“Good luck. You’ll need it.”
You darn kids who won’t get off my lawn might not recall hearing a synthesized, original-series-Cylon-like voice shout that admonishment at you, won’t recall the odd pause between the sentences that almost veered into Antici…pation territory. Won’t recall seeing the arcade game speaking this strange tongue with two joysticks for each player and no buttons.
You darn kids missed out on a rather unique arcade game called Smash TV. The premise was simple, you’re a player in a television game show that has you fighting for your life. Enter a room. Move one joystick in a direction, your game avatar moves in that direction. Move the other joystick in a different direction, your game avatar shoots in that direction. Defeat all the baddies in the room, you have your choice of leaving through one door into another room.
The game’s actually your basic dungeon crawl with a key difference The room you leave behind is closed, unable to be opened or returned to. The only rest for the wicked was to blitz through the enemy waves as fast as possible and fight the giant boss in the last room. It also has guns, but guns are just hand crossbows with magic ammo.
Something I’ve been trying to do in the 4e games I run is break the mentality that a night’s gaming is 3 or 4 encounters. Dailies are saved for the end, short rest after every encounter. These were, and are, selling points of 4e: no need to to sleep for a week after a fight, everyone can do something more than shoot arrow or swing axe, encounters are point buy to balance for groups on the fly. And those things aren’t bad. But sometimes it’s nice to shake things up .
Last weekend, I put my players through “The Gauntlet”. (I steal ideas from everything I can. I steal names too.)
The rules were simple. The players, lvl 12, started in the upper left hand corner. The door behind them closed. I told them that once all the monsters in the room were killed, the other doors would open, and they could choose one to move through. Rinse and repeat until they made their way to the end room where the Macguffin they were chasing was waiting for them.
But the monsters can watch through each of the ‘doors’, the orange energy barriers between rooms. Monsters can learn and adapt, if given time. Each room had a gimmick. For example, the room south of their starting position had three dirt patches. The yuan-ti archers in that room could, with a move action, burrow into one dirt patch and appear in the other. If the PCs had taken a short rest after the first room, all the archers would have burrowed, two to ambush the first player in, and the third to pull one PC under and isolate them on the other side of the room.
Most of the rooms had this situation, if you rest, the room will be a bit tougher, if you press on, it’ll be a bit easier. Give the players a good reason to take a short rest (regain encounter powers, heal up) and give the players a good reason to press on (advantages in combat, dailies used early that last until end of the encounter stay active for another fight.)
The players enjoyed the change of pace, instantly grokking the nature of the fight after the first room. The fighter used Rain of Steel in the first room, and since the party went the entire way through without taking a short rest (we stayed in the same initiative the entire session), it was lethal to the monsters. But it got the PCs to use daily powers in the first fight against three lvl 5 brutes.
And the players seemed to enjoy pushing themselves. Since it was all a single encounter, they actually used their second winds when ‘moving’ to the next room. They used consumable items and other, less flashy powers because their major encounter powers were burned early on. It forced the players outside their combat comfort zones, which is always a good thing, and even though it was a Maptools games over Vent, there was an excitment in their voices I’d never heard before, the tinge of a voice found in a Craps player in Vegas who’s gone 6, now 7, now 8 throws in a row, wondering if he should press his luck or take the safe bet and stop.
Not sure this is something I’d try for every session, but it’s good to know the players do enjoy something different from the 3 encounter delve set up I’ve cut my teeth on.
Mike Hasko .-._. Psycho Pez
So, when have you ever passed on a short or extended rest when you normally would have taken one in your 4e games, or changed the pacing of ‘encounters’ in games from other systems?
I’d love to find a way to get my players to not take a rest after every single fight. The current adventure my players are on is a gauntlet-like dungeon that I had planned on not allowing them to rest in. It’s too bad I created rooms with doors though, since every time they find a room with doors as the only access, they stop, barricade them, then take an extended rest.
Kudos to you for finding an interesting way to change the game style. Congratulations on getting your players to buy in too!
@AliotheFool Too bad that really strong stone goliath on the other side of the door can break it down with one punch and let all its minions through the door as the party is resting. In fact, it opened the door so suddenly that the party is surprised and prone… too bad they didn’t sleep long enough to regain their daily powers, this guy is mean.
Just sayin.
Regarding extended rests, there are some things to keep in mind:
1) Duration: An extended rest is at least 6 hours long.
2)Once per Day: After you finish an extended rest, you have to wait 12 hours before you can begin another one.
A party needs to wait 12 hours between rests. For example, if a party completes an encounter, then decides to barricade the room to rest, that allows *6 HOURS* for someone or something to notice them in there. If they then proceed to the next room, clear it, and decide to rest again, they have to wait *12 HOURS* in order to be able to begin the next rest. They then have to rest for another 6 hours – that’s 18 hours of supposedly uninterrupted time.
If this situation was a personal campaign, that would allow plenty of time for the opposition to mobilize counter measures. Intelligent enemies could trap areas, or use the pcs tactics against them – barricade the doors from the other side, for example, or cause a cave-in or brick it in. Imagine the players hearing “scrape….scrape…scrape” while they tried to rest.
Some other thoughts:
• Why not trap the door itself to cause damage when the players try to leave?
• Enemies can create defensive positions created in the next room to favor artillery and prevent charges.
• Perhaps the room they are in has spy holes where the enemy can see what they are facing, and create appropriate countermeasures. Increase the difficulty of the next encounter- possibly without the added reward for the increased difficulty.
• The party has barricaded themselves in? Excellent! The enemy adds to the barricade, then starts pumping in gas, or smoke, or water into the room. Now the party has to get OUT! -or- the enemy brings in phasing creatures to attack and harass the party, then retreat out of the room.
If the enemy is smart, there is no reason for them to stick around if they know the party is holed up in a room. Trap the room and exits, then pack up and leave, then hire brigands to ambush the party as they leave the complex. The party is giving the bad guys 6, 12 or more hours to prepare. The enemy can do a lot in that time!
If you want the enemy to attack the party instead of waiting or leaving:
• If the party has holed up in a small room, the enemy might bring in a tough brute with an aura that punishes the party for being close.
• perhaps the enemy can get to the floor above the party and collapse the ceiling doing some nice damage while not exposing themselves to retaliation.(Alternatively, they could collapse the floor, causing the party to fall into a trap of some sort – such as a spike pit, or acid, or a room full of angry critters
…and if you are playing a prepared module, you are still aware of your pcs habits of holing up and resting. You could prepare some possible counter measures ahead of time to spring on them if necessary.
Another thought occurs to me:
If your players tend to hole up and rest repeatedly, one way of handling some of the scenarios I thought of above, is as a skill challenge instead of an encounter. For example:
Situation: Party is barricaded in a room
Skill Challenge: Gas is being pumped into the room, and the doors have been barricaded and trapped from the outside as well.
Skill challenge: Get out of the room before falling unconscious from gas
Some possible related skill uses: Endurance (hold breath, resist effects), nature (cover mouth with cloth, move away from gas (high/low), arcane (identify magical gas and tell party possible counter measures), perception (locate entry point of gas, notice doors trapped or barricaded on outside), insight (understand noises heard during evening as barricades on outside of door, traps being laid), Thievery (delay trap for a turn, unlock doors, disable traps on doors) Athletics (break down door) etc.
You can choose the make this challenge rewarding or not. If it’s a penalty of sorts for repeated rests, don’t make it count towards a milestone, and no xp is rewarded. If you plan on this being party of a dungeon encounter, then DO reward them for escaping.
1: Make it clear that if they rest in occupied areas (orc lairs, half-way through their invasion of the bandit camp, etc.) they will be interrupted. You can’t sit down half-way through an attack and take a five minute break – the enemy is not only not going to sit still, they are going to prepare and then attack. If the players have a chance (or a certainty in some places) of being interrupted it gives them a reason to push on and a penalty for sitting.
2: Make it clear that extended rests require a moderate degree of safety and comfort – i.e. you can’t take extended rests outside of towns, inns and those rituals designed to mimic the comforts of the same (after all, why do you think they exist).
Carl
Using information from an article I read a few weeks back, I started making the encounters a series of combats with an end goal. When the players reach the goal the encounter ends and they can take a short rest. It makes my players think a lot more about when to burn the big powers and pushes them much more than a traditional fight-rest-fight pattern.
As an example, my players are fighting in some arena games currently. I’m not letting them rest in between waves (there are 3 waves), but instead, I send the next wave right at the end of the previous combat. The party will get a short rest after finishing wave 3.
It’s also possible to encourage multiple battles in one encounter through less artificial means. If the party uses a lot of thunder powers, the bad guys in the next room move in. Or one bad guy takes the MacGuffin and heads for another room where he knows he has allies. The players can choose to follow in the moment or rest and risk it getting away.
I also sometimes give the players a mini-rest. They get to spend one healing surge and recover one encounter power and then go on to the next fight. That way they aren’t limited to at-wills, but they don’t have their full arsenal either.
@theFool, if they monsters have time to prepare, they can set up traps and ambushes. Or imagine if they come out after resting and find all the monsters gone (with their treasure). They track the monsters out and find out that they have spent 8 hours marching to the nearest human town. They players can do a forced march to catch up, but it will cost them a bunch of healing surges and they’ll have to fight several battles without a chance to rest.