Whern exactly does an Encounter end ?

[Istar]

Our Wizard says that its when we take a short rest.

What if we dont take a short rest.

Does this mean out stance's or powers we activated in the fight, that ended are still active.

He is trying to say one of his dailys is still active till we take a short rest.

We are saying if thats true, we wont rest at all, we will just carry on with all these daily powers being active the whole day.

As some of the dailys are that good we wouldnt mind not being able to get our encounter powers back.

Can anyone clarify this.

 

[Aulirophile]

All daily powers automatically end after 5 minutes, whether you rest or not. PHB, under durations of a power. Zones, Stances, etc., have their own rule that says the same thing. That might be clarified in the PHB2, the PHB might still be right as well though.

 

[FireLance]

See "Durations" on p. 278 of the PH for the detailed answer to your question.

In short: "until the end of the encounter" means until you take a rest, or after 5 minutes.

 

[Istar]

Brilliant, cheers

 

[Nebten]

You should also let him know that if you don't rest, you can't use healing surges freely. So you are stuck with second winds and leader assistance (which typically has a limited number as well per encounter).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not all daily powers end after 5 minutes automatically. GENERALLY anything favorable to the players will last 5 minutes, for instance you can only sustain a power for 5 minutes and powers that don't have an explicit duration last 5 minutes. One corner case exists. A power with a duration of (save ends) could technically persist for an unlimited amount of time. It will be extremely rare that this matter however.

Note also that it is quite possible that the party could enter a second encounter within 5 minutes and still benefit from other powers if they didn't rest. Given that encounters usually only last under 1 minute you can generally assume that in this case the power will persist during the subsequent encounter.

For accounting purposes an encounter never ends until a short rest is taken. This would include for purposes of milestones, obviously for regaining encounter powers, using healing surges out of combat, etc. Most DMs will grant a milestone though if say you take on 2 encounters with no rest in between after the second one, but if you had for instance already had one encounter, rested, entered a second encounter, not rested, and then entered a third one you might be cheating yourselves out of a milestone overall depending on what happens next.

Now and then a party will decide its worth skipping a rest either to get more out of a daily power or because of a time constraint in the adventure or other tactical consideration, but its rarely a good idea overall. Unless the party went through the previous encounter without using any substantial encounter based resources they'll be at a disadvantage and it would be quite rare to use a powerful daily power and want to keep it going and NOT have dug pretty deep into your encounter stuff. Its possible if the players are aware of some strict time constraint or something like that, but not common.

 

[deadsmurf]

Generally any effect that doesn't say how long it lasts other than until end of the encounter can continue indefinitely (Stances are an exception, and always last 5 minutes at most) - but there aren't a lot of these.

 

[doctorhook]

An encounter ends whenever the DM says it ends, with a nod to the five-minute encounter rule.

 

[Squire James]

Not only does a DM determine when an encounter is over, but the DM can also determine how long characters can sustain powers and such. This is part of the DM's toolbox for setting the pace of the campaign.

For instance, in a really fast-paced campaign where everything happens in a week, perhaps short rests are a few seconds and encounters end immediately. Certain D&D Encounters scenarios seem to work better this way (a multi-encounter chase scene with 5-minute rests make no sense!).

In the "standard" case, I'd say combat powers and stances end at the start of a short rest, with healing surges and power recharges happening at the end of the rest. If they want to chase something and do a 2-in-1 encounter, they can maintain their powers as long as their chase doesn't go more than 5 minutes or so.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Yeah, it's also worth noting that the DMG implies you should be fast and loose with the 5 minute time period. There's a place where it suggests that you can take a short rest while searching a room since that was not strenuous and took around 5 minutes.

At this point I pretty much assume that combat ends, the PCs search the room and/or the bodies of their fallen enemies and they all get a short rest.

I'll assume they get a short rest even if they don't search the room normally in the time it takes to walk from one room to another, even if it's only 2 or 3 minutes instead of 5.

I've seen what happens to parties when they don't get a short rest between encounters and it isn't pretty, so I'm generous. It also has a side effect of removing the incentive to try to RUN to the next encounter to keep powers up. The point of encounter powers and "lasts until end of encounter" powers was to break the momentum of the game into "scenes". When one battle is done and there is a significant break in the action, all of these types of powers should end/be renewed.