Ramping Up 1/day Encounter Difficulty

[RHGreen]

To summerize one of the points - make travelling back and forth from town a bigger pain in the backside than not.

 

[Blackbrrd]

To summerize one of the points - make travelling back and forth from town a bigger pain in the backside than not.

The monsters can for instance create defenses that makes any encounters really really really hard.

"I think we have an invading adventuring group on the way, they seem to be pretty predictable, let's set a trap for them"

Make it obvious it is something that was done because they went back to town...

 

[CapnZapp]

Honestly? I'd just implement a house-rule that says characters don't get back Dailies, Surges, or Action Points until they pass two milestones, myself.

The Tweet house-rule, that is.

There's nothing magical about an extended rest - rests, surges, and powers are narrative tools and game devices, nothing more.

Unfortunately, the D&D designers decided to set the interval of extended rests into stone, which is very powerful magic to most players. Even the name of "Daily" powers cement the interval in which they replenish.

Not tying extended rests very strongly to in-game days would have meant the game would have been so much better, and would have allowed it to support a much larger variety of stories, with no house rules required.

A damn shame.

 

[CapnZapp]

To summerize one of the points - make travelling back and forth from town a bigger pain in the backside than not.

Well, this is highly unsatisfactory for lots of DMs.

What if you don't want to fill every day with the standard 4-6 monster encounters?

Allowing the adventure writer or DM to set the spacing of extended rests would have made 4E much more flexible. One (travel) adventure might span weeks, while another (dungeon) adventure might want to offer extended rests every hour.

 

[RHGreen]

Well, this is highly unsatisfactory for lots of DMs.

What if you don't want to fill every day with the standard 4-6 monster encounters?

Allowing the adventure writer or DM to set the spacing of extended rests would have made 4E much more flexible. One (travel) adventure might span weeks, while another (dungeon) adventure might want to offer extended rests every hour.

The disadvantages for town hopping should be at the discretion of the DM. If the DM thinks the players are taking the p??s it is up to him to stick the knife in. If he thinks it is acceptible then he doesn't have to.

If the DM thinks the PCs have enough resources to carry on without reasonable problems and the players are just being annoying - smash them.

 

[CapnZapp]

To actually answer the OP...

The problem is that the encounters are way too easy when they have all their action points, daily powers, etc., for every encounter.

Is there a rule of thumb for increasing the XP budget for an encounter when it's expected that a party will have a single encounter in a day?

No. I haven't seen any official discussion regarding this at all, despite how all-encompassing the problem really is.

My best advice is simply to use (possibly a variation of) the Tweet rule. In other words, make it so that the PCs don't get all their APs, Dailies and surges renewed after every fight, regardless of how many in-game days pass by.

Sure, you can experiment with upping the level of the encounters too, but this will probably lead to both good and not so good results. (Meaning that some level+4 encounters will be great. Others will be merely boring. And once in a while, you'll have one that threatens a TPK). Especially when you decide you don't want more monsters, but individuals of higher level - the game responds particularly poorly to Soldiers, Elites, and Solos that are of higher level than the PCs.

The basic fact is that encounters with more or stronger foes take longer time to resolve. I see no reason why the passing of in-game days should force you to use slower encounters.

So the final analysis is this: the game is designed around the multiple-encounters-a-day workload. A.k.a. the dungeon.

So the solution that works best in most cases simply is to treat your adventure like a series of encounters with no (reliable) way of taking an extended rest in-between (and then repeat for the next string of encounters). The Tweet house-rule is one way of accomplishing this. Stating outright "you can't relax until you've vanquished the three Dragons of Doom" would be another. The important thing is to allow the players some modicum of control over when and where they can rest. The Tweet rule writes this right into the rule, in a meta-game way (the players know when they can rest, the PCs don't). Whatever rule you use, at least consider telling the players (or their PCs). In my example, you're telling the players "plan for at least the three Doom Dragon encounters - more if you're unlucky or unskilled - before the next extended rest".

Allowing the players to plan for the next extended rest is essential to the game's core resource management, and so you should think hard about not providing any hints as to when/how the PCs may come about an extended rest.

Of course, it is possible to tie extended rests to days; any adventure that says "you have three days 'til the princess is executed" really means to say "this adventure is balanced around the PCs getting about 3 extended rests". With the PCs and their players in control of when those rests will take place. It's just that being forced to do this every time if you dislike house rules is one of 4E's biggest flaws.

 

[fba827]

So the final analysis is this: the game is designed around the multiple-encounters-a-day workload. A.k.a. the dungeon.

I was coming to post this and saw you already did

I may have just imagined it, but I feel like the DMG says somewhere that it assumes 3-5 encounters "per day" and 8-12 per level. Thus, we're talking about 2-4 uses of any given daily power per level.

(Again though, I can't recall where I read those estimated numbers, so I could just be imagining it all)

So, yeah, it assumes some more immediate threats (such as dungeon exploration where you have many rooms to allow for many encounters) and less so for slower paced exploring/interaction (such as city-wide investigations or cross-country travel)

Skimming through, I think there are basically there are suggestions to instead tie daily recharges to:
(a) milestones
(b) DM narrative

I like both those ideas, I guess it depends on the specific players as well as the specific situation.

I'd also propose a third possibility
(c) Replace "Daily" (or anything that recharges with extended rest) with "Weekly" -- while it won't change the underlying problem of the recharge being tied to in-game time passage not aligning with immediate threats, it might psychologically change the pace at which the players do things. ("so we sit around for a week.... again? wow this takes forever, it's been a month since we started investigating this crime.. the trail is getting colder and colder, maybe we should speed up")

but, just like the other two options, it depends on the specific players as well as the specific situation.

But options a and b to have an added advantage that they can be fluid over the course of the campaign, that is to say, if 5 levels from now the PCs have a faster pace, that type of house rule would adjust with it. Where as if you went with choice c, it is harder to say several levels from now that you'll suddenly change things from weekly to daily.

 

[CapnZapp]

Yeah, the important things to take away are:
1) strongly consider clueing in your players as to when extended rests are possible
2) the game should have allowed for variable spacing of extended rests. This does not necessarily mean player control is removed. It just means the game would have been able to handle a (far) larger variety of stories right out the box!

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Instead of having the houserule, one daily per encounter you should rather consider one daily power usage per encounter, which you can save up for later.

That's a good modification actually. It still allows a PC to save up daily power uses for a nova, but prevents 1st encounter novaing with all your dailies at once.

It's actually once per round. Just so you know and don't get disappointed if you do take it.

I was counting my normal attack as one of them. With two melee attackers and a 50% chance to hit, at least one of them will probably grant me a free action attack in addition to my normal attack. With the increased chance to hit and increased damage, those attacks have a better than 50% chance of hitting, and they'll really hurt. Oh, and I forgot that the free action attack has Combat Advantage...so it's even MORE likely to actually hit.

 

[keterys]

So yeah, while some parties like to nova early and often, others like to save their Dailies for the toughest of enemies so that they can unload on them. For a party like ours, I think that your houserule would actually hurt things a bit, because any time we have to burn a Daily during a "normal" encounter it always ratchets up the tension. Knowing that saving them won't help will eliminate that tension. But for an early nova party, it sounds like an excellent idea.

If you're facing 6 encounters in a day and have two dailies, then you still have the tension of trying to figure out when to burn them, plus you have the added tension of trying to figure out which is the right one to burn for a particular fight.

It also helps fight grind, where people hoard their dailies for a threat, slowing down encounters where no one uses dailies, which can lead to ridiculously easy 'climax' fights when all of the dailies come out at once.