Solutions to the 15 minute adventuring day: carrots and sticks.

[Aberzanzorax]

Here it is discussed that WotC are choosing not to implement a mechanic to counter the 15mad. http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-ho...n-d-d/326541-five-minute-workday-article.html

There is a lot of discussion about whether or not the 15mad is even a problem...but regardless of whether it is or isn't for your group, I thought it would be fun to develop a thread of potential solutions for WotC to use (or for us to use as houserules).


Generally, rather than forcing players to act a certain way, it's better to provide sensible options for them to choose from. Carrots tend to work better than sticks...but there is also a place for sticks.

I'll pull out some great ideas from that thread and toss out some of my own. I look forward to hearing other people's solutions.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Changing the rate or conditions of daily resource recharging.

At the very least it would be nice if they presented some optional modules where the rate of recharge of cleric and wizard spells could be controlled. For example:


1.) Wizards at home in their lab can regain all their spells in one day. Priests praying at a sanctified temple in town can regain all their spells in one day. Otherwise in the field wizards and priests regain 1 spell per day.


2.) Wizards and priests need to have X amount of uninterrupted rest in order to regain their spells. Even one round of combat or use of a physical skill or distractions such as noises, insects, an conjured imp sent to harass the party by its master, or nightmares induced from a haunted forest would interrupt the rest. (So a DM could do this to a party that rests too often for example).


3.) A “day” can be replaced with a “chapter”, so vancian casters over the course of an adventuring “story” replenish their spells at certain points determined by the DM, which might be hours, days, or even months (in the case of a long travel adventure where maybe 3-4 combats take place over the course of a three month long journey)

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Incentives to keep on going.

13th Age has a feature which allows you to pluck something from the next level (hp increase, new power, boosted defense, feat, etc) to incorporate into your current character after every game session, providing a much more gradual progression between levels. What if we took this into adventure design, that for each consecutive encounter faced, a PC was able to incorporate something from their next level? There isn’t a cap for this, and parties willing to push on for say 10 encounters straight would manage to effectively level twice (I suppose it varies just when they exhaust all potential level-based upgrades). If they chose a new resource, like a new spell or power, they’d immediately have access to it. When you extended rest, the whole thing resets, save the very first pick you made (for a maximum of maybe 1 permanent pick a game session).


Parties would actually have to weigh the pro’s and con’s of either pushing on ahead for +1, +2, hell edging +3 levels, or resting for the full resources of the current level. It kind of makes the 5MW a tactic, but not always the best one.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Make spell recharge not tied to resting at all, but to another mechanic.

One of the tools I'd like to see is an option that recognized that the hit points are the prime pacing tools, and worked accordingly. Namely, disallow recharging of Vancian spells and other such powerful resources for free (except maybe between adventures in restful, secure locations over several weeks*), but do allow them to be recharged with hit points.

That effectively means that the party runs out of resources when they run out of hit points. Now, you don't need to contrive anything, because it always works out that whether you are getting smacked or casting spells or whatever, when you hit that point where the hit points are low, the party is going to want to rest.

Naturally, you'd need to watch the healing magic, especially items. But that's a nice feature, too, in that if the party is in over their heads or doing really well, finding or not finding a few extra healing potions affects the pacing the way you'd expect. It should cost enough in hit points to make recharging a cure light wounds a bad idea. You might charge a premium for such spells to make recharging other spells more atractive.

Finally, this might have a pleasant side effect on the "clerics as healbot" issue, albeit only on long adventures. It becomes highly attractive for the cleric to start an adventure with mainly cures, as these are hard to replace. But then when used, the cleric does replace them with other spells--which now the cleric is highly encouraged to use as needed.

* If you make the recharge of Vancian spells always take hit points, then you can get some interesting opertional and strategic decisions when the party is in a secure location, but unsure of how much time they have before something big happens again. If you like this kind of thing, it would be good to not allow free recharge, and let the hit points the party is willing to risk be the guide. It becomes a more interesting mechanic than flat time for recharge, and also really makes natural healing interesting. However, if this part doesn't appeal to you, then such recharging at rest becomes a bunch of accounting, and you'd be better off to allow straight regain at rest on the grounds of fast play. In either case, how you handle that isn't crucial to the rest of the idea.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Make "novaing" or overuse of daily use in one encounter impossible by the rules.

An old argument that got brought up in the most recent Rule-of-Three article is how to balance traditional Vancian-style casters (with daily spells) against classes with mostly at-will or encounter powers. The problem is that those classes tend to "go nova" and blow all their spells every encounter, and then either sit on their butts or demand a rest. (Thus the 15-minute adventuring day.)

Here's a quick and obvious fix: let wizards get daily spells a la 3e, but they can only cast X spells without taking a short rest to recover. (I.e., only x spells per encounter.)

X would need to be playtested, but maybe Con mod + 1/3 level (minimum 2)?

That way the wizard can still ration out his spells however he wants (blowing all his high-level spells early) but still has SOME daily resources later on.

Similar adjustments could be made for other non-Vancian classes, obviously: psions can only spend Y magic points without a short rest, for example.

Offhand, this seems like an option that would preserve the "feel" of Vancian casters while solving a balance problem. It's very easy to justify plotwise, too: spellcasting is tiring, and even if you have a bunch of spells memorized, you can't just rattle off 40 in a row without a break. I honestly can't think of many wizard/cleric battles, even in D&D novels, that wouldn't fit in this new mechanic: even if Elminster can spellcast nonstop for 100 pages, well, he's like level 40.

What do people think?

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Change XP rewards/schedules.

In the end, it is all about Momentum. Drama, action, comedy - they all live and die based on timing. "Alpha Strike. Rest. Alpha Strike. Rest," is terrible timing. There's no momentum - it tends to rob the game of gravitas, urgency, and immersion. Yet the game's mechanics themselves encourage this. Depleted resources increase risk without any corresponding increase in rewards. It is a sucker's bet as the momentum of sequential encounters is complete against the interests of player characters.

If momentum boosted character performance (bonuses to hit, damage, HP, spells, etc.) directly it might be harder to keep balance within a given adventure. Momentum boosting loot is a kettle of fish that might break verisimilitude for some people.

So how else do you motivate players focused on risk-reward for charging headlong into escalating danger?

Escalating Experience Points

Back in AD&D who ever skipped out on the 10% XP boost from having a high score in a key attribute? Crazy people, that's who.

Give players some sort of progressive multiplier for XP that resets with an Extended Rest. Something like this: XP * (.9 + (.1 * E)) where E is the number of Encounters between rests and XP is Experience Points accumulated in those encounters.

A 1 Encounter work-day gives you regular XP for the encounter.
A 2 Encounter work-day gives you 110% XP for both encounters.
A 3 Encounter work-day gives you 120% XP for all 3 encounters.

If you somehow manage to clear 11 Encounters between extended rests you get Double XP for the day - and your poor character earned it.

As to a nice fluffy rule-book text:

"Once the party takes an Extended Rest tally the total experience points budgeted to challenges defeated by the party since the last Extended Rest. For each encounter beyond the first increase the awarded XP by 10%. So if the party defeated 4 encounters worth a total of 2000 XP the total reward would be 2,600 XP (130% of 1000XP) divided among the party members."

It's a little bit of math, but nothing outside the scope of what you'd see in the AD&D re-release books they are selling now. Plus it's DM-specific math so it doesn't slow down the game.

- Marty Lund

 

[Tuft]

Recharge house rule that sucessfully hindered both Nova and 15 min adventuring day in a campaign I played in:

Once a character has cast a spell, he can’'t cast another spell of that level until he has made a successful recharge test. At the end of each round, you are allowed one recharge roll for each level of spell that is presently not charged. You continue to roll for each uncharged level of spell each round until all your spells are recharged. Once recharged, any prepared spell of that level can be cast again.

See http://hastur.net/wiki/Recharge_Magic_(D&D) for full rules.

Eminently tweakable by changing the target number for recharge. Such tweaking occured during the campaign in question.

Comparable to the 4E monster power recharge rules, I guess.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I've been thinking lately about the charge die mechanic.

To explain, this is an idea for magic wands, where instead of charges the amount of power a wand has is represented by one die. Each time it is used, the die is rolled, and if it comes up as a 1, the wand's die type drops to the next smaller one. So fi you have a d12 wand, there is a 1 in 12 chance after using it that it becomes a d10 wand, and so on until you get to zero.

I've though it might be a good way to do reserves of power for class abilities (rather than spell slots/points). You would cast a spell, roll, and maybe your magical reserves would decrease and maybe they wouldn't. The same idea could be turned around. Instead of simply recovering to full power while resting, you might have to roll the die and roll high to power back up.

There are a lot of potential benefits to this approach (and drawbacks), but one feature to me is that the gradual change and unpredictable change in casting power would discourage artificially "calculated" player decisions, while still making spellcasting draining and resting important.

 

[Li Shenron]

Sync gaming sessions with adventuring days, i.e. wrap up the session when the party goes back to town.

If they want a 15 minutes adventuring day, they get a 15 minutes gaming night.

Ok, that's too mean...

 

[Libramarian]

I think of the cause of the 15MAD as being the probability, in the player's minds, that the next battle will kill them if they don't rest.

You can reduce that probability by:
- having most foes be "underlevelled", not seriously designed to push the party to the brink
- usually allowing an opportunity to rest shortly before the big climactic battle
- giving the players non-renewable magic items that can substitute for their innate resources in a pinch, if a battle turns out to be more challenging than expected
- giving the players a reasonable chance to run away from a battle that turns out to be more challenging than expected
- give most XP for goals other than killing, so it's not such a bad result to run away from or avoid a battle

Decrease the challenge of the average battle. Increase the overall adventure challenge by bringing back lethal puzzles and traps.