Embracing the 15-minute adventuring day

[heavyfuel]

Indulge me if you may

A while ago I started a thread in the RP forums stating that I’d grown tired of D&D and wanted a new system. However, after reading the suggested systems and reflecting for a while, I realized I wasn’t in fact tired of D&D, I was tired of just wasting time.

As I grew older, I no longer had the time to waste in meaningless combats. Me and my friends barely manage to get together twice a month to play, and when we do get together, sessions aren’t 6 hour long like they used to be, they’re 3.

Today, as I was snacking at something to stave off my hangover, it hit me. A possible solution.

People complaining about 15-minute adventure days be damned! "Let’s embrace it!" I say! Let’s only play the important bits of the story. No more killing two dozen minions in mind-numbing time-consuming snooze-fests just make players waste their resources. Let’s go full on Shadow of the Colossus here. Important fights only.

To achieve this, we’d have to drastically reduce the number of resources as if the players had gone through all those useless fights, without wasting precious time actually going through them.

Looking at the PHB classes, resources would be distributed along these lines. These are just examples and similar changed would have to be applied to all other classes/class features/ACFs

Important Disclaimer: This isn’t supposed to fix or balance any particular class. Classes that were strong before will probably continue to be just as strong. Weak classes will probably remain weak.


Barbarian: 1 rage per day.
Bard: Each bardic music can be used 1/day
Cleric: Turn Undead 1/day (some domains powers would have to be changed too)
Druid: Wild Shape 1/day
Monk: Stunning Fist 1/day
Paladin: Turn Undead 1/day, Smite Evil 1/day

Spells: Any class that casts spells now has 1 spell per spell level. Specialist Wizards have an extra slot of the highest level for their specialized school (focused specialization is banned). Clerics have an extra slot of the highest level for their domains. Sorcerers are the exception and have 2 slots per level. Cantrips remain unchanged for all classes.

Eg: a Lv 5 Cleric would have 4 slots: one 1st level slot; one 2nd level slot; and two 3rd level slots, one of which must contain a domain spell from levels 1~3

Some magic items would have to get charges cut as well. As for HP, in my experience players are always at Max HP at the start of fights anyway.

This is likely going to hurt classes with at-will abilities like Warlocks and Initiators, but I think they'll manage.

Overall, what do you think of this as a concept? Could it work?

[Crichton]

This is likely going to hurt classes with at-will abilities like Warlocks and Initiators, but I think they'll manage.

Why are we limiting at-will abilities? I'd say leave them be. It's as negligible an effort for a Warlock to use an invocation as it is for a Ranger to swing a sword. They weren't a limited resource before, that's the whole idea of them, so they shouldn't be now. It just becomes a question of if that ability is going to be a good use of your action that turn, if all you're playing is the actual turn-tracked combats.

[JNAProductions]

Why are we limiting at-will abilities? I'd say leave them be. It's as negligible an effort for a Warlock to use an invocation as it is for a Ranger to swing a sword. They weren't a limited resource before, that's the whole idea of them, so they shouldn't be now. It just becomes a question of if that ability is going to be a good use of your action that turn, if all you're playing is the actual turn-tracked combats.

That's not what they're saying-they're saying that at-will classes will, relative to the resource-using classes, be impacted by this change harder.

[heavyfuel]

Why are we limiting at-will abilities?

We're not.

However, these classes have somewhat weaker at-will abilities (compared to vancian casters) because they are expected to use their strongest abilities all the time.

In a game with drastically reduced number of encounters, this advantage goes out of the window.

Edit: Damn swordsages! Still fast even under these circumstances!

[King of Nowhere]

not only those limitations do NOT reflect actual resource consumption (as a monk, past the early levels you stop counting your stunning fists, you never run out of them), but they also do nothing for the most important resources you were supposed to consume: spells.
and on the other hand, reducing the spells per day takes away much more flexibility, and it makes it much harder to pick your scant spells.
All of this is just unnecessarily punitive.

I embraced the 15 minutes adventuring day when i realized that the way my campaign was set up, this was the logical outcome of high level combat1. So, everyone was always buffed up, and everyone always went full-out on offensive. obviously, this tactic favored casters, because they could worry less about using their limited high level spells, but it wasn't a problem at my optimization level. fights were always very intense, i'd say it was a success.
one thing, though, just because the adventuring day takes 15 minutes, the planning will take much longer. players will need to carefully pick their buffs and contingencies and strategies. but this part can be done at home. an organized player will already present you the list of his active spells, and it can be discussed with the rest of the party via whatsapp easily



1 This is mostly because of two factors:
a) high level combatants are way too valuable to just throw away in the hope of consuming some resource. it's just awful resource management for the big bad. much better to concentrate them all in one single fight in the hope of overcoming the heroes.
b) if the heroes are low on resources, they can always teleport away and come back tomorrow. the only way to avoid that is a time limit, and sometimes i did, but there just weren't many circumstances where it would be reasonable to do so.

[heavyfuel]

not only those limitations do NOT reflect actual resource consumption (as a monk, past the early levels you stop counting your stunning fists, you never run out of them), but they also do nothing for the most important resources you were supposed to consume: spells.
and on the other hand, reducing the spells per day takes away much more flexibility, and it makes it much harder to pick your scant spells.
All of this is just unnecessarily punitive.

I embraced the 15 minutes adventuring day when i realized that the way my campaign was set up, this was the logical outcome of high level combat1. So, everyone was always buffed up, and everyone always went full-out on offensive. obviously, this tactic favored casters, because they could worry less about using their limited high level spells, but it wasn't a problem at my optimization level. fights were always very intense, i'd say it was a success.
one thing, though, just because the adventuring day takes 15 minutes, the planning will take much longer. players will need to carefully pick their buffs and contingencies and strategies. but this part can be done at home. an organized player will already present you the list of his active spells, and it can be discussed with the rest of the party via whatsapp easily



1 This is mostly because of two factors:
a) high level combatants are way too valuable to just throw away in the hope of consuming some resource. it's just awful resource management for the big bad. much better to concentrate them all in one single fight in the hope of overcoming the heroes.
b) if the heroes are low on resources, they can always teleport away and come back tomorrow. the only way to avoid that is a time limit, and sometimes i did, but there just weren't many circumstances where it would be reasonable to do so.

At 4 encounters per day, averaging 5 rounds per combat, a monk should never have so many SF that he never runs out. Still, like I said, the numbers aren't set in stone, only the concept. We can give monks SF 5/day for all I care, lol.

As for spells, you're right. Perhaps say you can prepare more spells, but are limited in use. You still have the versatility but almost no lasting power.

I generally agree with you on one big fight, but - like you said it yourself - it benefits casters a lot more than other classes

[AvatarVecna]

I love this change. "Not playing 3.5" is my favorite way to play 3.5, and this change would make the default game more like my preferred game.

[King of Nowhere]

At 4 encounters per day, averaging 5 rounds per combat, a monk should never have so many SF that he never runs out. Still, like I said, the numbers aren't set in stone, only the concept. We can give monks SF 5/day for all I care, lol.

5 rounds of combat? perhaps here is were our experiences differ. i only remember a handful of combats lasting 5 rounds. and they were climatic boss fights, or fights with hordes of mooks. level-appropriate encounters that should "expend some resources" tend to last a couple of rounds, at my optimization level. at higher optimization level (say, when there is an ubercharger) they don't last even that much)
Also, still based on my experience and party dinamics, those encounters who are supposed to drain party resources, generally don't. not past the mid levels. when we face some weak enemies, the casters generally take out a bag of popcorns and let us martials handle it without expending resources. we all have high enough AC that we are very rarely hurt by those kinds of enemies anyway. at worst it drains a few cure light wounds



As for spells, you're right. Perhaps say you can prepare more spells, but are limited in use. You still have the versatility but almost no lasting power.


well, if you are set with giving some penalties to everyone to assume that they already spent resources, then i suppose this would be a good compromise to keep versatility in casters while limiting their staying power.

[Aotrs Commander]

I mean, I just have the 15-minute advanturing normally without reducing resources just by making all the encounters generally harder so they are at least like miniboss fights; boss encounters are almost invariably against classed enemies anyway.

(Granted, for the weekly game where we play APs I leave some a bit as-is, but the encounters need significant bufs anyway, due to our party size (and the group's extremely capabile teamwork skills).

A typical combat I find runs not more than 2-3 rounds normally anyway, at least the way we play.

[heavyfuel]

I love this change. "Not playing 3.5" is my favorite way to play 3.5, and this change would make the default game more like my preferred game.

The same "argument" could be made about anyone playing E6 or 3.5 with a houserule in place. Taking the parts you love about a system and discarding the parts you hate isn't badwrongfun


5 rounds of combat? perhaps here is were our experiences differ. i only remember a handful of combats lasting 5 rounds. and they were climatic boss fights, or fights with hordes of mooks. level-appropriate encounters that should "expend some resources" tend to last a couple of rounds, at my optimization level. at higher optimization level (say, when there is an ubercharger) they don't last even that much)
Also, still based on my experience and party dinamics, those encounters who are supposed to drain party resources, generally don't. not past the mid levels. when we face some weak enemies, the casters generally take out a bag of popcorns and let us martials handle it without expending resources. we all have high enough AC that we are very rarely hurt by those kinds of enemies anyway. at worst it drains a few cure light wounds


well, if you are set with giving some penalties to everyone to assume that they already spent resources, then i suppose this would be a good compromise to keep versatility in casters while limiting their staying power.

Clearly you play at much higher OP levels than my games go. I'd say a combat is usually decided by round 3, but there are still strugglers around round 5. Still, even at 3 rounds per combat, a Monk would need to be lv 12 to be able to SF every round, and that's assuming he's not conserving any for an eventuality.

Assuming people have spent resources is how the designers intended the game to be played. Sure, you can play differently, nothing wrong with that. But I do believe it's the default assumption.


I mean, I just have the 15-minute advanturing normally without reducing resources just by making all the encounters generally harder so they are at least like miniboss fights; boss encounters are almost invariably against classed enemies anyway.

(Granted, for the weekly game where we play APs I leave some a bit as-is, but the encounters need significant bufs anyway, due to our party size (and the group's extremely capabile teamwork skills).

A typical combat I find runs not more than 2-3 rounds normally anyway, at least the way we play.

Do you not find that without resource spenditure combats just get extremelly rocket-tag? Basically every time this happened, the side with better overall initiative just pummeled the other side. Could be just my personal experience, though

[AvatarVecna]

The same "argument" could be made about anyone playing E6 or 3.5 with a houserule in place. Taking the parts you love about a system and discarding the parts you hate isn't badwrongfun

It's not really the same. If you don't enjoy playing games where the easy tiny fights are a thing, there's a real simple solution: don't include them. Boom, magic!

Or, I guess - and I'm just spit-ballin' here - you could include fights like that in the games you play, and then decide that instead of playing them you're going to acknowledge that you're actively choosing to not play the parts of the game you don't like (yet chose to keep included and tried to replicate their mechanical effect, for some reason).

Houseruling to make the game different from the way it is, is like not having fights like this at all. Including the fights specifically so you can turn them into cutscenes isn't the same, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Nobody's making you play with the parts of the game you don't like, so why are you kneecapping yourself as penance for not playing them?

[heavyfuel]

It's not really the same. If you don't enjoy playing games where the easy tiny fights are a thing, there's a real simple solution: don't include them. Boom, magic!

Considering the game is supposed to include these fights, removing them altogether might as well fall into the "not playing 3.5" argument you're trying to make.


Or, I guess - and I'm just spit-ballin' here - you could include fights like that in the games you play, and then decide that instead of playing them you're going to acknowledge that you're actively choosing to not play the parts of the game you don't like (yet chose to keep included and tried to replicate their mechanical effect, for some reason).

Houseruling to make the game different from the way it is, is like not having fights like this at all. Including the fights specifically so you can turn them into cutscenes isn't the same, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Nobody's making you play with the parts of the game you don't like, so why are you kneecapping yourself as penance for not playing them?

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not in your second paragraph. Sarcasm doesn't translate well to text.

Are you suggesting that I say "You run into four kobolds while exploring the dungeon. They attack and you kill them all"? If so, then how do you suggest I replicate their mechanical effect?

Also, how is what I'm suggesting - in any way - kneecapping myself as penance?

[Hiro Quester]

The concern I would have is buffing. Our cleric uses much of his spells per day buffing the party, and applying specific-for-this-combat to the frontline melee characters.

The bard usually spends a round or two pre-combat, if possible, buffing the party too.

the Druid spends a significant amount of his spells self-buffing with hours/level or 24 hour buffs.

Could you save time in the desired way by assuming that such buffers have more spells, but they are already cast?

[Quertus]

Also, still based on my experience and party dinamics, those encounters who are supposed to drain party resources, generally don't. not past the mid levels. when we face some weak enemies, the casters generally take out a bag of popcorns and let us martials handle it without expending resources.

Sounds like someone went to the Quertus school of wizarding tactics. :smallwink:

[Aotrs Commander]

Do you not find that without resource spenditure combats just get extremelly rocket-tag? Basically every time this happened, the side with better overall initiative just pummeled the other side. Could be just my personal experience, though

No.

Of course, having an average party size of seven characters makes a difference in that regard, I suspect, as does us having max hit points (and some boss monster having incremented hit points.)

[King of Nowhere]

Assuming people have spent resources is how the designers intended the game to be played. Sure, you can play differently, nothing wrong with that. But I do believe it's the default assumption.


I see a problem in your mindset here. you are taking "the way designers intended the game to be played" as an absolute. While at the same time discarding other parts of it.
And you are giving way too much credit to the designers. while they certainly did a reasonable job given their limitations, they absolutely cannot compete with all the billions of hours that all the games have accumulated, and that show all the different things you can do with this game.
And that's not just about the fact that the game designers assumed ridiculously low optimization, or assumed that the game would consist in lurking about in basements with random monsters, while you can play (for example) a political campaign.

In your specific case, "the way the game is meant to be played" is by playing the resource management game. You are supposed to only have easy fights, but to be limited in your resources. the fighting game should consist in how to go through all the easy encounters without wasting too many resources. You can't try to play the resource management game while removing all the easy encounters where you were supposed to spend resources.
I think you should rid yourself of this preconception on "how the game is meant to be played" and just follow what makes sense at your table. And then if you see that there is some problem, you can try to fix it. possibly with a houserule, or possibly by specifically helping a specific player, or by having the world be more prepared for a specific trick.
It's what i did, and it's what worked for me. I started dming with a lot of preconceived notions. and i tried to upheld those notions and it was not working. then i stopped trying. I just let the game develop organically, and i only went in and tried to change things if I noticed something causing problems. And I define "causing problems" as "making the game less fun".
For you? if you skip the boring easy encounter, will your players complain "oh, but we were expected to be running low on those limited-uses-per-day stuff! I am not having fun because I still have all my uses of smite evil!"? No, I don't think anyone will have less fun because of that. So it's not a problem, so you should not try to "fix" it.
In fact, by getting rid of the easy encounters, you are already playing a new game, different from the original design.

Luckily, the good thing about D&D, especially 3.x, is that it is not a game. It is a toolkit to make different games. So, you are running a dungeon crawl where your players should try to save resources for the big fight. I had run a campaign where the party was basically elite commandos running black ops - except, powerful enough that they can influence a war single-handedly; but it had a strong political connotation too, in the end finding allies proved more important than raw power. And now i am in a campaign that is a big sandbox with a lot of different branching plots, and we have the occasional dungeon crawl, but we generally have enough punching power to skip to the end of those directly.
those three games are as different as a first person shooter is different from a real time strategy. it's a testament to how good 3.x is that it can support all those things.
So, you should not fret over "what game the designers had in mind". you should try to play the game you want, and eventually adjust the game for the need.



Do you not find that without resource spenditure combats just get extremelly rocket-tag? Basically every time this happened, the side with better overall initiative just pummeled the other side. Could be just my personal experience, though
Actually, it's the opposite cause-and-effect: as the players become more skilled, they optimize more, the game becomes more rocket tag (because you can optimize attack better than defence; this perhaps reverts for the really high optimization, where you start sending out simulacri while you are in another inaccessible plane entirely) and you consume less resources in a fight. You also consume more time planning the fight. And yes, better initiative wins the day in this case; at high optimization, a lot of effort is devoted to going first, because it makes such a difference.
And I found it's quite unavoidable, even if I don't like it much as I'd like fights to be a bit slower. even if you ask the players to not optimize, you'll still get something better than what you get from genuinely bad optimizers.
I've done some houseruling and power-capping to that extent (removing the most powerful melee builds, forcing spells to be resistible in some way, giving full hit points) and that helped, but still fights tended to be short. trying to change the system even more would be too daunting, though i may consider it in the future if i run campaigns in my same world (with the idea that technology has improved, spells have improved, i'll allow some more powerful stuff but will also set up some homebrew defences to keep defence feasible). also, i wasn't too dissatisfied with where i ended up. and you seem to not have particular trouble

P.S. even if stragglers can hold on longer, i consider a fight finished when the casters stop casting and the martials stop using limited resources. basically, when you switch from "all-out" mode to "resource saving" mode, because the enemies that are left are no longer enough of a danger to be worth expending resources over. and that almost always happens by round 2.

Sounds like someone went to the Quertus school of wizarding tactics. :smallwink:

our party wizard never heard the name quertus.
but he is safe enough in his might that he does not feel the need to prove it in every encounter, especially when the party's two martial specialists can handle it with barely a scratch. In fact, he likes to hold himself aloof for the smaller threats, and one of his favourite phrases is "don't disturb me for anything with a CR lower than X". He goes full nova when needed.
I have to say, for a martial who is getting chomped down by a pack of purple worms, having your wizard shout "try to keep the racket down, i'm trying to rest" is a big injection in self-esteem: it means he consider you competent enough to deal with it on your own :smallbiggrin: (that turned out a very fun fight, by the way. but there were reasons for trying to let the wizard rest)

[Silly Name]

The issue I see with your proposed changes is the one regarding spell slots: my first impression would be that it risks removing a good deal of strategy and synergy between spells, as well as making caster even more stingy with their spells.

Let's make a very simple example: the party sorcerer, who is level 4, casts Web, entangling the current enemies. Next round they cast Magic Missile on what they consider the toughest enemy, and on their third turn they use Flare on the enemy locked in combat with the fighter. Now the sorcerer is left with zero spells for the rest of the fight, and must rely on something like their crossbow.

Some class abilities like Smite Evil and Stunning Fist also don't really benefit from being restricted to 1/day forever: when the Paladin misses on her Smite Evil attempt, she is going to feel quite bummed she wasted her only use of that ability, and the same goes for the Monk. Rage is ok, because if the Barbarian is going to rage only once per day anyway, in the boss encounter, it doesn't really make a difference.

My suggestion? Use E6 rules: they go hand in hand with the 15-minutes adventuring day since the characters don't become gods of destruction who can bend reality, and instead must be extra careful with how they use their abilities since they are relatively limited.

[Rawrawrawr]

I think the 1/day limit is a bit too punitive - there's a pretty wide variety of daily limits on abilities (e.g., the monk has waaay more stunning fist uses than the barbarian has rages), and as a PC it's more fun to be able to do your thing more often instead of less often :smalltongue:

My recommendation would be that, since encounters are supposed to use up about 1/4 of party's resources per day, cut the amount of uses on class abilities by 1/4 (rounded up, to match the "save more uses for boss fights" most players have/again, just let PCs do their thing more often to make it more fun for players). So, if you have 1-4 uses of an ability per day (doesn't matter what - rages, spell slots, stunning fists), that becomes 1 per day. 5-8 becomes 2 per day, 9-12 is 3 per day, etc.

And then from there, you can fiddle to taste - for example, if you find you usually have two encounters per day instead of one, you can cut resources by 1/2 instead. Or if casters still have too many spell slots, you can cut them back a little bit more.

[heavyfuel]

I see a problem in your mindset here. you are taking "the way designers intended the game to be played" as an absolute.

[...]

For you? if you skip the boring easy encounter, will your players complain "oh, but we were expected to be running low on those limited-uses-per-day stuff! I am not having fun because I still have all my uses of smite evil!"? No, I don't think anyone will have less fun because of that. So it's not a problem, so you should not try to "fix" it.
In fact, by getting rid of the easy encounters, you are already playing a new game, different from the original design.

[...]


In no way "the way designers intended the game to be played" is an absolute. I don't play with rolled stats or a single die per level for determining HP. However, I classes were given resources based on 4 encounters per day, and pretending this isn't true is being dishonest. No one expected wizards to come to boss encoutners fully loaded with spells, just like no expected Paladins to have all their Smites for the boss.

Precisely reinforcing my point that I don't mind going against the desingers intentions. Yes, this makes the game different, but also more fun. Instead of a player sitting down and scrolling their phone for 3 hours because they don't want to spend their slots (not my idea of fun), you have players using their spells every combat, and actually participating in the game (fun).


The issue I see with your proposed changes is the one regarding spell slots: my first impression would be that it risks removing a good deal of strategy and synergy between spells, as well as making caster even more stingy with their spells.

Let's make a very simple example: the party sorcerer, who is level 4, casts Web, entangling the current enemies. Next round they cast Magic Missile on what they consider the toughest enemy, and on their third turn they use Flare on the enemy locked in combat with the fighter. Now the sorcerer is left with zero spells for the rest of the fight, and must rely on something like their crossbow.

Some class abilities like Smite Evil and Stunning Fist also don't really benefit from being restricted to 1/day forever: when the Paladin misses on her Smite Evil attempt, she is going to feel quite bummed she wasted her only use of that ability, and the same goes for the Monk. Rage is ok, because if the Barbarian is going to rage only once per day anyway, in the boss encounter, it doesn't really make a difference.

My suggestion? Use E6 rules: they go hand in hand with the 15-minutes adventuring day since the characters don't become gods of destruction who can bend reality, and instead must be extra careful with how they use their abilities since they are relatively limited.

The party sorcerer (who gets 2 spells per level) can cast web, followed by grease, followed by magic missile, followed by another web against any enemy that somehow managed to escape the first one. That's 4 rounds worth of spells. How is combat not effectively over after that? A Specialist Wizard would probably have to do without the Magic Missile, but how is that even affecting combat?

Again the numbers themselves aren't the point here. The point is the idea.

Meh, E6 has the same problems, only on a smaller scale. Plus you never get to be a high level awesome character (which you still totally are with a reduction of uses/day for abilities)


I think the 1/day limit is a bit too punitive - there's a pretty wide variety of daily limits on abilities (e.g., the monk has waaay more stunning fist uses than the barbarian has rages), and as a PC it's more fun to be able to do your thing more often instead of less often :smalltongue:

My recommendation would be that, since encounters are supposed to use up about 1/4 of party's resources per day, cut the amount of uses on class abilities by 1/4 (rounded up, to match the "save more uses for boss fights" most players have/again, just let PCs do their thing more often to make it more fun for players). So, if you have 1-4 uses of an ability per day (doesn't matter what - rages, spell slots, stunning fists), that becomes 1 per day. 5-8 becomes 2 per day, 9-12 is 3 per day, etc.

And then from there, you can fiddle to taste - for example, if you find you usually have two encounters per day instead of one, you can cut resources by 1/2 instead. Or if casters still have too many spell slots, you can cut them back a little bit more.

The thing is, you'll be doing your things just as often, if not more often. At lv 1, a Barbarian can rage for 1 out 4 encounters (25% of encounters). Under this system they now rage for 1 out 1 encounters (100% of encounters).

Wizards will be using their awesome spells EVERY combat. Telling the Fighter "you go handle this by yourself because I'm not spending slots" while the player sits and scrolls on their phone for the whole hour that combats take is not my idea of a good time. Now there's no more risk of going every combat because you know you'll get your spells back in a jiffy.

I really like your suggestions though, including the rounding up. Thanks!

[King of Nowhere]

In no way "the way designers intended the game to be played" is an absolute. I don't play with rolled stats or a single die per level for determining HP. However, I classes were given resources based on 4 encounters per day, and pretending this isn't true is being dishonest. No one expected wizards to come to boss encoutners fully loaded with spells, just like no expected Paladins to have all their Smites for the boss.


so, if I get this right, you want to curtail uses of abilities because you are afraid that by removing those resource-draining encounters, you'll be altering game balance, nerf some classes, buff some others?
If that is the case, again my advice is to forget it. the classes were never balanced in the first place, and anyway the balance is 95% player and build, and only 5% the class. so, my suggestion is again to not try to fix a problem that is not there, and try to play it as it will, and most likely there will be no problem. only if you find balance problems that were not there prior should you take measures. And again, in my experience balance can only be achieved on a case-by-case basis. you can't balance the classes, because they are too different depending on the levels of optimization and the way the specific players are playing them, and partially depending also on the world (in some world you can cast invisibility and rob a bank, in some others any bank will be warded against spells; in this second case a wizard is less powerful, even if the class and build and player is the same).


No one expected wizards to come to boss encoutners fully loaded with spells, just like no expected Paladins to have all their Smites for the boss.
expectations are also table-dependent. at the tables i come from, everyone expects the wizard to come to the boss encounter fully loaded (if not with all his spells, at least with his higher level ones; he may have throws some fireballs around, but saving the disintegrate), and all the martials with enough uses of their limited-use abilities to last for the fight. when i was dming, everyone expected it because there was only one fight, and when i am playing, everyone expects it because we either skip the mooks with teleportation or earth glide or other tricks, or we breeze through them with minimal effort.

[Rawrawrawr]

The thing is, you'll be doing your things just as often, if not more often. At lv 1, a Barbarian can rage for 1 out 4 encounters (25% of encounters). Under this system they now rage for 1 out 1 encounters (100% of encounters).

Wizards will be using their awesome spells EVERY combat. Telling the Fighter "you go handle this by yourself because I'm not spending slots" while the player sits and scrolls on their phone for the whole hour that combats take is not my idea of a good time. Now there's no more risk of going every combat because you know you'll get your spells back in a jiffy.

I really like your suggestions though, including the rounding up. Thanks!

Glad you liked the suggestion!

Just to elaborate on the "doing your things" thing, I wasn't criticizing the overall idea (I think it's a good way to solve limited play time, and being able to nova every encounter is always fun :smallamused: ), just saying that I thought that the specific 1/day limitation on most abilities was a bit too much, relative to how often they could be used normally.


The barbarian's kind of an outlier in this scenario, since their rage lasts an entire combat, doesn't stack, and is almost entirely combat focused.

For an ability that lasts less than an entire combat, like Stunning Fist, only having one use limits how many times you'd do it compared to "normal" play - I've pretty much always seen the monk reserve enough uses to Stunning Fist at least 2 or 3 times in the boss fight (the same actually goes for a Paladin's Smite Evil, which my suggestion doesn't really do anything about, but that's why I said you'd probably have to fiddle to taste :smalltongue: ).

For an ability like bardic music that can stack, if a player only has 1 use of bardic music, then they can't stack different uses like they'd be able to normally (e.g. by playing Inspire Courage one round, and then Inspire Greatness the next round).

And for something with more out-of-combat uses, like spells, if over half your spells are blown in combat, you don't have much left to contribute to out-of-combat situations. So ironically, I think limiting spell slots to 1/day per spell level might have led to the situation you described - the wizard might cast one or two encounter-changing spells in combat, and try to keep the rest of their spells in reserve for out-of-combat problem solving. By loosening the restrictions a bit, they're freer to drop more spells in combat, while still knowing they'll have a couple of tricks up their sleeve should anything else come up.

[Arkain]

Have you seen Saintheart's attempt at autoresolving random encounters (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?579192-Autoresolving-Random-Encounters-in-3-5-PF-Always-looking-for-PEACHes!)? Maybe adapting the idea to skip whatever encounters seem overly trivial and/or unnecessary for the players at the time could be an alternative.

[heavyfuel]

so, if I get this right, you want to curtail uses of abilities because you are afraid that by removing those resource-draining encounters, you'll be altering game balance, nerf some classes, buff some others?

Like I mentioned in the OP, this likely has minimal impact on game balance. It doesn't stop a Druid from curbstomping any level appropriate challenge.


Have you seen Saintheart's attempt at autoresolving random encounters (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?579192-Autoresolving-Random-Encounters-in-3-5-PF-Always-looking-for-PEACHes!)? Maybe adapting the idea to skip whatever encounters seem overly trivial and/or unnecessary for the players at the time could be an alternative.

I hadn't, but - to be honest - I didn't like it. Deaths occur far too often for something like a dice roll to decide.