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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5780605" data-attributes="member: 4937">The 15 minute work day is a product of encounter design; not a product of system.  It happens when the DM begins to feel that in order to challenge his players, he needs to increase the CR of the encounter to party level +4 or higher.  Or the DM feels that big splashy battles are more dramatic.  Often these occur in urban adventure settings with large set peice battles with opposing NPC organization, or perhaps in fortresses as dungeons where encounters tend to snowball as reinforcements arrive.  This creates a situation where the party must expend a large percentage of their resources in order to survive, which forces them to rest... which is a good thing because the next battle is usually designed to be of the same sort.The 15 minute work day occurs regardless of system whenever there are any expendable resources at all, whether spell points or hit points or even a damage track.  It's a logical strategic response to a situation in which the party is not under direct time pressure and is facing a foe which cannot or will not take the initiative.  If on the other hand you design encounters where the party is under time pressure and the foe will take the initiative, then the 15 minute adventuring day DOES NOT occur regardless of system because it ceases to be a valid strategic response.You can't fix problems in encounter design with changes to the system.  One of the things that reduced my initially high optimism about 4e prior to it coming out was the designers repeatedly asserted that they were going to fix encounter design issues with changes to the system, which told me they didn't really know what they were doing or what the system that they were making was ultimately going to play like.  What you mean is that it will complicate preparation a little except when you pay attention to it.  It will end up working like spell components, which people generally hand wave.You realize don't you that in the absence of an encounter structure (that is, if a series of encounters isn't related), that the only difference between 'a short rest' and 'a whole day' is flavor?  What you are essentially gauranteeing is that after every encounter there is a full rest, only that by flavor that full rest isn't a 'whole day' but some other shorter period of time.  And yes, it does punish the players for pushing on more than in 3.5, because while the result of resting or not resting is the same, the cost of resting (and the benefit of not resting) has been reduced in cases where there is an encounter structure.  In other words, in order for there to be a cost to resting, minutes and seconds must now matter in the encounter design, whereas before it was merely enough to be 'on the clock' if you had a deadline in days.  Granted, that's itself only flavor but it is restrictive on the events of your campaign.  Only the structure of taunt high speed chase now interrupts the decision to rest, and this only to change the flavor of resting from 'all day' to a few minutes or hours.  So the decision to rest is going to be more trivial than before, and pressing on therefore relatively more punished.</blockquote>

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