The One Hour D&D Game

Hassassin · Mar 19, 2012

dkyle said:
Quest XP was pretty standard, I think, but I didn't think adjusting combat XP was all that common.

Can't remember what AD&D books say, but 3e DMG certainly tells you to adjust the EL and/or XP award for encounters that are easier or more difficult than expected due to something outside the PCs' control. (As opposed to encounters that they overcome easily due to smart strategy.)

dkyle said:
But it relies on a few important assumptions: an encounter will have total XP of (standard monster XP of level [party level +/- 4]) * party size, that monsters will not deviate more than 7 levels from the party[...]

Actually, monsters are supposed to be no more than four levels lower or seven levels higher. The average of the range is above the party level, because the math is slanted in the PCs' favor.

dkyle said:
Once you take away that encounter context, a simple XP amount is not a good measure of challenge.

Don't tell me there aren't (sometimes significant) differences in the difficulty of e.g. 1k XP encounters in 4e. There are always a lot of factors that play into it, so it is only a baseline. As a baseline it should work even for adventures, as long as that's how they design it.

Radiating Gnome · Mar 19, 2012

ExploderWizard said:
No other D&D is really any different. The only changes are the time it takes to deflate those bags of hitpoints. D&D combat is abstract. The choice you have is to handle it quickly or drag it out over a longer period.

For me, the key to fun is player choice. If we abstract the game down the the point where it's just a matter of taking turns, rolling attacks and seeing who gets to a destination number of HP fastest, I'm convinced that is not a good time for players. They need to have choices to make.

Choices, though, give the players the opportunity to be creative. Even if it's incredibly simple, and it's a choice between two different possible attacks, the opportunity to make the choice is the key.

The full-blown 4e set-piece encounter is a festival of player choices. Where to move, how to get there, what resource to use, whom to attack, and so on.

The trick is that not ever combat needs to be that sort of set-piece. In 4e, we end up often ignoring smaller encounters because we don't want to invest the time it would take to play it out. So, this lower-complexity encounter idea is great so long as it preserves some choices for the players to make.

-rg

KidSnide · Mar 20, 2012

Radiating Gnome said:
For me, the key to fun is player choice. If we abstract the game down the the point where it's just a matter of taking turns, rolling attacks and seeing who gets to a destination number of HP fastest, I'm convinced that is not a good time for players. They need to have choices to make.

Choices, though, give the players the opportunity to be creative. Even if it's incredibly simple, and it's a choice between two different possible attacks, the opportunity to make the choice is the key.

The full-blown 4e set-piece encounter is a festival of player choices. Where to move, how to get there, what resource to use, whom to attack, and so on.

The trick is that not ever combat needs to be that sort of set-piece. In 4e, we end up often ignoring smaller encounters because we don't want to invest the time it would take to play it out. So, this lower-complexity encounter idea is great so long as it preserves some choices for the players to make.

I completely agree that player choice is the key part of combat, although I'll add the caveat that it's the presence of an interesting player choice that matters. "Heads or tails" is a choice, but it's rarely an interesting choice since you lack the knowledge to make an informed decision.

Combat length interacts with the "interesting choice" issue in two ways. First, the choices made in the combat are only interesting if they matter. Because many 4e combats have foregone conclusions and many of the resources reset (e.g. encounter powers), many tactical choices that could be interesting cease to be that way because they don't really matter. Yes, a more efficient defeat of the enemy might leave you with one more healing surge, but if you're a character who's not going to run out anyway, who really cares?

Second, it doesn't matter how many interesting choices you have per combat. What matters is how many interesting choices you have per hour of play. Sure, your tactically interesting combat may have 12 really cool interesting choices over the two hours you spent playing it out. But if I can manage 5-6 encounters in that time with 4-5 interesting decisions each, I can deliver a game experience with more fulfilling player choice even if each individual encounter is less interesting.

It's this second part that really does it for me. I would love to have combat that is half as satisfying, if I can run through it in a quarter of the time. Also, speaking just for myself, I like the 4e combat mini-game, but I enjoy the decisions involved in interaction and exploration more than I enjoy the decisions involved in even an interesting tactical combat. So for me, a game that lets me spend more time interacting and exploring is a big win.

-KS

Buugipopuu · Mar 20, 2012

I'm skeptical of 'one hour adventures' as a design goal. In a four player game, even fitting in a session of the simplest games (indie RPGs whose entire rules fit on five sides of A4, and character sheets that would fit in a text message) into an hour is difficult. Even with no rules at all, four players introducing their characters and the DM introducing the setting and setting the scene and describing the starting location will eat up a lot of your one hour regardless of what system you're playing in.

Radiating Gnome · Mar 20, 2012

KidSnide said:
Combat length interacts with the "interesting choice" issue in two ways. First, the choices made in the combat are only interesting if they matter. Because many 4e combats have foregone conclusions and many of the resources reset (e.g. encounter powers), many tactical choices that could be interesting cease to be that way because they don't really matter. Yes, a more efficient defeat of the enemy might leave you with one more healing surge, but if you're a character who's not going to run out anyway, who really cares?

By and large I agree, but I think many players -- including me as a player -- enjoy the challenge of trying to eke out a little more damage, the super cool combination, the unexpected move -- and it's a reality that the more you throttle down the tactical complexity of the encounter, the more difficult you make that particular challenge. If we're playing an encounter without minis and a map, it's a lot less satisfying to tumble into a flank for an action point fueled double sneak attack. You may still be able to do it, with the DM's permission, but it's a lot less satisfying when you haven't earned it with tactical maneuvering.

KidSnide said:
Second, it doesn't matter how many interesting choices you have per combat. What matters is how many interesting choices you have per hour of play.

As I said above, I think there's a quality issue here in addition to quantity. It's one thing if it matters, but you need to start asking how much it matters.

I know that, at least for our group -- majority very wargamy group -- they love the highly tactical encounters because they can study the tactical situation, and squeeze out cool maneuvers and make things happen essentially outside of the DM's control. The more tactically detailed the system, the more the power at the table shifts towards the players. They probably never quite get to 50% control over the action at the table, but in a very abstract, no minis system the players and their tactics are subject to the limits and vagaries of the DM's imagination. In your case, that may be totally fine, but I'm less interested in playing a game that's all in the DM's head than I am one that that's more concretely modeled for me (through minis, etc).

KidSnide said:
It's this second part that really does it for me. I would love to have combat that is half as satisfying, if I can run through it in a quarter of the time. Also, speaking just for myself, I like the 4e combat mini-game, but I enjoy the decisions involved in interaction and exploration more than I enjoy the decisions involved in even an interesting tactical combat. So for me, a game that lets me spend more time interacting and exploring is a big win.

See, we're very close -- I want to be able to run about half my encounters at a quarter the time so I can tell more story with them, and still be able to have my big deal slugfests 1-2 per session.

-rg

howandwhy99 · Mar 20, 2012

article said:
In about 45 minutes of play, we created an entire party of adventurers (dwarf fighter, human magic-user, halfling thief), kicked off an adventure with the characters just outside of a ruined keep, and explored six different rooms in a small dungeon. That exploration included two battles with goblins and hobgoblins. We played at a fairly relaxed pace. There was plenty of roleplaying between the characters and frequent questions on the rules as the players navigated both basic D&D and my house rules.

You should be able to play a complete adventure in an hour.

I like the article, but that's not an adventure in my mind. That's one hour of a nice game session where the players were focused on playing throughout.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands has the bog standard town & wilderness & dungeon design. 6 rooms, 2 combats, and some conversation does not mean we've sussed out enough of the module starting design to get bored and move on. If it did, we found we weren't really interested in the first place. Short module then, short night.

Fanaelialae · Mar 20, 2012

dkyle said:
Quest XP was pretty standard, I think, but I didn't think adjusting combat XP was all that common. But my experience with early D&D is very limited.

Of course, very early on, most XP was from treasure, and that was tied directly to what treasure table the monster you fought had.

But the salient issue is that XP wasn't always an "encounter design" tool. It was a reward, nothing more or less. Creating "fair" encounters wasn't really the point. If the random encounter table says you encounter "Orcs", then you roll for how many. It could be 1. Or it could be hundreds.

In 3.5, we got the CR system, but it didn't work very well. It was confusing, and general game balance problems made it rather superfluous.

XP as measure of challenge was new for 4E. And I think it works quite well. But it relies on a few important assumptions: an encounter will have total XP of (standard monster XP of level [party level +/- 4]) * party size, that monsters will not deviate more than 7 levels from the party, that monsters are present and free to act from the start, and that parties will get short rests between them. Those are important assumptions, because it forms a context the monster will be used in; how big of an encounter it'll be part of.

The problem in the L&L article is with trying to generalize that to Adventure XP pools, and have that XP value make sense whether the monster is alone, or in a group with a bunch of others. And I don't think that really works. Once you take away that encounter context, a simple XP amount is not a good measure of challenge. Adding in some kind of "overhead" XP, counted against that Adventure pool, for additional monsters per encounter could work, but then we're basically back to Encounter-based design, which is what a lot of traditional D&D players don't like, and what I think Mike was trying to avoid.

In addition, if that Overhead XP is purely DM judgement, then I don't think there's much point in having the system. If you standardize on assumptions of monsters per encounter and encounters per adventure, then you're basically just back to 4E-style encounter design.

In all fairness, DM judgment will always play some role, but I think you're right in that it isn't sufficient. While an experienced DM might be able to eyeball the difficulty of a non-standard encounter, a newb will almost certainly be unable to do so.

That said, I think it is feasible to create a system that reasonably balances 10 fights in the same day with 1 big fight. I don't expect it to be perfect, but as long as it works most of the time, I'd be happy.

The reason IMO that XP works better than CR is that it is more nuanced. One CR up or down is a large jump in power; you could even often add extra lower CR creatures to an encounter for "free".

As I said, XP is more nuanced. A low xp creature might be a low level creature or a higher level minion, for example. If you add a lower level creature into an encounter, the xp total still increases (unless the DM rules that the creature's presence is negligible). Of course, although it's pretty good, 4e encounter design is by no means perfect.

Perhaps then, what we need is an even more nuanced approach to encounter design. It might be a table, it might be a formula, I don't rightly know. But the way I envision it, this method would distinguish between the big fight and numerous little fights, and adjust xp accordingly.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 10 encounters with 5 creatures drains roughly the same resources as 1 encounter with 25 creatures. You'd then decide what kind of encounter you want to run, look it up in the table, and find the xp value (which you'd then deduct from the adventure total). So you might decide on two 5 creature encounters (100xp per encounter), and one 15 creature encounter (500 xp), with some xp left over for non-combat challenges.

In a sense, it's like layering aspects of the CR system over the xp system, in order to (hopefully) come away with a more precise metric for judging the difficulty of encounters.

Minigiant · Mar 20, 2012

ExploderWizard said:
No other D&D is really any different. The only changes are the time it takes to deflate those bags of hitpoints. D&D combat is abstract. The choice you have is to handle it quickly or drag it out over a longer period.

Weeeelll...Hit point damage is the chump method to victory after level 5 or so in 3.5.

I like the goal but I don't think more than maybe 10% of the 5E players will ever play the raw blankness needed to play a 1 hour game.

KidSnide · Mar 20, 2012

Radiating Gnome said:
KidSnide said:

It's this second part that really does it for me. I would love to have combat that is half as satisfying, if I can run through it in a quarter of the time.

Click to expand...

See, we're very close -- I want to be able to run about half my encounters at a quarter the time so I can tell more story with them, and still be able to have my big deal slugfests 1-2 per session.

Very close indeed. I love ending my adventures with a massive, tactically-ineresting slugfest too. It's the non-climatic, 4th-in-a-row slugfests that I could do without.

In any case, I completely agree that a satisfying D&DN needs to include the ability to have these long-lasting, complicated, tactical combats. I just think that resolving less important combats faster can be super-valuable for the overall adventure experience.

And, yes, "how many combats are important" is going to be a question that will vary table-by-table. If combat isn't a big deal for your game, you might decide that no combats are important enough to be worth the trouble of learning the more complicated rules. If combat is the center of your game, you might choose to use tactical resolution for everything. I suspect that most of us are in the middle, where we prefer some tactical combat and some faster-resolving non-tactical combat.

Either way, I think being able to run a 1 hour adventure is a good way of testing the fast-and-light version of the rules.

-KS

KidSnide · Mar 20, 2012

Minigiant said:
I like the goal but I don't think more than maybe 10% of the 5E players will ever play the raw blankness needed to play a 1 hour game.

I don't think more than 10% of the 5E GMs will ever have the mental focus and time management skill to get through a 1 hour game in less than 90 minutes.

-KS