A Discussion in Game Design: The 15 minute work day.

[Kurtomatic]

I agree that encouraging hording of AP-like resources is to be avoided. What if you attached other rewards to milestones that accumulate through the 'adventuring day' (which may not actually be a narrative day; YMMV)?

In 4E terms, a milestone grants 1 AP and a daily item power. What if we kept track of milestones per day, and used a progression something like...

• 1st Milestone: +1 AP, daily item power
• 2nd Milestone: +1 AP, daily item power, recover 2 surges
• 3rd Milestone: +1 AP, daily item power, recover 4 surges, recover 1 daily power
• 4th Milestone: +1 AP, daily item power, recover 6 surges, recover all daily powers

After the fourth milestone, you straighten your clothes, kick Agent Smith's ass, and go home. Translate to taste with your chosen game's daily resources.

 

[LostSoul]

I think if you made time an explicit character resource - even go to the lengths of putting "Days Spent In The Campaign" on the character sheet - that could make the 15-minute adventuring day an interesting choice.

Hypothetical, non-D&D game: You have an "In The Grid" meter on your PC sheet. For every hour that you spend "Hooked In" to the Grid, fill in a circle.

At 1, the Horu become aware of you.
At 3, the Horu can locate people you've talked to.
At 5, the Horu reverse one thing you've done.
At 7+, the Horu know where you are.

Obviously for D&D you'd want to make it different, but that's an example of how one can put time into the system and make it an explicit character resource. Basically you'd have PCs spend Time to do things - acquire XP, GP, social connections, retrain feats/skills/powers, make magic items, learn or create new spells, or any other character component.

This makes me think I need to develop a random death chart.

2d6
2 - Killed, body consumed, no chance for resurrection
3 - Killed, body left to decompose/rise as undead
4-5 - Tortured to death for 1d6 days
6-8 - Held for ransom/drained of blood for ritual components/kept as slave
9-11 - Held as sacrifice for foul ritual that takes place in 2d6 days
12 - Reverse Stockholm Syndrome

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

A character should gain strength and power over multiple encounters.

Which just about describes the tried and tested D&D concept of . . . character levels. Am I wrong?

 

[Mark CMG]

I've been working on a concept similar in nature that I call "Heroic Push or Breakthrough" which gives benefits for fighting on through the pain, standing up when others would retreat, etc. An increased XP percentage on "deeper" battles into the day would probably solve a lot of the disinsentive problems I have heard discussed here and elsewhere. If a group fights past where an estimated fifty percent of their resources are used, they gain an additional fifty percent on that encounter's XP. So, too, would fighting on after sixty percent would gain sixty percent on that encounter's XP. I don't suggest giving it for lower percentages nor do I encourage allowing huge debates among the players though I do suggest allowing the players to ask what the DM thinks might be the current estimate of used resources (they should be on the same page as to how exhausted they truly are). If they think seventy percent is too much and wish to rest up to fifty percent before pushing on, the incentive at fifty remains available. At each ten percent increment (starting at fifty), the PC also gains a +1 (cumulative) to one type of die roll (to hit, damage, etc.) or a range increment or something similar. These can be tailored to the PC specialty. This does not need to be the same from encounter to encounter for any given PC. There is the chance that it can encourage reckless behavior but I consider that a plus.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What is the 15 minute workday? Everyone has their own personal version of the concept, but to generate a good discussion we need to define the concept specifically.

The 15 minute workday occurs when characters engage in an adventuring activity that drains them of resources in some way. This could be loss of health, expending of abilities, etc. Instead of continuing said activity, the character chooses to refrain from the activity in order to recover the lost resources. Done to an extreme, the character is said to only engage in adventuring activities for “15 minutes a day”.

Now the first question, is this actually a problem? If we question specific gaming groups, this varies quite a bit. Some groups may only have one combat or “adventuring activity” per day, per week, etc. To them this isn’t an issue at all. Some gaming groups have entire sections of campaign take place over the course of a few days, to them it can seem like quite a problem.

My take on the 15 Minute Workday is this: it is not an artifact of the game, but rather, an artifact of playstyle.

I've been playing since 1977, in a variety of communities, in several states, in a variety of different RPGs and with literally scores of different players...and I've never seen it. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm just saying that it only exists under certain conditions.

And condition #1 is that the GM allows it to happen. Not once, not twice, but as a routine, which then becomes an expectation, thus leading to subconscious metagaming. The PCs "go nova", expending their energies with the knowledge that they'll be able to rest almost always at a time of greatest convenience to them.

In contrast, gamers of my acquaintance don't have that expectation, so don't play as if they can rest any old time. Instead of "going nova", PC's carefully manage their resources, always maintaining a reserve. For example, going through the 3.5 version of the ToEE, it wasn't uncommon for our party's mage to still have spells to cast after 5+ encounters. Which was a good thing because we (the Party) didn't determine when we got to rest- the campaign environment did...and there were times when we were retreating carrying one or another comrade from the field of battle. Sometimes harried as we went.

With this kind of playstyle, the proposed change reaaaaaally doesn't seem necessary. In fact, it is kind of anticlimactic.

 

[Imperialus]

I think a lot of this problem comes from D&D's tradition of relatively static dungeons and adventures. If the PC's know that when they run away and rest things will stay largely the same once they get back there is little incentive not to make a tactical retreat and try again the next morning. If on the other hand there is a time crunch and the PC's need to move in, complete their objective and get the hell out before the dreck hits the fan then they'll do so. The length of time they spend actually hitting things is immaterial.

The other thing that probably contributes is the abilities and hitpoints that reset like clockwork, once a day, once an encounter ect.

Just for example, I play a lot of Shadowrun. A typical 'run' looks like this:

1) Get the job, takes less than an hour in game and around the table.

2) do some legwork, plan for how to approach the target. (this typically takes an entire session). This will sometimes last 2 or 3 days of gametime, focused mostly on social skills, contacts, and other 'soft' attributes. Sometimes a minor firefight or other scuffle but typically of the low risk sort unless they do something stupid.

3) Do the run, this will sometimes span multiple sessions but for the PC's almost everything happens in less than an hour. Once they commit, it's almost impossible to extract and come back for another kick at the can. Heck, once they 'go loud' their adventuring day had better get a lot shorter than 15 minutes, because in less than 10 there will be corporate computer guys sealing the building, tracking them IDing them, feeding their locations to the fast response team that is choppering in from offsite, and the bound spirits getting sent to the location, all sorts of nasty crap. The longer the PC's spend onsite the more and more difficult it becomes for them to get out again.

4) Get paid, recuperate, and all that good stuff. Often lasts a couple weeks in game, and mostly takes place between sessions via email.

Edge, which fills a similar role in Shadowrun as AP do in D&D is the only resource that 'refreshes', and it does so over the course of the PC's downtime. If there is no downtime (of several days at least) there is no edge refresh. Damage in Shadowrun also heals significantly slower than in D&D, getting the crap kicked out of you can take the wind out of your sails for days, sometimes weeks.

 

[Starfox]

Before reading the thread, here are my views (I might come back and comment once having read it trough).

The reason to have dailies and other consumables is one of pacing. You want a variable pacing, where some fights are "big" fights and require that you use all your powers, while others are "small" fights and can run on only non-deletable resources. This gives the players a bit of control on how to run their resources. If they burn their all in the first fight, we get the 15 minute adventuring day. And in many cases, such as static dungeons/tombs, there really is no in-character reason no to. Rations come cheap.

To me this is not a satisfactory solution. I prefer a system where you build up your tactical options during the fight. In a short "small" fight you never get to use your big guns, simply because the fight is too short.

In 4E terms, this could be as simple as saying that the number of dailies you can use in a fight is determined by the length of the fight in rounds; you gain one daily item usage on round 3, another in round 8, and then every second round from that point out. Of course this might not work with 4E straight away - many dailies are designed to be used at the beginning of the encounter. But I think you all get my drift.

 

[Starfox]

In Deadlands, you have Fate Chips. They come in three colors, and you get three random chips at the start of a session. Then, you get chips: when your Flaws get in your way, when you accomplish something major (like finding clues, or beating a bad guy) or whenever you do something cool that the GM wants to reward.

You can spend chips to soak wounds, or to aid your die rolls. If you don't use them for those, you can turn them in for the game's version of XP. In fact, turning in unused chips is the only way to get XP. These thigns are a great motivator for the players - when you have a stack of them to spend, you can do really cool stuff.

Running Deadlands (and more recently Mutants and Masterminds) where the GM is supposed to hand out hero point rewards, I find that this never happened or only happened to the more charismatic (or nagging) players. The GM is busy enough as it considering what HIS team is doing - having to act as a judge of the fun-ness of the PCs action simply didn't work out at our table. Your experiences on this may vary, of course.

TORG had a somewhat similar system called Possibilities. These were both hero points and experience points. You literally burned your own reward during missions. I ran TORG for several years, and after a while I changed this rule - no more possibility -> Xp conversion. The reason was that the timid players and wallflowers ended up spending a lot less possibilities, and thus gaining much more xp, than the active, heroic ones.

 

[arscott]

My take on the 15 Minute Workday is this: it is not an artifact of the game, but rather, an artifact of playstyle.

<snip>

With this kind of playstyle, the proposed change reaaaaaally doesn't seem necessary. In fact, it is kind of anticlimactic.

But shouldn't D&D support a variety of playstyles? Adventure pacing is a major tool in the DM's arsenal, and when a ruleset dictates itself to a certain sort of pacing, you're hindering the DM's ability to make the game more fun.

Really, I think the best solution is to ditch the correlation between character powers and game-world time. Instead, treat "per day" abilities as "per session" instead. Absent very short or very long sessions, it works great--no 15 minute adventuring days because there's not as much benefit to resting. Games that feature lots of weaker encounters can just use a few "per session" resources each fight, while games that feature just a few, more challenging encounters will see the players bring their A game to every fight.

Running Deadlands (and more recently Mutants and Masterminds) where the GM is supposed to hand out hero point rewards, I find that this never happened or only happened to the more charismatic (or nagging) players. The GM is busy enough as it considering what HIS team is doing - having to act as a judge of the fun-ness of the PCs action simply didn't work out at our table. Your experiences on this may vary, of course.

The new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay handles this really nicely. It's game-effecting reward is called fortune points.

Whenever the GM decides that a player has earned a reward, he puts a fortune point into a "party fortune pool" instead of giving it to an individual player. When the party pool has fortune equal to the number of players, each player can take one from the pool.

 

[amerigoV]

Running Deadlands (and more recently Mutants and Masterminds) where the GM is supposed to hand out hero point rewards, I find that this never happened or only happened to the more charismatic (or nagging) players. The GM is busy enough as it considering what HIS team is doing - having to act as a judge of the fun-ness of the PCs action simply didn't work out at our table. Your experiences on this may vary, of course.

I run Savage Worlds (the base system for Deadlands). I tell my players to let me know if another player should get a bennie for their actions, etc. As you note, sometimes its hard for the GM to deal with his stuff, the story, and hand out bennies fairly.

D&D's encounter design has not helped. The XP system (for those that still use it) push the DM to have every encounter meaningful from an XP perspective (challenging at least on a mild level). Savage Worlds, for example, awards XP based on what gets done in a session. So as the GM, I am libertated to make encounters that push the story vs. having enough encounters to get the PCs enough XP to level. If the story makes more sense to throw a horde of weak creatures at the PCs that really are not a challenge but it illustrates something in the plot, I do not have any "guilt" of it not being a true challenge. The PCs blow through it and move on.

It again shows Gygax's brilliance of linking XP to treasure (award) in 1e, which did not become appearant to me until I started playing Savage Worlds.