D&D 5E Allow the Long Rest Recharge to Honor Skilled Play or Disallow it to Ensure a Memorable Story

[hawkeyefan]

Who decides what the PCs' goal is, who the antagonists are, etc?

Here's a summary of Curse of Strahd, taken from the Wikipedia page:

Adventurers are mysteriously drawn to the realm of Barovia which is surrounded by deadly fog and ruled by the vampire wizard Strahd von Zarovich. This gothic horror adventure takes the players on a course through Barovia that culminates with a vampire hunt inside Castle Ravenloft. Using a deck of tarokka cards, the Dungeon Master can randomize parts of the adventure such as the identity of a powerful ally, the placement of important magic items across Barovia, and Strahd's location within Castle Ravenloft.

Yeah, the book offers several important elements that are meant to be decided randomly by a card draw. In my opinion, it's actually quite a bit to track to leave it up to a random process determined during play. The card reading is meant to be an in game/in fiction event with Madame Eva, one of the head Vistani characters, performing a card reading for the PCs.

I actually crafted some goals into the scenario that were specific to my group based on our campaign. So I made some choices that suited those elements. Most significantly I kind of tweaked the role of Ireena Kolyana, the damsel in distress of the adventure, to have specific connections to our PCs, and so her fate was incredibly important to them.

Here are some features of the scenario:

* It takes place in a realm where the PCs are strangers, and hence where there is no basis for the players to exercise any authority over the basic background fiction (eg a player can't posit that their PC makes contact with a friend or ally from their past);

Yes, this I didn't mind because I actually wanted it to be the case. Because I was incorporating CoS into a larger campaign, the PCs were already established and had means at their disposal, and I wanted to bring them to a place where that was not the case. They were not randomly taken by the mists and transported to Barovia as the book suggests, but rather chose to go there through the Shadowfell (the book connects the demiplanes of dread with the plane of shadow, for which I like the 4E terminology and take).

I think that this idea of being a stranger works well in certain cases, and I think that horror can be on such case. The characters are going into the unknown and are on their own....that works for the genre.

* It is already established that the scenario will end with a vampire hunt in a particular castle - so both antagonist and the location of the climax are pre-established;

Yes, this was something made very clear in the book. It doesn't necessarily have to work out that way.....you could conceivably encounter Strahd in any number of places, and defeat him. But given his nature, it will be incredibly difficult to actually destroy him unless you do so at his coffin. The book offers a place within the castle where he can always be encountered. It doesn't overtly state this to the players, but is instead through the form of the card reading. Something like "You'll find him among those who are lost to him" meaning when the PCs go to the family crypts, he will ALWAYS be there.

I went with it, but had no intention of having him be there if they went there more than once. They only went into the crypts once, so it wasn't an issue in that regard.

* The GM determines (via card draw) who will be a powerful ally of the PCs;

Yeah, there are several NPCs that the PCs can befriend. The card reading gives one of them an ability to boost the PCs a bit during a confrontation with Strahd (I forget the exact nature, something like the ally can grant Inspiration once per round or something similar).

I didn't bother with that, but instead chose a specific character whose knowledge would greatly assist the PCs. I used that character to share a lot of the backstory of Strahd.

* It's predetermined that various magical items will be important to the adventure.

Definitely! I used these very much as described in the book. The Sunsword and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind both give the PCs significant advantages against vampires, and so they were a big part of the game. The PCs only felt comfortable going to the Castle to confront Strahd once they had these (they encountered him outside the Castle early on, and he smacked the crap out of them and toyed with them).

That seems like there is a lot of GM decision-making about the fiction; and it seems to invite quite a degree of curation by the GM and/or player-GM collaboration to make sure all that pre-conceived stuff actually happens.

Yeah, I actually quite like the adventure. I think it's among the best of 5E, if not the best (Lost Mines of Phandelver is very good, too). It does have a central premise, and the nature of things kind of locks the PCs into that premise....so there does need to be some buy in on the players' part. But it otherwise presents a sandbox type area where the PCs are free to roam to try and do everything they need to in order to be ready for the showdown with Strahd. In the book as written, only killing the vampire will let them escape from Barovia.

So it's a heavily curated experience. Again, something I think is baked in to the 5E approach to gaming.

 

[pemerton]

To add to my post just upthread (#630):

There is a real contrast here between classic D&D and 4e D&D.

In 4e D&D the availability, from upper Heroic Tier, of various forms of travel magic changes the subject matter of the shared fiction. The fiction can no longer be confined to a modest locality, because the players can have their PCs break out of that if they wish to.

But the actual process of play, whereby players confront and overcome challenges, doesn't change: at Heroic Tier the skill challenge was to move through a goblin-infested forest; at Paragon Tier it was to move through the Underdark; at Epic Tier it was to cross a layer of the Abyss. The fiction changes, and so the stakes and themes become grander in fictional terms, but the players are doing the same thing process-wise. Equally this is so in combat.

By contrast, AD&D envisages clear changes in the process of play as the PCs gain levels. Players of high level PCs don't have to engage with dungeon geography, or overland geography, in the way that players of lower-level PCs have to. And the planar adventures that high level PCs undertake are supposed to be different not just in fiction but in the processes of play (see eg Gygax's discussion in his DMG, including his ideas about plane-hopping to Gamma World or Boot Hill; modules like the Dungeonland/Magic Mirror adventures, Isle of the Ape and Q1; all the rules modifications in the AD&D Manual of the Planes; etc). And there is an obvious expectation that combat at high levels will include mass wargame elements (armies, siege rules etc) that probably won't figure at lower-levels.

Saying there can still be an overarching goal of skilled or clever play in both low and high level AD&D play is true but not very informative: it doesn't tell us what to actually expect when we turn up to the table. To get that useful information we have to actually attend to the processes of play that are apt to emerge from the sorts of moves made available to the players of various levels of PC. This is where moves like Passwall and Teleport play a pretty different role from moves like Hold Portal (replaces iron spikes) or Knock (replaces a STR or pick lock check) or even Phantasmal Forces (permits a new avenue for deceiving/manipulating NPCs and monsters).

 

[pemerton]

Sicart defined mechanics neatly as "methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world" and in much discussion of games, mechanics are understood to arise from rules, but to be something on top of them. A game mechanic might be built out of multiple rules and other game components. I'd like to preserve this distinction as it does a lot of work.

Example. One rule might be that fireball has a range of 150'. The game mechanic for fireball is the whole thing: the area of effect, the spell slot used in casting, the saving throw of the targets, the damage and halved damage, the damage type.

Here are two things that a player who has fireball written on a list of available character abilities can do:

(1) Make it true that one or more participants have to adjust the hp totals for characters under their control, subtracting Xd6 from them (where X is a function of the spell rules - in classic D&D it is equal to the caster's level). If hp reach zero then this triggers further application of rules like death/dying; and in some cases if hp cross a threshold (eg 50%) this might trigger a morale check.

(2) Make it true that in the fiction a great explosion of fire has occurred in a certain area. Obviously that fire might set things on fire, melt ice, vaporise liquids, etc.

I think the best discussion of the difference between, and relationship between, (1)-type stuff and (2)-type stuff is Vincent Baker's here. (And more links here.) A clear feature of Gygaxian skilled play, as exemplified in modules like B2 and S1, is a lot of arrows from clouds to clouds (eg poking things with 10' poles is like this) and from clouds to boxes (eg I listen at the door is like this). And the clouds are very granular around some recurrent topics like architecture and geography; and the action declarations that generate arrows from clouds to boxes are correspondingly granular and focused on those sorts of topics.

Some contrasting RPG approaches:

* My Classic Traveller game has arrows that run from clouds to boxes, but not at that level of granularity; and it has many fewer high stakes cloud-to-cloud arrows. Generally if things are high stakes than dice get rolled.

* Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP has very few cloud-to-cloud arrows because nearly every action declaration that matters gets treated as an opposed check; and it has considerably fewer arrows from clouds to boxes because it doesn't readily allow fictional positioning to matter unless it has already been "mechanised" (eg by being turned into an Asset). If we compare to Baker's analysis of DitV and D&D, Cortex+ Heroic has rightward arrows that resemble the ones for including a trait or belonging (does the current situation permit an Asset or Resource to be brought to bear?) but not ones that resemble taking the high ground and not really ones that resemble changing the arena of conflict as in DitV.

 

[Manbearcat]

To add to my post just upthread (#630):

There is a real contrast here between classic D&D and 4e D&D.

In 4e D&D the availability, from upper Heroic Tier, of various forms of travel magic changes the subject matter of the shared fiction. The fiction can no longer be confined to a modest locality, because the players can have their PCs break out of that if they wish to.

But the actual process of play, whereby players confront and overcome challenges, doesn't change: at Heroic Tier the skill challenge was to move through a goblin-infested forest; at Paragon Tier it was to move through the Underdark; at Epic Tier it was to cross a layer of the Abyss. The fiction changes, and so the stakes and themes become grander in fictional terms, but the players are doing the same thing process-wise. Equally this is so in combat.

By contrast, AD&D envisages clear changes in the process of play as the PCs gain levels. Players of high level PCs don't have to engage with dungeon geography, or overland geography, in the way that players of lower-level PCs have to. And the planar adventures that high level PCs undertake are supposed to be different not just in fiction but in the processes of play (see eg Gygax's discussion in his DMG, including his ideas about plane-hopping to Gamma World or Boot Hill; modules like the Dungeonland/Magic Mirror adventures, Isle of the Ape and Q1; all the rules modifications in the AD&D Manual of the Planes; etc). And there is an obvious expectation that combat at high levels will include mass wargame elements (armies, siege rules etc) that probably won't figure at lower-levels.

Saying there can still be an overarching goal of skilled or clever play in both low and high level AD&D play is true but not very informative: it doesn't tell us what to actually expect when we turn up to the table. To get that useful information we have to actually attend to the processes of play that are apt to emerge from the sorts of moves made available to the players of various levels of PC. This is where moves like Passwall and Teleport play a pretty different role from moves like Hold Portal (replaces iron spikes) or Knock (replaces a STR or pick lock check) or even Phantasmal Forces (permits a new avenue for deceiving/manipulating NPCs and monsters).

This reminds me of the below post of a recent play excerpt.

Climb as custom moves + navigation of layered decision-points + resource management (HPs, Adventuring Gear, Spells, Cohorts, Hold, possible complications involving other gear or Debilities)...

Nope. Scene transitioned to a Perilous Journey in another dimension by a Wizard with an Ethereal Walk spell (similar to your Passwall example)!

I think there is a lot to be said about this.

In @darkbard and his wife's last Dungeon World session they had made camp below a 400 meter, multi-obstacle wall on their Perilous Journey through/to the top of the mountain to face their ultimate adversary in the game (which became their adversary in session 2 I believe?). This was the 3rd camp of that journey.

Prior to play I had worked up some robust conflict resolution mechanics (a series of Custom Moves and procedures to invest the conflict with tactical and strategic decision-points + harrowing, thematic danger) to resolve the climb. Given the gravity of the effort, this would have likely have taken up a good 1.5 to 2 hours (given the inevitable snowballing complications and resultant game of "Spinning Plates" that would have arisen from the play). Given that our sessions are typically about 2.75 hours, navigating this wall and getting to camp 4 to Make Camp/Manage Provisions and then do End of Session would have likely have been the full content of the session.

However, darkbard's wife (a Wizard) had a spell loaded out that let them transit to the Ethereal Plane and obviate "the wall obstacle" entirely! So the session actually ended up being (a) saying goodbye to their cohorts (a Sherpa and his nephew who was one of their two Porters), (b) a Perilous Journey conflict through the Ethereal Plane to the Feywild barrier doorstep of an enchanted elven village (at a tree line at much higher altitude than should be possible) and, (c) the subsequent showdown with the BBEG with the Wizard's nemesis (an interdimensional, Lovecraftian horror) after a spellcrafting move of hers went south!

Obviously Dungeon World's "play to find out" is the polar opposite of a WotC AP, but what I wanted to focus on was how "the micro story" can change (without affecting the macro story). I had anticipated the session being about climbing a big, scary, multi-obstacle frozen wall! When the reality was, it turned out to be something entirely different (because a Wizard had a move to change the landscape of play...happens even in Dungeon World!)!

 

[clearstream]

Nope. Scene transitioned to a Perilous Journey in another dimension by a Wizard with an Ethereal Walk spell (similar to your Passwall example)!

It's only a problem when the content is finite

 

[Yazman]

The Storyteller imperative is at tension with whether the Long Rest will occur. Its invariably (or at least almost assuredly) going to lead to unrewarding, anticlimax if it occurs.

This makes no sense to me. Why would players doing a long rest, aka going to sleep, lead to an unrewarding anticlimax? This idea doesn't make any sense to me at all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This makes no sense to me. Why would players doing a long rest, aka going to sleep, lead to an unrewarding anticlimax? This idea doesn't make any sense to me at all.

You don't see how an encounter can be very different between having few resources (spell slots, hit points, hit dice, daily abilities) vs having all your resources and able to nova hard?

I mean, I know if I have a planned set of encounters for a single adventuring day and the party managed to work a long rest into the middle of it, it's much less challenging overall.