You're an incredible resource for us as we start our second adventure in D&D4e! We were just debating the rest mechanics last night!
 

This is how my group decided to handle the 5 minute workday issue.
Professional athletes, which were the best analog we could come up with for our heroes, can go for 2 to the 3 hours at peak efficiency and effort with only small breaks and gatorade.

So we introduced gatorade to the game world. As long as the party takes a brief rest, and drinks some gatorade, they recover all their daily powers.

This allowed me to prepare each combat with the assumption that the characters had all their powers, and balance around that.

The characters felt more powerful, and more heroic, and the gatorade gave me a great 'motivator' for them to do missions. In fact, we went on a whole series of sessions where the characters attempted to discover the secret of making the gatorade. It was fun.
 

The problem I face isn't that the group rests between each fight. The problem is that for the group to feel some wear on their ressources an adventure has to compact all the action into a 16 hour timespan. I just don't like playing 4 sessions (4 hours) or more which could take months in real time, just to resolve a 16 hours adventuring day.

I think a system with slower recoup would allow for a nail bitting 1 day adventure, and for longer timespans on adventuring.

I love how Encounter Powers recharge fast, and Dailies don't. I just think that healing should have a similar mechanic, with a portion of healing recovering over a longer period than a single day.

Presently, after a extended rest you just don't get all HP back, but all Healing Surges too.

Tobold your players are still low level, when they reach 12th level you'll see that At-Wills aren't used very often anymore and that players have access to many Encounter/Daily/Utility/Magic item powers.

At low level players really manage powers and surges, but at higher level things are different. At low levels players can always fear the surprise encounter because their ressources are more limited. At higher level it takes a series of epic battles to wear down a party.

Don't forget to replace the "Solo" (boss) monsters from Monster Manual 1 by the ones in the Essentials Monster Manual. MM1 monster don't do alot of damage and have to high hit points, making long boring fights that doesn't challenge players.

Certain magic itmes and Utility skills allow Healing without Surge usage or to heal multiple PCs or every party member gain 20 temp HP. I suspect that that the Skills Powers from Player Handbook 3 are in part responsable for this, I would have too study the sources of my PCs powers.

It's sad but 4th ed breaks down at higher levels. Essentials tried to fix it, but they tried to make it too compatible with vanilla 4th and couldn't get there.
 

@Ted

This is what I loathe. Balancing for a fully powered Paragon party makes for very long fights.

Why because balancing implies adding more creatures.

In D&D 4th you cannot use creatures that are much higher level than the PCs because:

1) PCs must already tweak their aatack bonus just to hit creatures of same level. 4th everything is about hitting with your powers. Even the best powers need to roll to hit else the effectiveness is zero or near zero.

2) Creature attack bonuses and defenses scale very fast and if you use a higher level creature then your PCs are always missing which isn't fun and have to burn through more monster HP.

3) Since game sessions are 3-4 hours long, longer fights aren't a good thing.

Ressource management adds strategic value to the game. I would rather find a solution which adds to the strategic value than remove it.
 

It's sad but 4th ed breaks down at higher levels.

In my experience ALL editions of D&D break down at higher levels. I remember some rather ridiculous 1st and 2nd edition AD&D campaigns with near-max level characters. In one of them, playing in a fantasy version of medieval Europe one of my characters made the river Rhine disappear.

Basically the problem is that your characters already start our their career as "heroes", and then want a significant boost to their power with every level. Do that 10 or 20 or 30 times, and you end up with characters that are ridiculously powerful.
 

Yes in ealier editions Spells could be very world changing or worse (9th level Wish, etc.).

In 4th since powers are combat focused it isn't about changing the world but more about character and monster stats scaling. In 1st your characters AC didn't go up with leveling like the defenses in 4th.

Mike from Wizard has already comment in D&D Next articles how he wants the basic orc to be a threat to level 1 PCs and for a horde of orcs to be a threat to a high level PC.

Currently in 4th a high level character could bathe in the middle of an orc army without a scratch because of his natural defenses.


 

I think you are still stuck in the assumption that encounters can only have 2 possible outcomes, victory or party wipe. If the players don't die, they are able to fully recover, under the assumption that all encounters are balanced against a fully prepared party.

Obviously, this led to your previous discussions on player risk, and how it's hard to keep putting your players at any serious risk when sometimes things will go badly for them.

If you don't let your players fully rest after every fight, you don't have to worry about threatening their lives. An encounter going bad can simply mean a few of the players take heavy damage in an early encounter, so they are at a handicap for subsequent encounters in the adventure.

This is more realistic anyway. I always thought it was crazy that serious wounds were supposedly fully healed after taking a knee for five minutes, or a night's sleep. The kinds of wounds you regularly take in D&D would take weeks to recover from, barring magical assistance.
 

I think keeping the dungeon monsters wandering to increase the odds of camp interruption, or simple environment clauses (like the smell here is awful, or the insects prevent you from resting well, or even a leaky ceiling) should be sufficient to keep the party moving on until they reach better "safe spots".

If a large dungeon only has 5 monsters in it though then it is quite possible for the party to just chill in there for ages.

Until they run out of food and water anyway.
 

Think outside a dungeon format also.

Adding wandering encounters slows down the game too much.
 

Carmedil : Not if you plan for it. Its fun to add an encounter during the night (plan for a not so hard one) because the characters starts the fight prone, without weapon nor armor.

In my game, i sometimes add wandering monsters at night so their extended rest is interrupted. Most of the time, they resume their rest, but end up not having all their Healing Surges, HP or Dailies... I told them at the start of the campaign. And i dont utilize this too often. Another trick is use is : You slept horribly, dark dreams, weird noises waking you, etc... so when you finally wake up, you dont have all of your ressources (HP, Healing Surges or Dailies.) I never remove too much : sometimes its a lv1 daily, 1-2 Healing Surges or they healed half their wounds while resting.

My group like it this way. Like i said earlier, i'm not using this all the time.

 

It's similar to an issue often considered in designing roguelike games. A lot of games (probably a majority) allow full healing if the player character can get out of combat to somewhere reasonably safe. Other games are more attrition based: for example healing might only come from potions (which are in limited supply) or at the end of a level.

Both can work, but the game has to be designed with them in mind.

The key is not to fall between two stools. Let them rest to full, and plan a couple of massive battles. Or don't let them rest at all, in which case they must conserve resources.



 

@CArmendil: You said one thing, that at wills are not used much after level 12. In our party, lvl 21 currently, at wills are used all the time.

I can't even say dnd breaks down, but a lot our bigger fights have recurring minion waves or battlefield effects, randomly drawn from a stack of cards (like 5-6 cards) made for that specific encounter which might help it not breaking down
 

I had a sort of cognitive dissonance issue with healing surges and the quick-heal mechanics of 4E, but I got over it. The main problem is that if you do a lot of combat narration, it's pretty much impossible to state what, with HPs, is going on when the warlord could yell you back to health at any second. Once I broke the habit of equating HP with physical health the logic behind 4E worked better.

Damn, all this 4E talk is seriously making me want to start a game again!