15 Minute Workday Myth?

[Lonely Tylenol]

This style of play wouldn't have worked in the Age of Worms. At the start the party mage did just what you described. Near the end of the path it became necessary to "go all out", which required more resting.

Interestingly, my (1st and 2nd level) Age of Worms party isn't running out of spells. They're running out of hit points. They usually still have lots of spells, but after being swarmed, acid-sprayed, wrecked by traps (taking 20, FYI), and the like, they go down pretty quickly. I would have lots of character deaths by now, except that I use my optional wound point system, which makes things less suddenly lethal.

I don't think they are suffering due to lack of caution, or due to the module being too tough. They're just generally unlucky. They regularly fail saving throws and climb checks, and often a single character will get suddenly hit by an enemy without the other characters being able to quickly respond, due to poor initiative rolls.

I do, however, think that the reason why they're not running out of spells is that the dungeon they're in has a fairly low encounter density, and they're taking a lot of damage due to hazards, rather than enemies. As well, the cleric doesn't have to heal all the time thanks to the wound point system, so I think I'm actually making some progress there.

 

[Aenghus]

I've been running 3/3.5e for the last six years, and I do think the rules encourage the "15 minute working day" in the absence of plot elements that impose a time limit.

As a player, I have seen it from the other siide in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. We were given a relatively safe base of operations in the dungeon, which led to hit and run raids. Later we just teleported in and out.

Specifically, once the PCs can teleport the whole party, for dungeon crawls it makes sense for the PCs to enter fully buiffed, nuke one or two encounters and teleport away before reinforcements arrive, then rinse and repeat.

The "Christmas tree" effect, the vast range of buffing spells, especially when you include newer material, and the huge difference between a buffed and an unbuffed party all push PCs to a brief agressive focused offence, followed by retreating.

And in the game I DM the general lack of a rogue means PCs find traps the hard way. They have got bored with trap filled dungeons over the years, so I limit both traps and tradiontal dungeons. Now before anyone asks, when DMiing I often prevent teleport within a location, and occasionally impose time limits etc.

It will be great if 4e allows parties to press on for longer without it being bad tactics, and permit time limited scenarios to be more fun for the players and DM.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think that the same people that invented the 3ed myth of "15 minute workday" will invent the 4ed myth of "30-levels adventuring without ever sleeping" before the advent of 5e

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think that the same people that invented the 3ed myth of "15 minute workday" will invent the 4ed myth of "30-levels adventuring without ever sleeping" before the advent of 5e

Possible. Though it might be that it will just be "the other faction" that will complain more about that. (It's their turn, after all. )

the vast range of buffing spells, especially when you include newer material, and the huge difference between a buffed and an unbuffed party all push PCs to a brief agressive focused offence, followed by retreating.

I think two things made things worse over time:
1) Shorter Duration for Buffs. In 3.0, the stat boosters had a duration measured in hours. People learned to rely on them. In 3.5, their duration changed to one minute per level. People still preferred to rely on them (and I argue the system and the adventure paths "agree" with them).
2) Spells that have a Swift casting time are usually compensated with a low duration. Unfortunately this means you can turn out more spells in a short period of time, but can only rely on them for a short moment.

I think some of the mechanical ideas were good - Swift Actions and related spells/abilities felt nice, but they don't work with tightly limited spell slots. That the stat buffs had a fixed bonus was a good change, but reducing their duration didn't help much.

 

[Keldryn]

Well it's not just the number of encounters, it's the amount of time in between encounters that creates the "15 minute workday" myth. With only 6 seconds per round, if there is nothing motivating a party to slow down (treasure, secret doors, avoiding nasty traps) then you can fight a dozen encounters in a very short period of time. That is the real cause of the short work day IMO not how many spells per day you have per day.

I usually just apply a bit of common sense and say that any combat encounter takes at least five minutes of in-game time (unless for some reason tracking time down to the second is important). The actual combat rounds played out may only account for 30 seconds of elapsed in-game time, but there's a number of assumed activities that will occur after the combat that will take some time -- binding wounds, cleaning the blood off your weapons, adjusting any armor that has come loose or unfastened, gathering up backpacks or any equipment dropped during or before the fight, retrieving any usable arrows, checking your weapons for any damage they may have sustained, taking a moment to check and see if the noise attracted anyone/anything, just pausing to catch their breath, etc. Unless the characters are in pursuit or being pursued, they are likely to be doing most of or all of these things after a battle, and nobody is interested in having players state that they are doing this stuff.

I think that I actually preferred the longer combat rounds of previous editions; it didn't really change how combats work mechanically, but it felt less precise to say that combat rounds were 1 minute (or even the 10-second ones of B/X D&D) than 6 seconds.

The RAW don't describe it this way, but I view the 6-second combat rounds a bit more abstractly. A 6-second round dictates how many actions a character can take in that amout of time, and a 5 rounds of combat will describe 30 seconds of action, but not necessarily 30 consecutive seconds; that amount of time can't really account for any lulls in the battle or opponents circling each other, waiting for an opening. I think this is one reason why a 5-round encounter that takes 40 minutes of real time feels so short when you realize that it only took 30 seconds of game time; the rules essentially account for every second of a battle, but nobody who plays the game describes their actions at this level of detail.

As for the whole thing about the RAW allowing players to stay awake searching a dungeon for 36 hours straight with no ill effects... that's simply a matter of common sense. You don't need explicit rules for that.

 

[pemerton]

I've never seen a genuine "15 minute workday" game.

I've GMed a Rolemaster game that came very close to this, as the PCs (all spell-users) teleported in (to the enemy stronghold/ruined castle/ancient pyramid/etc), did whatever it was that they were there to do until their power points were nearly all spent, and then teleported out again.

Like my term, "Narcoleptic Mage," its an exaggerated explanation of an in game effect.

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As a DM, I can usually come up with plotlines that don't permit the players to continuously sleep, and as a last ditch effort I can forbid resting more than once per day on the grounds that the party isn't tired and can't fall asleep.

Likewise - although the bit about "not being tired" doesn't work in RM because spell-users all have mediation skills that allow them to recover PPs.

But after a while it gets a bit contrived.

I'd rather the game just remove or lessen the player's incentive to sleep all the time.

Agreed. The real issue is a metagame and mechanical one, not a plot one: the players want to play their characters (in the game I am referring to, these were wizards and warrior-wizards of 20th level or so) and that means casting spells. Once the PCs run out of spells to cast, naturally enough the players choose for them to take those actions in-game which reset them to the point where they are, once again, able to do what the players want to do with them.

The downside of taking 20 is time. If the DM introduces no time pressure, then players not caring about time is pretty much the logical result.

I gather that you mean in-game time pressure - after all, at the game table the situation itself generates pressure not to waste time on boring stuff.

It is true that if the PCs don't care about time, they are likely to do things carefully (which, mechanically, equals Taking 20) - provided that this doesn't cost too much time at the game table. Even with starndard operating procedures it can get a bit tedious playing out this particular style of dungeon crawl.

If they are smart, setting a guard at the door, waiting for wandering monsters/alerted guards/etc.

This also has the potential to make for tedious play.

And assuming that it doesn't swallow up too much time at the table, the upshot seems to be that from time-to-time the player of the Rogue gets the thrill of making a Disable Device check, or the party as a whole gets the thrill of finding a secret door or a treasure cache. That is certainly one way to play D&D, but I suspect that it is no longer the most common way. Even back in the early 80s (or late 70s?), when Lewis Pulsipher published a Dragon article offering tips for this sort of play, he got a lot of hostile responses in the letters pages from proponents of other play styles. So I don't think it offers any sort of general solution to the problem of the 15-minute working day.

I'd prefer a solution which works by allowing players to play their PCs as they conceive of them whether or not their PCs are rested. This doesn't necessarily mean no fatigue penalties: but a tired fighter (with, say a -2 penalty to all rolls) is still a fighter, whereas a sleepy wizard with no spells left is not a wizard at all.

This would also not be a general solution - for example, it would make it impossible to play a 1st-ed style wizard. But at least it would be a solution that actually tackles what seems to me to be the cause. And, after all, the game can't be all things to all people.

 

[ptolemy18]

Really, how are you guys finding traps without taking 20?

In both the games I've played in and the games I've DMed, traps are secret doors are extremely rare, and only under exceptional circumstances (i.e. the mysterious dead-end, or some in-character clue that something secret might be around) has anyone ever done any serious Searching. So, no, it usually never even occurs to anyone to do this sort of thing. Sounds like we run different types of games.