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This was posted in "The Fifteen Minute Adventuring Day" thread, but quickly got lost among the discussion of spellcasters recovering spells...

To address the HP problem, I offer the following suggestion.

Split hit points in half. The "top" half is a recoverable pool that can regenerate with a bit of a break between encounters (maybe 15 minutes?). The "bottom" half are the hit points that function as normal.

What does this do? After every fight, the characters will be at a minimum of 50% of their hit points. There is less of a need for clerics if you know that you'll have a reasonable amount of hit points even if you got mauled in the last fight. At the same time, you can be worn down from fight to fight as the top buffer is torn away and the foes get to the crunchy goodness inside...which makes clerics a handy but not absolutely necessary thing to have. Healing spells would help the bottom half first, then carry over to the top half if there is any healing left.

For backward compatability...well, most foes aren't going to last beyond one encounter, so there's no need to split their HP. For a reoccurring foe, or one that runs away and returns, it's not hard to split the HP pool after the fact to figure out how many HP they have when they show up next.

Of course, any HP damage that is self or ally-inflicted would come off the "bottom" part of the pool. No using recoverable HP to ignore HP sacrifices...

Right...because every CR 15 bad guy pops out of the Abyss newly cloned, without any experience whatsoever how to prepare against and fend off the incursions of so-called "heroes" or "adventurers". They all build their evil empires or plot their apocalyptic plans within days, without having a clue about the world they are about to conquer and the powers that might come along to defend it from them, and without accounting for their abilities.

Gotta love those pushover nasties. :)

Unless they're spellcasters, there's not much they can do. Is every bad guy in your game a spellcaster? Does every evil band of fire giants just happens to have an archmage on tap? How about a pack of dire tigers terrorizing the countryside? D&D, as it stands, forces the bad guys to have casters in order to compete with casters. That's something I'd like to see Pathfinder get away from, as it doesn't mesh with the fantasy novels that are the source material for the game.

But here lies the problem. You as a DM have created a static world where monsters simply "take a coffee break" until their door is kicked in. In any kind of dynamic setting, the adversaries should react to the parties attack. An abortive day should do nothing more than warn the enemy & perhaps call a counterstrike on the party. This isn't an attempt to constrain play style, it's just common sense. Try to think of any fantasy movie or novel.

In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf couldn't teleport the Fellowship back to Rivendell to rest up after the orc fight in Moria. For that matter, he couldn't just teleport the party to the border of Mordor, bypassing all that tedious overland travel. In D&D, both of these things are not just possible, but commonplace.

Once wizards get Teleport (and especially Teleport Without Error), there's very little a DM can do to stop a party from resting up once their resources are mostly spent. Most foes aren't going to be able to retaliate from halfway across the world during the 8 to 12 hours of rest time the party is taking. Even before that, there are spells that can allow a group to hole up and recover (Rope Trick, for example).

Sure, the bad guys may be able to fortify their defenses, but their lair is probably in a shambles after having multiple spellcasters go nova on them in those first few fights. You can also set time limits due to the nature of the mission. However, the point is, unless you do this *every* time, the times you don't have such restrictions, the spellcasters dominate the game. You have an elite strike force that (especially in conjunction with a crystal ball) can pop in anytime, anywhere. You probably don't even need to rest if you can scry out the main bad guy, teleport to him, and nova him with your high-level spells. Teleport away to recover, while the bad guy's minions run away with the loss of their leader.

The rules as written do *not* encourage husbanding of resources. In fact, there are tons of tools to keep a party going, especially at higher levels. The problem is that the game becomes less about the characters and more about magic (spells and items). That's the primary reason fighters are marginalized at high levels, and the reason high-level play is considered to be, for the most part, broken.

I think it needs to be said ( and i apologize if it already has. I just had time to skim the thread) that the true solution to the 15 minute adventuring day lies with DMs and their players. This style of play is an abuse of the spirit of the rules. Rather than rewriting the rules to prevent such munchkin-like behavior, I think it would be more prudent to provide advice on how to adapt play style to discourage such behavior.

Seems to me that you're advocating an approach that forces character choices and play style to be restricted by the way the rules are written, instead of writing rules that allow people to play the way they want. The rules currently encourage the type of play that you say is an abuse of the spirit of the rules.

Here's an analogy - do you tell a gunfighter that although he's got six bullets in his gun, he can only use one because there are more challengers waiting? In a life or death situation, I don't begrudge a wizard the decision to use most of his high-level spells, then finding a secure place to rest in order to reload.

I don't agree with all of the 4E design choices. However, they did recognize that if you want to simulate the classic bits of the fantasy genre, you need to give the characters a way to keep going after multiple battles. Their solution was healing surges and per-encounter powers. I would like to see Pathfinder come up with a solution that lets people enter a fight with a decent amount of hit points, not have to run to the cleric after *every* battle (or have people buy tons of 1st level CLW wands), and structure spellcasting so people don't just unload with their full arsenal at the start of every challenging fight.

Well, to address the HP problem, I offer the following suggestion.

Split hit points in half. The "top" half is a recoverable pool that can regenerate with a bit of a break between encounters (maybe 15 minutes?). The "bottom" half are the hit points that function as normal.

What does this do? After every fight, the characters will be at a minimum of 50% of their hit points. There is less of a need for clerics if you know that you'll have a reasonable amount of hit points even if you got mauled in the last fight. At the same time, you can be worn down from fight to fight as the top buffer is torn away and the foes get to the crunchy goodness inside...which makes clerics a handy but not absolutely necessary thing to have.

For backward compatability...well, most foes aren't going to last beyond one encounter, so there's no need to split their HP. For a reoccurring foe, or one that runs away and returns, it's not hard to split the HP pool after the fact to figure out how many HP they have when they show up next.