D&D 5E Long Rest is a Problem

[TwoSix]

If the ROI from adventures doesn't feedback into making future adventures yield more, this doesn't go divergent.

Hence the idea that failure doesn't strip you of adventuring resources, but causes orthogonal plot/story "damage", and same for success.

Such a system is stable not chaotic, in terms of adventuring rhythm.

I agree, which is exactly why I wouldn't want to do that. I don't want the system to be stable in terms of adventuring rhythm. I want a non-zero chance that the PCs can straight up lose. Or at least fail enough to the point where it has meaningful mechanical repercussions, not just narrative ones.

 

[NotAYakk]

I agree, which is exactly why I wouldn't want to do that. I don't want the system to be stable in terms of adventuring rhythm. I want a non-zero chance that the PCs can straight up lose. Or at least fail enough to the point where it has meaningful mechanical repercussions, not just narrative ones.

The players lose if they win or if they lose.

If they win, the game becomes gonzo and falls apart. If they lose, the game becomes gonzo and falls apart.

That is what happens when you have a positive feedback loop.

As the DM you can do fiat-correction to the loop, but the game itself fights against you. And you just nullified the very thing you said you where looking for.

---

Imagine if finishing X% of an encounter gives you X^2 resources. And "typical" is 50% for 25% of resources.

Parties that hit 10% end up with 1% of resources, and are starved and the next quest they go on ... is also screwed. They have no resources, so they can't manage more than 10%, so are on a starvation track forever.

Parties that hit 100% get 100% of resources. Now they have 4x the resources for their next adventure, which makes hitting 100% trivial.

---

If the reward matters to your next adventure success and it is a positive feedback loop, then the game rapidly diverges into 100% and 0% branches.

To have variable reward like that, either the reward doesn't matter (is trivial next to other stuff), or there are external controls that dampen the feedback loop (the DM by fiat gives the players high-ROI trivial fights to recover from their bankruptcy, or otherwise adjusts it -- when they diverge, the DM starts providing gonzo difficulty as well).

Control theory doesn't care how the feedback is dampened. If it is in the assumptions of the encounter/adventure building, or fiat by the DM itself.

But it does say that if you don't dampen the feedback, the situation explodes.

 

[TwoSix]

The players lose if they win or if they lose.

If they win, the game becomes gonzo and falls apart. If they lose, the game becomes gonzo and falls apart.

That is what happens when you have a positive feedback loop.

As the DM you can do fiat-correction to the loop, but the game itself fights against you. And you just nullified the very thing you said you where looking for.

I agree with your math, but there's an important caveat. I want the game to end. I have no desire to play a long-term campaign that exists in a steady state. That's why I'm pushing to compound victories and failures (as you said, build a positive feedback loop). Getting to an end-state is a feature, not a bug.

Also, one needs to factor in random chance into the reward loop. Having better items increases the odds of success, sure, but the party only needs to get lucky once to be set for multiple further attempts. I'm setting the baseline low for the first few levels, bare competence will get them what they need to progress. High initial success will just give them a buffer to try riskier missions more quickly. And yes, it absolutely can compound, but a lot of the rewards for high success are either narrative rewards or are rewards that don't stack.

 

[Mistwell]

A long rest does 2 things:

1. Restores ability resources
2. Restores health

Certain classes (healers) can convert ability resources into health. If you remove or diminish the second element from a long rest, but keep the first element, it becomes nigh-mandatory to have one of these classes.

One of the goals of 5E was to make sure that no class was mandatory. That if you wanted to go with two rogues, a fighter and wizard, that would be perfectly acceptable.

If you want to get rid of long rests, you have to break the link between health and ability resources. Examples are Wounds/Vitality, or the system in Pillars of Eternity.[1] Or accept that the playerbase will insist that all parties must have a healer.

[1] 2 pools, Health + Vitality, Vitality is 5x Health. Damage is subtracted from both Health and Vitality. However, magical healing only adds to Health. If Health goes to 0, you fall unconscious. If Vitality goes to 0, you die. A short rest after combat restores Health to full, a long rest at camp restores both to full. You could tweak the pool multiplier for Vitality and the long rest rules to match how you want to play. Maybe Vitality is 10x, and you gain a max of 25% of Vitality per long rest.

You're not wrong, but a party with two rouges, a fighter and a wizard can substitute missing healing even without the rest mechanic. A Rogue Thief using fast hands and the Healer feat can make a fine healer. A Wizard with False Life and Polymorph can help out a well. The fighter comes with a bit of healing built-in. And healing potions are relatively inexpensive. It can be done, even if long rests are not the primary mechanism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My starting point in response to this: what does need to go back to civilisation mean?

Of course I know what it means in the fiction; but what does it mean at the table, for the play of the game?

Does it mean conceding a loss? This is the 13th Age and Moldvay Basic approach: you leave "civilisation" with a finite pool of resources (spells, hps, gear) and you go on your adventure, and if you can't win your adventure with that pool of resources then you have lost, and have to go back to recover resources with your tail between your legs. (Moldvay Basic is a bit less up-front about this and leaves it as an implication; 13th Age just comes right out and says it.)

Does it mean waiting for the GM to tell you that civilisation is available? This is largely how I approached things in my 4e play: as GM I regulated the pacing of extended rests by regulating the availability of resting places. There were a few points of player input: skill challenge successes could expedite that availability; player choices could push things to "just one more fight" within a given pool of resources; and - at higher levels - a player decision to spend resources on a Hallowed Temple could make civilisation immediately available to them. But the notions of win and loss were not really apposite, except on the margins: the players knew that I was framing challenges having a pretty keen eye on their available resources. What was mostly going on here was pacing. Even when the players were making the call, it was largely about their sense of how much more do we feel like proving the point that we can go on on the smell of an oily rag? In some cases this can start to bleed into a version of the previous paragraph: if the players decide to call it quits and take a rest, they are giving the GM licence to narrate that the world moves on in some way that is at odds with the players' (and their PCs') desires. Of non-D&D systems, Burning Wheel works quite a bit like this.

Does it mean having to succeed at some sort of ingame challenge? As per my previous paragraphs there were hints of this in some of my 4e play, but only on the margins. A game where it moves from margins to centre seems to me to run the risk of tedium: the point of spending our resources is to get the chance to recover our resources. Maybe some hex-crawling sort of play could be the non-tedious version of this, as there are trade-offs between doing other stuff but keeping enough in reserve to get home. I think it is, as a practical matter, pretty hard to run this sort of game without having it turn into GM decides - at least in the D&D context, where it is the GM who exercises so much control over what the "other stuff" is and hence how resource-draining it will tend to be.

There are probably approaches beyond the three I've outlined, but they're the main ones I thought of. Once one of them is settled on, we can then start talking about whether and how to flavour things in terms of ingame time periods. Moldvay Basic uses "the day" as its time frame, because the adventure is a spelunking expedition. But as every GM of mid-to-upper level D&D knows, this will tend to break down in the third paragraph approach because spells on a daily recovery make a mockery of realistically-framed exploration challenges. So if the game is going to involve adventures/challenges that unfold over longer time periods than a spelunking expedition, tying recovery to ingame time periods doesn't seem worth worrying about too much, at least until we know what else we want to do with those time periods. Eg maybe if we want the GM to really be able to go to town in the event of taking a rest = concdeding a loss, we want to make those rest periods weeks or even months so the GM can really mix things up without the fiction seeming too contrived. Burning Wheel heads in this direction.

To start with the last paragraph: my own view is that once we look at this through the lens of actual game play it makes very little sense for magic - which is just an in-fiction label applied to a certain set of player resources - to be a device for freely circumventing whatever we think the recovery rules should be. This is one thing 4e got right: eg even at high levels, the players using Hallowed Temple to force a long rest requires non-negligible resource expenditure. (At least that is how it was experienced in our game.)

As far as the relationship between recovery and story goes, I think the real question is what are players expected to achieve on a given set of resources? "Story" then needs to be built around that. If the GM is largely in control of pacing, s/he introduces the story elements in a way that allows resource recovery to take place when necessary (Tom Bombadil, The Prancing Pony, Rivendell, Lorien, Edoras, Minas Tirith, etc). If the game is more challenge-focused, the story elements need to be set up so it is at least feasible for the players to win on a given resource set, and if they lose then it is fair to chalk up a "campaign loss" (as 13th Age calls it).

Whether the ingame time period of recovery then gets narrated as hours or days or weeks or months seems a matter of detail, depending on the other details of the particular story being told. If it's LotR, days and even weeks are fine. If it's Die Hard, then we're talking hours at most.

All of this just makes me think of the most typical sort of process of play in D&D:
The GM goes out and buys a 'module', which consists of a series of situations which the players must expend PC resources to overcome in some sequence. Maybe the sequence is not entirely defined, maybe some parts can be bypassed, there may or may not be a single precise end goal beyond "loot everything", but the fundamental dynamic is that the GM has purchased resources to play with, and is motivated to use them.

The upshot is, the resource game just gets in the way. At best the module is like B2, a sort of unstructured looting process where the PCs can retreat, barring tactical issues, as-needed and then return with little consequence (maybe the orcs will flee with their treasure, possibly, but the GM isn't required or even motivated to do that). As soon as the module is more structured, then resources get in the way. Being defeated by a lack of resources is an end-condition, the rest of the material is not available for use, the result is a sub-optimal play experience. Someone needs to go dig up a new module, go through a new set of introductory narrative, etc.

No really universal 'solution' exists for this. You can simply play crawls, like B2, and don't try to push D&D beyond that, and it works OK, but it is a fairly niche kind of play. You can 'cheat' (IE the resource game is subverted, this is the classic typical response, the PCs find something to 'get back on track' when needed, this may even be coded into the module). You can let the PCs die (IE play it out hard, the PCs, motivated by whatever narrative concerns, fight to the bitter end and perish, or maybe not). Again this implies incompletion of modules on a regular basis (and PC wipeouts).

4e's solution was actually pretty darn elegant. You have resources, and a resource game, but it is loose and gets in the way less. If you break the short/long rest from specific narratives (IE Hallowed Temple and such) then it becomes a fairly interesting game where different sorts of resources get traded for each other. 5e CAN work this way too, if you want, but it is a bit less well implemented for this, as the designers were pretty stuck in crawl-derived resource mechanics. So you do run into problems that aren't addressed by the rules explicitly.

 

[TwoSix]

All of this just makes me think of the most typical sort of process of play in D&D:
The GM goes out and buys a 'module', which consists of a series of situations which the players must expend PC resources to overcome in some sequence. Maybe the sequence is not entirely defined, maybe some parts can be bypassed, there may or may not be a single precise end goal beyond "loot everything", but the fundamental dynamic is that the GM has purchased resources to play with, and is motivated to use them.

The upshot is, the resource game just gets in the way. At best the module is like B2, a sort of unstructured looting process where the PCs can retreat, barring tactical issues, as-needed and then return with little consequence (maybe the orcs will flee with their treasure, possibly, but the GM isn't required or even motivated to do that). As soon as the module is more structured, then resources get in the way. Being defeated by a lack of resources is an end-condition, the rest of the material is not available for use, the result is a sub-optimal play experience. Someone needs to go dig up a new module, go through a new set of introductory narrative, etc.

No really universal 'solution' exists for this. You can simply play crawls, like B2, and don't try to push D&D beyond that, and it works OK, but it is a fairly niche kind of play. You can 'cheat' (IE the resource game is subverted, this is the classic typical response, the PCs find something to 'get back on track' when needed, this may even be coded into the module). You can let the PCs die (IE play it out hard, the PCs, motivated by whatever narrative concerns, fight to the bitter end and perish, or maybe not). Again this implies incompletion of modules on a regular basis (and PC wipeouts).

4e's solution was actually pretty darn elegant. You have resources, and a resource game, but it is loose and gets in the way less. If you break the short/long rest from specific narratives (IE Hallowed Temple and such) then it becomes a fairly interesting game where different sorts of resources get traded for each other. 5e CAN work this way too, if you want, but it is a bit less well implemented for this, as the designers were pretty stuck in crawl-derived resource mechanics. So you do run into problems that aren't addressed by the rules explicitly.

I think you see this in CRPGs also; there's simply an irresolvable tension between "delivering a narrative" and "playing a game". (Unless you're playing a narrative game in which generating the story IS the game mechanic.) Any CRPG that's focused on delivering a narrative experience doesn't have anything like a loss condition, if you fail, you simply lose a little progress and can try again. There's no connection between the narrative result and the game result, they're merely interspersed or overlaid.

TTRPGs where death is a frequent occurrence don't really have a loss condition, either, outside of a TPK; the focus is on the group narrative built through shared experience, not on individual characters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you see this in CRPGs also; there's simply an irresolvable tension between "delivering a narrative" and "playing a game". (Unless you're playing a narrative game in which generating the story IS the game mechanic.) Any CRPG that's focused on delivering a narrative experience doesn't have anything like a loss condition, if you fail, you simply lose a little progress and can try again. There's no connection between the narrative result and the game result, they're merely interspersed or overlaid.

TTRPGs where death is a frequent occurrence don't really have a loss condition, either, outside of a TPK; the focus is on the group narrative built through shared experience, not on individual characters.

Well, CRPGs just have 'save points' or even just 'retry that last bit'. I suppose you could do something like that in a TTRPG too, though it wouldn't be very D&D-like...

So, Gygax did do what you're suggesting, by developing 'Troupe Play' where the players don't really run 'a PC' but really take charge of the PCs ENTOURAGE, which includes henchmen, hirelings, etc. The standard procedure was to simply promote the main character's main henchman to PC status if the current PC died. PCs might also have children or whatever in a similar vein if the campaign went in that direction, and of course holdings and such.
I'd also note that the role of a 'party' in that model of play was much more to be simply a temporary association of PCs for a specific purpose, players usually had MANY PCs of different levels, etc. Gygax stressed heavily that this all 'required', in his words, perfect timekeeping and etc. etc. etc., although I am not sure I agree with that assertion entirely...

One issue is that if you go to a more narrative approach, how do you design a commercial adventure module? It really is not that easy. It either has to be a sort of 'treasury of information' that the GM simply adds to a story to make it more interesting and weave in certain elements, or you have to pretty much posit specific pregen characters with motivations and whatnot that are designed to lead them naturally through an adventure sequence. Even then the sequence needs to be pretty carefully designed if it is going to 'work'.
Most 'story game' systems either are niche, and thus suggest a very narrow range of story elements which the game can provide either 'built in' or as a default supplement or they are placed in very elaborated and open structured worlds like Supers where the PCs really don't normally get totally defeated and there's a lot of existing material that can be tied back to and used to reengage in a specific narrative (and that is a highly shared consensus setting, like the DC Universe or something).

 

[pemerton]

The primary consideration for the players is in-game time; the campaign concept is set up with the understanding that the play length is finite due to in-game story considerations. "You have 2 in-game years to discover the source of the curse that will doom your village", that sort of thing. Everything else flows from the knowledge that if they retreat to rest and recharge, they're using up a portion of the campaign clock.

It's very hard to set up a situation like this in which in-game time is a player resource, at least in the context of D&D rules. Because so much of the cause-effect that makes the passage of time matter is under the GM's control independent of mechanical considerations.

There are contrasts here with various RPG systems that do make time a resource in certain ways - eg classic dungeoncrawling D&D, with its turns and its wandering monster clock; Classic Traveller with its 1 week per jump; the time trade-offs in Burning Wheel between healing, regaining Resources, or training.

That's not to say that what you're envisaging is impossible. But I think it's fairly demanding.

I'm envisioning shifting the bulk of the characters' power into consumables, not personal power. Magic is intrinsically external to the caster, effects are created by writing scrolls while in town, or by crafting items that are usable once or on an in-narrative timer (recharge at dawn, recharge at midnight, recharge by performing an hour-long ritual at the altar of the Sun God, etc.)

Thirdly, taking a long rests costs resources. It costs money and supplies to rest, and if the characters don't adventure to gain them, they'll slowly fall behind. Characters can work to earn their keep, but that consumes yet more time.

Also, adventure sites are designed to be one-off, whether that be due to intelligent enemies moving their lair and gathering reinforcements, or the gate to Faerie only being open during the new moon. The amount of resources that can be gathered from an adventure increases as the adventure moves; the first part of the adventure might only have 10% of the available treasure, the second part 20%, the third part 30%, and the most difficult part 40%.

<snip>

whenever the PCs retreat, they will lose something due to the need for upkeep and the loss of time, but ideally they will have gained enough to offset this and progress. Adventures are specifically designed so that completion is not necessary to offset upkeep and give progress, finishing the entire adventure will grant a large reward and a large positive bonus within the narrative.

What you're describing here is not my cup of tea, but it sounds pretty coherent. But I'm not sure you need in-game time as a resource to make it work.

there's simply an irresolvable tension between "delivering a narrative" and "playing a game". (Unless you're playing a narrative game in which generating the story IS the game mechanic.)

Woah! That kind of Forge-talk is heresy to some.

I don't think I agree, though I'll admit that "playing a game" can be read different ways, but even if we focus on loss-conditions I reckon in a system like Burning Wheel or Cortex+ Heroic the players can lose, in some sense at least, in the context of the gameplay delivering the narrative. Though maybe not in the way you're looking for.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I agree with @pemerton, there isn't an 'irresolvable' (sic) tension. A game could exist in which the players have a dual set of goals, create a narrative (with some sort of qualities) AND 'win' (which would imply certain bounds on the narrative, admittedly). I don't think the two sets of goals must be opposed.
For example, you might be able to add narrative mechanics to B/X dungeon crawling, such that the players would get some leverage to work a specific sort of narrative. It could simply be some 'meta-game' mechanics, like you can expend a player resource to alter a die roll, maybe leveraging a sort of FATE-like character trait. It wouldn't be too much different from consumables in that game, but it would let you tell stories like "this guy is incredibly lucky."