You Can't Take Short Rests

[The Human Target]

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

Oh yeah, withholding an expected short or extended rest is a great way to ratchet the tension of a fight way up.

 

[wedgeski]

Oh yeah, withholding an expected short or extended rest is a great way to ratchet the tension of a fight way up.

Telegraph it beforehand and you make it an interesting strategic challenge. "You know from your research that mind and body are constantly assailed in these dungeons; sleep is impossible, distraction clouds your every move, exhaustion waits at the end of every sword swing. Be wary!"

 

[LostSoul]

I think it would promote cautious, sneaky, exploratory play. You'd want to sneak around, make a good map, avoid traps, identify the monsters and ambush them. You might want to draw monsters out to ambush sites - a good use for empty rooms.

You'd have to do something with healing potions.

Some of the classes would be better than others.

 

[Jhaelen]

Well, I've been experimenting with denying extended rests (mostly for overland travel skill challenges, interspersed with 'random' encounters, caused by failures).

Since that works, okay, I guess, fiddling with short rests might work well, too.

I'd probably start by reducing the benefits of short rests first, e.g. you can only spend a single healing surge and only one encounter power is recovered.

I'd be a bit worried about the party once they're reduced to using at-wills. Not only will they be less effective, combat might also get boring for lack of options.

 

[FireLance]

For some discussion on a related topic, see an old thread of mine: Suppose I mess with the default time frame of the game...

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

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").

Is this part the house rule? Because a short rest does not recover hp by itself. You still need to spend healing surges, and you only gain those hit points back.

Unless I've been playing it horribly wrong by denying PCs free healing every 5 minutes.

 

[Bagpuss]

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").

Well that's wrong for a start, you only recover hit points that you spend healing surges to recover not all HP. My players often don't recover all the hit points because if they are only down a few or not a multiple of their healing surges they don't spend the surge.

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?

You don't do this sort of thing already? If players have a noisy fight in a room then they can trigger encounters in other rooms, and pull them in with no opportunity for a short rest. I rarely allow Extended rests inside a dungeon since patrols are likely to find them Extended rests usually require returning to somewhere safe, like a town.

No short rests per floor is a bit harsh as while they will have healing surges they won't be able to spend them since the leader healing powers (which are encounters) will have been used as will their Second Wind (which is an encounter) so what will happen is they will just die (or if they have any sense return out of the dungeon after each encounter).

You will also have more boring encounters as people have to spam their at-will powers, leading to more grind. Plus Essentials character will have an unfair advantage over non-essentials characters since their Encounter/Daily boost is built into their at-wills.

A short rest should not be assumed after each encounter, but 5 mins break is a lot easier to find in a dungeon that is active than 8 hours. Just have their short rest interrupt every now and again if you think they are having it too easy and have their extended rest interrupted nearly all the time unless they have somehow found a very safe place to sleep.

 

[Riastlin]

I have not done this as a general rule, but I have done it on an adventure level (if that makes sense). Essentially what I had (and will have something similar again soon) was a town overrun with undead. The party engaged a "squad" of the undead which was equal to an encounter unto itself. However, when the encounter was over, it became a skill challenge for the party to find a place to take a short rest (after all, the town was overrun with undead and they weren't going to just sit around and wait for the party to come around the corner). The party had to make stealth checks to sneak to a building, thievery to get inside dungeoneering or thievery to secure the building, etc. If they did that, they could hole up for a few and catch their breath. If they failed the challenge though, then the undead spotted them and they had another encounter (generally a much smaller encounter so as to lessen the extent of at-will spam).

I did not telegraph this too much to the party ahead of time, rather letting it play out more naturally in game. At first they were of course a bit taken aback, they had tried to rest in the middle of the street. After that first add on though they quickly realized what was going on and got really into the SC. It felt natural and made sense considering what was going on in the game at the time. I plan to do something similar again soon as the party will likely be trying to liberate a town from aberrant forces.

As for would I do this as a general rule: I don't know. The dungeon floor idea does make it plausible and I know there were a series of blogs around the intarwebz about rethinking the dungeon and one of those talked about creating encounter zones or sectors (sorry, can't remember who, but it might have been Schwalb -- I'm sure somebody here will recall it ). You just need to be careful with how you stack the enemies against the PCs or as others have said, you'll end up with at-will fests as the party has little choice but to expend their encounter powers, etc.

 

[Ryujin]

DM did this to us, in an adventure that was strung through multiple teleport gates. Our Cleric was dominated and grabbed, during the first encounter. The opposition fled with her, through a series of gates, and we pursued to try and get her back. Even though we had several members multi-classed as leaders, we had to break off after the third running battle, or it would have been a TPK. That, even though each encounter wasn't run to its conclusion, along the way.

 

[Stumblewyk]

It's killing me that I cannot remember where I read this, but it was a blog by a former D&D dev who discussed breaking up the "encounter" into multiple rooms on a dungeon floor - similar to what the OP is proposing.

Basically, the standard encounter's worth of XP monsters would be distributed over several areas of a dungeon floor, but not filling the entire floor. The dungeon floor would be broken up into "zones", once you cleared a zone, you could rest. Each zone would effectively be one encounter's worth of XP. I think the crux of this system would be to use minions liberally.

This would still make encounter powers valuable - you can take down the stronger enemies quickly, and reserve dailies for when you found the really bad monster further in on the floor. At-wills are great for clearing out the minions without wasting your big hitters.