That may be one problem from a certain point of view, but there are others. It's been too long since I read the 3E DMG so I'll just talk about 4E.
The 15-minute day is an optimal solution that significantly reduces the challenge of the game.
There are guidelines for the difficulty of the encounters that PCs should face based on their level. DCs and skill challenges are the same. If PCs are able to use all their resources in every encounter, the encounters are not very challenging.
There's two answers to this "problem" based upon if you build the game world around the players (the challenge of a location changes based upon PC power) or if you build the game world independent of the players (the challenges of a location do not change based upon PC power).
If you do the former - just make the challenges harder - you've already admitted that scaling the world to fit the player's abilities is acceptable, so just do it again.
If you do the latter - you wouldn't care. The PCs are playing smartly.
The "problem" with the 15-minute work day is that the GM has a mental construct of "how things are supposed to happen" that the players playing smartly and sitting down to rest is disturbing enough that a smart tactical option is considered a "problem."
In other words,
narrative desire - the desire to have a "plot" or a "story" - is being impinged upon because the GM desires things to happen in a certain way. We're the GM impartial and relying upon the players to drive the game (as opposed to a "plot") there is no more a feeling of unease or dissatisfaction from the 15-minute work day than one gets from from when the players use any other of their available options to perform better as a group.
IMO, because of the above, the problem of the 15-minute work day is wanting to
play a story and not
play a game.
The other way is to have the DM "play the setting" impartially as a living, breathing source of challenge and let the players guide their own destinies. This is AD&D's system as far as I can tell, but AD&D comes with a lot of things to make it work - wandering monsters, different DM advice, how to create an appropriate setting, and all of that.
Exactly. AD&D has the "world exists independent of the character's power" as the default.
To solve the problem you'd have to re-write how to DM the game.
No, you just re-scale the encounter according to the current 4e guidelines. The real problem is the desire a GM has for something to happen the way temporally expected.
Finally, if everyone would think of some of the fun action movies or stories they enjoy, almost invariably, one will find a
narrative reason as to why the 15 minute work day didn't happen. It's not like John McClain wouldn't have taken a week off to rest during Die Hard. It's not like Frodo and Sam wouldn't have rested had they that option. It's not like Rocky wouldn't have rested during the fight with Apollo.
If a GM demands a narrative exist, he or she needs to learn to create narratives that make the 15 minute work week "problem" impossible or simply be willing to have the end of the world happen and everybody dies game over man, if the PCs decide to rest anyway. The fact that "the end of the world" isn't
narratively pleasing contributes heavily to the belief that the 15 minute work week is a "problem." GMs thinking "I want this to happen, but they're resting even though everything should blow up... how do I change the world so what I want to happen happens regardless."
In summation, IMO it's the GMs desire to control what the players do that makes a "problem" out of the 15 minute work-day. And that's probably all I have to say on the subject as I'd probably just end up repeating myself if I keep posting.
joe b.