D&D 5E Classes with resources feel like usage is too restrained

[The Crimson Binome]

Awarding inspiration or bonus xp for "realistic roleplaying" would be the primary method.

It's hard to imagine what a "realistic" person would do, if the world actually worked the way that the rules describe.

But more to the point, what rpgs do you know that do a good job at this?

Most games, actually. The standard method is to simply make every fight potentially deadly, and to make recovery from a fight much slower. D&D is almost unique in the way that it expects you to schedule getting into fights that you know you will win, and even that has only been the case since 3.0 or so.

 

[flametitan]

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

The point is, the risk (not guarantee, you want PCs to rest sometimes) of unplanned fights that interrupt the downtime of their 5MWD serves as a deterrent from resting whenever they want. Sure, it's a 1/5 chance if you use the seeming default of 17-20 on a d20, but when you only get a long rest once every 24 hours, and have to rest for 8 hours before you get the full benefits, it will keep you from being too reliant on long rests (As you'll probably face off against a number of things before your rest ends), while short rests run the risk of being interrupted entirely, forcing you to take another hour break to try again, and another encounter roll. Is it perfect? No, especially once you get higher level and better means of camping out mid dungeon, but it's the mechanical process that is in place to deter rests.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

The point is, the risk (not guarantee, you want PCs to rest sometimes) of unplanned fights that interrupt the downtime of their 5MWD serves as a deterrent from resting whenever they want. Sure, it's a 1/5 chance if you use the seeming default of 17-20 on a d20, but when you only get a long rest once every 24 hours, and have to rest for 8 hours before you get the full benefits, it will keep you from being too reliant on long rests (As you'll probably face off against a number of things before your rest ends), while short rests run the risk of being interrupted entirely, forcing you to take another hour break to try again, and another encounter roll. Is it perfect? No, especially once you get higher level and better means of camping out mid dungeon, but it's the mechanical process that is in place to deter rests.

The problem is that creates a ridiculously dangerous world. I'm to actually believe farmers grow crops,hunters hunt in the woods, and merchants move goods in a world like that?

Sorry, that busts my vtude.

5E created this problem by assuming people want to play through a bunch of MMO trash encounters/putty fights whose sole purpose is to provide a mild nuisance to let the non-casters "shine" and beat up on some chumps. I dont like rolling dice just for its own sake, and prefer combat to be meaningful and dangerous. The 6-8 encounter baseline nibbled to death by ducks attrition is terrible outside a dungeon, and even there the 1 hour rest is absurdly long.

Best solution I can come up with is actually making tough monsters, having a few fights per day, and just giving all the short rest guys 2 "rest" tokens they can cash in whenever they want to recharge their stuff.

Also jeez, can we fix the spacebar thing yet?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm calling you out on recommending more encounters like that was a neat simple thing to accomplish without so much as a mention of all the hard work needed to maintain such a campaign. Characterizing it as the "one true answer" comes across to me as uncritical.

OneTrueWayism is very rarely True, that Way, One could say...

Seriously, though, while it's in no Way the OneTrueWay, 5e's guidance to use the 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest 'day' to help provide class & encounter balance is both called for (the surveys showed fans called for such guidance) and not completely off base. 2-3 short rest per long rest do seem to even out the resource differences among most of the classes. 6-8 modest encounters do go through those resources, and 5e fast combat means you can blow through them without their becoming too tedious for being so numerous.

If you use any modules, add, mod or ban anything, then sure, you might want to adjust that balance point...

And I still think the game should come equipped with a mechanic that discourages "early" rests.

So that the sole responsibility for answering the question "why press on" isn't squarely put on the DM's story shoulders.

We've had 'em before. Milestone mechanics like Action Points, Item Dailies, or enhancements there to or potential negative effects that happen on a long rest, like the Disease track.

It really irks me how D&D is built on expectations the game does absolutely nothing to enforce.

Breaking when you don't meet the expectation could be seen as doing something to enforce it.

 

[CapnZapp]

We've had 'em before. Milestone mechanics like Action Points, Item Dailies, or enhancements there to or potential negative effects that happen on a long rest, like the Disease track.

I can't be sure, but I suspect all of those pertain to 4E.

I would much rather see ones specifically catering to the sensibilities of 3rd/5th edition.

Breaking when you don't meet the expectation could be seen as doing something to enforce it.

Not sure I'm able to parse this correctly.

If it means what I think it means, well... No - I'd rather let you rephrase yourself before I say something.

 

[CapnZapp]

The problem is that creates a ridiculously dangerous world. I'm to actually believe farmers grow crops,hunters hunt in the woods, and merchants move goods in a world like that?

Sorry, that busts my vtude.

5E created this problem by assuming people want to play through a bunch of MMO trash encounters/putty fights whose sole purpose is to provide a mild nuisance to let the non-casters "shine" and beat up on some chumps. I dont like rolling dice just for its own sake, and prefer combat to be meaningful and dangerous. The 6-8 encounter baseline nibbled to death by ducks attrition is terrible outside a dungeon, and even there the 1 hour rest is absurdly long.

Best solution I can come up with is actually making tough monsters, having a few fights per day, and just giving all the short rest guys 2 "rest" tokens they can cash in whenever they want to recharge their stuff.

Also jeez, can we fix the spacebar thing yet?

Agreed on all counts!

(Except possibly the spacebar thing. Haven't a slightest what that's about )

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can't be sure, but I suspect all of those pertain to 4E.

They're examples of mechanical incentives for 'pushing on' that D&D has tried in the past, and it wouldn't be hard to add such things back in if you wanted to, as a DM.

I would much rather see ones specifically catering to the sensibilities of 3rd/5th edition.

Well, those are two very different sensibilities. Player Entitlement vs DM Empowerment. Rules-as-Written vs Rulings-not-Rules.

Not sure I'm able to parse this correctly.

If you can't use the thing satisfactorily without meeting the expectations under which it was designed, that's enforcing those expectations, no?

 

[ammulder]

I just struggle with what sort of adventure construction really works with the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest recommendation.

Long-distance travel with occasional encounters is right out, so let's look at a dungeon. Let's say the industrious adventurers spend 8 hours adventuring in a day, of which 2 are taken by short rests. Let's say it takes 5 minutes to clear a room in a dungeon (fight, search, investigate interesting junk, whatever). So 6 hours at 12 rooms per hour means they should clear 72 rooms in a day, with between 1-in-9 and 1-in-12 rooms having a combat, and the other ~90% having enough features of interest that the PCs don't clear the room in the time it takes to walk across it.

That's pretty demanding for dungeon-dressing, and not even sort of consistent with 5e published adventures. (I'm thinking the temples in PotA, the various locations in OotA, etc.) Those have some encounter in very nearly every room.

So like, you're supposed to get a third of the way through the Temple of Black Earth (PotA; 24 locations) every day, taking six hour-long breaks and two overnights while making your way across it? Obviously not. Even breaking for an hour seems pretty risky -- this is the headquarters of a cult driven by a terrible leader -- you can't think everybody just sits in their room and twiddles their thumbs all day (well, in fairness, a few of the defined encounters there do, but still). You'd expect the cult to, uh, take action if in the course of their routines and duties and missions someone finds that the monsters and guards at the entrance are dead, the kitchen table is covered with corpses, the strike force can't be summoned to go harass some village because they're all decapitated, and etc. As the GM, you have to work pretty hard to convince yourself that any hour of rest is "safe."

Maybe the scheme works in a dungeon totally filled with random, independent stuff, where nobody much cares what's going on in the next room so long as they can eat fungus and sit on a pile of treasure in their own room, but that kind of thing doesn't seem to feature much in a campaign with a purpose...

 

[flametitan]

The problem is that creates a ridiculously dangerous world. I'm to actually believe farmers grow crops,hunters hunt in the woods, and merchants move goods in a world like that?

Sorry, that busts my vtude.

<removed as it's not the main point I'm going for>

Also jeez, can we fix the spacebar thing yet?

(I've found a way to solve the space bar thing.Put the last character you want in your text *first* and then type everything that comes before that character. The spacebar issues only seems to come up if the spacebar is that last character in a wall of text.)

As for why random encounters don't "make a world excessively dangerous"

Firstly, not every location has to have the same risk of the same fights, only places that actually *are* dangerous (The ubiquitous Dungeons of Dungeons & Dragons). That's true in the real world, that's true in fantasy worlds. Evil is not an even spread across the land.

Secondly, The fact of matter that Bounded Accuracy exists reduces the dangerousness of Single large foes to towns and cities. A dragon's not a tough fight against an army. I recommend talking to @Hemlock's necromancer armies for testament of the power a good military has vs even dangerous monsters. Villages will have a harder time, but that's why D&D adventurers exist. They're there to protect that land in the areas the armies can't easily reach.

Thirdly, even if we *do* assume that the world is excessively dangerous as a result, that seems to be an assumption of the mapmaking guides in the DMG. I'll have to find it again, but there was a blog post that dissected the town-map guidelines, along with the population size limits the DMG discusses to find that its demographics are right... if you're looking at Europe after the Black Death. That suggests that D&D assumes a world of sparsely populated towns with little contact with each other, which sounds about right for a world with such dangerous creatures flying around.

Fourthly, magic. Teleportation circles exist, and they're not exactly expensive for merchants to operate. The only hard part is finding someone that can cast a fifth level spell, and considering that the generic "mage" NPC is a 9th level caster, I would assume they're not common, but not exactly rare, either. So now you've bypassed that dangerous wilderness entirely. Perhaps not with large amounts of goods, but that's still going to assist trade a *huge* deal.

 

[CapnZapp]

But more to the point, what rpgs do you know that do a good job at this?

Even more to the point, do you know of any other rpg that is so heavily basing its challenges on resource management, yet allows players to trivialize that management by simply saying the magic words "let's take a rest"?

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I see two fairly obvious solutions. Yet, for some reason both are considered completely unacceptable and have zero rules support.

One: the PHB says you can only rest in specially designated spots, like a sanctuary, or home, or an especially cosy countryside inn. This then gives the adventure control over when and where rests are allowed, thus creating true challenge: "will you be able to clear out the Critter Caves before you run out of resources?"

Two: attrition-based challenge is downplayed. Every encounter is evaluated on its own. The adventure assumes parties can rest pretty much whenever they want, so the level of challenge assumes a reasonably recently-rested party. All fights doesn't need to seriously threaten the life of a party member, but if a fight is a completely foregone conclusion, the DM is encouraged to simply narrate the results instead of wasting any time.

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The other fantasy rpgs I like all use solution #2. Not so much by actually making sure the bad guys are dangerous enough (far from it actually), but by not being level and hit point based. This means pretty much every fight has at least the potential of becoming really dangerous, just by the default of how combat and damage works when you don't have a hundred hit points. Compare D&D at level 1 - nobody has these problems at level 1!

It would be cool to have a published adventure that is built on solution #1 though. Where you essentially would have to finish each node of Princes of the Apocalypse with, say, two* short rests. And you could only take a long rest, one* long rest, before and after each one. That would mean you have eight short and four long rests before we check: did you succeed or did you fail?

*) Completely made-up numbers, by the way. I did give PotA a quick read-through back when; but I have absolutely no recollection of how quickly you would clear out each node...