You Can't Take Short Rests

[I'm A Banana]

So, this is somewhere between a game theory & design post and a house rule post, and I need some help thinking this through.

4e has Short Rests, which recover all HP and encounter powers and statuses, and Extended Rests, which recover all daily powers, action points, and healing surges (aka: "the amount of short rests I can take").

What, do you think would be the consequences of this idea:

You cannot take a Short Rest after an encounter?

Assume a kind of dungeon-crawl game, where each dungeon "floor" is essentially a single encounter. I won't be removing short rests entirely: You can short rest between floors, but not while you're "exploring the dungeon." Alternately, you can take a short rest after gaining [X] XP, where [X] is the approximate XP you'd get from a single encounter.

So instead of fighting everything all at once, you'd space out enemies in more areas across a given dungeon.

This is part of a broader idea I'm having about taking the ability to rest away from the PC's, and putting it in the hands of the DM, so that the DM can control pacing. I'm already having a brainstorm about only allowing extended rests in certain "safe zones" (mostly in towns), this would just be extending that idea to short rests as well.

How do you think such a thing would play? Any tweaks or ideas for me?

 

[Aulirophile]

So long as you're basically spreading out the encounter(s), so each short rest is still a level appropriate encounter, you inform the players in advance so they can use their powers appropriately, should work fine.

Problems:

Boring. You'll be down to At-Will spam inevitably. This detracts from a real strength of 4e.

Weakens static spells (immovable zones etc). Goes back to inform players in advance so they can know not to build a character focusing on this, because they'll be fairly gimp. Which is Not Fun.

Gabe from Penny Arcane ran a night without rests. It is a good read.

Penny Arcade - Garbled For Your Protection

 

[Mr. Wilson]

I've thought about this subject a bit, and one of the questions I have is what are you going to do about hit points, in-combat healing, and healing surges.

For instance, say you have the first encounter in the dungeon and someone takes 30 points of damage and is healed once with a healing word.

This means the Cleric only has one more healing word for the entire level, and the PC is down some HPs despite only blowing one healing surge.

Do you reset healing words, allow PCs to spend as many surges after combat as they wish, or tough it out leading to either nerfing the encounters to take this into account? More healing potions maybe?

I dunno, but that has been my main hold up with this idea.

 

[Aegeri]

Much like my curiosity over why Buddahfrog was doing things in the other thread, I think your idea is interesting because resting is something I think about a lot in DnD as well. I think the concept of spreading out monsters over a dungeon "floor" and declaring them one "encounter" is actually quite interesting. It does mean that you need to consider certain consequences very carefully - like if the PCs summon a creature or drop a zone how do you keep track of them? You need to figure out the time for certain things more - like how long it takes to search that room in the dungeon.

But if you did that and the encounters still sort of fit with the XP limit, just spread out over a dungeon I can see it being an interesting concept. Have to see how it would work in play.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hmmm...looks like folks loved it in Gabe's game. I could see zones and such being used a little more tactically (like, once you drop that zone, you'll want to do what you can to lure enemies back to it!). At-will spam might be a problem, especially since to get a reasonable amount of bodies in the floor, I might need to use a lot of lower level and minion creatures (which are more susceptible to the lower power of at-wills)....hmm...might need incentives to break out the "big guns."

I'm a little less worried about healing. I figure if the entire dungeon floor is a single "hard" encounter (and balanced like it), they won't need all that much healing. And the "slow dripping away of HP" is actually one of the effects I was going for with this.

And I always figure I can drop healing potions or let the floor have some special "victory condition" that the PC's can access if they try hard enough so that they can spend a healing surge. But the basic idea was to make them track each HP over a longer span of game time...

Hmmmm.....good thoughts, keep 'em coming!

 

[fanboy2000]

Interesting ideas. Some thoughts come to mind:

1) The "encounter" will be easier because focused fire can take one 4e monster of equal level then one 3.x monster of appropriate CR.

2) Because they're fighting fewer monsters at time, they should be able to fight more monsters without resting than they would in a more traditional. This is good, because it would allow you to put more monsters on a floor than you might if it only included one encounter fought all at once.

3) Here's how I would word the house rule: "you can't use a healing surge without a power or item allowing you to." If I understand what you're trying to do, this avoids the head scratching 'you can't take short rests' with a rule that I think gets you're desire to take control of the pacing.

 

[Mad Hamish]

A lot of it is going to depend on how things are set out.

If you're taking 1 actual encounter and spreading it over a large area so that they aren't going to reinforce each other then it's probably going to make things simpler for the PCs.
a hard encounter split into 2 makes control of enemies and wiping them out a lot easier.

I'd say it could well be worth a try but you might want to
a) have a few creatures you will remove if things are going badly for the pcs
b) have a few additional creatrures you'll add if things are looking too easy.

 

[Saracenus]

Ashes of Athas has a section of one adventure where you get limited short rests. Basically the local conditions during the mod allow for 2 healing surges, 1 healing surge and 1 encounter ability, or 2 encounter abilities.

Another mod in the series didn't allow for extended rests and depending on what you did in a caravan (we were trekking across the desert) you could get healing but didn't always get your encounter powers back (hello endurance checks).

I think if you give a good reason why they cannot rest, then limiting rest is ok. If you do it just because you don't want them to do it then its less interesting and you will get less buy in.

My two ceramic pieces,

 

[The Human Target]

I think its very easy for a DM to control the pacing of a game without doing something as drastically game altering as removing short rests.

 

[Aegeri]

I think its very easy for a DM to control the pacing of a game without doing something as drastically game altering as removing short rests.

The point is not to do it all the time in my opinion, but it makes for a fascinating and interesting change of pace.