D&D 5E (2014) Every Fight a Nova: Consequences and Considerations

[Minigiant]

I use characters that have a first name AND a last name/title.

That's how they know it's nova time.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I don't intend for this thread to discuss whether having every fight be a nova (i.e. PCs expend all of their most powerful abilities) is necessarily good or bad. Rather, I want to talk about what consequences and consideration should be taken into account ASSUMING that every fight is going to be a nova.

Should every challenge be set to deadly? Can we make adjustments to how numbers of enemies impact that difficulty? What does a nova set piece look like that is different than a "standard" set piece?

Other thoughts and considerations?

If you wanted a game so players could nova in every encounter you would have to rework resting/ recovery rules for one thing.

I don't think each encounter needs to be deadly, but certainly hard--otherwise the relative challenge would be so minor it would not be worth playing out IMO.

You can certainly adjust opponent numbers to adjust difficulty, but again at a certain point the numbers get so crazy you would need to narrate or come up with a different system to keep things moving along.

Frankly, I think it would get old really fast. The joy of the Nova is being able to do it and knowing when to do it. If you can do it all the time and use it all the time, it becomes stale and loses its appeal.

Now, this is different of course from changing the game mechanics to per encounter such as 4E did. I never played 4E but I have thought about changing all features in 5E to per encounter, reducing hit points a lot so each encounter is challenging, etc.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

OK. Possible consequences and considerations for the 5 Round Working Day:

DM side:
Expect a major nova at the start of the encounter. If you let the party get to the BBEG then they will dump all their resources into them and probably kill them. Likewise control or damage spells against available targets. With no need to budget resources, there is little reason not to open with your most powerful effect.
Best to not let them access to the final target at first. Stage fights so that the party can't see the BBEG on the first round or cannot engage them immediately. Do not have a single BBEG, have several.
Spread out and varied enemies, so a single spell can't affect a large chunk. Mix in ranged attackers as well as maybe some undead or constructs that may not be affected by the same effects as the rest of the opponents.
Party will theoretically be able to handle fights that are much greater than the deadly encounter budget, but also much more random. A few bad rolls could end the campaign against that level of opposition, but if they don't roll badly, the party can probably roflstomp most encounters. Use a wave system for the encounter will let you keep a stream of opponents to challenge the party, but that you can cut off if it looks like the characters are in trouble.

(All of these will be heavily dependent upon party composition. An all-caster party will be in their element and able to handle much more dangerous encounters than fighters and rogues.)

Player side:
Massively favours specific classes and actively discriminates against others. Some will get their full expected daily resources. Others will only get a third of theirs.
Will favour against concentration spells, since a caster con only use one, rather than 5-8 concentration spells they could in a normal day.
Player healing is heavily disincentivised since it won't be able to keep up with incoming damage. If the fighter drops in round 2 then it would be more effective to let them die and ress them after the fight is over than waste a round using healing instead of a top-end spell.
Concomitant much greater risk of death spirals and TPKs.
No HD-based healing possible. This would normally occur in the two short rests of the standard adventuring day and mean that the party can recover HP without spells. Without these, the party are operating off roughly half of the HP they would have over the course of the day.

What about beyond the immediate tactical concerns? How does this idea affect the campaign broadly?

I think there are a number of models that might lend themselves toward the nova game. PCs that are explicitly a special strike force, for example, or are undergoing long term travel that only allows for isolated combat encounters. What else?

More spells available for non-combat use. Teleports, Pass without Trace spell rather than stealth skill, Levitate or Fly rather than climbing, divination spells rather than investigating etc.

It occurred to me that another way to do this if you still wanted that multiple fight experience from a storytelling perspective would be to just say "all PCs gain the benefits of a long rest at the end of every encounter." That way you could still have a dungeon romp -- it just wouldn't be about resource management.

That would have a similar effect, yes. With all the associated risks and impact on party composition and player enjoyment.

 

[Reynard]

No HD-based healing possible. This would normally occur in the two short rests of the standard adventuring day and mean that the party can recover HP without spells. Without these, the party are operating off roughly half of the HP they would have over the course of the day.

I'm not sure I understand how this is relevant. They still start the fight with max hit points, and have all of their spells. How does not having spent any hit dice impact the situation?

 

[Vork_Hammerfist]

I don't play fifth edition, as I consider it lousy, but I have read it a fair bit. All of the options below will, to varying degrees, help make Nova fights a lot less boring or short, as well as forcing players to think a bit more strategically even though they don't have to worry about resource management as much (or more precisely, they worry about it differently).

1. Boost enemy AC.
2. Boost enemy saves (very important).
3. Consider using max HP for enemies. This shouldn't be too important if you increase AC and saves.
4. Spread enemies around the fight area so as to reduce the possibility of large numbers of them being killed in the opening salvo.
5. Varied terrain, such as water, lava, crevices, tunnels, trenches, and cliffs. This allows you to make it much harder to get to enemies if players don't reserve some spells for handling these obstacles.
   If players don't prepare spells to handle these problems it will create choke points, raising the possibility of their either having only one tank engaging the enemy at a time while multiple enemies can attack that single tank.
6. Deploy varied units. Have a good mix of support, artillery, tanks, and cannon fodder. Additionally, the enemy should have units capable of flight, swimming, or burrowing, dependent on viability of these movement types.
7. Interactive terrain. Ceilings that can be collapsed when pillars are taken out, creating (mostly) impassable terrain, and dealing damage (or outright killing) anyone within the area of effect. Bursts of lava or geysers that randomly deal damage to anyone within their AoE*, allowing saves for half damage.
8. Use waves. Enemies should arrive in waves, allowing you to use much larger numbers of enemies without making it drastically more likely to result in a TPK.
9. Timers. Inform the players that they have X number of rounds until something bad happens, or that if they do X or Y within Z rounds something good happens.
10. Either allow short rest classes to recharge their abilities between waves, or, better yet, give them magic items.
11. Harass the PCs. Specifically, have enemies attack them on their way to the big fight. If the long rest classes are trigger happy they may waste some resources. Eventually they'll learn to let the short rest characters handle the small problems.
12. Give players throwaway magic items. For example: a +1 weapon that is +2 vs the followers of a particular enemy or god, or faction. You can also have items that do the same thing with AC, or saves, or boost the power of certain (or all) spells. This happens sometimes in the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and of course the barrow daggers that Merry and Pippin have in LotR (this isn't brought up in the movies, but the dagger Merry uses to stab the Witch King was made specifically to fight him and his followers).

Anyway, that's my two pence/copper.

 

[Flamestrike]

The game becomes rocket tag where tactics other than 'win initiative at all costs, preferably with surprise' are redundant.

For an encounter to be a threat you basically need to cram an entire adventuring day's worth of XP into a single encounter. For a party of (say) 5 x 7th level PCs that's 25,000 XP, which is equal to a single CR20.

The other (long term) effect of doing the above is that your games will almost always end in a TPK. One day, you'll lose initiative to one of these encounters, and be on the receiving end.

Remember, if every encounter has even just a 5 percent chance of a TPK, odds are after 10 or so such encounters, your party have been wiped out in a TPK. If every encounter is coming with a 25 percent chance of a TPK, after 3 such encounters you should be all dead.

5e is deliberately forgiving in that an encounter that goes poorly for the PCs (bad rolling, bad tactics, DM is on fire with his dice) usually just translates to 'we burnt through more resources than we wanted to in this encounter, and now we're running low on HP/ Slots/ class features' and not 'damn - it's time to roll up new PCs'.

Remember, the PCs are expected to win a 'Medium' difficulty encounter, with 'no casualties, and only a possibility that one or more might need to use healing resources (HD, spells etc)' and even in a 'Hard' encounter, there is only a 'slim' chance that one PC might die.

Dialing everything up to Deadly+ means every fight comes with it a possibility of a TPK. Have enough of those fights, and you're invariably going to wind up with repeated TPK's... and why would anyone want to play that game?

 

[tetrasodium]

One of the issues with making every fight a nova is the balance between classes. Some classes have much more nova potential, but it's tied up in limited resources that means that they have a strictly limited (often 1) "nova encounters" per long rest. Other classes, especially at-will classes or short-rest classes, explicitly can't bring as much in a single nova battle, but would be balanced over multiple battles per day.

Basically, the varying recovery models of the different classes in 5e are not compatible with the concept of every battle being a nova. Other RPGs, including D&D 4e (pre-essentials) where everyone has the same resources, could do it.

Shirt rest classes like Monk & warlock can do quite well with nova>rest>repeat. The simple fact that fitting in a one hour short rest is almost always narratively easier to justify and harder to narratively block with any consistency compared to an eight hour long rest. The result is much like an out of control 3.x CoDzills the gm is not counterbalancing with magic items & such for other players.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I'm not sure I understand how this is relevant. They still start the fight with max hit points, and have all of their spells. How does not having spent any hit dice impact the situation?

It depends on how you are creating the encounter. If you are just making a single deadly+ encounter by eyeball then it isn't relevant.
If you are doing it by combining a day's worth of "CR budget" into a single encounter (mashing a couple of deadly encounters together for example) however, then it is. The daily budget will assume short rests and recovery of resources and HP which will not be happening in your single encounter.

 

[Reynard]

I'm not sure why the thread has slid in the direction of "cram a day's worth of encounter XP budget into a single encounter" since that's not the presumption. The only presumption is that adventures have a single set piece encounter in which it is established that nova is the way to go.

 

[beancounter]

Should every challenge be set to deadly? Can we make adjustments to how numbers of enemies impact that difficulty? What does a nova set piece look like that is different than a "standard" set piece?

Other thoughts and considerations?

No, the challenge should be appropriate for the setting, the circumstances or the result of the players actions/decisions

Yes, adjusting the number of enemies is key. It's all about action economy.

I don't know if there needs to be any specific difference in the setting. The environment can be part of the difficulty "setting" though.