Chapter 2: Combat By Design
2.11 They Can Sleep When They’re Dead
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” – Ernest Hemingway
How to Handle Excessive Rests
Ever notice the party stops to rest a little too often – after almost every combat, no matter what’s at stake? This leaves you wrestling with the story impact of excessive rests while the party starts each fight with a full suite of tactical decisions to make.
This encourages a time-devouring “kill ‘em all” combat mission mentality.
Today you will learn why excessive rest contributes to combat slog. You’ll learn a variety of methods to discourage excessive party rests and a few methods to avoid. Finally, you’ll bring it all together by applying these solutions to your game.
Why Manage Excessive Rests?
We’ve all been there: the party seems to stop whenever it likes to rest and restore its resources, regardless of what’s going on in the adventure and campaign world.
The encounters seem to blur like a chain of total annihilation combats, where maximum resources feel like a necessity for the party’s success and survival.
When you manage the availability, timing, benefits and costs of rests, you help create different starting conditions for the party for each Mission.
The party’s thinking shifts to accomplishing quests and missions with the resources
they currently have, rather than forcing rests after every combat, regardless of the situation or potential consequences.
A full suite of tactical options and power might sound good for every encounter, but remember this also means your players spend more time reviewing, choosing and
executing each turn.
Switch the focus to the benefits of completing Missions and away from prioritizing rests.
Top 4 Excessive Rest Adjustments
Here are the top adjustments you can make to discourage excessive rests and increase combat and adventure pacing in your games – and add a more dynamic storytelling feel to your campaign in the process.
1. Time Matters
Time marches on, both in the adventure and in the world. List events that occur based on certain triggers or at certain times, whether in a dungeon room or across the
continent.
• Clock’s Ticking. Quests and adventures have a time limit. For example, the item the party seeks is poorly guarded for a brief window of time, or the adventure location will be destroyed on a certain day and time. Will the party steal back the Sword of Worldbreaking before the next full shift of arcane guards fills the area? Or what happens atop Spellbreaker Cliff tonight at midnight on the full moon?
• There’s a Whole World Out There. Similar to Clock’s Ticking, think of your campaign’s story arc and the campaign world on a larger scale. What events occur that affect the characters in some way downstream? For example, the full moon is coming tomorrow and that gives enemies an advantage the PCs do not want to face. • Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Rivals beat the party, repeatedly, due to all the minutes
and hours lost to excessive rests. This reminds the heroes there are others like them, and the early bird gets the worm – or even the artifact. If this happens often, not only have you created recurring enemies or villains, you’ve also encouraged your heroes to actually keep moving and be heroic!
• Sleep, Interrupted. The more often the breaks and the longer they are, the greater potential of a new encounter, combat or otherwise. For example, an Infiltrate
Mission falls apart as the party lingers too long in the sewers of a castle, getting into one too many skirmishes and making the fatal mistake of resting in the area after each one of them.
2. Monsters Dynamically React
Include scenes and events that show monsters reacting to the party’s actions, including the extra time the monsters have to analyze and prepare to counter the party.
• Cause of Death = Counter-Tactics. Monsters react tactically to the evidence and presence of intruders as the party leaves a corpse trail behind. The types of wounds alter monster tactics. For example, zero blade wounds and several spell blast-like wounds indicate a spellcaster-heavy party and the monsters employ tactics to
specifically counter spellcasters, such as silencing traps and magic of their own, or making spellcasters the primary target for the champion monsters.
• Curiosity and Reinforcements. Monsters of all kinds become curious as word and corpses get around. Patrol counts and frequency increase. More scavenging monsters enter and explore there area – there’s now more to eat!
• Learn and Study: Foes might post guards, plant spies and saboteurs in the party and watch the party from a distance. For example, this might teach enemies the PCs’ standard line-up so foes know how to attack better. The lightly armored but very perceptive rogue always leads 10’ ahead? Attack the party from the rear as a diversion and then pile up on the rogue to take him out so the party loses its best scout, making future traps deadlier.
3. Rare Safe Areas
Include only a few physical locations and points in time where resting makes sense in the context of the story.
If the actions of the characters and their Mission goals have brought them to such a point, that means you’ve done a great job communicating and planning for it in the adventure.
• Mission: Clear and Secure. The Mission requires the party to eliminate every monstrous threat in a dungeon section or floor before a rest becomes a reasonable possibility. The nature of the dungeon and its denizens, plus failed attempts at brief rests indicates this. For example, the dungeon area is packed with monsters, such as in a hobgoblin stronghold or undead crypt.
• Mission Accomplished. Finally, the adventure’s ultimate villain has been
defeated! This is the most natural time for rest and recovery, as the pressure of time and the villain’s antagonistic stream of complications are finally released.
• A Secret Place. In a dungeon crawling with monsters and traps, is there a hidden place with a magical pool of minor healing and a flower-covered shrine? Reward PC curiosity, perception and intelligence by including and describing a specific place of safety that takes the party a bit of effort to reach and discover.
4. Mission Variety
Include missions and encounters where resting and having maximized resources isn’t a priority.
Like combat, there are other core RPG experiences to include your games. These examples can pose as little immediate physical threat as you wish. Instead, they create
temporary complications such as splitting or delaying the party or creating major decision points in the story.
• Puzzles or Riddles • Traps or Hazards
• Social or Friendly NPC encounters • Political or Negotiation encounters
Top 5 Excessive Rest Situations to Avoid
Avoid these excessive rest-encouraging situations. They encourage a mentality of constant rests where characters are “fully loaded” with tactical decisions and options to weigh and resolve in every single fight, reducing Turn Efficiency.
1. Too Many Simple Combats
Don’t make every combat a walk in the park filled with cannon fodder and a simple mission like “kill ‘em all.”
Easy encounters are one thing, but easy and simple are a recipe for boredom and going through the motions. Use simple and fast encounters only if they’re exciting and
engaging.
2. Too Many Very Challenging Combats
Don’t include a high amount of extremely challenging encounters either.
If you run five or six encounters in a row that push characters to their limits and nearly kill all of them, you’re practically asking them to rest and recuperate as much as possible in between.
The party’s mindset switches immediately to survival and the mechanical advantage that a consistent full night’s sleep or rest provides becomes a constant goal, regardless of the story ramifications.
3. Very Few Combats
Tired of combat slog from your party unleashing everything they have every fight? When the party rests excessively, they’re likely to do this and turns can drag in every fight. However, don’t cut out nearly every combat encounter to compensate. Focus on different Missions, different starting resource conditions, and a variety of Combatscapes.
4. Rest-Rich Locations
Avoid high amounts of empty rooms and sprawling corridors or sprawling, uneventful tracks of wilderness. Get to the action – the next Mission, even or scene – quickly. Don’t use or describe adventure or Combatscape areas that suggest there are safe rest points everywhere.
5. Too Many Restorative Combatscape Features
Don’t include too many Combatscapes that provide the benefits of healing, recharging powers or resting. While occasionally this makes for a more creative way to heal and restore party resources, especially when tied to Mission and adventure goals, use it sparingly so you avoid creating an expectation that the party should always look to rest and have maximum resources before every fight.
Talk to Your Playgroup
The above advice aims to solve the problem of excessive rests within the context of the story, including believable and dynamic reactions by local monsters and events.
However, if excessive rests continue to be a problem for you, and your adventures suffer, bring it up and talk about it between sessions or right before your next game.
Be honest about how the rest mechanic impacts you and the story, present some solutions you like or have already tried, and ask for the players’ opinions and advice. You may learn they feel the same way or have excellent feedback to help improve the rules, story or your GMing. Collaborate and come to a reasonable solution and next steps as a playgroup.
For example, try out a new approach, adjustment or house rule and see how it works in your next game.
Ever Onward
Congratulations! You’ve learned why excessive rest contributes to combat slog. You now know a variety of GM methods to discourage excessive party rests by
understanding why excessive rests contribute to combat slog and identifying methods to handle excessive rests.
What’s Next?
Next, you will learn additional methods for managing the strongest and weakest monsters in your combats.
There are never enough boss monsters or cannon fodder in our adventures. It’s important you use these critical monsters well so they make a fast, exciting and memorable impression.
Resources
More at Roleplaying Tips: Tactical Tips for Overesting PCs and Over-resting PCs. And at Leonine Roar: D&D 4e: Top 12 Ways to Stop Sounding So Damn Metagamey,