Five-Minute Workday Article

[Campbell]

In addition, if your opponent is just "the environment," it is automagically always dangerous. Can't rest in the middle of a raging river, and if you retreat, it is still there in the morning!



I'm not so sure about that. I'm eager to dialogue with someone who has actually had this problem in 5e and for whom the Caves of Chaos adventure advice isn't relevant to their playstyle, but I haven't been able to find such an individual.

I'd even settle for someone who has had this problem in previous "e's," and talking about what solutions may or may not work for them and why, but even these folks are kind of tough to find. Not impossible -- it does happen -- but certainly rarer than I'd expect.

It's not really that strong of an issue in lower level play largely because characters do not yet have means to circumvent their limitations. Additionally there is not much of a gap between using first and second level spells and at will options in all editions of the game. My experience has always been that the incentive to rest starts outweighing the incentive to push on around 5th level. Since I'm not interested in using D&D for lower powered games (better games for that ie. Modern Runequest) its a problem for me. Maybe 5e will do better here, but I think spells like rope trick and instant teleportation to variable far off locations are too deeply ingrained into in the D&D culture.

 

[MarkB]

Maybe 5e will do better here, but I think spells like rope trick and instant teleportation to variable far off locations are too deeply ingrained into in the D&D culture.

Indeed - and you can't entirely remove such options, because the party still needs to rest and/or retreat at some point, unless you build all your dungeons in compact chunks that don't exceed the recommended daily dose of combat rounds.

If the game is designed around the party having enough resources to face five moderately-challenging encounters between rests, then the moment you build a dungeon which includes more than half a dozen encounters between the entrance and the McGuffin, you've provided an environment in which the party are going to have to work out some way to rest before they're finished, even if they're the most resource-conscious group ever. And at that point, they'll be facing the pitfalls of wandering monsters and living dungeon ecologies the same as any 15MWD group.

 

[Tony Vargas]

On the one hand, I respect that 5e as a whole is moving back towards DM empowerment. The designers have made it clear that they are giving more direct control back to the DM, and that the system will not be as rules based as it has been in the past. In other words, there is a lot of "fuzzy" areas that will need DM action instead of direct rules.

I'm not sure I share your respect for sloppy design that make unnecessary work for the DM.

That said, I don't know if Dnd has ever experimented with mechanics to curb the desire to rest.

Milestones, action points, item daily limits, and items with greater powers that kick in after milestones were all tried in 4e.

Old-school, random 'wandering monster' tables were pretty common. Though I'm not sure if that counts as a 'mechanic,' exactly.

Now at the beginning of playtest seems an excellent time to try. Why not throw us a few ideas, let us give them a shot, see what comes of it.

You'd think so. If 'make the game better' is one of the goals of the playtest.

 

[HoolMarshes Dweller]

This is pretty dismissive considering threads full of people discussing their experiences with the problem. Don't make the mistake of assuming your experiences are universal. Where do you think all these "anecdotes" come from - are they fabricated?

To be honest, yes, I do think a fair number of them are nothing more than someone glomming onto another's experience. As I mentioned, who actually just sits there and goes "well Ragnar, guess you're out of spells, let's go watch a movie"?

I don't follow - if that's a fine adventure, then what's the problem with not having more to it? This basic point is that if someone's paying X dollars for a game, it should not contain too much "just deal with it yourself" in the rules.

There's no problem with not having more to it, but then again to suggest that it's the designer's responsibility to address this in the mechanics rather than the supplement/module design, is in my opinion exactly what creates fractures in the gamer base. In this example, the 5- or 15-minute "workday" as I have always seen it is a result of a lack of planned (or even ad hoc) content, options, storyline and so on. Simply put, the solution doesn't require a mechanic or rule to address it as the solution already exists.

It's not "just deal with it yourself" rather it's "you're encouraged to build this world around it, expect the unexpected from your players". If I am a new DM with little time on my hands to develop beyond "a dark hole in the ground", then it would stand to reason that I would be the perfect customer for D&D modules. And it is there that I say the writer of said module/supplement puts in side adventures, background, additional info/things for the players to do. To be clear, I'm not advocating adding rules or mechanics in modules, just adding material for the DM to work with in the module which is the very reason the DM purchased the module in the first place. A fine way to spend one's dollar.

If I am a DM with time enough to create the "hole in the ground", fill it with monsters, treasures, etc. it's not unreasonable to suggest that the same DM design potential side adventures, events, NPCs, etc. to support this. That's exactly what I was referring to.

 

[Campbell]

Indeed - and you can't entirely remove such options, because the party still needs to rest and/or retreat at some point, unless you build all your dungeons in compact chunks that don't exceed the recommended daily dose of combat rounds.

If the game is designed around the party having enough resources to face five moderately-challenging encounters between rests, then the moment you build a dungeon which includes more than half a dozen encounters between the entrance and the McGuffin, you've provided an environment in which the party are going to have to work out some way to rest before they're finished, even if they're the most resource-conscious group ever. And at that point, they'll be facing the pitfalls of wandering monsters and living dungeon ecologies the same as any 15MWD group.

I don't think they're necessary for high level dungeon crawling. I used to run and play in 3e games where they weren't a feature do to player class choices. Of course my games were never particularly focused on the crawl aspect of the game. Nevertheless, you do exactly what low level D&D characters do - set up rest shifts, have the non-spellcasters keep watch, retreat the old fashioned way, etc. As a POG I never experienced it, but some soldiers stay past the wire for weeks at a time.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

A lot of adventures do if you really look at them. Stop the cultists...before they open the portal of ultimate evil. Explore this ruin...before it floods completely.

True. I said about half of them have time limits. The other half don't. I don't want to be restricted to the ones that do.

Even when I run the ones that HAVE time limits...I often hate when the PCs go past them. It just isn't fun to have to change the plans for my next adventure because the PCs decided that resting was more important than the objective.

I once played in a game where the DM ran one adventure where we had to save the princess from some people attacking the castle. It was obvious that we were delaying much longer than he expected. The princess should have died, given how long we took to get there....but, the DM had planned for the next adventure to be us escaping the castle with the princess, and as the last surviving member of the royal family, using her as a plot device ot raise an army and take back the kingdom.

So, it didn't matter how long we took, because the time limit was artificial. Actually having the time limit matter would have ruined all the DMs hard work(and trust me, this DM wrote 30 or 40 pages of notes on stuff that was going to happen).

When I run a game where the time limit is "Stop cultists from summoning the most powerful god in existence who will wipe out all life on the planet", I don't ever plan on actually implementing the time limit...it's just there to try to give some urgency to the adventure. When will they successfully summon their god? About 5 minutes after the PCs stop them from doing so.

Is is possible to keep running this game after the god wipes out the planet? Sure, you can come up with an excuse as to why he can't do it right away and can be reimprisoned before he regains his strength or shield one city from destruction and run a campaign about stopping him. But, I didn't really want to run either of those campaigns. I wanted to run the dungeon crawl where the PCs attempt to stop the cultists. So, I'll make sure I DON'T have to run those other campaigns by never implementing that time limit.

Players figure this out pretty quickly. When I ran that campaign against the cultists, they'd rest after nearly every encounter and I'd have to say, out of character, "You guys do remember that these cultists ARE trying to summon a god who will destroy the world, right? So, you guys are going to risk it by resting while you still have hitpoints left?"

And they'd say "Well, we don't know how long this ritual could take, right? It could be tomorrow, it could be next year depending on how far along they are in the ritual and whether they have all of the resources required. So, we're out of spells, we may have hitpoints left, but it's possible someone might die next encounter if we have to use only our 1st and 2nd level spells...so, we're just going to have to risk it." (because "only having 1st and 2nd level spells is the same as being "out of spells" in their mind)

Sometimes, you can win narratively, evn if you fail in your objective. Indiana Jones did not keep the Nazis from getting possession of the Ark of the Covenant, but he "won" because the Ark didn't behave the way the Nazis thought it would.

Also true, but it feels lackluster to have the PCs win despite failing. Plus, it just trains them that time limits don't exist. After all, if they can fail to get the Ark, but have the Ark kill all the Nazis...well, guess they didn't need to stop the Nazis from getting it in the first place.

But, see above why actually implementing time limits is often just as bad. It always comes down to the fact that time limits solve nothing.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

When I run a game where the time limit is "Stop cultists from summoning the most powerful god in existence who will wipe out all life on the planet", I don't ever plan on actually implementing the time limit...it's just there to try to give some urgency to the adventure. When will they successfully summon their god? About 5 minutes after the PCs stop them from doing so.

Is is possible to keep running this game after the god wipes out the planet? Sure, you can come up with an excuse as to why he can't do it right away and can be reimprisoned before he regains his strength or shield one city from destruction and run a campaign about stopping him. But, I didn't really want to run either of those campaigns. I wanted to run the dungeon crawl where the PCs attempt to stop the cultists. So, I'll make sure I DON'T have to run those other campaigns by never implementing that time limit.

I ran a variant campaign along those lines that got around that problem. The cultists in question had been in the process of completing their ritual for a couple of hundred years, after they had recovered from whipping they took 6 or 7 centuries before that. They were on schedule to "succeed" something in the next few decades, if no one interfered, but other people (i.e. NPCs) were working to help or hinder, and had been from the very beginning. And the key bit was that however far they got was going to be "partial success" or "partial failure," depending upon how you looked at it.

At the start of the game the players or characters knew none of this, other than that the world had experienced massive cataclysms for some reason, once or twice every thousand years. So when they first got an inkling of what was going on, they felt some urgency but not a lot. The deeper in they got, the more urgency they felt--but knew that they could still fail. If there was a TPK, the next party would be even more urgent (since the players would know), but now things are that much worse. The longer it goes, the worse it is going to be, and the bigger hole for the next generations of heroes to dig out of (AKA - their next characters ).

The party mostly succeeded by the way, with only about a quarter of the planet devastated. The next campaign was picking up the pieces in that area. It started off that next campaign with a feeling of poignant success--glad they had kept the rest of the world from dealing with what the current spot was experiencing.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I once played in a game where the DM ran one adventure where we had to save the princess from some people attacking the castle. It was obvious that we were delaying much longer than he expected. The princess should have died, given how long we took to get there....but, the DM had planned for the next adventure to be us escaping the castle with the princess, and as the last surviving member of the royal family, using her as a plot device ot raise an army and take back the kingdom.

So, it didn't matter how long we took, because the time limit was artificial. Actually having the time limit matter would have ruined all the DMs hard work(and trust me, this DM wrote 30 or 40 pages of notes on stuff that was going to happen).

See, I have a problem with this example. It wasn't that the passage of time was immaterial, what happened was your DM had the tool in place and nullified it by not "pulling the trigger." He put the world on hold for you so you would not feel the repercussions of your dawdling.

I absolutely guarantee you that had a similar scenario popped up in an adventure in our group, the princess would have died under at least 7 of the guys who DM, myself included.

(This is a group that got Mordenkainen's kid killed...)

And just to be clear, the flipside situation is also true: if, by your cleverness, you had figured out how to break the siege with a counterstrike (totally negating the need for the next planned adventure) those same DMs would let that stand. That happened to me- the party successfully ambushed my BBEG, my dice went absolutely ice cold, theirs went hotter than lava, and he died in 3 rounds. I had to stop the session, since I had nothing else to run. I came back the next session with a revision: decapitated, his organization was regrouped by his second in command (and lover), and started trying to complete their fallen leader's ritual...

Another DM in our group had his precious Harpies slaughtered by some Entangles and a bunch of inept PCs using missile weapons.

And just like in your group, players figure this out pretty quickly. Waste time and you lose control, and possibly fail at your objective. Be clever and you might reap unexpected rewards.

 

[billd91]

See, I have a problem with this example. It wasn't that the passage of time was immaterial, what happened was your DM had the tool in place and nullified it by not "pulling the trigger." He put the world on hold for you so you would not feel the repercussions of your dawdling.

I absolutely guarantee you that had a similar scenario popped up in an adventure in our group, the princess would have died under at least 7 of the guys who DM, myself included.

(This is a group that got Mordenkainen's kid killed...)

As DM, I might not have killed the princess. They make good hostages and are often worth a lot in ransom. Of course, that assumes the enemy group wasn't definitely trying to kill off the entire dynasty. If they thought it would be easier to keep the populace in line with a live, hostage princess, they'd have kept her hostage. If the system was fairly patriarchal, they might have forced her into marriage so a male pretender could claim legitimate authority and secure a legal heir. If they wanted to make sure there were no legit claimants to the throne, she's dead meat.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As DM, I might not have killed the princess. They make good hostages and are often worth a lot in ransom. Of course, that assumes the enemy group wasn't definitely trying to kill off the entire dynasty. If they thought it would be easier to keep the populace in line with a live, hostage princess, they'd have kept her hostage. If the system was fairly patriarchal, they might have forced her into marriage so a male pretender could claim legitimate authority and secure a legal heir. If they wanted to make sure there were no legit claimants to the throne, she's dead meat.

All valid options, IMHO.