Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ (He/Him)
You are a hero. You may now rock on to Electric Avenue.
D&D 5E (2014) Have the designers lost interest in short rests?
- Thread starter Don Durito
- Start date
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
This was one of the motivating factors for my "aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overrated" thread. At nearly all levels of design, testing the rules is not treated with nearly as much value as whether the rules look good by whatever metric the reader favors. (And, yes, some of these metrics favor my interests; that doesn't mean I like this happening any more than a serious theist likes bad arguments for the existence of God.) Three years IS plenty of time to iterate on a design until it takes a good shape, but things moved terribly fast for the kind of data that was meant to be gathered. Single sessions are liable to be the primary data set when any actual-play data is collected at all, and those can be terribly swingy (as I suspect everyone in this thread can attest from personal experience).
It seems to me that the best use for public playtesting at this point is as an advertising and thematic (rather than mathematic) guidance, with the sole exception of things like "do people ACTUALLY take N short rests every long rest" or "how many fights do people actually run a day?" It seems like integrating public playtesting with a virtual tabletop would actually be a really good idea as a result, as you can watch how many short rests people take, how many encounters they do, how many skill rolls they make, etc. Such data could be incredibly useful for targeting changes to the ruleset to match actual-player interests while keeping the system mathematically rigorous: turn the "white room" (god I'm so naughty word sick of hearing that term) into a play room.
Oh absolutely. Many of the surveys bordered heavily on push-polling, with leading questions and phrasing designed to encourage particular kinds of response. Survey design--like statistical analysis--is something that very few game designers have any obvious training in. I once did a lookup, and as far as I could tell, almost none of the named game designers for any WotC edition had a degree outside of the humanities, if the information was available to me at all; the vast majority were Communications or Writing, Heinsoo has a theology degree, and the closest I could find to a degree involving math or science was psychology IIRC (that is, a soft/social science).
Now, just because someone doesn't have a degree in something, doesn't mean they have to be bad at it (after all, as noted, Heinsoo has a theology degree and he was at the helm for 4e, the edition [in]famous for its mathematical rigor), but the apparent near-total lack of STEM training among game designers for things that could really use it...isn't encouraging. I get that it's hard to attract people with physics or chemistry degrees to a job like this, but you'd think they could at least hire a survey-design consultant or something.
Asisreo
Patron Badass
Balance in a TTRPG will never come from a design team. It never really has, either.
I've never played a game where CR was so accurate that a GM could be blindfolded and still have a fun, interesting, balanced encounter from merely a Challenge Rating number. Some iterations were more accurate than others but never so accurate that we could seriously rely on it.
Likewise, encounter design will never be accurate without the DM. Lets imagine that WoTC
did it. Their new Errata changes all the classes so that short rests no longer exist, short rest class resources are doubled/tripled, and the expected number of encounters are about 3 before the next long rest.
Now, you are designing an adventure for the DMsguild. You want every class to shine in your adventure. How do you structure it? Do you make sure every day has exactly 3 encounters and do you think that's enough to guarantee all classes are relevant?
I don't think such an adventure, or similar ones, would do well. Aside from the overall feel of the adventure being so mechanical that you can taste the WD-40, I'm willing to bet that the adventure also railroads its players into following this structure no matter what they do. If they face an NPC they are expected to fight, no amount of good roleplay will prevent the combat occurring. None of their decisions will ever matter.
I've never played a game where CR was so accurate that a GM could be blindfolded and still have a fun, interesting, balanced encounter from merely a Challenge Rating number. Some iterations were more accurate than others but never so accurate that we could seriously rely on it.
Likewise, encounter design will never be accurate without the DM. Lets imagine that WoTC
did it. Their new Errata changes all the classes so that short rests no longer exist, short rest class resources are doubled/tripled, and the expected number of encounters are about 3 before the next long rest.
Now, you are designing an adventure for the DMsguild. You want every class to shine in your adventure. How do you structure it? Do you make sure every day has exactly 3 encounters and do you think that's enough to guarantee all classes are relevant?
I don't think such an adventure, or similar ones, would do well. Aside from the overall feel of the adventure being so mechanical that you can taste the WD-40, I'm willing to bet that the adventure also railroads its players into following this structure no matter what they do. If they face an NPC they are expected to fight, no amount of good roleplay will prevent the combat occurring. None of their decisions will ever matter.
ph0rk
Friendship is Magic, and Magic is Heresy.
I looked at one of their UA surveys once, and then never again. They are legitimately terrible.
This is wrong. While it is true a DM has (or can have) their finger on a scale, the entire point of using a published system is that the interlocking parts are as close to balanced as possible. If not, just use something like an OSR product or Tiny SRD or instead a numberless system (like the Cypher System) where balancing is overtly in the hands of the DM.
But in 5e? The PHB presents what appear to be roughly comparable options in terms of power and options with thematic differences. It does not spell out for players (as the DMG does not for DMs) that classes are not balanced, or the ways in which varying from the rest/encounter schedule can and will swing that balance.
5e is a system, you pay money for a system because it is more balanced than what you could come up with on your own.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
4e did a pretty good job as far as balance goes. Nothing is perfect, to be sure, but it did a pretty good job. 13th Age is another example that does a pretty good job. (I'd also say Dungeon World is pretty good, but that's a more complex question since "using the rules as written" and "extending the rules" is almost synonymous.)
Likewise, 4e's encounter building math actually works. There are, as always, some edge cases (like Needlefang Drake Swarms or high-level monsters with nasty condition effects de-levelled down to level 1), but by and large 4e's XP budget does what it claims to do and gives a statistically reliable estimate of difficulty. Statistical reliability means that, a small portion of the time, it WON'T work as intended--you CAN be surprised. But surprises will be just that, surprising.
As for your talk about this hyper-mechanical adventure, I see this as a defense of my argument, not an attack on it. The classes as currently designed in 5e could only all get to do what the game promises--everyone gets to contribute in roughly equal amount and intensity to overall success--if you design the adventure badly. That's not a sign that "everyone gets to contribute roughly equally" is a bad goal, it's a sign that the system is fighting your efforts to reach it. A well-designed system wouldn't need any weird efforts to cater to every possible pattern of player option choices. Simply offering diverse challenges would be enough, because whatever the players happen to choose for class or race or whatever, there would be an approach that does interesting things in the process of addressing those challenges.
Swarmkeeper
Hero
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.
As for short rests, as others have mentioned there are enough short rest features that are part of the core classes that they are an integral part of the game. That said, I've found that in one of our games where the PCs are now levels 19 and 20, short rests are rarely utilized. I haven't been keeping track, but my guess is that short rests became less of a thing once they hit the fourth tier. Then again we don't have a full warlock in the group which could be argued to be the class most dependent on the short rest due to so few spell slots.
Asisreo
Patron Badass
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.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Right, but this is a big problem for a published adventure developer. Their business model is to sell you content THAT YOU WILL USE. If it is largely going to end up on the 'cutting room floor' during play, that definitely reduces the utility of the material. On top of that, DMs are surely under a temptation to use 'DM force' to bend the arc of play such that it intersects with the material provided.
This was no issue at all for early 'classic' D&D. It aspired to NOTHING ELSE but the 'dungeon crawl' and thus a map full of rooms, traps, secret passages, and dangerous guardians of fantastic treasures served as a complete solution. Every room was virtually guaranteed to be visited! There was no advantage to the party to not do so, and thus no incentive for the DM to bend anything, at least in that sense (she might fudge some rolls to keep the PCs alive in a tight situation, but that wasn't really inherent to the system, it would be driven by table dynamics).
As soon as games developed in a more elaborately plotted direction, things got stickier. Modern 'narrative play' is really a response to that, but it leaves you with only a very provisional 'adventure path' and vendors of such material have not really ever come to terms with that. The best they can really do is try to provide the DM and players with strong hooks to give the narrative's assumed plotline a lot of momentum, and then leave it to the players and DM from there.
FOR ME this is not a problem, I don't really ever buy adventures. I think the most recent ones I own date back to the mid-90's or earlier and I am not really planning to run them anytime soon. I think I ran one pre-plotted 4e Dungeon adventure, and it was a pretty rough experience, things were just as a I suspect, a very thin plot that required a lot of DM arm-twisting in the form of "and then this happens..." sorts of stuff to 'keep it on track'. This was my favorite aspect of 4e, VERY VERY easy to just free-form ad-lib a game. All I ever did was write up some notes and descriptions of 'stuff' and then maybe it would come up in play. Most of it didn't!
There are many other ways to give weight to decisions. They should be weighty for all the reasons that exist in the real world (or analogous ones at least). This does require character development and joint participation in determining what the stakes and consequences really are. Mechanics can help that. Resources can then factor in as some of those, much like Dungeon World might do it.
The players choices aren't illusions. The CHARACTERS choices are certainly 'illusions', since they don't really exist... This is where most people's analysis falls down. They are determined to structure their thinking around an idea that the characters are treated as 'real' in some sense. It leads to a lot of difficult problems in play. So, resource management, IMHO, has the function of acting as one of the 'fictional positioning' constraints that are used by the game participants to decide what moves are and are not allowed and/or what their impact on the fiction is.
And I'm not advocating for the elimination of resources. I'm advocating for their use in a way that is under the control of all participants. So, if it is dramatically useful, to achieve the PLAYER's goals in terms of narrative and character development, etc. then they can, for instance "run out of torches" or "press on despite our wounds". I generally operate in the mode where the GM is framing scenes. So usually it will be the GM who is going to have the torches go out, perhaps, and 'press on' is more likely to be a player option, and it WILL be informed by what the fiction is telling them about their resources. Hit points and such are there to give them a good way to measure that stuff, but if they are really just wanting to be at full strength, for some dramatic reason, at a certain point, then that is probably a scene that should get framed into play.
I think this is not too different from how @pemerton has been doing it, though we seem to utilize slightly different techniques sometimes. Anyway, I actually like resource games, but I don't like when they are a choice of which player's character to gimp. If that is going to be the choice, then it should be a choice of the participants in the game, not dictated strictly by mechanics.
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.
Teleport comes up an awful lot & people still pretend that it's the kind of game changer it was in 3.5 when it meant you could teleport the group to a safe spot where you could safely take advantage of npc healers for long term care recovery & other things but
3.5
5
e
5
e
and yet 5e from the start has very much been designed as if linear fighter quadratic wizard is still a thing to the point where it needs to be guarded against everywhere they can shoehorn in a safeguard despite the fact that with feats & magic weapons it inverts to linear wizard quadratic fighter due to overuse of concentration, spells that are handicapped to be almost good (usually before concentration is added to be safe), & the massive over use of energy resist/immune along with magic resist that actually impacts the caster stacked against "resistance to nonmagical piecing bludgeoning & slashing" that ceases to affect the martial the second they got their first magic weapon. Descent into avernus is such a good example of this thought process that it's almost white room level clarity with scads of incredibly magical weapons & armor for the fighter side of lfqw with a wand of secrets, +1 wand of the war mage & some spellbooks paired with too little gold in the entire hardcover to really use even if the caster was a wizard who was given all the gold. As if that was not enough nearly every monster in it has significant amounts of energy resist & outright energy immunes along side magic resistance that cripples the already overly restricted wizard side of lfqw who fall behind the curve frequently & only manages to keep pace at their best even before the additional hurdle is added.
edit: With all of that said, what exactly is the value of being able to teleport in hardcover adventures that mave nowhere to teleport to& no reason even if you can. Descent to avernus proides another white room level example there in the form of the wandering emporium that should be a perfect example of a place were being able to teleport to it makes a huge difference yet has no inclusion of a teleport pattern.
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