D&D 5E How has 5e solved the Wand of CLW problem?

[delericho]

Consistency of the narrative. The characters should know how long it takes them to get their spells back.

Not really. How long does it take you to get your breath back after a game of football? Does it take the same length of time whether you're playing against a bunch of five years as when you're playing against a team of the same ability as you?

And that's just the easy example.

PCs go through a wide range of encounters in their careers, often in a wide range of environments, all while the tides of magic and the whims of the gods wax and wane. Frankly, any fixed duration for a short or long rest is a handwave at best - there should really be a significant random factor at work.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Not really. How long does it take you to get your breath back after a game of football? Does it take the same length of time whether you're playing against a bunch of five years as when you're playing against a team of the same ability as you?.

That's not even remotely comparable. Spell slots are discrete constructs. You can ask a wizard, in-game, how many Magic Missiles she can cast, and she should know the answer. Preparing spells is a physical activity, which requires a set amount of time. A wizard cannot possibly not know when those spell slots are recovered.

In the actual D&D novels, they refer to how many of a particular spell they have prepared today, and ask someone to come back tomorrow when they don't have a particular spell prepared at the moment. Spell slots are a fact of the world, which is known to people in that world.

 

[delericho]

That's not even remotely comparable. Spell slots are discrete constructs. You can ask a wizard, in-game, how many Magic Missiles she can cast, and she should know the answer. Preparing spells is a physical activity, which requires a set amount of time. A wizard cannot possibly not know when those spell slots are recovered.

He'll know once he has recovered them, but he may very well not know ahead of time how long it will take him to recover them.

As I said, the football analogy was the easy example. For a more directly comparable one, consider a student studying for an exam. Can you honestly tell me that his ability to memorise facts, and especially more complex theories, isn't significantly affected by a whole host of factors?

Heck, simply having five hours of sleep instead of six, or three cups of coffee instead of two can significantly impact on my concentration, and I never engage in life-or-death combat!

Preparing spells is a physical activity, which requires a set amount of time.

Driving home is a physical activity. Does it require a set amount of time, or does it vary, possibly widely, due to environmental factors?

 

[Hussar]

Consistency of the narrative. The characters should know how long it takes them to get their spells back.

Why? Since when does magic have to be consistent? Sometimes you get your spells back because you studied really hard, sometimes, it just takes longer. There's nothing there that you can't make consistent.

 

[Hussar]

Although, since I've had this sort of conversation before with Saelorn, I know that this will not end well.
[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], you have to realise that not everyone plays with the D&D rules=the physics engine of the world. That any rule is a fundamental constant of the game world is not how many people play. Thus, varying the time it takes to regain a spell is not a major issue. I mean, never mind wizards, how long does it take a cleric to regain his spells? After all, those are granted by some sort of power, not through study. So, why do those have to be regained in a fixed period. And, that ignores classes like Sorcerers and Warlocks, neither of which memorise spells at all.

How long does it take to petition The Great Old One to regain the use of your funky demonic sight?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have never read of any such thing in fantasy books. I play these games to simulate fantasy stories. Going to the store and buying a box of little magic sticks to heal destroys verisimilitude for myself.

So it's failure to model genre, rather than actually somehow not being narrative. I totally get that. I just didn't catch it the first time. Thanks for the clarification.

You hate wizards as they are with the overabundant spell options, I hate easily attainable wand healing.

I don't /hate/ that wizards (actually casters in general) are imbalanced. In fact, I'd like to see most of the gap closed more by giving non-casters more options and their players more agency, and only see casters reigned into the bounds of the genre (which are not really /that/ restrictive).

But, yes, those are both examples of things in D&D that are contrary to genre.

It didn't exist in any edition save for 3E from what I remember

Every edition has had healing items, but 3.x was unique in how cheaply they could be made/bought relative to wealth/level expectations. OTOH, you'd often see advice in other editions - or from those boosting said editions - to place more healing potions or the like as a way of coping with certain issues. So, in a way, you could argue 3.x was just a little more up-front and practical about a need implicit in the system that other editions may have ignored. I don't think it's a very strong argument, but it's not completely invalid.

I like magic healing kept to a minimum. 5E has done that. I might go farther once I do a few campaigns. I don't know how much I like paladin weeble wobble healing where he uses one point of his LoH to keep a warrior up every round swinging indefinitely. I definitely don't want easily accessible CLW wand healing back.

With something like 16 of 38 PC class choices able to cast Cure..Wounds and healing potions a common magic item that can be made/bought even under the standard rules, I'm not sure it keeps it to a /minimum/. But it at least has the alternatives of HD and overnight healing - while they're not enough to keep the game functional and balanced as designed, 5e does, conveniently, tell you up front that you'll need to mod it to get what you want out of it.

Such mods could include removing cure..wounds type spells from some spell lists (where they're not too iconic), increasing the number of HD, and allowing some mechanism(s) for expending HD in combat (such as optional actions, or magical healing that narratively accelerates healing - and thus consume HD instead of slots).

 

[Celtavian]

Thank you Aribar. However, your case is one with a clear timeline.

The thing is any solution the DMG happens to decide on ought to work for very different scenarios as well. Such as

A. Wilderness hexcrawling. "Here is the valley of Doom. Go enter it and return when you are fully laden with loot!"
An example where the whole point is the lack of any story-driven time restrictions. This does not mean the game can't restrict your resources (such as hit points and spells).

B. Dungeon Bashing. "Clear out the Kobold Hive! Do it quickly, or all remaining kobolds will gather into one force - a fight you can't win!"

C. City Intrigue. "Your aim is to gather evidence against Countess Bathory. Doing so will entail going to many banquets and blackmailing many prominent citizens!"

D. Desert Trek. "Crossing the Mirage Desert will take months!"

All these adventures have very differing needs as to pacing and resource management.

But they all should be runnable using the same ruleset of D&D. Which, as we agree, runs optimally on 5-8 encounters per long rest.

And in one and the same campaign. No switching out the DMG in between sessions!



I'm arguing the obvious solution is for the DMG to simply state how the D&D engine runs best - what the designer expectations are.

Then:

D. Assuming there will "only" be 5-8 monsters to encounter in the whole desert, state that no long rests will be possible in the desert at all. There are two oasis, and each will afford benefits equivalent to a short rest.

C. In this case, the rhythm of social and combat encounters can be impossible to predict. Perhaps your employer Mr Darcy hands you three special cards allowing you complete safety at a safe house. Meaning there will be no more than three long rests or your mission will be exposed/a failure.

B. This is what the game handles per default. You would think. Me, I would say it needs 5 minute short rests and 1 hour long rests, but still, the option is in the DMG. Point is, this is the only scenario for which the DMG is sufficient!

A. I would say that unless the Valley is so full of monsters you can hardly move between random encounters, you will have to abandon the resource management minigame and make every battle individually challenging. OR, you can boldly say that for this scenario you simply need 5+ encounters or you simply won't get any benefits from taking a long rest. An abstraction, sure, but one that allows the adventure to work as a GAME as well as a story.




Obviously, many gamers are happy to ignore the expectation of 5-8 encounters. And that's fine. But also beside the point - my argument is that D&D isn't helping me uphold the 5-8 encounter balance that means I can have "easy" encounters that aren't made completely trivial and meaningless (from a challenge perspective - the story angle is something else).

None of those require different pacing and resource management. Hex crawling would be travel by hours unless the valley is very small. You could easily create 5-8 interesting encounters wilderness hex crawling. Not to mention everything doesn't need to be combat.

Dungeon bashing? Once again, 5-8 encounters can encompass a large dungeon. One room does need to equal an encounter. At higher level you can use multiple lower level monsters to create a higher level challenge that encompasses large areas of a dungeon.

City intrigue doesn't need to involve combat. You can create pacing with travel. It's even easier to do in this game given the lack of easy magical travel options until very high level.

Those examples don't stand up to the litmus test.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], you have to realise that not everyone plays with the D&D rules=the physics engine of the world. That any rule is a fundamental constant of the game world is not how many people play.

This isn't even that, though. Arguing (for or against) rules-as-physics would make sense if we were talking about the exhaustion levels, which are clearly an abstraction of fatigue when it gets to a level where we care about modeling it. It's not even on the level of Hit Points, or class levels, where they're taking something very complex and modeling it simply.

It's just specifically with spells, where they're presented as a fact of the game world. A wizard knows that she's preparing Fireball and Magic Missile in the morning, because she sits down and reads her spell book every morning (or whenever). In any default setting, as described in a rule book or novel, you can look at a wizard, and see that she's preparing spells. It's the same with clerics, praying for spells every day (traditionally, at the same time every day). That's how the books describe the in-world actions taken by those characters. And since it's a physical activity which those characters actively choose to undertake, it stands to reason that they must know when they're doing it.

I mean, it's a setting detail (which happens to be identical across every established setting). You can change it, as surely as you can decide whether elves are 4' tall or 7' tall. But as far as anyone who has read any of the books is concerned, unless you're going out of your way to say otherwise, characters know when and how often they prepare spells.

 

[Skyscraper]

I'd never heard of this wand problem until these boards. Sounds super broken to me. I cant imagine many DMs permitting it.

That's the gist of why I raise my eyebrows to this alleged problem so many people appear to have. As a DM, there simply was no magic item shop, nor were wands of cure light wounds available at every street corner.

Problem solved.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Heck, simply having five hours of sleep instead of six, or three cups of coffee instead of two can significantly impact on my concentration, and I never engage in life-or-death combat!

I'll certainly grant that the long rest, in itself, is an abstraction. Wizards don't necessarily know that they need exactly eight hours of rest to reach the right mental state, or whether five might suffice.

There's a big difference between a one hour break where you catch your breath and bind your wounds, though, and an eight hour rest where you make camp and get a good night of sleep. There's a lot of wiggle room in either, but they're not comparable, and nobody can mistake one for the other.

And a wizard can't go from needing 5-10 hours of rest in order to recover fully in body and mind, down to 40-70 minutes, and then back up to 5-10 hours. That's just inconsistent.