D&D General IS the 5 min work day a feature or a bug?

[Mort]

I do run that way sometimes (but I always make sure to hide it from the PCs). My current Curse of Strahd game works half like that and half real time running.

There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, and it often works great and leads to really fun moments. BUT if you do it to often it becomes obvious and the players will notice (even if you think they haven't).

but if they want to engage on there terms, you can only stop them by making it a plot point, and that gets old real quick

You can have realistic consequences of what happens when they engage only on their terms.

Maybe they're ok with the consequences, maybe they're not.

But that way they can at least see the results of their actions. And I've found realistic consequences to the PCs actions don't get old, they become part of the story - often the most memorable/fun part.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, and it often works great and leads to really fun moments. BUT if you do it to often it becomes obvious and the players will notice (even if you think they haven't).

yeah and sometimes they see it and still ignore it for a better game... my rule of thumb is as long as we are enjoying the outcome...

You can have realistic consequences of what happens when they engage only on their terms.

yeah, but as my examples above those consequences do not by themselves stop it unless the consequences are so bad they end or might as well end the game... and I don't want every campagin to turn into a doomsday clock.

Maybe they're ok with the consequences, maybe they're not.

and when they are is when I find those 5 min work days come up

But that way they can at least see the results of their actions. And I've found realistic consequences to the PCs actions don't get old, they become part of the story - often the most memorable/fun part.

the realistic consequences only get old when they are always so bad that they JHAVE to avoid the 5mwd

 

[Voadam]

As a pacing mechanic I prefer recharge type magic from 3.5 and have played with it in 3.5, Pathfinder 1, 4e (an encounter/at will based variant), and 5e.

As a DM I prefer fights to be a certain level of expected toughness in general, and not vary significantly based on highly variable choices of PC power resource expenditures.

 

[Voadam]

I saw 5MWDs in AD&D and B/X where you had a high risk of death and a few very useful X/day spells for offense and healing. Playing cautiously in a high risk environment with resource management a priority lent itself to that kind of strategy.

 

[Mort]

yeah and sometimes they see it and still ignore it for a better game... my rule of thumb is as long as we are enjoying the outcome...

If everyone's having fun, why stop?

yeah, but as my examples above those consequences do not by themselves stop it unless the consequences are so bad they end or might as well end the game... and I don't want every campagin to turn into a doomsday clock.

Again, If everyone is TRULY having fun with the 5 min workday, then sure - keep it going.

and when they are is when I find those 5 min work days come up

the realistic consequences only get old when they are always so bad that they JHAVE to avoid the 5mwd

Consequences don't always (or even often) have to be negative. But sometimes they are.

As DM, I don't really care all that much about the 5 minute workday - except that it gets old and I want the players to be challenged in other ways too.

As a player, if I see it, I'll just tilt my character to take full advantage of it (My favorite class happens to be Paladin and they are AWSOME at the 5 minute workday), but still - it gets old.

 

[the Jester]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak in favor of the 5MWD except in terms of it being almost tactically obligatory in 3e due to the vast difference in effectiveness between a buffed party and a non-buffed one. And that was a pretty qualified endorsement, more "well, it is better because we can power up and that's the best choice" than "I personally like it better"

In response to the title: "Yes".

More seriously, at this point its a feature, which needs to either be designed around, or an alternative provided. 4E provided a solid alternative, which apparently insufficiently popular (I wonder how the 30-50m now would feel, I bet 4E's AEDU design would sit a lot better with most of them than it did with people in 2008, but other 4E elements like the heavy tactical focus would not).

I think a bunch more 4e in 5e would be very popular, but not the straight up "powers" design that 4e used at the start. Instead, have something more like the Essentials line, where different classes have different ways to hit the expected per-encounter and per-day damage spikes. And for God's sake, keep it fast and sleek.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I mean In My Experience the doomsday clock isn't when you run into the 5mwd... the "going out to adventure for fun and profit" is, and almost anytime you let players pick what to do.

True, but the point is the players expecting the rest of the universe to set its watch to their beat and wait for them to be ready rather than the other way around is the main point of the issue I’m stating here, if there’s nothing happening that they care about then they’re perfectly entitled to take as long as they want but the world still turns regardless of them

 

[DND_Reborn]

Example: the PCs decide to hunt a dragon... the 1st 2 encounters they have is with his forces (kobolds, undead, death knights.... depends on the scope/level of the game) and they fall back and rest and reprep... the dragon can only then re recuirt or raise or what ever soldiers... as long as the PCs win the hit and run tactics are taking resources from the defenders of the dragon, and the PCs are gettting theres back.

Counter-example:

The next time the PCs show up, the dragon is waiting in ambush along with whatever forces it has remaining and crushes the unprepared PCs who didn't think they would encounter the dragon until later.

OR

The dragon goes hunting the PCs and attacks when they are resting, breathing on their entire camp before they can do anything. Since they are sleeping, the automatically fail DEX saves and take full damage.

Allowing PCs do repeatedly do hit-and-run tactics is pretty bad on the opponent's part. Once, maybe twice, sure, but after that the PCs should become the hunted, not the hunters.

Example 2: The local orcs go on the war path... they have sacked 3 cities so far and show no sighns of stopping. So PCs hit the orc camp and fall back, then hit the orc camp and fall back... 4th city falls, they hit the orc camp and fall back then the orcs attack them well resting they kill a bunch of orcs then rest... then a 5th city falls... as long as the PCs are winning those fights (sometimes winning being kill more orcs then can be recruited to fill ranks, and get out alive) they can keep going. the 'punishment' of more cities falling can be written off as "Yeah, and if we go die fighting them before the 4th city fell there would be no one here trying to stop them form the 6th 7th and 8th"

Counter-example:

After repeatedly being hit by the PCs the orcs trail the PCs to where they are resting, and sack that city--including the PCs.

Again, allowing hit-and-run tactics over and over just sets up the players to think it should always work--when it is poor tactics to allow it to IME.

example 3: god I hate that I was a PC for this... the DM has a sect of evil wizards (I think it was 7 of them I may be misremembering) each had there own forces (one had undead, one had summoned creatures, one had mercenaries, one had 'loyal' kobolds) and thought he would shame us into facing them one after another (it was a pretty high level campaign by this point). we would engage and separate 1 then do what we could, then plane shift out... hit and run wearing them down (even more then once pulling teleport in drop big spells teleport out trick)
it didn't matter that THEY were regrouping because we picked almost every battle field... and when they tried to pick one we would just leave and pick a better time/place.

Again, hit-and-run and allowing the players to pick the battlefield? Why? I would hope 7 high-level Wizards (INT was their highest scores, right?) would be smarter than that. Why would they never gang up against you? I could see maybe a progression like you take out 1, then a second, and now the remaining have a couple gang up against you, and if you defeat those 2, the last 3 form treaty to destroy the PCs as a united front.

Frankly, this smacks too much of the DM allowing the players to steamroll over monsters and not having the monsters react. How would the PCs react if they were the targets instead?

I'm sure there is a lot more to these scenarios, but from what you have said I can think of a lot of ways of stopping PCs from being able to get in the rests required to keep allowing such tactics to work.

Having said that, I want to emphasize that stopping rests only works (for ME) if the narrative of the story also supports it. If it doesn't then something else will happen. Take the hunting the dragon example. If the PCs destroy the dragon's minions, and the dragon has nothing left to help it take on the PCs, I would certainly consider just having the dragon flee (with his treasure ). Another option is (depending on the dragon type) having the dragon trail the PCs to their base camp, wait for them to leave, and then burrow beneath it, creating a pitfall, and waiting in ambush for their return...

So many options, really.

 

[Mort]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak in favor of the 5MWD except in terms of it being almost tactically obligatory in 3e due to the vast difference in effectiveness between a buffed party and a non-buffed one. And that was a pretty qualified endorsement, more "well, it is better because we can power up and that's the best choice" than "I personally like it better"

One thing I definitely DO NOT miss is the high level 3e days of players having 3 versions of their characters: Not buffed, kind of bufffed, and fully buffed (with many iterations in between).

And then of course the dreaded 1st round of high level combat where SOMEONE on a given side WILL whip out a dispel magic and grind things to a halt.

 

[Lanefan]

my thing is I would rather the rules (in game narrative) reward going through more encounters instead of less

And that, without imposing some very contrived-looking rules that would fight hard against believability/realism, ain't gonna be easy to do.