Five-Minute Workday Article

[JRRNeiklot]

See, my problem with this is "what's everyone else doing" is likely the same thing they've been doing for the past 8 hours. I mean, how much did your day change from one day to the next. Most things have a fairly static routine. Now, it could be that the denizens go on alert, but, they probably did that 5 minutes after the first or second encounter. What's going to change? They're likely going to stay on heightened alert for the next day or so.

You and I have had this argument before. They can reset traps, build new ones, build a ballista, slaughter the prisoners, take new ones. Send assassins after your loved ones, retaliate by attacking nearby farmsteads. 8 hours is a long time.

 

[Zustiur]

You've just hit upon one of the reasons 4Ed will never be my D&D.

That's what I mean though - it took me a long time to see why that is actually the better way. Eventually I asked myself this question: Why do I feel that the bad guys have to use exactly the same classes as the good guys?
You may benefit from considering that question, or you may not. I'm not here to convince you one way or the other, but my point is that you may find the same conclusion that I did. Namely, I have no plausible reason why that should be so, and it's just making my life as a DM harder.

Once I realized that, I had no problem building NPCs like they were monsters.

3E has long been criticized for the time consuming and difficult process of making NPCs. 4E present a solution to that. If you find, as I did, that making NPCs in 3E is something you avoid, then you may benefit from taking that particular lesson on board. Is it the only solution? No. Is it the best solution? I have no idea. But it is 'a' solution.


And here's the secret: There's nothing stopping you building a particular NPC the old way if you feel it appropriate to the situation/story. Even in 4E.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You may benefit from considering that question...

Question considered and factored into my decision. I hate exception based design with a passion.

And that's just one factor among many that make 4Ed a "player only" game for me.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For NPC casters what I do. Is I consider them my character for a moment. Living where ever they live and with the NPC's goals. Then I ask myself what would be the spells I would on a average day have. Then those are the ones I give the NPC's. Which is another reason my examples above work on my PC's. They know if they do the 15 adventuring day and let a caster in the adventure know they are coming and prepare for them than the fight will be a lot harder than it otherwise would have been. But that to me goes back to the whole making a living breathing world I mentioned.

I did so do in 3E.

Which made the problem mostly worse. Because the caster would then not need to cast many buffs during the battle, he would get into the battle with everything he needed. Sure, a few slots will be devoted to "useless" spells (for that combat), but he really only needs 4 offensive spells for the typical fight. One side will be dead afterwards.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

You and I have had this argument before. They can reset traps, build new ones, build a ballista, slaughter the prisoners, take new ones. Send assassins after your loved ones, retaliate by attacking nearby farmsteads. 8 hours is a long time.

Some Goblins in a cave can send Assassins to my loved ones*?
They can build Ballistas in 8 hours?

Some examples seem a little far-fetched.

*) As if a decent min/maxer has loved ones. "My family is dead, everyone one of them. And so are all my mentors and pets." "If they want my loved ones, they have to take them out of my cold, dead hands!"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

They could mix up some concrete to entomb you if you're holed up in a "defensible position" in the caves.

Or build a nice bonfire in the vicinity, giving them options involving oil, choking smoke, or even pure heat.

IOW, they will react. The question of HOW is dependent on their resources and your party's particular location, etc.

 

[barbiomalefico]

Rather than focus on the encounter, we are now focusing on the adventuring day. That means that during the typical adventure, we expect the average party to defeat X levels worth of monsters over Y rounds of combat. In other words, we're assuming that an adventure includes a certain amount of combat, and this amount is defined in terms of rounds and enemies.

The discussion talked a lot about how to change rules in order to avoid the (1)5 minutes work day problem and how to manage adventures to achieve the same result.

The thing I was worried about is another: the adventuring day.
Is not simple to write an adventure based on days and not on encounter. For example, if I would like to write a dungeon, i will populate it filling the rooms with mosters, traps and so on. After that I have no idea of the room order coming from investigation. So if I think that room 1 -2 -3 are the first day and the PG start from 3 and then go to 4 they can approach an unbalanced encounter.

The DM cannot guess the decision of the PG so he cannot manage an adventuring day.

I'm scared about a designer unable to think about that!

 

[Tuft]

They could mix up some concrete to entomb you if you're holed up in a "defensible position" in the caves.

Or build a nice bonfire in the vicinity, giving them options involving oil, choking smoke, or even pure heat.

IOW, they will react. The question of HOW is dependent on their resources and your party's particular location, etc.

Warning, anecdote time:

When I joined my first 1ed game years and years ago, the campaign was a couple of years old already, so the PCs had quite a few levels. Of course I got told endless stories of what had already transpired in the campaign, and among those was this:

The PCs were attacking a huge, huge evil city on their own. Resting - raiding - resting - raiding. They had a tiny magical gem that contained a pocket universe, and used that as a base, popping in and out of it as necessary. The city was underground, a maze of corridors and caves carved from the rock, so it was trivial to find a crack in the wall in an unused cave as a secure hiding place for the gem, so the PCs thought it to be the perfect setup.

Well, the GM was extremely simulationistic, so he had already used his trusty population formulas to determine how many evil clerics of the appropriate level the city had. From that he got how many yes/no divination spells could be cast during the PCs' rest time.

So the evil clerics determined what half, quarter, eigth, sixteenth, etc of the city the PC were in. They got as far as singling out a city block before the time was up. So, being evil, they cast Rock to Mud on the entire block, population be damned. When the PCs popped out of their cosy pocket universe a little later, they emerged in a torrent of mud already being swept down a dark underground river into depths unknown...

From that anecdote I learned not to be complacent about rests and the 5 min adventuring day.


PS. I said the city was huge. I got shown the maps afterward, and they were a 7cm (3inch) stack of A4 graph paper using 5mm squares.... Those were the days of a grandioser scale...

 

[Bluenose]

You and I have had this argument before. They can reset traps, build new ones, build a ballista, slaughter the prisoners, take new ones. Send assassins after your loved ones, retaliate by attacking nearby farmsteads. 8 hours is a long time.

No, eight hours really isn't a long time to be starting a military expedition. And it's certainly not long enough to build a ballista, or even assemble one from existing parts. And if they send a group out to do some mischief, they might run right into our ambush; or they might find that we come in again while that group is away, making it easier for us; or they might find that we don't really care about a bunch of people stupid enough to live near a known lair without being able to protect themselves, and we're off in town buying selling the loot and planning a raid on some totally different place.

 

[tlantl]

Well. there's your problem, right there.

I kind of agree.

I write adventures that pertain to the exploration of the game world. I don't pour over CR charts or XP charts or in any way pick monsters to be appropriate challenges or to give a certain number of rounds of damage or any thing other than that they are close enough to the party's level to be dangerous for them.

I think that if the encounter or adventure is metered so closely then it forces me to follow that method or have a hard time creating good dungeons. If I want to use a specific monster in the adventure but it doesn't fit the formula then what happens?

If building adventures is like 3e or 4e then I'm really not going to be happy. I like to adjust encounter difficulty by tweaking the creatures encountered by weapon or armor or the number of hit points they have, and the way they react in game to the party;s presence. Sometimes I want the party to lose, sometimes I want a cake walk, sometimes I want a nail biter where no one can predict the outcome.

I don't want the group to always win unless they really mess things up.

you want to be a hero? Die for a cause, There's nothing heroic about winning all the time.