Rule-of-Three: 07/10/2012

My 2 cents from the peanut gallery...

The '5-minute adventuring day' is a playstyle issue and can crop up in any RPG and under any rule-system. The means to encourage a groups playstyle to change to one that pushes past resource limits are all in design and story-telling techniques.. the key and best of these is to have a living world.

I have been playing Skyrim alot recently and have become annoyed at how static it is. Its like a horrible DM where 'urgent' quests will wait months for the player to show up before anything happens.

How I avoid the '5 minute adventuring day':
- The world does not wait. Evil guys plan will go forward with or without the PCs... and the PCs involvement is critical is stopping it.
- Metagame announcements to the group regarding pacing for the expected day. Things like 'guys, you have a tough row to hoe today.. better be careful with your resources' and 'guy, this next encounter is nasty...but is the last one you will face today'.
- delink xp/progression from killing things. Tie it to accomplishing quests and have various degrees of success. Even failure means you learn something.
- metagame expectations of the group should include that PC spotlight time rotates and you may play a support role for a couple of sessions... but you will have spotlight time to show off your characters kewl powa's.
- metagame expectation that 'going nova' early might well get your party killed, and it is better to end the day with 'left over' resources alive than it is to not make it to the end of the day


Using these guidelines I have run an adventuring day in 4e that covered 13 encounters, most of them combat encounters and two 'boss' style encounters. I have also ran an adventuring day with only one combat encounter {made up of three level equivalents worth of bad guys}

If 5e gives me an xp budget for an adventure and guidelines on how to stack a 'days' adventuring... I am good with that.

Someone said:

You need to fix the story in order to allow the gamist convention of 4 equivalent encounters to take place, simply because those encounters take place wether you like or not. Also, looks like your enemies must be intelligent, have the possibility to escape or find reinforcements, and your plot must include a tight time limit. So my plans to drop some rumors about the legendary Crown of XP Galore that's been resting in the Cave of Many Mindless Golems since the dawn of time is useless unless the king needs the crown precisely tomorrow and the golems have a Plan B to flee into another cave in case of guerrilla adventurers.

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I don't understand.

If I have a cave of mindless golems then thats the story. No fixing needed. The players can nuke it....or go in an hour a day killing one encounter's worth until they are all gone. If it takes two months so be it.

On the other hand if the king DOES need the crown tomorrow they will have to vary their approach.

We make a story/scenario....they decide how to approach it with the tools available. I don't care how they do it...I just narrate the results.


/ps

plan encounters 4 a day everyday? Bosh that notion. My players would think the evil numerologists were plotting against them.

"You know Bob, we've had four battles every day for four days...I think the numerologists in that temple we raided cursed us.

Yah Tom, it is odd...and the last one always seems the hardest...."

Kamikaze Midget said:

Sure. My main point was just that this expectation did exist and did deserve to be met. If you don't share it, that's no big deal, as long as you can still play the characters you want.

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Here's the thing though, as you laid it out I feel it actually makes less sense.

Wizards are the learned ones. They're going to study and figure out how to not run out of spells if anyone is. They're not going to be the ones to blow their load and then hide.

Sorcerers are the channelers, if anyone is going to grasp at magic and come up with big, chaotic, destructive bursts at times it's them.

"Fire and forget" has always bugged me when it's the controlled, studious group that it happens too.

Primitive Screwhead said:

The '5-minute adventuring day' is a playstyle issue and can crop up in any RPG and under any rule-system.

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Eh, it's only a problem in certain systems. Very few have it as bad as D&D, and some don't have it at all.

Like, GURPs barely has daily resources for most characters. FATE's resources refresh and problems go away by actually playing the game.

Fiasco has absolutely no idea what the heck you're doing. Get back to getting into horrible trouble and _just play_.

Mengu said:

The more I read random ideas about length of an adventuring day, the more I want infinite resources. When you rest, you regain all your hit points, powers, everything. You're ready for the next encounter. Go! No daily powers. No healing surges. You run through as many encounters as you need to, to get your adventuring day done.

I know, there is supposed to be a resource management game within D&D. But I'm tired of it. I don't want to keep track of it. I just want to adventure, interact with new environments, new NPC's, new foes, I want to save damsels in distress, chase after thieves and brigands, investigate haunted houses, siege castles, lead nations, walk through hell, and kill gods. I don't want to count how many charges are left in my wand, how many arrows are in my quiver, how many surges (fine, hit dice if you must) I have left, how many dailies I have remaining.

What matters to me most, is being in the moment. I don't want to worry about how many times I cast fireball today, and see if I can squeeze out another one when a horde of gibberlings is coming at me. I don't want to worry about standing around, sucking on a healing wand before I run up the stairs of a burning building to save a mother and her child. I don't want to get to the doorstep of the big bad demon, and yell through the door, sorry buddy I'm out of healing, gotta go, I'll fight you tomorrow. I want to Just Do It.

There is also real life time constraints. We might have 3 weeks between sessions. If we're on the same adventuring day, it might mean I'm not going to cast any fireballs today because I cast one last session and I'm out. I've been out for 3 weeks, I WANT to blow something up!

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to play the resource management game, it's a large part of tactics we use, and I enjoy tactical play, but I'd be happier, if the resources were confined between short rests, rather than extended rests.

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This seems like textbook "heroic fantasy" D&D, as opposed to 1e-style "survival horror" D&D. I am more and more convinced that this is where to split the next edition into two versions, or groups of rules modules, instead of trying to do both with the same game.

I think resource management is pretty much an all or nothing thing, really. Is there anyone actually looking for easy, perfunctory resource refreshment that rarely affects the story, and rarely forces the players to make tough decisions? That's what the answer to the second question in the article sounds like to me. Or does everybody want either hardass resource rationing or none at all?

One of the reasons that 1e is the best edition for resource management play is that much of the PC's power is really supposed to be in the form of magic items like scrolls, potions and charged staves & wands. These don't contribute to the 15 MAD because the only way to refresh them is to go adventure for more. But this doesn't mix well with a more "heroic fantasy" sensibility, because heroes are supposed to be inherently awesome and not so dependent on their stuff. 1e has less of a heroic feel and more of a "1000 yard stare while clutching your bullets and amphetamine tablets" feel.

SkidAce said:

If I have a cave of mindless golems then thats the story. No fixing needed. The players can nuke it....or go in an hour a day killing one encounter's worth until they are all gone. If it takes two months so be it.

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I think the issue is that those two choices don't just change the colour of the story - is it about wild-go-lucky types or cautious treasure-hunters - but dramatically change the mechanical resolution, by changing the resources that are available.

Primitive Screwhead said:

The '5-minute adventuring day' is a playstyle issue and can crop up in any RPG and under any rule-system.

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I don't agree with this. In a system with no resource recovery based on a timer, it shouldn't happen at all.

Conversely, in Rolemaster (at least in my experience) it's a huge issue, because strong RM mage builds can spend all their power points really, really quickly.

My group doesn't find it to be a very big issue in 4e, because daily powers tend to be situational (at least, my players' have chosen situational ones) and milestones support going on to a significant extent. It is primarily healing surges that are the hard mechanical cap, and my players at least are very good at eking those out.

In anything but a very resticted, specialized form of Fantasy Hero, you have the direct opposite of the 15-minute work day. You can't really hurt the party unless you kill a character. So all your playstyle techniques, instead of wandering monsters or time sensitive missions or similar are replaced with things like deliberate Catch-22 situations, NPCs that can't effectively be fought (i.e. the evil king and his guard).

The funny thing is, if you find yourself running converted D&D adventures, you start looking for ways to make the party need to rest. Because otherwise, according to the pure mechanical logic of the system, they make the Energizer Bunny look like a tree sloth.

1st ed. Fantasy Hero (before Hero was made truly common across genres), added an optional "Long-term endurance" mechanic precisely to help you wear down the party and make them rest, because this was so expected in fantasy gaming (if not literature).