Why is it so important?

[wgreen]

That looks rather like a bad DMing problem than anything else IMHO.

Contributing to the problem of too-frequent resting are spells like rope trick and teleport. It's easy to say, "Well, if the PCs rest after just one encounter, I'll toss some wandering monsters at them while they rest," but if the party's in an invisible extradimensional space, or safe and sound hundreds of miles away...

-Will

 

[wgreen]

Oh the humanity! Is this really a problem? Do DMs make people role-play out the sharpening of their swords? Are these situations that common? And what's really the significant difference between that and:

PCs: That was a tough battle. We wait a round until we hear that "clicking noise" that indicates we've gained back our powers.
DM: (reviews his design, decides on no encounters in that short time): Ok, the round passes uneventfully.
PCs: Alright, we got our spells and hitpoints back, let's go.

The difference is that 3e is designed under the assumption that the party isn't resting for eight hours after every encounter, while 4e's assumptions are different.

Also, it's more aesthetically pleasant, narrative-wise, for the PCs to rest for a few minutes after every battle than it is for them to sleep for eight hours.

-Will

 

[Mallus]

Also, it's more aesthetically pleasant, narrative-wise, for the PCs to rest for a few minutes after every battle than it is for them to sleep for eight hours...

... in the middle of monster-ridden ruins that just so happen to sport a number of "sleeper cars" which are only periodically disturbed by noisy fellow passengers wandering man-eating monsters.

(assuming, of course, the standard static dungeon-diving paradigm)

 

[Doug McCrae]

Were all you guys actually sticking with 4 encounters/day in 3e? We'd mostly switched to one or two tough ones to make them more interesting for precisely the reason James Wyatt gives. Three pointless encounters is, well, pointless. Also we found it practically impossible to enforce 4/day anyway. The PCs are almost always the invaders, which means they can leave whenever they want and rest. Yes, I know the monsters can sometimes attack them but 90% of the time they can't, in my experience, due to lack of sentience, organisation, tracking, or the PC's base being too well hidden or defended. And we just didn't use big dungeons much, finding them to be both implausible and boring. Time limits were also very rare, being hard for the DM to justify.

 

[gizmo33]

Also, it's more aesthetically pleasant, narrative-wise, for the PCs to rest for a few minutes after every battle than it is for them to sleep for eight hours.

I don't get that either. Neither case seeems particularly significant in the overall narrative.

(As a side note, what exactly is the "narrative" related description of an "encounter". At least "8 hours" has some sort of game-world reality to it.)

It just seems to me that DMs are simply not preparing for contingencies. All the examples I can think of where the narrative is "wrecked" by unanticipated PC actions (such as resting, but really anything else) are situations of a less-than-helpful adventure design. IMO a good adventure design considers the relatively obvious possibility that the PCs retreat, for whatever reason, and come back - with reinforcements, other equipment, or whatever.

So if rope trick is a problem (and I think it is) then just redesign the spell. The spell occurs at a level where the typical monsters have no recourse against it, then it's inappropriately leveled.

In 3E, here's a possible good narrative: PCs attempt to rescue the princess from the evil wizard. PCs fail to get by the mooks and are forced to rest. Princess gets sacrificed to Set. Granted, this is failure, and interpreted by some as "unfun". Others I guess would prefer that the only kind of failure is a TPK.

When it comes to good narratives, IMO, it's as much about the DM adapting to situations as it is trying to shoehorn them into a small list of frameworks that you have already determined to be interesting. I don't exactly know that this is what's happening, but it really seems like it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

In 3E, here's a possible good narrative: PCs attempt to rescue the princess from the evil wizard. PCs fail to get by the mooks and are forced to rest. Princess gets sacrificed to Set. Granted, this is failure, and interpreted by some as "unfun". Others I guess would prefer that the only kind of failure is a TPK.

For that to work the DM has to make it 100% clear to the players there is a time limit. And then repeat it for the one who wasn't listening and the one who was out the room.

 

[gizmo33]

Were all you guys actually sticking with 4 encounters/day in 3e? We'd mostly switched to one or two tough ones to make them more interesting for precisely the reason James Wyatt gives.

Sure, why not? But then I don't see what the problem is with the existing paradigm. You don't use long dungeon crawls, then why is there a problem? If all encounters are 1/day, then all resources are "per-encounter" AFAICT. Someone who is designing encounters on a daily basis should simply keep the target CR higher than in a larger dungeon - which should be designed with the big picture in mind.

But it doesn't go the other way, if you want to do daily encounters in 3E, you still can. If you want an encounter to have significance in terms of attrition in 4E, there's no such thing.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If a system requires me to put a time constraint in all my adventures then that's a bad system. It severely limits the kind of adventures I can run.

 

[Mallus]

PCs attempt to rescue the princess from the evil wizard. PCs fail to get by the mooks and are forced to rest.

I think it's the built-in assumption that the protagonists will be able to rest up for an extended duration (pretty much wherever they are, like in the middle of some monster hotel dungeon) that some people --like me-- find unpalatable, not the consequences for such delaying.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Sure, why not? But then I don't see what the problem is with the existing paradigm.

With one encounter per day, wizards > fighters.

If you want an encounter to have significance in terms of attrition

I don't.