Reasoning behind Extended Rests?

[MaxterTemplar]

just one thing

Yeah, how -does- a Fighter blow 10+ healing surges in a single fight anyways?

Second Wind is 1, then two healing words, and let's even give 2 paladin lay on hands to be frisky....

....how many leader/paladin classes are you sporting that you -can- blow your entire wad of surges in a single fight? I just don't see it.

just one thing to add here.
Paladin's lay on hands expend the paladin's healing surges not his/her target's.

one way to expend every healing surge is to be a wisdom=20+ paladin and waste 5+ lay on hands, 1 healing surge, 1 armor power, and the rest on potions/daily powers (daily powers that allow-to-use/consume healing surges) but it sounds unrazonable, unless you are fighting a Solo monster, a red dragon for example.

 

[MaxterTemplar]

this tread really went away from the original subject.

I've been wondering about how D&D is built-up around having daily resources that you need to rest for the "night" to regain.

Obviously, one reason is "that is how it has always been". But 4th Edition is very much it's own game, and so I am not satisfied with that answer.

Another is "to make you hold back on your kewlest powers".

But that implies that resting for the night (i.e. taking an extended rest; you can obviously squeeze in three or four bouts of adventuring in a single 24-hour period) is bad somehow. Something to be avoided.

But why is that? Where - in the rules of the PHB and DMG - does it specify the consequences of resting "too often"?

Okay, so once in a while your DM will tell you "the evil High Priest has now started his ritual of World Doom, which you all know will take precisely 48 hours to complete. What do you do?" and there you have a specific and perfectly adequate reason to fight your way to the top of his mountain stronghold without taking more than 48/6=8 extended rests, or you will have Failed.

But most (if not all!) adventures doesn't have anything even remotedly as constrained and inflexible as this.

Quite often you gain vague hints that you must act heroically and with some modicum of urgency or Bad Stuff will happen. But seldom will Bad Stuff happen just because you rolled badly the last encounter so you feel you have to take that one extra Extended Rest.

So why not take Extended Rests once you've used up your Daily powers and most of your item dailies as well.

What is the incentive to keep going, right down to your very last healing surges? When "everybody" seems to agree taking an Extended Rest is not only rightly deserved, but mandatory as well...

And taking it a step further - why is 4th edition still designed around this concept? Why is "not fighting for six hours" considered to be such a penalty that players are expected to avoid it, even if it means they regain their best powers?

All thoughts on this would be appreciated! (including links to any previous discussion, if any

We are all aware of the "beneficts" of keep going and the fact that now in 4e is easiest to keep going for several encounters before you need to take a nap.

but the point is, that always is easiest and safer to take an extended rest every combat, some beneficts exist if you continue, like the milestones, AP, magic item usage, but always will be the less dangerous way to victory to go to every encounter at 100%. And there is no rule in the PHB or DMG or whatsoever that prevent/discourage the ABUSE of the extended rest. (other than time limitations of course)

you can go nasty and disturb them in their sleep, but you will be the bad guy and that is not bad at all but, be nasty and you will run a game without players in no time.

if you really want to apply a penality to lazzy characters that sleep all day and then have an encounter or (rarely) two, you can go two ways.

1.- Every season cover determined amount of game time ie: 2 days, so, if they end these days early, they will end the gamming seasson early too. this would be very anoying to your players, when they rant about this just say, "you will never gain a level sleeping arround all day"

2.- being less extreme and house rule that extended rest will give a penality of -1 (or -2) to atack rolls (and maybe skill checks too) because they are sleepy, and that penality goes away after reaching 1 millestone. that would give them at least one incentive to keep going, because they need to "warm" every single day before the real challenges, you can also allow a little of "sparring" betwen the characters to warm em up, this will consume little resources (but never noting) but it will not be deadly (much).

you can imagine any sort of penality for resting too often like make'em grow fat, weak or even stupid because their combat abilities are rusting. you know, you are not to be very heroic-like if you are sit on your ass all day. of course you are going to lose your phisical condition (that you got after "endless practice" as the flavor text says in 4e)

if your real problem is the expendable resourses, you may as well erradicating the extended rest to make your party fight forever.
- removing the extended rest
- recharging the so called "daily" powers with millestones
- recharging certain ammount of healing surges with millestones (2 or 3 would do)

you can do any kind of crasy stuff to get rid of the problem, but a rational conversation with the players is often a best choice. Any rule that restrict you to rest would give the feel that you canot prepare for a great fight because if they fight all day they will spend resources and if they rest, they will be less efective.

 

[CapnZapp]

if your real problem is the expendable resourses, you may as well erradicating the extended rest to make your party fight forever.
- removing the extended rest
- recharging the so called "daily" powers with millestones
- recharging certain ammount of healing surges with millestones (2 or 3 would do)

Thanks for bringing the thread back on track!

This solution may be crude, but it does accomplish one major feat: it puts the power to decide when characters can heal up firmly into the hands of the DM. (This because the DM is granted the right to override the default of the two-encounters-a-milestone; possibly simulating increased weariness by spacing milestones longer and longer apart)

Without going through the extra step of involving the plot, that is. (Meaning that the extended rest pacing should IMO be independent of the number of 18 hour chunks available until the adventure's conclusion)

This provides me with another angle from which I can explain my viewpoint:

Some frantic we-have-less-than-an-hour adventures might need several extended rests. Some languid multi-month exploration adventures might work best if only a single extended rest will be available for the entire length (perhaps a desert excavation, where only one oasis will be encountered).

Hopefully this helps you all to understand why I'm still "trolling" this thread

At least, these seem to be plausible conclusions given that there haven't been too many really convincing arguments why the extended rest needs to be exactly as given by the DMG (except the good-old "because this is how it has always been"). I can't be sure, of course.

 

[CapnZapp]

Returning to what triggered this thread in the first place, it was the horrid realization that if you forget to check your remaining healing surges after each fight, you could end up having zero surges when you lose all your hit points.

With increasing horror, it dawned on us that this leaves us with no alternatives whatsoever. Regardless of the abilities of the rest of the party, we cannot heal you, we cannot save you. No matter how many Healing Surges, Second Winds, Heal skills, or healing powers we have.

This felt like such a trap we were convinced we had missed something.

There simply didn't seem to be any in-game or out-of-game reason (balance-wise, story-wise, pacing-wise or other-wise) why a character should die like that.

But no. Instead, this started off my thought process which is what eventually led to this thread.

Just so you know

 

[CapnZapp]

One option would be this:

Only in combat do consumables and daily powers use up healing surges as written. Out of combat, you simply don't need to spend a healing surge to use, say, a Healing Potion. Direct use of Healing Surges does not become free, however. And neither does attempts at cheese by using encounter powers at five minute intervals - they too use up Healing Surges as usual.
Rationale: Assuming what happens inside combat is what's interesting, why not allow the party to convert gold into HS-free healing during short rests? This increases the party's resilience against the 4-encounter adventuring day without boosting their in-combat strength.

Combined with, say, "you regain one Healing Surge each milestone" and a party (or, more to the point, individual party members) could recover their (healing) strength without having to sleep on it. Any attempts to "game" the system by seeking out easy encounters just to have the milestones roll in would be countered easily by the DM, who simply makes any more milestones dry out.

This could enable a party to move on despite one PC becoming "dry", just by having him or her hang back a bit. Eventually the party as a whole would be worn down, but ending at such a time isn't the problem. (It is being forced to end when a single party member is "out" of non-transferable non-renewable resources, whether that be high-level spell slots or healing surges which is the problem)

(With enough interest, we could fork off this post as a new thread in Houserules)

 

[DracoSuave]

Outside of combat, you don't need to use items to heal, so that's not really helping much.

Also, if you run out of healing surges at the end of the fight and end up surprised you're with no healing surges... that's a tactical mistake on your own fault. You -made a mistake.- The penalty for making this mistake is not being able to heal a hit point during a short rest, except to get back up to 1 if you're below 0. You should have been paying attention to your surges and acting accordingly.

Think of surges not as healing opportunities, but more like your -actual- hit points. When they run out, you need to rest, because -now- you're injured for sure. You need to stop taking risks, and you need to back away and let the rest of the party (who probably haven't pissed away their healing surges) take up the burden of damage. Yes, sometimes the Strikers or the Leader has to get smacked around.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Returning to what triggered this thread in the first place, it was the horrid realization that if you forget to check your remaining healing surges after each fight, you could end up having zero surges when you lose all your hit points.

With increasing horror, it dawned on us that this leaves us with no alternatives whatsoever. Regardless of the abilities of the rest of the party, we cannot heal you, we cannot save you. No matter how many Healing Surges, Second Winds, Heal skills, or healing powers we have.

You can be stabilized, unless you take damage again, you won't die. You can then get back to 1HP after a short rest.

Also, this ignores a number of healing powers that do not require the character in question to spend a healing surge ... magic items, Paladin, a number of spells etc.

You may have no immediate options, most of the solutions are something that you would have had to do earlier, for example better use of surges, had the group ready to supply healing without surge use, taking a feat like durable to avoid running out of surges so quickly, getting the right magic item.

However, most "alternatives" would likely involve magic items and spell choices anyway, so the options that exist are already there. If you didn't have the alternative available at the time, you'd likely have to either perform a ritual to make the magic item, or go and buy it ... which is perhaps about as time consuming as just taking a rest.

Mentioning rituals though ... there is a ritual (I forget where, I know it's not in the PHB) that allows you to trade daily powers for healing surges. Rituals in that fashion (a way to spend some money and time performing a ritual to transfer or transform resources).

This felt like such a trap we were convinced we had missed something.

There simply didn't seem to be any in-game or out-of-game reason (balance-wise, story-wise, pacing-wise or other-wise) why a character should die like that.

A character wouldn't die like that, since they can even regain conciousness despite being at zero surges. They may have only 1 HP without any of the various non-surge using powers (or use someone elses surge power, or transfer of surge power) However, it is, in-game, a case of a character having reached the "limit", they've pushed their body as hard as they can that day. And out-of-game, the point of tracking surges as a resource is rendered moot if there isn't a consequence to them running out.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Returning to what triggered this thread in the first place, it was the horrid realization that if you forget to check your remaining healing surges after each fight, you could end up having zero surges when you lose all your hit points.

With increasing horror, it dawned on us that this leaves us with no alternatives whatsoever. Regardless of the abilities of the rest of the party, we cannot heal you, we cannot save you. No matter how many Healing Surges, Second Winds, Heal skills, or healing powers we have.

This felt like such a trap we were convinced we had missed something.

There simply didn't seem to be any in-game or out-of-game reason (balance-wise, story-wise, pacing-wise or other-wise) why a character should die like that.

But no. Instead, this started off my thought process which is what eventually led to this thread.

Just so you know

No offense, but why should the game be redesigned because someone might not keep track of one very important number? If you're using Character Sheets, there's a spot right on there for your healing surges. Each time you use one, you deduct one from the total so that you always know how many you have. It's the PC's responsibility to keep track of this information. If they don't, then it's no different than playing in a previous edition and realizing "Hey guys, I totally wasn't even paying attention to my hitpoints, which is why I only just now realized that the last attack should have killed me. Whoops!"

What's next? Should we get rid of death saves because someone might not track how many they missed until they figure out that they missed all 3 and they're now dead? Or get rid of ability scores since someone might forget their Strength mod to their attacks because they weren't paying attention? It's a PC's responsibility to get themselves some form of a character sheet (and there's a pretty good one right in the back of the PHB. $0.10 at Kinko's will get you a copy...) and use it to track all of the relevant numbers in the game. It's their job to do that, and always has been.

Additionally, as someone else pointed out, if you have no surges you can be healed to 1 hitpoint. This is stated in several different places. So if you were to run completely out of surges your party could heal you back up to 1 hitpoint and you could leave to take an extended rest.

 

[Derren]

Are your players likely to burn 1000 gp per encounter for that purpose, when they could reasonably carry on? Seems like an expensive habit to keep up.

There is also a magical item in the Adventurer Vault (Dimensional Knife I think. It was in one of the previews) which does exactly the same as daily power.

 

[CapnZapp]

Outside of combat, you don't need to use items to heal, so that's not really helping much.

You still need to spend healing surges, though.

My problem is that one character easily runs out of healing surges ahead of the others if he makes a wrong move during an encounter. My problem is that if one character runs out of healing surges, the party needs to stop for the day, even if the other characters are perfectly fine.

This suggestion is intended to ameliorate this, by
1) as long as you survive the encounter, you could gulp down a few hundred gp's worth of healing potions to heal back up without having to waste your last healing surges.
2) even if you had to be rescued in-combat (spending several HS more than other characters), if there is some modest number of healing surge returning over time, you could come back from your mistake. Again, this could possibly avoid the premature extended rest.

What this is all about is that extended rests feels right when most the party's resources have been exhausted.

As compared to when most party members are still close to 100% capacity - it is here taking extended rests feel wrong.

This isn't to say my suggestions will work. Your feedback is appreciated. Just that this comment of yours didn't really seem relevant?