Five-Minute Workday Article

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Not at all.

I respect certain things about 4Ed. I think there are certain things they did that ware better than in any other iteration of the game, such as the handling of the Warlock, the introduction of an action point mechanism, actual ritual magic (which should have been better implemented, but hey!) and making all stats matter to the battle optimizers.

Stronger than that, I actually like the game as a game; it IS fun to play. So I do think it's fair to include it as a source of design inspiration. (But I would say that anyway: prior revisions have had elements that had been inspired by competitor's games.)

I never said 4Ed wasn't an edition of D&D...but I have often said that it doesn't feel like one, and the magic system is a BIG reason why. The radical reworking of the magic system so that Vancian magic was, essentially, merely an appendix, is extremely off-putting to many.

Given the number of high-quality FRPGs that don't use Vancian magic at all, it is a puzzler for that subset who enjoy Vancian magic that D&D has to change one of its unique characteristics in order to appeal to players who already have other options.

Hence, the suggestion.

Personally, I believe you could retain a lot of the Vancian magic style.
Say, keep the wizard as it is now in the playtest.

But now look at the non-spellcasters. Give them daily resources. They don't need to work like spells or powers. The Fighter already can a few times per day take an extra action. We don't know yet how this scales, but I think fundamentally, even if the fighter has exactly as many extra actions per day as the Wizard, it won't be enough, since the Wizard abilities tend to be stronger than a single melee or ranged attack is.

So come up with additional stuff. At the level Wizard gets his first save or die spell, give the Fighter a hit and kill attack maneuver. When the Cleric gets his first Cure Serious Wounds, give the Fighter a unique fighting stance that generates temporary hit points until he ends it. When the Wizard can cast Knock, the Rogue gets an ability something that knocks it open.

At higher level, offer new types of feats or themes that let the non-casters pick up magical tricks, like dimension door. Or cast rituals like Teleport.

You don't need to give the Wizard AEDU to fix the balance problem. You just need to give the non-spellcasters the D.

The only problem is that there are people out there that think daily powers cannot be non-magical, and will refuse an edition with such a solution. That may already be a problem right now, though.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Personally, I believe you could retain a lot of the Vancian magic style.
Say, keep the wizard as it is now in the playtest.

But now look at the non-spellcasters. Give them daily resources. They don't need to work like spells or powers. The Fighter already can a few times per day take an extra action. We don't know yet how this scales, but I think fundamentally, even if the fighter has exactly as many extra actions per day as the Wizard, it won't be enough, since the Wizard abilities tend to be stronger than a single melee or ranged attack is.

So come up with additional stuff. At the level Wizard gets his first save or die spell, give the Fighter a hit and kill attack maneuver. When the Cleric gets his first Cure Serious Wounds, give the Fighter a unique fighting stance that generates temporary hit points until he ends it. When the Wizard can cast Knock, the Rogue gets an ability something that knocks it open.

At higher level, offer new types of feats or themes that let the non-casters pick up magical tricks, like dimension door. Or cast rituals like Teleport.

You don't need to give the Wizard AEDU to fix the balance problem. You just need to give the non-spellcasters the D.

The only problem is that there are people out there that think daily powers cannot be non-magical, and will refuse an edition with such a solution. That may already be a problem right now, though.

It doesn't solve the entire issue. The other half of the imbalance problem is that daily powered classes are unbalanced against the encounters themselves if you deviate from the guidelines. If there is only one encounter, they just nuke it with daily powers. You could just have an epic encounter that requires going nova, but maybe you don't want to for story reasons or that it would take longer to resolve than you want.

Daily powers balanced around attrition force that attrition, if you care about balance. You can't run a low combat game without dumping balance or DM heavy-handedness, and you can't vary the level of combat between adventures without the same.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

At the same time, many people thought when 4E dumped Vancian magic "Finally, we get a magic system that doesn't suck!" and these people have less an zero desire to go back. The numbers of the different attitudes can be quibbled over, but you can't dismiss the not wanting to go back attitude out of hand.

I'm not dismissing the "not wanting to go back" crew- in a certain sense, the rubicon was crossed with the release of 4Ed.

I'm making the observation that the key difference is in number of alternatives available if Vancian magic disappears from D&D:

Fans of Vance: few choices- mostly 3.5 clones.

Vance dislikers: the majority of the FRPG market

I don't think anyone has argued that all casters in 5Ed need to be Vancian- I know I haven't- but the pro-Vancians would like the iconic Wizard at least to return to its roots.

And even THAT doesn't neccessarily mean the Wizard is just photocopied from 3.5. For example, when I first heard of 4Ed being developed, I thought the mechanics & role of Reserve feats might be tweaked & expanded, perhaps even baked into the Wizard class, giving the class a way to do something "magical" all the time...though still variable from PC to PC.

 

[mlund]

In the end, it is all about Momentum. Drama, action, comedy - they all live and die based on timing. "Alpha Strike. Rest. Alpha Strike. Rest," is terrible timing. There's no momentum - it tends to rob the game of gravitas, urgency, and immersion. Yet the game's mechanics themselves encourage this. Depleted resources increase risk without any corresponding increase in rewards. It is a sucker's bet as the momentum of sequential encounters is complete against the interests of player characters.

If momentum boosted character performance (bonuses to hit, damage, HP, spells, etc.) directly it might be harder to keep balance within a given adventure. Momentum boosting loot is a kettle of fish that might break verisimilitude for some people.

So how else do you motivate players focused on risk-reward for charging headlong into escalating danger?

Escalating Experience Points

Back in AD&D who ever skipped out on the 10% XP boost from having a high score in a key attribute? Crazy people, that's who.

Give players some sort of progressive multiplier for XP that resets with an Extended Rest. Something like this: XP * (.9 + (.1 * E)) where E is the number of Encounters between rests and XP is Experience Points accumulated in those encounters.

A 1 Encounter work-day gives you regular XP for the encounter.
A 2 Encounter work-day gives you 110% XP for both encounters.
A 3 Encounter work-day gives you 120% XP for all 3 encounters.

If you somehow manage to clear 11 Encounters between extended rests you get Double XP for the day - and your poor character earned it.

As to a nice fluffy rule-book text:

"Once the party takes an Extended Rest tally the total experience points budgeted to challenges defeated by the party since the last Extended Rest. For each encounter beyond the first increase the awarded XP by 10%. So if the party defeated 4 encounters worth a total of 2000 XP the total reward would be 2,600 XP (130% of 1000XP) divided among the party members."

It's a little bit of math, but nothing outside the scope of what you'd see in the AD&D re-release books they are selling now. Plus it's DM-specific math so it doesn't slow down the game.

- Marty Lund

 

[keterys]

You'd probably have to do it based on total XP for the day, rather than # of encounters.

That is to say, if someone faces 10 encounters each 1 kobold, that's not necessarily worth more xp than 1 encounter with 10 kobolds or 5 encounters with 2 kobolds.

But it's probably good to reward the person who faces 10 encounters with 5 kobolds.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It doesn't solve the entire issue. The other half of the imbalance problem is that daily powered classes are unbalanced against the encounters themselves if you deviate from the guidelines. If there is only one encounter, they just nuke it with daily powers. You could just have an epic encounter that requires going nova, but maybe you don't want to for story reasons or that it would take longer to resolve than you want.

Daily powers balanced around attrition force that attrition, if you care about balance. You can't run a low combat game without dumping balance or DM heavy-handedness, and you can't vary the level of combat between adventures without the same.

I think that is a minor issue. If you want the combat to be challenging, you can always do it (without imbalancing the characters against each other), and if you have reasons not to do so, well, don't and accept that the encounter will be easy. It is not that difficult, mechanically speaking, to add NPCs or adjust NPC levels usually. But it's very difficult to impossible to create encounters that challenge a weak character and a strong character equally.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

You'd probably have to do it based on total XP for the day, rather than # of encounters.

That is to say, if someone faces 10 encounters each 1 kobold, that's not necessarily worth more xp than 1 encounter with 10 kobolds or 5 encounters with 2 kobolds.

But it's probably good to reward the person who faces 10 encounters with 5 kobolds.

Yes. Just put the XP award on a logarithmic scale, with a chart that shows how to adjust the total. There's an expected value that is considered baseline for a given level, and then a multiplier to reduce or increase the stated amount by creatures and straight challenge based on the log of the given XP.

It's true that you'll get XP more safely by fighting four or five fights in one "day" and adding them all up rather than fighting those same opponents in fewer fights. OTOH, the fewer fights will allow the players to maximize their big guns.

Though I think the same principle that Marty expounded applied to something besides XP might be a better fit in the long run, leaving XP as a character growth pacing mechanism for the default. (Using XP as a reward works well in a subset of playstyles.) A more fully developed action point currency would be my first candidate.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I think that is a minor issue. If you want the combat to be challenging, you can always do it (without imbalancing the characters against each other), and if you have reasons not to do so, well, don't and accept that the encounter will be easy. It is not that difficult, mechanically speaking, to add NPCs or adjust NPC levels usually. But it's very difficult to impossible to create encounters that challenge a weak character and a strong character equally.

Making the encounter more challenging inevitably involved making the encounter take longer to resolve. If the point having less encounters was to spend less time on them, it's not a minor issue. If the plot doesn't call for multiple combats but also doesn't call for a big epic grindfest, it's not a minor issue.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The only problem is that there are people out there that think daily powers cannot be non-magical, and will refuse an edition with such a solution. That may already be a problem right now, though.

The thing is, while you could add martial dailies or whatever back into the core of the game, they aren't really necessary to achieve a balanced result. There's no sense in raising the specter of how you justify that in fiction, and alienating everyone who looked at those black bars in 4e and snubbed their noses at it, since it's not really necessary. Not everyone needs daily resources in order to have balance. They CAN, but they needn't. Putting them in doesn't gain you anything that simply paying attention to the XP totals of your adventuring day doesn't give you, and it looses you a chunk of the public who shall brook no Fighter Daily.

That said, you certainly don't hear quite as much of an outcry over the Fighter's Surge (possibly in part due to it not being a rigidly defined power, but more a general resource), so that might be a track they can take, to a limited degree. But even that doesn't come 'till 3rd level, and I haven't heard a peep out of any tests that I've undergone about the 15 minute work day, so it STILL seems superfluous to me. If part of the goal in the core is to deliver a raw bare-bones D&D experience that is fun to play, martial dailies are NOT a requirement. They're fine, they're just inessential, which makes them a great option, but perhaps not an assumed part of the core, if the core is trying to do "bare-bones D&D."

I, personally, am kind of fond of the Fighter's Surge, mostly for how it splits that hair on martial dailies. I recognize, though, that it isn't something required for a balanced game, merely a fun option.

 

[Balesir]

Pool of Radiance (a 1E-based game) was absolutely affected by the 15-minute adventuring day, especially at low levels. Okay, technically, it was the hour-long adventuring day, but 30 minutes of that was leaving town and walking into the Slums.

Yep - I've been playing this again recently as "research" for a 4e conversion I'm hoping to run, and a 15MAD (OK, or 60MAD, or whatever) is absolutely the optimum strategy for it. The main reason to do a second fight at L1 is so that the MU can throw all the darts she carries in order to get carrying capacity to carry out more kibble to sell...