D&D (2024) Martial/Caster fix.

[ezo]

Uh.. if the players are getting long rests after each combat then the DM is doing something very wrong.

I second this!

The wizard is like a drag race car, and the fighter is more of a long distance race car. But D&D is always a drag race, because everything resets after a long rest, and the players will almost always get long rests after each combat. Being able to burst is more powerful than the ability to sustain, because you never need to sustain.

This is, frankly, never the case IME except for overland travel, i.e. random encounters, and rarely during city adventures. In such cases, you might get in a long rest if you have just a single encounter that day. However, even that comes with a strong caveat: players never KNOW that an encounter will be the only one! So, sure, go ahead and "burst" on that encounter, caster buddy, and then enjoy spamming cantrips for the rest of the day when you just happen to have another 2-4 encounters or more.

IME, the only spell that is broken in this respect is Leomund's tiny hut. WotC screwed up big time on that one! Too bad they didn't finish the job of fixing it in 2024...

 

[Distracted DM]

I'll say it every thread where it's relevant: decouple long rests from sleep. Say it'll take two days, or a week, or whatever... but that's the biggest bang-for-your-buck improvement as a GM if you have a problem with one or two combats per day.

My standing long rest time is 2 uninterrupted days of downtime, but I've had players in an awful jungle where it took a week, or in a couple instances it's happened in a night when they were really pressed and stuck in a dungeon and they WERE going up against 6+ encounters per "day."

Just kill the expectation that sleep = long rest.

 

[Chaltab]

I mean just enforcing the rule that you can't benefit from more than one long rest in 24 hours can nip a lot of that in the bud.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Uh.. if the players are getting long rests after each combat then the DM is doing something very wrong.

Some people have said that, but there are large swathes of adventure types that are very very difficult to run the way the system currently works, and its' the kind of adventures that people are most likely to want to play.

Journeys, for example, are difficult, because unless you put a deliberate time limit on the journey there's no obvious way to force multiple encounters per day.

You can designate particular locations for important encounters, like say they stay at a tavern and there's a bar brawl... But you still can't put an encounter there by itself, because they'll just rest after it.

The GM will need to deliberately sequence all encounters such that there is no opportunity for resting between them.

A journey according to the above system would be something like this:

• The players leave Waterdeep.
• Nothing happens for a while, then they are attacked by bandits
• They find the bandits have prisoners and they need assistance home, because there are dangerous monsters around
• The players decide to aid them, but are just as soon as they leave attacked again by more of the bandits.
• Having dealt with the bandits they are almost immediately attacked by worgs while making camp.
• The rest of the journey nothing happens.

Note that this is only necessary specifically because D&D's weird resource system. In a system with a more even attrition system, the effect of a different pacing style would be the same for all classes.

In short: The system forces the GM to bunch things together closely. All encounters that matter need to occur close to another encounter.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I mean just enforcing the rule that you can't benefit from more than one long rest in 24 hours can nip a lot of that in the bud.

The problem isn't the number of long rests per day, rather the problem is that unless there is explicit time pressure the players can always stall until they can rest if they need to.

 

[Chaltab]

In short: The system forces the GM to bunch things together closely. All encounters that matter need to occur close to another encounter.

Yes, this is accurate.

 

[ezo]

The problem isn't the number of long rests per day, rather the problem is that unless there is explicit time pressure the players can always stall until they can rest if they need to.

Well, this is the case in any system-- if you don't have "pressure" after an encounter, the party can recover everything before moving on.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Well, this is the case in any system-- if you don't have "pressure" after an encounter, the party can recover everything before moving on.

Of course but you're missing why this is a relevant point in the first place.

In Lancer, which is much better designed than D&D, it wouldn't affect the inter party balance much if I changed up how many combats they have between each rest, because no classes are more rest reliant than others.

This is not the case in D&D, where some classes' primary design goal is "I can keep doing this forever". Which is functionally a useless quality if you never actually need to use it that much.

This is, again, the race car analogy.

 

[TwoSix]

i don't think unlimited cantrips are an issue, i don't think we really need to go back to the emergency dagger or crossbow on casters, but i do think how much they scale is, if you consider their scaling as an analogue to extra attack you realize all cantrips have functionally extra attack (3), and even get it sooner than the fighter does (17 vs 20).

i think if they only scaled once at like, 8th they'd be fine but that idea is from before factoring any other changes to casting that's being proposed here.

Kinda sorta. A cantrip usually just gains a die of damage, whereas a weapon attack is a die +stat mod. A 4d8 17th level cantrip is 18 average damage, pretty comparable to a 2d8+10 from a big standard 2 long sword attacks.

Eldritch Blast with Agonizing Blast is the cantrip with fighter-like damage progression.

 

[Ashrym]

The wizard is like a drag race car, and the fighter is more of a long distance race car. But D&D is always a drag race, because everything resets after a long rest, and the players will almost always get long rests after each combat. Being able to burst is more powerful than the ability to sustain, because you never need to sustain.

If the party gets a long rest after every combat the DM is seriously messing up.

"After you finish a Long Rest, you must wait at least 16 hours before starting another one." That's in the rules for long rests.

The party is doing nothing but sitting around in you example. IME, we continue playing the game instead of having our characters sit around all day doing nothing.

how frivolous do you think these casters are going to be with slots? they're not going to be burning them left and right on every minor inconvenience, plus the cleric and moon druid are going to save on slots in battle relying more on their weapon and wildshape .a decent control spell or two and the group can probably cantrip spam through most of the fights without much worry, like i said in the post you replied to: casters strengths are in mitigating the amount of damage that they even need to endure in the first place.

a martial might be able to take a hit, but how does that stack up against the caster's ability to take away the enemy's ability to hit?

and i'll raise the point the original question queried about an adventure not a dungeon, and an adventure means far greater chances these parties are getting their long rests in.

It's got nothing to do with frivolous use of spell slots. That group needs to use those spell slots to end those encounters. The 2 driders example would take ~7 rounds of combat to cantrip to death, resulting in taking more damage.

My estimate was 2 spell slots per encounter without using spells outside of combat to run out of slots. This was after arguments were made to use spell slots outside of combat anyway. If the spellcasters use 1 spell per combat they're still running out of spell slots. Otherwise they're kinda of sucking even when they do still have slots because they're relying on cantrips et al.

How is the spell caster taking away an enemy's ability to hit without using spell slots? What do they do when they run out of spell slots? The barbarian in my example is handing out approximately 100 temp hp each rage. With the amount of resting attributed to spell casters that's easily room for up to 800 temp hp per day just by taking many short rests instead of the rest of the day off.

If all of your adventures consist of dungeons and combat, then I can understand how you might honestly believe that.
Most adventures however have a significant amount of non-combat, shenanigans, and scope for imaginative play. This is where classes with mental primary abilities and proficiencies can perform well even before they start delving into their toolbox of magical abilities.
Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any challenges that the only the martial party would be able to overcome. The only edge the martials might be thought of as having is physical strength, but between wildshape, summons, and the various spells that can more or bypass objects, I don't think that they have much of an edge there.

That significant non-combat shenanigans is when skill benefits can shine. Why do you think I like rogues and reliable talent so much? I can easily take more significant actions that call for skill checks than spellcasters can cast spells just by trying to take actions that would require that check.

I'm not sure why you think there are challenges the martial only party could not overcome. Climbing an ice glacier is a challenge they can overcome, for example. That seems like you're limiting either your scope or definition of the challenges to challenges that specifically require magic to overcome.