D&D 4E Does 4E fix the 5-minute workday?

[DandD]

Encounter and At-Will-powers are good enough so that you don't have to rely solely on Daily Powers, so I see no need for the party to always rest after one or two encounters (if they stil have enough hitpoints and healing surges, that is). I also don't see the need to penalize players for XP if they don't go fight on five encounters per day. It's only a game, not work, where they have to fill out a encounter quota.
I hope D&D 3.X didn't conditionize you to become a robot-GM, Bishmon.

 

[Derren]

5 minute workdays are not the problem of the game system but a problem of bad adventure design. As long as you have resources which are only available once each they it will always be more sensible to fight just one encounter and then rest when the adventure allows it.

 

[FourthBear]

There's nothing to prevent you from trying to do this as a player.

I agree with this. I think from many PCs perspective, they could very well always wish to rest up and replenish after every encounter, although other PCs and players may be too impatient to wait. However, I've always felt the 5-minute workday problem was better expressed as the "nova" problem, in which PCs use all of their expendable resources in one great orgy of concentrated power. Because so much of a typical party's power in 1e-3e was centered around the daily prep spellcasters, their overall power and capabilities swung very wildly depending on what time of day you caught them at and if they were previously expending resources at a high rate.

With healing surge mechanics and daily powers for all, i do think 4e won't completely remove the nova/5-minute workday problem. However, I think as a DM I will feel more comfortable at being able plan level appropriate encounters without having to sweat about them having completely hulled themselves out earlier. So I am hoping that 4e will keep some of the resource management decisions in the game without forcing me as a DM to softball to avoid TPKs when parties don't resource expend as I anticipated.

 

[AllisterH]

5 minute workdays are not the problem of the game system but a problem of bad adventure design. As long as you have resources which are only available once each they it will always be more sensible to fight just one encounter and then rest when the adventure allows it.

I'm not sure about that.

In D&D, in all previous editions, I think the game ASSUMED you would have a couple of spellcaster (arcane and divine, one of each) for each "encounter" be it a monster challenge or a non-combat challenge.

However, those spellcasters operate on a daily basis so the game kinda forced the "rest after each encounter" since the game assumed you would have two fresh spellcasters before facing a challenge.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I think too, since there is more chance of survival and more chance of still being able to face encounters will a fair capacity will encourage players to go more encounters without a extended-rest.

Before, these same players would feel worried about dying because of not resting, now there is a comfort zone where they can feel comfortable in moving forward without the instantaneous threat of death looming over them.

 

[whydirt]

Don't forget that players have some incentive to push forward due to gaining an Action Point and recharging "milestone" abilities in magic items every other encounter. At any given time, characters will have just earned a milestone or will be able to earn one after one more encounter.

I think that's part of the grease that should keep parties moving rather than trying to camp all the time.

 

[Stormtower]

My quick answer is:

There's nothing to prevent you from trying to do this as a player.

However, since the 5 minute workday is no longer hard-wired into the rules, the DM is no longer obliged to design his adventures around it, or risk a TPK.

Since your characters are still fighting fit after using their dailies, just not quite as fighting fit, the DM is free to make a situation where you have to complete your goal in 7 hours, or fail. Sure, you can sit down and rest til tomorrow morning, but the princess is going to be sacrificed at midnight, and the legion of devils will be loose in the world, since nobody interrupted the summoning ritual. Or have buddies of the monsters you just killed show up and have at you while you're trying to rest.

Doing either of those things previously would be a no-no because in the first example, you'd be either forcing the players to give up and fail, or forcing them to commit "PC suicide" by charging in to stop the ritual when they'd be certain to die and fail anyway. In the second example, you'd just be arbitrarily killed.

Now, the DM can throw more time pressure and more adversaries at you without guaranteeing a TPK. So while you can try to operate under a 5 minute workday, the DM is no longer mechanically obliged to comply.

IMO, of course.

I agree strongly with what you've asserted here. Given that, we should have transparent access to the designers' math re: # balanced encounters per day (or total monsters by XP value?) expected before a 4E party needs to rest. When DMs design scenarios with time constraints or resting constraints, we need to know roughly how many encounters to create with the "daily" resources of a normative party.

There is also the concept of milestones which has not been well quantified yet in the pre-4E discussion to my knowledge; so the possibility exists that DMs might tie per-day PC ability "refreshes" to certain scenario milestones to mechanically simulate a rest without actually using up the 6 hours of time.

 

[That One Guy]

They've certainly made it tougher to go crazy and expend most of your resources in one fight, but they didn't really do anything to otherwise discourage players from resting after one or two encounters.

In my campaign, I might do something like knock 10% EXP off each encounter unless the party makes it through five encounters that day (with some exceptions, of course), in which case they'd get the full EXP. Something like that would encourage the party to push on without me needing to have monsters ambush them in their sleep everytime they wanted to rest after an encounter or two.

I was thinking of a reward system. Maybe +5%/continued fight. So, 400, 420, 441, or something like that. However, I don't think it'd work out right because the +% would add too much or too little. Of course it could be as small as +1%, but that seems kinda' lame. I was thinking something along the lines of a rule variation on action points...

[Warning: I have not given this any serious thought, just kicked it around my head]

What if PCs could use multiple Action Points in a fight at an increased cost. First costs 1, Second 2, Third 3. So, if the PCs keep fighting, they'll sort of get a... momentum reward to keep on rocking. The rules say that an extended rest resets the AP to 1, so why not make that matter more? I'm sure there's a huge flaw in this, but it seems nifty in my mind.

Back to the OP, it does seem weird to get 3 encounter and 3 daily powers at once. But, I think it might be too early to assess how much impact that'll have on the game. I think if the prevailing attitude is, "Well, 2 or more of us have at least one daily, we're good!" then I think it'll encourage a longer interest in combat w/out resting. At the same time, if there is no draw back to resting constantly then the party will (and perhaps in said game should) recover their dailies. Also, there may be some rule in place that does say an extended rest may only be taken once per 24 hours... but I doubt that'd dissuade stubborn PCs from sharpening their blades for some ten plus hours just to rest again. Of course, rations... but...

Summary... It may encourage a five-minute work day, or it might not. It'll probably more depend on the group than the official rules, though.

 

[Ximenes088]

From what I've seen so far, it's just not going to be practical to take an extended rest mid-adventure the way it's currently practical in 3e. First, it's been strongly implied that you can only take one extended rest per day. Second, it's been indicated that teleportation and fast-travel powers are both much higher level and much more expensive and cumbersome to use. And third, we've seen no evidence of any Rope Trick or Magnificent Mansion analogues in the rules so far. It's not proof they're gone, but it's a strong implication.

If these implications are correct, there just won't be any way to call an arbitrary time-out from adventuring. It's not a question of careful encounter design, it's a question of basic practicality- how many adventures exist where you can simply set up camp at a random point and rest for six hours without fear of interruption? You can't retreat across the globe, you can't hole up in an extradimensional space, you have to bring out the cookpot and bedrolls right in the middle of the orc fortress or the haunted swamp. Even the most casual player is going to be able to see that behaving like that is very much likely to drain more resources than it returns.

 

[malraux]

The flip of the question "does 4e prevent the 5-minute adventuring day?" is "does 4e make keep going a viable strategy?" And while the former question is kinda iffy, as there's always going to be some incentive to stop, the answer to the later is definitely yes. Certainly it does better than 3e, where stopping once a caster was about to run out of spells was pretty much mandatory.