D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Ilbranteloth]

Big DM is fine with taking an amorphous ruleset and tweaking it to suit his preferences. DM Light is not.

Really? You (DM Light) are not OK with tweaking it to suit your preferences? That would lead me to believe you play it RAW, without variant rules and house rules. Like Adventurer's League.

If you were trying to imply that the ruleset is tweaked on the fly, I really don't think that's what most of us do. I could be wrong.

So my counter to your question is that if you see it as so easy and natural for a DM to do so, why not let us have our official changes and you just ignore them?

Well, I think you'd have to ask WotC that, although I think it has something to do with their design intent combined with what they learned during the play testing.

That is, they designed the game that they thought would appeal to the most people, while maintaining as many connections to the design hallmarks of earlier editions (although not all of them equally - which very well could also have come from the play testing), and other design goals (some of which are business goals). So whether you (or I) like it or not, this is the game they published. Sales seem to indicate that a lot of folks do.

As a result, you (and others that have different playstyles, like me) have to work with what they publish. It's not a question of "us" (whoever that is) "letting you" have your changes. It's a question of WotC ("them") deciding what they want to publish for their game. If you think that I, or [MENTION=6796241]OB1[/MENTION], or even a group of us have more control over what WotC publishes, then you're almost certainly mistaken. (@capnzapp might be Chris Perkins in disguise for all I know).

But WotC has also said, that if you don't like something, you can publish your version too. There are different restrictions depending on whether you publish on DMsGuild or not.

I don't have any illusions that WotC is going to publish what I write. They have people much smarter than me (thankfully). But I love that I have an opportunity to do so elsewhere.

Let's see - a Rest guideline sidebar? half a page maybe? A linear path sidebar that keeps players on track? one page maybe? Suggested encounter changes for those looking for consistently balanced encounters? half a page? Can't you live with 6 pages of the history of Anywhereburg vs. 8 pages and throw us a few bones?

So I'm sure I'll be accused of not wanting to allow you to have your page count in the books. That's not my intent. But I'll tell you why I think that what you're describing is a long shot (and it really wouldn't make any difference to me either way).

First, despite this thread, and numerous threads here and elsewhere saying "the rest system is broken", I haven't seen is a consensus as to what constitutes a fix. Until there is a variation, or even a couple of variations, that folks agree on, there's not really anything for them to publish. By far that's the most important thing you need to do. I haven't seen it yet. So chances are that WotC hasn't either.

Once you have a solution that a group agrees on (doesn't have to convince all of us), then they have something to work with. So let's assume that happens, and in Xanathar's Guide to Everything or a future rulebook, they publish the rule(s) you want to see. These are, of course, variant rules, and not part of the core rules.

Then you're suggesting that in each adventure, they publish a couple or three pages on how to make the adventure suit your variant rules. But there are already several other variant rules too. Shouldn't they get their couple or three pages too? What about new variants? Now we're talking a bunch of pages to modify the adventure to suit the variant rules of several different groups of players. That's a lot of work, and a lot of pages.

The adventures don't do that, though. They don't acknowledge variant rules (unless the adventure is specifically designed around it), and assume that if you're using one or more of the variant rules, that you're able to deal with that aspect. Even monsters outside of the MM are reprinted in an adventure that uses them, because their expectation is that you have the PHB, DMG, and MM. They don't provide stats for monsters that are in the MM, nor descriptions of magic items that are in the DMG for that reason.

Does that mean they won't do it at all? No, I think the various reworks of the ranger shows that they are listening to what's going on out there, and trying new ideas. Mike's "Grayhawk" initiative is another example of something that a smaller group has expressed opinions about (although that might benefit simply from Mike not liking the core initiative). Playable monster races were something people were asking for (not me), and that's been answered with TgtM. We don't know what will be in XgtE so it very well might have some other rest variants already.

I totally support trying to come up with variants that work for you and others, and getting those published by WotC if that's what you want. A few pages in a rulebook, yes. But a few pages in every adventure? That's just not realistic (at least to me). If you choose to use the variant rules (or for that matter, your own home rules), then you've got to take on the extra work (if any) that involves.

Now, that doesn't mean there isn't any value in it. There are a number of guides for specific adventures online, both in and out of the DMsGuild. My assumption is always that if it's something I like or care about, there's got to be somebody else that does too. So I want to make it available. So we can both enjoy them. But I have no illusions that it's a large group of players.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Yeah, hopefully I haven't actually come out and said that 5e is objectively bad. I'm not an edition warrior, and I don't think it's objectively bad. I strongly prefer 4e, but it's also perfectly reasonable to strongly prefer 5e. I've had an edition that is probably as close to perfect for me as D&D will ever be, it's just ultra frustrating to see the next edition do a 180 in direction from it.

Well, to be fair, I think that's also what the majority of D&D players felt when 4e came out.

I wasn't around here for the edition wars, and while there are a lot of things I don't personally like about 4e, I think it's an incredibly well designed game. Just not the game I want to play, unfortunately. It's not that I couldn't make it the game I wanted to play, it's just that it would have taken a lot more work than ever before. And there wasn't really a need, since I already had the game I wanted to play.

The fact that 5e is a "return to form" I think could reasonably have been expected, with the sales numbers, the sales numbers of Pathfinder, and the general sentiment that seemed to have been out there at the time. Of course, for the folks that started with 4e, it doesn't matter, this is as drastic a change as 4e was to the rest of us.

Having said that, I'm glad that D&D went through 4e. If they had tried to remain closer to the history of the game at that time, I don't think we would have gotten anything nearly as elegant and simple as 5e, despite its flaws. It's not perfect, but I think this would have received a lot of negativity from the 3e players if this was 4e too. I'm not so sure it would have been seen as a step forward.

I would be interested in knowing what you had in 4e that you feel is missing in 5e. Obviously they're quite different, but I don't know 4e well enough to hazard a guess, and everybody has their own favorite parts of any ruleset anyway.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Really? You (DM Light) are not OK with tweaking it to suit your preferences?

We already know that he puts on a tremendous amount of prep to make his preferred DM Light mode of play work in 5e, even using published adventures as a starting point.
So I guess he's doing so in spite of not being ok with it - thus posting all this stuff, I suppose.

If you were trying to imply that the ruleset is tweaked on the fly, I really don't think that's what most of us do. I could be wrong.

Doesn't really matter, how we Big DMs exercise our Empowerment - making rulings, tweaking rules, authoring new ones, etc - we're on board with being heavily involved with the functioning of the system - whether that means imposing balance, leveraging imbalance in our stories, wrapping those stories around the system, or warping the system to suit

It may be naive to think D&D could 'simply' be published in a neat package that do what he needs and still be D&D, but whatever it hypothetically were, we could treat it as a starting point and be off to the races.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

We already know that he puts on a tremendous amount of prep to make his preferred DM Light mode of play work in 5e, even using published adventures as a starting point.
So I guess he's doing so in spite of not being ok with it - thus posting all this stuff, I suppose.

Doesn't really matter, how we Big DMs exercise our Empowerment - making rulings, tweaking rules, authoring new ones, etc - we're on board with being heavily involved with the functioning of the system - whether that means imposing balance, leveraging imbalance in our stories, wrapping those stories around the system, or warping the system to suit

It may be naive to think D&D could 'simply' be published in a neat package that do what he needs and still be D&D, but whatever it hypothetically were, we could treat it as a starting point and be off to the races.

Yes and no. I could theoretically have put all that time and effort into 4e to make it work with my AD&D style game and setting, but thankfully I didn't have to as my players didn't like it either. There comes a point where there is just too much to change to make it do what you want. Of course, at that time I didn't realize how much AD&D we were still playing in our 3.5e game. But then I wasn't active on the forums back then either, so I probably missed that I was playing it differently, not to mention suggestions on how to fit 4e into an older campaign.

Having said that, if you want to continue to use what's newly published (again, thankfully I didn't care about what was published for 4e either), you're kind of stuck using the current version of the rules. I get that, and understand the complaints that [MENTION=54690]outsider[/MENTION] has because of it. He would prefer to be playing 4e, but either can't find the people, or doesn't want to keep playing old material. Somebody either more knowledgeable in 4e would have to provide some suggestions there, or I'd need to be pointed in the right direction and go dig out the books.

As for [MENTION=54380]shoak1[/MENTION] at times it sounds like there's a lot of overlap between his style and mine (or others), and other times it seems like he's talking about playing a different game. I can't really judge how compatible 5e is to his play style, or even if 4e is closer. It's probably just me that's not getting it.

I'm still happy to try to help if we figure it out!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes and no. I could theoretically have put all that time and effort into 4e to make it work with my AD&D style game and setting, but thankfully I didn't have to

So you can hypothetical imagine what shoak1 or outsider is dealing with, but you didn't deal with it, yourself. I suppose you could have cribbed from Fourthcore, had you decided to, as they were going for something of the same style.

I actually have run 4e in something akin to an AD&D (even used Essentials to run an 0D&D adventure), and it's not the same kind of work shoak1 is doing, at least, for me it wasn't. It was a matter of going all "Big DM" on the game and just doing it. Not particularly harder than prep with 4e usually is - and 4e prep was awefully easy.

As for [MENTION=54380]shoak1[/MENTION] at times it sounds like there's a lot of overlap between his style and mine (or others), and other times it seems like he's talking about playing a different game. I can't really judge how compatible 5e is to his play style, or even if 4e is closer. It's probably just me that's not getting it.

I'm still happy to try to help if we figure it out!

He confuses me, too. In GNS BS terms he's an "incoherent" combination of gamism & simulationism. ;P 4e incoherence tended more towards gamism + narrativism.

Having said that, if you want to continue to use what's newly published, you're kind of stuck using the current version of the rules. I get that, and understand the complaints that [MENTION=54690]outsider[/MENTION] has because of it. He would prefer to be playing 4e, but either can't find the people, or doesn't want to keep playing old material. Somebody either more knowledgeable in 4e would have to provide some suggestions there...

There's another stumbling block, too. If you wanted to run something a lot like AD&D in 2008, you could run Hackmaster or one of the emerging OSR games coming out, and you still can. If you wanted to keep playing 3.5, there was lost of 3pp material for it, too, and the licence to make more was still out there, within a year, it had been clones as Pathfinder.

So the impetus to make 5e work is much higher.

Well, to be fair, I think that's also what the majority of D&D players felt when 4e came out.
The fact that 5e is a "return to form" I think could reasonably have been expected, with the sales numbers, the sales numbers of Pathfinder, and the general sentiment that seemed to have been out there at the time.

There we go, assuming 'majorities' and statistics we don't have, again.

But, that aside, 5e is not simply a return to AD&D, nor is it just a repudiation of 4e in submission to the h4ter victory in the edition war. It's D&D for all D&Ders, past 4e fans included, and when it fails them, it fails just as much as if you'd cracked it open and found it harder than ever to get that AD&D feel out of it.

I would be interested in knowing what you had in 4e that you feel is missing in 5e. Obviously they're quite different, but I don't know 4e well enough to hazard a guess, and everybody has their own favorite parts of any ruleset anyway.

The list of system artifacts and pointless details would be staggering, just as it was going from AD&D to 3e or 3e to 4e, but it also wouldn't really be the point. There's no point to fixating on that stuff when you roll rev, it's going to be different, or there would be no point in having it. (There are a few glaring examples, of course, like the Warlord, and the Defender Role.)

It's really just a matter of basic qualities. Balance, clarity, consistency. You could run an encounter or even a non-combat challenge with an expectation that the difficulty would be something like what you intended. Players could play the characters they wanted to, with some confidence that what they chose to model them would actually work something like it was meant to, and without having to apply ungodly system mastery to make some concept barely-viable, or keep others from dominating. You could introduce new players to the game and they'd likely pick it up quickly - in constrast, it wasn't so great for returning players.

A player who enjoyed 4e could get a similar experience from just the right DM in 5e.
A DM just has to rise to the challenge.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

So you can hypothetical imagine what shoak1 or outsider is dealing with, but you didn't deal with it, yourself. I suppose you could have cribbed from Fourthcore, had you decided to, as they were going for something of the same style.

I don't know if the extent of the changes I've been making are similar or not. My approach is different, perhaps. I tend to write new rules to fix what I perceive as a problem, and then share those for criticism and play testing. I figure if there's something that I don't like in the rules, then it's kind of up to me to fix it.

But I also get that rewriting rules, or writing new ones, isn't everybody else's passion, much less strong point. I've been doing it since AD&D, attempting to make a lot of the Dragon magazine articles work with the rest of the rules, and each other. And naturally I thought I could do better. And wouldn't you know it, every time that I thought I had an article to send to the magazine, they published the same thing!

So I'm not sure it's really a question of dealing with less, rather than dealing with it differently. I recently found the books I was writing to make 3.75e? when 4e came out. Trying to figure out where the 3e line would have gone if they stayed on that track instead of shifting to the 4e that was published.

I actually have run 4e in something akin to an AD&D (even used Essentials to run an 0D&D adventure), and it's not the same kind of work shoak1 is doing, at least, for me it wasn't. It was a matter of going all "Big DM" on the game and just doing it. Not particularly harder than prep with 4e usually is - and 4e prep was awefully easy.


He confuses me, too. In GNS BS terms he's an "incoherent" combination of gamism & simulationism. ;P 4e incoherence tended more towards gamism + narrativism.

There's another stumbling block, too. If you wanted to run something a lot like AD&D in 2008, you could run Hackmaster or one of the emerging OSR games coming out, and you still can. If you wanted to keep playing 3.5, there was lost of 3pp material for it, too, and the licence to make more was still out there, within a year, it had been clones as Pathfinder.

So the impetus to make 5e work is much higher.

There we go, assuming 'majorities' and statistics we don't have, again.

Oops. Right you are. Just what I heard...

But, that aside, 5e is not simply a return to AD&D, nor is it just a repudiation of 4e in submission to the h4ter victory in the edition war. It's D&D for all D&Ders, past 4e fans included, and when it fails them, it fails just as much as if you'd cracked it open and found it harder than ever to get that AD&D feel out of it.

The list of system artifacts and pointless details would be staggering, just as it was going from AD&D to 3e or 3e to 4e, but it also wouldn't really be the point. There's no point to fixating on that stuff when you roll rev, it's going to be different, or there would be no point in having it. (There are a few glaring examples, of course, like the Warlord, and the Defender Role.)

It's really just a matter of basic qualities. Balance, clarity, consistency. You could run an encounter or even a non-combat challenge with an expectation that the difficulty would be something like what you intended. Players could play the characters they wanted to, with some confidence that what they chose to model them would actually work something like it was meant to, and without having to apply ungodly system mastery to make some concept barely-viable, or keep others from dominating. You could introduce new players to the game and they'd likely pick it up quickly - in constrast, it wasn't so great for returning players.

A player who enjoyed 4e could get a similar experience from just the right DM in 5e.

A DM just has to rise to the challenge.

I said "return to form" in quotes precisely because it's not like any single prior version, but the attempt has been made to make it feel a lot like those earlier editions. But I get the sense that it feels particularly different to 4e players (probably because of my own perception of the switch to 4e.

I know there are a lot of differences, but many times there are some specific mechanics or approaches that are key for a given person. For example, there are many who don't feel it's D&D without Vancian magic. Put that back into 4e, and they're OK with it. So just wondering if there are some specific things that we might be able to brainstorm on and come up with some options.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I said "return to form" in quotes precisely because it's not like any single prior version, but the attempt has been made to make it feel a lot like those earlier editions.

5e is a lot like TSR era D&D, maybe 2e a bit more. Lack of MCing being the standout difference. Turn on feats & MC and it resembles 3.x in a basic way.

But it's not that it's exactly like one of those TSR games, especially not the 'RAW' because, really, the experience wasn't exactly the same, even for the same game - It's the commonalities that are what it evokes...

But I get the sense that it feels particularly different to 4e players

'Feels?' meh. To those who started with 4e, it's just different, not unprecedented.

For example, there are many who don't feel it's D&D without Vancian magic. Put that back into 4e, and they're OK with it.

Vancian was eroding over time. It changed from 'memorization' to prepped. It was diluted by spontaneous casting, warmages, & Warlocks...
...but 4e wizards were a bit Vancian they prepped dailies and utilities and forgot them upon casting. They just also got at-wills.

5e neo-Vancian is spontaneous and includes at-will cantrips.

:shrug:

So just wondering if there are some specific things that we might be able to brainstorm on and come up with some options.

For me, there aren't. I approach 5e as 5e and run it in the personal style I developed for AD&D.

I can run any game that way, really, if either the players don't know the system - or they accept that I'm not going to be bound by it.
The beauty of 5e is that it sets up players to be accepting, because they need the DM at every turn.

 

[clearstream]

An angle to consider is how rests balance against map scale? Let me explain that. I'm running OOTA. Initially, my PCs were long-resting after each encounter. Consequences were typical -

• over-valued "recover on long-rest" features
• under-valued "recover on short-rest" features
• clear trend of alpha-striking
• consequent need to make each encounter lethal to keep them mechanically interesting (that's not to say we couldn't have narrative encounters, but only that mechanically an easy encounter that wasn't a narrative encounter became pointless)

The issue here was not inability for me as DM to introduce more encounters between rests. I can do that. But whereas in a dungeon the next event is minutes away down a corridor - so 8 hours is a long time - on a world map the next event is days away across the Darklake (or wherever) and 8 hours is a blip.

My goals as a DM therefore became

• I wanted to mix up encounters more so that there could still be lethal encounters, but could also be mechanically meaningful easy and medium encounters
• I wanted to be able to allow lengthy travel times and periods of downtime to deliver my vision of an open-world campaign

I felt drawn toward the gritty realism DMG option - one week long rests - and we may indeed go there in due course. But for now we're using 24 hour long-rests. Extended short-rests (8 hours+) still count for recovering levels of exhaustion and training days (we're using that option for downtime). My players accepted this without complaint once I explained that my goal was not to tax them beyond what their features were balanced against (6-8 medium to hard encounters between long rests) but only to map long-rests against the temporal and spatial scale of the campaign. Which got me thinking about this thread and wanting to draw attention to this finding.

As empowered DMs we can always drop in more encounters between long-rests (yes, it can stress our narrative, but we can do it). So that isn't the issue. And we aren't (or at least, I'm not) aiming to stress PC capabilities more than the designers' game balance intends (which is stated expressly in the DMG). Our issue is doing all that without bogging down our campaign, and that depends on our temporal and spatial scale. It accordingly makes sense to scale rests against that scale.

I feel like the DMG misleads in this regard because longer long-rests isn't mechanically about grittier realism at all. It's about whether my next encounter is a corridor or leagues away. A threat system such as the Angry DM advocates is kind of like a squashy balloon. When players push down on one part of the balloon, it swells up in another. So if they avoid challenge by dawdling, more challenge rises up elsewhere via threat. It alleviates to some extent the narrative stress of finding ways to keep them moving. However, to me it now feels like it fixes the wrong problem. I now feel like a DM needs to look at their temporal and spatial scale, and match their long-rests to that.

 

[shoak1]

So you can hypothetical imagine what shoak1 or outsider is dealing with, but you didn't deal with it, yourself. .....It's really just a matter of basic qualities. Balance, clarity, consistency. You could run an encounter or even a non-combat challenge with an expectation that the difficulty would be something like what you intended. Players could play the characters they wanted to, with some confidence that what they chose to model them would actually work something like it was meant to, and without having to apply ungodly system mastery to make some concept barely-viable, or keep others from dominating. You could introduce new players to the game and they'd likely pick it up quickly - in contrast, it wasn't so great for returning players.

A player who enjoyed 4e could get a similar experience from just the right DM in 5e.
A DM just has to rise to the challenge.

Well said. The only thing I would add is that if you don't like Big DM "rising to the challenge" during the game, or have a DM not willing to do a lot of prep work, you're really screwed.

I would be interested in knowing what you had in 4e that you feel is missing in 5e. Obviously they're quite different, but I don't know 4e well enough to hazard a guess, and everybody has their own favorite parts of any ruleset anyway.

4e modules were.....awesome. DCs aplenty, encounter to encounter design. And balanced encounters. As Tony said 4e had balance, clarity, and consistency in contrast to 5e. My prep time of published and user modules was a fraction of what it is now.

The optional 3 sidebars I suggested in modules - encounter to encounter rails, rest limitation suggestions, and level appropriate balanced encounters - would give people who liked the 4e format what they aren't getting from 5e. Its not just about me - there were lots of peeps who liked 4e's linear and balanced encounters. Why so utterly abandon that concept as to not even provide optional guidelines to get to it?

And its not (mostly) about economics as many have suggested here. Designer bias is at least as important as the free market system in how a game turns out. In the real world there is not such a direct and perfect link between statistics/marketing/sales, and R+D /development. Usually the guys doing the former don't even know how to play the game lol. So if you get a guy or team developing the game (and its products) that really favors a certain style, its gonna skew things considerably, both in the final ruleset and in the modules. My guess is that the top shot caller who actually plays the game at WoC is a rather staunch BigDM guy. But that's just an educated deduction. And maybe there is some "OMG I dont want to piss off the counterrevolutionaries by putting anything in 5e that resembles 4e, that will kill our base!!! (pause for irony)"

Look I get all the crap about 5e supposedly "being for all of us." But imo is a reactionary (to 4e) game designed by well meaning advocates of the other side who have convinced themselves they are unbiased and impartial in making a game "for all of us". Kind of like the way a liberal might convince himself he is unbiased toward conservatism (or the way Big DM convinces himself he's impartial)(pensive smile).

Reminds me of Christmas. My aunt who barely knows me gets me a gift and as I open it says "Stevie boy, I noticed you didn't have any couch pillows!" So I open the package to find a gold embroidered baby Jesus themed couch pillow....thanks Auntie. In D and D terms its like the feat list ("Look what I got you combat boys - some FEATS!" - "Wow Auntie, they're....optional, unbalanced, inconsistent, unsupported, and generally just not very well thought out.......but.... they're just great Auntie (forced smile)")

 

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=54380]shoak1[/MENTION] Based on your comments throughout the discussion, I have to ask...and I mean this 100% sincerely...why have you chosen to play 5th Edition rather than 4th or 3.x/Pathfinder? What are the strengths if 5E as they pertain to your desired style? Why are the two prior editions of the game not suited for your desired playstyle?

I'm genuinely curious.