Fighting the 15-minute Adventuring Day: How the Rules Can Help

There's a perennial problem with D&D (especially since 3e) that the game rules tacitly encourage a particular style of play - go into an encounter at full strength, unload all your most powerful spells and powers, have the Cleric heal everyone, and then rest to regain full strength. The short form of this is the "15-minute Adventuring Day" (hereafter 15mAD).

There are a few problems with this style, from the point of view of realism, of characters behaving as they 'should', and so on. But for me the big one is balance, on two fronts:

• Some characters have a small number of very powerful limited-use powers, while others have a lot of weaker on-demand powers. The 15mAD strongly favours the former, who get to use all their big guns, and then impose the rest on the others, while the latter get to play second-fiddle and then serve as glorified bodyguards while the spellcasters rest.
• The game is designed assuming that characters will face multiple encounters between rests. The 15mAD removes this, meaning that encounters need to be rebalanced in a way that the game doesn't really support... and leaves DMs trying to do this all on their own.

Now, to a large extent this is a cultural issue - if the group agrees not to use the 15mAD, the problem goes away. But the problem with that is that it is quite clearly an optimal way to play, and so the PCs are agreeing to hinder themselves if they do this. And, of course, any agreement is liable to go out the window the moment things get really tough.

But there are things that the game could do to help this. A few suggestions:

• The first option is to have the 'adventuring clock' have stronger effects than at present - each time the PCs take a long rest, the enemy get some of the treasure away so that it can't be recovered, and they draft in more reinforcements. So taking the rest isn't as optimal as at present.
• Another is to make sure all characters have a mix of powers of the various types. Unfortunately, this was tried in 4e and found to be wanting, but at least part of that was presentational.
• But the major thing would be to build in some rules whereby there is strong incentive to go on for "one more encounter". That might take the form of increasing XP awards for each encounter after the first, or perhaps the use of an "escalation die" so that PCs become ever-more awesome as they go on. Or, indeed, characters could have some powers and abilities that only unlock after a certain number of encounters.

The basic principle there is that characters should face a dilemma: they can stop for a rest and regain X, or they can carry on and instead gain Y. And as long as both X and Y are desirable, that creates an interesting decision to be made. Which is very much a good thing.