D&D General D&D without Resource Management

[EzekielRaiden]

Put another way: there is nothing wrong with the 5-minute workday if-when the characters can pull it off.

Yes, there is. The thing wrong with it is that it explicitly, by the designers' own admission, sidelines characters which get little to no benefit from such tactics.

Which, apart from 4e, has always been the martial characters. Those characters inherently get to have less fun this way. And that's not even touching on the "so that's five encounters in a row that the Druid and my Wizard have completely nixed" type problem, aka "wishing the encounter away" as noted in a previous thread.

The thing wrong with the 5MWD is that it short-circuits actually playing the game. As I said in the other thread, it is the result of failing to match tasks with outcomes. Players substitute a trivial, no-effort task for the non-trivial, effortful task because why wouldn't you? But that is, very literally, choosing not to have fun in order to win more often.

Giving players the ability to choose to have less fun in order to win more often is a mark of bad game design.

 

[Voadam]

Not sure how you base them on narrative and setup when everything recharges per encounter.

Easy, how tough do you want an encounter to be based on narrative and setup? Make it that tough.

The CR system and judging challenge works better if the players are on an even baseline instead of maybe 5 PCs will nova, maybe none of them will use any expendable resources as the baseline variability.

If you want Old School low level lethality then make the encounters tough and lethal.

If you want it based on random encounters for the terrain in a sandbox then do so.

If you want action hero or anime heroics then the PCs generally shine and kick butt over their foes in combat.

Either that means you have to scale them up to always be challenging

Only if the narrative and setup is that fights are always challenging. Most narratives will have variability in the challenge of the different fights.

Even if you want a consistently high challenge game that is fairly easy to set up, just pick encounters of that target level of challenge. It is easier to do with PCs being on a more consistent baseline than if they had bigger possible variations from the use or absence of more powerful and swingier daily/long rest based powers.

and create a narrative that allows for that, or it means none of them matter because the chars wipe the floor with the enemies each time, until they come to the boss

Or fights will vary in how tough they are generally with narratively tough opponents being tough challenges.

The default x per day limit pacing encounter design calls for and allows variability of fights within that limit. You can do that too with per encounter resource management.

Whether most fights and how many fights are easy or hard will depend on what the DM throws at the party and the narrative genre and tone the DM is going for.

The weaker opponent fights are generally narratively there for the characters to either shine and look cool, or to go through fairly quickly as a minor obstacle which makes narrative sense to be there and to be overcome fairly easily. What they are not there for is a small cumulative wearing down of game day based resources.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

4E had way less daily resource management and more encounter-based resource management. This made the game effectively not care about how many encounters you had in a day.

False. Healing surges forced every character to care about how many encounters they participated in each day. It's part of why using surges as a cost for failure outside of combat was such a powerful tool in the 4e DM's arsenal. Losing just two surges could be devastating to a character's ability to participate in combat. Even beefy characters (Defenders, the beefier types of Striker, certain Leaders) would feel that.

Surges were the driving force ensuring strategic/logistic pressure, and they were extremely effective for that purpose. A party with no Daily powers will gladly sally forth into danger. A party with all of their Daily powers and no surges will flee from danger. Because the players are quite well aware of the peril they put themselves in when they go into combat with no surges left.

This, for example, is why that one ritual that let you swap surges between party members (Comrades' Succor) was so desirable. Desirable even though someone in the party had to lose a surge to use it! It meant that you could funnel surges from well-protected squishies (e.g. back-line Wizards, high-AC speedsters like Storm Sorcerers or Avengers, Rogues that have been stealthy enough to avoid being hit) to front-line fighters regularly taking a beating.

Unfortunately, a lot of DMs either completely ignored surges as a tool for shaping player behavior, or used them only in a really rudimentary way (in part because many actively avoided the skill challenge rules, where surges can shine even more brightly.) Between them, consumables, and actual Daily powers--which, again, allowing flexibility in their use outside of combat was clearly by the rules, people just...didn't do it--there's plenty in 4e that makes you care how many encounters you have each day. It just featured both well-supported tactical resources and well-supported strategic ones.

 

[M_Natas]

Well I don't think it is good gameplay. You can think differently.


But I don't want to get rid of strategic level gameplay. Having resources not be encounter based on the other hand doesn't remove tactical gameplay.


Yes it is. A ton of classes use spells, and whilst there are some spells that are too good or too weak, spellcaster play is not just spamming one good spell (unless you're a warlock.)

Because we have spellslots instead of Mana / Sorcery Points (or what that Variant rule is called). Everybody who have used the Variant Spellppoint Rules to replace spellslots makes the same experience: Caster always use the highest spells. Instead of 2 or three fireballs, and then shatter and then catapult, it is fireball all the way till they got no more Mana.

Yes, the reason is that it is not the deafult option, but an obscure foortnote in DMG. Most people just use the deafult setup and do not even stop to consider if it is optimal for the sort of game they want to have. Then again, most people really don't even care about the sort of issues people here constantly whine about, so the default seems to work well enough for them.

Yeah, optional rules that replace rules and increase the difficulty for the players are rarley used. Gritty Realism. Variant encumbrance ...
Optional rules that give players benefits are like always taken (Flanking).

If given a choice, players will always opt to make it easier for themselves, even if it kills the game because it becomes to easy.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Or less tedious. Gritty Realism and Variant encumbrance don't so much make the game 'harder', they make it more annoying.

It's like if a videogame's difficulty slider inverted and remapped your controller instead of making the enemies tougher or hit harder.

 

[Pedantic]

Yes, there is. The thing wrong with it is that it explicitly, by the designers' own admission, sidelines characters which get little to no benefit from such tactics.

Which, apart from 4e, has always been the martial characters. Those characters inherently get to have less fun this way. And that's not even touching on the "so that's five encounters in a row that the Druid and my Wizard have completely nixed" type problem, aka "wishing the encounter away" as noted in a previous thread.

The thing wrong with the 5MWD is that it short-circuits actually playing the game. As I said in the other thread, it is the result of failing to match tasks with outcomes. Players substitute a trivial, no-effort task for the non-trivial, effortful task because why wouldn't you? But that is, very literally, choosing not to have fun in order to win more often.

Giving players the ability to choose to have less fun in order to win more often is a mark of bad game design.

I think you're talking past each other. The game doesn't need to have a class that relies on an extended workday for relevance, that's a frustrating historical artifact, and the players could reasonably produce interesting gameplay while still having an incentive to manipulate resource recovery, that just isn't reasonable in a system that ties recovery to sleeping overnight.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, there is. The thing wrong with it is that it explicitly, by the designers' own admission, sidelines characters which get little to no benefit from such tactics.

Which, apart from 4e, has always been the martial characters. Those characters inherently get to have less fun this way. And that's not even touching on the "so that's five encounters in a row that the Druid and my Wizard have completely nixed" type problem, aka "wishing the encounter away" as noted in a previous thread.

The thing wrong with the 5MWD is that it short-circuits actually playing the game. As I said in the other thread, it is the result of failing to match tasks with outcomes. Players substitute a trivial, no-effort task for the non-trivial, effortful task because why wouldn't you? But that is, very literally, choosing not to have fun in order to win more often.

Giving players the ability to choose to have less fun in order to win more often is a mark of bad game design.

Winning more often is, obviously, the type of fun the players are choosing to pursue.

Thus, if the winning strategy is to shorten the adventuring day whenever possible, that's what they both should and will do. I don't see how that short-circuits playing the game if their (IMO quite reasonable) intent is to play to win.

There's ways to prevent this but they aren't likely to be very popular:

--- Gritty: take away most if not all recharging powers-abilities-etc. other than hit points (small-fractional recharge on a long rest) and spells (full recharge daily regardless of rest schedule), and don't replace them with anything. Characters have to rely either on at-wills or on being able to get an overnight rest, the latter not always being so easy to do when in the field. Ditch short rests entirely. This would clobber the PCs' overall power level and might make a few entire classes redundant, I'm fine with both.
--- Gonzo: make everything either at-will or fully recharged every short period of time (but not "per encounter" as that's just too wishy-washy and hard to define). This removes all reasons for resting other than that the PCs realistically need to sleep sometime; otherwise, they could just keep on keepin' on. This would push the PCs' power level to the stratosphere, though, and I'm not fine with that.

The drawback with the gritty option above is that the DM really isn't encouraged by the game to use the extra time the PCs spend resting to have the enemies beef themselves up.

 

[James Gasik]

Because we have spellslots instead of Mana / Sorcery Points (or what that Variant rule is called). Everybody who have used the Variant Spellppoint Rules to replace spellslots makes the same experience: Caster always use the highest spells. Instead of 2 or three fireballs, and then shatter and then catapult, it is fireball all the way till they got no more Mana.

Yeah, optional rules that replace rules and increase the difficulty for the players are rarley used. Gritty Realism. Variant encumbrance ...
Optional rules that give players benefits are like always taken (Flanking).

If given a choice, players will always opt to make it easier for themselves, even if it kills the game because it becomes to easy.

Well of course you use the most powerful spells, because of the way D&D spellcasting works.

Like, why would you cast three magic missiles if you can cast one fireball with greater effect? If a higher level spell ends a combat more quickly, then it's conserving more resources to use it than to use weaker spells.

Personally, I wonder if it would be better if the magic system let you do this sort of thing- if you're spending all your juice on the best spells, that's less spell slots laying around to use shield or silvery barbs.

 

[M_Natas]

g is, this isn't un-fun play; in that if resting more often is what the characters would logically do then there's no inherent problem with their doing just that. Put another way: there is nothing wrong with the 5-minute workday if-when the characters can pull it off. That said, it's on the DM to allow the enemies to also benefit from this extra time, rather than just have them sit passively waiting for the PCs to finally reach them.

What's un-fun IMO is having those rests restore as much as they do. Resource management should be a longer-term thing, e.g. an overnight rest should get you back just a fraction of your total h.p. rather than all of them.

Further, resource management should include not just hit points, spells, and abilities but also food-water, light sources, wealth, ammunition, and time.

Funnily, I developed a system for Gradual Ressource Regeneration: https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/456636 (free download)

Characters regain roughly 10 to 30% of ressources (HP, Spell Slots) per long rest (depending on Constituion, Character Class and Level) - that can be adjusted by the conditions they are resting in from never (in the open while it's storming) to 100% (in like a luxury magical spa), so that adventure gear finally matters and be more than a ribbon you get at character creation and than never touch again.

 

[Corinnguard]

Like, why would you cast three magic missiles if you can cast one fireball with greater effect?

Fireball is only good in enclosed spaces if you are a Sorcerer with the Careful Spell metamagic ability.