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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6861533" data-attributes="member: 6787650">There are a couple of resources that scale this way: Rage and Bladesong and AoE spells like Hypnotic Pattern. If you want to counter those abilities, though, you don't have to break encounters up into multiple encounters--you just need to stretch encounters out longer or spread over a greater spatial area. Rage in particular is vulnerable to spatial dispersion--if the Barbarian spends one round Dashing towards a new target, and doesn't take any damage that round, his Rage ends.5E is designed so that a fight that a fight of 1000 adjusted XP is supposed to use up twice as many resources as a fight of 2000 adjusted XP. (It's not perfect but it's tuned that way to the best of the designers' ability, while still remaining simple enough to run.) By splitting the adventuring day into fewer fights, you make each given fight deadlier (more likely to cause a death/failure, and therefore more interested IMO) but you don't make long rest abilities more powerful in the general case. You do, however, limit the number of times that short-rest abilities like Action Surge and warlock spells can come into play because obviously they can't rest for an hour in the middle of an encounter unless the players go out of their way to make that possible (e.g. Rope Trick).If you want to turn up the difficulty on your Hard fights, use more intelligent enemies. Drow and Hobgoblins are favorites of mine. They're smart enough to do things like build fortifications with partial cover, to Dodge when it's appropriate, to drop prone when under missile fire, to withdraw and wait for Rage or spells like Flaming Sphere to burn themselves out, to take advantage of lighting conditions to gain advantage on attacks, etc. I've killed more PCs in "Easy"/"Medium" fights with drow and hobgoblins than I have in "Deadly" fights with melee monsters like Umber Hulks and Iron Golems. Opposable thumbs and large brains FTW!</blockquote>

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