Five-Minute Workday Article

[Dannyalcatraz]

Groups with ineffective casters are less likely to see the short adventuring day problem.

With respect, I think you have that backwards.

I've been playing in groups with one guy since 1985: 80% of his PCs are wizards, most with as optimized a spell list as any you'd see here. He rarely casts more than a few spells per encounter, and often has spells left at the end of the day.

And as I've stated before- no 15MWD.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Then perhaps, for those people, the system IS the problem, and they should try another FRPG with mechanics more to their liking, instead of trying to change D&D into something else.

Many people like Vancian magic- myself included- why take away their fun when you don't have to?

We've had 5 years of D&D without it, more if we include the time between the announcement of 5E and it's eventual release. Like it or not, non-vancian magic a part of D&D now, same as Vancian magic. Why take away our fun?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) D&D has always had non-Vancian elements, so their inclusion in the game doesn't bug me- their predominance does.

2) Vancian magic is the rarer mechanic- strip it from D&D, and the Vanceophiles will have few, if any- alternative games from which to choose to scratch that itch. In contrast, if D&D returns to a more Vancian playstyle, those who hate the mechanic will still have dozens of games in RPG stores from which to choose. I think it presents a unique game experience worth preserving AND playing.

 

[pemerton]

I imagine it will only be as important as the "one monster per character" or "encounter XP" threshold in 4e.

That is, you can have a 4e "encounter" with 3 minions as your only encounter for the day if you want. It isn't well balanced -- it's super-easy, something I personally wouldn't want to even roll dice for -- but you can certainly have it. If you have a lot of encounters like this, or it most of your encounters are like this, your controllers dominate.

It's fairly straightforward to run a below-EL encounter in 4e in which controllers don't dominate - many minions attacking from different positions, or multiple below-par standards, or some combination of the above. I certainly don't need to run the equivalent of 4 EPL encounters to make intraparty balance work - I know this from experience.

What are we meant to be going "backwards" on here?

Exactly what I've just described - namely, the ability to run encounters of varied strengths and at varied numbers and intervals without destabilising intraparty balance. Which is a consequence of some prominent mechanical features of 4e - the relatively reduced significance of daily compared to encounter and at-will powers; the fact that you start each encounter at max hp regardless of whether you have 1 or 10 healing surges remaining; the fact that all pre-Essentials classes have the same nova potential.

The DM takes their daily budget of XP, and plans out their scenes. A skirmish here, some puzzle or trap there, topped off with a mini-Boss. It's really no different from 4e now, except now you have a further meta-framing device to help design your stories.

I don't see where there's any railroading

This need to plan out is exactly the railroading that I am concerned about. I want each new scene to be the upshot of the previous one as actually resolved, in play. Not to be planned in advance in order to make my XP budget work.

All Mearls is talking about is a tool to gauge how much a party might have to face before taking a rest. And DMs are entirely free to ignore it.

But the consequence of this, as Mearls himself points out, is that the balance of effectiveness between casters and noncasters will be upset. Which, as Mustrum Ridcully has been pointing out, is the main problem with the 15 minute day in combination with variable nova potential across classes.

Whatever rules and pacing ideas you instituted in your current D&D edition of choice to combat this same exact problem (which has existed in every edition of D&D up to this point whether you want to admit it or not)...

...use that for 5E.

I've identified these upthread. I've played all-caster games. I've played games in which casters are nerfed so that, when nova-ing, they reach parity with non-casters. And I've played 4e, which has roughly uniform nova potential across classes. The second and third of these are mechanical solutions. The fact that 4e delivered it without me having to rewrite the system myself was a significant reason for me to choose it over Rolemaster to run gonzo/mythic fantasy.

4E minimizes the problem at a system level, by reducing the impact of the Daily nova and equalizing daily resources across all (non-essentials)classes. 5E appears to offer neither.

Exactly this.

 

[Aenghus]

With respect, I think you have that backwards.

I've been playing in groups with one guy since 1985: 80% of his PCs are wizards, most with as optimized a spell list as any you'd see here. He rarely casts more than a few spells per encounter, and often has spells left at the end of the day.

And as I've stated before- no 15MWD.

I did say "less likely" not "won't". I'll spell out my reasoning, though. I find there's a much higher level of system mastery needed to play a caster competently over a non-caster. And a badly played caster doesn't pull his or her weight in the party and so their recharge cycle is less relevant to party plans, and they are less likely to cater to them in party scheduling.

The play style of your wizard player sounds similar to the way I tend to play wizards in relevant editions of the game, carefully rationing out spellpower over the day. I don't see why this needs to be the only viable way of playing a wizard though.

It would be nice for the future of D&D if there were wizard-type class options for less patient players as well. I find a bunch of players are attracted to the class for flavour reasons and don't want to ration their power use in this way.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What is it about "for me, DM intervention and playstyle changes do not solve this problem to a satisfactory degree" that is so damn hard to understand?

Also, most of the solutions that go down the playstyle/DM line of thought include preserving the Vancian/per-day magic system as one of their premises. For people who have no love for that system and don't take that premise for granted, those solutions are very hollow. The root of the problem is per-day resources, and for people who don't hold per-day magic to be a sacred cow the obvious solution is that per-day needs to change some how.

I dont think it is hard for people to understand. I do grasp that lots of people want an imbedded mechanical solution to this. But for many of us, such a solution is ruinous to our enjoyment of D&D. We like vancian spells per day. If they remove or change vancian spells, people like me wont play.

That said I love plenty of games that don't use levels, stats, vancian magic, classes, etc. My taste in rpgs is quite broad. But for me, vancian casting is a critical part of what makes D&D the game it is, and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. If they turn d&d into a different game, then they face the problem of having to sell me on that game from square one. Whereas I have already bought into D&D and am willing to play and buy it.

 

[pemerton]

What is it about "for me, DM intervention and playstyle changes do not solve this problem to a satisfactory degree" that is so damn hard to understand?

The other thing that seems hard to convey that the main issue is not the inanity of the 15 minute day - though that can be inane sometimes - but rather the destabilisation of balance across classes having different nova potential.

For me resource management and pushing on to your limits is one of the biggest appeals of DnD.

If you read through this thread, most of those who are concerned about the 15 minute day are not objecting to resource management. They are objecting to PCs being on different resource schedules, such that departures from a mechanically-assumed number of encounters (or rounds of combat, or XP of foes) per day destabilises the balance between those PCs, generally in favour of those (like casters) with high nova potential (because the mechanics permit them to spend all their resources in one rapid burst).

There is already a published version of D&D that maintains a sophisticated resource management economy, but doesn't give rise to the concern that I have just articulated, namely, 4e.

I think it is obvious to everyone that D&Dnext is going to be very different from 4e. But it is equally natural for those who are playing a version of D&D that offers a mechanical solution to the problem Mearls is talking about to be somewhat dissapointed by his failure to acknowledge that he is already publishing a version of the game that solves the problem. And his failure to canvass the range of other solutions that might be available, such as some of the milestone variants that have been mentioned in this and other threads.

Then perhaps, for those people, the system IS the problem, and they should try another FRPG with mechanics more to their liking, instead of trying to change D&D into something else.

And now we seem to be back in that strange world where 4e is not an edition of D&D, and so ought to have no bearing on D&Dnext design.

I can't speak for thecasualoblivion, but for several posters on this (and related threads) there is a version of D&D that solves the problem of nova-induced imbalance, namely, pre-Essentials 4e, which gives every class more-or-less equal nova potential, and does not require any minimum number of combats or XP or rounds in order to preserve intraparty balance.

 

[Bedrockgames]

We've had 5 years of D&D without it, more if we include the time between the announcement of 5E and it's eventual release. Like it or not, non-vancian magic a part of D&D now, same as Vancian magic. Why take away our fun?

D&D has long had nonvancian magic at the edges. I am not opposed to including other magical mechanics in the game. But if you take vancian out, make wizards and clerics non vancian, I truly believe 5E will fail.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I don't want to get rid of Vancian magic, because I like it a lot. However, the main reason that 3E made the 15 minute work day that much more prominent was that it used a naive solution for the problem of "low-level wizard are often under-powered." Pile on more Vancian spells, they aren't under-powered anymore, but you do magnify whatever negative effects are in Vancian spells. This should be obvious, in the same way that a few neighbors in your apartment building running their radio a tad too lad is annoying but tolerable, while half the complex hooking up their systems to guitar amps and turning them up to 11 is not.

Adding low-powered at-will spells instead of scalable Vancian slots are one way to solve that. Giving the wizards a wider range of useful mundane skills and maybe d6 hit points is another. Heck, just being able to use a crossbow instead of throwing daggers can be part of a solution. Or you can go with the Arcana Unearthed/Evolved intent (if not always execution) of making the spells generally less powerful but more plentiful/flexible.

Even the 3E kick of adding a lot more slots can work, if you are willing to impose sharp limits elsewhere. Let rest recharge one spell level per hour of rest, plus caster ability mod,(thus a 3rd level spell taking 3 hours by itself), double or triple when in a secure, calm location, half when interrupted in a dangerous location. That's 8-12+Mod spell levels in the dungeon, 4-6 (+ Half mod) if a wandering monsters drop by--enough to get back a few key spells or several smaller ones, but by 4th or 5th level, a typical 5E caster is unable to restock completely depleted spells in a single rest.

All or nothing resources really push the players towards "all". The more disproportionate a character's resources skew towards all or nothing, the more the push will be felt. (That's also a criticism of overnight healing of all hit points, though in 4E it would have been significantly muted had hit points been largely restored, but surges not--as then the hit points become almost pure combat pacing while surges become the real resource.) How you change the proportion doesn't matter so much as changing it somehow. Add resources that aren't all or nothing. Drop resources that are. Change resources that are all or nothing so that they are no longer all or nothing. And so forth. There's a point at which the music becomes tolerable again.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's fairly straightforward to run a below-EL encounter in 4e in which controllers don't dominate - many minions attacking from different positions, or multiple below-par standards, or some combination of the above. I certainly don't need to run the equivalent of 4 EPL encounters to make intraparty balance work - I know this from experience.

You're being a bit overly-specific. My example was meant to show that 5e won't necessarily be any more strict about what you MUST include in a day than 4e was.

If you skew the inputs, your outputs will be skewed. If you use a preponderance of minions, your controllers will feel mightier and your strikers and defenders will feel weaker. If you use a lot of brutes and artillery, your leaders and defenders might shine. With solos, strikers and defenders work their magic. If you have only one encounter in any given day, that day, the Daily abilities might dominate. If you always have 3+ encounters on each day, At-Wills and Encounters get better.If you use a variety, over time, it's not a significant deal: everyone does their thing and no one feels left out. If you run a game wherein your only encounters are ever solos, that's going to skew things.

There's no game system in existence wherein variety is a possibility that does not have this skew. If you take a game capable of modeling a lancing competition between knights and also picking pockets, and then arrange your game so that most of the time is spent picking pockets, those who invested in mounted combat are not going to contribute as much. And vice-versa. In order to run this hypothetical game of Soldiers & Skullduggery in a "balanced" way, you'll need to include a variety: picking pockets AND mounted combat!

That's not a strict rule. It's a guideline for balance. It could be a strict rule (YOU MUST ALTERNATE YOUR SOLDIERS WITH YOUR SKULLDUGGERY EVERY HALF HOUR OF GAME PLAY), but I think most folks would rather rightly balk at such a thing.

Exactly what I've just described - namely, the ability to run encounters of varied strengths and at varied numbers and intervals without destabilising intraparty balance. Which is a consequence of some prominent mechanical features of 4e - the relatively reduced significance of daily compared to encounter and at-will powers; the fact that you start each encounter at max hp regardless of whether you have 1 or 10 healing surges remaining; the fact that all pre-Essentials classes have the same nova potential.

Let us not mistake a guideline for an absolute and then get all Chicken Little, here. You've got the 5e rules in front of you right now, with all their apparently game-breaking Vancian magic, right? Does anything on that page limit your ability to run encounters of varied strengths at varied numbers and intervals? Or has my experience with different monsters, different response rates, different caves, etc. anomalous? Is my reading of the part where they leave the encounter rates up to DM judgement misaligned?

Or, quite possibly, is it actually not as disastrous as it is being made out to be, here?