Seerow wrote:And what exactly is wrong with having a lot of longer encounters? I wouldn't personally expect to clear out a dungeon in one night. Maybe that's just another example of me playing the game drastically differently from how most people here do. But if we go through a dungeon and take 3-4 sessions, that's fine with us. I'd imagine from the attitude displayed that something along those lines would be even more egregious to the average person here.
Seerow wrote:The point isn't that you MUST have dungeons, but that if you play the game and think that including dungeons is a stretch of disbelief, you're probably doing it wrong.
I believe the point was not that anyone's stretching disbelief or Doing It Wrong, but rather that the inability to have different sorts of dungeon encounters is precisely the problem with the 4e healing surge setup. Let's say there's a dungeon concept where the PCs have to go through a cave infested by dragon-related creatures, retrieve a MacGuffin from the dragon living there who controls the kobolds, and get out safely (dragon-slaying optional). Were you to run that, you'd probably set up a bunch of larger encounters where waves of lizardfolk assault the PCs in narrow hallways, a draconic roper tries to knock the PCs into an underground lake while kobold archers rain down death from a far ledge, wyverns buzz PCs as they try to navigate a room full of puddles and rocks and traps, and so forth. The combats are all huge, dramatic set piece battles, and that sounds like an awesome dungeon concept to me.
Were Frank to run the same dungeon, he might set it up so that there's one kobold tribe that constantly harasses the PCs, firing a crossbow bolt here and dropping flasks of flaming oil there and leaving snares and caltrops in the PCs' path over there, while zombies and skeletons animated by the tribe's necromancer come after the PCs in ones and twos, everything working to chip their health away and making the PCs' lives absolutely miserable until the players get nervous at the mere mention of sounds in the darkness. The whole experience is about attrition and messing with the players' minds, and that sounds like an awesome dungeon concept to me.
Were I to run the same dungeon, I might decide that I've used kobolds a lot lately and I want to make this more of an exploration adventure, so there aren't as many or as frequent encounters, but the entryway caved in and the paths aren't safe so the PCs have to find other ways to their destination. There might be beholders and oozes in some rooms and a bunch of goblins in others, so any individual battle could either be a huge fight or a minor annoyance; either way, though, the PCs know that they only have limited supplies and have to conserve for those big fights as much as possible.
In the Cave of Seerow, PCs might face 4-5 challenging multi-round encounters per day; 4e handles this relatively well, no problems there. However, in the Cave of Frank, the PCs will probably be fighting dozens of 1- or 2-round combats that aren't particularly taxing, and in the Cave of Emerald the PCs can face anywhere from 1 to 12 encounters a day, anywhere from easy to lethal in difficulty, depending on where the players explore. In previous D&D editions, all of these could basically be handled equally by a given party--healing came in smaller increments, day-to-day attrition worked, and the 3e quota of the equivalent of 4 even-CR encounters could be met with 4 normal encounters, 8 easy ones, 2 normals and a boss fight, and so on.
In 4e, though, the Cave of Frank and the Cave of Emerald don't work so well. Healing surges vs. innumerable kobolds means you'll either waste healing because you have to heal in 1/4 chunks or you'll wait too long to heal because you don't want to waste healing and would be in more danger than the rules expect. Healing surges vs. ridiculous boss fight can result in problems if you, say, had to heal the squishy wizard a lot during the combat and thus post-battle the defenders can heal back up to full while the wizard is stuck at half HP, where in prior editions healing could be distributed as needed; they've thus fixed the "problem" of having to rest in a dangerous spot in the dungeon because the casters are out of spells by replacing it with the problem of having to rest in a dangerous spot in the dungeon because the controllers are out of healing surges.
