Stopping the "extended rest after every encounter"

[deleteme123456]

Anyone got any suggestions short of sledge hammer house rules to prohibit my PCs from idling around for half a day after each encounter to regain daily powers and healing surges?

I think they should be capable of doing at least 3 if not 4 encounters per day, and have implied that they will get ambushed if they camp excessively.

Right now though they're right outside a major town (doing KotS), so they had one encounter, went in and rested (which I could believe plotwise, since they spent most of the day exploring town and meeting NPCs), came out, had another encounter, in which they used one daily, one action point, and one character used half his healing surges. We stopped there for the night, but I'm already expecting them to turn back inside and wait around until they can take a rest again. I can't very well ambush them inside town without destroying the plot.

I am considering bringing even more monsters to the encounter and just repeating the ambush every time they leave town until they destroy the lair, and maybe advancing early to the encounter on pages 60-61 but having the main enemy there gain an additional "teleport to saftey" ability so that character will be around to harass them again. This would represent the increasing power of evil as time progresses.

 

[generalhenry]

PUNISHMENT TIME

have the monsters reinforce the first encounter harder than before.
make it clear that they're loosing ground.

And add some villager corpses to extend the guilt.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

You can only gain the benefits of an extended rest once every 24 hours.. so for your party to accomplish this the next day they will have to 'rest' for almost the entire day...turning it into a 'one encounter per day and lets wait for dawn'

Shy of a sledgehammer? ... let them now OOC that the first encounter will be noticed by the next gaming day and whatever lies ahead will have time to prepare and reinforce... then toss in one or two more encounters or bump up the CR of each encounter by 1 by adding reinforcements.

well, that may be a bit of a sledgehammer, but it also fits the storyline. Doing this will let your players know that the game adjust to their actions and inaction.

Later, make sure that your plotlines allow reinforcements and/or additional defenses within a certain timeline. You will find your group adapting to the 3 to 5 encoutner per day paradigm rather quickly.
{or you might pull a TPK or two... }

 

[deleteme123456]

I thought it was every 12 hours but that also could be houseruled.

 

[Glak]

give them a magic ring

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Its a minimum of 12 hours between extended rests and you need to have slept at least 6 of the 24 hours preceeding the end of the rest.

That means a minimum of 18 hours between encounters if you go for an extended rest between each one.

Of course, just like earlier editions, 4e is silent on forcing PC's to get tired and there are no rules on having to go to sleep outside of the wizard power

 

[77IM]

Of course, just like earlier editions, 4e is silent on forcing PC's to get tired and there are no rules on having to go to sleep outside of the wizard power

The tiredness rule is the part about getting 6 hours of sleep within the past 24. Rather than imposing numerical penalties, a group that isn't sleeping enough will find that they don't recover their daily powers and healing surges during the extended rest. So they can still run around doing stuff without taking fatigue penalties, but they won't have their best tricks (powers) or energy reserves (healing surges) available because they are tired.

-- 77IM

 

[generalhenry]

even at 12 hours, that's plenty of time for monsters to be monsters and kill innocent villagers.

 

[mattdm]

Of course, just like earlier editions, 4e is silent on forcing PC's to get tired and there are no rules on having to go to sleep outside of the wizard power

The little bar on Extend Rest says you don't have to sleep every time, but the text afterward says "You need at least 6 hours of sleep every day to keep functioning at your best. If, at the end of an extended rest, you haven’t slept at least 6 hours in the last 24, you gain no benefit from that extended rest." So that's a lot more than 3.5 says.


There's still no rules for what happens if you don't actually need to regain anything an extended rest would give you, but the Endurance skill is wide-open enough that I for sure would be requiring endurance checks if someone wants to not sleep for days on end.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Keeping things moving

Well, other than extended rests only work once per day, I would have them hounded by encounters until they can find a safe place to rest.

Once players get into a dangerous area (dungeon, hostile wild area) I don't allow an extended rest unless they can find someplace fortified to hole away. A secure campsite or a room they can barricade until morning. It's just too dangerous for them. It's just like camping in certain ways - you find the right campsite. You don't set up camp in a game trail.

Another tactic is to run into another group of adventurers and/or mercenaries. Have them mock the PCs and spread word about how they're lazy and shiftless. Ask them how their beauty sleep was. Have otherwise incompetent soldiers accuse them of being soft. Other NPCs can bring it up and make fun of them. Most religions have dogma related to being idle as a bad thing (the devil's playground, etc.)