Can someoone explain the "Daily Hate" for me?

[Ahnehnois]

[MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] You seem to find the ability to perform better/higher than expected unrealistic, but it's actually quite unrealistic for people to perform the same all the time. Olympic athletes can't break records every day all year long, and they require a lot of rest afterwards to get back up to their peak (even if they'll still beat the pants off you or me at their degraded level). It's also fairly against trope (that moment in the book where the ally drops and in a flare of anger the hero does something they couldn't normally do, or someone goes "You're our only hope - you can do it!" and miraculously they can, etc)

Levels of performance vary, absolutely. I just don't think that an Olympic Athlete can do what they do three times per day on a moment's notice at arbitrary intervals, no more and no less. I don't know if D&D is ever likely to be able to model adrenaline surges effectively. I generally assume that the combat rules generally assume that when you're fighting a battle to the death, you're at pretty close to peak capacity (which is why, for example, D&D movement rates are incredibly fast). I also assume that characters take a lot of down time for R&R and train a lot; I just don't mechanically require those things.

I am also a fan of action points (I use them based on the UA version) to represent those rare instances when you really need to give it that last bit of effort you didn't think you had in you. I don't give out action points on a per-day basis, however.

 

[Ahnehnois]

But at the end of the day... what you've come up with (while it works great for you) is not what many people are going to consider to be "D&D" to them. It's going to be a very different game. One that would cause people to walk away from it the same way they walked away from each edition of D&D over the years. It's no longer the D&D game they wish to play. So while you might be satisfied, many others probably won't be.

And that's the conundrum that the designers face: who do they let go as a potential customer... the folks who have certain baseline expectations of what most editions have presented in terms of "D&D rules", or folks like yourself who've modified the rules so much because you aren't happy with the baseline expectations?

You're right. Which is why we'll never be rid of Vancian magic. Even my spell point wizards still memorize spells (though the other classes are spontaneous). However, people bought 3.X's alternate magic systems presented alongside per-day spells. Options are good.

You also seem to be ignoring that 4e's martial powers (the daily ones especially) make it a very different game, which many people don't consider "D&D" to them. Are you concluding that radical change in the other direction to what I've done (adding dailies for everyone instead of eliminating them for everyone) was a good idea, or that any change this radical is unfeasible?

 

[Dannager]

So when I see professional writers putting a "per day" extra action on the fighter, I see it for what it is: lazy, inept design. And I ask myself, why would I put down money for the product of someone else's laziness?

It is worrisome that you seem to view a style of game design more focused on narrativist play to be lazy, inept, and stupid.

 

[Mengu]

I don't hate daily resources per se, but I don't like the implicated dictation on the length of an adventuring day, or some corollary between number of encounters and difficulty of encounters within the day. I want to be able to run an adventuring day that is 1 encounter long, or 12 encounters long, without having to worry about how easy/difficult each encounter needs to be or when PC's will run out of dailies. Each adventure has its own needs, and I want to be able to meet them without some gamist restriction that will inevitably become a tool for players to plan around.

 

[Ahnehnois]

It is worrisome that you seem to view a style of game design more focused on narrativist play to be lazy, inept, and stupid.

I don't.

Looking at things from a GNS paradigm, I consider myself to be heavily narrativist (certainly all those online tests agree with this). I don't consider the mechanics under discussion to be narrativist at all. If recharge times were to be used at all, as [MENTION=43019]keterys[/MENTION] said, a story-based recharge mechanic would make more sense rather than this arbitrary daily stuff, as not all days are of the same story relevance. Fatigue is more of a simulation issue than a narrative one. I also find metagame mechanics like action points serve the narrativist angle heavily. Being able to issue a knight's challenge (1/2 level + Cha mod) times per day? Not so much.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You also seem to be ignoring that 4e's martial powers (the daily ones especially) make it a very different game, which many people don't consider "D&D" to them. Are you concluding that radical change in the other direction to what I've done (adding dailies for everyone instead of eliminating them for everyone) was a good idea, or that any change this radical is unfeasible?

I would imagine that another radical change (like what you have done) will certainly sell initial sets of books (like 4E did)... but that it probably would not have the sustaining power of sales over time. Enough people would look at it as a completely "new game" that (while some people would think is exactly the kind of game they want) many players of 4E, PF, 3E and earlier would not hold to be the D&D experience they want, and would be more likely to stick with their edition of choice. Regardless of how good the rules might be.

Going backwards and sideways in design to create a Generic Universal Dungeons And Dragons game (GUDAD) that reflects back on the versions that came before it has (I believe) a better chance of getting more people to buy in long term, than the creation of a whole new version. We've seen the "whole new version" in the design and sale of 4E... and it did not sustain sales long term enough to warrant sticking with it. A new game would likely suffer the same fate... probably even faster than 4E (as it would fall into the "fool me once, shame on me-- fool me twice, shame on you" paradigm).

 

[Animal]

So...why/what is it about have abilities of any kind limited to uses per day that gets everyone so annoyed or resistant if not outright "dealbreakery/I won't play if..."?

I don't get it. 'Splain, please.
--SD

I think the 4ed's at-will/encounter/daily paradigm just makes the game more centered around encounters rather than around adventuring in general. So i guess a lot of old-school roleplayers find this approach too wargamey.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I would imagine that another radical change (like what you have done) will certainly sell initial sets of books (like 4E did)... but that it probably would not have the sustaining power of sales over time. Enough people would look at it as a completely "new game" that (while some people would think is exactly the kind of game they want) many players of 4E, PF, 3E and earlier would not hold to be the D&D experience they want, and would be more likely to stick with their edition of choice. Regardless of how good the rules might be.

Going backwards and sideways in design to create a Generic Universal Dungeons And Dragons game (GUDAD) that reflects back on the versions that came before it has (I believe) a better chance of getting more people to buy in long term, than the creation of a whole new version.

I generally agree with this, which is why I'm not trying to go into game design (that, and I have other goals), merely happily homebrewing away. The main thing for me to consider 5e would be if it gives me the "design space" I talked about above to create what I want that I got from various expansions, but with simpler characters and less number inflation that 3.5; an unlikely outcome.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I generally agree with this, which is why I'm not trying to go into game design (that, and I have other goals), merely happily homebrewing away. The main thing for me to consider 5e would be if it gives me the "design space" I talked about above to create what I want that I got from various expansions, but with simpler characters and less number inflation that 3.5; an unlikely outcome.

This is where GUDAD might actually be a revelation... where a large number of the "alternate rules expansions" that traditionally were found in other books one, two, three years down the line... will actually appear in the first set. So folks such as yourself might actually be given the tools needed to jerry-rig the game to your specifications... or at the very least have materials like adventures, campaigns and the like, all designed more open-ended such that you could plug them easily into your own game as it stands. So while you might stick with your modified PF system, new WotC GUDAD material might actually have some use for you.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There's two different ways to see this.

The first is that some people don't like a daily recharage rate for certain groups of abilities because it breaks the fiction for them. Usually, this is about abilities that are supposed to be largely physical/nonmagical/not special, and the idea that you can "run out of juice" to swing your sword or try a particular trick isn't something that makes a lot of sense to some players. Daily limits on such abilities are obviously a mechanical balancing mechanism; it doesn't grow organically out of what the thing represents, it just imposes itself into it. That intrudes too deeply into some folks' fiction and breaks the reality of the game-world, hurting their ability to suspend disbelief and engage with the imaginary world in a coherent way.

The second is that some folks don't like the idea of limited-use abilities at all, because of the spikes and troughs in character capability they create, and the natural tendency for player groups to try to exploit those spikes and minimize those troughs. For this, it's a balance concern: if not everyone has daily abilities, then does the game naturally skew toward those players, leaving those with more reliable abilities in the lurch because the daily spikes are functionally occurring MUCH more often than they should? The second category has much less of a problem with everyone having the same recharge structure, and, in fact, would probably prefer it.

So to figure out where the "daily hate" comes from, you first need to find out what kind of "daily hate" it is. From there, you can work back to helping people get over the hate.

To me, the first consideration is mostly an issue of subjective playstyle considerations, and so people aren't going to just give these up if you explain it away. It's not a logic thing, it's a personal thing, a subjective thing. Rather than something with a correct answer, it's something that needs to be accounted for: no D&D game should REQUIRE martial dailies to be a functional game.

I believe that the second consideration is the same, ultimately, but the veneer of balance concerns makes it seem like something else at first. Once you get a bit deeper than that (the balance concerns aren't exactly sound), you find that the real issue is just as subjective and personal: some folks don't like limited-use abilities very much. Because that's also subjective, no modern D&D game should REQUIRE that some folks have dailies and others don't to be a functional game, either.

So, to me, rather than expecting the players get over the hate, D&D needs to embrace the hate, to find the legitimate gripes behind it, and to design itself in such a way that people can play in the way they like, rather than forcing them to get used to playing in a way they hate.