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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4732375" data-attributes="member: 82106">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4732051" target="_blank"> D&D without healing surges </a>I thought this idea was worth exploring in a bit more detail. It seems like a potentially elegant solution to 15 minute adventuring day and healing nova behavior exhibited by many parties.First of all it is totally Paul's idea, I'm just wanting to explore it a bit further. So thanks for the idea Paul!I think all 4e DMs are fairly familiar with the 15 minute, 1 encounter, extended rest adventuring day phenomenon. And yes, before you post all the usual solutions, there are various ways to discourage it. Lets not recapitulate them all here, please! The long and short of it is deadlines and gauntlets work but get old fast. Various other tweaks to surges, milestones, rests, etc may also work, they may even work better than Paul's solution, but that's what I would like to find out.There is another issue, maybe more or less of one depending on your viewpoint and play style, which is the healing nova. 4e appears to have been designed to basically drip out healing over 3-4 combat encounters. The rules pretty much seem to presume that a party can access somewhere around 1/3 of its surges, maybe a bit less during combat. Interestingly this relies heavily on players using a typical mix of characters. What happens if a party has 3 leaders? What happens if all the members of a party MC to a leader class and gain an extra healing power? What happens if every member of a party does his utmost to get healing items? It turns out a party can pretty easily be built that can do a "healing nova" and access a VERY high fraction of its HS in one encounter. This can really encourage the 15 minute day syndrome (at least in the opinions of some of us).Garthanos suggested just doing away with healing surges. That certainly does away with the problem, but is there another way?Paul's idea is to simply do away with healing surge RECOVERY. At first glance that sounds like going in the wrong direction, but is it? If taking an extended rest won't get your surges back, then you might as well soldier on. Obviously characters MUST eventually heal and a party drained of all its surges isn't going to survive for too much longer. But if as Paul suggests we budget out a sequence of encounters, punctuated by "vacations" (the old style extended rest), then the best resource managing parties will reap a big reward. How is this different from existing short rest, extended rest? If this new type of break, which I will call Long Rest, is say 1 week long, then it is long enough that its NARRATIVE significance and plot significance are unequivocal. The bad guy might or might not escape if the party camps for the night to recover, but if they have to camp for a week, that makes it clear that the bad guy is long gone.It also introduces a certain degree of grittiness back into the game and brings damage recovery a bit closer to the realm of realism. I contend that has positive narrative implications as well. It no longer requires the DM to suspend the ordinary rules of healing in order to present a wounded foe or ally for instance. It may make it possible to introduce effects that more gradually degrade a character's health as well. And finally it creates a bigger distinction between normal healing and something like a healing fountain or location that restores healing surges.The main question I have is does this kind of mechanism increase the percieved cost of actions which consume a healing surge so much that it reduces their utility below the threshold of viability? Does it actually have that effect at all? If so is it a major problem and what else would have to be tweaked in order to make it right?</blockquote>

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