Five-Minute Workday Article

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If you have rules that have a low or no likelihood of a 5 minute or 15 minute adventure day occuring, I don't need to think about it at all as a DM - I don't even have to need to think about what the opposition is doing.

But I am actually not that lazy that I couldn't do that.

The bigger issue is - if there is a 15 minute adventure day, how does this affect balance? Suddenly, the casters shine and the non-casters look at their pathetic influence on the outcome of the encounters. And if I go "easy" on the party with light encounters that don't really need spells, the casters sit around hoping for an enemy worthy of their spellcasting prowess.

That's where the real headache begins - because now I don't just need to think about how my NPCs would react naturally to the party retreating after every room. I have to think how to rebuild my adventures so that I find the exact right tnumber of encounters most of the time so that every party member feels equally important.

That's where I say - no, I am too lazy for that. Give me something else.

In 4E, people can do the 15 minute adventure day if they really want to. I just throw harder encounters if I feel they get off to easy. But no class turns into an overachiever that dominates gameplay, because every class has dailies to blow (even the Essential Fighter and Rogues, since they at least have healing surges, though they may still have less fun)
Or the party can carefully optimize their resource use so they can run through dozens of encounters in a row. I can throw many but easier encounters at them (and heck, I can even throw a hard one at them and still give them a wandering monster if they retreat afterwards without a fear of TPK, since they still got some resources left!)

 

[Balesir]

I don't really understand. The DM's role isn't to combat the players, it's just to facilitate the ongoing game, the stories, adventures and challenges.

That's one play style, yes. There are others. DDN was supposed to facilitate them all.

 

[Shadeydm]

All the DM needs to do is maintain the consistancy of his game world while keeping an eye in the daily battle budget. There will be a learning curve for the players but this isn't the end of the world. If they blow all thier resources in the first battle and get thier clocks cleaned in the next they will likely learn to evaluate the challenges they face better.

 

[Shadeydm]

So the official stated opinion of the designers of 5e is that the game does not support adventuring days in which the players engage in a single, simple fight that isn't an epic, lengthy, knock down brawl.

Actually I believe they said such a fight would probably not be a challenge which is probably exactly what that fight was in your game. If however you were doing that in 4E you will have the added bonus in 5E of the fight not dragging on forever

 

[Neonchameleon]

"The halfling race is underpowered, so we're suggesting that at least one floor of each dungeon have 4-foot ceilings."

Hey! That's not to power up halflings. It's because the Kobolds occupy the top floor. And if Kobolds get more than four foot ceilings they start running beams across the top or raising the ground on rubble (in some places they actually run a mezzanine level with ladders and gaps in the floorboards to drop things down/prod up through). And three foot ceilings, thank you.

Also the 15 minute adventuring day is in part a problem with how easy it is to take an extended rest. If (as [MENTION=71811]Badapple[/MENTION] was suggesting) just sleeping for the night won't do the job, a lot of the problems go away. I have a current Kingmaker house rule that you can only take an extended rest at a friendly town (or in the trading post) and it takes a few days. Which means that taking an extended rest feels to my PCs like slinking back to the town, their tails between their legs in defeat and in a trek sometimes of 60 miles each way.

Would I have problems with the 15 minute adventuring day under the official rules? Yes. It's simply smart play. Under my rules? With the PCs trudging 60 miles to return to the town feeling defeated and it being a week before they return to their previous location. Doesn't happen unless someone is out of surges. Parties IME are much more likely to be happy to stop for a day than they are to take a massive hike just because some twit burned through most of his power.

And DM empowerment? What they are proposing isn't DM Empowerment. It's almost the opposite. DM Fetters. "To have a good game you must work round the crud in the system." The more work the game is forcing me to do to get to a baseline decent experience, the less empowered I actually am. The more they are tying me down and not letting me get on with what I want to do. And in this case the more they are crippling my ability to run a different type of game to the one they want to lay out for me. One reason I run 4e is that I don't want All Combat All The Time to keep the casters' resources down. Or "I Win" buttons out of combat.

 

[Neonchameleon]

All the DM needs to do is maintain the consistancy of his game world while keeping an eye in the daily battle budget.

Or to put this another way "All the DM needs to do is maintain the consistency of a game world where the local ecosystem can easily lose a thousand bad guys into the teeth of the local adventuring parties per day" (assuming an average of four fights/day and 1:1 odds per fight).

I don't want to have to warp my game world so that I have to throw four packs of ninjas, thugs, or other goons at the PCs almost every day. As a DM I want a game that doesn't break if the PCs are in a court environment and no one actually fights that day. Or if they are exploring the wilderness and only find one big beast in the day. To me these allow far more consistent game worlds than forcing me to keep coming up with bad guys for the PCs to fight.

 

[FireLance]

You know what they say: with great empowerment comes great emresponsibilityment. Or something like that.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't find their way of dealing with the 15-minute adventuring day concerning.

I find it concerning that they even care about it at all.

 

[Shadeydm]

Or to put this another way "All the DM needs to do is maintain the consistency of a game world where the local ecosystem can easily lose a thousand bad guys into the teeth of the local adventuring parties per day" (assuming an average of four fights/day and 1:1 odds per fight).

I don't want to have to warp my game world so that I have to throw four packs of ninjas, thugs, or other goons at the PCs almost every day. As a DM I want a game that doesn't break if the PCs are in a court environment and no one actually fights that day. Or if they are exploring the wilderness and only find one big beast in the day. To me these allow far more consistent game worlds than forcing me to keep coming up with bad guys for the PCs to fight.

Nice strawman

Mod Note: Nice threadcrap. How about we keep it clean, polite, and less accusatory? Please and thank you. ~Umbran

 

[Neonchameleon]

Nice strawman

Where's the strawman? That I have to throw a certain amount of encounters/total size of encounter budget per day? Or that I'm actually pointing out what this means in practice?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think we are not seeing the whole here:

The day now is our encounter!Just as in 4e, you were doing encounters in waves and such to allow a bit of a breather and to make it more dynamic, that design principle is now used for the whole day.

So there are no meaningless encounters, that last for hours of out of game time.

So, the assumption is again: attrition over the course of day instead of attrition over a short amount of time. This makes the game much more flexible:

You can have a single creature killed at the morning. (only 2 rounds of fight, very easily killed, but to prevent him from running, you used a fighter´s surge)

later you encounter another group of guards. 5 rounds later they are dead (about a usual encounter of 4e) And at the end of the day, you have the big battle. Twice as hard as a usual encounter. (8 rounds)

So you have 15 rounds to survive. So a mage may spend a daily resource every 5th round, and needs to have good things to do in between.

And in 4e, I have seen quite a few 15 min workdays:

encounter 1: may not be meaningless! 5 goblins
encounter 2: another meaningless fight
encounter 3: just another meaningless fight

encounter 4 should have been the "boss" fight

6 hours out of game time, 15 minutes in the game. Nothing accomplished.

Even if the group does not rest now, it was still a 15 min workday, because the time we had to play is over.

And now the soultion: Then don´t do meaningless fights. And a skill challenge to prevent the first single creature before he runs of. Scrap the really meaningless fight.
Ok, so we are now down to 1 meaningful fight at the day.
And now it does not matter if your resources are daily or encounter. And I prefer some fights before that, that are resolved very very quickly, not a full encounter.

And if you really need just encounter powers: just allow extended rests after each encounter.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Where's the strawman? That I have to throw a certain amount of encounters/total size of encounter budget per day? Or that I'm actually pointing out what this means in practice?

You don't have to do that. If you want a single, simple combat in a day, go ahead. Is it obvious to the players that this will be their only encounter? Then they will nova. In any edition. The careful use of resources requires that they be limited and that the future remain unpredictable.

Or, as you have already pointed out yourself, change the requirements for an extended rest. They don't know when they will next have the chance to get their resources back, so they won't burn them all.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

And DM empowerment? What they are proposing isn't DM Empowerment. It's almost the opposite. DM Fetters. "To have a good game you must work round the crud in the system." The more work the game is forcing me to do to get to a baseline decent experience, the less empowered I actually am. The more they are tying me down and not letting me get on with what I want to do. And in this case the more they are crippling my ability to run a different type of game to the one they want to lay out for me. One reason I run 4e is that I don't want All Combat All The Time to keep the casters' resources down. Or "I Win" buttons out of combat.

I don´t think it will be hard at all. You should just think about a single battle: the bos battle, and think about if the boss can be defeated, if the PC´s have at least half of their resources left, and arrive there in time (i.e. on their chosen place to fight with a little bit of preperation) and if the PC´s will lose, if the boss catches them sleeping.

So over the course of the adventure, you put enough possibilities out there, that the PC´s spend too many resources in senseless fights.
And if they go in with the mentality: go in, kill everything, they will die no matter what. Rest in an unsafe place, fight with too many resources spent.

Daily powers just make the PC´s think about different things than fighting. Because fighting is always costing you resources.

The deadlier a fighting system is, and the more resource draining, the more people think about different solutions. And that is my preference for an RPG. Just enounter resources does exact the opposite.

And your solution: A rest can only be done in a safe heaven makes a "day" even longer. And this solution is a lot more preferable to me than the opposite.

 

[erleni]

I think we are not seeing the whole here:

The day now is our encounter!Just as in 4e, you were doing encounters in waves and such to allow a bit of a breather and to make it more dynamic, that design principle is now used for the whole day.

So there are no meaningless encounters, that last for hours of out of game time.

So, the assumption is again: attrition over the course of day instead of attrition over a short amount of time. This makes the game much more flexible:

You can have a single creature killed at the morning. (only 2 rounds of fight, very easily killed, but to prevent him from running, you used a fighter´s surge)

later you encounter another group of guards. 5 rounds later they are dead (about a usual encounter of 4e) And at the end of the day, you have the big battle. Twice as hard as a usual encounter. (8 rounds)

So you have 15 rounds to survive. So a mage may spend a daily resource every 5th round, and needs to have good things to do in between.

And in 4e, I have seen quite a few 15 min workdays:

encounter 1: may not be meaningless! 5 goblins
encounter 2: another meaningless fight
encounter 3: just another meaningless fight

encounter 4 should have been the "boss" fight

6 hours out of game time, 15 minutes in the game. Nothing accomplished.

Even if the group does not rest now, it was still a 15 min workday, because the time we had to play is over.

And now the soultion: Then don´t do meaningless fights. And a skill challenge to prevent the first single creature before he runs of. Scrap the really meaningless fight.
Ok, so we are now down to 1 meaningful fight at the day.
And now it does not matter if your resources are daily or encounter. And I prefer some fights before that, that are resolved very very quickly, not a full encounter.

And if you really need just encounter powers: just allow extended rests after each encounter.

I guess you don't see the heart of the problem for us (I'm not saying that you are "wrong", only that we perceive a problem that probably isn't there at all for you).
The point is that as casters can nova and mundane cannot, all the important encounters will be dominated by casters and all the more or less irrelevant mop-up will be done by mundane. This even if the 5 (or 15) minute workday will be avoided. That is exactly my experience in all D&D editions I played (except 4th) above a certain PC level.
Last week I was talking to a friend of mine that used to play 3rd edition with us. He is still playing 3rd edition with another group in a different city and told me that, to avoid "caster domination" spoiling their fun ,they banned wizards, clerics and druids from the game and implemented Tome of Battle classes (so taking out daily-based classes for more or less encounter-based ones).
If you run a game where you have max 1-2 encounters per day, like many "exploration" games do, casters with daily powers will absolutely always dominate under DDN assumptions.

 

[erleni]

So over the course of the adventure, you put enough possibilities out there, that the PC´s spend too many resources in senseless fights.
And if they go in with the mentality: go in, kill everything, they will die no matter what. Rest in an unsafe place, fight with too many resources spent.

Why should I put in a lot of meaningless fights only to make up for the shortcomings of the system?
I prefer to run less encounters, but meaningful ones (like 4e encounters are, even if longer, as there you can have tactics and so far in DD&N you only have meaningless slaughter).

 

[Klaus]

I'm of two minds here:

On the one hand, I respect that 5e as a whole is moving back towards DM empowerment. The designers have made it clear that they are giving more direct control back to the DM, and that the system will not be as rules based as it has been in the past. In other words, there is a lot of "fuzzy" areas that will need DM action instead of direct rules.

That said, I don't know if Dnd has ever experimented with mechanics to curb the desire to rest. Not simply mechanics that reduce the problem like encounter powers....but mechanics that actually change the players incentive so that mechanically they WANT to continue adventuring instead of resting.

Now at the beginning of playtest seems an excellent time to try. Why not throw us a few ideas, let us give them a shot, see what comes of it.

There are some abilities scattered here and there in 4e that encourage soldiering on. For instance, there are feats that increase your at-will powers when you're out of dailies and encounters. Not much, and they're dependant on the players taking them, but maybe it's something deserving a look?

 

[McTreble]

Only since reading ENWorld and other forums have I even thought about the phrase the "5 minute work day". As a player or DM, we just wouldn't allow for that kind of break and rest unless you were tired enough. You don't wake up at 6 am, kill camp, walk into the nearby cave, fight a roomful of orcs, and leave to sleep. It's too bright, you're too antsy, just not tired.

How hard is that to establish (as DM) and adhere to (PC)?

If WotC wants to give us a sidebar of tips on how to eliminate the 5 min day, great. I don't want a class/ race/ feat/ equipment/ spell/ weapon overhaul that bakes in those ideas.

DM and PC trust.... solves everything.

... that, and bacon.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

It's worth considering that from what we've seen so far in DDN, Fighters and Rogues both have daily abilities that they can 'nova' with.

 

[Shadeydm]

Where's the strawman? That I have to throw a certain amount of encounters/total size of encounter budget per day? Or that I'm actually pointing out what this means in practice?

Ok start as new thread and detail the "problem" and I'll be happy to "fix" it for you

 

[erleni]

It's worth considering that from what we've seen so far in DDN, Fighters and Rogues both have daily abilities that they can 'nova' with.

Isn't the fighter "nova" ability actually coming from its theme?