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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5835540" data-attributes="member: 54877">Renewable, important resources that are not automatically brought back in a short time, but can be under certain circumstances, also helps a lot. Let me go long way around for a moment.  Say you've got five characters in a Rule Compendium (or equivalent) game: Fighter, Cleric, Magic User, Rogue, and Elf. Make them about 6th level. It is a fairly tough game. The party has a couple of minor encounters, then they have a big fight and get mauled pretty severely. Hit points are down, cure spells are gone, magic items are depleted, and the MU and Elf have got little offense left. If this happens enough, the party might at least consider "camping" every time they think they can get away with it. After all, in their current state, one more moderate fight will probably lead to some character deaths. Consider the 4E equivalent of this game. That's 10 daily powers available, plus whatever utility slots are daily. Then you've got a bunch of healing surges spread among the party. OTOH, the at-wills are always there, and the encounter abilities are coming back with the five-minute rest. So there is only so down the party can get, but they can be down enough to matter. However, the problem here is that daily powers and surges have exactly the same characteristics as the RC game, only muted due to scope. Meanwhile, the encounter powers come back automatically, with nothing but the rest. Now take a hypothetical mixture of these two games with a few other things thrown in. You get XP for the treasure you gain--minus whatever you spend on equipment. The "magic user" has a wand of magic missiles (that she found), which can be recharged in town--at moderate but still felt cost. There are encounter abilities available that take five minutes to recharge via some moderately expensive stored crystals. Free "surge" use is rather limited, but you can spend more with the right consumable magic. Camping all night can restore daily abilities--at substantially more gold cost compared to doing so in a restful environment. Suddenly, rests are much more situational. Namely, they are a good idea when the party is hurt and has already recovered a lot of treasure, but not so hot until some treasure has been recovered. There are, of course, a lot of other ways you could set up the same dynamics. But the basic are that resting has to hurt in some way that matters directly to the end goal of the activity the party is resting from. You want the party to be tempted to rest the more banged up they get, but otherwise have strong reasons to press on. The typical 15MAD game situation occurs because the game gives them strong reasons to rest, and then the adventure must provide even stronger reasons to press on.   (At the other extreme, this can lead to other distortions of play--such as every fight being a killer, the social contract encouraging the party to press on even when the game is screaming to rest, and then the DM has to start pulling punches, outright fudging, or other ways to not overly punish the party for following the social contract.)</blockquote>

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