D&D 5E Have the designers lost interest in short rests?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, I'll admit it's nice to have someone be so frank about the situation, but the implied "can't nothin' be done about it" attitude isn't exactly a great follow-up.

So. Regardless of whether you think it is wise or has any given probability of success, how would you suggest fans who do care about reasonably well-designed rules act toward WotC to try to change this situation in the future? (By which I mean "do nothing becaude it won't happen" isn't really a welcome or useful response.) Because it seems as though three-ish years of public playtesting were almost entirely a waste of time at this point.

(Also, the existence of errata, Sage Advice, balance discussions, etc. are all things that suggest to me that they DO at least want players to see the game as reasonably balanced/well-designed, and their responses to things like the fan concerns about non-PHB Sorcerers getting bonus spells known seem to back that up more. Of course, the problem is that they took the wrong lessons and stuck to the flawed core rather than issuing errata to fix the flawed core, but I guess 5e is the child of 3.5e in more ways than one.)

Well, as I'm sure you are well aware, ALL of this WAS revealed in PT of 'next', and explicated at great length in the forums (which are of course now history, and thus we can't really go back and look at what was said). The responses were utter dead silence. MM would just breezily come out with some nonsensical statement about how things 'worked' which plainly did not work, often made the DM's job harder, etc. The playtest WAS basically worthless, it was a PR exercise. I never saw a single instance where any significant part of the core rules structure was impacted by it at all. Mike, Monty, etc. had made up their minds before they even started the project. Much could have been improved, but it was not to be. I don't know if other game developers listen, WotC is really not good at it. They are still not doing it.

 

[Azuresun]

I believe part of the issue some have with the baseline of six to eight medium/hard encounters per adventuring day is that some may have this idea of an adventuring day = a game session OR that they must fit the adventuring day into one session because of... reasons. One adventuring day can certainly span over several game sessions. We do that regularly and have not... er... encountered this "book keeping pain in the ass" that is claimed here - and I award XP after every session based on the challenges the present PCs had overcome that session. If you do session-based XP such as in AL, it becomes an even easier bookkeeping task. I should also note that while I try for 6-8 encounters, I don't don't rigidly adhere to that. Some adventuring days will have more encounters, some will have less. Another point to make is that not every encounter is resolved via combat and not every combat is a fight to the death. With those points in mind, we have more "time" in any given adventuring day for more encounters. Based on my experience, I've not found 6-8 encounters to be either hard or unrealistic.

It's also unnecessary. The DMG says 6-8 encounters of medium difficulty. It has started driving me batty when people start quoting "6-8" like it's holy writ, when that just plain is not what the book says anywhere, and anyone could look it up for themselves.

My actual play experience at a tabletop (rather than forums) says that you can get away with as few as two--the only real no-no is letting the PC's go into a big climactic encounter with their alpha strike potential fully loaded. Even then, a "single" encounter can become two through having enemies show up in waves, or having a monster that transforms into a scarier form when the first stage is "killed".

 

[Asisreo]

That's an over simplification but you brought up two good relevant points in a bad way. Inter-player balance is one of the most important things that the designers ignored when making short rest classes & giving them powerful tools to go with the same stuff long rest classes have as now Alice with a short rest class like warlock is mechanically encouraged to end every fight with "lets take a short rest" so she can nova next fight while bob the long rest class is tired of playing second fiddle so far behind Alice that he's wondering why he even bothers is encouraged to fight her for no other reason than wanting to stop playing third fiddle. Meanwhile Chuck the GM is forced to transparently place some form of invisible wall throughout the campaign to balance those two mechanical needs above plot story world cohesion & just about everything else.

The point, actually, had less to do with SR-LR and more to do with the primary uniqueness of the individual classes. I tried to keep my reply succinct. The SR-LR dynamic adds to that, but its not the only way this occurs. Another way it occurs is through the generally unique features each class obtains throughout their levels.

Take a level 1 wizard and warlock. If you wanted the warlock to have a moment in the spotlight, but could not alter the short rest balance, how would you? Well, if the warlock was a GOO warlock, you could include a situation where having the ability to communicate with someone without speaking would be useful. Something like a stealth mission, where silence is nearly mandatory.

This balance between classes by providing scenarios where each class can uniquely, or efficiently, provide for the rest of the party will keep inter-play balance consistent.

Players really don't care about "how many spell slots were expended by this character than mine" or "how much damage this character does than mine." They really care about how many highlight moments this character gets rather than them.

So a DM's job is to balance the highlights between each player's moments, not to balance with a measured mechanism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would rather they go the reverse and transfer more recoveries from Long Rests to Short Rests, but in a more limited fashion. For example, here's a start on spellcasting:

It NEVER ceases to amaze me how all this fiddling and faddling goes on, but the results are always inevitably just a covert return to something closer to A/E/D/U. So, there's a real serious question here. If nobody has an issue with that, then why did we go through this whole design rigamarole at all? If the issue was NOTHING but some presentation, that should have simply been addressed at the start.

 

[tetrasodium]

The point, actually, had less to do with SR-LR and more to do with the primary uniqueness of the individual classes. I tried to keep my reply succinct. The SR-LR dynamic adds to that, but its not the only way this occurs. Another way it occurs is through the generally unique features each class obtains throughout their levels.

Take a level 1 wizard and warlock. If you wanted the warlock to have a moment in the spotlight, but could not alter the short rest balance, how would you? Well, if the warlock was a GOO warlock, you could include a situation where having the ability to communicate with someone without speaking would be useful. Something like a stealth mission, where silence is nearly mandatory.

This balance between classes by providing scenarios where each class can uniquely, or efficiently, provide for the rest of the party will keep inter-play balance consistent.

Players really don't care about "how many spell slots were expended by this character than mine" or "how much damage this character does than mine." They really care about how many highlight moments this character gets rather than them.

So a DM's job is to balance the highlights between each player's moments, not to balance with a measured mechanism.

Limiting it to L1 warlock/wizard takes agonizing out of the equation but really doesn't change anything. It's also a level where everyone has tons of cool things right around the corner. Warlock has eldritch blast, pact magic, more HP, more weapons they are proficient with, & light armor proficiency. Wizard has one extra spell slot & a few more spells known. It's also a level where everyone is squishy as heck & that 120ft range eldritch blast at a level where even PCs who have longbow proficiency are very likely to not actually own a long bow. If I wanted the warlock to have a moment in the spotlight?.... put an opponent between 60 & 120feet away? Problem solved. Lets be honest & admit that the warlock spell is probably hex & is going to make that 1d10 force be 1d10 force+1d6necrotic during the "boss" fight.

Characters at level 1 are so fragile & tight on resources that it's almost impossible to do much with the spotlight before the party hits level 2, limiting the analysis to first level doesn't change things for warlock it just shelves the problem in an irrelevant forgettable niche.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Allow me to clarify what I mean by "balance."

Ultimately, the game is not about mechanical balance, but about the endless amount of player choices. If it was about mechanical balance, the players could play with scales and weights instead of a TTRPG. Or a videogame. Thus, mechanical balance isn't something that a system should be overly concerned with, otherwise its just a physics engine that you use words with.

However, there is another type of balance which is distinctly non-mechanical called inter-player balance which ensures each player will not feel as if their decisions matter less than another player's. There is a quantitative aspect to this, such as damage and HP, but there is also a qualitative aspect. Wizards can't heal. Clerics can't teleport. This ensures a wizard player and a cleric player has something unique to them, and each character can make distinct decisions that matter.

In this way, I believe 5e is balanced. Its balanced with inter-player dynamics in mind rather than by a mechanical, structured adventure. This balance can't be given as a ruleset because it would have to predict when the cleric can heal and when the wizard can teleport. This ruins the whole point of the game, Player Choice.

I've always referred this basic concept as 'plot power'. If you think of a game in narrative terms, then this is a relevant measure. However, I am not sure that it is really all that balanced in 5e. Wizards and other full casters, but especially wizards, have a LOT of plot power! I played one through a good chunk of the levels back a couple of years ago, and wow. Given a lot of the constraints of 'classic' spell casters have not been restored (IE consider a 1e magic user) the wizard has a LOT of very plot powerful spells available. Most of the plans our party made as far as dealing with different stuff pretty much revolved around figuring out how to strategically manipulate the situation in our favor using my spells. I would not say the other PCs were 'weaker' at all, but planning was pretty much an exercise in developing a spell-casting approach to a problem, and then the other PCs contribution was to 'be there' and handle a few specifics, or just provide the muscle needed to wrap up a situation. Of course some other casters, we had a cleric IIRC, got some of this too, but their spells seemed a bit more situational, or else supporting/supplemental.

I thought 4e was, again, a bit more successful in this area. Anyone could learn 4e rituals, for the cost of a feat, and those were the main 'strategic' resource. Plus the whole SC concept kind of insured that skills and such played a larger strategic role in the game. 5e's version of rituals OTOH is just yet another way to loosen restrictions on casters. Admittedly, some of the ultra-power level spells of the days of yore have been toned down SOME, but not that much!

 

[Zardnaar]

It NEVER ceases to amaze me how all this fiddling and faddling goes on, but the results are always inevitably just a covert return to something closer to A/E/D/U. So, there's a real serious question here. If nobody has an issue with that, then why did we go through this whole design rigamarole at all? If the issue was NOTHING but some presentation, that should have simply been addressed at the start.

Not really it's easier if everything was the same doesn't have to be aedu.

All long or short rest or at will plus one of them.
5E class design all over the place eg rogue, warlock and cleric.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So. Regardless of whether you think it is wise or has any given probability of success, how would you suggest fans who do care about reasonably well-designed rules act toward WotC to try to change this situation in the future? (By which I mean "do nothing becaude it won't happen" isn't really a welcome or useful response.) Because it seems as though three-ish years of public playtesting were almost entirely a waste of time at this point.

Honestly? The most effective tool for the playerbase to have any effect on game mechanics is to complain loudly about how terrible the game is, and stop buying new books. As long as people keep buying whatever they put out, they have no reason to actually address anything.

If you really, really want to try and "officially" salvage this edition? I dunno, maybe an aggressive letter-writing campaign? It worked for Star Trek.

(Also, the existence of errata, Sage Advice, balance discussions, etc. are all things that suggest to me that they DO at least want players to see the game as reasonably balanced/well-designed, and their responses to things like the fan concerns about non-PHB Sorcerers getting bonus spells known seem to back that up more. Of course, the problem is that they took the wrong lessons and stuck to the flawed core rather than issuing errata to fix the flawed core, but I guess 5e is the child of 3.5e in more ways than one.)

Well, of course they want players to see the game as better than it actually is. That doesn't cost them anything.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not really it's easier if everything was the same doesn't have to be aedu.

All long or short rest or at will plus one of them.
5E class design all over the place eg rogue, warlock and cleric.

Well.... Not really. lol. It can be CALLED anything, and it can be dressed up in any clothes you want (although I will continue to insist that consistent nomenclature and universal mechanics are best). It still has to have the essential characteristics of A/E/D/U (the U part is less critical).

The reasons become pretty apparent as soon as you start thinking about it. There obviously must be 'at will' abilities. If nothing else every PC has some sort of flavor of a 'basic attack'. Nowadays even wizards and clerics have an At Will. While some of the details vary from 4e's 2 choices per PC (which itself had exceptions) it is logically got to be some small number of attacks and abilities which are always available. So the 'A' is realized (and already effectively exists in 5e, though some things like Battlemasters kind of skate the edge of it).

Likewise the 'encounter' abilities. They logically must be a resource, otherwise they would simply be an At Will, so we have currently in 5e not a huge consistency here, but every single class has something that is recharging on a short rest or per-encounter. Every fighter has action surge and second wind for example, not to mention BM superiority dice, which are really just an approximation of 'do this about 2x per encounter' and might as well actually be written as such (and could even stand to be 'use each of these powers once per encounter, up to a maximum of 2 total uses'). They could just as easily be, and effectively are, powers in the 4e sense. Again, logically, you need these sorts of things for pacing and resource reasons. Unless your game is simply going to present a 1e-like fighter, there's not much other choice.

And obviously there are plenty of 'daily' powers out there, although the non-caster classes often lack them (and again this is simply a problem). Of course even fighters do have daily RESOURCES in the shape of HD and hit points themselves, which are most useful to fighters. It would be nothing but good for the game if they also had one or two 'big bang' powers that gave them something more on a par with what full casters can do (and maybe these would include some 'U' stuff that is good outside combat, what a revolution that would be!).

If you're going to tweak things, you are ALWAYS going to come closer to this basic model. The beauty of the logic of the design of 4e was they simply went all in and did what had to be done, and called a spade a spade. It worked! We can argue about the details of the FORM of powers, maybe they should work somewhat differently than, and be presented in a slightly different way from, the 4e ones. But the core A/E/D/U idea is simply not going to die.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It NEVER ceases to amaze me how all this fiddling and faddling goes on, but the results are always inevitably just a covert return to something closer to A/E/D/U. So, there's a real serious question here. If nobody has an issue with that, then why did we go through this whole design rigamarole at all? If the issue was NOTHING but some presentation, that should have simply been addressed at the start.

People complained about the universal resource mechanic feeling too same-y, but the real issue was always with giving Encounter and Daily abilities to martial classes. That's the part which "didn't feel like D&D anymore" and should have been fixed.