Is the 15 minute adventuring day now the 90 minute adventuring day?

[Majoru Oakheart]

One more reason why I say that those groups must have a bad DM is: how is it possible that the PC party can fight 15min and retire always without consequences?

That implies that the PCs have full control over when exactly they want to fight. The "adventure" itself cannot do anything against a PC that chooses to have a rest? That really sounds quite poor adventure design to me...

Maybe I had an unusual RPGing experience throughout the years, but 90% of the times our PCs do not choose their adventures. They can choose generally how they want to affect it, but most of the times it's the adventure that comes to them and not the other way around. So a group that enters a dungeon cannot just say anytime "all right dear enemies, enough for today see you tomorrow".

It depends. Classic dungeon delves are designed to be "delved" into. You go in as far as you can handle, you retreat and make camp then you delve back in further next time. The farther you can make it into the dungeon, the harder it gets.

Most of these aren't designed with a specific timeline, since you never know how far the PCs will make it in before having to retreat. Classic dungeon delves aren't necessarily up against a large, monolithic group of bad guys that is going to mobilize their troops against you for raiding them. In one session you might go into a dungeon, find a cave full of orcs, kill them and retreat back out. You've killed all the orcs, however, and there are none left to retaliate against you. You go back in and head a different direction and then fight a digester. Then retreat and rest. The digester isn't intelligent and didn't have allies so there is no retaliation.

Even some of the newer dungeon crawls designed in the same vein don't really have a reason for the enemies to hunt you down or a reason why you can't stop at almost any time. My players went through the entirety of RttToEE in short, one day trips.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

This also breaks the system.

it is always possible to break the system.

You should learn not to burn all daily abilities when there is no pressure. The DM should make sure that burning daily powers always bears the risk that you are less powerful afterwards. So when everything works fine, most players are always at 100%. Maybe 1-4 healing surges down, but still able to keep on.

Also think about it ingame:

Fighter: "I scratched my thumb, i want to rest. *whine*"

 

[Hussar]

One more reason why I say that those groups must have a bad DM is: how is it possible that the PC party can fight 15min and retire always without consequences?

That implies that the PCs have full control over when exactly they want to fight. The "adventure" itself cannot do anything against a PC that chooses to have a rest? That really sounds quite poor adventure design to me...

Look at any crypt style adventure, and you see exactly that. Why would constructs and undead "get ready" for the next incursion? They don't leave their respective areas. Numerous Tomb Raider style adventures fit here.

Any outdoor adventure where each encounter area is mostly self contained - each area is the lair of one or one group of creatures that do not cooperate. Again, no reason to get ready. WG 4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharzidun features exactly this before you enter the temple.

Any adventure where the defenders are not terribly well organized also would mean that there are few consequences to 15 minute days. I'm looking at Mike Mearl's Salvage Operation in Dungeon for a perfect example of this.

Any adventure that does not feature large numbers of intelligent, organized humanoids would also have few consequences to the 15 minute day. Isle of Dread for example.

Maybe I had an unusual RPGing experience throughout the years, but 90% of the times our PCs do not choose their adventures. They can choose generally how they want to affect it, but most of the times it's the adventure that comes to them and not the other way around. So a group that enters a dungeon cannot just say anytime "all right dear enemies, enough for today see you tomorrow".

You assume too much here though. Many, many dungeon adventure feature small groups that have little or no contact with eachother. The only time an adventure actually would significantly change with the party doing the 15 minute day thing would be in a large, fairly organized lair of a single group.

For just about any other adventure in a dungeon, there's no real reason for the inhabitants to get organized enough to have any significant impact or impediment for the party.

 

[Derren]

One more reason why I say that those groups must have a bad DM is: how is it possible that the PC party can fight 15min and retire always without consequences?
.

You are correct, it is primary a DMing fault. But like with other DMing faults 4E tries to alter the rules so that those faults don't have an impact anymore instead of giving the DMs guidelines of how to avoid the faults.

Never blame the customer that he doesn't use the product correctly (even if it is true). Also how many DMs have actually read all the DMG guidelines? And when a DM again complains about 15 minute workdays then telling him to "RtfM because it explains how to avoid it" doesn't help. From the DMs point of view the system is to blame, not himself.

 

[Hussar]

You are correct, it is primary a DMing fault. But like with other DMing faults 4E tries to alter the rules so that those faults don't have an impact anymore instead of giving the DMs guidelines of how to avoid the faults.

Never blame the customer that he doesn't use the product correctly (even if it is true). Also how many DMs have actually read all the DMG guidelines? And when a DM again complains about 15 minute workdays then telling him to "RtfM because it explains how to avoid it" doesn't help. From the DMs point of view the system is to blame, not himself.

You keep repeating this, but it doesn't make it true. It is not primarily a DMing fault. Not at all. It is completely unrealistic for there to be consequences for the party for falling back in far too many situations for it to be a DMing fault.

 

[Aenghus]

I'm quite familiar with the 15 minute adventuring day both as a player and as a DM.

As a player going through the RttToEE, we had a safe haven for much of the dwarven mines section, that allowed us to clean the place out room by room, retreating when spells ran low. Once we got teleport we just teleported in and out, with the occasional scry-and-fry (which is the ultimate extreme end of the 15-minute adventuring day phenomenon).

It seems to happen naturally in high level PC-driven games where the PCs have access to enough teleports to enter and leave the adventuring area. The ability of the PCs to nova with a lot of buffing spells and their best combat spells to have a few easy fights and then leave to safety is the essence of this issue. This behavior is reinforced if the DM increases the encounter difficulties in response, as this convinces them they have to buff to have a chance of surviving an encounter, and increases the risk of a TPK if they do enter such an encounter unbuffed.

I can see it would be much less of an issue in low level and/or low magic games, or games with tight IC time limits.

4e reduces the buffs available to a party, both in strength and number, and seems to link them to per encounter or at will powers, meaning they should have them available every encounter. This immediately removes one of the reasons for deciding to rest up - running out of buff spells.

Daily powers and healing surges are the limited resources left in 4e that will motivate a party to rest (possibly action points as well, if it's possible to use more than one in a single encounter). From what we have seen, there is less ability to nova an encounter, and hence less incentive to do so.

Changing teleport and other long-distance transport spells into rituals (and likely restricting their use in other ways) will also inhibit commuter adventuring.

I expect there to be a smaller issue with 4e PCs running out of steam and having to rest.

 

[HeinorNY]

What about this house rule:

Warming Up
You add +1 to attacks on actions gained from extra action points. This bonus raises by 1, up to half your level, each time you spend an extra action point. When you take an extended rest, you lose this bonus.


OBS: Extra action points are those gained when you reach a milestone, or just every action point which is not the first one you gain every day, by taking an extended rest.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

The big difference I see between 3e and 4e is that in 3e, clearing 4 rooms is 4 different combats; in 4e, with the larger "encounter space" and different encounter balancing, clearing 4 rooms might be 1 encounter. You can have a fully populated dungeon cleared in 4-5 encounters and it is easy (supposedly) to balance, while in 3e, this would actually be 8 to 12 seperate combats, which if not CRed correctly, would either be a complete cake-walk (not a 15 minute work day) or potentially a decent challenge (thus needing them to come back over the course of 3 days or push on without proper resources).

This seems t me to a fallacy. With 4e we saw talk of how Dungeon design should be more spread out so that encounters would include multiple rooms. What was not mentioned apparently was that it was still one encounter with all the participants spread out over more space. This was more of a design philosophy that is system independent than something 4e specific. In practice having actual multiple full encounters in multiple rooms proved quite deadly.

From this thread: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=220972

But that's all on their side of the screen. They were also done in by something I learned about 4th edition. Fighting two encounters simultaneously is far more lethal than it used to be. That's probably good for the game on balance, but it does impose some new caution in my adventure design (or it should have, at any rate).

In 3rd edition, it wasn't necessarily a big deal if two rooms' worth of monsters attacked you at once. The CR 12 monster in room A4 and the CR 12 monster in room A5--well, that's still just an EL 14 encounter and only incrementally more difficult than those two rooms tackled separately. But in 4th edition, it really feels like something that's twice as hard. Which isn't to say it's impossible--my Thursday guys might have pulled out a victory with a little more luck and a little more foresight. But you can't blithely kick open door after door, that's for sure.

You don't want to eliminate the possibility of kicking in two doors at the same time, of course. And it's rarely worth the effort to bend over backwards during adventure design to protect the players from themselves. But you can bet that I'm going to include more doors rather than doorways, more ambient sound, and more "baffle space" between encounters in my site-based adventures in 4th edition.

The open dungeon design seems to me to be the same in 3e and 4e. If you want more realism in terms of monster placement take the same 8 Orcs and put two in each room if you want to have a multi-room battle instead of all 8 of them in one room.

The buff and run from room to room before the minute/level spells run out seems much the same in terms of clearing out 3-4 rooms in an encounter as what you are talking about in 4e. In 3e that technique allows the party to face multiple real encounters instead of several lower level encounters that are spread out which seems to be the case for if one does this in 4e.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

As a DM you can do a lot of things to keep your characters moving:
1) You could place mechanisms in those old tombs to convince players to go on

2) you can set up encounters so that in 2 different rooms there are 2 easy encounters, both together are very hard.
When neither group (party/monster) has prepared for the battle, the monsters of the 2nd encounter will join the battle when the first encounter is half over...

3) let the monsters move between rooms (just assume that the current setup of the undead monsters is a random snapshot of a continuous flow). If you take out 1 set of monsters, they will be missed (maybe at dinner etc.) And if PCs come again next day they will be prepared

4) teleporting in can be easy, teleporting out can be difficult (or vice-versa). Remember: teleport will probably a ritual, so this might be the default case for 4e

5) make it clear when hit and run was a good idea and when not

6) let monsters do hit and runs on your players

7) attack players at extended rests (eventually the set up guards then)

8) attack players at short rests (eventually they will setup guards for even 5 min breaks)

9) just tell your players that their characters are not tired and just don´t find rest there... (maybe it is too cold/wet etc)

10) don´t play with players trying to break the system that hard...

 

[DM_Blake]

My 3E experience may differ from most, but I found the game quite unsuited for dungeon adventuring. I find the idea of camping in the middle of a dungeon (or repeatedly wandering in-and-out) to totally break my sense of disbelief. So I found myself almost exclusively designing really small (2-4 encounter) dungeons that you could do in a single day, or other story lines that allowed the PCs time to rest.

Yep, I've done pretty much the same thing with my 3x games.

And when I buy the premade dungeons that have a big dungeon to explore, I often edit that dungeon somewhat to reduce the difficulty of many of the encounters and/or provide extra resources not included, just to make it more possible for a long, one-day dungeon crawl.

I see the 15-minute adventuring day all the time. My group this weekend did this very thing. We entered the lair of the evil lich right after breakfast, fought 4 fights (1 behir, 1 ghostly lion, 1 ghostly lion, a pair of ghosty lions) - all of which occurred within less than 100' from the entrance of the lich's lair, then we retreated back outside to rest and recover spells/hp.

It will be nice in 4e to be able to explore a 20-room mansion (or dungeon) in less than a full week of adventuring.