What to do about the 15-minute work day?

[Tony Vargas]

On the other hand, if the system addressed the innate defect and had some sort of reward to encourage players to accept the additional risk that deviating from the Nova-Rest-Nova macro entails, there'd be a lot less need for sticks.

Or if the system simply didn't encourage the Nova-Rest-Nova thing in the first place, of course.

 

[Lwaxy]

"Let's just hit it with everything we got, then sleep for the rest of the day and get our spells back. You know, take a fifteen-minute workday."

Happened to me once, a while back. I just made it clear that they had just gotten up and weren't tired, so they would not be able to sleep. And none of them had any spells for a restful sleep, either. Solved the issue quickly.

 

[MarkB]

Happened to me once, a while back. I just made it clear that they had just gotten up and weren't tired, so they would not be able to sleep. And none of them had any spells for a restful sleep, either. Solved the issue quickly.

4e does that explicitly - you can't benefit from an extended rest until at least 12 hours after your last one - and 3e effectively enforced it for divine casters, who don't get their spells back immediately after resting, but must instead meditate at a specific time of day.

However, this often just results in the players taking 24 hours off to rest instead of 8.

It can also screw things up even for legitimate parties, if an area is structured awkwardly. I've been playing a 4e game using one of the WotC-published epic-tier modules, and whilst our party have ample options to safely retreat and rest, the dungeons in the module tend to consist of endless strings of rooms with combat encounters and not much else to do. The result is that, even without any novas, we can easily go through 6-8 encounters and be down to our last few healing surges within only a couple of hours of in-game time, and be in desperate need of retreating to rest while still having ten hours left on the clock.

It'd be nice to find a solution to the two-hour working day as well.

 

[Jester David]

Question:
Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Question:
Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?

Depends. If you always come up with reasons why the PCs can't do it, I think it's eliminated that careful playstyle. If you reduce the reasons to take such rests, no.

If you design the classes so that everyone benefits equally from rests, then the play style doesn't cause mechanically imbalanes anymore - and 15 minute adventure days don't become a spellcaster's paradise and 12 hour adventuring days aren't a spellcaster nightmare anymore than there are a fighter's nightmare.

 

[pemerton]

To my mind/view/enjoyment of the game, the players should not have any inkling of "how the story ends."

<snip>

But the idea that the player knows they're getting X amount of treasure at the end of the rainbow...with Y and Z items that they requested (because the books said they should/could)...the expectation that they WILL get to the end of the rainbow, at all, because everything they come up against will be "balanced" or "level appropriate" or should be "designed to be overcome"...that they expect to succeed, practically regardless of their choices, and if they somehow don't the DM is "doing it wrong" or "screwing them" somehow...These things just all elicit a knee-jerk reaction from me of "NUH UH!"

Where's the challenge?

This post seems to assume that the pay-off for play, the "big reveal", is finding certain treasure "at the end of the rainbow" after struggling against great dangers to recover it. This is a very significant assumption about playstyle.

In a game with wishlists, the payoff for play is obviously going to be something different.

Here's a comparison: in some RPG systems, what benefits a PC gets at level gain is randomly determined. So one payoff for play can be learning what you get when you level. But in AD&D or 3E, the only randmoly determined aspect of level gain is hit points - you mostly get to choose your benefits of levelling, or have them dictated by known rules. So the payoff from play is something else - say, doing more stuff with your PC, or having interesting and exciting adventures.

4e played with wishlists is much the same. Gaining treasure produces the same sort of satsfaction as other decisions about PC build. But the payoff from playing is something eles.

 

[Lwaxy]

It'd be nice to find a solution to the two-hour working day as well.

Definitely. In the case of such dungeons, I'd just rule that everyone is exhausted and could rest. While this wouldn't solve the 2hrs issue, it would at least prevent the 24hr waiting time.

As most of the casters in our group don't do vancian and spell points regenerate a little, it probably wouldn't be as bad an issue. Even the two vancian casters get spell regeneration depending on how long they don't cast anything without resting, but only for their specially chosen spell (which is usually some attack or defense magic, of course).
The latter is not the best solution but I think we kind of managed to keep the feel for vancian magic management somewhat.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Question:
Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?

Yes, mechanically /preventing/ it, would. Eliminating imbalanced rules that favor it over others, however, would not.

This is something that comes up a lot, actually. Someone will pipe up that this or that ed or system or whatever "doesn't support" this or that style. What he really means is that it doesn't over-reward that style or punish other styles. Not that the style isn't possible within the system.

Right now - and by right now I mean for it's entire history - D&D overwhelmingly favors the 15 minute workday, and it's only by DM intervention or player restraint that every encounter isn't followed by a complete re-charge of player abilities.

That's a flaw. That it's a long standing one that many are accustomed to kludging or living with doesn't make it a feature.

At least, with 5e, they're going to design the classes to balance at a point in the adventuring 'day' and tell you what that point is. So the DM at least knows to force days to a certain length to reduce the likelihood of class imbalance. FWLTW.

 

[Hussar]

Mustrum_Ridcully is really hitting the nail on the head IMO. It's not necessarily having the 15 MAD that's the problem. After all, there are all sorts of scenarios where it's not a problem to have one big fight and then fall back. I'm not saying that this is the only scenario, simply that these scenarios are not all that uncommon either.

The problem is that the Vancian casters and the non-Vancian characters are playing fundamentally different games. The balance of the game can radically change depending on the pacing of the game and this can be an issue in some groups.

There's a reason that some groups adopt, or try to adopt, the 15 MAD - it's an effective strategy. IMO, the best way to reduce 15 MAD is to reduce that effectiveness.

AD&D did it by having very, very strong restrictions on casters and by having martial characters that were far, far more powerful than the opponents that they faced, at least on an individual level. It wasn't unreasonable for a fighter type to get through a combat without expending any resources, or at least minimal enough resources to ignore. So, why bother going nova with the casters when your fighter types can just blow through the encounter anyway?

4e went another direction and made everyone have the same resource base.

I'm not really sure where the proper answer lies. But, I do think that simply giving advice isn't it. I went around the block several times with [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], with him showing far more patience than he probably should , trying to show me how he gets the results that he gets. Now, I still don't understand. I have too many questions to be able to adopt his advice into my games.

Granted, even at the times when we did have 15 MAD, I never really saw it as a problem because I just thought that that's how D&D is played. IME, it's always been there as an option and, because it makes a lot of strategic sense, whenever the situation allows, I'd pretty much presume that that's what the party would do. It's no different than sending scouts ahead or searching rooms or any other standard operating proceedure that groups fall into after a fairly short time.

3e makes it a much larger issue since the casters get SO much more powerful at higher levels. Virtually any problem that comes up becomes an exercise in patience and throwing enough magic at it. And I can see how the non-casters can feel very sidelined by this. Watching the change in one campaign where a player playing a paladin who died brought in a cleric as a replacement character that suddenly dominated virtually every encounter was a real eye-opener.

We didn't really have 15 MAD for most of our games, but that's because we didn't play core casters very much. No cleric, we had a Favored Soul. The druid in a later campaign had reserve feats. And the running joke in the group was that wizard was the cursed class because every wizard player wound up quitting the game after only a few sessions.

Honestly, my solution to all this would be to go that direction - use things like Favored Souls or Shadow Casters (from Tome of Magic) as the baseline for casters. Sorcerers as the model for Vancian magic instead of the Wizard. It reins in the power creep from extra books and keeps everyone on a much more even footing for resources.

I'm tired of half my players playing different games.

 

[Elf Witch]

Question:
Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?

I think it can impose one play style and basically say that your play style is not the way we the designers feel you should play.

That was one big flaw of 4E to me that I felt it supported only a narrow margin of play styles. A good DM can tweak any game and make it playable and I do think most DMs end up tweaking her and there. I have only played in one or two games that didn't have at lest one house rule in it.

I think the way to avoid this in 5E is to give options but also advice on how to tailor the rules to your play style.