Rule of Three 2/28

[Crazy Jerome]

Renewable, important resources that are not automatically brought back in a short time, but can be under certain circumstances, also helps a lot. Let me go long way around for a moment.

Say you've got five characters in a Rule Compendium (or equivalent) game: Fighter, Cleric, Magic User, Rogue, and Elf. Make them about 6th level. It is a fairly tough game. The party has a couple of minor encounters, then they have a big fight and get mauled pretty severely. Hit points are down, cure spells are gone, magic items are depleted, and the MU and Elf have got little offense left. If this happens enough, the party might at least consider "camping" every time they think they can get away with it. After all, in their current state, one more moderate fight will probably lead to some character deaths.

Consider the 4E equivalent of this game. That's 10 daily powers available, plus whatever utility slots are daily. Then you've got a bunch of healing surges spread among the party. OTOH, the at-wills are always there, and the encounter abilities are coming back with the five-minute rest. So there is only so down the party can get, but they can be down enough to matter. However, the problem here is that daily powers and surges have exactly the same characteristics as the RC game, only muted due to scope. Meanwhile, the encounter powers come back automatically, with nothing but the rest.

Now take a hypothetical mixture of these two games with a few other things thrown in. You get XP for the treasure you gain--minus whatever you spend on equipment. The "magic user" has a wand of magic missiles (that she found), which can be recharged in town--at moderate but still felt cost. There are encounter abilities available that take five minutes to recharge via some moderately expensive stored crystals. Free "surge" use is rather limited, but you can spend more with the right consumable magic. Camping all night can restore daily abilities--at substantially more gold cost compared to doing so in a restful environment. Suddenly, rests are much more situational. Namely, they are a good idea when the party is hurt and has already recovered a lot of treasure, but not so hot until some treasure has been recovered.

There are, of course, a lot of other ways you could set up the same dynamics. But the basic are that resting has to hurt in some way that matters directly to the end goal of the activity the party is resting from. You want the party to be tempted to rest the more banged up they get, but otherwise have strong reasons to press on. The typical 15MAD game situation occurs because the game gives them strong reasons to rest, and then the adventure must provide even stronger reasons to press on.

(At the other extreme, this can lead to other distortions of play--such as every fight being a killer, the social contract encouraging the party to press on even when the game is screaming to rest, and then the DM has to start pulling punches, outright fudging, or other ways to not overly punish the party for following the social contract.)

 

[Transformer]

Why should the DM alter the rate of progress for the villain because the PCs decide to rest? After all, the bad guys plans suffer setbacks due to PC interference which means their actions have meaning. The INACTION of the party should have similar meaning.

The basis of XP also have a lot to do with what tactics are best. If XP is primarily earned through defeating "encounters" then having more of them (due to wandering monsters interrupting rest) is a benefit that just helps the party advance faster.

If XP is primarily gained by finding treasure than extraneous encounters with non-treasure bearing wandering monsters slow down progression and are avoided if possible.

Likewise, if XP is primarily gained by achieving goals then too much delay and failing repeatedly with bring constant diminished rewards.


It all comes down to the rewards. If the DM constantly props the PCs up and shifts the goalposts to whatever the PCs are currently doing then nothing will change. Why stop doing something that works.

I think I may have been unclear. By "adjust based on whether the players did or did not sleep in the middle of the adventure," I meant what you're calling 'not adjusting', i.e. having the villain's plans be in a different state depending on whether the players rest or not.

You seem to be assuming--correct me if I'm wrong--that the DM actually has the villain's plan plotted out and knows how long each stage will take: he has written down somewhere "the villain will have infiltrated Big City's high council in 3 days, will have laid siege to Big City in 7 days, and will have taken Big City in 9 days if the players don't do something in that time frame to stop him." If the DM does in fact have a plan that detailed, then you're right, he's set to prevent the 15 minute workday simply by following through on what he has planned. If the PCs rest for 6 hours and have to spend a day running the kobolds down because they escaped, and so they get to Big City on day 8 instead of day 7, then the city is already taken. A DM who is in such a position, and has set the precedent of following through on his strict and objective time records, can just keep doing what he's doing.

But I don't think most DMs actually have that level of detail planned out. I think most DMs sorta just run the campaign world around the players. The players are infiltrating the kobold lair to get the artifact, and the big bad is off doing...something. Maybe the DM has a vague idea that the PCs might go to Big City next, and he has a cool encounter with the big bad planned out there, but he certainly doesn't know exactly how many days have to pass before the big bad takes Big City. So, if the PCs rest in the middle of the kobold lair, and so, have to waste a day tracking down the kobolds, what should the DM do? How does he alter his plans for the cool encounter with the big bad in Big City? Maybe there's a quick and easy way to make it so the villain's plans are farther along than originally planned when the players reach Big City, but then again maybe there's isn't.

So I think we're saying the same thing about what's ideal. The ideal is that if the players spend 6 hours resting in the middle of the dungeon, ridiculously, and that sets them back 2 days, then ideally the villain's plan should be 2 days farther along than it otherwise would be. But practically, for most DMs, that's very hard to achieve consistently, and so players get away with running 15-minute workdays.

As for the XP thing, you certainly have a point. Having XP based on the strength of monsters killed leads to some odd incentives. From a metagame perspective, the 15-minute workday is incentivized, because if you run 15-minute workdays you can consistently take on tougher encounters, and so in terms of real-world time you level faster. Meanwhile, if accomplishing goals or foiling evil plots gives no XP, there is little metagame incentive to do so unless the players are all really into the story. I don't have a solution, and I don't really want monster-based xp to go away, but I acknowledge the point.

 

[keterys]

In previous discussions I've also seen people who are totally fine with just failing some of those side-goals, because it affects the overall world (potentially even making it more interesting) rather than themselves personally. Need to finish in 2 days or the Princess is sacrificed to open a portal? Awesome, I've been wanting to fight more demons. Etc.

Another anecdote in line with that "recuperate until we die from it" theory: at one point we tried resting in the Temple of Elemental Evil (I forget why, presumably cause someone was out of spells) and so we got attacked while we rested. So we fought them off, and resumed resting, and got attacked again... after that, we're discussing whether to just leave and someone points out that if it happens one more time we'll level from the XP.

In other news, I've largely decided that XP for killing monsters instead of accomplishing goals is something I'd just as soon do without.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I like this whole article, but I'm most encouraged that they heard loud and clear the problem with calling the third pillar "roleplaying".

I'm not sure interaction is all that much better. Combat is a form of interaction.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

My problem with the 15-minute adventuring day is that I feel like the system forces me into it. (Especially in 3e and earlier).

We head into the kobold lair to get their artifact, the first fight goes poorly, and all of a sudden the cleric is out of healing spells. Now our choices are either to go back and rest or die. I feel silly having to rest after one battle, and from a story perspective its unsatisfying, but it's better then death.

Both Pathfinder and 4e have alleviated this, but in both I've felt a mechanical need to rest when the story dictated otherwise.

 

[Sunseeker]

To any GMs who've had a problem preventing the 15-minute workday in the past: how did the characters get away with it? Why wasn't the artifact long gone by the time they woke up?

Generally speaking the mystical artifact in question may be within the Kobold lair, but not directly in the possession of the Kobolds. It may lay within a magical barrier, it might have some greater creature guarding it. It may only be able to be handled by "the chosen one". It may simply be too magically powerful for the kobolds and those who attempt to handle it get fried/mutated/teleported to the Abyss.

But I agree that in the cases of more mundane objects, the Kobolds would likely simply depart with it. On the same token though, it is their home, they may be very keen on defending it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

So I think we're saying the same thing about what's ideal. The ideal is that if the players spend 6 hours resting in the middle of the dungeon, ridiculously, and that sets them back 2 days, then ideally the villain's plan should be 2 days farther along than it otherwise would be. But practically, for most DMs, that's very hard to achieve consistently, and so players get away with running 15-minute workdays.

Not quite for me. In that scenario, the ideal for me is that the villains' plan should be about 1 day farther along than it otherwise would be. In other words, there is slack in the schedule, but not infinite slack. Moreover, the slack contains some uncertainty. I know what the range is, but the players don't--or at least they only know so much as they spend time digging it out, in game. I freely grant that is a hybrid between the "old school" strict time tracking discussed in the 1E DMG versus the "events move at the speed of plot." However, it is a hyrbid that works well for me.

In previous discussions I've also seen people who are totally fine with just failing some of those side-goals, because it affects the overall world (potentially even making it more interesting) rather than themselves personally. Need to finish in 2 days or the Princess is sacrificed to open a portal? Awesome, I've been wanting to fight more demons. Etc.

My most common method for dealing with the feel of the issue is to simply set in motions events and actions such that the characters can't possibly deal with all of it in a given time, with given resources. The choices becomes for us the more interesting ones of "how much can be accomplished" and "what priority" and "what makes the list versus gets left to sort itself out." Of course, then you need a lot of things happening that aren't absolutely critical to stop. However, given a critical mass of such otherwise "minor" difficulties, I find the players do care quite a bit about their overall objectives.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm not sure interaction is all that much better. Combat is a form of interaction.

Maybe not. But at least there aren't people, as far as I know, actively pushing a very narrow definition of "interaction" in order to legislate whole swaths of the "interaction games" hobby ... out of it.

 

[ExploderWizard]

You seem to be assuming--correct me if I'm wrong--that the DM actually has the villain's plan plotted out and knows how long each stage will take: he has written down somewhere "the villain will have infiltrated Big City's high council in 3 days, will have laid siege to Big City in 7 days, and will have taken Big City in 9 days if the players don't do something in that time frame to stop him." If the DM does in fact have a plan that detailed, then you're right, he's set to prevent the 15 minute workday simply by following through on what he has planned. If the PCs rest for 6 hours and have to spend a day running the kobolds down because they escaped, and so they get to Big City on day 8 instead of day 7, then the city is already taken. A DM who is in such a position, and has set the precedent of following through on his strict and objective time records, can just keep doing what he's doing.

You are correct. I structure the campaign around locations and a general timeline of local events. Should the PCs not get involved in some ongoing activities, certain results will simply take place.

In effect, the game world operates independently of the PCs. Play sessions focus on what the PCs are doing but that is not the whole of the campaign world. Things happening outside the scope of PC activity helps give the world a sense of life.

If the players are certain that the entire world revolves around their characters then they will be more prone to act that way.

 

[Hassassin]

I'm not sure interaction is all that much better. Combat is a form of interaction.

Yeah, but that's the point. Whatever you want to call it, social interaction, talking, diplomacy, combat *is* a form of it.