keterys]

Someone else on the boards said they were doing it (extended rest per adventure) - I've never tried that myself.

That said, depends what you call an adventure. 32-64 page module is a bit long. But a lot of adventures can be finished in far less combats than that. I'm wrapping up the first module in Curse of the Crimson Throne soon in one group, and they'll have done 2 extended rests during the module and one after it's finished (as well as a lot of days of just RP, tooling around town, no combat, etc). In both cases, I'd say that they completed an adventure (in that they completed a major quest with all attending loose ends, having nothing else to do) each of the days. One day had 4 combats and... let's call it an equal number of skill challenges, and left them off exhausted with I think 5 surges left in the party. The other quest had 5 combats and 2 skill challenges and finished with two of them in good shape, one of them very low on surges, and the last person at 1 hp with no surges.

And if I'd been using the house rule suggested, where you heal to full during a short rest without expending a healing surge, that would have totally worked fine with or without the 4 surges reduction. Nice thing there is even if someone has no surges and falls down to 0 during a fight, the important part is surviving the fight as a group, then you can get them back up. And you can get them back to 1 during the fight if you do need to spend a healing trigger on them.

So, yeah, I really do want to try it sometime. Sometime.

 

[babinro]

When I proposed that house rule, it was also contingent on reducing surge totals by 4, fwiw.

But I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

You could avoid the surge reduction by just doing lots of combats between extended rests. For example, I think that house rule would be a decent way to do 'one extended rest _per adventure_'. The game can actually be much better paced if your surges and 'dailies' are per cinematic unit, but you don't get completely screwed by going into combats at 1 hp.

Personally I make use of this houserule and the players really seem to enjoy it.

My version of it is to have players regain use of all daily magic item uses as well as daily powers after 2 milestones. In order to regain healing surges, or cure diseases, the party still requires an extended rest. In this manor, healing surges are still relevant. The extended rests do not replenish daily magical item uses or daily powers.

 

[Trellian]

To make it even more complicated, I'll probably mix it up a bit, sometimes using published material (where the pacing system works great), and sometimes using self-made adventures which contains a lot less combat.

So one extended rest per adventure doesn't work universally, since some adventures are longer than the others. One rest per 2 milestones should work better.

However, as I haven't played a 4th edition campaign yet, I think it's best to see how it plays out RAW first. I just wanted to hear some opinions on how to do this without breaking the game one way or another.

Artificially or not, I would like to be able to provide challenging encounters for my PCs, but whether the best to do that is to beef up the encounters, or to alter the rest mechanism, remains to be seen

 

[brehobit]

I've run a fairly combat-light game in 3e that involved lots of travel.

For 4e I'm considering:
* You dailies back after a few days of full rest. Resting in a shack in the winter takes longer than resting in a high-end inn maybe?
* You recover 1 healing surge per night, +1 more depending on a roll (details TBD, but bonuses for high CON and good resting circumstances. Penalties for forced marches etc. Maybe let a heal check play a role?) With a horrible roll you might not get full HPs back.

It will be rare that the party would have more than 1 fight in a day. And probably very rare to have more than 3-4 fights between long rests.

Surges and Hps
Survival check.

• -5 to +5 for resting situation (-5 sleeping in a tent when it's freezing and you are having to help keep watch and you don't have very good warm-weather gear, +5 resting in a high-quality inn). 0 is tent sleeping on a normal fall/spring day.
• -5 to +5 for what you did during the day (-5 forced march, +5 rested all day) 0 is a normal walk or ride for most of the day.

Results:

• <-4 no healing: no healing surge
• -4 to 5: heal up to one healing surge in HPs, no healing surge.
• 6-10: heal full hit points -OR- regain one healing surge.
• 11-25: heal full hit points and one healing surge.
• 26-40: heal full hit points and two healing surges.
• 41+ heal full hit points and three healing surges.

 

[Garmorn]

To the OP I would go with the book until I got a hang of how it affects your campaign. These posters really have a wide verity of playing styles.

My is even worst. I can go several game weeks with out combat or just one per week, the boom out of now where there are 5 or even 6 in one day. It keeps my players from being bored and allows me to mix combat heavy periods with interaction heavy periods in the same adventure.

By the way, I never use modules. Never had and probably never will so I can relate to the pacing in them.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

IMHO you can adapt the system as you wish...

even the you only regain all your surges and powers when rest is optimal (tavern, bed etc.) and you regain less if you resst in the road.

Maybe allow regaining dailies only by action points. Healing surges ist the best thing any edition did to this game, as it allows for more fights and usually you are not forced to take an extended rest to get to nearly full fighting power again.

So if you limit dailies to a less reliable resurce and make regaining healing surges a bit more difficult, you can easily have a perfect system for 1,2,3 and 4 battles a day. Maybe when you bloody or drop a foe or heal an ally to nondying or nonbloodied state.

a different approach, if you like less but bigger battles, would be allowing to regain encounter based attacks/powers in the middle of a fight.

 

[Skallgrim]

I really think that once you get a good feel on your party and their "combat capacity", the regular rules will work really well.

As you said, putting tougher fights is, to a large extent, very similar to having more fights. In addition, careful use of terrain and tactics can make a fight tougher even without altering the XP budget.

I think that using fewer tough fights will be just fine with the basic system. There are only two things that I would note:

Use more threats, not higher level threats. Monsters substantially more powerful than the PCs just don't 'work right' in the fight. They are too hard to affect, and too effective.

Don't telegraph which days are going to be 1 encounter days, or 2 encounter days, or 3 encounter days. If the PCs KNOW that they can use all of their daily powers in this fight, they ARE going to whip them all out. If they aren't sure, they will probably save them until the fight gets hard. If 5 pcs each blow a daily in each of the first 4 rounds of combat, the fight is probably over at the top of turn 5.


The other thing to think about is not a problem, but just a consideration. Planning on fewer tougher fights can discourage certain character concepts, and encourage others. The high damage, high risk striker with fewer surges looks pretty good if he knows he can plan on 3 fights a day. 6-9 surges will cover him for three fights, in most cases. The durable defender with 15+ surges isn't probably going to use 5 per fight, so he's got wasted abilities. Make sure that your players are thinking about your changes to the 'game assumptions' and be prepared to allow them to tweak their characters a bit (extra retraining, perhaps) if things don't work out as planned.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

I find myself wanting to treat Dailies the same way I want to treat level advancement: by DM fiat.

Tracking XP is boring. The DM can tell me when it's time to level up. If I get impatient, I tell him out of game, and he can either make me happy or not.

Similar with Daily powers. The DM tells me when I get them back. I'm good with that. Why wouldn't I be? I trust the DM to make the game fun in so many other ways -- this is just one more.

The complication here is that there are some places where the value of powers waxes and wanes with the availability of Dailies, specifically, utility powers. So the players need to have a feel for how it's going to work.

NOTE: This is musing out loud, that's all.