Of all the complaints about 3.x systems... do you people actually allow this stuff ?

[pemerton]

How is that a realistic option for DMs? Are you suggesting you only want to throw challenges at your players where time is not a factor?

It depends what you mean. I'm happy for time to be a factor in the fiction ("If we don't rescue the prisoners in time, they'll all be sacrificed!"). But if it's going to be a factor in resolution, I want that to play out onstage ("Oh know - the gnoll demon priest is about to sacrifice those prisoners, and there's a demon and an ogre in the way - do you think you can get through there to rescue them?" - as it happens, the players in my game adopted defensive tactics at the start of the encounter and lost one of the prisoners).

This passage has influenced quite a bit how I think about and adjudicate ingame time (and some other things as well - the bolding is mine):

Simulationism over-riding Narrativism

*A weapon does precisely the same damage range regardless of the emotional relationship between wielder and target. (True for RuneQuest, not true for Hero Wars)

*A player is chastised for taking the potential intensity of a future confrontation into account when deciding what the character is doing in a current scene, such as revealing an important secret when the PC is unaware of its importance.

*The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).​

Conversely, when framing narratively intense scenes is allowed to override simulationist concerns, the hero will arrive "just in time" to try and stop the villain detonating the bomb (or sacrificing the prisoners, or . . .).

A related comment - when Gygax says in the DMG that there can be no meaningful campaign without properly tracking time and treating it as a player resource, he is wrong. For some sorts of play - especially operational gamist play - what he says is true. But there are other ways to play the game. Even for the sort of dungeon exploration play described in Moldvay Basic, time is not as important as Gygax suggests. It rations wandering monsters, but wandering monsters in Basic can be useful source of XP, and out of the dungeon time is not tracked at all.

Can the onstage descision to rest have consequences while the players are carrying out that action?

You'll have to elaborate, because I'm not sure I follow the question. Generally, resting in my games is not played out - we cut to the end of the rest.

If you are asking whether I am willing to ambush resting PCs, then the answer is "yes". But the ambush will not be resolved offstage.

Another possibility is to space extended rests narratively; which is to say, either put an encounter "quota" in effect (only take an extended rest after x encounters), or only allow them at planned points throughout the adventure, as per required by the story or by the combat pacing.

One version of this that I have used is to relate extended rests to skill challenge success - if you fail in your skill challenge, then you don't have time to rest, or can't find a suitably restful place, or whatever. One potential downside of this approach, though, is that it can produce a cascading, positive feedback dynamic, where success breeds less challenge breeds success - whereas arguably, dramatic pacing is better served by success being followed by a greater challenge.

So anyway, an ongoing puzzle for me in my 4e game.

 

[Hussar]

That's your POV.

There are others whose experience is 180 degrees from that; that it demonstrably DOES work. Like mine.



You mean you haven't seen an explanation you accept.

You and I have gone round and round on this: my experience as a DM and player says otherwise- I've seen no systematic fudging, no difference in the softness of encounters.

Well, considering you play in a game where you allow multiple splats, play with larger than standard groups, die roll generated PC's and frequently point to an example where a 3e module is being used against 3.5 PC's, I'd say that there is considerable softness in encounters and the fudging is built right in.

I mean, right off the bat, what you say is directly countered by the designers of 3e. Right in the books they say that you should only be able to do 4 Par EL encounters per day. If you're regularly doing more then it's pretty obvious that you're running under-Par EL encounters.

That or Monte Cook has no idea what he's talking about in the 3e DMG. Because if you reduce the Fast Group to 4 encounters per gaming day, then the spread between adventures drops to a matter of a few months total spread over twenty levels. There's virtually no difference at all.

So, the whole "Speed up the party with Time Pressure" stick approach doesn't work at all. You'd have to set ridiculous paces for it to have any impact.

 

[billd91]

Well, considering you play in a game where you allow multiple splats, play with larger than standard groups, die roll generated PC's and frequently point to an example where a 3e module is being used against 3.5 PC's, I'd say that there is considerable softness in encounters and the fudging is built right in.

I mean, right off the bat, what you say is directly countered by the designers of 3e. Right in the books they say that you should only be able to do 4 Par EL encounters per day. If you're regularly doing more then it's pretty obvious that you're running under-Par EL encounters.

That or Monte Cook has no idea what he's talking about in the 3e DMG. Because if you reduce the Fast Group to 4 encounters per gaming day, then the spread between adventures drops to a matter of a few months total spread over twenty levels. There's virtually no difference at all.

So, the whole "Speed up the party with Time Pressure" stick approach doesn't work at all. You'd have to set ridiculous paces for it to have any impact.

You keep trying to beat this dead horse. Expected results, averages, and estimates allow for a lot of variability. If the expected value of a d20 roll is 10.5, that doesn't mean I'm going to roll it every time. In fact, I can't even do so. Yet that doesn't mean the value is irrelevant. It also doesn't mean that my results are wrong if my observed results are different from 10.5.

The guidelines in the 3e DMG are similar. They describe AVERAGE results based on AVERAGE inputs, not the breadth of experience you can see in the game. Can we stop treating it as such?

 

[Number48]

A related comment - when Gygax says in the DMG that there can be no meaningful campaign without properly tracking time and treating it as a player resource, he is wrong. For some sorts of play - especially operational gamist play - what he says is true. But there are other ways to play the game. Even for the sort of dungeon exploration play described in Moldvay Basic, time is not as important as Gygax suggests. It rations wandering monsters, but wandering monsters in Basic can be useful source of XP, and out of the dungeon time is not tracked at all.

Gygax can be seen as a real innovator to come up with D&D, but he was so wrong so much of the time. Every incarnation of D&D before 3E was some variation of "Gary's Game." If you weren't playing the way Gary said, you were doing it wrong. Lest you forget, Gary was quite the douche DM judging by the monsters, traps and cursed magic items spread liberally throughout the game. In his day he was the best DM because everyone had to DM his way.

 

[JamesonCourage]

This "one year to go from level 1 to 20" is kind of staggering to me. There's nothing at all wrong with that approach, but it's so foreign to my group. When my players went from 2-22, it took them about 68 years in-game (and about 1,700 hours of real-life play-time).

I guess things just play out differently depending on the group. 1-20 in 5 years would be tremendously fast for my games, I guess. But, hey, I get the feeling I'm the outlier here. As always, play what you like

 

[BryonD]

Conversely, when framing narratively intense scenes is allowed to override simulationist concerns, the hero will arrive "just in time" to try and stop the villain detonating the bomb (or sacrificing the prisoners, or . . .).

Is that a good thing?

That idea seems to suggest that if it controls then no choice ever has a long term significance (for better or for worse). Good planning is not rewarded because you would have arrived "just in time" anyway and bad planning has no consequence because you still get there "just in time".

By assuring that characters will always get there in time, the game would completely deny them the potential for actually achieving "getting there in time".

 

[Hussar]

You keep trying to beat this dead horse. Expected results, averages, and estimates allow for a lot of variability. If the expected value of a d20 roll is 10.5, that doesn't mean I'm going to roll it every time. In fact, I can't even do so. Yet that doesn't mean the value is irrelevant. It also doesn't mean that my results are wrong if my observed results are different from 10.5.

The guidelines in the 3e DMG are similar. They describe AVERAGE results based on AVERAGE inputs, not the breadth of experience you can see in the game. Can we stop treating it as such?

If you rolled a d20 1000 times and got significant variance in the average from 10.5, I'd question whether or not your D20 was skewed, or perhaps something else was giving a biased result. What I wouldn't do is simply nod my head and accept that rolling d20 1000 times and getting a skewed result is somehow my fault for not being able to reproduce.

Because that's what it boils down to. Numerous people have claimed that the 15 MAD is a DM problem. It's not systemic - it's because of the DM. But, when I turn the same thing around and say, no, the reason you're not having 15 MAD is because of the DM, suddenly I'm wrong.

Sorry, it doesn't wash. I'll buy that it would occur here and there. No problem. But, as an average? Nope, something else is going on. And it's pretty clear what's going on - the DM is enabling it by soft balling encounters and allowing high powered PC's (which is really the same thing).

Because, even if you do go 1 encounter/game day, the time difference between campaigns is negligible. Beating PC's with the time issue stick, in the long run, doesn't matter. The Slow Group just isn't slow enough to make any difference.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, considering you play in a game where you allow multiple splats, play with larger than standard groups, die roll generated PC's and frequently point to an example where a 3e module is being used against 3.5 PC's, I'd say that there is considerable softness in encounters and the fudging is built right in.

Ummm..you're just a tad confused.

While I allow nearly anything- with prior approval- the standard 3.5Ed setup in our group is PHB + first 4 Completes only; no Psionics, no Dragon, no campaign sourcebooks, no MIC, no Spell Compendium, no ToB, etc. Compared to the body of what WotC actually published, that's pretty tight.

While our gaming group is large (12 at its peak), the most we've had active in any one campaign was 8 (5 is more typical). Even so, 5-6 at the table on game night is typical- everyone is a working adult, we're geographically scattered over 4 counties, and all but 3 of us are married with kids.

Our die-rolled PCs have their share of single digit stats. In some campaigns- not the RttToEE- the stats were rolled in order. In RttToEE, my ultra-multiclassed PC's stats averaged out to 13 each at 1st level. Hardly über.

And the DM started the RttToEE in 3Ed, then when a particular player joined, the entire group switched to 3.5Ed...and while we did that, he redid the remaining encounters with 3.5Ed critters.

Nope, something else is going on. And it's pretty clear what's going on - the DM is enabling it by soft balling encounters and allowing high powered PC's (which is really the same thing).

You're dead wrong.

When I retired my 10th level Diviner/Ftr/Rgr/SpSwd from the RttToEE campaign, his best magic item was a +2 Flaming Whip. His next best was a plain vanilla +2 Shortsword, which he dual wielded with the whip. Hardly high-powered.

The rest of the party included a single classed wizard, a single classed fighter, a Ftr with 2 clc levels, a rogue with 1 Sorc level, a Barb with a few Druid levels, and a monk. At 2 different points in the game, we had a guy play a straight Favored Soul for about 4 sessions, and after he left, another guy played a Druid for about 4 sessions.

And as stated before, not everyone shows up every session. Because of scheduling issues, we play if 5 show. Whatever 5 we get.

And we still had to fight the doomspeakers, demonic dinosaurs, big-ass elementals and so forth.

 

[pemerton]

This "one year to go from level 1 to 20" is kind of staggering to me. There's nothing at all wrong with that approach, but it's so foreign to my group. When my players went from 2-22, it took them about 68 years in-game (and about 1,700 hours of real-life play-time).

Well, it depends pretty heavily on both mechanical aspects of the game (how does time factor into resource recovery? PC advancement? etc) and on the scenarios played.

In my own game, the PCs have:

*rescued some forsest homseteaders from marauding goblins;

*cleared the forest of 3 small-ish goblin lairs;

*tracked the hobgolbin leaders of the goblins back to a ruined minotaur city, fought and defeated some of those leaders;

*rescued prisoners and refugees and taken them back to a friendly city;

*learned that some other prisoners have been sold to gnolls;

*tracked down those gnolls in a ruined minotaur temple and rescued one of the prisoners from those gnolls (the other was sacrificed in a demonic ritual);

*travelled to the northernmost friendly city still troubled by the hobgoblin armies;

* defeated various cultists who were trying to instigate civil unrest in that city;

*defeaetd a wizard advisor to the ruler of that city, who was actually a traitor directing the goblins and hobgoblins;

*defeated the fiance of that wizard, also the niece of the city's ruler, who was secretly a necromancer.​

Side-treckish stuff done along the way includes exploring some haunted minotaur tombs, freeing an island from a Shadowfell curse, and meeting, helping and then fighting with some witches who were refugees from the Feywild.

As far as the actual stuff is concerned, I don't think there's anything odd about a dwarven warrior who's done all this stuff being a paragon warpriest of Moradin, respected by all right-minded people that he deals with - those are some heroic deeds that have been done! And likewise for the other PCs. There paragon paths are quite organic out of events. It's just that there has been almost no downtime at all for these heroes.

It's not part of our "plan" for the campaign either that this stuff happen quickly (nor that it happen slowly). But most of it is stuff that the PCs have no reason to hesitate or delay about doing - every day's delay is potentially more lives lost to marauding armies - and the mechanics of the system don't mandate lengthy rest periods. (I should add - this is not a facet of 4e. In Rolemaster or AD&D, magical healing would take the place of extended rests, and would add no more than a day here and there to the time required for these adventures.)

Anyway, that's quite a few encounters, and the XP rules are what they are. The levelling is not too fast - 5 levels per year when playing every 2 to 3 weeks is about right (ie 3 to 4 sessions per level). And as I stated upthread, cognitive dissonance between real time and game time means that verisimilitude is threatened only when one of the players (and it is always one particular player) draws attention to how little time is passing in the gameworld.

1700 hours of playtime, for me, would be 400 or more sessions, or more than 20 years play at my current rate. I don't want my campaign to last that long. My first Rolemaster campaign lasted for about 8 years, and was played weekly, and so would have had about that many hours of playtime. It finished when levels were somewhere in the low-to-mid 20s (I can't remember now), but level gain had slowed to a crawl after the first four years. One of many features of that game that I would not want to repeat. Even in that game, though, only 5 or so years passed ingame, and that entirely for mechanical reasons: Rolemaster can have long healing times even when magical healing is used; and Rolemaster has ritual mechanics which can take up days and days of casting time.

 

[ferratus]

This "one year to go from level 1 to 20" is kind of staggering to me. There's nothing at all wrong with that approach, but it's so foreign to my group. When my players went from 2-22, it took them about 68 years in-game (and about 1,700 hours of real-life play-time).

With the amount of time per month I play D&D, I'd have to have to play 14 years to get 1,700 hours. I can't imagine playing a single campaign for that long. I can't imagine having the same circle of friends for that long.

I'd still like get to level 20 once and awhile though.