Reasoning behind Extended Rests?

[Bagpuss]

When WotC says "the 15-min day is gone" I expected them to remove the root of the problem, the fact that in order to recharge your powers you must spend a stipulated but arbitrary long period of inactive time (18 hours in 4E).

You can be active in all but 6 of those 18 hours.

Alternatively, to have introduced - in the rules - a set penalty of taking the extended rest option that you could weigh against the advantages and disadvantages of plowing on.

They have you loose accumulated Action Points. Not a big one I know.

Or, as before, to have acknowledged that the cost of taking extended rests vary tremendously between adventures, and because of this, the rules can't give more than a suggested cost (=18 hours) with the final decision being up to the DM. Much like milestones, which default to 2 encounters, but which can easily be overridden by the DM!

Now that's not a bad idea, I wonder why (since it was like 3rd Ed based around 4 or so encounters a day) they didn't say something like you have to have two milestones, before you can take an extended rest?

But then you the problem what if they only have one encounter in that day (say they are travelling on a reasonable safe road).

Still would have made a useful sidebar in the DMG.

 

[DracoSuave]

Because it's not appropriate to have hard rules for number of encounters between extended rests.

Overland travel, for example, you might go days without an encounter. In the enemy's castle, you might NEVER get an extended rest. There's no rules for it, because it -has to be flexible- for the DM to do his frikken job.

No amount of rules text can replace common sense.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

In several places, you set me up as a straw man. Please discontinue this practice.

I hope you aren't talking about me, because I don't believe I'm doing any such thing, I'm explaining my point of view. I just think you are looking at it from the wrong angle.

When WotC says "the 15-min day is gone" I expected them to remove the root of the problem, the fact that in order to recharge your powers you must spend a stipulated but arbitrary long period of inactive time (18 hours in 4E). Alternatively, to have introduced - in the rules - a set penalty of taking the extended rest option that you could weigh against the advantages and disadvantages of plowing on.

I agree. And I was trying to explain that the root of the problem isn't that there is no penalty for resting. It's that there is too much advantage to resting.

Most players naturally want to keep going. Given the choice of a minor disadvantage for continuing and no disadvantage for resting, they will take the minor disadvantage purely for role playing reasons(they don't want to look like cowards, they think it sounds stupid for their characters to fight 5 goblins then go home and rest the night, etc). It's a matter of degrees. If you are likely to die if you continue then it's better to look like cowards.

Or, as before, to have acknowledged that the cost of taking extended rests vary tremendously between adventures, and because of this, the rules can't give more than a suggested cost (=18 hours) with the final decision being up to the DM. Much like milestones, which default to 2 encounters, but which can easily be overridden by the DM!

I'm not sure what point you are making here. Yes, the cost of taking extended rests does very tremendously and can be overridden by the DM. Are you saying that the 18 hour time period is not a disadvantage for taking a rest because DMs can change it? If that's the case then it doesn't matter what rules they put into place to fix the problem, since they all could be changed.

I am perfectly aware of the concept and its ramifications, thank you very much.

I'm not entirely sure you do as you keep wanting to apply some sort of disadvantage for resting. It doesn't need one, since that isn't the problem. As I mention above, the problem is the amount of penalty to get for continuing. Which is dramatically less than previous editions.

But this forces adventure designers to take into account the opposition and allocate a number of days to complete the mission. Any story that would work better on the daily or yearly timescale - or one where the component of time isn't the critical one - is hosed.

Yes, it does. I had the privilege of attending a seminar with Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, and Chris Tulach on adventure design which was very beneficial in this regard. One of the things they hammered into me over and over was that 4e adventures should ALWAYS have a time limit of some sort. For a number of reasons. The primary one being that the daily power/action point/healing surge mechanic was designed around the idea that the PCs WANT to keep going. And that without some outside motivation it was too easy to simply do an extended rest after every encounter.

But that's not the only reason to put time limits on. There's the fact that in a heroic fantasy game there should always be some pressure on the characters to keep them motivated. The most exciting part of the game is when the pressure is on.

They explained that the time limit doesn't have to be given explicitly. Even implicit time limits work. For instance, a group of Orcs capture some people from a village. The PCs have to rescue them. The Orcs might want to hold them for ransom or are putting them to work in mines. It could be that if the PCs did nothing for 6 months and then attempted the rescue then it would be no problem. But maybe the Orcs are planning on killing them tomorrow. There's no way of knowing. Are the PCs going to risk it over something as small as an action point? Better to leave now and fight your way past all the Orcs until you free the prisoners.

Even if you create a campaign with no time limit, it should consist of adventures that each have an individual time limit. For instance, an evil tyrant is looking for pieces of a scroll that contains a ritual that will allow him to take over the world but neither he nor the PCs know where the pieces are. When the PCs learn the location of a piece, the tyrant should as well. And the PCs should know that the tyrant knows, making it a race against time. Then, afterwords, it goes back to waiting and having no time limit again.

PS. Again thanks Runestar. Yes, it seems that while milestones etc allow a party to continue on more than 1-2 fights, they still have to rest well within the first hour of each day's dungeon clean-out.

There is a definite limit on how long you can keep fighting for before you rest, true. This is intentional. The designers have said that they didn't want PCs to be able to fight forever.

My experience is that the average fighter has 10 healing surges and that they lose 2-3 per combat. Which means they can fight about 4 combats before the group decides to take an extended rest. Most of the official adventures are designed around this pacing. So are most of the Living Forgotten Realms adventures. With luck and good teamwork, the number of combats could probably go up to as high as 6, but much beyond that is impossible.

The best thing to do is to create adventures where the logical stopping point is after the 4 encounters. For instance, with the Orc kidnapping adventure above, you design it so that the Orc lair is split into 4 logical places to have an encounter and at the end they find the prisoners. Or they find a clue that will lead them to the real prisoners but it is over a day travel away.

This creates adventures that "feel" natural.

However, it seems you want a solution other than the one the designers put into the game. There isn't one. As written, it is still a better idea to rest after every encounter. This is explicitly because the designers didn't want a penalty for resting as they feel that the natural desire of players to continue and plot concerns in an adventure balance out the advantage you get for resting. If you have players who don't want to go onward and you aren't willing to encourage them with plot, then I agree, you will have the 15-minute work day back.

 

[demonsquidgod]

My question is: WotC claims to have abolished the 15-adventure day. I don't see where and how.

As far as I understand it, it is always more beneficial to take an extended rest than to plow on. There are no built-in penalties to taking extended rests other than time consumption - which is exactly the same as in 3rd Edition! How is that a solution?

AFAIK, the only thing 4th does better than 3rd is granting some modicum of "plow-on" capability when you're forced to continue past the first 15 minutes of each adventuring day.

Dailies are used once in an encounter, as are action points. They help but much of the battle will still resolve around tactics and the character's themselves. In 3e one could get so buffed up before a fight it seemed ridiculous. So you would get twenty spells cast on you and everyone else, go fight someone, then run away and rest to regain those spells.

Essentially the amount of resources one got back after resting was far higher in 3e than it is in 4e. Not having any dailies is far less crippling than being out of buff spells. Add to this the fact that you must wit twelve hours between each extended rest and the cost benefit ratio seems much more shallow.

You could still pull a 15 minute adventuring day, followed by a full day of waiting around, but there's far less tactical need for it.

 

[James McMurray]

In reality, I think what really happens is that the party defender ends up burning most/all his surges within 2-3 battles (between 2nd wind, healing word, short rests and the like), while the rest of the PCs still retain most of theirs. Then you end up with the problem of the defender not being able to perform his role properly, and the rest of the party being unable to effectively fill in for him.

If this is the case, the rest of the party isn't doing their job, and the defender is doing his poorly. His job is not to take every point of damage, but to take the majority of it. The rest of the party isn't tasked to never get hit, they're goal is to not die. Everyone has resources (hit points and surges). If only one person is using them, there isn't enough teamwork being used.

 

[Lokathor]

The obvious solution to the 15mwd is to beef up milestones.

For example, all of your item daily powers can be refreshed in addition to giving you that extra item daily activation charge. Then, give everyone a +1 to hit.

There, now the party is in some ways stronger than they would be if they took an extended rest, and they're still weaker in some ways too (daily powers and healing surges). This makes taking an extended rest a serious tactical choice.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Why keep daily powers?

It rewards "good play" without making it "boring play". Good play means you don't use your dailies or use them only rarely. But that's boring, because the daily powers are the "kick-ass" powers that you actually want to use to "show off". if you don't get to use dailies because you're oh-so-clever, you unfortunately don't really get to do something cool mechanically.

Daily powers are also a way to allow characters to deal with foes of different difficulty levels and measure their success. If you deal with an encounter 2 levels above your level without using daily powers, you're pretty good. If you spend a few dailies after an encounter of your level, you probably screwed up.

This also provides a very "gamist" motivation to not use dailies - you still get to kick ass, and you can prove this by showing how few dailies you spend - without ever having to sit back and not working hard to make your encounters and at-wills count.
The milestones also are your reward for smart play - if you keep on going, you get action points and can do niffty things with them - plus getting more out of your magical items.

You still can rest after each encounter. But you don't have to rest just because the encounters would have been too difficult or you would have to stay back and aimlessly fire your crossbow.

 

[Rafe]

No amount of rules text can replace common sense.

In my opinion, no truer words have never been written on these forums.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think and hope we understand each other better now, Majoru.

Yes, it does. I had the privilege of attending a seminar with Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, and Chris Tulach on adventure design which was very beneficial in this regard. One of the things they hammered into me over and over was that 4e adventures should ALWAYS have a time limit of some sort. For a number of reasons. The primary one being that the daily power/action point/healing surge mechanic was designed around the idea that the PCs WANT to keep going. And that without some outside motivation it was too easy to simply do an extended rest after every encounter.

And I maintain that it feels rather dodgy to put in an restriction into the rules but have the motivator be DM and adventure specific.

Why not then either remove the restriction (from the rules), or enter a motivator (into the rules proper)?

My entire point being: why have only half the mechanic in the rules, and half outside?!?!

My experience is that the average fighter has 10 healing surges and that they lose 2-3 per combat. Which means they can fight about 4 combats before the group decides to take an extended rest. Most of the official adventures are designed around this pacing. So are most of the Living Forgotten Realms adventures. With luck and good teamwork, the number of combats could probably go up to as high as 6, but much beyond that is impossible.

Agreed. I'm sure you can see the source for my disappointment.


A bit of background:

I'm playing Keep of the Shadowfell, which seems like a very standard dungeon slash.

My experiences so far is that you fight some goblins, then you run out of healing surges and have to take an extended rest.

There's nothing natural to this at all - you simply must stop advancing because you've run out of healing surges. You don't stop because you have achieved something, you stop because the game has set up arbitrary limits.

This feels exactly like 3rd edition.

I didn't count the number of minutes, but it sure felt like fifteen to me...

 

[CapnZapp]

Addendum: to make myself really clear, I am amazed at the fact that while powers no longer may be a critical resource, now healing is.

Instead of the Wizard going nova and stating "I'm spent. We rest. No discussion" now we have the Fighter (very quickly) hitting rock bottom and stating "I'm spent. We rest. No discussion".

First they move away from the 15-minute adventuring day, then they implement healing in such a way as to immediately return it.

Why not instead relax the restrictions to allow DMs to tailor them around the needs of his story?

Hopefully I'm making myself understood this time around, because I'm really running out of explanative power here..