D&D 5th Edition: 8th Revision and Counting

[Stubbazubba]

Wow, a lot of horrible arguments flying around here, I'm just going to take the ones that are still hot and wait for the other ones to recycle again;

I don't know of anyone suggesting that a hero be at 100% capacity after every encounter.

But that's exactly what an encounter based system does, unless you tie it to a different resource that doesn't renew with encounters, like 4e did tying to to a daily resource, which brings us right back to the 15MWD problem.

The point is that if all you get are encounter powers, then for balance purposes they will only be powerful enough to kill equal CR creatures. If you have daily abilities that are designed to handle four equal CR fights every day, you can blow them on one CR+4 fight and still handle it. By giving everyone encounter powers only, you're telling people they shouldn't be punching above their weight and blowing tons of resources to do it (because nobody has resources to blow).

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meter, or building up magical power so you can unleash a huge spell without frying your own brain. There are all kinds of mechanics which brings further tactical depth to the combat encounter and avoids this fixation on logistics and strategy which has no place in an adventure story, which D&D has been selling itself as for over a decade now. It focuses the game on tactics, not strategy, which the combat engine has never been equipped to handle.

There's no such thing as "without time pressure". Wandering monsters and dwindling food, ammo and curative resources ensure this.

Arbitrary, boring reasons that exist purely to force the players into playing logistics, not the adventures they came to have. Again, if the game is about one thing in most players' minds, why are we trying to arbitrarily make it something else?

Earlier you responded to something I said about the system running counter to the flow of the game, and I think you misunderstood my meaning, judging from your examples. I don't think the game should be easy or not require different approaches for different encounters, nor do I think that barging in guns blazing (cause you're at 100%) should often be a viable approach. The point should be to incentivize approaching the situation, though, not just seeking out resource renewal and getting prodded away, finally deciding "K, I guess we'll finish the quest against our better judgment cause the DM has that look in his eye saying 'you rest, you die from monsters, starvation, and running out of arrows, in that order.'"

I know you can add all these arbitrary restrictions on when parties can rest, but now you've got this huge framework (daily abilities, player-activated refresh, PCs want to do that, but to balance it out we have random encounters, ammo, and food, i.e., book-keeping at best, wasting time at worst, see above) just to get people to play the game as intended. You can arrive at that end-state much more elegantly and without forcing logistics and meaningless random encounters, which have only ever slowed good games down, onto your players by simply focusing on encounters. We want them to press on, well then just let them press on. We want them to be challenged more and more as the day goes by, well then make more tactically interesting monsters that require more different approaches than "Dailies, then Encounters, then spam At-Wills til they drop. Pass the beer."

Note that I'm talking about spells, powers, and other flavors of offensive capacity. Defensive capacity is a good candidate for a long-term resource; Damage, at least some damage, could persist until you rest, so the party inches toward disaster throughout the day, but there's no reason to make them less capable of dealing with it at the same time.

In what way can the encounter power system you espouse deal with issues that occur on greater timescales than combat occurs on? Where something might take a full minute of time to accomplish or more (and by more I mean in the realm of orders of magnitude more, so 10, or 100 minutes of time). Because if you actually break down what players tend to concern themselves with at the varying levels of play the game occurs on, you find that you can fill out a game with enough material and systems that combat is only 1/3 of the game. How does your power system deal with that?

...what exactly did you have in mind? Cause I'm not seeing how anything would change. OK, you need to guard this door while the NPC inside completes a ritual that will cleanse the palace of undead. Through the night, you are attacked 3-4 times. I don't see how having all encounter-based abilities changes the story, just the strategy/tactics, which are already a given. Is there an example you have in mind where some story must really change with encounter powers instead of dailies?

[Zeful]

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meter

You complain about bookkeeping and posit adding a rage meter to play...

Yeah, you seem to be picking and choosing your position and not staying very consistent. Though if your only starting at not full capacity, you imply a very fine gradation of abilities across levels, such that you could actually achieve 60-80% of full capability often enough that such a distinction is valuable, either implying feature creep or adding some kind of cost subsystem that will add more bookkeeping.

...what exactly did you have in mind? Cause I'm not seeing how anything would change. OK, you need to guard this door while the NPC inside completes a ritual that will cleanse the palace of undead. Through the night, you are attacked 3-4 times. I don't see how having all encounter-based abilities changes the story, just the strategy/tactics, which are already a given. Is there an example you have in mind where some story must really change with encounter powers instead of dailies?

You seem to be referring to another argument entirely, as I say nothing about stories in that post.

[1337 b4k4]

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meter, or building up magical power so you can unleash a huge spell without frying your own brain.

Ok, I see at least some of our disconnect here. If every fight starts at the same power level and you can build past that initial level, I don't consider that starting at 75% and moving to 100%, I consider that starting at 100% and moving to 125%, it's basically semantics. It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

There are all kinds of mechanics which brings further tactical depth to the combat encounter and avoids this fixation on logistics and strategy which has no place in an adventure story

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

Arbitrary, boring reasons that exist purely to force the players into playing logistics, not the adventures they came to have.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The various other resources built into D&D were not and are not arbitrary. Whether they're boring or not depends a lot on how they're tracked and used. But further, who are you to say that the players didn't come to have that adventure?

Again, if the game is about one thing in most players' minds, why are we trying to arbitrarily make it something else?

Probably for the same reason that even if most D&D players were trying to play Space Marines and Kobolds with it, we shouldn't turn D&D into a space game, because it's not what the system was designed for. I get that plenty of people want to play other types of games, but that doesn't mean D&D needs to change the system to be the system for those players. To be perfectly honest, trying to embrace systems and stories that it wasn't meant to model is precisely why D&D has fallen apart over the years. There's nothing wrong with D&D being D&D and letting someone else be "non logistical, non dungeon crawl, political intrigue with a fully tactical battle system" fantasy. Hell there's nothing wrong with WotC producing that game. But to call it D&D and to try and stretch D&D into that mold is harmful to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game, D&D as a community and the tabletop RPG industry as a whole.

[Draz74]

I'm going against the grain, here, but chalk me up as a vote in favor of D&D actually holding onto some Simulationism.

Among other reasons, this may be D&D's best shot at being better than Legend at something.

Agreed, per adventure doesn't work as well if you don't have a clear goal. If I do a sandbox style adventure I usually let them rest whenever they want, but "level" up the monsters each time they do, or provide bonus XP for successive encounters completed without resting.

Indeed, that latter might work as a general rule. The game is balanced against 4 encounters per day right? And it does say to modify CR based on situational advantages, right? Why not simply give reduced XP for encounters with fewer than 4 per rest and bonus XP for those with more?

Say, now there's an interesting.

[Coidzor]

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

Since when has it been an integral part of D&D though? This is the first time I've seen someone make that claim and I've heard the grognards gripe about just about everything else.

[kerplunksploosh]

I want my Simulationism too. Is this too radical an idea to propose, that possibly 5th Edition could cater to multiple parties? One thing I saw in 4th Edition that I liked was breaking characters down into stages of growth. Heroic, Epic, Paragon, or some such. I think one system is capable of a breadth of experiences, even if some mechanics shift as you level up (a la no longer receiving additional Hit Dice upon reaching Level 10 in 2nd Ed).

Levels 1-5 could be Adventurer levels. Here you are essentially a commoner, and it plays out like 2nd Ed, gritty and realistic. Food is tracked, light sources are an issue, and combat is still swingy enough that even CR-1 encounters may very well kill a PC.

Levels 6-10 could be Heroic, where we first can Create Food And Water, and Permanent Light. A lot of the fiddly stuff isn't really an issue anymore, and the focus can shift from planning how to simply SURVIVE to how to accomplish significant, although not planes-shaking, goals. Still fairly simulistic though. It sounds like most people here would prefer to simply start out at Level 6, skipping that lame fiddly stuff. More power to you.

11-20 would be Epic, and the simulation breaks down a fair amount for the sake of balance. Fighters would throw boulders at the enemy and command armies, thieves can vanish in plain sight and can poison with a kiss, wizards can do whatever they set their mind to, as long as they have plenty of prep time with no one getting in their way.

21+ would be Legendary, the PCs are now ridiculously powerful, challenging gods and whatnot. They're Exhalted. Here's where fighters would eventually need some sort of magical mantle to continue to keep pace with wizardy types.

I don't mind a *very* high level fighter having some inherent magicalness, but I resented, in 4th Ed, my fighter starting out feeling magical.

[Coidzor]

I don't mind a *very* high level fighter having some inherent magicalness, but I resented, in 4th Ed, my fighter starting out feeling magical.

Magical or supernatural?

[Frozen_Feet]

Let me talk about a completely different game for a second. It's called Exile 3: the Ruined World. It's a computer game.

In that game, you have food value. Taking a full rest in the game consumes food and time. Getting food costs money. At early parts of the game, your food resources might limit how far you can go, thus impacting which quests you could complete. After the first third, food generation spells mostly nullified the need to take detours just to avoid starvation.

But the time requirement remained, because in that game, passing of in-game time had tangible, and serious, consequences. If you didn't stop the monster plagues afflicting various parts of the world in time, not only would the wilderness be inhabited by more and more powerful monsters, towns got ruined (hence the name) and NPCs got killed, closing off entire trees of sidequests and making previously safe zones riddled with peril. The game never became unwinnable, but it became significantly harder (and more depressing).

Taking your sweet time also had consequences on a tactical level. Sure, I remember pressing the "long wait" key repeatedly to heal to full between encounters, but such "15 minute workday" wasn't always particularly wise, because monsters in a dungeon renewed and your light sources ran out. It was a pretty common occurrence for me to go "oh, my light source ran out while I rested, better light this to... GOOD GODS, where did all these oozes come from?" Choosing the wrong place to rest could actually make a dungeon harder.

Why do I bring this up? Because while the game system was very different from D&D (skill point based instead of class based, spell points instead of vancian), it was pretty clearly rooted in conventions of the genre established by D&D. If you've ever played the game and also read the 1st d AD&D books, you will understand what I'm talking about.

To anyone arguing otherwise: time constraints and wandering monsters have always been part of D&D. They are, to me, perhaps its most iconic feature. Next should include them.

And the kicker is, the existence of wandering monsters turns resting after each encounter from a no-brainer, to one tactical choice among many others. Game Masters who cry foul because their players are making their characters rest when they can are essentially complaining about their players playing smart.

Players (and GMs) complaining about artificial time constraints, on the other hand, are ignoring that such constraints are fundamental to the genre of heroic fantasy! In stories, the heroes can't rest now, because if they do, they lose - the villain gets away, the world ends, the princess will be moved into another castle etc. The contrived circumstances that lead to these situations are what is colloquially referred to as "plot".

[Stubbazubba]

You complain about bookkeeping and posit adding a rage meter to play...

A rage meter would be far, far more effective at engaging players than keeping track of rations, if that's the choice. Furthermore, you only have to keep track of a rage meter in an individual fight, it's hardly book-keeping. It's not something you're going to use, then put down and forget, then go back and not remember what level you're at. That's a low cost (in terms of bookkeeping) for high benefit (in terms of engagement and excitement in combat). What kind of payoff does rations or ammo provide?

Yeah, you seem to be picking and choosing your position and not staying very consistent. Though if your only starting at not full capacity, you imply a very fine gradation of abilities across levels, such that you could actually achieve 60-80% of full capability often enough that such a distinction is valuable, either implying feature creep or adding some kind of cost subsystem that will add more bookkeeping.

I'm having trouble parsing this poorly-conveyed rebuttal. There might be something I could talk to you about here, but all I can see is, "[Dismissive positioning], fjklaejlkapjfdhae, therefore, you're relying on feature creep or more bookkeeping, ergo, your idea is bad."

Nevertheless, I'll take a stab: I don't mean at level 1 you start out at 60-80%, I mean when you begin an encounter you're at 60%, whatever that means for your level, and don't have access to all or most of your most powerful abilities. Think Chrono Cross; you have to attack and build up some energy/momentum before you can unleash the big guns. Level has little to do with it, and no, there's no implication of fine gradation.

It could be as simple as; a Barbarian has to fell one foe and his Rage abilities open up; a Fighter has to attack an enemy normally, and more options open up with each hit, some of which form combos or some-such (no more than 3-4 levels deep, ever); a Sorceror only has access to their first or second levels of spells at the beginning of encounter, after casting 1 spell they have access to 3-5, after 2 they have access to 6; a Rogue's abilities are dependent on getting Advantage on enemies, etc., etc. Yes, each class would get new abilities or adjustments as they level up, that's what a class-and-level system is, but I don't see how that's feature creep or more bookkeeping.

This brings the focus in on encounters, where the system shines. The long-term considerations are just not streamlined or engaging enough to warrant the focus being on them, when encounters can be so much more interesting.

You seem to be referring to another argument entirely, as I say nothing about stories in that post.

Care to explain what you meant, then? Cause you give these extremely vague descriptions like "takes one minute or 100 minutes to accomplish," and don't apply that to anything. I tried my best at guessing what was in your head, and now a lesser man might say you're running from your stance, but I don't think that's the case, I just want you to explain the problem so we can talk about it, as I said. Yeah, I guess Trapfinding takes longer than your average combat, but I don't see how combat abilities being on an encounter basis change how Trapfinding works. Can you elaborate?

It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

As I've said twice now, I'm not talking about all resources being restored for each encounter, I'm talking about offensive capabilities. HP or other defensive resources should carry over from encounter to encounter so that the PCs have some limit, and those need to be beyond the ability of combat healing to fix. This is expressly for the singular purpose that each encounter can affect you going forward.

But beyond that, you're absolutely right, I think each encounter should not have to be weighed against all future or past encounters, because that's 1) not very engaging, since players don't know what's coming next anyway, and therefore can't weigh it except based on paranoia, and 2) requires a whole bunch of satellite crap like ammo and rations and random encounters to make work anyway, which is a bunch of monotonous book-keeping with no gain other than forcing the players to play through poor strategic decisions or simply a short string of bad luck. Balancing healing, rations, ammo, rest time, spell slots, and innumerable other things for a full adventuring day where you have absolutely 0 idea or control over what that actually entails is a waste of time and player enthusiasm; if you understand your DM/the adventure well enough you'll nail it, if not, it's hit-and-miss, and moreover, none of these mechanics are ever exciting or engaging in and of themselves. It can be grossly simplified to just keeping track of health and healing through the quest, and make offensive capability encounter-based.

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

OK, so anything a little more modern? It turns out man vs. nature is actually a big topic in The Hobbit, but adventure media today (Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, LotR, Star Wars) does not consider rations, except on rare occasions where it's a plot device, not a building block of the genre. But this just leads into another point, which you introduce-

Probably for the same reason that even if most D&D players were trying to play Space Marines and Kobolds with it, we shouldn't turn D&D into a space game, because it's not what the system was designed for. I get that plenty of people want to play other types of games, but that doesn't mean D&D needs to change the system to be the system for those players. To be perfectly honest, trying to embrace systems and stories that it wasn't meant to model is precisely why D&D has fallen apart over the years. There's nothing wrong with D&D being D&D and letting someone else be "non logistical, non dungeon crawl, political intrigue with a fully tactical battle system" fantasy. Hell there's nothing wrong with WotC producing that game. But to call it D&D and to try and stretch D&D into that mold is harmful to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game, D&D as a community and the tabletop RPG industry as a whole.

OK, aside from that last conclusion, I agree that D&D shouldn't try to be something it can't be, that it needs to recognize its strengths and play to them, not be everything under the sun. Well, what it does well is squad-based tactical combat. The ammo, rations, and random encounters part of the game is what drags it down in the eyes of many, if not most players, and they prefer games with narrative and meaningful options before them, where each encounter progresses the plot or a plot, and where their precious gaming time is spent doing something important, not calculating how many days they can spend in the dungeon before they won't have enough rations on the way back and die one day's journey outside of town.

IOW, the tactical, (i.e. encounter-based) parts of D&D are appealing, but most players long ago grew weary of the cumbersome strategic (i.e. long-term logistical) elements and, in fact, have abandoned them. So while D&D shouldn't change to be whatever anyone wants it to be, it should realize that its strengths are what people play from it consistently, not just "whatever it was first designed to do," because it turns out it wasn't designed to do all of that well. I don't much care if it's integral or inherent or whatever else to old school play, it has never done it in a way that engages players like its combat does.

[Flickerdart]

Don't get me wrong, if you like alternative recharge systems and don't like daily based ones, that's fine I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. But don't try to tell me it's because daily systems always involve your players taking 8 hour naps between combats and then tell me you're just going to handwave the inconsistencies in your own preferred system.

Did I ever say that? No. No, I did not. I merely suggested ways in which one could explain a per-encounter system of powers.

[Zeful]

I'm having trouble parsing this poorly-conveyed rebuttal. There might be something I could talk to you about here, but all I can see is, "[Dismissive positioning], fjklaejlkapjfdhae, therefore, you're relying on feature creep or more bookkeeping, ergo, your idea is bad."

Essentially in order for the numbers you provide to mean anything, the number of abilities must be large, or there is an external cost used to limit powers.

Think Chrono Cross

Never played it. Didn't really like Chrono Trigger's combat because of the terrible ATB system.

It could be as simple as; a Barbarian has to fell one foe and his Rage abilities open up; a Fighter has to attack an enemy normally, and more options open up with each hit, some of which form combos or some-such (no more than 3-4 levels deep, ever); a Sorceror only has access to their first or second levels of spells at the beginning of encounter, after casting 1 spell they have access to 3-5, after 2 they have access to 6; a Rogue's abilities are dependent on getting Advantage on enemies, etc., etc. Yes, each class would get new abilities or adjustments as they level up, that's what a class-and-level system is, but I don't see how that's feature creep or more bookkeeping.

And this sounds trite and un-fun.

Care to explain what you meant, then?

Fine. Some things are not combat and do not work on combat time scales.

Most tabletop games (though this can also apply to other games as well) essentially are three games in one, each one operating on different time scales. Combat is fundamentally different from exploring the dungeon, which is different from wandering around town or to the dungeon. The levels of abstraction are very different between them. Making a system soley for combat, with no consideration to the other scales is neglecting the potential those design spaces have. Designing mechanics that let someone scout ahead, build traps, or even move about the level fluidly is not the kind of thing that should be part of an encounter-only powers system, which if you're building an encounter-only powers system either has to be ignored because it doesn't fit, or requires building an entirely separate system for it as well, which for casters saddles them with up to three magic systems and their resources and rules (and putting an intercontinental teleport in a encounter-based combat system is overkill and castrates any looming threat because they can do it so often and so quickly that can never really be caught out). Which adds even more bookkeeping, what with having to manage so much at any one time.

Cause you give these extremely vague descriptions like "takes one minute or 100 minutes to accomplish," and don't apply that to anything.

Well yes. Because I was speaking in generalities rather than restricting myself to examples from one or two systems.

[Kurald Galain]

Why? If there's an extended rest during an adventure then obviously the intent is that you're not running from one battle to the next

The issue is if the adventure writer did NOT intend it. For instance, in an adventure involving several days of travel, it is reasonable to have only one fight per day for awhile. This gets more than a little silly since it lets players unload all their most powerful once-per-day effects in every battle.

So, basically, you want something like an unearthed arcana with a decent rules set for including such non-focal things with varying degrees of focus and time devoted to them.

I want rules that make things like darkness, starvation or underwater fighting actually relevant. It's okay if high-level characters have a way to bypass that, but low-level characters should have to take it into account. I would prefer this being in the core rules but a module would be an acceptable compromise.

For example, the obvious counter to darkness is carrying a torch. That's fine, but it does have a lower field of vision than a sunny day outside would have. I like this because it makes a battle in darkness play differently, and add a tactical challenge. So let's not have a sunrod that immediately fills the entire battlefield with sunlight, making darkness completely irrelevant.

[1337 b4k4]

Since when has it been an integral part of D&D though?

Since the beginning. Seriously why do you think there are all the for encumbrance, and resource tracking. Information about how long torches and lanterns last, different types of food with different expiry rates, wandering monsters and travel time rules. Heck, read through anything Gary Gygax wrote about the early game, or just read the 1e DMG. It's very clear that adventuring was (and is) supposed to be dangerous and resource consuming and that sometimes the monsters are the least of your worries.

As I've said twice now, I'm not talking about all resources being restored for each encounter, I'm talking about offensive capabilities. HP or other defensive resources should carry over from encounter to encounter so that the PCs have some limit, and those need to be beyond the ability of combat healing to fix. This is expressly for the singular purpose that each encounter can affect you going forward.

But beyond that, you're absolutely right, I think each encounter should not have to be weighed against all future or past encounters, because that's 1) not very engaging, since players don't know what's coming next anyway, and therefore can't weigh it except based on paranoia

Ok, and how does that solve a 15 MWD then? Why are the players not incentivized to take an 8 hour nap after each fight to regain the defensive resources? Surely having good defensive resources are just as important as having good offensive ones. Especially if you don't know what's coming, how can you know that going forward with only 60% of your defensive capabilities is enough?

OK, so anything a little more modern?

I don't read a lot of modern adventure (to be honest, I don't read as much as I used to) so the most modern one I can think of off the top of my head is Raptor Red from '95. But since you listed video games, the entire survival horror genre is pretty much built on resource management in the face of the unknown. Sure there are zombies, but they wouldn't be any scarier than the hordes in quake if it weren't for the fact that you only have 10 bullets. Oregon trail and it's ilk had pretty big resource concerns although that might not be "modern" enough for you. How about the TV show Jericho? Or the game Fallout? Of course there are all the rougelikes out there as well.

IOW, the tactical, (i.e. encounter-based) parts of D&D are appealing, but most players long ago grew weary of the cumbersome strategic (i.e. long-term logistical) elements and, in fact, have abandoned them. So while D&D shouldn't change to be whatever anyone wants it to be, it should realize that its strengths are what people play from it consistently, not just "whatever it was first designed to do," because it turns out it wasn't designed to do all of that well. I don't much care if it's integral or inherent or whatever else to old school play, it has never done it in a way that engages players like its combat does.

I would argue that the backlash against 4e, the frustration people felt at 3.x and the whole OSR thing and WotC's decision to look back at what the old games did proves you wrong. There is a sizable chunk of players for which what D&D was originally designed to model and did model is engaging, fun and exactly what they want out of the game. Until 4e, D&D didn't do squad based tactics well and the fact that a bunch of modern D&D plays play D&D for squad based tactics I think speaks more to the fact that 4e fractured the fanbase, dropped a bunch of the original fans and replaced some of them with new / different fans then it does to what "D&D Players" as a whole find engaging.

IOW, if they were to turn D&D into space marines and kobolds and still call it D&D, just because the then current paying customers for D&D would be playing it for the spaceness of it doesn't mean that D&D players as a whole want a space game, it just means they fired all their old customers chasing a new batch of customers.

Theoretically, this is what WotC intends to address with the modular system, where by the very core of the system makes few assumptions about the type of game you're playing, the the modules plug in on top of that core to create the squad tactics or dungeon crawling experience players want. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.

[obryn]

To anyone arguing otherwise: time constraints and wandering monsters have always been part of D&D. They are, to me, perhaps its most iconic feature. Next should include them.

I think wandering monsters are an iconic feature of AD&D 1e, B/X, and earlier. D&D started moving away from them in 2e, and although they made some cameos in 3e and later ... they're hardly a constant across editions.

-O

[Synovia]

It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Getting around a game mechanics problem with narrative changes isn't fixing anything, so lets admit what the real situation is, set it as a baseline, and get to fixing it.

Deciding that players get spell/etc allotments based on what they'd need for one encounter is the best way to do that. Tweaking the situations where they're harried (which are a minority of the encounters) is a lot better solution than tweaking the majority of the situations and letting the system work on the minority.


EDIT:

To clarify: The majority of our problem is that D&D 3.5 (and most other version) assume that we're going to be doing 4 encounters a day, and set the players resources to what the players would need in 4 encounters. As commonly played though, we rarely have more than 1-2 encounters a day, so the assumption the game is built on gives players (especially spell casters) way too much resources.

[Jacob.Tyr]

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Getting around a game mechanics problem with narrative changes isn't fixing anything, so lets admit what the real situation is, set it as a baseline, and get to fixing it.

Deciding that players get spell/etc allotments based on what they'd need for one encounter is the best way to do that. Tweaking the situations where they're harried (which are a minority of the encounters) is a lot better solution than tweaking the majority of the situations and letting the system work on the minority.

Do you all play with such horrid munchkins that they actually do 15m work days? I have never had a party try to pull this, sleeping during a session has been a rarity for me. And if your narrative is so completely devoid of pressure that sleeping every 15 minutes requires a complete rewrite of whatever you're doing, you're probably doing it wrong.

[Clawhound]

For single-encounters, the problem is then that there is not reason NOT to cast those big spells. We could introduce a reason to NOT cast those spells. There's only so far you can go to justify that, though.

Perhaps higher levels spells should have a requirement, such as casting a lower level spell first, or creating a casting focus, or something clunky like that.

[Synovia]

Do you all play with such horrid munchkins that they actually do 15m work days? I have never had a party try to pull this, sleeping during a session has been a rarity for me. And if your narrative is so completely devoid of pressure that sleeping every 15 minutes requires a complete rewrite of whatever you're doing, you're probably doing it wrong.

No, players don't sleep after every encounter, but I honestly can't think of any time I've seen players play through 4 encounters before sleeping.

So why are we basing players resources on 4 encounters if almost nobody plays that many?

[1337 b4k4]

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Maybe in your games they do. In mine, aside from my players realizing that their characters wouldn't be able to sleep for 23 hours of every day, my players don't have time to spend 8 hours between combats.

As to rope trick, this might be true in 3.x, but it's sure as heck not true in 1e. Per the PHB, rope trick lasts 2 turns per level. 1 turn is 10 minutes, which means you need to be level 3 to have it last a mere hour. 8 hours of rest times 3 levels per hour = level 24 before rope trick can be used to keep your players safe from harm long enough to recover their spells.

Does this mean that eventually, the dangers of sleeping in a dungeon become less of a concern? Sure, but we're also talking level 24 characters. By level 24 I expect them to be running castles and stronghold and not dealing with the minutia of being ambushed in an alley by their political rival's hired henchmen from a tavern.

And let me make this perfectly clear, I don't care how 3.x did it or the problems 3.x had. I agree that 3.x screwed it up badly, and they did so because they eliminated a great number of the checks and balances that had been built into the system previously. Telling me that 3.x did it one way so it can't work is simply not an argument.

I think wandering monsters are an iconic feature of AD&D 1e, B/X, and earlier. D&D started moving away from them in 2e, and although they made some cameos in 3e and later ... they're hardly a constant across editions.

So it's a feature that lasted as a given rule across the first 25 years of D&D (the rules cyclopedia ran concurrently with AD&D 2), poked it's head up here and there for the next 8 years and it's only within the last 4 years that they've been eliminated completely and you don't think that constitutes an iconic feature of the game?

[Synovia]

Maybe in your games they do. In mine, aside from my players realizing that their characters wouldn't be able to sleep for 23 hours of every day, my players don't have time to spend 8 hours between combats.

I dunno, to me, a game where the players immediately get ambushed after each combat seems awfully trite. Strains the credulity a bit.

Constant ambushes make sense in some situations (like trying to sleep when you're invading an enemy fortress), but in others, like the common tomb-clearing/etc, any decent adventurer is going to back off and rest when he needs to, and getting ambushed in the basecamp or an archeological dig every time they try to sleep just doesn't make any narrative sense.

As to rope trick, this might be true in 3.x, but it's sure as heck not true in 1e. Per the PHB, rope trick lasts 2 turns per level. 1 turn is 10 minutes, which means you need to be level 3 to have it last a mere hour. 8 hours of rest times 3 levels per hour = level 24 before rope trick can be used to keep your players safe from harm long enough to recover their spells.

1E, really?

1E came out 40 years ago. It hasn't been relevant to 75+% of the D&D populace for 30 of those years. 1E was already deprecated when I was born, and I'm not a teenager.

I understand some of you love the old editions, but c'mon, but you can't assume that people are going to know you're using 1E as your baseline.

This is a bit like having a conversation about fuel mileage in modern cars, and you not mentioning that your argument is based around the '60 plymouth in your garage.

If we're going to have a discussion, its going to have to be based around Pathfinder/3.5/4.0 as the baseline, because thats what 95% of the playing population knows, and thats whats relevant.

[Saph]

I'm kind of split on the 15 minute work day issue.

On the one hand, when it comes to life-or-death combat, the 15 minute work day is fairly realistic. When real-world military units get into serious combat, their typical response once the shooting is over and the area is secured is to head back to base camp. They then do a debriefing, resupply, treat/evacuate their wounded, gather intel for future encounters, and so on. (That said, if real-world militaries had access to healing magic that could fix anyone up to 100% health inside of six seconds it would change things up a bit.)

On the other hand, the 15 minute work day is also annoying. It's hard to keep up a sense of drama and adventure when the PCs are spending 23 hours 45 minutes each day lazing around, not to mention that the GM has to update their adventure (because now an extra 24 hours have passed and things have changed). Worst of all, the characters who don't want to stop and rest (which is likely most of the party) often want to do stuff while the other party members are resting, meaning that the 'rest' can end up taking a lot of game time.

In actual practice in our 3.5 and Pathfinder games, we typically don't do 15 minute workdays, ever. Partly this is because our group plays with changing worlds, not static worlds, and 24 hours prep time for us equals 24 hours prep time for our enemies. Partly it's because we're all experienced enough to be reasonably careful with resources, and most characters of 4th level and up can go for a pretty long time without rest if you're smart about it. Sure, the spellcasters might be running a bit low after 4-5 encounters, but you've got fighters in your group, haven't you? We could theoretically do 15 minute workdays, but to be honest it doesn't seem like a very smart tactic.

[1337 b4k4]

I dunno, to me, a game where the players immediately get ambushed after each combat seems awfully trite. Strains the credulity a bit.

Constant ambushes make sense in some situations (like trying to sleep when you're invading an enemy fortress), but in others, like the common tomb-clearing/etc, any decent adventurer is going to back off and rest when he needs to, and getting ambushed in the basecamp or an archeological dig every time they try to sleep just doesn't make any narrative sense.

There's nothing straining about adventuring being dangerous and ambushes don't have to be the only way that time constraints are put on you. Intelligent monsters will become aware of your presence, wild animals will get into your food stores etc etc. The wilderness is a dangerous place, and nature doesn't give a dire rat's behind about you and will kill you just a mercilessly as a serial killer. And thats before you add in anyone who might be actively trying to hurt you or someone else.

If we're going to have a discussion, its going to have to be based around Pathfinder/3.5/4.0 as the baseline, because thats what 95% of the playing population knows, and thats whats relevant.

Bull. Absolute and complete horse crap. You don't get to dictate the terms of the conversation or declare that I can only use a system I've already acknowledged was broken and flawed to support my point. The fact is, daily resources and vancian casting can work and can be done right and was indeed done right previously. If you're going to ignore the great body of RPGs that existed before the year 2000, we're done having a conversation here because you're not interested in discussing D&D and it's mechanics, you're interested in declaring how awful 3.x was and how because 4e did everything different that the mechanics that existed in 3.x can't be done.

[Synovia]

There's nothing straining about adventuring being dangerous and ambushes don't have to be the only way that time constraints are put on you. Intelligent monsters will become aware of your presence, wild animals will get into your food stores etc etc. The wilderness is a dangerous place, and nature doesn't give a dire rat's behind about you and will kill you just a mercilessly as a serial killer. And thats before you add in anyone who might be actively trying to hurt you or someone else.

I completely agree. I just don't think that you should NEED to do that to keep players from blowing away every reasonable CR encounter they face. You shouldn't need to wedge things in story-wise to fix a mechanics problem.

Bull. Absolute and complete horse crap. You don't get to dictate the terms of the conversation or declare that I can only use a system I've already acknowledged was broken and flawed to support my point. The fact is, daily resources and vancian casting can work and can be done right and was indeed done right previously. If you're going to ignore the great body of RPGs that existed before the year 2000, we're done having a conversation here because you're not interested in discussing D&D and it's mechanics, you're interested in declaring how awful 3.x was and how because 4e did everything different that the mechanics that existed in 3.x can't be done.

I'm not ignoring before 2000. It happened. What I'm saying is its really not relevant to the current game, because almost nobody plays it anymore.

[obryn]

So it's a feature that lasted as a given rule across the first 25 years of D&D (the rules cyclopedia ran concurrently with AD&D 2), poked it's head up here and there for the next 8 years and it's only within the last 4 years that they've been eliminated completely and you don't think that constitutes an iconic feature of the game?

As I mentioned, I think if you do a survey of 2e stuff, wandering monsters are pretty much not a defining or iconic feature. So I'd cut that down to 15 years, which is less than half.

I'll grant that it's an iconic feature of some editions of the game, and specifically some sorts of adventures, which are both quite a bit different.* It has a purpose - and that's time pressure on dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls. It also has a tendency to slow down progress to the more exciting parts of an adventure and not make much narrative sense, which is why it was so often houseruled out even back then.

So no, if I were to list "iconic game features of D&D," wandering monsters would not be in my top 10 or probably even top 20.

I love AD&D, don't get me wrong. But Next isn't (or shouldn't be) an OSR game. It should embrace more modern design, and not rely on picky time or resource tracking to achieve some semblance of balance.

-O


* Such as, free-wheeled, almost point-buy, multiclassing is iconic of 3.x, but I wouldn't call it iconic for D&D.

[lesser_minion]

So why are we basing players resources on 4 encounters if almost nobody plays that many?

Nobody ever did?

The balancing in 3e was never based on players facing four encounters per day, it was based on the assumption that an encounter of a certain power level relative to the PCs' would cost the PCs about 20% of their resources (and note that it wasn't phrased as "daily resources" either). There is a massive difference.

In fact, one of the other assumptions inherent in the 3e balancing was that the PCs wouldn't decrease in effectiveness as their resources were spent.

[obryn]

The balancing in 3e was never based on players facing four encounters per day, it was based on the assumption that an encounter of a certain power level relative to the PCs' would cost the PCs about 20% of their resources (and note that it wasn't phrased as "daily resources" either). There is a massive difference.

That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

-O

[Ashdate]

I would suggest that while it's okay to look to 1st and 2nd edition for ideas, pre-3e systems have simply not had the "spotlight" shone on them that 3e and 4e has, which is to say, "take the mechanics contained within the first editions with an ounce of caution. The internet wasn't around to break them".

On the topic of the 15 minute workday, a system that encourages players to soldier on - without the need for a DM to throw random encounters or threaten the players with plot nastiness - would be best. There's nothing wrong with the occasional random encounter or "you've only got three days to retrieve the McGuffin" plot, but I'd rather the PCs be the ones to decide whether and when they "rest".

The suggestion earlier in the thread that successive encounters (without resting) gives a greater "reward" sounds like a very reasonable compromise between those who don't want game mechanics to determine when rest is appropriate, and those who want to discourage Rope Trick abuse. I would personally add the potential for more treasure/magical items, but I would imagine some pushback on that.

[lesser_minion]

That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

There is a difference between saying that fighting more than four "challenging and level-appropriate" encounters will probably kill the PCs, and saying that the PCs should fight four encounters per day.

And again, remember that the rules also assume that the PCs aren't getting weaker when they expend these resources. 3e's balancing actually assumed that players would limit their resource expenditure in an encounter.

Note that the fifteen minute workday "problem" was never about novae, which can be stopped easily just by keeping an eye on the action economy -- a solution which, compared with per-encounter limits, also has the advantage of working with a wider range of possible encounters.

In 3e, novae weren't actually that big a problem because there wasn't actually much point to them. Once you've paralysed an opponent, you can just kill them. Winning the fight does not also require you to stun them, daze them, defenestrate them, compel them, confuse them, chastise them, castrate them, exhaust them, enervate them, and distract them with a pole-dancing illithid.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

-O

Note that he said encounters of a certain power level deplete 20% of your resources--that certain power level being an even-CR encounter. 3e doesn't assume 4 encounters per day, it assumes either 4 fairly nonlethal on-CR encounters per day, or 8 relatively safe below-CR encounters, or 2 fairly challenging above-CR encounters, or one major "boss fight" encounter, or some other configuration that works out to that (like four bunches of mooks, one average encounter, and one hard encounter).

It averages out at 4 encounters because you're expected to face those around half the time, but the system doesn't assume 4 encounters/day at all. If WotC tried to balance some late 3e stuff and 4e around encounters because they thought 3e assumed that, then they misunderstood their own system (not surprising, since the guys who wrote 3.0 were long gone when 4e rolled around).

I'd say that most people who experience the 15-minute workday start tending towards having one really big encounter per day, if the forums are a representative sample, and though that doesn't follow the guidelines in the DMG regarding how often you should face above-CR encounters, the system is built to handle that just fine and can be played that way even if it would be more interesting to mix things up a bit.

[kerplunksploosh]

Again. Would it be so much to ask for rations, light, and gritty survival stuff to be relevant for levels 1-5? It is something that DOES appeal to me. I'm a weirdo that enjoys planning over combat encounters. I wouldn't dare insist that level 15 players really care about how much food they packed. They're rich, and packed enough grub for the journey. It strikes me as bafflingly easy to separate different playstyles into different levels.

At the 15MWD: Is it really a problem? Some times there ARE no time constraints, and that's just good sense for a party to behave like that, even in a simulistic world. If there are NEVER time constraints, that's just bad DMing. Certain mechanics can discourage that, sure, but there's no cure for bad DMing... is there? I've actually put a lot of thought into role-playing aids for players, but I can't think of anything for DMs.

At Coidzor: Full-on Magic, not merely supernatural. Ok, I was actually a Paladin, but I was using Luminescent Rainbow Glo Radiant attacks at an embarassingly early level. I could have avoided those skills, but as I levelled I helped address party needs. I was expecting a largely-mundane 2nd Ed Pally, which is where the disconnect came from.

I'd suggest collapsing the number of classes to enhance customization. I might focus primarily on advanced martial training, with just a touch of holy healing/protection, and possibly a brief Rage (a la Luke Skywalker, who seems to otherwise fit into Paladin description) whenever something dear to me is threatened. I honestly think 3 base classes are sufficient; fighter, rogue, mage. (Combat, Noncombat, Versatility, respectively)