Out of curiosity, for the people who've experienced the 15 minute work day, have you found it in games other than D&D?
In Rolemaster I've found it to be a huge issue.
In one campaign, it ended up that everyone played casters - so the whole party was on a daily nova/recharge cycle.
In another campaign, we nerfed casters (by limiting spell selection and eliminating the default spell-buffing items) so that, when they nova-ed, they were about as good as non-casters.
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.
I can't see how this article is objectionable. The only two ways around short workdays are either:
a) everything is a per-encounter ability (including hp), so the "workday" becomes meaningless,
b) the DM pacing the adventure so the party isn't forced to blow too many (limited) resources early.
I don't really understand. The DM's role isn't to combat the players, it's just to facilitate the ongoing game, the stories, adventures and challenges.
If there's an orc stronghold that needs raiding, then if you dive in, burn all your resources immediately and decide to retreat then they will respond. They'll call up reinforcements, attack the players' camp, build barricades and so on.
The issue isn't about stopping to rest - it's about the imbalance between nova-ing classes (eg spellcasters) and other classes (eg fighters and rogues).
Mearls even notes the problem in the column, but doesn't say anything about how to handle it.
According to some posters on this site, that does not avoid this, and they have noted the existence of the 15MWD in 4Ed.
The main point is, that in 4e (pre-Essentials) it won't cause a balance problem between PCs with different classes.
Why didn't this seem to be as much of a problem in older editions? Module/adventure design typically had wandering monsters, no safe rest zones, or a time limit.
It was an issue when I GMed Against the Giant in the mid-80s.
The day now is our encounter!Just as in 4e, you were doing encounters in waves and such to allow a bit of a breather and to make it more dynamic, that design principle is now used for the whole day.
the Encounter is being stretched out to a whole day.
The problem with this is that the encounter is a natural unit of play for many playstyles. (Ie all those based on strong scene framing.) Whereas "the day" is an arbitrary unit of ingame time - unless you change it in the sort of way that [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] and [MENTION=71811]Badapple[/MENTION] have talked about.
For me, at least, there seems to be an element of railroading in mandating a precise number of rounds of combat between rests. Under this approach, how do the players get to shape what happens in the gameworld?
I have every confidence that those who don't like vancian magic will be able to swap it out. In fact, if you just
time shift your daily rest to happen after every encounter, and put all your requisite monsters into each encounter (or have some sort of solo or super-solo encounter),
you've just gotten rid of Daily magic with one easy rule.
But I still have to have encounters of a minimum level of dangerousness to balance fighters and rogues against casters - otherwise the casters will dominate, as Mearls himself notes. This is not a requirement in 4e, and I'm not sure I want to go backwards in this respect.
I don´t want the 4 encounters assumed per day as in 4e
There is no "assumed encounters per day" in 4e. You can run easy encounters, or challenging ones, at a very wide variation in encounters per day, because what makes an encounter challenging is somewhat independent of a party's overall resources, because the mechanics (the need to unlock healing surges, action points, pre-Essentials magic item usage) put limits on the amount of a party's total resources that it can deploy in any given encounter.
I wonder which playstyles promote the 5-minute workday and which don't.
For me, it's been a big issue in classic D&D and Rolemaster, where casters are ineffective without their daily resources, and a non-issue in 4e, where healing surges provide the only hard cap, and the players have shown they can win level-equivalent combats on encounter powers and three healing surges across a party of 5 PCs.
So for my group, at least, they will push on with their PCs as long as (i) they have viable resources to draw on, and (ii) they are confident they won't be hosed.
These two things are related, but (i) is more a question of active resources available, whereas (ii) is more about the passive buffer against bad luck. Hence why healing surges tend to be a hard cap in 4e play.
The mechanics I need, then, are mechanics that make it transparent to the players what their resources are (4e is particularly good at this, I think) and that makes it easy for me, as GM, to build encounters that are of a reliable level of difficulty. Unpredictability or excessive swinginess reduces the players' confidence that they won't be hosed, which in turn reduces their confidence that they have viable resources to draw on, which in turn encourages them to rest to maximise their available resources.
If you get into a fight, lose some HP, and there's no cost to getting them back - might as well get them back.
Within reason. If I'm hungry, a sandwhich might do. It's not necessarily rational or reasonable to hold out for a whole truck of sandwhiches, even if I've got reason to think one might come by any moment.
4e sends the signals here especially clearly, via its hp/healing surge mechanic. But even without that mechanic, if it's clear that a typical combat is not going to do more than X damage per PC, then a buffer of 2X hp is probably enough for rational and reasonable players. Which is why I think reliable encounter building tools are so important. (Of course, this is also risking the production of encounters that are boring until the last one for the day, because before then no one is at risk of dropping - but this is a different pacing consequence of the 4e hp/surge system. Though the elegance of that system is demonstrated by the way it simultaneously helps resolve too quite different pacing issues, of boring attrition combats and the 15-minute day.)
