Stringing together multiple encounters

[the-golem]

The "Five-Minute Rest" concept is ridiculous if you take it literally. I never have such a strict interpretation in my games, it seems so silly.

Unless I specifically decide on running waves, quite a few things count as a rest. Searching through bodies, scouting the hallways for patrols, spending a few minutes to sort out a complex puzzle left by a mad archmage.

Even the example with the ships and the swimming would either be a chain-encounter, or individual encounters.

Now, for fun:
"Lets set down and have a cup of tea gents, I need ta rest my weary bones."
"We just stopped give minutes ago, why do we need to rest again?"
"Well, that squad of orcs caught us unawares, and .."
"Fine, you sit there if you want. I'm willing to bet those orcs have friends, and I sure aint gonna be sitting around waiting for them to find us."

 

[the Jester]

I would get really fussy about rules and exact timing in that case. Especially if this was an out of the blue thing.

Wait, are you suggesting the dm should warn you when the encounters are coming?

I have to say, that's a perspective I have never encountered before.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

The "Five-Minute Rest" concept is ridiculous if you take it literally. I never have such a strict interpretation in my games, it seems so silly.

Unless I specifically decide on running waves, quite a few things count as a rest. Searching through bodies, scouting the hallways for patrols, spending a few minutes to sort out a complex puzzle left by a mad archmage.

Even the example with the ships and the swimming would either be a chain-encounter, or individual encounters.

Now, for fun:
"Lets set down and have a cup of tea gents, I need ta rest my weary bones."
"We just stopped give minutes ago, why do we need to rest again?"
"Well, that squad of orcs caught us unawares, and .."
"Fine, you sit there if you want. I'm willing to bet those orcs have friends, and I sure aint gonna be sitting around waiting for them to find us."

I agree. A short rest doesn't need to be defined that exactly in your game. For organized play, yes, but at home, not so much.

A DM is perfectly within rights to simply declare a short rest has occured, or that a quick body-loot was enough before the next wave comes, or even the amount of time it takes to move down the hall to the next room.

My group in our Saturday game is caught in just such a scenario, and I hope that the DM will be kind enough to grant us our encounter powers. Failing that, our party of 7 will be hard pressed in our flight from the six level+8 elites that one of our number accidentally triggered.

 

[the Jester]

The "Five-Minute Rest" concept is ridiculous if you take it literally.

I don't think so at all. If you fight hard for a minute or two, with your adrenaline pumping at full "life on the line" mode, I think five minutes is a generously short time to take to catch your breath and get yourself ready to move on.

 

[Aulirophile]

Comparing it to real life is not such a good idea. Martial Artists who compete train themselves to deal with whatever recovery time the competition allows, and they fight for one hell of a lot longer then the average 24-36 seconds 4e combats last. That recovery time can be as little as 30 seconds in some cases. Between rounds they may just drop on the mat and breathe, but they're ready to go 30 seconds later and can go all out for the next round. Boxing is similar.

Five minutes is unnecessarily long by real life standards for people trained to Fight all out and then recover.

If you want historical examples the rotation time of Roman legions and Spartan Phalanxes is fairly well documented. Ditto, they didn't need five minutes. They did rest, fight, rest, fight, rest, fight for a long time in some cases. Way longer then we are discussing here.

 

[the Jester]

Sports are very different than fighting for your life. That's ignoring the possibility of plate armor and 80+ lbs. of weapons and treasure on your back while you do it. Boxers are carrying the weight of their gloves, trunks and mouthpiece. Bear in mind, too, that most of the adventurers are not in the peak of physical condition- a lot of them will have decent but not high physical stats, while a martial artist or boxer will be in fairly peak shape.

I'm not saying you can only fight a few rounds and then need to rest; there's no reason you can't have a combat that lasts for 600 rounds or more if the circumstances somehow allow. And I'm certainly not saying that D&D attempts to, or should attempt to, model reality here. I'm just saying that the five-minute rest is actually quite reasonable.

 

[Aulirophile]

Sports are very different than fighting for your life. That's ignoring the possibility of plate armor and 80+ lbs. of weapons and treasure on your back while you do it. Boxers are carrying the weight of their gloves, trunks and mouthpiece. Bear in mind, too, that most of the adventurers are not in the peak of physical condition- a lot of them will have decent but not high physical stats, while a martial artist or boxer will be in fairly peak shape.

I'm not saying you can only fight a few rounds and then need to rest; there's no reason you can't have a combat that lasts for 600 rounds or more if the circumstances somehow allow. And I'm certainly not saying that D&D attempts to, or should attempt to, model reality here. I'm just saying that the five-minute rest is actually quite reasonable.

See comment about Roman Legions and Greek Phalanxes. Less then five minutes recovery in the rotation? Check. Fighting for your life? Check. Heavy armor? Not plate, but check. Especially in the case of a Roman Legionnaire. I've held the shields they used (well, historically accurate replicas), they are heavy.

5 minutes is unnecessarily long if you want to compare this to real life. Going to a non-physical class you might have some kind of argument, but then I'd point out that these are adventures fighting for their lives on a regular basis whose abilities are explicitly extra-human in 4e (and most of the non-physical classes have no weight issues anyway, so cross that off the list. How is wearing regular clothes and holding a paring knife physically taxing?). Training for a low refractory period can result in a large amount of stamina and physical strength, but it doesn't have to. You could be a real life Str 8 human and still have a low refractory period. All it takes is regular interval training.

So regular humans don't need 5 minutes with appropriate training (adventurers would call this "adventuring"), but super humans do. Buh?

Regardless, I'm OK with the RAW of 5 minutes, and I am sort of kind of OK with a DM limiting resting if he does it in a reasonable way, but there should absolutely be a power recovery mechanic to prevent degenerating into At-Will spam or something else to do with the standard actions and, hopefully, something else to soak some damage. For no other reason then it is boring if you get down to just at-wills. In the scenario the OP presents, pray to the ocean Gods to wash your wounds as you swam. Religion DC 10+1/2 level, for every 2pts over the DC you get a single use of an encounter power back or can spend a surge. Could do a similar thing with athletics (swimming is trivial for you, think long distance swimmers). That'd be pretty interesting.

 

[ffy]

usually we dont necessarily take the short rest = 5 minutes rule as it is written. i am more partial to the prospect of a little bit of downtime being enough for the heroes to catch a breath. but if the do something that is straining during the downtime they wont have a chance to catch a breath - for example looting corpses and getting into the next room in a dungeon is enough time for our heroes to have taken a short rest, while running from enemies at one castle gate to another to fight the enemies breaching through there is straining and will not give them the time to catch a breath.

when i put my players through an arena fighting championship that was essentially a test of their endurance and showmanship, we went through something like 7 or 8 encounters (lvl-1 to lvl+2) in a row. we all enjoyed it, even though they didnt have any time to rest. though they had the ability to regain their powers during the fight. for example, if a barbarian leaps down from a pillar to decapitate a duergar with an avalanche strike, the crowd goes wild and that spurs him on - he can use that encounter power again. meanwhile, a warlord gets thrown across the arena to relative safety away from the fight, and while he is down there he can catch a breah (stay down for a turn, roll endurance to see how much that helps, for example he gets to use one surge and get back one encounter power) before charging back in. playing to the crowd and imagining what just happened to their character were important aspects of staying alive in that long long fight.

in a long chain of encounters like this (7 or 8) it is definitely important for the PCs to have a chance to regain surges, powers and hit points, or it will probably get boring and dissolve into an at-will spam, after which they will die.

for a shorter chain of encounters (3 or 4) i would say it is important to know what the PCs can do. if all the PC strikers are built for single target damage, throwing 3 encounters lvl-1 at them that are filled with mobs of enemies is still bound to get boring. what use is one-rounding a monster if theres still 20 more to come? it will still dissolve into an at-will spam and get boring before the end.

i read somewhere that the 'die hard' effect is important for planning enjoyable encounters and adventures. what the 'die hard effect' means is that the PCs are heroic if they are beaten, bloodied, hanging to life by a thread against overwhelming odds and then win. getting into the climactic action sequence of the movie, a hero that is bloodied and without healing surges, with a couple of dailies and encounter powers up his sleeve and armed with an action point (in die hard that would be the bloody, dirty-wifebeater-wearing john mcclane armed with a desert eagle) is much more heroic than a hero with almost full surges, relatively unharmed, yet without his 'teeth' (in the movie that would be a well-groomed john mcclane straight off a taxi, going up against the boss armed with a walking cane). both have a good chance of dying in that climactic fight, but if the second guy dies he might feel cheated by the DM for putting his character in a situation like that.

stringing encounters together without the chance to rest there is a good chance you will have a fight to remember on your hands. but there is also the chance of it becoming a boring slugfest in which the players might feel cheated at some points. it comes down to how the DM organises it, and that organisation comes down to how well the DM knows the players. it will definitely be more work than just taking three random encounters, throwing them in one after the other and going with it. in my eyes there is no clear-cut answer on what exactly a DM is to do.

 

[kaomera]

It made sense in this context: we were on a series of ships and had to swim between them, so it was not a resting situation. We were (are) on a time clock, so we couldn't just spend the downtime and then move on.

Amusingly (for me, at least) shipboard scenarios where the first thing that had come to my mind when you described your situation. But anything that keeps the players busy for longer than a combat can do this. IMO it's more interesting when the players have a real choice - if you have enough time to either take the rest or do the skill challenge (or whatever), frex.

I have to say, that's a perspective I have never encountered before.

It's what gets referred to a lot as "player entitlement", the idea that arbitrary DM decisions are basically unfair. IMO it comes about because players want and expect to have a fundamental understanding of how the game works, and in part due to picking up on the habits of the DM or game. If you've gone through multiple levels without any real penalty for a "5-minute workday", then the players are likely to develop a tendency to blow all of their daily resources each time an encounter starts. And if, suddenly (at least from a player perspective), they have a situation where they are forced into back-to-back encounters, they're liable to feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them.

How much "warning" the PCs should get is going to vary wildly between groups and with their experience. It would be fairly trivial to take a group of new players and "train" them to the point that it becomes trivial to engineer a TPK. If X thing always works, then they expect it to not suddenly stop working. And it can be tricky even with more experienced gamers, I know I've seen players take specific character options for reasons I found pretty counter-indicated. In fact I think that players with significant experience with another DM (and especially if it's just one, as her specific quirks can be easily seen as part of the "system" of D&D) can actually be a worse trap in some cases.

Of course, a lot of this goes away if you have even a good core of people you really know and have been playing with for a while to call on as players.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I actually just did this my last session - 6 n or n-1 encounters (they are about 1/2 way through them) seperated by parts of a running skill challenge. Basically, they were rushing to get the McGuffin from some baddies before another group could. However, unlike the OP's, my PCs could take a short rest if they wanted (and indeed, they've taken 1 so far) - its just that every short rest counted as a failure for the running skill challenge.

Now, I did tell them ahead of time that a rest would count as a failure... otherwise it wouldn't have been very fair, as the default assumption of the system is that you can take a rest between every encounter, should you so like.

So far, its working pretty well - hasn't felt much harder, though, as the PCs have more healing than you can shake a stick at (with a taclord, a pacifist laser cleric and a chaladin as 3 of the 4 PCs), plus both my rolling and my tactics have been... very bad.

I will admit, though, that it does lead to PCs with nothing but at-wills to use, which can be a bit dull... on the other hand, it does encourage them to use some of the dailies early (my PCs tend to hoard dailies), which hopefully will make the final showdown more climatic. I should know more in 2 weeks.