PF2 and the adventure day

[robus]

I’ve only DM’d 5e, so excuse my ignorance, ... Is the concept of an adventuring day new in that edition? Did PF1 have such a thing?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I’ve only DM’d 5e, so excuse my ignorance, ... Is the concept of an adventuring day new in that edition? Did PF1 have such a thing?

Early editions of D&D didn't really have a concept of balance, as we understand the concept. Prior to 3E, you were expected to avoid fights, and your resources (spells) existed as a buffer in case you messed up.

Third edition was the first time that they spelled out how many fights they assumed you'd get through in the day (IIRC, it was around 4), but due to a combination of factors, that became untenable. It mostly ended up that you'd have one super-deadly encounter per day, and then you'd find a way to rest; that was the same model which PF1 used. If you tried to go for multiple hard combats in a day, then you'd run out of your best spells, which meant the enemy would explode you before you could explode them. Even if you were nominally supposed to have four encounters in a day, weak encounters didn't deplete your resources at all, which meant the super-deadly encounter was the only one that mattered (and thus the only one worth playing out).

Fifth edition, by contrast, really tries to limit how quickly you can spend your resources. With very few exceptions*, you can't cast two spells in a round, and combat is over before you can go through all of your slots. Weaker enemies can still hurt you, and you might still want to use spells to take care of them, which means those fights are worth running. That's what makes the long adventuring day practical in 5E.

 

[CapnZapp]

The *real* cause is how utterly trivial it's always been for the players to stop the adventuring day on their own terms.

That is, not having to conserve any more resources than they want to themselves.

Anything from simply leaving the dungeon to casting Teleport to safety.

Countermeasures mostly range in the hilariously inept category: such as the idea that wandering monsters would deter adventurers from depleting themselves ahead of time. Which is trivially easy to avoid (Rope Trick is just one suggestion), at least for veteran players.

As long as D&D doesn't dare to challenge players by strictly controlling the access to rest, the concepts of adventuring day, balance and challenge will remain illusions that does not fool those players that know how to get around the adventure's or DM's pacing.

Just about the only trick in the book that even works a little is the good old time pressure: "please hurry, the dragon will eat the kidnapped princess in three days". To this I say three things:

1) relying on the same old storytelling move gets old fast.
2) in 9 cases out of 10, it's a bluff, plain and simple. Most official modules featuring time pressure don't even bother detailing what happens if the heroes isn't on time - because the secret is they can never be late. The final encounter always finds the heroes arriving "just in time"...
3) this makes players jaded. What if they simply refuse to go on adventuring low on resources. There are, after all, always more adventure and more princesses. Not to mention the fact the dragon and it's loot stays put. And that in D&D you can always raise the princess back to life after killing the dragon easily (because you held off attacking until you were fully rested)

D&D is not only lax in upholding the game challenge, it is actively hostile to the idea - player characters are given loads and loads of abilities that allow them to evade having to keep adventuring when resources are low.

There needs to be real change before I'll take the concept of the adventuring day seriously.

Likely not 6th edition but maybe 7th... *sigh*

 

[Campbell]

It's not just the adventuring day. A lot of anticlimactic roleplaying comes down to GM sentiment and unwillingness to pull the trigger. Player decisions should be consequential. If you make a threat you should be willing to make good on it. Countdown clocks can be helpful here. So can wandering monster checks in dungeons.

 

[Mycroft]

3.x and 4E era WotC people are working in PF2, yes.

Yes, Logan Bonner has obviously had a big impact on PF2.

 

[Mycroft]

Prior to 3E, you were expected to avoid fights, and your resources (spells) existed as a buffer in case you messed up.

Not necessarily, there can be plenty of fighting and seeking out combat in Basic/AD&D.

 

[muppetmuppet]

People always go on about this resting problem. I tend to find it is ok in practice but maybe I run weird games.

Take my current campaign. I started with OOTA. While travelling through the under dark the one big encounter per day was pretty much the norm. When stopping off at one of the mini dungeons the whole dungeon was generally needed to be done at once so 3-5 encounters. And in other towns larger dungeons were found in some cases where more than one day might be needed to clear the whole.

So this made the adventuring day pretty varied which I felt made different characters more or less powerful in each case but on the whole it was pretty balanced and worked out fine.

Currently I am running an assault on Myth Nantir. Here the players could choose how many missions to attempt having been told that there was no long rest available (there was an army assaulting the place). They could use the mythal itself to heal between missions but that would drain the mythal.
We are now at the climatic battle with a demon lord attempting to use a portal to enter Myth Nantir now that the mythal has collapsed and the defenders almost overwhelmed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I’ve only DM’d 5e, so excuse my ignorance, ... Is the concept of an adventuring day new in that edition? Did PF1 have such a thing?

It's as old as D&D, in a practical or de-facto sense. It's been explicit since, at the very least, 3e (of which PF1 is a clone, so yes, totally needs a prescribed 'adventuring day' to resource-balance classes vs eachother and encounters).

Any game with significant 'daily' resources (and that can be daily or just about any other time-based recharge limit) has introduced a factor that makes the quantity and difficulty of challenges faced in-between those recharges a significant factor to balancing said challenges against the capabilities of the PCs (that is, making them actually challenging). If the game also has classes and gives classes different mixes/versatility/power of such resources, then class balance also becomes dependent on that same prescribed pacing.

People always go on about this resting problem. I tend to find it is ok in practice but maybe I run weird games.

Nothing about the below sounds weird...

Take my current campaign. I started with OOTA. While travelling through the under dark the one big encounter per day was pretty much the norm. When stopping off at one of the mini dungeons the whole dungeon was generally needed to be done at once so 3-5 encounters. And in other towns larger dungeons were found in some cases where more than one day might be needed to clear the whole.

IIRC, the prescribed day-length in 3.x (and, I assume PF is no different) was to average around 4 encounters/day. So your campaign has some single-encounter days that favor daily-resource-heavy classes, and some 3-5 encounter days that are more or less balanced. In theory, longer days could favor at-will-heavy classes. So, that averages, overall, below the prescribed length. I don't think that's at all unusual.

If you were running 5e, which expects 6-8 encounter days, and 2-3 short rests, you'd be falling well short.

 

[Jer]

If you were running 5e, which expects 6-8 encounter days, and 2-3 short rests, you'd be falling well short.

But - to be fair - what mostly seems to happen in practice after about 3rd level or so is that your daily players feel like their characters are awesome and your fighter players wonder why they're bothering to play something that isn't a caster. Which is why 5e sometimes feels so much like how we used to play D&D back when I was a kid, despite the loss of THAC0 and named saving throws and various other changes

 

[Parmandur]

But - to be fair - what mostly seems to happen in practice after about 3rd level or so is that your daily players feel like their characters are awesome and your fighter players wonder why they're bothering to play something that isn't a caster. Which is why 5e sometimes feels so much like how we used to play D&D back when I was a kid, despite the loss of THAC0 and named saving throws and various other changes

If players are feeling that, the casters are not being pushed hard enough: if they don't fear using spell slots, they need more challenge from the DM.