Okay, 3rd edition resource management is geared to have 4 meaningful encounters before being forced to rest. But guess what, a lot of times this shits on your plot. You have some sort of dramatic situation like saving a princess before she is sacrificed, but the players fight 4 encounters before the final battle to defeat the badguy and save the princess. So they leave to rest or they get their asses handed to tham because they have nothing left...
Well, since the game is geared to having 4 encounters then a rest, one solution is to give the players a free rest if they complete 4 encounters without forcing them to actually rest within the game story. Of course, this would get a little weird since battle #4 would be fought with very few resources and battle #5 would be fought with full power. But it is easy to even things out.
Ok, so here is the idea. Every encounter they earn a Milestone. Each milestone can be spent to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of the resources they would get from sleeping. Two milestones could get you 1/2 (rounded down) and 4 Milestones could give you full recovery. You could also spend those Milestones within a combat, maybe to save yourself. This would help alleviate the problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph since people would be spending Milestones in an uneven way.
One issue with this is spells. How do you handle clerics and wizards and those that have to choose a set of spells at the beginning of the day? Well one option is to allow them to choose any spells they could normally choose when resting. Another option is to only allow them to recover spells that they used. A third is to allow them to have any spell that they had memorized. The difference between the last two options is that if a wizard has a fireball memorized and has not yet cast he could not get another fireball in the first case, but could in the second.
So if you allowed in combat spending of Milestones there would be a danger. Spell selection is often a time-consuming process and high-level casters going through their list or even going through a pile of splatbooks to find the right spell for a situation could kill the pace of combat. But the idea of suddenly marshalling your resources and getting a few hit points back instead of dying or suddenly pulling a needed spell out in a dire situation does seem cool. So you could place limits on the selection such as the second option I mentioned above.
So one interesting question is do you allow them to go over? If a character has 4-4 spells and they use them up so that they have 3-1 and they then spend 2 Milestones do they go to 4-3 or 5-3? If you allowed this they would potentially be able to save up a lot spells and then go crazy in some battles. But is this really against what casters do anyway? It just extends it. Personally I would allow it only I playtested this system a little more...
Okay, a quick summary of what you get when you rest:
-You heal your level in hit points
-You heal 1 ability damage to each stat
-You regain your spells
-You regain any abilities with daily uses (like Barbarian Rage)
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I think the safest use of this would be allowing casters to regain spells already used (option 2). The first option is -- as you pointed out -- too easy to exploit, and I'm not sold on the third option. Leave that level of spell versatility to the sorcerers.
To stave off questions of how to balance regained spell levels, I'd suggest simply getting back 1/4 of your spells at each spell level. If you haven't used any spells at level 3, you can't add them up to somehow get a fourth level spell.
Downgrading spell levels on a 1-to-1 basis would be OK. Instead of a 4th level spell slot, you could get back a 3rd.
Of course, if you implemented a system like this, you could get away from the problem you've found with using Action Points to regain abilities.
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