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

[flametitan]

Now I'm imagining a "trade nexus" which is really just a 60' radius area in which animated skeletons wait, clutching packages, until a wizard casts Teleportation Circle. At that point, they all begin a perfectly-choreographed movement which is designed to let every skeleton in the area Dash through the portal before it closes. I suppose you could even extend the radius even further by having some skeletons grapple and drag other skeletons closer, and some skeletons riding mounts for the extra movement speed. (If your mount Dashes for 120', you can spend 15' of movement getting off and then Dash yourself for another 45' for a total of 165'. BTW, in theory you could move a total of 800' in a round this way by leveraging three separate Phantom Steeds plus a bonus action Dash via Expeditious Retreat. But, like the skeleton markets, it's rules-lawyery and more than a bit ridiculous.)

If you want to go even more silly, you just have lines and lines of peasants along the countryside (a la the peasant railgun) who've readied their action so that as soon as they get the parcel, they hand it to the next person. Now you have shipments travelling across continents in six seconds. It was a revelation I've heard from a podcast talking about wanting to play a world where RAW defined the laws of physics, and how RAW doesn't allow for the Peasant railgun, but does allow for instant transport.

I've taken to dubbing it the "Peasant Amazon."

 

[Willie the Duck]

Really, no one? How many campaigns do you see, in 5E or otherwise, that routinely last into the late teens? Can't we just say that those guys retired offscreen?

'No one' is hyperbolic. Likewise, I don't factually know what was on the 3e designers list of things to fix. Tony asked for a perspective from a BECMI player, so I gave one.

I'm really not sure what you are getting at with the retiring offscreen part.

Empirically, it seems to me that the name-level distinction is alive and well in 5E, even if the breakpoints are slightly different. I don't have a good explanation for why this should be so, other than some conjecture about how high-level magic gives players so much agency that many DMs find their methods of adventure-construction ceasing to work. But that's just conjecture, and the real point is this: even though 5E is apparently designed and intended to take most players all the way from 1st level to 15th+ level with a single character, in practice this happens infrequently. Just like in AD&D. (I presume that BECMI had a different breakpoint because of its 1-36 structure.)

BECM (we'll just leave I as its' own thing, kinda like ELH-3.0) had a few break points. Everything after you got 9th level spells was its' own category, since you didn't really gain much. However, in BECM (and AD&D) there was a point around 9th or 10th level where all the numbers changed-you stopped gaining dice of hp and instead just gained a set amount. The xp requirements for each level stopped doubling and instead went up by a set amount. Depending on the edition, you then got followers, or in the case of C from BECM, actual rules for settling down and managing a domain. Frankly, it was still entirely too sparse, but you could rule a Duchy, go to war, basically retire from adventuring. It was not made clear exactly why one should do that, though, since the magic users and clerics were still gaining 'blow-em-up' and 'cure-em-up' spells and not just 'Bigby's flourishing crops' or 'cure critical water crises.'

I think I get what you are saying. And yes, high level magic has and always will create a division between adventurers who have to think carefully on how they are going to cross a river, and those whom the DM is going to have to think carefully to keep from crossing the planet. It's still a far cry from the name-level distinction of TSR-era games.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Probably already been stated but 2 of the three examples you listed are short rest recovery resources. It makes sense for them to not last more than 1 or 2 combats. The exception to this is the elemental monk which should probably get a free firebolt like ability that doesn't cost ki.

I changed the elemental monk's ki cost to 1ki/spell level, and gave it absorb elements, and they can use it without spending ki 1/short rest. Totally fixed, IMO.

All monks I have regain 1ki/5minutes of meditation, with an actual rest fully restoring their ki, and they can spend a Hit Die to regain 1 ki. They can almost always use at least 1 ki in any fight, but can still run out on long days. At level 11 they can also choose to either regain 1hp/minute meditating, or lose one level of exhaustion per 10min meditating. And they don't learn all languages.

 

[TwoSix]

I'll suggest what I usually suggest in these cases.

Short rest is 6 hours.

Long rest is 48 hours, and requires civilization or at least a well-defended safe location.

Use magic items and consumables to tweak access to resources as desired. Bracers of ki that give 1 ki point a round for 5 rounds, once per day (i.e. short rest). Potions of mana that give back spell slots. Potions of restoration that give you the benefit of a short rest, once per day. Things like that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can understand Captain Zap feeling that 5e is a second attempt at making 3e.

That's also a reasonable way to look at it. 5e is arguably positioned 'between' 2e & 3e. (Though it's arguably a lot of other things, too...)

As a die-hard BECMI fan (played BECMI 83-89, never touching 1e, and then again when we got sick of 2e and later 3e), I can say that 5e feels to me like an alternate RC, or another attempt at B/X/ECMI (never distinguished between B/X and BECMI much until people on the internet did). I feel it takes all the things that the designers who made 3e had on their list of "things people really want fixed about AD&D 2e" (Racial level limits that don't do their intended function, nonsensical racial class restrictions, rewarding high dice roll with strictly better optional classes, multiple incompatible skill systems, name-level distinction after which you are supposed to settle down and become rulers but almost no one ever does) and applies them to BECM.
...
That's deliberately biased because Tony asked for that viewpoint.

Thanks for that perspective, Willie.

Sorry if this starts to sound like singing Kumbaya 'round the campfire, but, 5e really did try to appeal to fans of every prior edition, and there's lots of stuff in there that's been in every edition (the least-common-denominator take on 'inclusive'), but there's also stuff in 5e that was unique to each othere edition that I'm familiar with, and, it appears, the one I'm least familiar with, as well. So that it's also tried to be for fans of /each/ prior edition is still pretty plausible - and not looking nearly so impossible as it did early in the playtest, IMHO.

 

[CapnZapp]

I'll suggest what I usually suggest in these cases.

Short rest is 6 hours.

Long rest is 48 hours, and requires civilization or at least a well-defended safe location.

But now regular dungeons (you know, the kind of dank holes in the ground where you come up two hours later and four levels higher ) don't work no more.

The take-away: different adventures need different rest pacing.

No single figure for a rest will cut it.

The point is that the rules need to not commit to any one given number.

Don't write into the rules "5 minutes", "one hour" or whatever, and instead say "a short rest is a period of low-activity time in relative security, the length of which is determined by circumstance and thus varies with different adventures. Your DM will tell you at the start of each adventure the durations of short and long rests." [Followed by DMG examples]

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Here are the last two sessions I've run, neither of which worked well with the SR/LR mechanic:

1. Out of the Abyss: full of long travel stretches with few encounters per day (even, sometimes, days per encounter). As a player, there's no reason not to throw your all at a travel encounter, because in the rare case you get another on the same day, you can generally squeak through it with whatever you have left. Certainly you could short rest after every one to be on the safe side. I suppose I could throw in a really pumped up second encounter to put a scare into them, but I can't reasonably do it often enough that they feel a strong need to conserve resources during travel.
2. A scenario I was handed involving chasing minor enemies into their underground cave with the goal of confronting the major enemy hiding in the back room. There were 5-ish small encounters before the big one. But the players didn't rest. Partly I think they were excited to reach the goal, and partly it didn't seem sensible to just stop in the middle of cave-delving when any of the prior encounters could have potentially alerted the major enemy. Hard to know if one guy in hiding snuck off to warn him, or if he had one spell set to warn of intruders or whatever.

So in my sample size of two, there's one with always-a-short-rest and one with never-a-rest.

I might have been able to push them toward taking a short rest in the second case, but how do you characterize it without making it sound completely implausible? Sure, you've alerted numerous enemies, but you feel confident they're all dead? Sure, there's a big bad guy, but he doesn't really care what goes on in his cave? Yeah, you can take a lunch break, what are the odds that anyone in the cave complex will do anything that involves moving to a room containing either you or a bunch of dead guys you've left behind?

A five-minute rest would be easier to squeeze in, but easier to abuse as well.

Short rests need to be amorphis to fit the needs of the campaign, adventure, and/or adventuring day.

 

[TwoSix]

But now regular dungeons (you know, the kind of dank holes in the ground where you come up two hours later and four levels higher ) don't work no more.

Sure. But since I don't run them, it's sort of irrelevant. For me, of course. but I'm the important one here.

Edit: Scratch that, that's not true. You can do still do dungeon crawls, you just need to tweak the magic item budget of restoration items up to fit. That's the whole point, set the baseline refresh low and use in-game items to push the refresh to the campaign needs.

 

[CapnZapp]

Sure. But since I don't run them, it's sort of irrelevant. For me, of course. but I'm the important one here.

Sure, but you didn't say that in your original post

 

[Flamestrike]

It seems to me like full casters have the advantage here on their resources, that is, they can cast every turn and assuming a typical adventuring day, run out right around the end of the day.

A typical Adventuring day is 6-8 (lets say 6) encounters of around 5 rounds each featuring around 2 short rests.

If your casters have enough juice in the tank to drop (6x5) = 30 spell slots in that time, something is very out of whack.

Even at mid level, a Wizard 11 has 16 spell slots (plus arcane recovery) to work with over those 30 rounds, and 7 of those slots are 1st and 2nd level spells of reduced utility by the time you're facing mid-high level encounters.

That's a spell every second round or so, and every second or so of those spells is a minor spell of 1st or 2nd level like shield, mage armor, invisibility or charm person.

Meanwhile, playing a monk I barely have enough Ki to last me through one fight let alone 6, even with a short rest recharge.

In the above scenario, a Monk 11 has 33 Ki points, or enough for 1/ round with a few left over. The BM Fighter 11 has 3 action surges, 3 second winds, 15 superiority die (d10s) enabling roughly 2 + 1/2 superiority die per combat, plus either a second wind or an action surge every combat.

The Monk has a lot of baked in mobility and defenses over and above the Wizard also. The fighter has double the HP and more at will minor utility/ damage via extra feats and ASI. The wizard has lower HP, poorer at will damage than the Fighter, and at will utility of rituals (assuming enough time to use them).

It actually balances really well at this point.

That's not the problem. The problem for many is they don't use the assumed [6ish encounter 2ish short rest] adventuring day despite the game balancing there.