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

[Garthanos]

The balance is not between characters. It's between players. And it assumes a lot of characters played over time and a changing roster of characters. I'm not defending it. I don't want to play that way. I'm not even going to claim it necessarily achieves its balance goals. But it was designed with a kind of balance in mind - just not the sort that modern gamers assume is the universal goal.

Assumptions are not necessarily bad but they have requirements or they will not succeed when faced by actual users... "said the optimistic software developer"

 

[Don Durito]

Assumptions are not necessarily bad but they have requirements or they will not succeed when faced by actual users... "said the optimistic software developer"

Well yes. But to be fair to Gygax and Arneson, the original game was built out of shared play at a small number of tables and then published with an intended audience of people who shared similar assumptions.

Then it exploded.

And we've been stuck with so much of it ever since.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My preferred approach here - and I'm thinking Burning Wheel and also 4e informed by BW ideas - would be for the player to declare the appropriate checks (eg Fire Portal-wise in BW wheel) to learn where a portal can be found. In 4e the player can also just make it clear that s/he wants a relevant ritual scroll as a treasure parcel component.

If relevant checks fail then new challenges open up, in the standard "snowballing" fashion of this sort of play.

Right, maybe the portal opens and malfunctions (I like the mechanics for this in MotP), or whatever. This sort of play is really very natural once you get going with it. I liked giving out residuum, or gold, as a way of just letting the PCs 'do what they want' to a degree. I guess other sorts of ritual components work too, if you want to put a few constraints on the options for some reason.

 

[MichaelSomething]

How can designers make a game people will like when people can't agree on what the game is?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

How can designers make a game people will like when people can't agree on what the game is?

I think the truth is that Gygax struck fire, ONE TIME, and D&D's entire strategy since then has been basically to just stick with the formula. 4e was an exception, to a degree, and you could say that 3e did make some significant mechanical adjustments, but 3e didn't budge on the basic equation, and even 4e only sort of half-covertly subverted a few things.

So, that is what they do, they're not really 'trying to please people', they are just taking what worked and doing it again, with a few different frills. One of the consequences of that is, of course, that the same old issues always arise. I mean, the only reason 1e/2e didn't run with endless debates about encounter vs day resources is because wizards were so humongously strong that nobody even thought about it in those terms. So we simply had LFQW, and there were debates about THAT, but only after 3e was released did anyone start to think about when resources should refresh or for whom. It is funny that it is still being debated.

 

[Don Durito]

Yeah. It always bemuses me when people claim that 5e (sometimes it is claimed 3e) introduced these issues and that they somehow didn't exist previously.

It may become more obvious in later editions because they actually give you a guideline for intended overall balance between classes. But that didn't mean the issues didn't always exist!

 

[pemerton]

There seem to be two arguments as to why spellcasters aren't necessary,

The first assumes that adventures are designed by the GM, with the basic trajectory of action decided in advance, so that the GM will make sure, via the design plus downstream adjudication, that any party of whatever composition can travel along the pre-planned trajectory.

The second assumes that players will establish wants and needs for their characters commensurate to their capabilities - so if the PCs can't teleport, or send instantaneous telepathic messages, or travel to other planes, etc, then the players will reconcile themselves to doing other things.

The second seems largely tautological. The first is a very specific assumption about the approach to play which is certainly not true for me.

When I GM FRPGs the players want to do things that exemplify the "F" - fantasy! And the main way they do this is via magic. There are all sorts of pathways to that, both in terms of the fiction and the mechanics, which vary from system to system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There seem to be two arguments as to why spellcasters aren't necessary,

The first assumes that adventures are designed by the GM, with the basic trajectory of action decided in advance, so that the GM will make sure, via the design plus downstream adjudication, that any party of whatever composition can travel along the pre-planned trajectory.

The second assumes that players will establish wants and needs for their characters commensurate to their capabilities - so if the PCs can't teleport, or send instantaneous telepathic messages, or travel to other planes, etc, then the players will reconcile themselves to doing other things.

The second seems largely tautological. The first is a very specific assumption about the approach to play which is certainly not true for me.

When I GM FRPGs the players want to do things that exemplify the "F" - fantasy! And the main way they do this is via magic. There are all sorts of pathways to that, both in terms of the fiction and the mechanics, which vary from system to system.

Right, and to carry this thought further: Equality of fictional power is the only thing that we really need in a system of the 2nd type. It isn't strictly necessary that the wizard and the fighter "do the same damage", although gross discrepancies are probably undesirable. What is needed is that the players all have the same opportunity to express their wants and needs, and an equal ability to deploy their character's capabilities to explain the narrative trajectory.

When a decision point is arrived at, any player would have some avenue by which to say "and now I will make thus-and-such happen, and here's my fictional justification, payment of cost, check result, thing I risk to achieve that, etc. Obviously some other player and character could as well exercise a different decision and justification. The game may need to arbitrate that, or not (4e interestingly went from "there are turns in SCs" to not having any mechanism for that outside combat).

The fighter problem, or the short vs long rest issue, are simply questions of who has the most plot power, and when and why do they have it, and which PCs have to 'pay more plot cost' to recover resources. It is certainly more convenient if this is flexible and equitable. IMHO.

 

[tetrasodium]

Point 1 is irrelevant, accuracy is accuracy. Only the % chance of missing matters.
Point 2 is situational, you really cannot evaluate how this will play out in a given game. While it might be possible to state some trend, I really couldn't say what it is. We could be fighting nothing but giants, for example, which have little in the way of such immunities.
Point 3, but again, that doesn't mean you won't run into them. The degree to which they will show up is hard to say. It may always be unusual, but still..
Point 4 doesn't really matter. It just shows that there is an adventure where something specific is true.

And Point 0, fighters still come up short in every non-combat respect to full casters (maybe the Champion's athletic prowess could matter a bit, but a wizard can cast several spells which provide better versions of that).

Alice makes one attack/round with 100% of her damage. Bob makes 2 3 4 or more attacks that combined add up to 100% of his damage. Bob does more total damage. Until they need to roll above ten the odds are in bob's favor & alice takes a larger hit to her damage. Accuracy & the ability to play the odds is not something you can imply dismiss in this kind of thing. The fact that bob is more likely to have a +N weapon than alice a +N focus due to wotc's own adventure design & influences means that the breakpoint for bob is going to be significantly above ten

Point two is critical and DiA proves that it is both a valid & severe harm to casters rather than just a "situational" aberration. As to your "They could fight giants" is a bizarre hill for your dismissal to die on as well, did you even look at their statblocks? None of the MM giants have a resist nonmagical b/p/s yet there is a giant that bears immune to fire, one immune to cold, & one immune to lightning/thunder. If you wanted to dismiss the relevance of energy resist/immune you should at least have tried to find a group of monsters not bearing immune to some of the more common energy damage types used by casters when trying to claim energy resist/imune are not used excessivelu

Point three... No seriously the list is like a few other plants such as awakened tree, the guy in DiA that gives you the magic +1d6 fire to all your weapons gauntlets", & some low cr swarms you will probably consider a threat at low levels were it is unlikely to have magic weapons . I'm not saying you couldn't find some others, but they are so incredibly rare that your point is absurd.

Point four is also critical because it takes what should be a ludicrous "your gm sucks bro, time to have a talk" situation & presses it into the form of a hardcover first party 250 page hardcover adventure published by the industry leader for the industry leading ttrpg for GM's who don't know better to use

 

[MichaelSomething]

Yeah. It always bemuses me when people claim that 5e (sometimes it is claimed 3e) introduced these issues and that they somehow didn't exist previously.

It may become more obvious in later editions because they actually give you a guideline for intended overall balance between classes. But that didn't mean the issues didn't always exist!

Early editions had a lot of guard rails in place to curtail the power of casters. Expensive spell components to stop powerful spells being spammed; castings times that would make spells disrupt able; randomized spell learnings; high lethality making getting access to higher level spells difficult; magic items tables that favored fighters, d4 hit dice for the wizard; no limitless cantrips; different leveling rates for classes; etc.

Later editions removed those guard rails, not understanding their purpose.