Here, Let Me Fix "Powers Per Day" For You

[Li Shenron]

I have been gaming for more than 20 years, and I have never seen this "fifteen-minute day" problem. My players have learned the hard way to conserve resources.

Same here.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I'm being unfair (or just plain stubborn.) But this is a D&D adventure, not the "Everybody Watch My Awesome Wizard" show.

The limited number of spells, etc. is a feature, not a bug.

We must have had badwrongfun

Me too feel like a traditional D&D adventure is having a Fighter who fights, a Cleric who heals and protects, a Rogue who sneaks and handles traps and lock, and a Wizard who can go beyond human capabilities and do what cannot be done with mundane means, but the power of the latter is compensated by the limited resources.

When a game doesn't accept this concept, and want to switch to another concept that is "no resource limits", it is then unavoidable that it must also change the concept of magic to go beyond mundane means otherwise the Wizard would be easily dominating the game. Spells need to be toned down somehow and the risk is reducing the Wizard to a Fighter with a different flavor. It's fine, but it's a different game, and for my own tastes it's an inferior game setup because you have one huge diversity option less.

Instead, 5E should just give each character a certain number of points, and give each of these superawesome superpowers a point cost. Done.

We already have points, we just call them "slots". You may want to explore variants, and if you e.g. add a simple rule that a higher level slot N can be swapped for a number of lower level slots the sum of which is N, this already allows the player for more control over focusing her firepower on a shorter or longer time frame.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

And then there is the other problem... Combats that are individually boring because you don't get to use your cool toys, and no one felt any real pressure, becuase there were still a ton of hit points left afterwards?

And a random encounter every hour? That is probably more than believable in the middle of a dungeon. But travelling the wilderness? Unless 95 % of these random encounters are stuff like: "You see some animal" "You see a farmer", I don't think they are in any way reasonable.

Or what if you're in the middle of a city - how many muggers do you expect the party to attack over the course of the day. And how many are even a genuine threat?

What if your system allows Scry-Buff-Teleport?

What if your entire adventure only consists of investigation until you finally have the villain figured out and strike at him, and then only one or two of the characters in the party have the cool powers and the rest just gets to say "I attack"?

 

[Shadeydm]

What if your entire adventure only consists of investigation until you finally have the villain figured out and strike at him, and then only one or two of the characters in the party have the cool powers and the rest just gets to say "I attack"?

Yes because I attack is so much worse than saying "I rain of blows" aka. I attack him twice lol.

 

[pemerton]

I'm impressed that you manage to make Every. Single. Plotline. You. Ever. Run. Ever. follow a format in which storyline imposed time limits prevent the players from meaningfully manipulating the amount of action per day, and where random encounters as a means of punishing nova-play flow smoothly into your plot instead of acting as an awkward and obvious kludge that breaks believability by making it obvious that the DM is altering reality in order to punish the players instead of just running a believable world.

"Daily" powers are a pretty poor mechanic.

<snip>

If you have a useful daily spell, for instance, that doesn't have some hugely expensive material component, you can cast it systematically any time the DM isn't keeping you busy. A bit of downtime and an AD&D wizard with Dig and Wall of Stone can radically re-shape an area. In 3e it was Fabricate. There are many such 'creative' tricks that are fun when done once, but get out of hand when done systematically - which an arbitrary 'daily' limit leaves the door open to.

<snip>

On the DM side, significant daily resources are a campaign-pacing nightmare. The DM must slave his campaign ideas to challenging a party that can't be allowed to face too many or too few challenges in each and every day being played through. This leads to tons of 'filler' encoutners, and an ever-present threat of 'random' wandering monsters, (that end up painting the world as a place so insanely dangerous that it's a miracle any peasant survives ploughing his fields without being jumped by an ankheg or purple worm). The DM must cajole or coerce his players into 'pressing on' if he hasn't consumed enough of those daily resources yet, or give them some improbable opportunity to 'rest' in the middle of some vital quest or hellishly dangerous dungeon because that last fight turned out to be much tougher than he expected.


While dramatic abilities that can't just be 'spammed' every round are a great idea, tying them to an arbitrary unit of time, like a 'day,' is not such a great idea. A more story-oriented recharge rate would give the DM much more flexibility.

I hate per-day mechanics simply because they are designed for long dungeon crawls, and don't work at all for anything else. Since I don't like long dungeons, that is a problem for me.

This all fits with my experience of a game in which daily resources play a large role.

In 4e I have developed various techniques to mostly work around them - skill challenges required to get extended rests in the field, for example - but healing surges still present a hard cap on adventuring that has to be worked around.

I think the sort of game one is trying to run matters quite a bit here. SKyOdin's example of long dungeon crawls doesn't have to be taken literally, I don't think - it's about the relationship between the required rate of expenditure (ie how many encounters of how much difficulty) and the rate of return. And Tony Vargas's example of going nuts with utility magic in downtime is a version of the same issue.

You can up the difficulty-of-encounters-faced-per-recharge-period using random encounters, or reinforcements, or turning the elite into a solo, or whatever it might be, but then as Cadfan points out this imposes a certain structure and content on the gameworld that might not fit with what those at the table and actually playing the game envisaged.

Like Tony, I've got nothing against resource management but think that there are plenty of other ways to pace recovery that can work better for some (perhaps many?) games than "per day" - such as per hour of play, per session, per adventure, etc.

 

[pemerton]

We must have had badwrongfun

I don't think anyone is saying that you're doing it wrong. They're just pointing out that experiencing the 15 minute day problem doesn't mean that they have missed some obvious solution.

I mean, I know about wandering monsters. I just have zero interest in using them, as a pacing device or anything else.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I agree with SKyOdin.

I think encounter (or scene or combat) powers allow a greater range of different play styles. But just because you have at will or encounter powers doesnt mean you cant be set upon by wandering monsters or time sensitive events cant occur like a dungeon being reinforced by hobgoblins or traps etc.

I dont think there is any contradiction between mechanical pacing approach of AEDU and these sensible and believable in game events.

Random encounters in a system that has only encounter powers and recovering of everything thereafter are just annoying.
Also, encounter powers have a great problem:
every single encounter needs to be balanced. If you have daily resources, players can react to more difficult or more easy encounters by soending more or less resources. Not so in an encounter based system.

There may be encounter powers, but daily powers are extremely important too.

 

[Someone]

Well, WotC is planning to go back to the old school vibe, so it seems they've decided to go back to balance mechanics with plot devices. I propose we go further in this idea and make the D&Dest game of all, and balance the paladin with role-playing restrictions, and balance the monk by forcing the player controlling him to shave his head.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

And a random encounter every hour? That is probably more than believable in the middle of a dungeon. But travelling the wilderness? Unless 95 % of these random encounters are stuff like: "You see some animal" "You see a farmer", I don't think they are in any way reasonable.

Random encounters on the road should happen only once in a while. And here it does not matter, if you have encounter or daily powers.

I rather liked, that to benefit from a full rest, you need to be in a safe place for a good night´s sleep. So it does not matter if you spend 10 days on the road, or 1 day in the dungeon.

 

[Cadfan]

@Cadfan . It that a bit more of a palatable interpretation?

No, of course not. Its not even responsive. I'm not questioning whether its plausible to sometimes have reasons why the players can't rest after every single fight.

I'm questioning whether its possible to always, in every situation, have realistic plot based reasons for 3 to 4 fights per day plus convenient wandering monsters such that a narrow window of properly balanced game play can be enforced.

 

[Raith5]

Random encounters in a system that has only encounter powers and recovering of everything thereafter are just annoying.
Also, encounter powers have a great problem:
every single encounter needs to be balanced. If you have daily resources, players can react to more difficult or more easy encounters by soending more or less resources. Not so in an encounter based system.

There may be encounter powers, but daily powers are extremely important too.

I think wandering monsters were annoying even before encounter powers! BUt they were a mechanical measure than brought dungeons alive to some degree I guess.

I am not sure that every encounter needs to be balanced - I am in a 4th ed campaign where it is not the case.

I agree about the importance of daily powers and I think resource management is important. I am willing to entertain that the balance between encounter powers to daily powers in 4th could have had slightly weaker encounter powers and a greater number of weaker daily powers for instance. But I would want non-casters to also have access to such resource management issues.