D&D 3E/3.5 Jonathan Tweet: Third Edition and Per-Day Spells

On the Third Edition design team, we were tasked with rationalizing the game system, but there were some big elements of the system that we didn’t question. We inherited a system in which spellcasters get better in three ways at a time as they level up; they get more spells per day, higher-level spells, and more damage with spells of a given level. In retrospect, that problem is easy to see, and we didn’t fix it. We also inherited a system that balanced powerful class features, notably spells, by making them usable once per day. The problems with that system are less obvious, and we didn’t fix this system, either. But the 3E system laid bare its own inner workings, and so soon enough designers saw that there were issues with this system, and over the years several of us designers have tried to address it one way or another.

In classic dungeon crawling, the default best strategy is to take each room one at a time and regain your hit points and spells after each one. That’s no fun, so people usually don’t play that way. For 3E, we spelled out that the game was balanced for four average battles between heal-ups, but actual practice varied. Whatever per-day powers are balanced at one rate of fights per day are necessarily unbalanced at faster or slower rates. Classes with lots of per-day power are too strong when there are one or two fights per day and too weak when there are five or more. Individual Dungeon Masters might be able to schedule the action in such a way that they maintain the sort of balance they’re looking for. If that works, it represents the DM’s efforts and not anything we on the design team could accomplish through system design. Many Dungeon Masters might find the per-day rules convenient precisely because they allow the DM to modulate the threat level up and down. DMs rule on how many encounters the party has in a day and whether they can suspend their mission long enough to reset their spells and other per-day powers. A dynamic I’ve seen over and over again, however, is that players with spellcasting characters are adept at talking the DM into letting the party rest. When the spellcaster is out of spells, they need a night’s rest a lot more than the other characters in the party need to press on. When a mission goes south and the encounters burn up more per-day resources than the DM figured they would, the party often simply camps out for the night and sets out the next day with spells reset to full.

Limiting spells by day also means that a spellcaster’s power level is different when they’re in a preliminary skirmish compared to when they’re in a climactic showdown. When it’s a high-priority battle or when the player knows that there’s a long rest afterwards, the spellcaster can use their best spells without worrying about holding back. This effect is something of a game-wrecker when the party arranges to jump the big bad guy after prepping up to full. With a well-placed teleport, the party’s spellcasters can unload all their best “per-day” spells for the one battle that matters that day (an “alpha strike”). Classes with at-will powers can’t “unload” the way spellcasters can.

The per-day system also changes up balance for NPCs. Generally, when a party attacks an NPC boss of some sort, that NPC is in a fight for their life, and they cut loose with every per-day power they can manage. Fighter NPCs aren’t particularly dangerous because they have no such resources to unleash. In my campaign, I found the psionicist NPC the most dangerous because they could use the point system to cast at full capacity every round. As player-characters, psionicists have all the balance problems of the wizard and then some.

Seeing the issues with per-day powers, the designers started experimenting with per-encounter powers in supplemental material. The psychic warrior, for example, had a “focus” that they could expend once in the battle in order to have a special effect. At that point, designers were still in simulation mode, and encounters that were “per-encounter” by fiat seemed too artificial. The psychic warrior had a believable, in-world reason for their “per-encounter” abilities. Tome of Battle: Book of the Nine Swords (2006) introduced special, limited-use powers for martial classes. By 4E, the designers fully embraced per-encounter powers.

Fourth edition established balance among the classes by giving all of them per-day and per-encounter powers. That’s one way to solve the balance issue. 4E is so well-balanced that it’s hard to make bad choices in character design. This approach had the unfortunate effect of making the classes all feel sort of the same.

With 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo and I took a different approach. We turned 3E’s four-fights guideline into a hard rule. You get your spells and hit points back not just by resting but only if you have engaged in a minimum amount of fighting. After your fourth fight (or after four fights’ worth of fighting), the party gets to reset to full. Alternatively, the party can admit defeat and get a heal-up without “earning” it, but admitting defeat entails a “campaign loss,” as determined by the GM. This system creates a lovely rhythm, with characters feeling flush and confident in the first fight, feeling hard pressed in the last fight, and then feeling good again when they heal up. I play a cleric in a 13th Age campaign, and the last fight before a heal-up is tough going. The last fight is so tough that we player all know that the decisions and rolls we made in the earlier fights all mattered in terms of what we have left for the last one.

 

[Zardnaar]

To the OP I think you made 2 wrong assumptions.
1. A required amount of encounters. This has lead to WW1 style attrition of HP.

2. Scaling damage spells are not broken at least capped in 2E/3E. Remember how good the war mage was in 3.5? Combined with HP inflation fireball hasn't been that good since 2E.

Observation earlier in 2E weapon speeds were optional, spellcasting times were not.

So yeah trying to fix something breaks something else. 5E has issues around saves, hp inflation, easy mode encounters/healing etc.

 

[ENWorldUser]

Playing BECMI at higher levels gave spellcasters a lot more spells, so we didn't have to rest as much. They got up to 9 spells per spell level, not like 3e's 4 posted above.

 

[Zardnaar]

Playing BECMI at higher levels gave spellcasters a lot more spells, so we didn't have to rest as much. They got up to 9 spells per spell level, not like 3e's 4 posted above.

I don't think to many people reached those levels. High level Spellcaster tables may as well gave been NPC only.

 

[Stormonu]

3E had to carry over a lot of ideas and concepts from 1E/2E and mostly clean them up. I remember many arguments and resistance to changing things too much, and if it had, I think it would have suffered 4E's fate. 4E attempted to make a "clean" break from previous editions, and paid the price for it.

As to the 5-minute workday, I've tried a few approaches to it, but perhaps one of the more interesting ones I've seen is a mixture of cooldowns and a system referred to as momentum. Each ability has a basic recharge rate (your typical at-will, encounter/short rest, daily/long rest), but you can "recharge" quicker through success and moving toward your adventure goal. This lets you move along an adventure and face encounters with a fair chance of success, but if your party gets on a roll (for example, start wailing on a miniboss or boss), you can "charge up" your more awesome abilities to unleash at critical times. (If you've played Destiny/Destiny 2 or later versions of Street Fighter, it's like the charge-up bar in those games).

 

[Don Durito]

It's not exactly simulationist that a single night's sleep = a full recovery. I don't exactly think this fulfills the requirements of prioritising sim in any meaningful way.

And the 13th age method doesn't necessarlly have to completely throw simulationist concerns completely out the window.

Generally, a narrative beat that allows for a full heal up in 13th Age is going to match the sort of situation in which a proper rest and recovery is plausilble for simulation reasons (or at least it's easy enough to play it that way if you care to).

Think about the work week. What's more restful? 8 hours sleep the night before you have to give a major and important presentation to a large group of people, or 8 hours sleep the night after?

It doesn't actually feel all that unrealistic to say that you recover better after you've actually accomplished something (at least not when you compare it to the alternative that's actually on the table.)

 

[Helldritch]

Ok, let me correct a few mistakes.

1ed Casters were almost never going nova unless in a life or death situation. Especially at high level. An 18th level mage going nova and expanding all his spell slot would take 34h45minute to recover all his spells. This means two days and a few hours into the third day to full spell recovery. It was taking 15 minutes per spell level to recover a spell (PHB 1ed p. 40). A single 4th level spell was taking a full hour to recover! With the rules about random encounters during adventures, the casters were forced to rely on scrolls, wands and staves. In addition recovery of certain spell level required longer rest time. 1-2nd level 4 hour sleep with a 2 hours increment per 2 spells levels up to a 9th level requiring a full 12 hours of uninterrupted rest. And it was uninterrupted rest. One encounter could ruin your day...

Casting time was also a strong thing going against casters. The longer a spell was to cast, the higher chance you had to see it disturbed. No concentration check. One hit and the spell was lost. Casting was a risky thing in 1ed. Casters were powerful but very fragile. A meteor swarm had a casting of 9 segments. This meant that even if the character had rolled a 6 and won the initiative, his spell would go on the 9th segment of combat. Pretty much certain that an enemy would try to stop the caster with a bow, a dagger or whatever. That is why many defensive spells were there to help the caster.

Casting was not an auto success and war caster was not a thing. Some DM were going as far as saying that since casting required the caster to be motionless, that Dexterity modifiers to AC were not working. Add in the component elements (I was just caring about the costly components but I knew of some DM that kept a precise account of every single components carried...) this often meant that spells could only be cast a number of times before the lack of components prevented a caster from casting some spells. Casters were not having it easy in 1ed. That is why they became so powerful in 3.xed. With all these restriction and spell loss possibilities removed, they were too dominant.

 

[Imaculata]

I've always felt that 3E tried to keep too many elements of 2E which were problematic, without wanting to change them too much. Has anyone ever bothered with spell components for example?

 

[Alzrius]

There's another aspect to casters which is somewhat tangential to the specific issues brought up in this article, but which is an important aspect to their overall spike in power in Third Edition: making magic items became formulaic, which in turn made it player-facing.

Although the ability to make magic items was feat-restricted in 3E, rather than being baked into spellcasting classes the way it had been before, and the magic items themselves were in the DMG, everything else lowered the barrier for player-characters making magic items. Whereas before the process had largely depended on unspecified rare materials, it now consisted purely of expenditures of gold and experience points. Now, those were still something of a cost restriction, but not in the way that rare materials had been. Worse, the entire process detracted from game-play rather than added to it.

I'm generalizing here (though, to quote Dave Barry, as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care), but in prior editions of D&D, if you wanted to make a wand of fireballs you told the DM, who told you that after some research (largely conducted by hired sages off-screen while you and your group were adventuring), making one would require the feathers of a phoenix, the blood of a noble efreet, and a ruby that had been dipped into the heart of an active volcano. And just like that, you had several new adventure hooks for a player-driven quest, presuming that the wizard could convince the other PCs to go help them collect what they needed.

In 3E, the player just made sure they had Craft Wand, and then declared that they were taking twelve days to make it, paid the 11,250 gp and 450 XP, and went adventuring with their new wand. Which was just like every other wand, unlike how a lot of magic items in 1E and 2E often had small twists that made them unique. In 3E, your wand of fireballs shot fifty fireball spells at minimum caster level for 5d6 damage, with a DC 14 Reflex save for half. (That's another issue that changed how things worked for casters in Third Edition; how the target numbers for saves were calculated.) In 1E or 2E, that wand would have been Kerrigan's wand of flames, that cast fireball so many times, but also provided a +2 bonus on reaction rolls for creatures from the Plane of Fire and granted a +1 bonus on proficiency checks to start fires. Those were incredibly minor bonuses, but they gave the wand its own unique identity, rather than being something that might as well have come off of an assembly line (which gave us the "Big Six").

There was no "magic market" either, where you could just buy the magic items you couldn't make for yourself, but that tended to work in everyone's favor, even if spellcasters seemed to benefit more (in my experience) from being able to buy cheap scrolls of whatever spell they needed.

 

[Dire Bare]

Exploration of a dead city is a standard D&D trope. But any simulation-favoring GM running such a thing has to deal with the fact that the sensible approach is to alpha-strike a room or two, rest overnight and repeat.

Eh. From a gamist perspective, you are correct. But not from a storytelling or even a "realistic" perspective. The storytelling tropes behind the D&D adventuring party isn't a paramilitary team clearing a city of insurgents, despite the game rules sometimes encouraging that sort of behavior.

Maybe I'm just more crotchety than most, but whenever a GM tells me "your cannot rest here because there are regular patrols" or "there are many wandering monsters here", or "the McMuffin will be unobtainable in X hours if you rest"

Those seem like legit storytelling reasons to create tension, mood, and atmosphere.

In the real word archaeologists take months or years to explore ancient ruins. Realistically, D&D explorers will do the same. But we're not really interested in realism, we're interested in having fun!

Not exactly a good comparison. D&D adventurers are exploring ruins that are still accessible without digging them up, there are extant rooms, buildings, and dungeons to explore. And the goal isn't scientific curiosity of the details of past cultures, but rather to find treasure, slay evil, and rescue the villagers. Archaeologists take a long time to explore a site because they meticulously are uncovering traces of ruins and artifacts from being buried (in most cases).

 

[slobster]

It's not exactly simulationist that a single night's sleep = a full recovery. I don't exactly think this fulfills the requirements of prioritising sim in any meaningful way.

This is one place where the vocabulary makes understanding and communicating a bit clunky. When I say "I'm simulationist" in this conversation, I'm just talking about the rest cycles and rules of 13th age vs. something like stock 5E. What I'm definitely NOT saying is that I strive primarily for "realism" in my games. I am not a "sim" gamer.

What I am looking for is immersion, believability, and for the game rules as a construct to fall away during play. In other words, I just want verisimilitude. I want the players to really feel like they are adventuring in a fantasy world, and for the rules to basically be a means to that end.

Something like the 13th Age rest mechanic feels, to me, like it erodes at the verisimilitude because it leads to players asking things like "why do I feel rested now? Why does it always happen after a set number of encounters, doesn't that seem a bit unrealistic? How come I got three rests in a day when we were delving the tomb of the Red Emperor, but now it's been 3 months in our ocean voyage and we're only getting our first rest after the pirate attack?" That's not to say it's a bad system, generally. But its drawbacks are big enough for me that I'd rather deal with the headache of planning around the "you sleep, you long rest" system and all the issues you need to solve with that, because the benefit of immersion and player agency is, IMO, worth the trade-off.