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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nork" data-source="post: 5288776" data-attributes="member: 59879">Rests should service the plot, not obey rule mechanics.I think maintaining the concept of getting an extended rest "when you go to sleep" was the biggest fumble in D&D4.  It should have been, that you get an extended rest at the end of a "chapter" in the story.  Fitting 4 or more fights into a plot is usually pretty hard, especially if it isn't a dungeon crawl.Consider an overland travel adventure where they go to a new city or local.  Either they get to extended rest every night and are not threatened by any of the fights, or the DM throws them an encounter that is so over-budget that it breaks the system.  It breaks the system because the players have access to all of their dailies, yet not all of the healing surges.  The system wasn't designed to produce one threatening fight, it was designed to be threat by attrition without swingy threats.Or the party doesn't get to extended rest every night, and by the end of the trip (which the DM will make involve just the right number of encounters per extended rest), the party is taxed and exhausted as they arrive at their destination and can then take an extended rest.One scenerio is an out of control by necessity situation where it devolves into a DM vs PC "I have to make something extreme to threaten the players" situation, and the other largely lets the D&D4 mechanics run on auto-pilot and do their job and services the plot.As for combats taking too long, a way to speed them up is to ask people to know what they are going to do before it is their turn.  If people take 3 or 4 minutes or longer during their turn to decide what to do, then things are going to slow down a lot.  Four players spending 3 minutes pondering what they are going to do during their turn, adds 72 minutes to six turns of combat.Also ask them to read the text of the powers they intend to use before it is their turn.That being said, some players enjoy the 'spotlight' of it being their turn and waiting until they are the center of attention to make their decisions gives the decisions a sense of importance.  There is nothing wrong with this, it is what makes the game fun for that person.  If this is the case, then requiring fast combats would actually be a detriment to the purpose of the game.If you have a mix of players, just having the players that don't care about that aspect of the game focus on being quick and precise as soon as it is their turn can still drastically speed combat up.</blockquote>

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