D&D General D&D without Resource Management

[ezo]

Lanefan is fighting 10 people at once. His arms flash out, blasting each one of us away. Will he tire? Will he weaken? How many HD does he have left?! Who can say. Fight on, Lanefan. Fight on.

Well, he took a wild swing at me but it was easily avoided.

It was just the opposite for me when I learned about and later participated in backing it's Kickstarter about 2 years ago.

I've looked at it and didn't find it appealing, but I know many here like it so that's good for them.

 

[jgsugden]

Unless you're both a) in a dungeon-crawl environment and b) have set things up such that the PCs can't hide anywhere and rest, 6-8 (meaningful) encounters per adventuring day can pretty much only happen if you throw believability out the window.

Not all of us are willing to do that.

You do not know what other DMs do, and you are mistaken when you say it can only be done in those two ways. Many of us, as DMs, regularly run 6 to 8 encounters per day - with 1 to 3 short rests. We do it in dungeons, but we also do it on other environments, and we do it in compelling storylines that are not a detriment to the game and absolutely do not throw believability out the window.

For example, I recently ran a couple sessions for a 9th level party I DM occasionally (this is the 'backup game' when another DM is not available). This storyline evolved out of choices the PCs had previously made - and was something they could have anticipated, but did not put resources into investigating prior to this time. There was no expectation they'd be prepared for it, but I was anticipating it as a possibility.

It began with the PCs within 'their' town when there was an attack. The PCs were targeted as a way to keep them from getting involved in the 'main action' through a combat that was not aimed at killing the PCs, but was instead aimed at putting them in situations that required them to spend time and resources to resolve (Encounter 1). In this encounter, they learned who was attacking, and had to deal with the expendable forces of the enemy (summons, animates, and other easily replaced tools). If they'd realized it was a distraction, they could have changed the course of the sessions - but that would have been hard and they did not. The point of this encounter was to engage the PCs and get them to potentially realize something strange was going on - not to threaten their lives.

They [heard] / [heard of] more combat 'nearby' and realized there was something larger going on. They went to the other section of the city where they heard fighting and fought off the bad guys guarding the entrance outside a foil's manor house (encounter 2), then went in and fought the bad guys that were still in the house (encounter 3). These encounters used the defenses of the manor house as both interesting terrain and environment features for the combat, and gave the PCs insight into elements of the storyline (including confirming things about the foil / manor house owner that they'd long suspected). Again, here, the PCs felt like heroes because the challenges before them here were not threats to their lives - but threatened to derail their progress in figuring out what was going on in time. They managed to get to the foil / manor house owner before he was captured/kiiled. However, the bad guy leader did escape with the "child" of the manor house owner and a treasure. He could have been stopped there had the PCs been more expedient.

After the combat they found the owner of the home who 'explained the situation' and hired/strongarmed them to recover both 'his child', and his treasure. The bad guys were going to use his treasure in a ritual that night (in about 5 hours), and the child was being held as a hostage (he said) - if anyone tried to recover the treasure, the kid would be slain (was the claim). The manor owner didn't want 'his kid' killed, but was more invested in stopping the ritual (great guy). The PCs had opportunities to uncover information that would reveal that their foil - the manor house owner - was going to do the ritual himself, and was going to sacrifice 'his kid' to do it. This is something I'd call a social encounter because they could have used up resources to get the most out of it. However, I recognize most DMs would not count this as an encounter. They then took to their method of travel which allowed them to short rest while traveling (essentially a magical hover wagon).

Knowing who was behind the attack, the PCs knew where to go to engage them. Along the way there was one random encounter (encounter 4). It took place because the dice said it should, but I selected the monster to be one that the PCs had to be careful in fighting because if could cause them delays if they did not avoid the attacks of the creature. It was a homebrew creature that isolates creatures by tossing them forward in time so that it can deal with threats one on one. While a random encounter, I maneuver the situation to make it more meaningful given the situation.

A couple hours after the fight at the tower, the group approached their goal. They used Augury to confirm they were in the right place. They then started to sneak in and, of course, blasted the guards with a Thunderwave to knock them off a bridge (thank you, BG3 [Enemy deaths by falling are up 300% since BG3 was prereleased] - Encounter 5). While an easy encounter in terms of combat difficulty, it was designed so that if the PCs allowed an alarm to be raised, it made the rest of the adventure harder - which is a common thread in easy encounters in my game. Your risks in these encounters are not to the lives of your PCs - they are risks that storyline can go in a bad direction. They killed the weak enemies, but raised the alarm themselves with the booming spell.

This resulted in two encounters worth of enemies combining (turning two hard encounters into one pretty deadly one) (Encounter 6+) and the BBEG getting into his most defensible location. The PCs took big hits in this battle, but survived. They searched the base and discovered the BBEG was locked in what appeared to be a vault. Augury 'confirmed' for them that they'd face their foes if they broke in, and the PCs knew the BBEG wasn't going to abandon the location because he needed it for the ritual (they needed a place of power and this was one of few potential sites nearby). Some PCs short rested while others searched for 'other' ways into the vault. They ended up using some additional resources here to deal with traps in order to loot the place when they uncovered treasures during the search - and more people short rested to attune to new goodies.

They then disabled some of the traps on the vault and managed to get the vault open. They discovered the ritual chamber within it and were attacked. The BBEG had time to prepare end engaged the PCs using the defensive capabilities built into the chamber, as well as his own considerable power. (Encounter 7+). This was a challenge for the PCs because the leader of the lands needed the BBEG's support, and had forbidden the PCs from 'causing mischief'. While they thought the King would not punish them for stepping in to stop the ritual, they did not know for certain. As a middle ground, they decided to stop, but not kill, the BBEG. Tough battle. PCs pull it out and begin a short rest.

Then, the manor house owner and his 'army' showed up and demanded the treasure and his kid back immediately. He wanted to do the ritual himself. The PCs could fight the army (not really a great option), stall, sneak out with the treasure and kid, or do a variety of things. The sorcerer pulled it out and banished the manor lord - who the group knew to be a fey in disguise - and sent him back to the Feywild while the Warlock, who put a lot of resources into trickery, 'replaced' the Manor Lord with an illusion. That told the army to withdraw. By the time the Manor Lord traveled back and recovered his army, the time for the ritual was past. You can decide whether this was also an encounter.

To me, this not "a dungeon", and it is not forced/contrived. It has time pressure to keep the PCs engaged without taking a long rest (which is very common in most fictional conflict ... almost every comic book has a time pressure element that has the heroes racing to stop something). There were four locations (some with multiple sub-locations where encounters could/did take place), and the PCs could have worked through it in a variety of ways. For example, they might have realized they were facing a distraction in encounter one and stopped the theft before the treasure was lost. Then the encounter should have kept them in town where they had to deal with the foil's attempt to complete the ritual. Under that plan, there would have been the battles in tow, with the BBEG involved in the third, and then conflict with the BBEG in his place where he would have done the ritual (most likely).

This is just one example. I have plenty of others I could pull out ... but you should see the point. The players had plenty of options on how to proceed within the storyline (or just letting the ritual happen / the mystery going unsolved). They had real stakes. I used a mix of easy through deadly encounters to challenge them in different ways before they had time to long rest.

I think this is right in line with the DMG guidance and it worked well. Why do I say that? Players were engaged in the dynamics of the story and felt the time pressure. Players had fun trying to figure out the best way to resolve the situation given the constraints. There were multiple paths to move forward based upon how the PCs 'attacked' the issue. The PCs succeeded in the adventure, but could have failed in several ways that they overcame. All that ads up to working well in my book.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's the most fun they think they could have, else they'd be doing something different.

Again: no it is not. It is the most direct path to the goal they were told to value. That is not the same as having fun. That is the whole point here. There is a VAST difference between doing something you think has value, and doing things you find fun.

Except every game would be a tie; as even if I'm playing black there's no way white can take a piece on the first move, thus the other player won't have captured any pieces either.

Sure. Point being: no one would be having fun, and yet they would be pursuing victory, because victory is the thing they have been told is valuable. Because, again, there is a difference between "this thing is what you should care about" and "this thing is what is fun to do."

Ah, there's the disconnect: to me "cross the finish line" is the enjoyable payoff (particularly if you're the first to do so!) for all the grunt not-fun stuff you had to do to get there. Back in school I used to love winning races (not that I won very many) but I hated all the running I had to do in order to get those wins.

Then you should recognize that most people do not feel that way. There is a reason we have the old saying, "life is a journey, not a destination." Winning is a flash-in-the-pan moment. A journey is a whole experience.

Also, a puzzle is still a game.

No it is not. A puzzle, by definition, has a single solution. A game, by definition, does not. It may have a single win state, but that is not the same thing. Further, with a game, there must be some kind of failure state. The only possible failure state with a puzzle is that the participant chooses not to continue trying to solve it--but they could attempt to resume it again at any time, which rather weakens the claim that that is a "failure state."

Same is true of D&D: the 5-MWD doesn't optimize the fun out of the game, it (potentially) brings more fun into it.

Except I am explicitly telling you that it does not do that.

To use your "winning races" example, imagine if you had a teleporter which could instantly teleport you to the finish line of every race you participate in. Each time you use it, however, you must fill out a complicated form, in triplicate, by hand, which gets regular small updates so you can't just memorize how to fill it out.

That is what the 5MWD does. It creates bureaucracy, and deletes any actual challenge or excitement in the doing. You win the races, consistently, every time, but that and some paperwork are all you do.

Do you not think that such victories would lose their savor after the third or fourth "welp, guess I gotta file my taxes now that I insta-won that race..." event?

Rewarding in-character risk is what individual xp is for: those who take the risks tend to (ideally) level up faster than those who do not, even within the same party. That people are moving away from individual xp (and xp in general) as a reward mechanism ain't my problem.

I genuinely do not understand what that has to do with anything. Especially since taking individual risk is what results in dead characters dramatically more often. The rewards are not commensurate to the cost of failure, because the cost is absolute, while the rewards must always be partial at best--if there are even rewards at all.

Humans are, on average, highly risk-averse. The 5MWD is the path to surer, more reliable rewards. D&D making loss a dramatic all-or-nothing affair ensures that that tendency pushes players toward the path of maximum safety every time.

Except for many - as you yourself point out just above - human nature says that pushing the win button very likely IS the enjoyable experience. And trying to legislate against human nature doesn't often end very well.

Again, no it is not. Because you keep conflating "enjoyable" with "valued." Something can be valued while being genuinely hated. I value the medicine which helps me sleep or addresses my occasional aches and pains, but I do not in the slightest enjoy its use. I value the benefits of socialization, despite finding it incredibly draining to hang out with more than 3-4 people at a time, doubly so if it's 5+ people that I don't really know.

Games try to make it so that, in order to reach the thing-that-is-valuable, players must do a task-that-is-fun. But if players can get the thing-that-is-valuable with less risk by doing a task that is boring, tedious, or even actively unpleasant, many will do so. Hence, a good game designer must tailor both the things-that-are-valuable in their games, and the tasks-that-are-fun (or at least meant to be fun), so that the genuinely maximally effective path to the former IS the latter. The players thus do the task which is enjoyable in and of itself, in addition to seeking the valuable end, because it doesn't matter which one you prioritize, you'll pick the same path. To seek the valuable end is to do the task which is enjoyable in and of itself; to do the task that is enjoyable in and of itself is to seek the valuable end.

As long as you hold onto this simply mistaken belief that "get the valuable thing" is always fun, you will continue to reach this incorrect conclusion. Getting valuable things is something a person can desire to do, without that desired thing being fun--indeed, it can even be the absolute antithesis of fun, it can be exhausting and depressing! But if the players believe it is valuable enough, they will still seek it despite hating every moment of doing so.

That's not fun. That's not even a chore. That's self-flagellation.

That you can find fun purely in the victory, without really caring about the race that precedes it, does not reflect on the vast majority of human beings. Most humans want to enjoy both the process and the result. Or, if you prefer? Most humans aren't Spike, as MTG would put it. They're Timmy or Johnny, or some mixture of two or all three. Spike only cares about winning, and will only have fun if she wins. Timmy doesn't care about winning per se (though he won't say no to it if it happens to come along)--instead, he wants a flashy game, a dramatic game, a game where there are twists and turns and shocking reversals before a satisfying finish; he wants an emotionally satisfying game. Johnny, by comparison, wants an intellectually satisfying game: clever ploys, artful connection of disparate things, strategic thinking that leads to an ineluctable conclusion. Both Timmy and Johnny can lose ten out of ten games and still have fun--tons of fun--so long as the path was worth walking. Only Spike would reject this. And there are plenty of Spikes in the world! But they're nowhere near the majority. Not even a plurality.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Level Up never appealed to me, personally. In general I would prefer a lower power-level and lower complexity game, so adding even more things characters can do and keeping casters as powerful as ever isn't my thing.



Comparitively to longbows, certainly, but they DO require regular use and practice to remain proficient. Although the concept is easy enough, you still have to be shown how to use it. They are as not light or easy to work as many people think.

Like modern handguns, you still need regular practice, etc. With all the time and dedication required to study magic in most fantasy IME a wizard would have little time to train and keep proficient in a crossbow.

By that definition, magic-users shouldn't have proficiency in any weapons. How are they maintaining training in their dagger, staff and dart skills?

 

[ezo]

By that definition, magic-users shouldn't have proficiency in any weapons. How are they maintaining training in their dagger, staff and dart skills?

Because, as written for 2E, daggers and staffs are commonly used in magic rituals, etc. Frankly, that is all they should use IMO.

 

[Corinnguard]

Blasting? I thought he was eloquently using a pair of swords while dancing across the battlefield, dodging blows from his opponents while landing his own with biting repartee.

I just described him being a Fighter (Duelist) in Level Up.

 

[Lanefan]

Lanefan is fighting 10 people at once. His arms flash out, blasting each one of us away. Will he tire? Will he weaken? How many HD does he have left?! Who can say. Fight on, Lanefan. Fight on.

Well, Lanefan the character is a Fighter, so this fits I suppose.

 

[Lanefan]

Many of us, as DMs, regularly run 6 to 8 encounters per day - with 1 to 3 short rests. We do it in dungeons, but we also do it on other environments, and we do it in compelling storylines that are not a detriment to the game and absolutely do not throw believability out the window.

For example, I recently ran a couple sessions for a 9th level party I DM occasionally (this is the 'backup game' when another DM is not available). This storyline evolved out of choices the PCs had previously made - and was something they could have anticipated, but did not put resources into investigating prior to this time. There was no expectation they'd be prepared for it, but I was anticipating it as a possibility.

[snip write-up of what sounds like a fun sequence of events]

This is just one example. I have plenty of others I could pull out ... but you should see the point. The players had plenty of options on how to proceed within the storyline (or just letting the ritual happen / the mystery going unsolved). They had real stakes. I used a mix of easy through deadly encounters to challenge them in different ways before they had time to long rest.

I think this is right in line with the DMG guidance and it worked well. Why do I say that? Players were engaged in the dynamics of the story and felt the time pressure. Players had fun trying to figure out the best way to resolve the situation given the constraints. There were multiple paths to move forward based upon how the PCs 'attacked' the issue. The PCs succeeded in the adventure, but could have failed in several ways that they overcame. All that ads up to working well in my book.

And that's all great...but how can/do you sustain that the next day, and the next, etc.?

Having one day work out like that is all well and good. The trick is to find a way to sustain that pressure over a string of consecutive days to - one hopes - slowly wear them down. Easy enough in a dungeon-crawl situation provided the PCs at least attempt to keep moving into new areas, not so easy in a city or travel or shipboard situation without straining credulity beyond reason (many action movies are guilty of the same thing).

 

[Lanefan]

Again: no it is not. It is the most direct path to the goal they were told to value. That is not the same as having fun. That is the whole point here. There is a VAST difference between doing something you think has value, and doing things you find fun.

Winning is one and the same: it has value, and it's fun.

Then you should recognize that most people do not feel that way.

I don't recognize that, because I don't think that most people do feel that way.

There is a reason we have the old saying, "life is a journey, not a destination." Winning is a flash-in-the-pan moment. A journey is a whole experience.

This entirely depends on why the journey is being made, and we could jump off from here into all sorts of philosophical meanderings that don't interest me all that much. In the case of D&D, while the journey can sometimes be enjoyable in itself the real reason for doing it is and remains the payoff at the end.

No it is not. A puzzle, by definition, has a single solution. A game, by definition, does not. It may have a single win state, but that is not the same thing. Further, with a game, there must be some kind of failure state. The only possible failure state with a puzzle is that the participant chooses not to continue trying to solve it--but they could attempt to resume it again at any time, which rather weakens the claim that that is a "failure state."

The failure states in a puzzle come either a) on the realization that the puzzle is outright beyond the solver's ability to solve, or b) on the realization that the puzzle itself is somehow incomplete (e.g. a missing piece in a jigsaw, or insufficient information in a logic problem, etc.).

Except I am explicitly telling you that it does not do that.

To use your "winning races" example, imagine if you had a teleporter which could instantly teleport you to the finish line of every race you participate in. Each time you use it, however, you must fill out a complicated form, in triplicate, by hand, which gets regular small updates so you can't just memorize how to fill it out.

That is what the 5MWD does. It creates bureaucracy, and deletes any actual challenge or excitement in the doing. You win the races, consistently, every time, but that and some paperwork are all you do.

This analogy falls apart if-when one eschews cheating. Using a teleporter (or a bicycle) to win a running race is clearly cheating, while using the 5-MWD as a means of succeeding in D&D play is fully within the rules.

A better analogy might be one where in a long-distance running race I'm wearing different shoes from everyone else, shoes that give me a bit more bounce in my step thus making me run a bit faster while reducing fatigue in my legs. There's no rules against it, I still have to run the distance, yet it gives me a better chance of winning.

I genuinely do not understand what that has to do with anything. Especially since taking individual risk is what results in dead characters dramatically more often. The rewards are not commensurate to the cost of failure, because the cost is absolute, while the rewards must always be partial at best--if there are even rewards at all.

Humans are, on average, highly risk-averse. The 5MWD is the path to surer, more reliable rewards. D&D making loss a dramatic all-or-nothing affair ensures that that tendency pushes players toward the path of maximum safety every time.

And as that sense of self-preservation in all likelihood very closely reflects the thinking of the characters in the fiction and is thus what those characters would reasonably try to do, I can't possibly argue against it.

That's where having a game-state reward for individual risk-taking comes in: it provides a counter-incentive to that self-preservation mantra and (hopefully) a choice whether to go high-risk high-reward or low-risk low-reward.

Again, no it is not. Because you keep conflating "enjoyable" with "valued." Something can be valued while being genuinely hated. I value the medicine which helps me sleep or addresses my occasional aches and pains, but I do not in the slightest enjoy its use. I value the benefits of socialization, despite finding it incredibly draining to hang out with more than 3-4 people at a time, doubly so if it's 5+ people that I don't really know.

I conflate enjoyable with valued because to me they're pretty much the same thing: the value is the enjoyment, even if that enjoyment might be slightly delayed. In D&D, that means some things you might see as tedious (e.g. careful resource management) are enjoyable due to the enjoyment of the later payoff.

Same is true of "grinding" in a video game - the enjoyment comes from the later payoff.

Games try to make it so that, in order to reach the thing-that-is-valuable, players must do a task-that-is-fun. But if players can get the thing-that-is-valuable with less risk by doing a task that is boring, tedious, or even actively unpleasant, many will do so. Hence, a good game designer must tailor both the things-that-are-valuable in their games, and the tasks-that-are-fun (or at least meant to be fun), so that the genuinely maximally effective path to the former IS the latter.

Except - and D&D is a good example - you're inevitably going to hit situations where "fun tasks" and "valuable things" are diametrically opposed; and then what do you do? For example, tracking resources might not be a fun task but without having put in that work the end payoff isn't nearly as valuable when it arrives.

WotC-era D&D has, I think, largely gone the route of skipping over or negating the task side while promoting the valuable-things side.

That you can find fun purely in the victory, without really caring about the race that precedes it, does not reflect on the vast majority of human beings.

I disagree with this claim. When [I forget which sports coach it was] said "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing", he wasn't speaking in a vacuum and was, I think, speaking for the majority when it comes to things like sports and games...of which D&D is one.

Most humans want to enjoy both the process and the result. Or, if you prefer? Most humans aren't Spike, as MTG would put it. They're Timmy or Johnny, or some mixture of two or all three. Spike only cares about winning, and will only have fun if she wins. Timmy doesn't care about winning per se (though he won't say no to it if it happens to come along)--instead, he wants a flashy game, a dramatic game, a game where there are twists and turns and shocking reversals before a satisfying finish; he wants an emotionally satisfying game. Johnny, by comparison, wants an intellectually satisfying game: clever ploys, artful connection of disparate things, strategic thinking that leads to an ineluctable conclusion. Both Timmy and Johnny can lose ten out of ten games and still have fun--tons of fun--so long as the path was worth walking. Only Spike would reject this. And there are plenty of Spikes in the world! But they're nowhere near the majority. Not even a plurality.

When I played M:tG I was, by these definitions, a failed Timmy/Johnny combo (all my brilliant ideas only worked in my head, crashing and burning as soon as they saw real play); and was never anywhere near good enough to be Spike.

What I disagree with is the implied assertion that D&D-Spike optimizes all the fun out of the game - and I say this as, myself, very much a non-optimizer when it comes to things like "character builds". Further, the characters having and using a sense of self-preservation in the fiction in no way falls under "optimizing the fun out of the game", and I say that as a long time player-side risk-taker who has sacrificed many a character on the altar of "in for a penny, in for a pound".

 

[James Gasik]

That has been a long debate. The premise of D&D is, at it's core, pretending to be people who take extreme risks in order to gain incredible rewards.

The rules system itself rewards specialization.

So one would assume that it makes just as much sense for the characters to optimize as their players in order to succeed.

But then you have people who sniff and say "ugh, powergaming munchkins" with as much derision as possible if you actually follow this line of logic to it's conclusion, lol.

----

As for resource attrition itself, I've noticed something in playing 5e. When the resources run low, the game pretty much grinds to a halt, whether you've had 2 encounters or 5. The party looks beat up, the Cleric is low on spells, and even with a short rest, the group consensus is "maybe one more encounter".

So the party looks for ways to rest/retreat, and if none are had, characters start dying.

A lot of people wonder why are they pushing themselves to this extreme in the first place? In the game I'm currently playing, we're slowly clearing out a mega-dungeon. The party has mentioned wanting to tackle side objectives, or head to a major city in the hopes of converting our loot into magic items (lol).

I keep resisting because, to my mind, leaving the dangerous individuals who haunt the dungeon alone will only lead to disaster- note that the DM nor the NPC's have ever mentioned we're on a clock, it just makes logical sense to me in game. And that's the only reason why we keep going back, and as we get deeper in, our ability to tackle encounters starts dropping. The past few sessions, we've had large setpiece battles that eat up a lot of time and resources (primarily because our damage dealers are not optimized) and we had two battles back to back (one with fiends and the other with derro) where I cast very few spells due to magic resistant foes, and by the end of it, even though my tank was still pretty full, everyone else was like "we need a long rest".

So I started talking to the DM (we played 4e together) and I was like "what happened? That Derro encounter was something we used to do back in the day, and be good for three to four more!".

And our consensus is, 5e has two issues. One, it's not well suited for large setpiece battles. It basically wants you to ration out your resources over the course of a half dozen or so encounters, few of which are particularly difficult, somehow cramming a couple of 1 hour naps in there, which isn't very interesting, and somewhat verisimilitude warping to somehow take a siesta in the middle of enemy territory.

Two, the whole reason D&D was a resource intensive game was, back in the day, the farther you could go into a dungeon or wherever, the better the rewards (and you also had to worry about weaker foes waiting for you to come out so they could ambush you)! You got better loot and more xp as you fought more dangerous foes.

But that's not really the case in 5e. You get the same xp per adventuring day fighting a few tough battles vs. a lot of easy ones. The gold and treasure you gain isn't a primary part of the game loop like it was back in AD&D. The only reason you have to push yourselves has to be supplied, usually by the threat of "things will get worse if you don't".

It's not like the old days where you hear about some long lost crypt in the middle of nowhere that's minding it's own business, and simply exists for you to explore it at your leisure, lol.

5e has brought back the need for managing resources over long spans of adventuring time, but took away a big part of the reason why this was necessary to do so.