The One Hour D&D Game

Mattachine said:

I "stop" the party from taking extended rests in two ways:

1. I don't design all encounters to be challenging the PCs to their utmost. No more 3e encounter design. A lot of encounters are just wearing them down a bit. Remember adventures in AD&D?

2. More importantly, extended rests have to make sense in-character. Why doesn't the party take an extended rest in the depths of a dangerous cave complex? Because nobody would do that--it would be foolish. I demand that my players play with a bit of verisimilitude. I don't need artificial time tables (though I occasional use in-story time tables), because the players need to play their characters in a way that makes sense.

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It simply does not occur to anyone I play with that they should play such a meta-game. I give them fun encounters and they play it cool. If someone dies, well, at least there is a little drama to it.

I think really, we all people who have enjoyed 4e just want to see even better stuff. I'm convinced there is a perfectly reasonable game at the intersection of our desires. I think now is getting to be a good time to see what you have WotC! C'mon. Just because some people are going to complain...

LostSoul said:

1. Like it.

2. I think it would be good if that were part of the game. That is, instead of having to choose between maximum effectiveness (taking an Extended Rest after every encounter - 4E doesn't make time a resource) and playing in-character, there was a line about making sure that it makes sense to take an Extended Rest. Even if it was something simple like "The DM should only allow an Extended Rest when it makes sense to the ongoing story of the campaign." Or they could relate Extended Rests to in-game consequences, e.g. "When you take an Extended Rest, the DM complicates your PC's life."

I say this as someone who feels that Extended Rests are, by far, the worst aspect of 4E.

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Eh, did you need to be told? I seem to recall that the first thought out of my head about it was that it happened when I thought it would be good to happen, and maybe a lot of times the players DO have a choice. They can hole up and face tougher opposition. Most of my adventures are written so that you can take different approaches. Now and then there's a gauntlet. My Tuesday (now Thursday) group has to get to the Shadowgate at the Vuul Barrow and perform a ritual by moonrise. I can make it as tough as I want, they will press on.

howandwhy99 said:

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.

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This last weekend, I ran B2 at a Con, using the B/X ruleset. Characters were premade (2nd level) so we could skip that part, and in about an hour's play we had a complete "adventure" - though the party died by TPK (it's not a good idea to invade the evil temple and get caught between skeletons and zombies and their evil cleric leader). It ended at a good stopping point - had the players won, they would have taken out the "boss". There were about 4 fights (3 PCs vs. 2 bandits, 3 PCs vs. 6 skeletons, 3 PCs vs. 8 zombies, 3 PCs vs. 10 skeletons, 3 zombies [from the last fight] and an evil cleric), some exploration, and some RP between the characters and NPCs.

In the end, we were able to get in about 3 hours of play over the total 4 hours. After the first part, a couple of extra players showed up, rescued the 1st party and then ventured through some of the other caves and even back to the keep to pick up another PC (my son, playing a M-U), interact with the NPCs there before the group finally returned to the evil temple to steal a trio of 500 gp gems to finish the four-hour slot.

After this weekend, "D&D in an hour" sounds like a feasible goal - exploration, RP and combat - though I'd still prefer playing a good 2-4 hours at a stretch.

Kamikaze Midget said:

While I don't expect a game involving 6 people to be quite as efficient as a cartoon in delivering the awesome, I need to get much closer than a 45-minute combat will let me get. Ain't got time for that.

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Are you saying "I ain't got time to bleed"?

AbdulAlhazred said:

Eh, did you need to be told? I seem to recall that the first thought out of my head about it was that it happened when I thought it would be good to happen, and maybe a lot of times the players DO have a choice. They can hole up and face tougher opposition. Most of my adventures are written so that you can take different approaches. Now and then there's a gauntlet. My Tuesday (now Thursday) group has to get to the Shadowgate at the Vuul Barrow and perform a ritual by moonrise. I can make it as tough as I want, they will press on.

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Two points: One, it's poor game design to allow resources important to the game to refresh without any consequences. Yes, you can add them, but the game as written doesn't spend much time on it. Two, the game is built around the assumption of balanced encounters, so what counts as "tougher opposition"? Since you get XP for encounters and treasure based on character level, you're only rewarded for facing more encounters.

Story consequences would seem to be a good way to go, yet I don't recall much text in the DMG about that sort of thing. I could be wrong. Anyway, most of the game doesn't seem to care about the campaign story much - it doesn't influence the Paragon Paths you can take, for instance.

LostSoul said:

Two points: One, it's poor game design to allow resources important to the game to refresh without any consequences. Yes, you can add them, but the game as written doesn't spend much time on it. Two, the game is built around the assumption of balanced encounters, so what counts as "tougher opposition"? Since you get XP for encounters and treasure based on character level, you're only rewarded for facing more encounters.

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Well, I take the whole treasure parcel thing with large doses of NaCl personally. I mean it is good to establish a baseline that will work within the game. OTOH it really should only be a starting point.

I think the problem with the whole resting thing is, you don't want to just up front make it really gamist. It has to flow organically out of the story. Otherwise you're really just railroading in a sense. Mostly resting once a day DOES work pretty well. There will be those times when you'd like to put a different pace to things and then you do. I don't think it is straightforward to explain it in terms of a rule, and whatever is in books tends to get interpreted that way. Look at the 'wishlist', which has taken on some huge life far beyond its remit.

Story consequences would seem to be a good way to go, yet I don't recall much text in the DMG about that sort of thing. I could be wrong. Anyway, most of the game doesn't seem to care about the campaign story much - it doesn't influence the Paragon Paths you can take, for instance.

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I think the DMG does talk a lot about story arcs, plots, and how there are consequences to actions. It is very lose on trying to impose how the story works on the PCs mechanically because why do you WANT the rules telling you that? I don't think they should. Each PP and ED has a good hunk of background info on what concept it is intended to fill out. Presumably the DM and the players will use that information to fit it into their game.

Really, 4e DMG aimed at explaining the hows of the basic skills of building encounters and stories, and motivating players, etc. The 1e DMG OTOH goes totally the other way and kind of just assumes you'll take care of the 'campaign stuff' yourself, and throws a lot of 'use this' and 'do this' at you that is at a detail level, but you never get what a campaign IS. Nor anything much in the way of setting ideas, etc. A new DMG might kind of aim to hit somewhere in the middle.

Balesir said:

I think the CLW wand went beyond game style in 3.5E. I played a Shifter Barbarian in Eberron and a single level of Ranger to get tracking (using my already-good Nature skill, IIRC) and the use of CLW wand healing was way, way too good to pass up.

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YMMV, obviously. I'm not sure I've ever played in a home game where a PC used a CLW wand. Do PCs usually buy them, or does someone convince the cleric/bard to take Craft Wand?

Then again, my PCs were never about maximizing their use of the rules. I remember a great negotiation in 3.0, where I promised to give the (high level) PCs a bunch of stat boosting items if they all promised to stop casting Bull's Strength (etc) unless someone was just about to use an appropriate skill. Rolling those damn d4s and recalculating all of the combat stats took forever...

-KS

Adventure focus vs Encounter focus

A couple of things
Encounter based design can work fine but the focus on individual scenes makes adventures seem very choppy. There is a lot of work to be done to help it form a smooth story. The filler between encounter design is not something that is shown very well in the core books or in pre-made adventures.

Adventure based design, first of all, is more inclusive of older edition's play style (pre 3E) and is not as big a shift from encounter focus as people are making out. You still need to plan cool engaging encounters, an orc confectioner guarding a Boston cream pie in a 10' x 10' walk-in cooler for ex. But now you design that orc/pie encounter in a larger context. You have a whole 'Assault on Gruumsh' Finest Bakery' with a couple of orc/pie battles, some exploration of the kitchen, and some roleplay haggling over the recipe for One Eye's, a fine orcish pastry. The "Assault" takes about an hour and is a fine chapter in the 'Cupcake Wars' adventure path/ adventure arc. The next adventure goes into 'Corellon's Confections'.

Can you do this exact same thing in 3E or 4E with encounter based design? Heck yeah. It's not reinventing the wheel, it is just a refocusing of the goal. There should be a satisfying group of encounters with a good conclusion in a one hour's time. It is a worthy goal and not a repudiation of what has been done previously. It is a shift to making player time a consideration in the Next's design not just game time. This is good.

The big thing is taking the scaling of option bloat in a modular system to keeping this goal a reality as the game matures.

Blue said:

Basic D&D character creation was roll 3d6 six times, pick a race/class, buy equipment, roll HPs, and maybe pick a spell as opposed to richer character creation experiences any modern RPG needs to deliver. This is an interesting experiment of what was state of the art 30 years ago and could help us remember our roots, but not something that should be realized in a fully-fleshed-out RPG of today that's a worthy successor of 3.5 and 4e, both excellent games with different strengths. If that's the game we want to play, it's already available as Basic D&D for anyone who wants it.

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Some of us don't want a successor of 3.x and 4e. Some of us want a successor of Basic D&D, and some of us want a successor of AD&D. I think we all want a system that can be all of those things.

What I find disconcerting is that some people believe that 3.x and 4e were the only versions of D&D that had any merit (or that 3.5 is the "classic D&D experience"). In reality, BD&D and AD&D had existed for 26 years before Third Edition came out. 3e advanced some aspects of AD&D, but abandoned others. It was a significant refocusing of the game. It was, and still is, the new kid on the block. It is not everything that D&D ever was or ever will be.

"If that's the game you want to play, just play that game" is fallacious. What if someone told you, "if you just want to play 3.5, just play 3.5"?

I'm a role play heavy kind of player and DM. I don't like long drawn out combat sessions they get old fast. Single combat should resolve quickly, mass combat battles should take longer much more to handle. A 1hour session is not an adventure IMO maybe a session or a side-trek at best.

However, I am very interested in what the new iteration of D&D will bring.

Later

Aoric