Ramping Up 1/day Encounter Difficulty

[Holy Bovine]

You could go with a story based solution as well here. Simply make the adventure time sensitive.
Undead attacks are killing townsfolk - Angry Farmer "Why are you resting at the inn? My daughter just got eaten by ghouls!"
BBEG is near to completing a ritual to open a gate to the Nine Hells - Angry Mentor "Damn you and your cowardice! Now we have a legion of devils to fight as well!"
In a dungeon surrounded by hostile monsters - Angry henchman - "You want to rest here? We're surrounded! Stopping now signs our own death warrants."
After coming back to an area they only partly explored - Amused DM "The place looks deserted. Guess the inhabitants bugged out with their treasure after your initial assault."

Just putting a little pressure on the players to make them think if they delay too long they will fail often works wonders.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I do the "episode" method myself. If the plot dictates that a series of encounters take place over a series of in-game days (wherein the players could theoretically take Extended Rests), I just tell them at the start of the episode "hey, just fyi... all the encounters you will be facing in this part of the story are considered part of the same game-term 'day', and I'll let you know when you've completed the 'day' in question so you can take an Extended Rest and get back all your dailies and surges".

They know to treat this section of the story like it was a dungeon scenario, even though it might take place over several days (or even several weeks). So they can regulate their power usage as they would if they were underground going straight through a series of encounters in a row.

 

[CapnZapp]

@Holy Bovine: Yes, but one big point is:

You shouldn't have to make your non-dungeon adventures time-sensitive, just to cover for the game rules! The game rules should cover non-dungeon adventures from the get-go!

Let me clarify: the suggestion to include a timer is not a bad one, Bovine. It's just that it would get old real quick if it was used all the time. It would be much better if the game solved this through core mechanics once and for all, so story-lines didn't have to take it into account - so all stories automatically worked regardless.

 

[CapnZapp]

I do the "episode" method myself. If the plot dictates that a series of encounters take place over a series of in-game days (wherein the players could theoretically take Extended Rests), I just tell them at the start of the episode "hey, just fyi... all the encounters you will be facing in this part of the story are considered part of the same game-term 'day', and I'll let you know when you've completed the 'day' in question to get back all your dailies and surges".

They know to treat this section of the story like it was a dungeon scenario, even though it might take place over several days (or even several weeks). So they can regulate their power usage as they would if they were underground going straight through a series of encounters in a row.

The pertinent question here is:

How do your players know what they need to do to make that extended rest happen?

That is, I'm all for this "episode method". It's just that with the default "daily method" it's pretty obvious to the players what they need their characters to do to recover: 1) find a safe spot 2) lie down and do nothing for hours

Of course, a perfectly good answer is "I'm telling the players; the characters don't necessarily know". It's meta, but it works.

However, if the DM is depriving the players from making the choice when to take an extended rest on a regular basis, he or she is removing a significant aspect of the game: the resource management part.

 

[Eric Finley]

I've got an extensive house-rule set on the drawing boards which uses a randomizer - a deck of custom "context" cards, one per PC - to distribute roughly one daily per encounter, roughly one AP-equivalent per milestone (+1 for the start of the day), and roughly one daily item usage per milestone (+1/2/3 for the start of the day)... but in an unpredictable manner. My plan is that you can push past those limits at a significant penalty, if you really need that daily that luck just isn't letting you recharge, but that overall you have to plan for the possibility that you may have "gotten up on the wrong side of the bed" this encounter. As it were.

I'll be interested to playtest it and see how it works. My hope is that adding the luck factor will mean that more disparate power levels are reasonable inside of a group... because there will be times when your heaviest hitters are not firing on all cylinders, or your weaker ones are in the groove.

This allows an encounter start to simply be "This is a hard encounter, guys, draw three contexts and pick one. Oh, and it's your first one of a day that'll have more, so draw one extra for that."

 

[Infiniti2000]

However, if the DM is depriving the players from making the choice when to take an extended rest on a regular basis, he or she is removing a significant aspect of the game: the resource management part.

More importantly, the big problem with this house rules is that he's depriving the PCs the ability to recover surges. How about if a string of bad luck (or good luck on the enemies' part) or bad choices causes the ranger to use up all his surges? Now, he can't even rest to recover so what option does he have?

The only way the DM go circumvent that is with metagaming. "Oh okay, I really meant this episode will apply after the ranger can rest." Or worse, "Okay, ranger you actually have 3 surges remaining, so let's just throw out more rules while we're at it."

The Tweet Rule only works if everyone burns through surges at the same percentage and IME that doesn't often happen.

 

[keterys]

Actually, it does work. It just removes the possibility of chickening out on the challenge and makes abilities that provide surgeless healing far more relevant.

Unlike, say, in a campaign like LFR where we haven't seen a purpose yet to having healing without spending a surge cause the adventuring day is never more than three encounters.

 

[CapnZapp]

More importantly, the big problem with this house rules is that he's depriving the PCs the ability to recover surges.

Enabling stories to escape the dungeon or time-critical adventure is the more important goal.

As long as WotC doesn't provide a core rule, we have to put up with house rules and their kinks.

As I said earlier; if you can accomplish this without removing the players' ability to choose when to take extended rests, so much the better.