The One Hour D&D Game

Mark CMG said:

Yeah, a movie that was just a single 2 1/2 hour combat might not do too well.

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No one tell Michael Bay.

KidSnide said:

The one hour game is really a stress test. A good GM can cram more into a session than an average GM. If a good GM can make a one hour game work, then the average, tired, adult, weekday night GM can run a satisfying session in the two-and-a-half hours they have to run.

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A one hour game is definitely good for little children or preoccupied adults. We played a Labyrinth Lord session in about two hours (and the much of the first was spent getting organized on Google plus).

However I do not want to see the Fifth Edition hampered too much by such considerations. I think that the D&D board games are better for such a market. Pathfinder is thriving among dedicated roleplayers, and it consumes enormous amounts of time to build characters, build encounters and run fights, as much as the Third or Fourth editions.

ExploderWizard said:

Roleplay isn't limited. The beauty of minimal mechanics means you get more roleplay time without giving up progressing with in-game activity rather than less. Old school D&D was all about the silly.

Out of character banter and just fooling around will add time to any session,that isn't system specific.

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Oh I know. I have great deals of fun playing Old School. But even then we never did everything in an hour.

I don't want to buy Old School D&D + New School Modules. I am just afraid that core might be going back to sacks of HP with some ability scores attached to them. And some characters can choose to use a smaller sack of HPs for some spells. Those games exist already.

I love the idea, and even if not an hour just 2 or 3 for a fully fledged adventure would be great. As long as we can do simple combats on the less important fights and dial up the complexity for set pieces, that would be great!

Crazy Jerome said:

[MENTION=70707]dkyle[/MENTION], note that I did not say that such a system would be perfect in every way, and have no mathematical issues. I was answering your objection that such a system is functionally useless. It's not useless, but it does require a hefty dose of DM judgment. The cruise control in my car is still useful, even if it doesn't work well on steep hills, much less function as "auto pilot".

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I don't expect it to be perfect. But the problem with your suggested modification is that it makes it effectively the same as 4E's encounter design, just in a roundabout way. That doesn't really argue in favor of Mike's Adventure XP pool idea as being viable, if the only way to make it work is to turn it into an encounter-based design. I said a particular system was useless, and that it needed to account for encounters to work. So, I guess, we're in agreement, since your counter argument was to make it account for encounters.

To continue the analogy with cruise control, it isn't that I think it's imperfect. It's like if someone suggested that cars should have something where you can input an arrival time, and destination, and you'll just get there. But, of course, we can't do automatic steering or turns yet, or collision avoidance, so the driver has to do that. So we'll just assume those things, and have the car just figure out the right speed to maintain when on highways, and then we've just reinvented a more awkward to use cruise control. The essence of the original vision was lost. Your revision to the Adventure pool concept makes it fundamentally different, and not what I think Mike was suggesting.

Mark CMG said:

Well, I cannot say that I'm a follower or fan of DBZ. What little I know of it didn't attract me as a viewer. Do you think that 5E should, or some version of D&D does, emulate DBZ well?

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Hah, no on both accounts. DBZ has a few mechanics that D&D has always lacked (charging up attacks, etc), and its battles are infamously long (as in, several episodes long). 5E sounds more like Final Fantasy than DBZ.

It might be that "core" means something different to some folks. This is a new game, so they aren't taking anything out of its core though they might not be putting everything into it that some might feel should be core. I think the plan is to make sure the options are there so that if someone feels something should be added that wasn't, they can add it themselves. However, maybe I am not understanding your post? Do you think that if something is available as an option that you could add to the core that would be worse than if others found it a struggle to try and remove the portion(s) you thought should be core?

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The main thing with "core" is that the farther from the core system you go, the harder it is to bring people along with you, especially if digital tools are involved, unless the tools do ALL of the work for you. People love mods, but mods are automatic once applied and don't require modding your mind.

dkyle said:

You're post suggested that my issue with Adventure XP pools was grounded entirely (or at least almost entirely) in 4E. I don't think it is. The same issue comes up with wave-based encounters in 4E, and in every past edition of D&D. It would be folly for them to ignore it.

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I think you're onto something. I think the problem might come in this:

XP can never be an accurate measure of a monster's challenge.

If XP is a precise measure of monster challenge, a monster alone should be worth less XP than a monster in a group, period. One orc? 25 XP. Four orcs? 100 XP each (or whatever). That's an issue with 4e right now: if you don't include the recommended quantity of critters, things get easier.

This is part of D&D's general problem of trying to measure an encounter's toughness by individual monsters therein. It's nearly impossible. Four mages with fireball in a small room are more challenging than four mages with fireball in an open field. A big solo monster is less challenging in a party with 3 strikers than the exact same XP quantity of minions. Two monsters with synergistic abilities (say, a skirmisher and a controller that can inhibit movement, or a lurker with insubstantial and a controller that imposes weakness) are a much bigger challenge than two other random monsters. A creature with Vulnerable Radiant is much less of a challenge in a party with a laser cleric than in a party full of martial characters. There's so many variables that affect an individual encounter that even in 4e (which probably gets it the most right), XP value is only a rough approximation.

So giving a precise measure of an individual entity's challenge is, clearly, a problem with no easy solution. To get it more accurate, you'd have to have a different XP total for every possible encounter, which is clearly a Sisyphean task: there are limitless possible encounters.

I'm not sure XP (or anything else) can be a measure of difficulty, reliably. It can be a rough approximation, but it can't get the details right.

So what if XP was a flexible reward, rather than a budget? What if the DM adjudicated the level of challenge overall, rather than with each specific monster? So the adventure guidelines would state that this is a Level 1 Adventure worth 300 XP, and the rules tell a DM what a level 1 Adventure's DC's an monster levels are, and the DM populates his adventure with as many skill checks and mosnters as he things should be "worth" that level of XP?

Since a DM is probably the best judge of what is actually a challenge for her particular party, I think that giving some broad guidelines and letting them figure out what happened might be a viable approach...perhaps...

dkyle said:

If we assume a simple system where there's a set Adventure XP pool, and monsters have a set XP, and that's it (which is what I think Mike was going for), ignore unquantifiable things like ambush setups and terrain advantage, and assume the game looks anything like any edition of D&D, I don't see how 10 100XP encounters could be anywhere close to similarly as challenging (or resource consumptive) as 1 1000XP encounter. Facing 10 times as many monsters all at once is just inherently massively more difficult than facing them one at a time. It's not due to Encounter powers. A 4E "Encounter" could be built as 10 waves of 100XP, and it would still be trivial compared to the 1000XP all at once Encounter. DMG2 advises as such, that a Wave-structured encounter should have more total XP to be challenging.

I feel like this is self-evident, but I'll give an example. Suppose we expect that the party can kill one monster per round (and assume a simple per-side initiative). Assume 10 identical monsters, each dealing D damage per round.

In the 10 separate monsters case, we can expect 5*D damage dealt to the party. Half those encounters, the party goes first, and kills the monster without taking damage. Other half, the monster gets in 1*D of damage.

In the one big combat case, we can expect 9.5*D the first round (50% chance of killing one monster first, so .5*D, rest get in 9*D), 8.5*D the second, and so on. This comes out to 44.5*D damage. Almost 9 times as much expected damage as the 10 encounters case. Or 90 times more than a one lone-monster encounter.

Now, obviously, this is an idealized scenario. There might be AoEs available to kill more at once, and party damage absorption isn't the only resource that might be drained. But it illustrates the issue. Dealing with 10 monsters at once simply isn't as resource intensive as dealing with them individually, unless the game deviates radically from traditional D&D (i.e., all PC attacks being AoE, covering all enemies at all times, and/or all PC attacks being a finite resource, while healing is infinite).

This isn't a 4E issue. Take any edition of D&D, and the players would be fools to attack 10 monsters at once, instead of picking them off one at a time.

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I see your point, and I will admit that my saying that the two variations on the 1000-XP budget could be identical in resource use was reductive. Of course it will be easier to take on smaller groups of monsters. But my experience has been that in 4e, it's even easier-er. That is, 4e is set up with the expectation that every encounter will be challenging; hence encounter powers, short rests, etc. So it tilts the balance even farther in the direction of the PCs totally dominating a lone foe or small group. Then the PCs get a short rest and are returned to full HP most of the time. If we think of something like 3e, where there are no encounter powers and far less healing, resources get spent at a much higher rate. So maybe the party will dominate against the first few lone monsters, but at a certain point the wizard's spells and the cleric's healing get used up, and then the math shifts so that the lone monster has a better chance of doing more than .5*D damage. This tilting point doesn't occur in 4e, at least not for quite some time, because anybody can spend healing surges at will between combats, and encounter powers will never run out.

Another issue is the huge number of hit points in 4e. It's necessary for exciting, engaging set-piece encounters, but again the ready availability of out-of-combat healing (not even taking into account encounter healing powers that give more than a surge's value) means that most PCs enter most encounters at or near full HP. Imagine if HP were cut down again-- if, as in your example, a monster's 1*D damage were enough to seriously hurt or kill a PC on a high roll. The party may only take a few hits, but if those hits account for a significant percentage of HP and can't be healed as easily, they'll add up. For example, I recently played Pathfinder after four solid years of 4e. Our caster used her single spell in the first combat, we ran out of healing quickly after that, and I was left praying that I didn't get hit for 3 damage because I'd be unconscious with no means of getting back up. In fact, the party ended up running from a single monster because we just didn't have the resources to take the chance that it would do its bit of damage before we killed it-- every HP counted.

Again, I do see your point, and I don't mean to be saying that there could ever be total parity between ten lone monsters and one group of ten. But some of the ways in which 4e is set up make a lone monster encounter far less meaningful than it has been in the past.

I really like this as a testing policy on their part. If the most stripped-down basic version can run through a simple adventure (including character gen) in an hour, then it makes it that much easier to run an adventure in 2-4 hours with some of the more complicated modules turned "on." Its even better if (as has been suggested) the detail vs. speed dial can be turned up and down during an evening or adventure.

I'm not what those who suggest that this is "too fast" are getting at. Seems to me that if one adventure can take an hour and I have three hours....three adventures works, yes? That's not even taking into account table-talk, goof-offery, using more complicated modules, etc.

Minigiant said:

I just don't see how you could even fit character creation, talking to the quest NPCs, exploration to the adventure site, exploration of the adventure site, a few little battles, and a boss battle all in an hour.

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Well, 3E and 4E character creation takes forever without a computer program and quite a while with one.

When a player has to pick 1 of 50 feats and 4 of 50 powers, it takes some people a long time to figure that out.

If a lot more abilities of first level PCs are class features and fewer of them are spells or powers or feats where a selection process is required, then character creation at least can be sped up quite a bit.

But, the price one pays for having a lot of options is that it takes a long time to read through those options and select them. By definition.