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?