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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7168154" data-attributes="member: 996"> I remember that, yes.  Similar to the 13A solution, but more complex, with time pressure still the governing limitation on players wanting to take 'extra' rests, as opposed to 13A's more story-oriented 'campaign loss.'   Up thread I had a very minor epiphany:  RPGs don't just juxtapose roleplaying and gaming, they integrate them.  That is, an RPG isn't x% RP and y% G, it's 100% RPG.  The mistake people make is thinking that only talking in character is RP, or that any dice-rolling is just gaming.  If I, as an aging, unattractive, socially awkward nerd, whose never been to a method acting class in his life, speak in character as an 18 CHA hero, I'm am so not going to pull it off, but the game is there to say "no, wait, the character has an 18 CHA, and that's  +4, and he's proficient in diplomacy for another +4 at this level," and the DM is there to take that into account and rule on what that character, conveying the meaning of what I said, would achieve - or call for that roll.  Making the roll doesn't kill the RP, it's part of it, because it's helping to model the character.The same goes for a tactical encounter.  I can, as a system-master, choose the best spell for the situation, and the best action for system, based on the rules, and that, in turn, maps to the character being a skilled spellcaster who knows what spell to cast when - I don't have to shout magic words and make weird hand-gestures, even if I could rock the Dr Strange thing - but, I'm still playing the character, not myself, and need to judge what he'd do, independent of meta-knowledge I may have about the campaign, and even what he /should/ do based on the story.  Taking it (all the way) back to the Elephant that we've been so rudely ignoring, how do you integrate a game with (ironicaly) a 'rigid' rule about resting (short rest = 1 hr, long = 8hrs once per 24 hrs), and an only slightly less 'rigid' balance point of 6-8 encounters and 2-3 short rests between long rests, with the range of Big Stories your "Big DM" might want to tell?  By giving him a few alternate resting rules and having him choose one at the start of the campaign?  Well, it can work - if you want to run a campaign that's frenetic or languid all the way through, or if you want to consistently stress resources in a Fantasy Vietnam theme, or if you want to have huge mega-encounters that the party has to pull out all the stops to defeat and rest up before the next one.  That's a modest range, right there, as long as you don't vary them within the campaign.For a more varied sort of campaign, the Big DM just flexes his Empowerment and rules whether resting is possible or not and how long it takes.  For a series of highly varied, but structured challenges, the Lighter DM would just plan out how long a series of 6-8 challenges should take, and put a long rest before it and at the end, since he's exercising that sort of control, anyway.  Whether the challenges are spread over an hour or a month shouldn't matter.Sound good?(And, yes, I'm aware I just re-itterated, then slightly re-framed a solution Zapp advocated pages and pages ago...  hopefully, though, it makes some sense in the context of the discussion since then.)</blockquote>

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