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

[Majoru Oakheart]

Imo not because you are not gaining anything, you just don't loose it. The limiting factor is still the number of healing surges left and the dailies. And even if you don't use the AP, there is no advantage in having 2 AP instead of just 1.

Somewhat true. Once again, having 2 means being able to use them in the next 2 encounters. Once you have two, it's a better idea to fight 2 more encounters than rest and fight the same 2 encounters. Overall, getting another one is not actually a benefit to continuing on. It just takes away a minus to continuing on.

Groups which really rested after every fight (I have never seen such a group but people say they exist) will now use their dailies in the first fight and then rest.
Adventure design is the solution to the 15 minute workday, not rules.

So far this has not been my(limited) experience. My group is one that likes to pull the 15 minute adventuring day. They don't do it every day and it isn't like they go into a dungeon with the plan "Use everything you have since we're not fighting a second combat today." They instead go into a dungeon fully expecting to keep fighting until they can't possibly continue anymore. Then they run into the first encounter and it hits the fighter so hard that the cleric needs to use his Heal spell first round. Then they realize "wow, if we don't take this down right NOW, it could actually kill us." and they all cast their highest level spells at it. Then, after the combat they assess their status and realize that if they fight another monster like that they won't be able to survive. So they leave the dungeon to rest.

However, if you look at some of the dailies listed on the characters sheets, you'll see that they aren't always the best option. If you are fighting a bunch of minions, it isn't work using a Sleep spell on them. They'll be dead before they even make their first save most times. If the monsters go before you and all run into melee with your fighter, it's probably not a good idea to waste the sleep on them. It only slows them for the first round and slow doesn't have any effect on creatures already in melee.

The same thing is the case of the Ranger. Split the Tree is only good if there are two enemies within 3 of each other. Even then, if you are capable of killing a creature with an at will attack this round and the extra damage is just overkill, why bother using it?

The Cleric's power does a lot of damage, true. 17 is pretty good. However, the ranger does an average of 14 on his at will power who is his quarry. If you hit with a lance of faith for 8 and your +2 to hit makes the difference between the ranger hitting and missing, you've just done 22 damage instead of 17.

The point is that it's NOT the best idea in 4e to use your dailies right away. I've now run a bunch of 4e games and it was not the inclination of players to do so, either.

Also, the decision to do a 15 minute adventuring day is a risk analysis. If your group goes up against an encounter lacking 1 of their dailies, say the fighter. Plus, everyone in the group is down 2 healing surges. I can tell you that group is basically at 99% power. It's near impossible for one person to use more than 5 healing surges in one encounter(unless the group has 3 clerics or something). Most people realize this pretty quickly. Even down half their dailies and half their healing surges, they are STILL at around 95% power. The risk of fighting in that condition is so close to the risk for fighting an encounter at full strength that it isn't worth the hassle of telling the DM that you are leaving, worrying about random encounters, changing all the numbers on your character sheet...

When you compare that to the risk of fighting a CR 15 creature with no Heal spells left and your only Delay Death used when you are level 11 you see that people are MUCH more worried. I normally play the cleric in our 3e games, and I can tell you that at that point I'd be encouraging us all to rest, even if we only had one encounter that day.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In most 2 player fighter games you build "power" for each successful hit agains an opponent, which you can use to power specail moves.

In the Super Robot Wars series of strategical games for each hit you build "spirit" points. Some of the most powerful attacks (usually the finishing moves) can't be used if you are under a certain threshold.

And these are just the first two examples that came into my mind, so I guess this kind of mechanic is well represented in videogames.

Ah, okay. Don't know many (any?) of these games, apparently. (Not a real surprise, there are just way to many games out there...)
But I am not sure your example fit that well. Hitting an opponent and building up energy/tokens to fuel powers is still something different then gaining resources for resolving a certain milestone. I was thinking more along the lines of a game where you would get a special resource if you maybe played on instead of saving or clicking the rest button or something like that. And i don't know any that fit that.

Well, closed I can think of that creates a similar dynamic would be NWN 2 - Mask of the Betrayer. But there it's not that you gain resources from going on, you just lose them (spirit energy) if you rest and "waste" time.

 

[jaer]

The healing surges and daily/per encoutner/at will powers don't seem to be the only thing helping to eliminate the 15 minute work day.

There is also the 5 minute break between encounters. If you have three encounters, you've spent at least 10 minutes resting, 5 minutes exploring, and 5 minutes fighting! Twenty minutes right there! Woot!

On a more serious note, though: I do experience the 15 minute work day with my high level group. They fight one 6-10 round encounter...at 6 seconds a round, that fight only takes 1 minute. They go on for a minute or so, then fight the next encounter. They get in maybe four fights before exhausting their high level spells. The priest can't heal through combat with low-level magic (she is the most limiting factor, followed by the gish. The mage/psion multi-class has the spells and power points to go for hours!)

Four combats lasting 1 minute each, and the party husseling through rooms so their minute per level duration spells last as many combats as possible...figure at most two minutes between encounters. They spend a few minutes studying their surroundings and teleport out to rest.

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).

 

[DeusExMachina]

The 15 minute adventuring day is all too recognizable at the moment...

We're playing a 17th level campaign in the Demon Web Pits and our DM just loves to throw high level monsters at us (him being more than just a bit of a power player). So we run out of healing after 1 or 2 combats and then have to heal, except that he doesn't like it when we heal too much, so he throws in encounters at night and what not. This has the unfortunate side effect that people die on a regular basis, but that he doesn't want to lose characters because he's afraid of losing story coherency and pulls out all kinds of crazy dei ex machinae to keep us alive...

Or rather he's kind of given up on that and just had an angel join the party that can cast true resurrection in 1 round...

 

[Li Shenron]

Here's a scenario where it happened almost every day:

(snip)

If I were the DM of a group of people that play the game that way, the solution will be quite simple:

make each "room encounter" in the dungeon hard enough so that it REQUIRES characters to fight 1 battle per day.

If the players really enjoy playing like that, let them play like that, but the whole RPG game ruleset isn't REQUIRED to adjust itself to that kind of gaming group.

Then I guess that such a group of players will have some argument because fighter-types are much weaker than wizard-types. But it's their problem, if they want to play like that.

 

[hong]

If I were the DM of a group of people that play the game that way, the solution will be quite simple:

make each "room encounter" in the dungeon hard enough so that it REQUIRES characters to fight 1 battle per day.

This also breaks the system.

 

[Li Shenron]

I've seen the "15-minute adventuring day" in practice. Fight, rest until dawn, fight, rest until dawn.

It's 75% the DM's problem and 25% the player's problem. (yeah, I made those numbers up.)

The DM is obviously setting up encounters that are too difficult. If the idea is to have the players make more progress than that during a day, why is he setting up encounters that take so many resources to overcome? Also, apparently the DM has designed a dungeon where you actually can rest for 24 hours reasonably undisturbed, with a reasonable expectation of getting your hit points and spells back. What a boring place! A "dungeon" should be a dynamic, living thing that reacts realistically (with all the proper caveats that accompany that term in a fantasy world) to the PC's presence. Resting, especially at 1st level when there isn't access to ameliorating magic, should be a risky venture.

But it is partly the player's fault too. They should be more cautious, not blow through as many resources, try to use stealth and negotiation to get through encounters unscathed, run away if necessary, and so on. The mentality of "if it's here, we should fight it" and "the DM wouldn't put something in the dungeon he didn't know we could defeat" are sad little delusions. Your characters shouldn't metagame! Even if the dungeon is designed so that these assumptions are true (and I'm not saying I do that when I design a dungeon), the players should role-play their characters, and their characters should worry that they don't know whether or not they're tough enough to get through this place alive. C'mon, live like you might die guys! A bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing - it keeps you alive!

I think that's very well put.

The DM could try to make sure that the adventure encounters are such that don't deplete the party's resources too quickly. Maybe the first couple of encounters are "teaser", in the sense that the encounter purpose is NOT to kill the PCs but to trick them into wasting some resources. Smart players figure out that they beat the encounter with little resources. Then comes the real one or two encounters, where they have to give it all to win.

Clearly, if a gaming group is used to believe that every single encounter in an adventure must be deadly, then 3e is not good for that, you need 4e (and probably not even 4e is enough).

It's hard to understand really what many players want... they want excitment (threat of death) but they don't want to die. Toss them an encounter that doesn't threaten their life and they complain about lack of fun, toss them an encounter that does threaten, and the one who gets the shaft and dies complains about being unfun...

 

[Li Shenron]

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".

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

make each "room encounter" in the dungeon hard enough so that it REQUIRES characters to fight 1 battle per day.

If the players really enjoy playing like that, let them play like that, but the whole RPG game ruleset isn't REQUIRED to adjust itself to that kind of gaming group.

Then I guess that such a group of players will have some argument because fighter-types are much weaker than wizard-types. But it's their problem, if they want to play like that.

I guess I'm missing where this is their problem. I was running an adventure published in Dungeon magazine using all of the D&D rules with no house rules.

I didn't want to change the encounter difficulty since the reason I was running a Dungeon magazine adventure instead of writing my own is that I'm a rather lazy DM and hate doing "homework" before every session. My prep time is, maybe, an hour per session. I already have enough work to do as a Living Greyhawk Triad member and a Living Forgotten Realms Admin that I don't want to have to do MORE work to run my home game.

The adventure in question had the difficulty of monsters across the board. Some were WAY to easy for my powergaming group. Others were REALLY hard. If the group teleported in and encountered one of the hard ones, they'd teleport out immediately after the combat to avoid having to fight anything else.

If they teleported in and got a couple of easy encounters in a row, they'd sometimes explore 10-20 rooms before they rested. I'm not saying that they enjoyed fighting only one encounter per day or even that they WANTED it that way. They didn't. The group was more than happy to continue playing the game after they were low on resources. It was just a couple of key resources they weren't willing to continue without. Generally, they were the ones that ensured their survival: Highest level healing spells and Delay Death.

I don't see how my players are abnormal. Most groups I've played with generally manage resources like that. I have yet to run into one that says "I know we are down all our highest level spells and our good healing but let's continue on since it is stupid to rest after one encounter."

Shouldn't the system cater to a group of people who like going into dungeons, killing things and taking their stuff? I thought that was the entire point of D&D. If it shouldn't cater to them then who SHOULD it cater to?

 

[Bandreus]

yup, I got it wrong. You gain 1 AP every 2 encounters (not one), and you don't regain one surges during a short rest (that's funny, I actually remember I read this somewhere).

Anyway, I do think the changes are for the better. Or at least this is what I can tell from the previews so far. All of this will clearly improve the party's ability to push harder throughout encounters. And I agree with those who say many things feel videogamey. That's no bad thing, and BTW you should think D&D is basicly a "videogame" that's been stripped off of the "video" chunck. Don't take me wrong, but game design just evolves over time, so it's no news that D&D (as other pen&paper rpgs) borrows from electronic gaming as much as videogame developers borrow from tabletop games.

What I'm a bit concerned about is that this way players, while having many tactical options, don't really have to care about managing their resources since, in the worst case, all they have to do is having an extendend rest to be fully up and ready.
This kind of breaks the tension about the unknown, since everything that's not going to kill you is simply another 6h away from the next try. You either get killed or not hurt enought to be seriously beaten.

Minion to Badass Boss "Hurray! We managed to make that f***ing adventurers run away, and they were the hella near to death, even if they killed the most of us. They wont try it again!"
Badass Boss to Minion "You fool, they'll be back in 6h to end the job :|"