Possible gamist fix to the 5MW

[Primitive Screwhead]

I have often mentioned on this site that I think the 15MW is a question of play style and that mechanical fixes are difficult../ however here is an idea that creates mechanical tension between healing, adventuring, and spell recovery. This might just work...


Rest:
PCs can benefit from up to 8 hours of rest from noon to noon. If playing a game focuses on night time adventuring, you can use midnight to midnight, with the players making the choice of which part of the day is their rest timeframe.
Elves can only benefit from half this time, but have other advantages off setting this as listed below

Healing:
For each hour of rest a Character regains 1/8th of their hit points. When the hit point total is not exactly divisable by 8, the remaining hit points are recovered in the last hour of rest.
Elves regain 1/4th of their hit points per hour of rest.
Characters cannot rest if currently under a condition such as bleeding, diseased, or wounded.

Wounded:
Players can chose to accept a wound in order to negate a critical hit or to reduce the damage taken by an amount equal to thier CON score.
Cure light wounds can heal 1 wound per application instead of recovering hit points

Spell Points:
Characters must be at full hit points and not under a condition that precludes resting in order to regain spell points
Characters meditate for half an hour to regain 1/8th of their spell point total, with remaining spell points regained in the 8th meditation.

Spells/daily resources:
Characters must be at full hit points and not under a condition that precludes resting in order to regain spells/ daily resources
Characters can regain a daily resource by spending about 3 minutes per resource level in either meditation, study, practice, or prayer. This allows the recovery of 20 first level spells in an hour, or 10 second level, or 6 third level or 5 fourth level or 4 fifth level or 3 sixth level or 3 seventh level or 2 eighth level or 2 ninth level.. or a mix that adds up to the time spent.
This time must be spent without distraction and cannot be done while travelling on anything smaller than a schooner. Part of the time accounts for preparing the site for studying, laying out books, lighting incense, etc. The details of the set up is up to the player but it is obvious in the game world that the character is studying/meditating in that a specific location. {or had been using the site}


What does this do?
1) A mechanical dial is created through how magical healing works. Easy healing = encounter based playstyle while hard healing = day based playstyle.
2) Casters have added flexibility in being able to swap out spell choices, but have to work with the group regarding how much time they sit studying
3) Elves become the premier casters as they have lots more time to study
4) A common mechanic for regaining all types of daily powers/spells/whatever
5) Can be an optional module, as each group could run extended rests as written or drop this option in
6) campaign sites can be set up to enhance the rate of regaining daily resources.. around which monestaries, colleges, and alters would arise. These are often far from civilization.. which makes for great adventuring hooks. Older sites might become central to towns and cities.. with castles being locations more defendable as casters inside can recover spells faster.
7 Other options might be available, like stating that goblinoids {Orcs, Ogres, Bugbears, etc..} can recover martial daily resources while injured.. making them the premier ground combat race.


Why noon?
[sblock]
Remember the old west? Gunfighters always met at high noon because they had fully rested and were ready to face new encounters....
:joker:

Simply because it is an easy marker that eliminates arguments over when the 'day' started.. and this is a default. The players can elect to change this as a group by declaring that they are going to sleep all day and work all night, changing the marker to the middle of thier adventuring day {midnight}. Or say they will be the life of the party have the marker set for sunrise.. or early risers and set the marker at sunset... whatever the middle of their adventuring day is.

[/sblock]

Or maybe I had too much caffiene and am really off my rocker!

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

You don't describe what the effect of a wound is.. does it mean you can't regain HP through rest? If the only way to remove a wound is CLW then that puts a large burden on them. Presumably there's some limit to how many wounds you can take too, else I would negate all damage and never have to rest anyway.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

[MENTION=882]Chris_Nightwing[/MENTION], my bad.. its a HR I have used in a number of versions of DnD and forget to expand on it.

A wound causes a -1 penalty to all D20 rolls, which stacks with all other penalty sources. In 4e, you also reduce the number of healing surges regain at the end of an extended rest by the number of wounds you currently have.

CLW is on method for removing a wound, the primary method is through the use of the heal skill. Depending on the grittyness of the campaign I have gone from this check being a daily check following an 8 hour rest to having it follow the 4e disease track which makes it more like a weeks worth of recovery time.

I haven't looked closely enough at Next to determine how this option would fit in.


[sblock] Based on 207 views and only one reply, I can assume one or more of the below is true:
{a} this idea is really bad
{b} the 5MW isn't a problem worth fixing
{c} people just don't like my screen name
[/sblock]

 

[Black Knight Irios]

a) I don't know if your idea is really bad I just think it adds more book keeping. And I don't want more book keeping, my guess would be others as well.

Secondly, I prefer a less gritty style for my campaigns or when I play.


b) The 5/15MWD is a problem worth fixing or at least worth giving guidelines to DMs how to deal with it if it turns out to be a problem.


c) I believe your name has nothing to do with the lack of answers.

 

[the Jester]

While it's not a bad system per se, it suffers from three strikes for my D&D playstyle.

First, it highly complicates the way healing works.

Additionally, it retains the "rest 8 hours = back to full hp" problem.

Finally, by adding a -1 penalty with wounds, you are adding a "death spiral" mechanic, which I don't favor for D&D.

I'm okay with all of these things for certain styles of gaming; for instance, it would work well (IMHO) for a game where you play a werewolf or other fast-healing monster. But I don't like it for my personal style of D&D.

There's another problem, too: Your system requires rewriting a great deal of the game because it's using spell points.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have often mentioned on this site that I think the 15MW is a question of play style and that mechanical fixes are difficult..

I can see that, if you think of the 'problem' as being the fact of a party tending to have only one encounter per 'day.' Whether you have one encounter per day or 13, and whether that's because of player or DM decisions (or more often, a tension between the two), /shouldn't/ be a problem. The 15MWD is a problem because the mechanics of the game have rewarded that style, and, prior to 4e, rewarded it to vastly different degrees depending upon party composition. Fixing the mechanics, in that sense, isn't a matter of preventing the 15MWD - which would just be changing one style bias for another - but of not over-rewarding it. Groups who want single-encounter days should be able to play that way without experiencing class or encounter imbalance, and with the game still running smoothly for them.

So, simply removing the mechanics that make the 15MWD overly-desirable in a meta-game sense (and disruptive in a balance sense) is adequate.

Why noon?

Remember the old west? Gunfighters always met at high noon because they had fully rested and were ready to face new encounters....
:joker:

Apropos of nothing, it was also when a Royal Navy ship at sea in the age of sail reckoned a new day.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Thanks for all the responses!

Black Knight Irios.. I was just joking about the screen name. The bookkeeping added is minimal as you just need to track the number of hit points and/or spell points you gain in an hours rest, and a reference card for how many spells of a given level can be regained in an hours rest.
Then the wound mechanic if that is adopted as part and parcel of this.. I really added it in because it would be added in my game.. its really not part of the 'fix'.

the Jester, I agree with two of your points.. keeping the 8 hours and full up and the issue of the death spiral. However the death spiral is specifically a choice by the player.. which makes it less abhorrent.

If you remove the wounding mechanic, that is really the complicated part and is not critical to the system working.

And the system works with spell points and Vancian spell slots. Instead of gaining all spells in 8 hours, it breaks down into smaller chunks and allows the caster to decide which spells to prioritize.

Tony Vargas That is some awesome trivia! Thanks!

 

[SKyOdin]

It is much more complicated than existing rest rules, and ultimately doesn't really solve the 5MW problem.

At its heart, the problem with the 5MW isn't the exact amount of time lost, it is that the pacing of an adventure is broken by the party having to leave and rest up after every encounter. It doesn't really matter whether it is for a day, a week, or just an hour.

As long as gameplay is built around attrition of daily resources, and as long as those resources can be recovered by an option that is available to the players at their discretion, the 5MW will be a problem.

 

[slobo777]

It is much more complicated than existing rest rules, and ultimately doesn't really solve the 5MW problem.

At its heart, the problem with the 5MW isn't the exact amount of time lost, it is that the pacing of an adventure is broken by the party having to leave and rest up after every encounter. It doesn't really matter whether it is for a day, a week, or just an hour.

As long as gameplay is built around attrition of daily resources, and as long as those resources can be recovered by an option that is available to the players at their discretion, the 5MW will be a problem.

Agreed. A "gamist fix" would need to work without reference to time frames or resting. 4E's milestones and encounter powers are gamist, for example, adding benefits that drive sessions towards more encounters with less focus on resting.

A mechanic that offers more of a resource as players take risks with their PCs and push them harder (at the expense of losing other precious resources) might help.

As it stands, if I want the gamist side of an RPG to take the fore (and I often do), then I'll set a challenge with limited options for rest - or where resting is akin to "we give up", and try to make this clear at the outset.

For me, a gamist fix that discouraged super-safe resource hoarding and resting, on top of that would be a nice touch, but not essential. 4E could have done it if more was made of Milestones.