This "resting at 9:05 AM" business

Let's look at it this way. According to the game design, an encounter with a CR of your level is supposed to drain 25% of the party's resources. So after 4 of those, a party is supposed to be pretty much out of resources (spells, HP, etc) and will be forced to retreat and rest. A battle lasts an average of what, maybe 5 rounds? That's 30 seconds. You're talking about as little as 2 minutes of combat wiping out the party's resources.

How many encounters are there in a dungeon? In a largish dungeon, there can easily be 15-20. A dungeon is also dense, meaning that the party encounters them quickly. So it's possible that a good party that manages resources wisely still runs out of resources in the first half hour.

So if you don't like the paradigm of "Rest, hack hack hack, retreat, repeat" then there are a lot of things you can do:

- Make the adventure take place in several different locations, each of which containing just enough encounters to challenge the party and also force some resource management. If the party somehow knows that there will be 3 encounters at this location, the wizard has to choose which of the 3 encounters he's going to use his only fireball in.

- Make time a resource. If it's a dungeon, make sure that the party knows if they retreat and rest, the enemy has time to prepare for them. When they reenter, the enemy has fled, or barred doors, or set traps, or prepared ambushes. You know, things an intelligent enemy would do in a dynamic situation. Then the party has to decide whether to use expendable resources to do more combat and force a more advantageous situation, or to pull back early and possibly waste resources the next day just fighting to get back where they were when they left.

- Give the party a time limit. Tell them straight out that they have 2 days to clear out the dungeon, or recover the artifact of x, or whatever. Note that if you do this, you should make the goal possible. Expecting the PCs to go through 20 CR-level encounters in 4 hours is ridiculous and unrealistic. Forcing the PCs to do so just to "win" is bad DMing; it's setting the PCs up to fail. The best possible situation is giving them a sufficient challenge and a time limit that forces them to use expendable resources in order to fulfill. So make sure they have lots of expendable resources to use, and make sure the loot and/or reward is larger than normal to compensate for their use.

If the party is just going dungeon crawling with infinite time, don't be surprised if they take it slow, particularly if you're a "play the dice as they lay" DM that isn't afraid to kill PCs. The way the game is set up, using expandable resources is really a waste of money except in a rare few situations (i.e. given a time limit). Expendable resources--wands, scrolls, and potions--are poor and expensive duplicates of what the party gets without cost just by resting. Expendable resources in 3.x DnD are really rather poorly thought out. They're far less effective than your normal spells (piss poor caster level and save DC) and very expensive for their utility. They're really only good for all-or-nothing battles when you're out or spells and still need to fight, or to fulfill a function the party couldn't otherwise fulfill. Given that it's widely known that the game is balanced to expect a party to have a set amount of money, it makes far more sense for a party to spend their money on permanent magic items and take it slow than to blow a ton of cash on potions and wands and blow through a dungeon like a tornado.

It sounds like they're moving the 4.0 dynamic to be resources management on a micro level. So instead of asking "Should I use my only fireball now?" it's "Should I fireball the orc horde, the enemy shaman, or the 3 big ogres?" The intent is to force you to make tough choices, but frame it in a system that let's you fight on for more of the day instead of slinking back to camp after 4 encounters and 20 minutes. It's making a system where the wizard actually has something useful to do rather than fire his crossbow (at a -3 attack, oh and you could hit your fighter in the back, but it's only 1d8 damage anyways). I can't think of the number of times in 3.x when a spellcaster has literally done nothing because he had no options. He had no spells to use (or didn't want to waste them), and couldn't possibly hit the enemy with his crossbow. I'll tell you right now: that's not fun. And DnD is ultimately a game, to be played for fun.

So if 4th edition moves towards a system where a wizard always has something "useful" to do (i.e. he can always just zap an enemy for x damage) and the fighters have an in-combat resource to manage, I'll be very happy. If they make it so that you can fight more encounters per day, I'll be very happy. If they preserve a sense of decision making and careful management, even better. I don't care if it's WoW inspired or not if it's fun and it works. Presumably WoW is so popular because it's fun. There are certainly worse things to take inspiration from (let's make DnD more like work!)
 
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Hejdun said:
Let's look at it this way. According to the game design, an encounter with a CR of your level is supposed to drain 25% of the party's resources. So after 4 of those, a party is supposed to be pretty much out of resources (spells, HP, etc) and will be forced to retreat and rest. A battle lasts an average of what, maybe 5 rounds? That's 30 seconds. You're talking about as little as 2 minutes of combat wiping out the party's resources.

That's assuming the dungeon has wide, clear corridors, big unlocked doors, and waiting enemeies in every room. I agree that after 3 to 5 combats (in any edition, really) the PCs are probably ready to rest for the night, but the idea that these are all finished in the first "game hour" is patently ridiculous, IMO. Between exploration, NPC interaction, looting and the like, those 3 to 5 combats should take up most of an 8 hour day.
 

Reynard said:
That's assuming the dungeon has wide, clear corridors, big unlocked doors, and waiting enemeies in every room. I agree that after 3 to 5 combats (in any edition, really) the PCs are probably ready to rest for the night, but the idea that these are all finished in the first "game hour" is patently ridiculous, IMO. Between exploration, NPC interaction, looting and the like, those 3 to 5 combats should take up most of an 8 hour day.

It depends on the adventure. A lot of adventures are little more than "Here's a big dungeon filled with bad guys and loot," in which case I could certainly see 3-5 combats happening in an hour of game time. This assumes that the party is already at the dungeon, so it really only kicks in when the dungeon is so big and monster-filled that the party has to rest several times in order to clear it out. Otherwise just traveling to the dungeon could take hours or days.

But you are right in that, depending on the DM and the adventures he runs, it's certainly possible (nay, likely) that it'd take a full day to encounter 3-5 combats. I'd say it's the likeliest occurrence. But it's not totally out of the ordinary for the 3-5 combats to occur very quickly.
 

Reynard said:
...
...Moreover, this attitude of "well, it is 10 am, let's camp" can only happen if the DM allows it to happen. Dungeons are dangerous -- full of nasty and horrible things, all of which want to eat you and some of which are smart enough to do so while you sleep. PCs that spend 20 hours a day in a campsite produce a lot of sounds and smells that should be attracting everything from goblin guards to hungry carrion crawlers. In addition to all that, it suggests that each room is a fight, with nothing else to do that might take up time (explore, count treasure, decipher ancient glyphs, read the previous adventurer's journal after prying it from his mouldering bones).

Anyway -- how do you feel about the idea that PCs can/should/must rest after just a couple of encounters. Do you run or play in games where this happens? Do you actively avoid it? Prefer it?
...
I agree that the idea that it is needed is bunk. For certain play and adventure styles yes, per encounter works great.

Yeah, camping is not always an option and even if you retreat to a safe place to camp, don't expect the dungeon etc. to be as you left it. Momentum is important and most of our adventures rely on PCs using brains and all their stealth and info skills to get the drop on numerically superior and/or better placed enemies. So resource management is part of the game, which we love, but we also love other strategic games like Civilization (albeit a computer game).

The players always try to do the attaack rest if they can. I don't try to avoid it or encourage it. The adventures are designed in ways that make sense of the setting and the NPCs act in ways that make sense for their plans. So areas with organized intelligent monsters, you need to strike hard and not let up, coming back later will be hard. Areas of random non-intelligent monsters, sure you can attack-rest-repeat.

P.S. We also play a homebrew set-up that gives spell casters more choice, a spell point system that allows more weaker spells or the standard number of spells of normal power, and you memorize a group of spells ut can use any of them any number of times as long as you have the spell points. Spell casters are more flexible, less likely to feel useless, and have many ways to manage resources. Knowledge skills and intelligence gathering are also big in our games so the spell casters always have a role to play.
 
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It's not just the spells-per-day element of the game that makes this happen, IMO.

It's also got alot to do with the idea that characters are going into approximately 13 encounters (fighting critters, in most campaigns) each level, and that somehow, dungeons are only stocked with critters at or within one step of the APL.

The only way that I've really seen to deal with this sort of thing is to use weaker critters (at about APL-4 or so), although you can't do too much about this at lower levels. Besides, grinding through a band of skeletons or goblins at 5th level can be satisfying or interesting, but less so the tenth time that day. Scrolls and wands are wonderful, but alot of players are loathe to use disposable magic items because they want to sell them.

Perhaps the best solution is to design encounters that don't require resources to be expended to deal with them. Magical phenomena, simple puzzles, flavor set pieces that give the characters more information but don't involve killing things. Dungeons should be more than monsters and traps in my opinion.
 


My players aren't fond of resting (early). It's much more typical for them to press on, even after most or all of their characters' limited resources (spells/powers) are used up. Only after having had a particularly nasty encounter that (almost) killed one or more of the characters, will they call it a day and look for a safe place to camp.

Most fatalities so far have resulted from being attacked while camping, btw. When the fight is taken to the players things are much more dangerous than when they represent the active faction.

I fully expect my players to be quite happy if in 4th.ed. the majority of their resources are available in every encounter, so they won't have to rest as often (if at all).
 

Reynard said:
Anyway -- how do you feel about the idea that PCs can/should/must rest after just a couple of encounters. Do you run or play in games where this happens? Do you actively avoid it? Prefer it?
Honestly, I don't know how you avoid it in some situations, especially confined dungeons. I guess I'm just a incompetent DM, but it seems to me that:
  • It takes 6 seconds to walk 60ft at normal speed (granted, this is usually lower since you're waiting for the full-plate-wearing fighter and searching, tracking, foraging, etc.).
  • Most combats last less than a minute.
  • The CR system is designed to allow for 4 at-CR encounters per day.
Unless your dungeon is freakin' huge, you'll roll through four encounters in pretty short order. It might not be 9:05, but very rarely (IME) does dungeon delving consume the entire day, even when there are other things to do in the dungeon than "kill stuff." I would argue that this holds true for a lot of encounter environments. It's even worse if the party manages to hit the hardest encounter in the area first and that can't always be blamed on "poor adventure design."

In my opinion, the worst thing about the 4 encounters and then rest model is the situation in which the party has been through 3-4 encounters at or below their CR and then WHAM, out walks the BBEG and mops the floor with them. It feels arbitrary, because the PCs often have no way of knowing what is coming up next. It kills fun. If they guess wrong and push on, they have a good chance of getting creamed. If they guess wrong and go rest, they're bored but safe. Most parties that I know take the second option if at all possible. On the flip side, one of my groups is 3 martial adepts, 1 warlock, and a beguiler. We've been through four combat filled sessions in a row and haven't slept yet.

But my biggest reason for supporting per encounter stuff has nothing to do with the rest at 9:05 "problem." I love it because it will always allow the wizard to blast stuff with magic (which he's good at) rather than spend half the combat plunking away with a crossbow (that he sucks at). That's the not-so-fun side of "resource management."

How many times have I heard: "Well...*sigh*....I guess I'll shoot him with my crossbow. Oh, look. I missed. Next."
 

Well, I'm glad someone started a thread with this title anyway. I'm trying to find the specifics as to why, when WotC reps said this at GenCon I sat there with five of my players and they all turned to me with the quissical "WTF?" looks on their faces.

I don't have this problem. Sure, if you run constant gauntlet-crawls I suppose it comes to this. I have smart players who prepare, that's all. The spellcasters make scrolls, clerics pool the party and buy a wand of cure light wounds, the fighters and rogues play a little smart in combat, that's all.

It's certainly more of a grey-matter excersise than the opposite, which is "charge, hack, heal, repeat"...which may be fun for a video game, but not our D&D. :)
 

DM_Jeff said:
Well, I'm glad someone started a thread with this title anyway. I'm trying to find the specifics as to why, when WotC reps said this at GenCon I sat there with five of my players and they all turned to me with the quissical "WTF?" looks on their faces.

I don't have this problem. Sure, if you run constant gauntlet-crawls I suppose it comes to this. I have smart players who prepare, that's all. The spellcasters make scrolls, clerics pool the party and buy a wand of cure light wounds, the fighters and rogues play a little smart in combat, that's all.

It's certainly more of a grey-matter excersise than the opposite, which is "charge, hack, heal, repeat"...which may be fun for a video game, but not our D&D. :)

Therein lies the problem. I saw it with 3.5 with the increased emphasis on minis and tactical gaming. I'm seeing it now with the increased catering to the dungeon crawl model. WotC seems as if they are tuning the game to a channel that I am not on.
 

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