I know that 4ed has tried to combat this tendancy by introducing healing surges, At-will and encounter powers, along with milestones, but milestones don't really seem to be attractive enough to stop the rests. Additional Action points might be valuable, but if you rest after each encounter you get your Action point back anyway, plus it allows you to use your daily powers for each encounter.
I am really sick of all these rests and retreats out of the dungeons and am looking for any house rules others have come up with to combat this. I am not looking for advice like introduce time constraints, as these only work for some kinds of adventures, nor for advice about sending in random monsters to disrupt their rests, as my group are pretty cunning when it comes to making their place of rest pretty secure. What I am looking for is actual rule changes that others have tried.
I was thinking about allowing spending of multiple Action points within one encounter, but I am not sure if this would be unbalancing.
Any advice on how to make extended rests not so necessary would be really appreciated!!
House-rule that they can only rest each set amount of time (like 18 hours or so).
That's not a house rule, per se. Check the PHB, page 263. After you complete an extended rest, you can't benefit from another one for 12 hours.
By the way, thanks for the quick replies
Party leaves for a day; they return to find the keep boarded up, guard patrols trippled, extra traps rigged everywhere and treasure hidden somewhere outside the dungeon.
The sensible thing that they're doing should be done by the attacked side as well; nobody would be stupid enough to assume somebody who just assaulted their keep then returned to heal would stay away.
The only times this wouldn't work, was if the dungeon was totally passive, with no intelligent creatures what soever... but then the question is: why is the dungeon on 100% power when they arrive?
My reasoning would be that as long as the major item it is defending remains; the denizens reset: Skeletons are reanimated, Golems are reconstructed, traps are reactivated and/or rebuilt (automatons that rebuild traps? seems like a good investment for a dungeon that has to endure the ages), new monsters might even wander in to make it home.
What i am really looking for is a game mechanic that makes continuing on a viable option, more vaiable than just getting an extra action point every two encounters. Milestones and healing surges were a move in the right dircetion but I am not sure they have gone far enough to make extended rests and the re-arming of healing surges and daily powers not necessarily the best option. My problem is that the group I play with are very experienced dungeneers - they are quite willing to continue resting if that is the best option to maximise their survivability, and I don't blame them for it - after all, why create risks for yourself when you don't need to and why act dumb when your not.
Also; just rule X creatures in the dungeon; there are no reinforcements, they are just sharper, and if you kill more then half of them, they all pack up and leave, so the next morning the players will find nothing.
Perhaps occasionaly they'll find some reinforcements from a nearby dungeon or fort, just to change things around.
The most sensible thing for the world to do, at least in my opinion, to adventurers like this is to kill them off because waiting like that isn't a viable option against a living dungeon.
Hmm. If they are in an ancient dungeon, you could also make the air their so rank that resting doesn't really work; they just feel as crappy the next morning as they did last night, or worse.
And, the only way out is redoing all the traps they encountered on the way in, at least some of which should be jumping over dangerous things like lava-flows, or other traps that can only be navigated, not disabled.
One of the major problems my group has had over the years with D&D has been the tendancy of parties to rest after each encounter to get back to full hits, spells etc. Even the players hated having to do it, but didn't see why their experienced adventurers wouldn't do what is sensible and rest. Obviously, some dungeons were active, making this difficult, but unless they were up against a tight time constraint, they would almost always find one way or another of doing it. It was one of the biggest bugbears we had with the game.
I know that 4ed has tried to combat this tendancy by introducing healing surges, At-will and encounter powers, along with milestones, but milestones don't really seem to be attractive enough to stop the rests. Additional Action points might be valuable, but if you rest after each encounter you get your Action point back anyway, plus it allows you to use your daily powers for each encounter.
I am really sick of all these rests and retreats out of the dungeons and am looking for any house rules others have come up with to combat this. I am not looking for advice like introduce time constraints, as these only work for some kinds of adventures, nor for advice about sending in random monsters to disrupt their rests, as my group are pretty cunning when it comes to making their place of rest pretty secure. What I am looking for is actual rule changes that others have tried.
I was thinking about allowing spending of multiple Action points within one encounter, but I am not sure if this would be unbalancing.
Any advice on how to make extended rests not so necessary would be really appreciated!!
Couple of things.
It isn't reasonable to rest after every encounter, life doesn't work that way. The game world shouldn't either. This ends up being a problem if the game is played in a static world. When we first started playing 4e my group had this mindset as well. I introduced a 'rival' adventure group. When the group started doing the 2 minute workday, the rival group swooped in and finished the adventure for them. After a lot of yelling and screaming amongst the group they learned not to rest after every minor encounter.
Like Salla said you can only have an extended rest after 12 hours. So that's 19.5(if they post guards) hours before Adventure! resumes.
However, the adventuring party will accept all this and still retreat to buff themselves up again. They will then go back in. If they find themselves having difficulty with the new defences they will attack for as long as they feel reasonably safe and then retreat to rest again. They may not be getting far in the dungeon, but they are accumulating experience and will be hoping, through a war of attrition to come out top, so long as they are careful.
If as a DM, i as to say 'when you return you find the whole place abandoned, then that is the end of the adventure - what a waste of time and presnts the problem of what to do next. I could say 'If you go out to rest again then the dungeon is over' but that is railroading my players, which is something I try to avoid. In addition, in many situations, the bad guys wouldn't go. I could make the ultimatum, and have in the past, but it always leaves a slightly bad taste. For that reason I am looking for some house rules that buff up milestones, so that it is the players themselves that want to press on, not that they are forced to because I tell them to stay or else.
Hope that all made sense!!
If as a DM, i as to say 'when you return you find the whole place abandoned, then that is the end of the adventure - what a waste of time and presents the problem of what to do next. I could say 'If you go out to rest again then the dungeon is over' but that is railroading my players, which is something I try to avoid. In addition, in many situations, the bad guys wouldn't go. I could make the ultimatum, and have in the past, but it always leaves a slightly bad taste. For that reason I am looking for some house rules that buff up milestones, so that it is the players themselves that want to press on, not that they are forced to because I tell them to stay or else.
Hope that all made sense!!
Just a minor nitpick.
You feel it's railroading, but aren't the players railroading the story/situation if they rest whenever they feel like it?
It seems or can be interpreted along the lines of, the players are working your leeriness of supposed railroading to their advantage.
The houserules I have seen posted on here about milestones and dailies and the like, break the basic premise behind the game; Attrition. There is supposed to be a struggle within the player to know when to use their daily abilities. If the players never have to worry about it and can easily go into every fight completely fresh, the game itself breaks down.
I don't even give out milestones unless the actual combat was worthy of counting towards a milestone.
Life > Trying to kill the adventurers in vain, one last time.
Personally I'd think you'd have to get this behaviour out of your players, not reward it. It slows the game down and it hardly makes any sense in most situations (make sure it doesn't in the few cases where is does, too. Makes for more exciting storytelling)
The problem really seems to be you and your players. Just stop doing it! If its boring and not fun then simply stop it. Its crazy to continue having the whole party rest after every encounter if it only brings about complaints of silliness and boredom. Talk to your players, tell them you can come up with all kinds of ways and rules to stop the behavior, or they can stop being pansies and just be freaking adventurers. Heroes don't rest after every encounter, they press on, they act heroic. And besides, like I said, if the group doesn't like the way the game feels doing this, then just stop doing it.
However, for some dungeons this is not possible. In the last version of D&D we were doing 'return to the temple of elemental evil' - there is no way they would all pack their bags and leave in the main area. My group would go in, kill a whole lot and then retreat out. I would then replenish the defenders, throw in some new bad guys and defences, try to figure out what difference it made to the internal power struggle etc. The party would then come back in, kill a whole lot more and bug out again. So i would go through the whole process again etc, until it became almost ridiculous that the denizens could find all these replacements. The players were happy because they were accumulating experience points from all the kills they were making, even if the treasure gained was not that great. Also, bear in mind that the players were not doing this because they didn't want to go further in the dungeon, they were doing it because they were trying to maximise their chances of survival. In the dungeon itself, it talked about finding places to rest up in the dungeon - my players decided that the best place to rest was outside!
Apart from the problem of re-stocking the dungeon, the main concern i had about resting was that it basically means that each encounter the party faced, they would be on full powers, hits etc, so the whole idea of attrition went out the window. By the way, that is not to say we didn't have fun in the adventure - there were some great long-running battles as the complex came alive and tried to kill them, and it became touch and go at many points. It was just that once they had survived this they would retreat to rest.
Now i could have taken a seriously powerful monster from the higher levels of the dungeon and stuck him near the entrance - something so damn powerful that the party would not be able to get past it. This may have been the realisitic thing to do but it would have stopped the players from progressing further, which basically means the end of the adventure. So I didn't go down that route. I understand that this would have taught my players a lesson about resting but anyway, at that point, real life got in the way and we stopped playing.
Perhaps 4ed does not run into the same camping problems (hopefully!) but from what i can tell having your full complement of dailies when you go into an encounter is a good idea, so fear that the same type of situation will re-occur. Perhaps it won't?
I do appreciate all the advice that i am being given, though, and realize it is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks, so thanks for all the tips!!
For that reason I am looking for some house rules that buff up milestones, so that it is the players themselves that want to press on, not that they are forced to because I tell them to stay or else.
Well honestly I don't see how you could buff them up to make them more attractive then an extended rest. I mean the players basically get set back to brand new on an extended rest so what could be better then that?
Also it sounds more like you got a bunch of sissies rather than a bunch of adventures. Running home to patch up after every battle instead of pressing on. My group typically does 6 or more encounters before an extended rest. In fact it's kinda a running theme of the group to see how long we can go without needing to rest to truly push the new attrition system of 4e. Often times this means going into combat without full HP because if damage is less then our HS value it's not worth wasting a HS on. Also our healer has Restful Healing so his healing powers are maximized during short rest.
Daily powers are not needed every encounter. In fact most encounters they are not needed at all. You only need to whip them out for hard encounters which is why they are Daily. If your players use them every encounter then either you will need to start making the encounters a lot harder or accept the fact they will cake walk through pretty much everything you put in front of them.
Also I gotta ask what level are your players? Because at lower levels when you only have 1 Daily, 1 Encounter, 2 At-Wills it can be very intimidating for new players (new to 4e) not having that daily. But once you get level 3 and get that second encounter power suddenly it doesn't seem as important cause now you got 2 fairly good attacks before needing to fall back on At-Wills.
Perhaps 4ed does not run into the same camping problems (hopefully!) but from what i can tell having your full complement of dailies when you go into an encounter is a good idea, so fear that the same type of situation will re-occur. Perhaps it won't?
I do appreciate all the advice that i am being given, though, and realize it is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks, so thanks for all the tips!!
4e can take a bit of getting use to from 3.x where you typically did nova, rest, nova, and so on. Also if your starting out I recommend starting at level 3 at least and not level 1. The extra HP really help players feel less vulnerable. But also the addition of a utility power and another encounter power really helps. Like I said above it helps minimize the feeling that you need that Daily power.
Also when picking utility powers encourage your players to take Encounter ones instead of Dailies if possible. Cause for teams like mine that go for 6+ encounters it's better to have an ability that you can use every encounter instead of one that you can only use once in 6+ encounters. There are some really good Daily Utility powers though which can be worth it though.
Also a great tactic that our party often gets into is the every combat use an AP setup. The way we pull this off is first two combats we don't use an AP so when the 3rd combat starts we have 2 AP but since you can only use 1 AP per encounter you might as well get using them. Well you can then use one for the 3rd and 4th encounter but after the 4th encounter you get another one so you can use it in the 5th encounter also. Every player using an AP during either their 1st or 2nd turn really hits the enemies hard.
Now I know the players can get an AP by extended resting just like they can get their Dailies back. But it still helps with the momentum to build up those AP chains.
Lastly I don't think there is anything you can do to increase the power of milestones to make them more attractive then an extended rest. I do think you can fundamentally change the rules though to make your players want to reach them though. There are already some items which only allow you to use their power if you reach a milestone for the day. Well the simplest answer for the Daily question would be to not allow your players to use their dailies until they reach a milestone. Though this is kinda railroading them and also posses the problem of what happens if you take an extended rest right before the boss or only one encounter before the boss. Then they don't have their dailies going into it.
Also you sound like your just about to get into 4e since you talk a lot about your concerns and experience with previous version of D&D. Well some advice is do what our group did which was we wanted to test how well the new system was at letting us keep going. So during our first game we made a promise to ourselves to see how far we could make it without needing to use our dailies. Well we got very far and only ended up needing to bring out the dailies because most of us ran out of HS so we had to finish the enemies off quick.
Fortress is where any tribe/cult/warlord gather his army to do something. Usually they have a limited amount of men to work, and have an eye on each entrance possible. Guards, turns, messengers, everything os more or less organized, and if something happens inside the fort, everyone will know this in less than 5 minutes.
Dungeon is something full of monsters that simple live there and dont care about the exterior world. A dragon nest, a swamp cave of lizardfolk, a cursed mausoleum, etc. Usually, they have limited resources, and don't care if anyone go in and out any time they want. They react to any threat, and that it.
Ruin is something Indiana Jones-que. Some place that they expect that would be empty of monsters, but not traps or story elements. Maybe some savage people, but you cant be sure if they are hostile or friendly.
All those dungeon types have their way to avoid 15-min adventure day.
Fortress, after the second retreat-for-rest, would search were they are resting, gather the best fighters they have, and ambush on their sleep. Tecnically, that is merging 3 or 4 encounters that WOULD be separeted if they pressed on, and showing that they really dont have much hope to winning. War rule 1: You never can give time to the enemy to regroup and plan again.
Dungeons can have their personal explanation to respawning, or the monsters can just run away if they feel pressed. A cursed cript can raise every dead inside it at midnight. A golem forge can have some homunculi repairing they. A wolf cave can retreat after the alpha male dies, and go to that place where they can find moist and delicious
Ruins is easy. The terrain is hostile, and you can be attacked by almost anything that moves. Snakes, spiders, rats, savages, etc. And if the ruin is (tecnically) empty, so why are you resting after just one solo trap encounter?
The timed mission is the most common way to force your players to press on, but almost any setting can have a logical way to penalize your players to not be "heroic".
As you figured, we have not tried 4ed yet, so perhaps i was jumping the gun. It was just that in the last version resting was such a pain in the ass that we may have become oversensitive about it:P
Is it really best to start at 3rd level? In the past we have always started a new version with brand new 1st levelers. Also, it is not that my players fear death - in fact they find it boring when death's boney claws are not beckoning - it was just they didn't see why experienced adventurers would not rest when given half a chance.
If we were to start at 1st level, any suggestions of the best adventure to kick off with? Or for that matter, if we started at 3rd?
Realistically, if me and my Orc brethren are hanging out in our cave and some jerks try and kick in the front door we aren't going to just let them pick us off room by room; we'll try and rush them all a once. The orcs in back playing xbox are going to come running when they here fighting in the living room.
Just a minor nitpick.
You feel it's railroading, but aren't the players railroading the story/situation if they rest whenever they feel like it?
It seems or can be interpreted along the lines of, the players are working your leeriness of supposed railroading to their advantage.
The houserules I have seen posted on here about milestones and dailies and the like, break the basic premise behind the game; Attrition. There is supposed to be a struggle within the player to know when to use their daily abilities. If the players never have to worry about it and can easily go into every fight completely fresh, the game itself breaks down.
I don't even give out milestones unless the actual combat was worthy of counting towards a milestone.
That doesn't work. Let playeres play their game..let the DMs play theirs. if the players want to take each encounter fresh, its because they don't trust that the DM has properly modulated the number or intensity of encounters.
Your encounters have to build momentum to a crescendo. If the 2nd encounter is really tough and forces them to expend too much resources (or the party feels its that important do so), then the 3rd encounter is on not worth the risk of entering underpowered.
If you want them to push through encounters underpowered, then you have to give more incentive to do so. Bonus XP in addition to a segway that tempts the PCs to push.
But more than that...give them a dab of what they want. A healing draught that restores a single lost healing surge, or a quickening crystal that brings restores one lost daily power then burns out. (I prefer the former to the latter, but I put it out there to give you some things to consider).
If your PCs aren't pushing, its because the DM is not incentivising them to do so and the story is too sloppy to demand it.
Is it really best to start at 3rd level? In the past we have always started a new version with brand new 1st levelers. Also, it is not that my players fear death - in fact they find it boring when death's boney claws are not beckoning - it was just they didn't see why experienced adventurers would not rest when given half a chance.
If we were to start at 1st level, any suggestions of the best adventure to kick off with? Or for that matter, if we started at 3rd?
No it's not needed. It's just that how overly paranoid about resting you made your players sound it seemed like a good start. Starting at level 1 can be perfectly fine just make sure you don't over tax your players. My first 4e game was with the H1-KotS which you can download free on the main website. It's a rather long adventure going from levels 1-3 so it can be a great way to get your feet wet.
I do recommend watching out for two encounters though that nearly TPK our group. First is when you go to the Kobold Lair and fight the guys outside it says to have one of the guys run in and get the rest of the Kobolds. Well the problem with this is the guys inside are an Encounter level 6 and your group is still level 1. That's n+5 which the DMG only recommends up to n+4 and while it is possible for a group to do high stuff it highly dependent on the group.
Anyhow the outside was level 1 encounter worth 575 xp and we wiped them but the inside came out before we got a short rest so we whipped out our dailies at that point and had already used our encounter powers so were stuck with at-wills. The inside group level 6 encounter was worth 1250 xp but we managed to take down all but two brutes and the Elite (boss) worth about 500 xp together. We then had to run and the fighter stayed an extra round to hold them back while we carried off the warlord but it cost him his life
. Since we were new to 4e the and the DM thought the battle was a little unfairly stacked having two encounters back to back no short rest he let us return for the fighter's body since he died outside away from the lair entrance and got the local cleric to res him. The other encounter in there is the last one of the adventure which is also a level 6 encounter. The difference though is your party should have reached level 3 by this point. This one is also heavily stacked against the players and probably should be ranked a bit higher cause of terrain and hazards in the battle giving free attacks and bonuses for the enemies. Anyway three of our party was knocked unconscious by the end of it but thankfully no one died. I've heard that encounter is so hard though that even fully rested groups have had TPK on it.
But both of those examples are of poorly designed encounters and not of the system. As most encounters (like 20+ total) went rather smoothly without to much trouble and almost never having someone get knocked unconscious. I just figured I'd give you a heads up in case you run it as your first dive into 4e. The Kobold Lair would of be manageable if we had gotten in that short rest first so not having the guy run to call the others would of been nice. Since healers tend to have encounter based heal powers so we didn't get to refresh those. And the final boss was mostly a result of bad rolls and that stupid terrain bonuses. But over all we only did like 3-4 extended rest averaging about 6+ encounters per extended rest with the except of that Kobold lair which is like the 3rd-4th encounter from the start of the adventure.
Also keep in mind that to die in 4e from damage you need to go negative your bloodied value so it's not like 3x where 10 extra Damage can kill you. So you need to take 150% your Max HP to die from damage. So it's very rare that this will happen unless you as DM attack their unconscious character. More likely they will die from 3 failed saving rolls which team mate with Heal skill can prevent by stabilizing them.
If you make your own campaign I'd say stick with n to n+2 encounters until you get a little feel for the system and the players also get comfortable with the idea they don't need their dailies every fight.
Also keep in mind that 4e differs from 3x in how power progression advances. What I mean by that in 4e the HP tend to out pace the ability to do damage. This means that your players will become more durable compared to monster's ability to damage them. So odds are as they level up they will feel even more confident about pressing on and even doing things like my group does which is not using HS during short rest to heal if the damage is less than the HS would heal to allow us to last longer. I don't recommend trying that at early levels though as first couple levels you probably wanna be near full HP unless it's only like 2-3 HP damage. (On a bit of a side note though monsters do tend to get more stat condition effects on their at-wills as later levels)
Also as players get more daily powers and more magical items with daily powers they will feel they have a lot more to fall back on as most fights you don't even use a daily power and tough ones you may only need one or two. I know my group and I'm sure many others do this to which is try and save as many of their Daily powers until the boss fight then simply nova on him. Which is a good tactic as long as the path too the boss isn't to hard.