15 Minute Workday Myth?

[Rechan]

I will say that it shocked me when I first encountered the 15-minute work day. Was playing Shackled City with a new group RL. The 5th level group had came into a complex, killed two guards who sounded the alarm (in the process the party used a wildshape and two spells) and then said "Welp, we're going to rest."

Meanwhile, everyone in the complex went into lockdown, prepping for an invasion. In the second encounter after we "broke camp", we came across the BBEG of the complex, resulting in two character deaths (one of them mine) and the survivors retreating after the BBEG wiped the floor with them. The response from the team was "Well, we didn't expect to find her on the first DAY! We were going to REST".

Except that the entire party kept going "We're not checking every door, we're looking specifically for the boss." So in practice they're looking for the express lane to the bad guy, while they don't intend to find the boss until after Rest 2 or 3.

I wanted to hit my head against a wall.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I'll admit I have run a 15 minute workday in D&D. However, it was the result of playstyle.

In the past few years, however, I've encouraged players to take 20 on every single five foot square they find. It takes 2 minutes per square to do this. The average dungeon I run players through has about 500 squares. They normally rest once per day.

How do I encourage them? Traps. Secret doors. Treasure. I hide them all over the place and in squares that wouldn't be obvious.

A side effect is that this makes players very cautious on when to use spells that last a minute, 10 minutes or an hour per level. They have to look at the size of the room and gauge how long it's going to take. And if they barrel into another room because the "clock is ticking" on a buff, that's usually when a trap that required taking 20 to find it goes off (and usually on the guy who didn't follow the rogue's footsteps exactly) or the party runs into a dead end and has to backtrack to find a secret door.

In 4th edition, I hope they take into account the amount of time it should take to thoroughly check for traps. For me that's what normally makes a party rest, not daily resources.

What about you?

Wow. To me this sounds like replacing the 15 minute workday with 12+ hours of drudgery. I played in an adventure where it got to a similar point. The game was moving so slowly that I stopped caring and just walked stright through to where I was going and if a trap killed my PC, at least he was likely to end up in some form of heaven rather than the living hell I was in.

The only effective way I have found to preventing the "15 minute workday" cycle of fight and rest is to provide some reason why the PCs cannot afford to stop and rest for 8 hours. If there are no consequences to doing it, who in their right mind wouldn't?

It seems like 4e may be moving towards removing most of the benefit from resting instead.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

The only effective way I have found to preventing the "15 minute workday" cycle of fight and rest is to provide some reason why the PCs cannot afford to stop and rest for 8 hours. If there are no consequences to doing it, who in their right mind wouldn't?

Right. It's madness not to attempt to come to each potentially deadly situation at full power, and if there's not a good reason to avoid resting, you rest. However, eventually, the DM might tire of constantly providing reasons why the players can't rest. Removing the need to rest a lot is a better solution than leaving it up to each DM to deal with the problem.

I don't know if anyone's pointed this out, but this problem is connected to the problem Mike Mearls identified with the EL system, which is that there are typically 4 encounters per day, 3 of which are too easy, and one which is hard. This last one is fun and exciting because it's hard. So DMs tend to throw more hard encounters at the players, who use up more of their resources per encounter, and so can't take as many encounters per day. After one or two of these, they need to rest or they will die in the next encounter. The 15 minute adventuring day is a consequence of the EL system being unbalanced by an emphasis on challenging encounters.

They seem to be addressing this problem both by bumping up the standard encounter difficulty (to make them all fun, challenging encounters), and reducing the PCs' need to rest between encounters.

 

[Cadfan]

I've never seen a genuine "15 minute workday" game. Like my term, "Narcoleptic Mage," its an exaggerated explanation of an in game effect.

I've always seen players do their best to "get everything done" so to speak before they rest. The problem is, there's a significant motivation built into the game rules to rest as often as possible, and there's a lot of spells and items that give players a lot of control over whether they can or cannot rest. This means that players, looking at things from their perspective and their incentives, will decide that "get everything done" is less encompassing than I might think.

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. But rather than constantly worry about whether my plotline is too sandbox-ish, meaning that players will be able to rest at their own schedule regardless of balancing issues, I'd rather the game just remove or lessen the player's incentive to sleep all the time.

 

[takasi]

OK, it's not:

DM: "You're in a kitchen area. There is a cauldron above a fireplace and some sacks of food in the corner."

Player: "What's in this square? I take 20!"

DM: "Nothing."

Player: "What about that one?"

DM: "Nothing."

Again, that's NOT how we play.

Remember that taking 20 doesn't mean the table sits around for 2 minutes of gametime.

In our games, we enter a room that's 20x30. I say "Taking 6 seconds per 5' or 2 minutes? About 3 minutes for one or 48 minutes for the other." They tell me, we all write it down (for possible fatigue and monitoring buffs), adjudicate (hey found a trap, found some hidden treasure under a fake floor panel, found a secret door, etc) and move on.

It's all abstract and the game runs very smooth.

And most of the traps in the DMG have values that require taking 20 on the part of the average rogue at 25 point buy. The average search DC for a CR 1 trap is 22. Lidda only has a +6 to search, so the chances are she's not going to find the trap unless she takes 20. The rule of thumb is that if there's no way to do something by taking 10 then you should probably be taking 20 (especially if there's nothing stopping you from doing so other than time).

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

 

[jaldaen]

When someone first mentioned the 15-minute day I started examining previous adventures and campaigns and realized that they did happen from time to time, especially with "edgy" adventures (where party level = the EL of many of the encounters... no fodder fights, just edge of your seat fights)... and campaigns where the DM is especially good at tactics, and/or the adventurers are constantly under assualt, facing terrible odds/powerful forces, etc... It also happens much more in campaigns where spellcasters are an integral part of the party's tactics.

The latest example I've come across is Speaker in Dreams... We've had to rest twice since the Big Event (and two or three times before that)... and the enemies we are facing have encouraged us to use every trick in the book to take them down. And though we've been successful we have suffered massive amounts of damage during each encounter (with a PC dying each time from one hit wonders or coup de graces)... after each encounter our cleric has pretty much used up all his healing spells... and we still have not faced the BBEG...

Each of these encounters has been about a one to two minute melee and each time we've had to rest afterward b/c if we pushed on in our weakend condition we would probably become a TPK...

What makes it worse is that Speaker in Dreams really feels like it would be a great adventure for 4e... in 3.5 it runs choppy b/c you've got so much damage output from the enemy's that its difficult to keep going without resting after every major fight. Hopefully in 4e it'll be easier to string along a bunch of difficult fights without the players having to retreat b/c a couple of the casters are out of spells (and feel too vulnerable to keep going).

 

[Rechan]

I don't know if anyone's pointed this out, but this problem is connected to the problem Mike Mearls identified with the EL system, which is that there are typically 4 encounters per day, 3 of which are too easy, and one which is hard. This last one is fun and exciting because it's hard. So DMs tend to throw more hard encounters at the players, who use up more of their resources per encounter, and so can't take as many encounters per day.

The thought that comes to mind then is to make encounters hard, not because it's a monster with huge HP/saves/damage output, but to make a difficult situation that doesn't necessitate the use of high level abilities.

Take the standard CR monster for the PCs level, and put it on a swaying rope bridge above wide pit filled with swarms of some kind. PCs on a rickety raft versus underwater zombies trying to capsize their boat/drag them into the water. Neither of these necessitate "Use your highest level spells", but they aren't a speedbump for the PCs either.

 

[takasi]

They seem to be addressing this problem both by bumping up the standard encounter difficulty (to make them all fun, challenging encounters), and reducing the PCs' need to rest between encounters.

I don't see this as a problem though. In fact, I think it would be more of a problem if they don't have to stop fighting between encounters. You get the "level three times in one day" problem. Now you HAVE TO to institute a time sink like encouraging players to take 20 on the rooms they search. Without a resource sink there's nothing stopping them plowing through a dungeon in 15 minutes.

 

[Rechan]

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

By rolling.

If you don't have a chance to make it by taking ten, then I don't think it's an adequate CR for your level. Taking 20 for every trap just seems ridiculous to me.

Also, traps have CR. If you can just beat the trap by taking 20, that's free XP right there. There should be a chance of FAILURE.

 

[Pbartender]

Remember that taking 20 doesn't mean the table sits around for 2 minutes of gametime.

In our games, we enter a room that's 20x30. I say "Taking 6 seconds per 5' or 2 minutes? About 3 minutes for one or 48 minutes for the other." They tell me, we all write it down (for possible fatigue and monitoring buffs), adjudicate (hey found a trap, found some hidden treasure under a fake floor panel, found a secret door, etc) and move on.

It's all abstract and the game runs very smooth.

Yep... That's about how I run it too. One of my players says, "I want to search the room." I ask "You want to Take 20 on that? It'll take about half an hour for the whole room." If the character have the time, they say, "Sure, that'll be a 30 total on the check." I tell them what they find, and maybe check to see if a 'random' encounter shows up in the meantime. It saves a lot of out-of-game time, and eats up some in-game time.

Sometimes, the players decide they're in a hurry, and take the roll instead.