Here, Let Me Fix "Powers Per Day" For You

[BobTheNob]

No, of course not. Its not even responsive. I'm not questioning whether its plausible to sometimes have reasons why the players can't rest after every single fight.

I'm questioning whether its possible to always, in every situation, have realistic plot based reasons for 3 to 4 fights per day plus convenient wandering monsters such that a narrow window of properly balanced game play can be enforced.

Thanks for responding. This is a bit clearer what your original point is. It seems I may have offended you somehow to get this response and if I did, Im sorry, I didnt mean to, I was just trying to contribute in a positive manner.

Thanks for letting me know know that I need to work on my responses so they dont come across in a way that can seems aggressive or negative. We are all trying to be civil after all.

 

[Elf Witch]

I am also talking about D&D - including 4e, which last time I checked was an edition of D&D - but am making comparisons to other systems also. For example, the OP said that "the fix" for the 15-minute day is wandering monsters. It's true that that is one fix, but it's one that arguably hasn't been a big part of D&D design since Dragonlance was published - which is now nearly 30 years ago - so it can make sense to look at how other systems handle the issue.

As for your particular experience with 4e, I personally don't quite get it - I don't see how a version of the game that make daily resources less important than any other edition would be the first one in which you encounter limits based on daily reources other than healing. But anyway, that would seem to be an argument for making daily resources even less important, which is what some other recent threads have argued in favour of. But at present D&Dnext seems to be going in the other direction.

And others have brought up things besides wandering monsters, things like time constraints, making the world continue even if the PCs are taking long extended rests. And wandering monsters did not go away for everyone 30 years ago. I still use them and so do most of the DMs I play with.


I play Shadowrun and mages and shamans never run out of spells but they can't take so much drain that it makes it not feasible to keep casting. And the only way to get rid of the drain is rest or use of a stim patch. Now stim patches come with a danger of becoming addicted to them. But you never just stop the run because the caster is out of spells the caster pulls out his weapon and keeps going.

Also if you know as a caster that you need to keep track of the best place to use your spells.

I have played other systems but I don't recall any that give you unlimited resources everyone I played required some resource management. Most of them gave you the ability to go nova if needed but usually that kind of play was not rewarded.

In my case several of the players never played mages they played rogues and fighters and never really had to manage resources like they did in 4E they would worry about when to use their daily and if they had used it they didn't want to keep playing. They wanted to rest. There were arguments of when an encounter ended and another one begin.

Because everyone had dailies and encounter powers they were more likely to want to stop and rest if mre than half of the party didn't have them. Unlike older editions when the issue was usually reserved for casters. As long as they had healing then the mundane types were willing to shoulder the major burden of going on.

 

[CleverNickName]

For example, the OP said that "the fix" for the 15-minute day is wandering monsters. It's true that that is one fix, but it's one that arguably hasn't been a big part of D&D design since Dragonlance was published - which is now nearly 30 years ago - so it can make sense to look at how other systems handle the issue.

Not exactly...I suggested that "the fix" was to give each character a number of points to spend on actions, and have those points replenish every day at a certain rate. But everyone seems to have latched on to the first part of my post, where I wrote about why I never noticed the problem in the first place.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

DnD is not just a fantasy game it is DnD there are plenty of other systems that can do fantasy.

That is probably the ultimate crux. I don't just want to play a D&D that simulates what D&D has always been. But apparantly the current belief at WotC that is the only kind of D&D that has a chance after 4E that did try to actually innovate D&D and fix all those problems fans like me saw before.

I played 4E for six months and no matter what class I played I was bored out of my mind and the dM who ran it is a fantastic DM. The game ran like a chess game with all the different rules for this maneuver and that maneuver.

I love that - combat is a great puzzle piece. But if there is a 4E flaw here it is that combat is very dominant with the hour or so it typically takes for an interesting encounter to resolve. I could probably enjoy a game where combat can be done shorter...
4E doesn't force people to make it all about combat, but when you do combat, it will probably dominate a session (or way below the "encounter budget").

This was the first time I had really encountered the 15 minute adventuring day because of losing resources as opposed to being out of hit points an healing. I dislike healing surges because again they scream video game where you go and click on an item for more life..

I can't change your feelings, I suppose, but why are healing surges in any way like "an item for more life"? Wands of Cure Light Wounds (D&D 3E phenomen mostly) and Potions of Healing (any edition) are "items that you click to get more life".

Healing Surges are something very different, because you cannot buy Healing Surges, you cannot collect them in droves, they are not rewarded in any way by play. They limit healing and they would do so even in a Monty Haul campaign where the party has collected 5,000 Potions of Cure Light Wounds. They limit healing in a way almost no video game has limited healing ever. The closest resemblance I am aware of in a video game is Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, where characters can only carry a limited amount of medi-gel with them to revive themselves, but even that is not identical, since you can still be revived by others (if you can be revived at all, if a Banshee bursts her arm through your chest, there is nothing that can be done for that wave).

And I experienced the 15 minute adventure day primarily in 3E because healing was not limited by something like healing surges. Healing was all over the place thanks to cheap healing items. And I believe these healing items lead to the introduction of healing surges, the idea being:

• 3E combat did - with the "proper" amountof magic items allow full health after each combat encounter. => 4E will assume full health at the start of any combat encounter.
• In 3E recovery was demanded only by daily resources, namely spells. => 4E introduced healing surges so that there were other daily resources that everyone would have and run out of, parallel to daily spells.
• In 3E spellcasters couldn't do much other than casting in combat, but this meant they couldn't keep up long thanks to all spells being daily => 4E introduced magic encounter powers and at-will powers
• In 3E combat could get repetitive with maneuvers that either always work or almost never work based on the feats you had => 4E had encounter and daily powers that gave you special maneuvers and gave you at-will powers with minor maneuver quality.
• In 3E using daily powers (spells) was very powerful and allowed certain classes to dominate when they could afford (or needed) using them => 4E gave everyone such encounter-dominating daily powers so no one took all the spotlight.

Mayb the solutions they found for these 3E phenomena was not the one everyone liked, and maybe some of them were not deemed problematic or experienced by some. But there were all good reasons for making these changes, and none of them had something to do with videogames.

And others have brought up things besides wandering monsters, things like time constraints, making the world continue even if the PCs are taking long extended rests. And wandering monsters did not go away for everyone 30 years ago. I still use them and so do most of the DMs I play with.

But how much do wandering monsters really help? If the party ever decides to rest, it will have to face them. It seems to be a wise idea to rest early and often so you still have enough spells left for all those wandering monsters.

Time constraints cannot be in every adventure - and they also put a lot of pressure on the DM - because if he miscalculates the challenges in his game, he may end up having the PCs have rest not because they "novaed", but because they did the bes they could and still couldn't make it to the final time-critical encounter in time - or they die there, out of resources and overwhelmed.

And sure, the world moves on - but how much supplies do the NPCs have, how much new people can they recruit. Sure, they may change their base of operations - but any base of operation large enough to require extended rests for a party to deal with is difficult to move, and will probably set back other operations fo the enemy - so it may still end up being a net win for the party if the enemy has to move his base.

All these solutions ultimately put a lot of pressure on the DM, because he has to engineer scenarios for this to work. I prefer the DM to be able to stay focused on the core of the story, and wandering monsters and NPCs moving their base isn't one of them.

I play Shadowrun and mages and shamans never run out of spells but they can't take so much drain that it makes it not feasible to keep casting. And the only way to get rid of the drain is rest or use of a stim patch. Now stim patches come with a danger of becoming addicted to them. But you never just stop the run because the caster is out of spells the caster pulls out his weapon and keeps going.

In my experience with Shadowrun 3E - casters always cast spells in ways to avoid all drain. And no one - neither caster nor street sam - sticks around long when he's injured.

I have played other systems but I don't recall any that give you unlimited resources everyone I played required some resource management. Most of them gave you the ability to go nova if needed but usually that kind of play was not rewarded.

Shadowrun is pretty much my example here - other than injuries (and drain is just a form of injury), everything else is not pure mechanical/metagame resource like "daily spells". You have to manage your ammo and grenades, of course, but that's pretty much it (and usually minor). The challenge in Shadowrun was how to use your abilities and how to pick your fights (including entirely avoiding them) for your best abilities.
Of course, within combats, one could argue that combat/magic/hacking/rigging pools where a form of metagame resource.

An even better example could be Cyberpunk, since it doesn't have spells at all.

 

[Elf Witch]

That is probably the ultimate crux. I don't just want to play a D&D that simulates what D&D has always been. But apparantly the current belief at WotC that is the only kind of D&D that has a chance after 4E that did try to actually innovate D&D and fix all those problems fans like me saw before.

I love that - combat is a great puzzle piece. But if there is a 4E flaw here it is that combat is very dominant with the hour or so it typically takes for an interesting encounter to resolve. I could probably enjoy a game where combat can be done shorter...
4E doesn't force people to make it all about combat, but when you do combat, it will probably dominate a session (or way below the "encounter budget").

I can't change your feelings, I suppose, but why are healing surges in any way like "an item for more life"? Wands of Cure Light Wounds (D&D 3E phenomen mostly) and Potions of Healing (any edition) are "items that you click to get more life".

Healing Surges are something very different, because you cannot buy Healing Surges, you cannot collect them in droves, they are not rewarded in any way by play. They limit healing and they would do so even in a Monty Haul campaign where the party has collected 5,000 Potions of Cure Light Wounds. They limit healing in a way almost no video game has limited healing ever. The closest resemblance I am aware of in a video game is Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, where characters can only carry a limited amount of medi-gel with them to revive themselves, but even that is not identical, since you can still be revived by others (if you can be revived at all, if a Banshee bursts her arm through your chest, there is nothing that can be done for that wave).

And I experienced the 15 minute adventure day primarily in 3E because healing was not limited by something like healing surges. Healing was all over the place thanks to cheap healing items. And I believe these healing items lead to the introduction of healing surges, the idea being:

• 3E combat did - with the "proper" amountof magic items allow full health after each combat encounter. => 4E will assume full health at the start of any combat encounter.
• In 3E recovery was demanded only by daily resources, namely spells. => 4E introduced healing surges so that there were other daily resources that everyone would have and run out of, parallel to daily spells.
• In 3E spellcasters couldn't do much other than casting in combat, but this meant they couldn't keep up long thanks to all spells being daily => 4E introduced magic encounter powers and at-will powers
• In 3E combat could get repetitive with maneuvers that either always work or almost never work based on the feats you had => 4E had encounter and daily powers that gave you special maneuvers and gave you at-will powers with minor maneuver quality.
• In 3E using daily powers (spells) was very powerful and allowed certain classes to dominate when they could afford (or needed) using them => 4E gave everyone such encounter-dominating daily powers so no one took all the spotlight.

Mayb the solutions they found for these 3E phenomena was not the one everyone liked, and maybe some of them were not deemed problematic or experienced by some. But there were all good reasons for making these changes, and none of them had something to do with videogames.


But how much do wandering monsters really help? If the party ever decides to rest, it will have to face them. It seems to be a wise idea to rest early and often so you still have enough spells left for all those wandering monsters.

Time constraints cannot be in every adventure - and they also put a lot of pressure on the DM - because if he miscalculates the challenges in his game, he may end up having the PCs have rest not because they "novaed", but because they did the bes they could and still couldn't make it to the final time-critical encounter in time - or they die there, out of resources and overwhelmed.

And sure, the world moves on - but how much supplies do the NPCs have, how much new people can they recruit. Sure, they may change their base of operations - but any base of operation large enough to require extended rests for a party to deal with is difficult to move, and will probably set back other operations fo the enemy - so it may still end up being a net win for the party if the enemy has to move his base.

All these solutions ultimately put a lot of pressure on the DM, because he has to engineer scenarios for this to work. I prefer the DM to be able to stay focused on the core of the story, and wandering monsters and NPCs moving their base isn't one of them.


In my experience with Shadowrun 3E - casters always cast spells in ways to avoid all drain. And no one - neither caster nor street sam - sticks around long when he's injured.


Shadowrun is pretty much my example here - other than injuries (and drain is just a form of injury), everything else is not pure mechanical/metagame resource like "daily spells". You have to manage your ammo and grenades, of course, but that's pretty much it (and usually minor). The challenge in Shadowrun was how to use your abilities and how to pick your fights (including entirely avoiding them) for your best abilities.
Of course, within combats, one could argue that combat/magic/hacking/rigging pools where a form of metagame resource.

An even better example could be Cyberpunk, since it doesn't have spells at all.

I am not down playing the fact that many fans have had issues with prior editions. The issue I see is how do fix it where you don't totally alienate the fans who are not having as many issues.

I hate healing surges because they are not believable to me why does someone shouting at me seal my wounds. I can buy that magic can heal but not the power of shouting or just the power of rest. Again this is because of the way hit points are looked at I know the designers claim that it is more than just taking damage but the only way you lose them is by taking damage.

Now if they were temporary hit points where you drag your hurt butt up once more and deal with the enemy I would have an easier time swallowing them. Healing surges scream GAME to me.

If you only get spells back once in a 24 hour period then wandering monsters matter a lot. You can rest all you want but your spells don't refresh until the next morning. So if the players learn that you are not going to just let them sit there at say 10 AM in the morning and nothing bad is going to happen until the next day the they learn not to blow all their spells on the first encounter if it is not necessary.

No time constraints don't have to be in every single game but sometimes they need to be there to make any kind of sense. Rescue the princess, defeat the bad guy before the eclipse., cross the mountain passes before the snow, get a message back to the king that he is about te betrayed. The world should not stop just because the PCs do,

And yes sometimes things go bad for the PCs and they have to rest well in that case it comes under the it sucks and now things may be harder to accomplish or in some cases you lose this time so what do you do to pick up the pieces.

That is what happens when you use dice in a game if you don't always get the outcome you hope.

There is a lot you can do in 24 hours you can move all the treasure out in another direction, you can set traps and ambushes, you can make more undead. The list is long.

There is no way to cast a spell in Shadowrun in a way to avoid drain. There is only one way to avoid taking drain and that is hoping you roll enough successes to stage it down to nothing as you take drain those minuses starting adding up. Which is why tactically a mage should have at least one or two elementals bound to them. And have designed their mage to have a decent score in using a weapon.

In Shadowrun you don't just bug out if you take a little damage if you did you would never get anything done and you would get a rep for not being able to get the job done. If it gets bad you had better have a contract with doc wagon to come haul your wounded butt out of there nd make sure you always have your life monitor on. The best if you can afford it is to have a platinum contract then they will send a strike team who will fight to get you out of there.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=50987]CleverNickName[/MENTION], fair enough. I guess Im one of those who latched!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I hate healing surges because they are not believable to me why does someone shouting at me seal my wounds.

Possible explanations:

1. What wound? There was no wound, yo uwere just really tired but your comrade inspired you.
2. Oh, that wound. Yeah, it hurts a lot, but Bob the Warlord is right, we have to fight on! I can lie down when I am dead.

4E almost requires you to give up the idea that hit points = meat. If you can do that, you're fine, if you can't, I cannot really help you.

And no, being "hit" by a weapon may cause "damage", but that term is just a shorthand for exhaustion, bruises, injuries and all other stuff that takes the fight out of you.

If it was really physical damage in any edition of D&D, you would have to deal with stuff like gangrene or tetanus infections, and being slowed down by injures.

Hit Points either are videogamey on their own, or they are abstractions.

If you only get spells back once in a 24 hour period then wandering monsters matter a lot. You can rest all you want but your spells don't refresh until the next morning. So if the players learn that you are not going to just let them sit there at say 10 AM in the morning and nothing bad is going to happen until the next day the they learn not to blow all their spells on the first encounter if it is not necessary.

That just suggests that you need to rest earlier so you still have spells to deal with those wandering monsters. Also, if I am not resting, what am I doing instead? Fighting the non-wandering monsters in the dungeon? Am I expected to expend spells doing that or not? So if I fight monsters and NPCs for 12 hours and decide now it's time for a rest, does that mean I am still full of spells somehow so I can deal with those wanderings monsters? Or do they they not bother me since afte rall I did my mandatory 12 hour shift of adventuring and deserve a rest and every decent evil wandering monster respects that?

No time constraints don't have to be in every single game but sometimes they need to be there to make any kind of sense. Rescue the princess, defeat the bad guy before the eclipse., cross the mountain passes before the snow, get a message back to the king that he is about te betrayed. The world should not stop just because the PCs do,

How does this work in a more open-ended game, a sand bax or hex crawl or whatever, where the players set their goals? How many of those are time-boxed?

There is a lot you can do in 24 hours you can move all the treasure out in another direction, you can set traps and ambushes, you can make more undead. The list is long.

How fast do you think new traps can be made? Undead creation usually costs resources, how much has the enemy? Do you just handwave it? Ambushes just tend to mean that you create another 15 minute workday, if they actually work. And you can make ambushes even on a 12 hour workday - just get your damn dungeon organized, evil mastermind, and don't just let the party stroll through room by room!

There is no way to cast a spell in Shadowrun in a way to avoid drain. There is only one way to avoid taking drain and that is hoping you roll enough successes to stage it down to nothing as you take drain those minuses starting adding up.

That's what I mean - don'T cast spells at forces you can't handle. You'll usually get away with that, but you don't get Meteor Swarms for it either.

In Shadowrun you don't just bug out if you take a little damage if you did you would never get anything done and you would get a rep for not being able to get the job done. If it gets bad you had better have a contract with doc wagon to come haul your wounded butt out of there nd make sure you always have your life monitor on. The best if you can afford it is to have a platinum contract then they will send a strike team who will fight to get you out of there.

The trick is to not get hurt. That means rapidly defeat your enemies thanks to your high initiative, and to be armored heavily and generally use all the tricks at your disposal. Fact is, if you amount something like a moderate wound (in 3E at least), you cannot fight effectively anymore.

 

[FireLance]

I hate healing surges because they are not believable to me why does someone shouting at me seal my wounds.

Possible explanations:

1. What wound? There was no wound, yo uwere just really tired but your comrade inspired you.
2. Oh, that wound. Yeah, it hurts a lot, but Bob the Warlord is right, we have to fight on! I can lie down when I am dead.

Not to mention, healing surges (basic ideas: hit point recovery as a percentage of total hit points, daily limit to the number of times you can benefit from most, but not all, methods of hit point recovery) and non-magical hit point recovery (e.g. recovering hit points after a short rest, second wind, the warlord's inspiring word) are actually quite distinct. 4e has both, but you can have one without the other*, and it seems unfair to me to blame one for the perceived shortcomings of the other. That's a whole load of other, painfully long threads, though.

EDIT: * To elaborate: remove the ability to recover hit points after a short rest, the second wind action, and the warlord class, and you can have healing surges without non-magical hit point recovery. Every character still has healing surges, but he can only access them through magical means such as a cleric's healing word, a bard's majestic word or a magic item such as a potion of healing. Remove healing surges and you can still have a second wind mechanic (as in Star Wars Saga Edition) and non-magical hit point recovery during a short rest (as in the 5e preview, although you still need a healer's kit, and Hit Dice can be considered healing surges lite), and inspiring word can be limited on a uses per day basis (like spells and other special abilities).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Healing Surges did also fix another problem I had with hit points and healing (spells).

Why does "Cure Light Wounds" heal the serious, life threatening wound of a Low Level Character, but barely fixes a scratch on a High Level Character? That would really imply that a higher character level can somehow deal with even more grivious physical wounds than a low level character. Low Level Characters die when they are hit by an arrow, High Level Characters need 15 arrows stuck in their body? ANd how do they do this? DO they have more meat to stuck arrows into? Harder skin? Faster Regenerative capabilities?

Or is it actually the other way and they are still as dead mostly as a low level character by a single arrow, but their hit points represent their ability to avoid getting actually stuck with an arrow in the first place - so an arrow hit simply causes a smaller wound as it was mostly deflected or dodged at the last moment. But then, the Cure spells don't make sense anymore.

----

Of course ,that's highly tangential.

One thing that occured to me - the real problem of 15 minute adventure days is not really that it's 15 minute long. It is that it benefits one subset of the party and not the other, namely the guys with powerful daily abilities become more powerful than those without powerful daily abilities. And if you don't have the 15 minute adventuring day, the spellcasters may feel weak or unneeded since they don't really have much to contribute if they don't get to blow some spells.

 

[pemerton]

If you only get spells back once in a 24 hour period then wandering monsters matter a lot. You can rest all you want but your spells don't refresh until the next morning. So if the players learn that you are not going to just let them sit there at say 10 AM in the morning and nothing bad is going to happen until the next day the they learn not to blow all their spells on the first encounter if it is not necessary.

As I posted upthread, not everyone who finds that certain mechanics lead to an undesirable 15 minute day is in need of player education.

I, personally, have zero interest in playing a game in which wandering monsters figure prominently. They're a distraction from the real point of play.

The world should not stop just because the PCs do

Why not? Or to turn this from question to assertion: there are multiple ways to handle ingame causation and the passage of time, and "the world not stopping just because the PCs do" is just one of them.

Suppose that I want a "Balrog on the bridge of Moria" moment in my game. One way is to wait for the dice to line up so that the appearance of the Balrog, the readiness of the goblins etc all correlates perfectly with the time that the PCs happen to be crossing the bridge, despite all their prior resting, arguing etc. Another way is to stage the scene when they get to the bridge. I personally tend to prefer the latter approach.

Ron Edwards has some things to say about how to handle the passage of time and scene framing:

I'll discuss two elements of Resolution which are rarely recognized: the treatment of in-game time and space. These are a big deal in Simulationist play as universal and consistent constraints, which must apply equally to any part of the imagined universe, at any point during play.

To talk about this, let's break the issue down a little:

*In-game time occurs regarding the actually-played imaginary moments and events. It's best expressed by combat mechanics, which in Simulationist play are often extremely well-defined in terms of seconds and actions, but also by movement rates at various scales, starship travel times, and similar things.

*Metagame time is rarely discussed openly, but it's the crucial one. It refers to time-lapse among really-played scenes: can someone get to the castle before someone else kills the king; can someone fly across Detroit before someone else detonates the Mind Bomb. Metagame time isn't "played," but its management is a central issue for scene-framing and the outcome of the session as a whole. . .​

Gygax's text [the AD&D DMG] perfectly states the Simulationist view of in-game time. It is a causal constraint on the other sorts. . . It works in-to-out. In-game time at the fine-grained level (rounds, seconds, actions, movement rates) sets incontrovertible, foundation material for making judgments about hours, days, cross-town movment, and who gets where in what order. I recommend anyone who's interested to the text of DC Heroes for some of the most explicit text available on this issue throughout the book.

. . .

Concrete example[ of] Simulationism over-riding Narrativism . . .

*The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).​

I'm personally not interested in the DC Heroes approach. I'm happy for the princess to die, or the building to be blown up, but it's not going to happen offscreen, as a result of (what Edwards is calling) metagame time. It will happen onscreen, as an element of and immediate consequence of actual play.