Five-Minute Workday Article

[ExploderWizard]

Get rid of the whole 'expected fights per day' nonsense, base XP on something other than 'defeating encounters', do away with 'at-will' magic and bring back sensible limitations on casters and the problem will fix itself.

As for a magical mechanical solution? There isn't one. Make the game about the adventures instead of all about the rules is a good start.

 

[Badapple]

Hi Badapple! I have a request - would you mind not explicitly setting the size, font, and (especially) colour of your posts? I read the board in the "Child of Black" format, so text set to WHITE doesn't show up for me.

Hello! When I typed up my post, I actually composed it in Word and then pasted it on to this message board. (Makes it easier to spellcheck, and leave and come back without losing my post due to getting timed out). For whatever reason on this EN site, when I do that though my font comes out black though and this message board's default background is black so the post comes out unreadable. So then I edit the post and highlight the text and change it to white manually and it looks ok on my screen. Sorry it doesn't show up well on yours.

For a quick reply like this though, I'm not pasting text in from another place, I'm just hitting the reply button and typing away.

 

[Zaukrie]

The 5minute workday has always been a dm and playstyle issue. I have never had that problem in over 30years of gaming. It just is not a style that anyone I played with did on a routine basis. For all this board's talk of immersion, this problem seems to be player driven, in that they play a game, rather than immerse themselves in the world. Given that, my question would be, are both camps having fun? If so, how is this a problem? If not, why keep playing a way that isn't fun?

Sent using Tapatalk 2

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Isn't the fighter "nova" ability actually coming from its theme?

"Fighter's Surge" is a class feature, not derived from the slayer theme. 2nd level abilities all appear to be class features in the playtest characters.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Get rid of the whole 'expected fights per day' nonsense, base XP on something other than 'defeating encounters', do away with 'at-will' magic and bring back sensible limitations on casters and the problem will fix itself.

As for a magical mechanical solution? There isn't one. Make the game about the adventures instead of all about the rules is a good start.

This has provoked an interesting idea in my head. There are many ways to award XP in different games (I believe there was a frontpage discussion about this some time ago). Many people talk about increasing encounter difficulty or throwing wandering monsters at parties who rest too frequently, when this is exactly what they want: more XP.

Instead, give far less XP for defeating a monster (if any) and make the majority of XP come from quest completion. Every day that goes by before completing a quest, that XP total drops, at a rate appropriate to the quest. It may sound a little gamist, but throws an interesting dynamic into decisions about resting. I could imagine two different factions offering essentially the same quest, one with a high starting XP and rapid decline, the other with low starting XP and gentle decline. How confident does the party feel?

 

[TerraDave]

I think its interesting that he decided to step into this debate. Its half an answer, but its right, given its half.

Its more interesting to watch how troubled some people are about, say, daily resources. (Though to be fair, there are those, like myself, that think getting rid of such resources would also be a disaster...and that this is really a non-issue).

The thing is that 5E is really meant to tap into years of D&D success, and that probably means not messing with how most people play with it too much, unless there is a clear, broad-based benefit. It would just be self defeating, no matter how much screaming there is on the internet

 

[erleni]

"Fighter's Surge" is a class feature, not derived from the slayer theme. 2nd level abilities all appear to be class features in the playtest characters.

Ok. I didn't have the playtest docs at hand so I was not sure. Anyway it's a very limited nova ability compared to what a caster can do.

 

[Iosue]

Man, I really don't get the backlash against this. Nor can I follow it, as it seems people are jumping to different conclusions based on different readings of the article that I'm just not seeing.

Here's how I see the article.
1. One of 4e's strong points are the tight math and the DM tools that allow you to create encounters at the difficulty you want to make them.

2. To alleviate the 5, 15-minute workday problem, 4e made the encounter the focal point of design, and introduced encounter powers.

3. Because 5e, at its core, is not going to use AED type powers, they need a new model for the XP math. For this reason, the Encounter is being stretched out to a whole day.

4. This is purely a guide for DMs to create adventures. They can choose an XP budget, just like they did with Encounters in 4e, and then create either a big huge battle, or many shorter battles, or combinations thereof. A DM can likewise ignore it completely. No battles that day? No problem. The PCs can still get XP from exploration and interaction.

 

[Iosue]

Hello! When I typed up my post, I actually composed it in Word and then pasted it on to this message board. (Makes it easier to spellcheck, and leave and come back without losing my post due to getting timed out). For whatever reason on this EN site, when I do that though my font comes out black though and this message board's default background is black so the post comes out unreadable. So then I edit the post and highlight the text and change it to white manually and it looks ok on my screen. Sorry it doesn't show up well on yours.

Are you just Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V'ing it? If you right-click when you paste, there should be on option for pasting just as plain text. If you do that, the forum will post it using format defaults, and it'll appear on any skin.

 

[Herschel]

So, we're down to five minutes? It was a fifteen-minute day in 3e.

I always felt that the 15-min AD was a playstyle issue anyway. After all, in 4e there is not a single thing stopping the party from throwing their every Daily power, magic item, and Action Point at the very first encounter, and then declaring that they were taking a rest. Indeed, that's the sensible approach to dugneon-crawling, just like having the caster's go nova in 3e.

Except you need actions to sustain those zones/effects, you can only have one stance active at a time and the pesky rule about only being able yto benefit from one extended rest in a 24-hour period anyway.