D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Imaro]

And I said otherwise... where, again?

You claimed I forgot it... I was reminding you I didn't.

Which I said... where, again?

Well if you know that how do you reconcile that knowledge with claiming encounters are pacing for worldbuilding as opposed to what they are pacing for... the adventuring day?

How do the job lots and encounter #s change from 1st through 15th so that the encounters make sense from the world description, again? At 1st, they always run into small groups of weak Wyrms, but at 15th it's big groups of strong wyrms or small groups or singles of very strong wyrms (with wyrms defined however you like as a group of foes). What part of the story of the Dark Forest of Wyrms supports that no powerful wyrms can be found when the party is 1st level, and then no weak wyrms can be found when the party is at 15th level? Or the gradual transition that exists in-between?

Here we go again... you ask me a question, then present an answer and finally try to push me to answer the question based on the answer you've given.

How about we use our creative juices and have the adventurers at lower levels also run into the occasional powerful but wounded, dead, dying, crippled, etc. wyrm... as well as the occasional hatch-lings and young wyrms...that have wandered too far from their pack, gotten lost etc... maybe some single wyrms that haven't found a pack yet... gigantic wyrm skeletons and so on. While higher level adventurers could run into singular healthy powerful wyrms, fully formed large packs of weaker wyrms, medium sized packs of stronger wyrms and the occasional legendary wyrms that were though to be rumours and myths. This is all of course along with the other encounters one would find in this forest...

Honestly I keep finding it strange that all of your examples have both 1st level and 15th level adventurers in the same area fighting the same things. You want to talk about breaking consistency and verisimilitude... it would be this for me. Why are 15th level adventurers still wandering the locales of 1st level adventurers... it seems like a silly restriction you've created to try and prove your point. Ultimately there is a point where the dangers of an area are so insignificant to a band of adventurers that they wouldn't have adventuring days in said area... you seem to ignore that little bit of consistency when it's convenient.

The deadliness of the wyrms? They're of small threat to villages when the party is 1st level, and threats to kingdoms at 15th level. Where are the kingdom level threats at 1st, and where are the village nuisance threats at 15th? The world is only presenting things dangerous to the PCs, and only within a narrow band defined by their level, and always in lots of 3 per adventuring day (which is one day by the default assumption, changing that is part of worldbuilding as well), and that's not well explained by the Dark Forest of Wyrms.

See above... age ranges, size ranges, breeds, etc. can all be used as well. The world isn't presenting anything, the PC's are having an adventuring day and thus are encountering things within the presented scope and pacing of an adventuring day (I thought you understood this??). Again I have to ask why would 15th level adventurers have an adventuring day in an area 1st level characters wouldn't be instantly wiped out in?

To address another of your concerns...it doesn't have to be in lots of 3... there are rules for multi-part encounters which can be used to get some variation when needed.

And finally again... as long as they have adequate prey... why would wyrms seek out settlements to attack (and possibly be badly injured in the process)...as opposed to sticking to their hunting grounds... in the forest?? again a bit of silly inconsistency to try and push your point.

Banding is part of worldbuilding -- THIS area is for when their 1-5, and will have threats for them but become safer as they level, and THIS area will be for 6-10....

No... I just showed you why and how that doesn't have to be the case...

You're planning your worldbuilding around your players, and how you plan that is influenced by your pacing mechanism. If you change pacing, you need to change some assumptions about what's where and what levels it addresses.

The pacing is for adventures... thus the adventuring day. When there is no adventuring day these encounters don't happen... thus they can't be the pacing of the world because there are gigantic swaths of time where they aren't encountering anything... there's downtime... If anything the pacing of the world has to be a mixture of both.

Are you saying that encounters reflect nothing about the world? Clearly not, given your ridiculous previous strawmen about rocs on the ocean floor. If your encounters are built entirely with the world in mind, how are they not reflections of that world? And, if at 1st level, all I meet in the Dark Forest of Wyrms are little wyrmlings in small packs, but at 15th all I meet are powerful wyrms that can devastate towns, then aren't those reflecting something about your world? Aren't they directly saying that the Dark Forest of Wyrms has gone from a place of wyrmlings to a place where threats to kingdoms exist? If it was always both, why does it only confront the players according to their ability -- why do the wyrmlings so successfully hide from the 15th level party and the powerful wyrms hide from the 1st level party?

LOL!! Now it's ridiculous again...smh

Encounters are impacted by worldbuilding, I've maintained this position since we started this discussion... thus they reflect (not create or influence unless you choose to let them) the world.

Now to answer your question...You only meet small packs of wyrmlings because your DM's imagination and creativity aren't up to the task, plain and simple. I've come up with numerous encounters outside of this that reflect a forest where there are greater dangers in less than 5 mins of thinking. But then your DM is also the type that apparently thinks 1st level adventurers and 15th level adventurers should be doing the same things in the exact same areas... again a lack of creativity and imagination. I mean is it that hard to vary a pack of wyrmlings so there are stronger and weaker members?

Also and I have to point this out a deadly encounter is anything with an XP rating of Deadly per the DMG or more... so deadly encounters can actually be anything mre than the Deadly Threshold.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Tier-4 characters have more important things to do than hunt kobolds in Kobold Copse. Coming back to the number of rests per adventuring day, although that definitely interacts with the difficulty of encounters, it also interacts with a great deal else in the world. Say my pacing is Gritty Realism? Then spells like Raise Dead are far less available. Clerics become less able to mitigate famine using Create Food and Water. Magic becomes a more precious resource.

But, if, for some reason they go to Kobold Copse, do they find archdemons there or kobolds?

Look, my comments are focused very tightly on the contested notion that selecting a specific and dogmatic encounter pacing paradigm, like always having 3 deadly encounters per adventuring day (default 1 calendar day), will have an impact on worldbuilding. Building bands of areas appropriate for ranges of character levels is an example of this. If you stop having encounters in Kobold Corpse after the party outlevels the encounters you can place there within the dogmatic encounter paradigm you've selected, then that's an example of worldbuilding being affected -- you can no longer reflect your world accurately at those locations without changing it.

That's a very narrow point. If you want to discuss how not picking a dogmatic encounter pacing paradigm alleviates that, then you've already stepped outside my point and into things I've already said, at the beginning of this side trek. We don't disagree.

 

[Imaro]

Tier-4 characters have more important things to do than hunt kobolds in Kobold Copse.

Lol... you would think so... wouldn't you?

 

[Imaro]

But, if, for some reason they go to Kobold Copse, do they find archdemons there or kobolds?

Look, my comments are focused very tightly on the contested notion that selecting a specific and dogmatic encounter pacing paradigm, like always having 3 deadly encounters per adventuring day (default 1 calendar day), will have an impact on worldbuilding. Building bands of areas appropriate for ranges of character levels is an example of this. If you stop having encounters in Kobold Corpse after the party outlevels the encounters you can place there within the dogmatic encounter paradigm you've selected, then that's an example of worldbuilding being affected -- you can no longer reflect your world accurately at those locations without changing it.

That's a very narrow point. If you want to discuss how not picking a dogmatic encounter pacing paradigm alleviates that, then you've already stepped outside my point and into things I've already said, at the beginning of this side trek. We don't disagree.

Or perhaps... they don't have an adventuring day there while passing through? You keep claiming calendar day... it's adventuring day, I thought you were clear on this?

 

[hawkeyefan]

The deadliness of the wyrms? They're of small threat to villages when the party is 1st level, and threats to kingdoms at 15th level. Where are the kingdom level threats at 1st, and where are the village nuisance threats at 15th? The world is only presenting things dangerous to the PCs, and only within a narrow band defined by their level, and always in lots of 3 per adventuring day (which is one day by the default assumption, changing that is part of worldbuilding as well), and that's not well explained by the Dark Forest of Wyrms.

Don't you feel like the leap from a normal encounter to a deadly can take less than a 14 level swing? Aren't you providing an extreme example where another far more reasonable example coudl easily suit?

And didn't [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] already address this problem when he said:

I'm not sure why that would have to be the case or if the PC's become powerful enough where the Dark Forest of Wyrms is no longer a viable threat fiction-wise then they don't have adventuring days in the forest... Or I use manipulation of CR and # appearing adjustments to keep the lots deadly while still keeping the Dark Forest of Wyrms a deadly wyrm infested forest. But in each case I am manipulating the encounter rules to fit the world.

These are two ways around there being an impact.

A) The Forest is no longer considered dangerous to PCs once they reach a certain level.
B) If you do want to have a difficult encounter in the forest, you don't need to leap from wyrmlings to ancient greater wyrms....you can simply increase the numbers so it's swarm of low CR creatures, or you can raise the CR slightly and the numbers slightly to achieve the needed math. Neither of which makes the creatures in the forest now capable of threatening kingdoms rather than villages.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You claimed I forgot it... I was reminding you I didn't.




Well if you know that how do you reconcile that knowledge with claiming encounters are pacing for worldbuilding as opposed to what they are pacing for... the adventuring day?




Here we go again... you ask me a question, then present an answer and finally try to push me to answer the question based on the answer you've given.

How about we use our creative juices and have the adventurers at lower levels also run into the occasional powerful but wounded, dead, dying, crippled, etc. wyrm... as well as the occasional hatch-lings and young wyrms...that have wandered too far from their pack, gotten lost etc... maybe some single wyrms that haven't found a pack yet... gigantic wyrm skeletons and so on. While higher level adventurers could run into singular healthy powerful wyrms, fully formed large packs of weaker wyrms, medium sized packs of stronger wyrms and the occasional legendary wyrms that were though to be rumours and myths. This is all of course along with the other encounters one would find in this forest...

Honestly I keep finding it strange that all of your examples have both 1st level and 15th level adventurers in the same area fighting the same things. You want to talk about breaking consistency and verisimilitude... it would be this for me. Why are 15th level adventurers still wandering the locales of 1st level adventurers... it seems like a silly restriction you've created to try and prove your point. Ultimately there is a point where the dangers of an area are so insignificant to a band of adventurers that they wouldn't have adventuring days in said area... you seem to ignore that little bit of consistency when it's convenient.




See above... age ranges, size ranges, breeds, etc. can all be used as well. The world isn't presenting anything, the PC's are having an adventuring day and thus are encountering things within the presented scope and pacing of an adventuring day (I thought you understood this??). Again I have to ask why would 15th level adventurers have an adventuring day in an area 1st level characters wouldn't be instantly wiped out in?

To address another of your concerns...it doesn't have to be in lots of 3... there are rules for multi-part encounters which can be used to get some variation when needed.

And finally again... as long as they have adequate prey... why would wyrms seek out settlements to attack (and possibly be badly injured in the process)...as opposed to sticking to their hunting grounds... in the forest?? again a bit of silly inconsistency to try and push your point.



No... I just showed you why and how that doesn't have to be the case...



The pacing is for adventures... thus the adventuring day. When there is no adventuring day these encounters don't happen... thus they can't be the pacing of the world because there are gigantic swaths of time where they aren't encountering anything... there's downtime... If anything the pacing of the world has to be a mixture of both.



LOL!! Now it's ridiculous again...smh

Encounters are impacted by worldbuilding, I've maintained this position since we started this discussion... thus they reflect (not create or influence unless you choose to let them) the world.

Now to answer your question...You only meet small packs of wyrmlings because your DM's imagination and creativity aren't up to the task, plain and simple. I've come up with numerous encounters outside of this that reflect a forest where there are greater dangers in less than 5 mins of thinking. But then your DM is also the type that apparently thinks 1st level adventurers and 15th level adventurers should be doing the same things in the exact same areas... again a lack of creativity and imagination. I mean is it that hard to vary a pack of wyrmlings so there are stronger and weaker members?

Also and I have to point this out a deadly encounter is anything with an XP rating of Deadly per the DMG or more... so deadly encounters can actually be anything mre than the Deadly Threshold.

Do you recall above where I said that wyrm can be defined as any group of foes you wish? I did that to try to avoid the no-true-scotsman argument you're so fond of where you say that it's a lack of imagination by being stuck with only that one monster type. See, I do follow your arguments pretty well.

And, in this last attempt to claim that example isn't the right one, you still missed the point: where are the very dangerous things hiding (things being whatever you can imagine works) when the party is 1st level in the Dark Forest of Wyrms, and where are the weak things hiding when the party is 15th? You keep skipping this argument in favor of special pleading, no true scotsmen, and red herrings: how is your world being faithfully reflected in the Dark Forest of Wyrms when the party can only ever find the threats that are deadly encounter for them at whatever level they enter?

Now, you're right, you can avoid one direction of this by saying that the Dark Forest is all fell things far above the party level because deadly is open-ended (although that defeats the entire purpose of the encounter pacing paradigm, but whatevs). It doesn't work if the party is high enough level that those fell things aren't deadly anymore and they suddenly disappear from the forest.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Or perhaps... they don't have an adventuring day there while passing through? You keep claiming calendar day... it's adventuring day, I thought you were clear on this?

Calendar day is the default, you're done worldbuilding if you change it.

But, thanks, for making my point: the party cannot have encounters there with kobolds because it doesn't meet the pacing paradigm anymore. So the encounters there (or lack of) no longer reflect the world (there are kobolds in that there copse!) they reflect your pacing paradigm. The world is left without explanation as to why you can no longer find kobolds in the copse.

Unless, of course, you come up with some new fiction to explain it, in which case....

 

[Imaro]

Do you recall above where I said that wyrm can be defined as any group of foes you wish? I did that to try to avoid the no-true-scotsman argument you're so fond of where you say that it's a lack of imagination by being stuck with only that one monster type. See, I do follow your arguments pretty well.

And, in this last attempt to claim that example isn't the right one, you still missed the point: where are the very dangerous things hiding (things being whatever you can imagine works) when the party is 1st level in the Dark Forest of Wyrms, and where are the weak things hiding when the party is 15th? You keep skipping this argument in favor of special pleading, no true scotsmen, and red herrings: how is your world being faithfully reflected in the Dark Forest of Wyrms when the party can only ever find the threats that are deadly encounter for them at whatever level they enter?

Now, you're right, you can avoid one direction of this by saying that the Dark Forest is all fell things far above the party level because deadly is open-ended (although that defeats the entire purpose of the encounter pacing paradigm, but whatevs). It doesn't work if the party is high enough level that those fell things aren't deadly anymore and they suddenly disappear from the forest.

Mix the types of wyrms up in packs (some stronger/larger some small, BA helps with this)... show a powerful one crippled and hurt that's a deadly encounter for the lower level PC's (otherwise he'd be way above their capacity to deal with)... and so on (there are more suggestions in the actual reply)... See you aren't following my arguments because I addressed your concerns in my reply.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I grant most people don't select a fixed encounter pacing mechanic, and that allows a great deal more flexibility -- in fact, I've said that from the start. But, if your pacing mechanic is such that it MUST tie directly to player level at all times, and in such as was as to generate only the most dangerous encounters for that player level, I cannot see how that doesn't impact worldbuilding -- either the world is built to accommodate this extreme stress on how it presents itself (and I hope we agree encounters are a presentation of the built world) or you have to adapt the world on the fly to accommodate the stress. Or ignore it, which is it's own kind of impact. If you want to keep presenting the built world, it must take into account HOW you're presenting it. And encounters are a how of that presentation. I cannot see how encounters can be both based on the world and not a reflection of it. If you're disturbing how you present encounters to match a dogmatic pacing paradigm, then you're distorting how you're reflecting your world. Either you build to correct that distortion, or you correct for it on the fly by changing the world.

I think you're overstating how different a deadly encounter must be from a normal one. You're assuming some massive shift in power level of the enemies....world shaking creatures as opposed to wild animals. That is extreme and need not be the case.

You should be able to see it because plenty of examples of how to avoid such an impact have been given.

remember, I'm not advocating a dogmatic encounter pace. What we are talking about was taking one dogmatic approach and altering it to another dogmatic approach. 6 to 8 normal to 3 deadly. In that case, there are ways to achieve the change that don't require a change in the world. Can you agree with that?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Being consistent isn't to prevent things from happening, it's more a question of what's happening in the world to make sense.

So, nothing like the real world, then?

I think you're overstating how different a deadly encounter must be from a normal one. You're assuming some massive shift in power level of the enemies....world shaking creatures as opposed to wild animals. That is extreme and need not be the case.

Thanks to BA, you can just add more of the same to a common-creature encounter and make it threatening (what? the wizard can fireball them? not if they're closing in on all sides... besides, that's resource pressure, too).

What we are talking about was taking one dogmatic approach and altering it to another dogmatic approach. 6 to 8 normal to 3 deadly. In that case, there are ways to achieve the change that don't require a change in the world. Can you agree with that?

Actually I see two problems with that. One is that if the 6-8 encounter guideline wasn't flexible enough, a 3-deadlies probably isn't either. The other is that potentially-whole-combat resources like rage, concentration spells, and the like, will be overvalued in the 3-deadly dogma.

Calendar day is the default, you're done worldbuilding if you change it.

Seems to me that you're just taking one step in worldbuilding if you change the default to something else - like a week, the one solid alternative in the DMG that gets mentioned the most. You're just changing from one inflexible option that limits future worldbuilding decisions to a different inflexible option that limits future wouldbuilding decisions (or adventuring-day-planning decisions, if you feel there's a hard dividing line between worldbuilding & encounter design).

But, thanks, for making my point: the party cannot have encounters there with kobolds because it doesn't meet the pacing paradigm anymore. So the encounters there (or lack of) no longer reflect the world (there are kobolds in that there copse!) they reflect your pacing paradigm. The world is left without explanation as to why you can no longer find kobolds in the copse.

I don't see why you can't find them, they just might not qualify as an encounter...