D&D 4E Tweaking a couple of things my group doesn't like about 4E

[Holy Bovine]

A simple rule we use for extended rest to give some 'hold over' from a day of hard adventuring

An extended rest restores no hit points to the PC. All surges & powers are restored, action points reset to 1 etc.

Basically it means if a PC goes to sleep with 25 points of damage after spending all his surges and getting whatever magical aid he can to heal he still has those 25 points of damage after resting but can now spend surges to heal them. I have had more than a few PCs start a day down 2 or more surges

 

[Grydan]

One thing to keep in mind is that your two goals might come into conflict here.

Some of the suggestions people are offering for extended rests are things that discourage the party from taking them as often. That means more fights being fought without daily powers, which makes them end up taking longer.

 

[jbear]

Here, it was easy to find as Stalker0 has it in his sig.

It's a must read:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/254630-stalker0s-guide-anti-grind.html

ENjoy!

 

[Mapache]

Some of the suggestions people are offering for extended rests are things that discourage the party from taking them as often. That means more fights being fought without daily powers, which makes them end up taking longer.

Agreed. My perspective is that harder fights are more interesting and big flashy powers are cool, so I run my game with fewer, harder, more significant battles, generally only two or three per extended rest. And, I prefer to scale up difficulty by adding more enemies instead of higher-level enemies (keeping them with party level + 2), because missing all the time is frustrating, and more enemies means you get to see the tide of battle turning more clearly. I've also made good use of "double-minions" which get bloodied on a hit and defeated on the second (or go down in one hit to crits, attacks they are vulnerable to, and anything I deem sufficiently awesome)—just use the stats for ordinary minions otherwise, and rate them around 0.4 of a normal monster instead of 0.25 of a normal monster.

 

[keterys]

Requiring 4 fights per extended rest (the two milestone house rule) means that eventually everyone (ie, all 5 people in the party) can use a daily every fight. At earlier levels, you might use a daily every other fight, or have half the party use a daily every fight (2-3 per fight).

That's still a lot of dailies.

The 20th level group I'm in just hit its _6th_ milestone after an end of adventure Big Bad fight. 12th fight of the day, and we had a few dailies left, even with generally at least one person using a daily every fight.

 

[RHGreen]

Despite an initiative board, I still run into a fair number of my players not being ready on their turn. So, I've moved to just going clockwise. At the start of each encounter, we all roll initiative, and whoever rolls highest (it's been me each of the 3 times I've done this) goes first and from then we proceed clockwise. If players want to reseat themselves based on initiative, that would be fine with me, but they haven't done that yet. But it's working pretty well. I don't like dealing with all the monsters at once (when it's my turn) because I think it can disrupt player tactics, but it's fine. It has sped up gameplay, though, and that was the goal.

Of course, if you don't have that problem (and you probably don't since you seem to have experienced players), then that isn't a solution.

Might be a good idea to seat them in order of their initiative bonus.

 

[nightwyrm]

The problem I sort of had with restricting extended rest for my group is that our group meets for about 3-4 hours every 2 weeks (at best). People either forgets that they have/haven't used, or it would be a month or more in real time before they could refresh dailies etc. A few times I just handwaved to "you all start frest this session" kinda thing and what ended up as the campaign goes on was I just made tougher fights all the time in order to challenge a fully fresh party (which had its own problem with the fights ending up longer).

But I blame the problem more on our erratic and infrequent schedule than on game mechanics.