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I'm planning a long battle. Like, a solid four-hour dungeon crawl. Our heroes have a way to track down the baddie who's been plaguing the town, but she's got time to prepare.
I don't imagine they'll have much time between battles to rest. If they do, they'll probably have a fight during one of the watches. How do I rate the CR of the fights at the end of the battle to represent their depleted resources?
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Exactly the same as they'd normally be rated.
Within some limits. Basically 5 or so fairly average CR fights is usually considered a pretty good day, if you are forcing them to go through a dozen or so without rest, it does change things, although CR adjustment isn't really a good metric for that.
How tough it will be depends on a lot of things, one of course is how much of your party depends on limited resources, another would be if they rely on daily character resources for healing or use CLW wands (the later are usually a lot better at lasting the difference.)
One thing to think about, is preserving the 'fun' factor. I totally get the desire to force a party to go longer than normal, sort of dig deep and figure out a way to overcome that challenge, but at the same time if a wizard runs out of spells on encounter 5, and their are 7 more encounters, they probably aren't going to be having much fun for the multiple hours of game time those encounters will represent.
That doesn't mean you can't do it, but at least finding a way to hint that it will be a longer slog that usual before they use most of their spells right off would probably help.
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That doesn't mean you can't do it, but at least finding a way to hint that it will be a longer slog that usual before they use most of their spells right off would probably help.
This. Such a resource management style can be fun if you know what you're getting into, but it certainly isn't the default playstyle in Pathfinder.
I'm planning a long battle. Like, a solid four-hour dungeon crawl. Our heroes have a way to track down the baddie who's been plaguing the town, but she's got time to prepare.
I don't imagine they'll have much time between battles to rest. If they do, they'll probably have a fight during one of the watches. How do I rate the CR of the fights at the end of the battle to represent their depleted resources?
I think it was 4th edition that distinguished officially between "short rest" and "long rest," where a short rest is basically enough time to vape a wand of CLW or two, and a long rest is long enough to replenish spells.
I generally consider encounters that are not separated by a short rest to be all part of the same encounter, so two CR 5 encounters that are separated literally only by seconds would actually be a single CR 7 encounter.
Two encounters that are separated by a short rest are simply two encounters as per normal. After that, it's up to the GM to make sure that the number of encounters between long rests is "fair." It's not reasonable to expect characters to carry enough spells and rage rounds to handle 30+ encounters per day even if the encounters are technically level-appropriate.
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I generally consider encounters that are not separated by a short rest to be all part of the same encounter, so two CR 5 encounters that are separated literally only by seconds would actually be a single CR 7 encounter.
I might split the difference at CR 6 myself. Two CR 5s in quick succession still aren't as rough as two CR 5s at the same time. After all, while you're dealing with the 1st one the 2nd isn't hitting you.
I might split the difference at CR 6 myself. Two CR 5s in quick succession still aren't as rough as two CR 5s at the same time. After all, while you're dealing with the 1st one the 2nd isn't hitting you.
I generally consider encounters that are not separated by a short rest to be all part of the same encounter, so two CR 5 encounters that are separated literally only by seconds would actually be a single CR 7 encounter.
That's a reasonable response. My point was simply that the presence or absence of a short rest is a very important factor; that's basically the only way you're going to get condition removal spells in or the bulk of healing in, for example. (Even lesser restoration takes three rounds to cast. Like I'm going to cast that while something's gnawing on my arm....)
You can do it the other way round and reduce your party's CR for the depleted resources. A wizard 9 without spells and usable gear can be treated as CR 1 instead his normal rating. Casters would drop down hard, while melees not so much, since their armor and weapons don't use themselves up (= always same damage and AC). That is of course subjective, but you can gauge encounters a little better when viewing it like that. At the end of the crawl, a CR 5 encounter might be a real party killer for a 9th level group without anything left.