D&D General D&D without Resource Management

[FrogReaver]

IMO - The fundamental problems with any player driven fiction dependent recovery mechanic are 1) The DM must design adventures that give players agency while for balance purposes restricts that agency to not materially altering the encounters per rest schedule and 2) that the DM must either allow the players to fictionally 'game' the recovery mechanic - or artificially put pressure on the players when they try to do so. That said some players will not try to game the mechanic and that eliminates this concern for those particular groups - but in general that cannot be guaranteed.

The solution to me seems to be to focus more around the encounter level. Make losing encounter not necessarily be TPK's, provide a narrative failure - possibly have that failure spill over into some daily PC resources - and when they get low enough another failure can mean PC death is a narrative consequence.

Players would have have a few high level options while on the adventure and not in battle - fallback for recovery, retreat to a safe haven. Give these choices sufficient narrative weight or at least the potential for it.

Resulting system maybe isn't d&d, but probably is really fun while avoiding some of the biggest issues.

 

[Lanefan]

Not even sure what this means, man. Balancing to short rest means you can do more dungeons, more fights, more hazards, more traps, etc. Put in some new conditions to make it all work, like Exhaustion 2.0 which means you need to take an 8 hour rest in order to Refresh, or Wounded which makes it so you need a medicine check and 24 hours of rest in order to Refresh.

Forest and trees, man. Forest and trees.

In the end you'll do just the same number of dungeons, fights, hazards, traps etc. as you would have before, only at a ludicrously-faster pace in terms of game-world time than would be the case with a slower rest schedule.

 

[Shardstone]

In the end you'll do just the same number of dungeons, fights, hazards, traps etc. as you would have before, only at a ludicrously-faster pace in terms of game-world time than would be the case with a slower rest schedule.

Sorry, that's not true. Limit Refreshes to two per session if you want and you're good to go. But games like Spire and Heart both use a similar model for refreshes (but with a unique class-based narrative requirement) and run just fine. The point is to limit the amount of things I'm tracking and for how long.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sorry, that's not true. Limit Refreshes to two per session if you want and you're good to go. But games like Spire and Heart both use a similar model for refreshes (but with a unique class-based narrative requirement) and run just fine. The point is to limit the amount of things I'm tracking and for how long.

Per session doesn't balance either. You still can run to many or too few encounters for the balance point. The particulars of that game may make this achievable, but it would not be with 5e style abilities.

 

[Shardstone]

Per session doesn't balance either. You still can run to many or too few encounters for the balance point.

Sorry, that just doesn't matter. I'm not trying to make a perfect system, I'm trying to make a system I think is better. Running too few or too many encounters also doesn't break balance. There's nothing unbalanced about having to fight a chain of encounters back to back. That's intense. There's nothing unbalanced about having an easy one-encounter session. That's easy fun.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sorry, that just doesn't matter. I'm not trying to make a perfect system, I'm trying to make a system I think is better. Running too few or too many encounters also doesn't break balance. There's nothing unbalanced about having to fight a chain of encounters back to back. That's intense. There's nothing unbalanced about having an easy one-encounter session. That's easy fun.

Between recoveries there is most definitely a balance point and too many/too few encounters will be unbalanced.

I have no idea what 'break balance' means.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not even sure what this means, man. Balancing to short rest means you can do more dungeons, more fights, more hazards, more traps, etc. Put in some new conditions to make it all work, like Exhaustion 2.0 which means you need to take an 8 hour rest in order to Refresh, or Wounded which makes it so you need a medicine check and 24 hours of rest in order to Refresh.

Forest and trees, man. Forest and trees.

I don't know this means, man. Balancing for the encounter does not make sense, insofar as verisimilitude is concerned, in all situations. I really think you need a mix.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I meant to respond to this earlier, but have been distracted by IRL things.

Frankly, Lanefan, this position comes across as naive at best; you are assuming that because someone does something, it necessarily must be the most fun they could have. That is simply, outright false. We can cover it with a thought experiment: Imagine you are playing Qhess, which is just like chess, except that it has an automatic win button which only activates if the player captures no pieces after playing for exactly one full hour. The optimal choice, then, is to sit there and do nothing for exactly one hour and then slam the instant-win button; by definition, you have captured no pieces (since you haven't moved!)

The problem here is exactly what I said earlier: the difference between task and outcome. The game tells players that some outcome is valuable, and thus they will pursue it. The whole point of telling the player something is valuable is to get them to want to pursue it. But, for a game to be a game and not a puzzle (or other non-game things), there must be multiple tasks which could potentially lead to that outcome. Hence, the player is encouraged to pick whichever task is the most effective at producing the outcome. But the outcome itself is, generally speaking, not much fun, for the same reason that "cross the finish line" in isolation is not a particularly enjoyable action. It is the process of getting to the finish line that is, generally speaking, where the enjoyment occurs.

Hence: Something which short-circuits that process, which lets the player completely reject the challenge, really does damage the fun of play. It turns the process into something trivial and boring.

Players will optimize the fun out of a game if they're given the chance to do so. Not all of them, of course; but most of them will. It is human nature to want to win, and if one must endure tedium, even outright unpleasantness in order to win...most players will do it.

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

I mean, there's also a third way, which has none of the problems of either of those, and instead gets the players to want to engage with the actually enjoyable gameplay-process of the game in question.

That is, write the game so that engaging with the process of gameplay, engaging with risk and challenge, IS the most optimal path to victory. Then, the folks who would already be doing that because they want to aren't punished for refusing to push the "I win" button, and the folks who prefer to optimize will literally optimize for an enjoyable experience because that's what is maximally effective.

Hence why I desire games where it doesn't matter which direction you look at it. Choosing to do the roleplay that makes sense and offers a fulfilling experience leads to mechanical benefits and better gameplay; choosing to seek mechanical benefits and better gameplay leads to roleplay that makes sense and offers a fulfilling experience. Games that fix the problem of optimizing the fun out of the game by making optimization indistinguishable from choosing to have fun with it.

 

[jgsugden]

The people who have WOTC sponsored and approved D&D content don't do 6-8 encounters to drain and track resources which breaks the system.

I can 100% tell you that your assumption is not accurate. I am a DM that does this, and as a player I have played in many games that, you know, followed instructions.

The game works well when you follow the suggested design. Too few people have tried it.

 

[Minigiant]

I can 100% tell you that your assumption is not accurate. I am a DM that does this, and as a player I have played in many games that, you know, followed instructions.

The game works well when you follow the suggested design. Too few people have tried it.

Oh why don't people fully read my comment.

Some people do fewer encounters per day because they enjoy it or it makes more logical sense.

It isn't always optimization.
It isn't always optimization.