House Rules: The Extended Rest

This comment came up on the previous house rules thread, and I realized it ties to another house rule I use that I’d forgotten WAS a house rule.

As for recovering dailies – My players like to take extended rests frequently. It’s an urban campaign in Sharn, so (relatively) safe places to rest are easy to come by. I wanted to encourage them to stretch their resources a little further, so I was trying a method where you only regain a number of daily powers equal to the number of milestones you reached since your last extended rest. This worked okay, but does involve some long term bookkeeping. Still looking for alternatives.

I understand the problem. I often run adventures in which days pass between encounters. If you run strictly by the rules with dailies recovering every extended rest, you lose dramatic tension and blur the line between encounter and daily power, as people get used to having their full set of dailies each encounter.

As a result, I generally abandon the term daily.  As I said in the previous post, in my mind what the daily power models is the cinematic experience in which a character has a few dramatic moves that he’s only going to use at critical moments in the story. I look at it as an episode of a TV show. In 24, that one-hour episode is going to take an hour of subjective story time. In a different show, that one-hour episode may take a week. But you still don’t want to see the protagonist using his coolest moves every ten minutes in show #2 just because the story calls for a time-lag between scenes. What makes the move dramatic is that it’s only pulled out when it’s needed. As a result, I typically make “daily” powers and healing surges refresh once per adventure. I’ll make an exception if the story itself calls for the PCs to be at full power or if finding a safe sanctuary for a rest is a key part of the drama – in which case I might not even reset at the start of a new session if the PCs haven’t found that safe haven. So if I look at Lord of the Rings, if the goal of a given adventure/episode is to reach Rivendell, I don’t care that you slept at Bree along the way – Rivendell is the dramatic point at which the story rests.

It’s not necessarily realistic, but I’m more concerned with the dramatic flavor. The key is making sure the players understand the rules ahead of time. The unspoken rule is “Dailies & Surges are once per adventure”; if rest is a requirement or an option, I’ll make it clear.

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