Per day or per session?

[Doug McCrae]

"Session" may mean any number of encounters.

Equally you could have any number of encounters over the course of one day.

WotC's market research comes in here, to determine the typical session length or, more importantly, the typical number of meaningful encounters per session.

 

[Eagle Prince]

That's kinda what I said...

My friend used some book (don't remember the name) for a char that gave him some strange once per session stuff. I think one of them let him get a reroll once per session, but once per session someone could basically force him to do something out of honor. It seemed to work out pretty well.

So it might be able to work. I don't think it really has any more interent balance than once per day, only that one is going to come up a whole lot more than the other. If you were only looking at balance, I'd think per encounter is clearly the easiest to balance.

One last thing, if you were actually playing for 8+ hours straight, it would kind of make sense for everyone to take a quick break and stretch their legs, maybe get a bite to eat. And then the DM can pretty easily say, okay your per session abilities have reset. You could also have other mechanics to regain use of them that depend on roleplay. If something comes up that makes sticking to your paladin code really inconvenent, but you manage to do it, the DM could say cool, for sticking to it you can use your honor ability again.

 

[MerricB]

Per Session has no inherent balance. Per Day - at least - means what the group wants it to mean, and can be fiddled by the DM.

Cheers!

 

[Psion]

Per session mechanics usually don't work very well unless the game is set up very differently than D&D - if then.

How does an adventure designer, or a GM, design encounters around the 'per session' mechanics? A GM *may* be able to estimate the average amount of kibbitzing and fooling around in a session, and both a GM and a designer may have a rough grasp of how long a typical encounter will take to play, but neither is likely to be a reliable indicator. At least 'per day' can be estimated for a timetable-driven adventure.

'Per session' also has the odd effect of penalizing players for a long session or one in which they focus on the game, and rewarding them for a short one or one in which they spend only a relatively small amount of time actually playing.

I'm no fan of 'per day' mechanics, but 'per session' is almost always worse.

I gotta ask: have you ever actually used per session mechanics? This all sounds highly speculative and (playing a game that makes frequent use of per-session abilities) quite at odds with reality.

IME, they work better than per day and MUCH BETTER than per encounter.

I've never once had to "guesstimate" the "average amount of kibitzing" and I don't have to worry about "camp time cycles." The game flows much more smoothly for it IME.

Per-session tracking:

• eliminates inter-session tracking
• encourages variety, by making the character to resort to different resources across the session.
• eliminates the need for precise time keeping and lets you focus on game play
• de-emphasizes the continual camp-and-rest thing.
• helps naturally build tension towards the end of the game session.

As for problems of session length: a game presumably knows how long a session is and shares that assumption. If you vary significantly from that it's prudent (and not at all difficult) to adjust the per-session allocations accordingly. Your suppositions about the problems with per session are in reality trivial to deal with, and well worth their advantages.

 

[hong]

Per Session has no inherent balance. Per Day - at least - means what the group wants it to mean, and can be fiddled by the DM.

Cheers!

Per session equally means what the group wants it to mean, and can just as easily be fiddled with by the DM.

 

[Henry]

The main problem I have with "per encounter" is that I can easily visualize a party going into Undermountain at first level, and emerging in about 6 hours of in-game time as 10th level characters. Unless the XP awards are decoupled from "encounters", and hitched to accomplishing an overall mission, then level advancement is REALLY going to fly too fast.

I also don't like the loss of "attrition" adventures, which are a cool part of the genre as a whole. Even "24" style adventures, with a time deadline, would seem to me to become unusable, because there's no reason to not fight your way through the whole scenario, unless a DM uses overwhelming encounters all the time as roadblocks, not a fair option in my opinion. I'd have to see how it plays, because I just don't see it working.

 

[hong]

The main problem I have with "per encounter" is that I can easily visualize a party going into Undermountain at first level, and emerging in about 6 hours of in-game time as 10th level characters.

This is like saying that I could send a 3E party into 1E G123, and have them slaughter all the giants in an hour.

 

[Henry]

This is like saying that I could send a 3E party into 1E G123, and have them slaughter all the giants in an hour.

To me, it's not, because the party would run out of power long before. Not so with the power being renewable with every encounter. Fight a group, run and hide for a minute, fight another group, hide a minute with those renewed spells, rise and repeat until Nosnra/Grugnur/Snurre are belly-up in their own blood. The cleric gets his cures back, the wizard gets his spell-power back, and the party is either at or near full strength all the time, hit points and all.

The mental block for me is that "per minute" thing. even having to rest for an hour I could see, but it's all too easy for a party to get a break of a minute's time in a dungeon, fortress, etc. That's why I'm waiting to see how they DO do it -- I'm very curious.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I gotta ask: have you ever actually used per session mechanics? This all sounds highly speculative and (playing a game that makes frequent use of per-session abilities) quite at odds with reality.

IME, they work better than per day and MUCH BETTER than per encounter.

I've never once had to "guesstimate" the "average amount of kibitzing" and I don't have to worry about "camp time cycles." The game flows much more smoothly for it IME.

Per-session tracking:

• eliminates inter-session tracking
• encourages variety, by making the character to resort to different resources across the session.
• eliminates the need for precise time keeping and lets you focus on game play
• de-emphasizes the continual camp-and-rest thing.
• helps naturally build tension towards the end of the game session.

As for problems of session length: a game presumably knows how long a session is and shares that assumption. If you vary significantly from that it's prudent (and not at all difficult) to adjust the per-session allocations accordingly. Your suppositions about the problems with per session are in reality trivial to deal with, and well worth their advantages.

I've played quite a few (including Spycraft 2.0 which is, IIRC, the game to which you're referring).

My experience with session length is that it varies considerably from session to session - if your experience is one of consistency, that explains a great deal. Similarly, I've had sessions with a single encounter and sessions with five or six.

Explain to me how, from a game balance perspective, a per session ability does not become dramatically more or less valuable depending on such circumstances? The action dice in Spycraft, for example, were often either too few for the number of uses required of them or expended in one last glorious, meaningless burst of out-of-encounter effort (something I would have otherwise handwaved) to get some ridiculous side skill check - after all, why not expend the dice, they weren't coming back.

In a game that isn't terribly CONCERNED with balance, per session is as good as any other mechanic and in some ways better than most. It's especially useful for games with a more limited scope, like many indie games, because it's often tied directly into their nature.

We're talking about D&D, however - the world's most popular Tactics/RPG and one of the better ones. Restricting abilities in such a way as to render balance completely unguessable, especially to adventure writers, compromises one of its greatest strengths.

 

[Psion]

I've played quite a few (including Spycraft 2.0 which is, IIRC, the game to which you're referring).

Indeed it is.

My experience with session length is that it varies considerably from session to session - if your experience is one of consistency, that explains a great deal. Similarly, I've had sessions with a single encounter and sessions with five or six.

Okay... what constitutes an "encounter"? Unlike D&D (much to my chagrin), what happens outside of combat can be very important, and many of those "per session" balanced abilities that I spoke of are all about what happens between encounters.

Explain to me how, from a game balance perspective, a per session ability does not become dramatically more or less valuable depending on such circumstances? The action dice in Spycraft, for example,

It should be noted that Action dice aren't just a per-session resource. The GM is supposed to award 2-3 per hour. But moving on...

were often either too few for the number of uses required of them or expended in one last glorious, meaningless burst of out-of-encounter effort (something I would have otherwise handwaved) to get some ridiculous side skill check - after all, why not expend the dice, they weren't coming back.

See, I'm thinking "feature". Players like to do something really cool once in a while, and not have to bank on a natural 20.

In a game that isn't terribly CONCERNED with balance, per session is as good as any other mechanic and in some ways better than most. It's especially useful for games with a more limited scope, like many indie games, because it's often tied directly into their nature.

We're talking about D&D, however - the world's most popular Tactics/RPG and one of the better ones. Restricting abilities in such a way as to render balance completely unguessable, especially to adventure writers, compromises one of its greatest strengths.

It would be highly dependent upon how the game washes out, but up front, I'm not seeing this "balance" concern of yours. You give the players a resource; they use them. The fact that it's based on table time instead of in-game time just means it's balanced differently. This certainly has different implications, but as already mentioned, I consider those largely positive.