15 Minute Workday Myth?

[takasi]

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 dungeon.

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?

 

[Kunimatyu]

You encourage taking 20 on every square? Yikes.

I think 4e's traps will be big encounter traps ala Dungeonscape, and the "count every square" approach will be going the way of the dodo. At least, I hope that's the case.

 

[Rechan]

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.

So your response to 15-minute work day metagaming on the players part is to metagame on the DM part?

If a trap can only be caught by taking 20, then that's a trap that's well outside the bounds of the party.

The characters without search in their class skills must be bored to tears. And what exactly prevents the monsters from the next room from going "Hey, those bozos in the next room are taking five hours to get in here. My buff spells are running out - I'm going to charge in there and attack them."

In one of my games, the players are so paranoid and cautious I just want to scream at them. They find a sack in a monster's lair, they cast detect magic on it, then they pull their weapons and poke the sack, then they look inside, then they turn the sack upside down with their weapons drawn. It really slows things down and makes every five feet an exercise in analysis.

 

[Henry]

Truthfully, we never saw the "15 minute workday" because our groups always measured our firepower against whatever it was we were fighting. We didn't go "all out back-to-the-wall" unless the enemy proved that's what we needed to do. Miss on a roll of 19? Time to break out the spells. Sucked up a magic missile like it was mother's milk? Time to break out the Assay Spell resistance. Fireball made it wince? Time for the empowered Force Orb. If we did have an exceptional circumstance that mandated we use all we had, then we took the rest and moved on. Only in situations where we had a time limit did it make for lots of soul-searching about casting a spell.

Not everybody has this style, and I can understand that a mage wants to cast spells like a race car driver in his stock car wants to go faster than 55 mph. It's just one of those things that surprised me that so many gamers felt that the "15 minute workday" thing applied to them.

 

[Henry]

In one of my games, the players are so paranoid and cautious I just want to scream at them. They find a sack in a monster's lair, they cast detect magic on it, then they pull their weapons and poke the sack, then they look inside, then they turn the sack upside down with their weapons drawn. It really slows things down and makes every five feet an exercise in CSI-style fine-tooth combing the trains of dirt for a threat.

I'd almost be willing to bet they're checking in table legs for hidden magic wands, too. Is this something they've always done (older players of previous editions doing standard procedure) or did you or another DM previously have a campaign where this kind of thing was rewarded (like say the sack DID have something fishy about it)?

 

[psionotic]

It also depends on whether your adventures are pre-printed or homebrewed. We recently played through Age of Worms, and, at least for our group, we had to rest after every fight (occasionally every other) or we were going to get annihilated. So, as fun as that series is, for our group, it forced us to go 0:15, rest for 8:00.

And we still had two party wipes and numerous deaths.

 

[hectorse]

Souns aweful boring

 

[Umbran]

What about you?

The PCs in my games are always trying to accomplish some goal, or get something done that is meaningful to them. Their approach to resource management is always relative to what they perceive as the pressures upon them in seeking the goals.

When they are facing the one thing that stands between them and the goal, they'll go all-out. Otherwise, they are naturally cautious. No so cautious as to Take 20 searching each 5 foot square - but that's again because of playstyle. My players and I don't find very frequent traps to be dramatically interesting. So, I don't put them in a situation where such searching is really called for...

 

[Rechan]

I'd almost be willing to bet they're checking in table legs for hidden magic wands, too. Is this something they've always done (older players of previous editions doing standard procedure) or did you or another DM previously have a campaign where this kind of thing was rewarded (like say the sack DID have something fishy about it)?

It's an online game (ergo why wasted time bothers me), so I'm not fully familiar with how their games were ran in the past. They're either experienced or new players, but either way.

The sack in question was a bag of tricks, so it had something furry at the bottom of it, so I GUESS I can see their wariness, but still.

I personally have two preferred styles of play. Either 1) Open every door we come to with sword ready, spells flying, and charge in to fight what's there! Or 2) Bond-style, with recon and sneaking, bringing things ahead of time to set up a trap or a clever tractic (the players in my urban Mystery campaign take this route, so it's satisfying until they throw monkey wrenches into my plans in rapid succession).

Neither of these really require putting the door to the closet under a microscope to ensure it's not going to eat you.

 

[Khairn]

I admit to being more than a little perplexed by the assertion that the 15 minute workday is a common playstyle for many GM's and players. Sure, I've experienced them as well, but both my players and I realized that this type of play was not very fun.

So I simply stopped GM'ing in a manner that enabled my players to play that way.

I created adventures that minimized safe spots where players can rest, or created time constraints that forced them to press on. If they did flee the dungeon to rest, I made certain to change some elements when they returned. I also adjusted the foe's & threats the players were facing so that there weren't encounters where the players were forced to expend all their resources.

The net result was that the "15 minute workday" became a playstyle of the past for us. Much like Monty Haul dungeons and 5 hour single combat sessions.

The system doesn't create a 15 minute workday playstyle, its the GM's and players who make that happen.