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I don't think this paradigm would particularly appeal to your interests; your posts over the years generally lead me to believe you favor character-focused neotrad and narrative play over classic-style play. (If my read of your interests is wrong, I apologize.)
Your love of the sorcerer concept with its innate well of magic would certainly painfully contradict with the paradigm I'm suggesting.
Of course, stuff can happen in the dungeon in those two days. Inhabitants can change, defenses can be shored up, traps reset, etc. But all of that's up to the DM.
What style of "D&D-type play" (which is what I'm talking about, here) isn't driven by the party somehow ending up traversing an increasing challenging series of linked encounters that often end up in combat? In which some sort of resource (whether that be a metagame currency like XP, or a diegetic resource like gold or spell reagents) wouldn't end up being required?
You're talking about a party that would basically need to be acquiring a sizeable amount of gold in every adventure in order to fuel their magic. So, every adventure is going to have to start with "What's in it for us financially?" This works fine as a "gameplay loop" if you're going to be doing mostly oldschool dungeon crawls for glory and glory and treasure, but it interacts awkwardly with other sorts of stories. Off the top of my head, it limits the party's ability to work pro bono--they have to have treasure or they can't do anything. Asking your party to save the village of halflings from the horde of restless ghosts that sprang up when someone unwisely disturbed an ancient battleground is going to be a tough sell if the halflings can only pay them with turnips and gratitude, for example.
Or on the flip side, if you want your party to be the elite enforcers seeking out enemies of the crown in a time of dire threat to the country, then logically the queen would give them access to the royal treasury so that they can always have all their spells available. That completely bypasses the treasure-for-magic minigame.
I would be fine with gold-for-magic as an optional rule, but I don't want to implement mechanics for the base game that constrain story options to that degree.
Correct. The designer calibration and the actual play by the majority are off. That's why we are looking for a solution.
And since the solution needs to address resource attrition, combat encounters are the primary resource usage and need to be weighed much more heavily than anything else.
If we want to fix X, putting in a fix that doesn't properly address X because... X needs a fix so it's not generally played with is circular logic. If we want a fix, we want an actual fix, not something that doesn't fix it either.
This is only half the issue. You can definitely adjust encounters to make them more challenging. However, that doesn't address how fewer encounters affect the balance between classes.
I don't want to get into the weeds arguing the already proven case that number of encounters affects at-will and long-rest-recovery classes differently. Here's a quick thing I posted before to refresh on the idea.
There are two very different aspects that need to be met by number of encounters per day.
One of them is challenge. And yes, you can have fewer, deadlier encounters and reach your goals for this. This isn't really debated, and it's the primary - on only - one that most people think about.
The other one is balance between the at-will classes like rogue or the EB-focused warlock, and the long-rest recovery classes like full casters plus hybrids like the barbarian or the paladin.
If you took your average full caster and took away all slots, they would be less effective on average than at-will classes like the rogue. At-will > cantrip. (This doesn't include EB boosted with invocations.)
On the other hand, if you gave casters unlimited of their highest level slots, they would do more than at-will characters. A fireball with multiple opponents, etc. Slots of the highest few levels > at-will.
Putting them together, we get, in generic terms for the average character:
Slots of the highest few levels > at-will > cantrip
So in order to balance these, we need some number of spells cast using highest level slots, and some cantrips or low-impact spells (like 1st level offensive spells in T2+). Some above and some below will average out to the same as an at-will.
Let's examine that. If you run a few encounters and run the party's casters all the way out of spells - you are STILL not balancing the classes unless you also are forcing them to have a good number of rounds at less than at-will effectiveness.
An easy way to work this out is average effectiveness per action, over the course of the adventuring day.
Ah, so if you have fewer encounters, as long as the last as long as more encounters we're good, right?
Well, no. It's moving in the right direction, but duration is a thing. If an encounter is 3-4 rounds and you can a spell lasting 1 minute, you only get 3-4 rounds of it at most. But if the combat lasts 9 rounds, then you are getting 2-3 times the effect from the same slot and the same action. It's more powerful. So you need to offset it with even more rounds of lower than at-will efficiency.
A easy way to see this is the barbarian. Say you've got 3 rages per day. Assuming the encounters total to the same deadliness, is there any case where you are worse off if you can rage for every encounter instead of half of them? That's one of the things that decreasing the number of encounters does - allows duration effects to be even more powerful.
To sum up:
1. Can balance danger and challenge in fewer encounters by having tougher encounters.
2. Need to have more total rounds fighting in fewer encounters that all of the more encounters in order to maintain balance between classes.
And that second one does not often get met. Fewer encounters per day is usually fewer total rounds then if we did all of the encounters per day, and that definitely is mathematically biased in terms of the long-rest-recovery classes like casters as well as a big boost for hybrids like the barbarian and the paladin.
Leave that to the DM. A trivial encounter may not count at all, while a drop-dead all-out might count for multiple. The 13th Age solution with 4 combat encounters per full-heal-up explicitly gives the DM that judgement. (13th Age grants less daily powers for the characters at all levels, it's calibrated around 4 encounters, unlike D&D 5e).
You left out the problems with quick-to-short-rest-nova short rest classes sitting at the same table with long rest based casters and such who need to ration out the same csntripized high level spells the warlock is spamming without the benefit of at will EB. Likewise with martials when the extra attack monk is doing the same short rest loop to spam flurry/stunning strike/etc
I disagree. First of all, the OGL crisis showed that they're not really "letting" anyone use the 5e rules. For various reasons, they pretty much have to, and literally cannot change their mind at this point.
Secondly, since there are many other takes on 5e, why should WotC's version be assumed in discussion? What makes them special?
Needs a maybe option. I plan to buy the core rules but we play DCC so it may or may not be adopted. We also have Dragonbane and Dungeon Dwellers come to us.
Nice options. If you do return to D&D5.5One2024, is there stuff from DCC, Dragonbane, or Dungeon Dwellers you'd want to port over or influence your house rules?
Oh for sure. Which is why I started with the notion it's beyond the scope of an Internet poll. It's more a waxing on how many people responding to the simple question of "are you going to buy the 24' edition" have reasons to buy it or not that aren't indicative of the product itself.
I was trying to get at earlier, a better wording would ask four questions not two. First establish if they're currently playing 5e, then establish if they plan to buy the new books. That way you can see what is attrition and what isn't.
Off the top of my head, it limits the party's ability to work pro bono--they have to have treasure or they can't do anything. Asking your party to save the village of halflings from the horde of restless ghosts that sprang up when someone unwisely disturbed an ancient battleground is going to be a tough sell if the halflings can only pay them with turnips and gratitude, for example.
Couple points here. First, of course they can do things without magic. Diplomacy is free, so are weapon attacks, scouting, and planning.
And if your party was only willing to help those halflings with their ghost problem because it cost them nothing to do so, then they weren't really paragons of altruism, right?
And, if they truly want to help the poor halflings but can't because they've spent their resources on other kinds of magic, that's exactly the sort of encounter I want to facilitate as a DM! That's a "make your choices have obvious consequences" experience I'm always looking for.
Or on the flip side, if you want your party to be the elite enforcers seeking out enemies of the crown in a time of dire threat to the country, then logically the queen would give them access to the royal treasury so that they can always have all their spells available. That completely bypasses the treasure-for-magic minigame.
There are, of course, other constraints, on magic than simply gold. The loop is to acquire "resources", which you might be able to buy with gold but certainly not always. It's like dragonshards in Eberron; you introduce a diegetic constraint that can be used to control the flow of magic in the narrative.
I would be fine with gold-for-magic as an optional rule, but I don't want to implement mechanics for the base game that constrain story options to that degree.
I always find it's better for a game to be constrained at its base, and then expandable via options. It's trivial to add recharging and permanent magic to PCs via magic items and boons.
I think it's cool when folks who don't play 5e still want to chat about D&D, comparing what works, how things are different (not necessarily better or worse) etc.. I do find it tiring when there is endless repetition of why 5e/WotC are so terrible, with the implication that those of us who enjoy it are wrong. I could do without that (and thanks to the ignore feature, I largely do).
In this discussion, I think we are often missing the point: this isn't a new edition, and isn't being marketed as a new edition. WotC doesn't want you to feel you need to change out your books right away. In fact, it's the opposite: they want you to feel that you don't need to change out your books right away. They are much more interested in keeping you playing, and the updated rules are mostly for new players or those who are ready for a new PHB, etc. Not that they won't take your money, but they've got by far the most popular version of the game yet and have built a huge player base that is overwhelmingly 5e, so they don't want to jeopardize that.
If you're not interested in 5e and haven't been playing it, or if you just hate anything to do with WotC, you're not who the update is for. They could offer a major rules revamp, like the old editions model, to try to lure you back to the fold, but why would they do that? It makes a lot more sense to build on what has been massively successful.
Yes. For story purposes, though, there isn't a huge amount of difference between one day and two days in the dungeon either. A bit, sure.
You're talking about a party that would basically need to be acquiring a sizeable amount of gold in every adventure in order to fuel their magic. So, every adventure is going to have to start with "What's in it for us financially?" This works fine as a "gameplay loop" if you're going to be doing mostly oldschool dungeon crawls for glory and glory and treasure, but it interacts awkwardly with other sorts of stories. Off the top of my head, it limits the party's ability to work pro bono--they have to have treasure or they can't do anything. Asking your party to save the village of halflings from the horde of restless ghosts that sprang up when someone unwisely disturbed an ancient battleground is going to be a tough sell if the halflings can only pay them with turnips and gratitude, for example.
Or on the flip side, if you want your party to be the elite enforcers seeking out enemies of the crown in a time of dire threat to the country, then logically the queen would give them access to the royal treasury so that they can always have all their spells available. That completely bypasses the treasure-for-magic minigame.
I would be fine with gold-for-magic as an optional rule, but I don't want to implement mechanics for the base game that constrain story options to that degree.
Optional sounds good to me too, but for the opposite reason: I don't want PCs as heroes to be encouraged any more than PCs as money-grubbing murder-hobos (or at least, I'm ok with both motivations being on equal footing).
If you do return to D&D5.5One2024, is there stuff from DCC, Dragonbane, or Dungeon Dwellers you'd want to port over or influence your house rules?
