Opinion: will you be reluctant or eager to switch from 5E to 6E?

[Goobahfish]

I disagree. I think managing resources around the uncertainty of replenishment is an important part of the problem solving process, to say nothing of game balance. If a wizard can just burn all their spell slots without concern that they might not have a resource they need, then the limits on the resource are not actually affecting the game at all and may as well not be present.

If youre going to nova, or burn a dozen spells unlocking chests, or hunting for traps or whatever, you should have to weigh the opportunity cost of those resources not being available later when you decide to do those things.

The problem here is that this view is a narrow lens. The meta-strategy becomes how to do 5-minute adventuring days. If you solve the 'turn X into a 5 minute adventuring day' you have solved the smaller problem of 'run out of resources by going nova'.

Half the responses in this thread seem to be hacked homebrew methods for overcoming these weird tensions created by bad game design. This mechanism works well in isolation like an individual game of Hearts/Uno etc where certain powerful cards need to be played at the right time to win, not immediately played nor saved for the last round. However, in D&D where the number of games played and the number of rounds per game is tacitly under the control of the players, it revokes the basic balance of the system.

The counter-meta is for the DM to screw with rests in narratively unsatisfying ways. They can be interesting if they are the point (as in my original analogy to desert adventures) but are really problematic if they are incidental balancing mechanisms.

---

To clear up some confusion, I am not against LR abilities. I think they are cool. My concern is that some classes are 'structural LR classes' which I think is pretty dumb because 'LR' isn't really codified within the game (and definitely shouldn't be) and thus these characters have wildly fluctuating power levels.

As I said, I think most of the power of classes should be derived from passive abilities and short rests with LR serving as 'clutch nova' mechanics rather than 'default nova' mechanics.

[Keltest]

The problem here is that this view is a narrow lens. The meta-strategy becomes how to do 5-minute adventuring days. If you solve the 'turn X into a 5 minute adventuring day' you have solved the smaller problem of 'run out of resources by going nova'.

Half the responses in this thread seem to be hacked homebrew methods for overcoming these weird tensions created by bad game design. This mechanism works well in isolation like an individual game of Hearts/Uno etc where certain powerful cards need to be played at the right time to win, not immediately played nor saved for the last round. However, in D&D where the number of games played and the number of rounds per game is tacitly under the control of the players, it revokes the basic balance of the system.

The counter-meta is for the DM to screw with rests in narratively unsatisfying ways. They can be interesting if they are the point (as in my original analogy to desert adventures) but are really problematic if they are incidental balancing mechanisms.

---

To clear up some confusion, I am not against LR abilities. I think they are cool. My concern is that some classes are 'structural LR classes' which I think is pretty dumb because 'LR' isn't really codified within the game (and definitely shouldn't be) and thus these characters have wildly fluctuating power levels.

As I said, I think most of the power of classes should be derived from passive abilities and short rests with LR serving as 'clutch nova' mechanics rather than 'default nova' mechanics.

What do you mean? A long rest is generally assumed to be "tonight's sleep" which you can't avoid without exhausting yourself to death eventually. That seems pretty well codified to me. Youre taking long rests for sleep, if nothing else, all the time (absent the use of the grim and gritty rules where a long rest is a week). The 5 minute adventuring day comes into play when a DM doesnt have any other challenges between the first encounter of the day and the next long rest opportunity, which leads to absurd things like the party crawling through a dungeon, finding a band of ogres, burning all their spell slots on it, then camping out in their room for 8 hours while the next room with a pack of orcs wait politely for them to finish. Hence restricting rests.

[Tanarii]

If the DM is denying access to a long rest, he might not be denying access to a short rest. Either intentionally or just by letting the dice fall where they may regarding the timing of whatever is creating time pressure. Of course, there may be time for neither. It is unusual, but actual time pressure that isn't "go go go right now" can do that.

Simple example, using the 15% chance of a wandering encounter (DMG) every hour (DM call but reasonable), there is an 85% chance of succeeding on a short rest, but only a 27% chance of succeeding on a long rest.

[Psyren]

To clear up some confusion, I am not against LR abilities. I think they are cool. My concern is that some classes are 'structural LR classes' which I think is pretty dumb because 'LR' isn't really codified within the game (and definitely shouldn't be) and thus these characters have wildly fluctuating power levels.

LR is codified within the game. DMG 84:

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can get through fewer...This provides a rough estimate of the encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

In general, LR resources are designed so the characters can make it through 6-8 encounters per day. That includes both combat and non-combat encounters. If your players are routinely nova-ing all their resources 2 encounters into that and you don't want them to, either your encounters' difficulty might need to be adjusted, or your players need to be trained out of doing that and conditioned to internalize the importance of properly managing their resources.

[PhoenixPhyre]

LR is codified within the game. DMG 84:



In general, LR resources are designed so the characters can make it through 6-8 encounters per day. That includes both combat and non-combat encounters. If your players are routinely nova-ing all their resources 2 encounters into that and you don't want them to, either your encounters' difficulty might need to be adjusted, or your players need to be trained out of doing that and conditioned to internalize the importance of properly managing their resources.

Making encounters more difficult (one of the options here), in my experience, makes people nova even harder. It becomes a spiral. I find that uncertainty is the most effective thing, along with having a bunch of different clocks running. Not doom clocks, but "the world is progressing, even if you stop". And enforcing the idea that you can only LR once in 24 hours. So a 5 minute working day means taking an entire day off. Not holing up for 8 hours, but holing up for 20+ hours.

[Segev]

"If there's time for you to go to bed at night, there's time for you to take an hour-long nap during your shift." It just doesn't follow.

No, that's not a valid response, because you changed what I said to make it ridiculous. I said, "If there's time for a long rest, there's time for a short rest." I did not say, "If there is time for a long rest in situation A, there's time for a short rest in situation B."

To use your wording: "If there's time for you to go to bed at night, there's time for you to take an hour-long nap at night."

If there's time for you to take a long rest before your big boss battle, there's time for you to take a short rest before your big boss battle. The reverse is not necessarily true.

Long Rests typically happen at the end of the day, while Short Rests happen during it. They don't happen at the same time. And just as importantly, LR resources tend to come in greater quantities than SR ones, so you don't run out of them at the same time either.

Agreed. The issue being that a 5 minute adventuring day comes about when short rests give so little that it becomes worth it to just stop everything, fortify up, and wait 23 hours rather than 1.

My position is that LR classes need more SR restoration. That way, SRs give them enough to justify taking one and keeping going, extending those LR resources a little further, possibly by not having to use them up at all in favor of SR resources, or possibly (as you've suggested) by restoring a smaller amount of them. SR classes getting a few LR resources is also fine, but I do like there being SR-strong classes and LR-strong classes, so having some classes get better SR abilities with more limited ways ot extend their use over long stretches while others get LR abilities that don't refresh as fast with SRs is good. You have to be careful about whether SR or LR abilities are stronger if both can have LR and SR restoration, though.

I think, for example, monks getting ki back on an SR is good, but maybe they need an LR feature that lets them recover some ki as an action or something PB/day. Warlocks having some LR-restoration bonus spell slots or spell slot recovery or something would also be good. Something, as you note, to let them push just a little longer if they happened to need that short rest but can't get it.

That said, you can keep the current paradigm and JUST give the LR classes a little bit more of their prime resources back with a short rest (maybe sorcerers get PB SP back per SR, and Arcane Recovery can be spread out over multiple SRs, and barbarians get 1 rage back per SR, for example), and solve the specific scenario of, "LR classes aren't out of juice yet, but SR classes are, and you have a boss fight that won't wait an hour for you to rest" with better/more options for instant SRing. Catnap, special potions, a hero point based mechanic, or whatever excuse you want to use to give PCs the ability to sometimes SR without taking the full hour.

[EggKookoo]

Making encounters more difficult (one of the options here), in my experience, makes people nova even harder. It becomes a spiral. I find that uncertainty is the most effective thing, along with having a bunch of different clocks running. Not doom clocks, but "the world is progressing, even if you stop". And enforcing the idea that you can only LR once in 24 hours. So a 5 minute working day means taking an entire day off. Not holing up for 8 hours, but holing up for 20+ hours.

Seconding the value of multiple small clocks over one big doomsday clock. The latter is more likely to reduce agency, since ignoring the clock ends the story or comes close to it. Having multiple smaller, manageable clocks makes each rest an interesting decision in opportunity cost. It gets the players discussing things.

[Keltest]

Agreed. The issue being that a 5 minute adventuring day comes about when short rests give so little that it becomes worth it to just stop everything, fortify up, and wait 23 hours rather than 1.

I disagree. 5 minute adventuring days come about when there is no disadvantage to doing so. If theres no penalty for having a long rest after every encounter, or some restriction on doing so, then people are just going to do it all the time, and indeed it becomes the best strategy to do so. It doesnt have anything to do with short rests, because people will always prefer having more resources to fewer.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I disagree. 5 minute adventuring days come about when there is no disadvantage to doing so. If theres no penalty for having a long rest after every encounter, or some restriction on doing so, then people are just going to do it all the time, and indeed it becomes the best strategy to do so. It doesnt have anything to do with short rests, because people will always prefer having more resources to fewer.

Agreed. And that's where having a sense that the world is moving on without you matters. Not just locally (ie the place you're in), but globally. The longer you ignore certain threats or opportunities, the worse they get or the more the chance they have of vanishing. And making that fairly open.

But that requires people to actually be engaged with the world and the narrative. It's less effective when only the mechanics matter. I don't have any answers for that other sort, other than personally not playing at those tables.

[Keltest]

Agreed. And that's where having a sense that the world is moving on without you matters. Not just locally (ie the place you're in), but globally. The longer you ignore certain threats or opportunities, the worse they get or the more the chance they have of vanishing. And making that fairly open.

But that requires people to actually be engaged with the world and the narrative. It's less effective when only the mechanics matter. I don't have any answers for that other sort, other than personally not playing at those tables.

Even in a basically storyless game like a megadungeon crawl, wandering encounters and the idea that the party might not be able to get a long rest whenever they feel like it still help add uncertainty to the availability of a long rest after every encounter and as such help dissuade nova tactics. You dont need staggeringly complex geopolitics to convince people that they cant just sit on their butts for 23.5 hours. A pack of ogres clobbering them mid-rest because they have no resources to use will do it too.

[Warder]

TIL that people had such strong opinions about the SR/LR recharge thing - I've seen it mentioned before, of course, but it's never once been an issue at any table I've played at, so I never expected it'd be a hotly debated topic for something that needs rectifying in an edition change.

In my experience, resistance to taking short rests come from a narrative perspective; an hour is a very long time to hole up in hostile territory, and there are quite often other external time limits to consider as well - you know, "stopping the ritual", etc. It seems to me that the easiest "fix", if one is needed, is to make short rests much shorter - 10 minutes tops - and limit the amount you can benefit from between long rests. It's a very hard sell to convince the party to sit down and have lunch for an hour when dragon cultists are summoning Tiamat, but taking a breather to wrap your wounds makes far more narrative sense.

[Keravath]

If 6e is a stealth reversion to 4e - I won't play it and most of the folks I know wouldn't play it either. So, playing 6e would depend on what changes are made to the mechanics and how it plays compared to 5e. There is always room for improvement in a game system.

However, if they try to simplify it too much, make it too accessible, reduce record keeping, give the players less they need to know to play the game, try to reduce d&d to its lowest common denominator - all of those sound like a great idea and are certainly laudable goals to make it easier to play to attract more players and easier to run to encourage more DMs - but if those goals come at the cost of losing whatever "je ne sais quois" makes D&D the game it is then it is less likely to be successful.

In my opinion, that is more or less what happened with 4e. (Note: These are my impressions based on no more than half a dozen game sessions of 4e). The system was simplified and streamlined. Each class had at-will, encounter, and daily abilities as well as healing surges so that everyone could play whatever character you liked but mechanically it had little impact since everything essentially felt the same. I felt that the 4e system would have made a decent video game.

On the other hand, 3.5e, Pathfinder etc had far too much detail. Optimization and required level of knowledge were too high in my opinion to capture a wider audience.

5e seemed to find a sweet spot, enough like 1e and the other versions of D&D to feel like D&D while also simplifying the mechanics enough to make the game more accessible and easier to play. My personal opinion is that 5e is the best version of the game published so far (though I didn't play basic, I started with AD&D).

TL;DR ... I will buy the core books for 6e same as I have done for every other version :) ... whether it sees play will depend on whether it is "better" than 5e in terms of mechanics while still capturing the feeling that makes the game D&D.

[Psyren]

To use your wording: "If there's time for you to go to bed at night, there's time for you to take an hour-long nap at night."

But this doesn't work, because "at night" means the adventuring day is over. You should have no reason to short rest when the adventuring day is over, so I can't connect with this idea at all.

If there's time for you to take a long rest before your big boss battle, there's time for you to take a short rest before your big boss battle.

As I mentioned, the point of a time limit is that there's no time for either rest before the boss battle. But with long rest resources you don't need to rest before the boss battle, because they come in larger quantities. You just have to manage those resources.

Agreed. The issue being that a 5 minute adventuring day comes about when short rests give so little that it becomes worth it to just stop everything, fortify up, and wait 23 hours rather than 1.

It's only worth it to do this if your plot has no stakes or urgency. Which imo makes it a bad plot.

I think, for example, monks getting ki back on an SR is good, but maybe they need an LR feature that lets them recover some ki as an action or something PB/day. Warlocks having some LR-restoration bonus spell slots or spell slot recovery or something would also be good. Something, as you note, to let them push just a little longer if they happened to need that short rest but can't get it.
...
That said, you can keep the current paradigm and JUST give the LR classes a little bit more of their prime resources back with a short rest (maybe sorcerers get PB SP back per SR, and Arcane Recovery can be spread out over multiple SRs, and barbarians get 1 rage back per SR, for example), and solve the specific scenario of, "LR classes aren't out of juice yet, but SR classes are, and you have a boss fight that won't wait an hour for you to rest" with better/more options for instant SRing. Catnap, special potions, a hero point based mechanic, or whatever excuse you want to use to give PCs the ability to sometimes SR without taking the full hour.

I'm conceptually fine with these (but the devil is in the details.)

[Ogun]

The grittiness/ high fantasy scale of 5e reflects all of dungeons and dragons history.
Starting out as disposable and becoming godlike was baked into the experience.
That early level lethality has gone down, the late level invulnerability, not as much.
The various scales mentioned, the modularity, these are all features of class free point buy games designed to be used for any fantasy world you want.
Gurps and Hero system spend huge portions of their page counts offering ways to set the tone you are looking for, mechanically.

Asking Dnd to do that is possible, and it's happening, but it can, will and has frustrate a lot of old guard.
By allowing 3rd party and homebrew to do this work, Dnd avoids a lot of potential missteps.


On the original topic, I will play whatever the lingua franca game is.
I never played 4th, because the people I played with at the time hated it.
I like mucking about with systems, but playing with friends beats any potential gain from a system.

This maybe why I'm genuinely confused by the anti short rest arguments. 😳
If your druid or warlock is out of their best resources, why wouldn't you try to short rest?
If your party is in the middle of rescuing hostages, chasing down cultists, or clearing out trolls, rests can't happen.
Marshaling all of a parties resources is part of the game.
Short or long rests are tactical choices, and also narrative tools.

Speaking of narrative tools, the best games I've played in are the ones that sharply curtail class options.
I'm talking games where there are only rogues, monks and warlocks!
The classes reflected the world building the DM was undertaking.
Instead of trying to hamstring full casters to make their power level fit the gritty setting, he eliminated them.
In another game he capped spellcasters at 3rd level spells.
In all games he runs, he removes the parts of Dnd that don't fit his vision.
This works for us because his visions are flipping awesome, and we want in on them.
You can build a lot of what you want from a big bloated overpowered mess, just by saying no to stuff you don't like.

The official game can't do that without losing customers.
It has to keep things simple enough , while offering at least the illusion of choice in character creation and play.
Bloat and powercreep ensue, because they have to keep selling, and "official crunch" is the only thing they have a monopoly on.
I messed around with PF2 but it seems like the philosophy is to make character building choices pretty meaningless.
Like every race was little more than a skin in a video game.
Because having your prefered class/race combo be subpar is less fun for some people, one could say 5.5 is headed that way.
The realistic consequences of being a different species, race, or even culture require zero mechanical support support to invoke and yet they are not often invoked at gaming tables.
With that as a given, I don't really see how tying ability score allotment is meaningful.
If it can be changed by training(leveling) up, let it start out at a "level of training" unique to that PC.
I've played a weak Goliath, it was a blast.
There are plenty of other things that can be unique to individual fantasy races.
I'm not a fan of the PB per day abilities, but Attribute Bonus per day could reward a PC for leaning into the racial gimmick.
Size still matters, though less and less.
Different kinds of movement proliferate.
(Why have unlimited flying on 1st level PCs when it's hard to aquire for every class?)
And then there are inexplicable outliers like the bugbear...

As long as my people play it, I will try 6e.
If it has edge cases and unusual bits to exploit, I'll play around with the system for fun.

[TMac9000]

Judging from our group’s past behavior:

When 2E came out, we switched to 2E. When 3E came out, we switched to 3E. When 3.5 came out, we switched to 3.5. When 4E came out, we gave it a whirl. (It was fun but it didn’t really feel like D&D.) And when 5E came out, we switched to 5E.

I expect that when 6E happens, and eventually it will, we’ll probably slide over to that.

Note: I respect folks who hew to older editions. I *do* run Classic Traveller, after all, despite all the new editions out there. I guess I like my SF old school, but don’t really GAF when it comes to fantasy.

[Necrosnoop110]

If 6e is a stealth reversion to 4e - I won't play it and most of the folks I know wouldn't play it either. So, playing 6e would depend on what changes are made to the mechanics and how it plays compared to 5e. There is always room for improvement in a game system.

Agreed.

I think, however, there is a way to work towards better "power" balance (balance both between classes and with the absolute 1-20 power range) and play-ability, without losing the open-ended-ness that makes D&D different than war-gaming or board-games. And I think streamlining things isn't exactly the same thing as power balancing.

I often speculate whether Advanced vs Basic and/or Core vs Epic rulesets would work toward making the game better for both newbies and hardcore. Whether or not "dividing" the game in such a way will ever happen much or at all, is another question.

[Sception]

I'll be excited, I like playing with new stuff. That said, I'll be /more/ excited if it's compatible enough with 5e that I can still play a Conquest Paladin, because as much as I like playing with new stuff, what I /really/ like is playing with the exact same old stuff that I always play with.

[KorvinStarmast]

I have a stock item that I tend to provide periodically (usually when I know there's a boss fight and no sane way to rest and it makes sense to provide them; they can be bought in some areas):

Potion of Apprentice's Friend

Spoiler: potion details

Show

Common potion.

This potion takes one minute to drink. After having been drunk, the user receives the benefit of a short rest.

Special: For every such potion drunk after the first since completing a long rest, the drinker must make a Constitution saving throw with DC = 10 + 5*number of these potions drunk since the last long rest. On a failed saving throw, the drinker also gains 2 levels of exhaustion.

------

Play test Endorsement: in our previous campaign these weren't all that plentiful, but when we had them they were a very good means to the end that PhoenixPhyre describes - and from my end, it did wonders for pacing and SR incorporation into play.
I heartily recommend that any DM consider importing this custom magic item into their campaign. You could say that we play tested it and gave a resounding four out of four thumbs up. (And I usually ended up giving mine to the Warlock; I was the bard).

If 6e is a stealth reversion to 4e - I won't play it and most of the folks I know wouldn't play it either.

Yep. Crawford is a big fan of the fey wild, and he was a 4e dev also. You can see a bit more creeping 4eism, I think, happening as we progress. (Mind you, my favorite 4e ism is Adv/Disadv, I think it's a great tool).

Note: I respect folks who hew to older editions. I *do* run Classic Traveller, after all, despite all the new editions out there. I guess I like my SF old school, but don’t really GAF when it comes to fantasy.

I am so envious; Classic Traveller? Haven't had a chance to play that in nearly 40 years.

[Segev]

I disagree. 5 minute adventuring days come about when there is no disadvantage to doing so. If theres no penalty for having a long rest after every encounter, or some restriction on doing so, then people are just going to do it all the time, and indeed it becomes the best strategy to do so. It doesnt have anything to do with short rests, because people will always prefer having more resources to fewer.

Agreed. And that's where having a sense that the world is moving on without you matters. Not just locally (ie the place you're in), but globally. The longer you ignore certain threats or opportunities, the worse they get or the more the chance they have of vanishing. And making that fairly open.

But that requires people to actually be engaged with the world and the narrative. It's less effective when only the mechanics matter. I don't have any answers for that other sort, other than personally not playing at those tables.

I agree; part of the problem is lack of consequences for resting for longer. However, there is a certain amount of self-regulation that players will engage in if they feel they have a choice NOT to decide to hole up for 23 hours. Not all players, but some.

Regardless, more SR restorations make it easier to weigh short rests as actually worth doing enough that keeping going rather than finding that place to hunker down and hoping you have enough time is viable.

[Goobahfish]

What do you mean? A long rest is generally assumed to be "tonight's sleep" which you can't avoid without exhausting yourself to death eventually. That seems pretty well codified to me. Youre taking long rests for sleep, if nothing else, all the time (absent the use of the grim and gritty rules where a long rest is a week). The 5 minute adventuring day comes into play when a DM doesnt have any other challenges between the first encounter of the day and the next long rest opportunity, which leads to absurd things like the party crawling through a dungeon, finding a band of ogres, burning all their spell slots on it, then camping out in their room for 8 hours while the next room with a pack of orcs wait politely for them to finish. Hence restricting rests.

Oh yes, there are rules for what happens when a LR happens, but nothing resembling "you must finish 6 encounters before taking a Long Rest".

This provides a rough estimate of the encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

As I said, not codified. That is clearly DM fiat.

or your players need to be trained out of doing that and conditioned to internalize the importance of properly managing their resources

Sorry, what now? Are players pets?

I find that uncertainty is the most effective thing, along with having a bunch of different clocks running.

This is broadly the correct solution assuming the rules exist. However, my main point is that this becomes a necessary 'meta-rule' (there must be a time-limit on everything) which basically restricts the types of games that can be run. I do similar things, but having the 'need' to this all the time (to 'balance' the game) is inherently restrictive.

It seems to me that the easiest "fix", if one is needed, is to make short rests much shorter - 10 minutes tops - and limit the amount you can benefit from between long rests.

That is my solution too. A short rest representing 'enough time to patch up small wounds, drink some water, take some deep breaths and get your s##t together'.

Also, I literally call it a 'breather'.

-----

OK, perhaps I can further clarify. If we assume that the game is balanced if the players do 6 encounters. Thus, if the players do less than 6, the game is kind of unbalanced (at least for the LR/SR balance).

Each time the party try to avoid an encounter (say socially, sneakily or using a cunning plan) they are changing the 'balance' of the game. These behaviours (avoiding encounters) shouldn't be discouraged. Yet, for a DM trying to maintain 'balance', they have a kind of perverse incentive to do so. It is this same perverse incentive which indicates that having a 5-minute adventuring day is bad.

The thing is, it doesn't even need to be a 5-minute day. It could be a three encounter day and it is still unbalanced.

Moreover, any day which involves 'travel' (i.e. we walk for 4 hours to go from A to B) basically halves the 'adventuring day' anyway. In a completely in-world reasonable way. If a half-day trip needs three random encounters... that seems tedious.

Now... from a purely logistical point of view, having a 6-encounter day is a LONG day from a 'at the table' perspective (i.e. it might require more than a single session). Record keeping of spells and so forth between sessions is... awkward.

My main point is that the balance of the game shouldn't be that beholden to the flow of the game.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I disagree with the concept that 5e D&D is balanced around 6 encounters. Or 1 encounter. Or any specific number of encounters. That's not a reasonable reading of the text, in context. For one BIG thing, it leaves out the scale of the encounters (6 Medium =/= 6 Hard, etc). For another, it treats the post hoc "in playtesting, we found that our parties generally needed about 6-8 Medium encounters and 2 short rests before they needed to take a long rest" statement (which is what we have) with a "we designed it so that if you're not having 6 Medium encounters and two long rests per long rest it's out of balance."

One fight per day is ok. If, on other days, you have more than that. The only real pathological case is always 1 fight. Variety is what matters. And the number estimated? That was for
a) playtesting
b) very low optimization optimization (basic rules, since the PHB wasn't out yet) parties
c) using playtest enemies
d) over a limited span of levels.

That entire chapter of the DMG only applies with any confidence to new DMs and low-optimization parties. Everything else is left up to the DM. I've had great success with not even tracking the adventuring day more than "ok, I probably want there to be the chance of more than one fight that day". Not calculating encounter budgets or difficulty, not even really calculating the CR of homebrew creatures beyond "what proficiency bonus do I want them to have".

Balance is much more affected by how you play than any of the mechanical details.

Mathematically, the best balance point isn't fights per day, it's rounds per short rest. And the "magic number" seems to be about 7-9. 3x 3-round fights works. But so does 1x4 and 1x3. Or 1x 10 round fight. Just don't do the same thing every day and you'll be fine. People will learn not to nova, because there's the risk of needing it later.

[Psyren]

^ While I agree that the guidelines can't uniformly apply to every table, I also think you're conflating "encounter" and "fight."

[PhoenixPhyre]

^ While I agree that the guidelines can't uniformly apply to every table, I also think you're conflating "encounter" and "fight."

I'm being a bit loose, but any encounter or scene that has the potential to use resources counts as a "fight".

However, I think that the xp tables are the most wrong way to assess that for most games. The difficulty definitions apply broadly, but what is Medium (will drain some, but not many resources) for one group may be deadly or easy for another. Trying to pin things to the xp definition makes the whole idea less useful.

[Keravath]

In fact, anyone who likes 5e is very likely to be disappointed in 6e, if historical trends hold. Because each edition is written, in large part, as a reaction against the perceived failures of the previous one. Thus the drunken wobble back and forth.

Odd. That isn't my impression at all.
1e->2e->3e->3.5e was a pretty natural progression. They fixed some of the issues along the way ... moved away from THAC0, percentile strength and other 1e idiosyncracies.

4e was the odd one out being an utterly different design paradigm.

5e actually seemed like a natural progression in terms of simplification and streamlining from 3/3.5e while incorporating some concepts from 4e.

If 6e is a refinement of 5e then it will likely succeed, if it is a radical change like 4e the odds might be against it unless the system is so much better.

[Psyren]

I'm being a bit loose, but any encounter or scene that has the potential to use resources counts as a "fight".

Why not just say encounter? Potential to use resources is how they're defined.

[Tanarii]

Odd. That isn't my impression at all.
1e->2e->3e->3.5e was a pretty natural progression. They fixed some of the issues along the way ... moved away from THAC0, percentile strength and other 1e idiosyncracies.

3e was a hard left turn on many fronts that alienated a large chunk of the existing player base, who refused to make the conversion. It even earned the name The Edition That Shall Not Be Named (TETSNBN) on dragonsfoot. What saved it was the internet era bringing geekdom out of cold and resulting in huge growth in the RPG market due to bringing in large new generation of players.

The break between TSR D&D and WotC 3e was as big as the break to WotC 4e. Whereas 5e is basically 3e core framework with some good ideas stolen from 4e, plus a few of its own good ideas in how to simplify things.

[EggKookoo]

3e was a hard left turn on many fronts that alienated a large chunk of the existing player base, who refused to make the conversion. It even earned the name The Edition That Shall Not Be Named (TETSNBN) on dragonsfoot. What saved it was the internet era bringing geekdom out of cold and resulting in huge growth in the RPG market due to bringing in large new generation of players.

I agree. I don't think any edition defines a generational divide quite like 3e does.

[Psyren]

Yeah I wasn't even much of a 2e fan (all my knowledge of it came from Baldur's Gate) and even I remember the huge edition wars and resentment that popped up because of 3e; and then again for 3.5, aka "oops we forgot to playtest, buy new core books!" 4e was not at all the only edition change to cause hostility.

[Segev]

I agree. I don't think any edition defines a generational divide quite like 3e does.

I do not see this. I started with 1e and 2e in the 90s, and played them for years before 3e came out. I thought 3e an improvement in almost every way. There are things now that I look back at and think should be reincorporated, but by and large I still think 5e is also far superior to 2e. I actually like both 3.PF and 5e for different things and don't have a favorite between them.

I would play 1e core only again before I would play 4e, though. 4e just...wasn't D&D, in the same sense that a Winnebago is not a Cessna. Winnebegos are fine for what they're designed for, but if you wanted a personal plane, they're going to disappoint.

[Tanarii]

I agree. I don't think any edition defines a generational divide quite like 3e does.

I do not see this. I started with 1e and 2e in the 90s, and played them for years before 3e came out. I thought 3e an improvement in almost every way.

I think EggKookoo put it very succinctly. Despite the fact I started in 85, and played constantly until 3e came out, and personally loved it and adopted it with many of my friends. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a huge paradigm shift on multiple fronts, and for much of the existing player base just wasn't D&D any more. Just like 4e. Which I also loved and adopted. (Although by then my friends had settled down and I had to join official play in game stores and meet/find dedicated groups of players.)

IMO, ultimately the primary difference for the existing player base was there wasn't a Pathfinder (2e style) as an alternative after 3e came out. They were just left with games with no more support. Otoh many of them were fine with that, there was a ton of TSR content, especially for 2e. Pretty sure I owned most of it too