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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3800695" data-attributes="member: 5143">The point is, although it's more complicated than what I've said (PCs are individually taking damage, the cleric is healing them, they are using magic items, each party member is doing damage or missing each round), what it comes down to it is that in each round the party loses so many resources such as hit points, spells, magic items and the enemies lose so many resources.  If you take an enemy out of the battle, you remove its damage from your party.Most of the time a good party can figure out quickly that their resources are capable of handling the enemy without any REAL risk of death("They did 13 damage first round and 18 damage second round.  The cleric can heal the damage each round with a cure moderate.  We are perfectly fine.").However, they know that if their cleric wasn't there to heal them, and they only had 30 hitpoints, they'd be dead in 2 rounds.  So they aren't about to stop healing to "conserve resources".  They NEED to use those resources to survive, but it is a fairly big no-brainer than they'll win using the resources.I haven't seen anything that could explain to me why those aren't two valid points.  The story is often hurt by resting.  Although, strangely enough, my concern had more to do with a situation when there were no story concerns at all for resting.I was running a party through RTTToEE and then Castle Maure afterwards.  RTTToEE has built in options for "What happens if the PCs leave for a week and then come back.  However, at low levels they were tedious and lame.  Each section of the temple would hire a small number of new guards in a week.  So, when the PCs were at low levels and they'd walk to a major town to get items sold and buy new ones, they'd merely have to fight the entrance encounter again.  By the end of 1-2 game sessions, the party would have enough treasure that they'd want to sell it again(or they'd be out of resources) and would leave the dungeon and come back in a couple of weeks.So, then, we'd spend one session fighting all of the battles we fought two sessions ago, run out of time, then have the party continue to actually get further into the dungeon on the following session.  Then, they'd realize that they had too much loot to carry and they were out of resources, so they took the opportunity to leave and sell their stuff again.  So, every second session was fighting the same battles over and over again.  Which got boring for me as a DM.  I wanted to get to the cooler part of the adventure instead of rolling the same 12 crossbow shots from the entrance guards again.So, I gave up allowing the temple to recruit new people so that we'd get somewhere.  I figured they'd run out of possible candidates after a while.  Then, the party realized this and started resting in the dungeon in areas they'd already cleared out, sealing the doors so no one would bother them.  When they realized they could do this and get away with it, they started resting more often and more often.  There really were no story concerns except that the PCs knew that the temple was up to something big and they needed to stop it.  But there was no urgency in the PCs because they were fairly certain that I wouldn't let the temple succeed before they got to the end of the dungeon.Once they got high enough level to teleport, I didn't have to worry about restocking the dungeon at all anymore or whether or not someone would discover them while sleeping.  They'd simply teleport out as soon as they felt they had used enough resources or they had enough treasure and teleport in the next day, fully rested.  Since there were no story concerns and no consequences to resting, they did it whenever they wanted.The only REAL concern was it didn't seem very "realistic" for them to be exiting the dungeon after every battle just because they could.  It seemed like they should WANT to push on, to reach the leaders of the temple and wipe out the den of evil as soon as they could before their plan could be unleashed.Also, resting does bypass the resource attrition game.  It doesn't bypass resource management, that's a different game though:  "Will I need my fireball against the BBEG?" is adifferent question than "Will I have enough spells left to survive against the BBEG?"Running out of any one spell or spell level may not be enough reason to rest, but there reaches a critical point where you CANNOT continue with the resources you have.  I want to remove this limit.But as was pointed out previously, if you fight the 3 "uninteresting" battles, end up with not enough resources to continue, then you either risk death by resting or death by continuing on.  You don't have enough resources for another battle one way or another.The only real solution to this is to rest after 2 "uninteresting" encounters to make sure that you have enough resources left to fight any random encounter that might attack at night.Exactly, and that's what I want.  I want it to be that the ONLY reason heroes fail is that they didn't try or they went in WAY over their head.  Failing due to the fact that you used too many magic missiles against those orcs is...not very heroic feeling.  It's very "realistic".  But that's not what I'm going for when I play D&D.It's just that unless you push the PCs forward, that they can find a solution to 90% of all consequences to resting:  Leave the dungeon and come back tomorrow or spike the door shut are the two biggest and easiest(I've also seen rope tricks, illusions and silence spells, and any number of other adventurer tricks).It IS possible to push a party to continue with story reasons, but that almost always ends up in a TPK.  After all, if a party is stuck in a situation where they have to fight the BBEG with almost no resources or rest and have the BBEG kill the kidnapped villager, then they HAVE to continue if they want to be the heroes.  Forcing a party to fight a battle they can't handle will often cause a TPK.A party put in that situation runs into a lose-lose situation.  The only win in that situation was to conserve enough resources that you don't get into the lose-lose situation.  Which basically asks the questions "Was luck on the PCs side?", "Did the wizard use a crossbow while the cleric attacked with his mace for the at least one of the combats?", and "Did the DM plan out the strength of the encounters correctly?"</blockquote>

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