D&D 5E Solving the 5MWD

[Vael]

I feel like that doesn't capture my goals. I am looking to be able to offer play that is not all-alpha-all-the-time. So I want diversity. I'd like to be able to sometimes offer conserve-your-power-carefully play.

So it is about diversity in play, not punishing players.

I feel like you can get there with varying up encounter design and rewards.

Don't have all the monsters on the map or grid at once. Maybe put half of the monsters just out of sight around the corner. If they nova the first group, more come in after.

Second, consider that there are quite a few spells that have a duration of 10 minutes to an hour. Let PCs have multiple fights before these spells give out. And if the party doesn't have them, give them as rewards.

As you sip from the enchanted pool, the magic fades from the water. You are under the effect of the Dragon's Breath Spell, but don't have to concentrate. Or the Bless Spell, and it'll last for the next hour.

Side Note: A lot of concentration buffs only last 1 minute. Extending some of them to 10 or 30 minutes would be another way to incentivize a party to have multiple combat encounters. I know, it leads to long pre-battle buffing routines, but Concentration does limit that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

13A solution?

13th Age. Abilities recharging on a fixed schedule by encounter, in that case some after each encounter, and a 'full heal up' after every 4th encounter. Simple & workable, but limits your options both as player & DM.
We've mentioned a few times and I started abbreviating.

 

[Lanefan]

The "5 Minute Working Day" problem is 'Players blow all their limited resources each combat and then take a rest, and I don't like the idea of players spending two weeks getting through a small goblin cave because they slept 20 times'

Understandable.

Clearly, these players WANT to USE their powers, the powers that make their character cool, the thing they enjoy, A LOT. Ok.

Or, whether 'cool' or not, they just see using as many powers as they can as a simple way to make things less risky for their characters.

The solution then, to me, would be to INCREASE the number of uses of these powers SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO TAKE AN 8 HOUR REST AFTER EACH FIGHT.

So, not power creep but pedal-to-the-metal power gallop: the party's at full blast before every encounter.

All this means is that the encounters then need to be made somewhat tougher on average, to account for this: just another lap in the arms race.

It also means the complete end of the longer-term-than-a-single-fight resource management and attrition aspects of the game.

The "SoLuTiOn" that I keep seeing in this thread is "Hur hur, how I make Playerz not get rest, how I make battle into SLOG, how I prevent power use and refresh and kill teh PCs?"

Preventing your players from playing the way they clearly want to play, and punishing them for playing the way they enjoy is what I mean by "Adversarial DMing".

It's only natural that players want to make things easier and-or less risky for their PCs, and as being at full power before each fight is a simple means of doing this, of course that's what they want.

But that doesn't automatically mean it should happen. It's the DM's (and to some extent the game design's) job to make things tougher on the PCs - in that regard the DM is in effect the opponent, and that aspect of the game is by nature adversarial whether you like it or not.

 

[FrogReaver]

The learn that they didn't pause the rest of the world at their insistence.

I hear that alot - but reasonably, how much can really change in 24 hours fictional time? This is one reason I prefer a longer rest cycle - but then the opposite effect happens and you've given the enemys too much time for preparation or maybe even so much time they are no longer on high alert.

Time passes yet - but there's only certain things that can reasonably happen in any pre codified resting-recovery timeframe.

 

[FrogReaver]

13th Age. Abilities recharging on a fixed schedule by encounter, in that case some after each encounter, and a 'full heal up' after every 4th encounter. Simple & workable, but limits your options both as player & DM.
We've mentioned a few times and I started abbreviating.

I mentally dislike the notion of always having a specific number of encounters per recovery period, even though i'm sure it plays well.

That's why I think recovery rate should be tied not to encounters but to XP (And certainly not to in game player declared resting). 1 encounter that's twice as difficult as another should theoretically count for 2 encounters. But getting beyond those fractional values is quite difficult and that's why I would base it fully on XP.

 

[FrogReaver]

"Should have" as defined by what?

The best thing for avoiding any short-workday problem - and I speak here from experience - is to have players (and thus by extension characters) who have extremely low boredom thresholds. Then, whenever they start resting too much, all you-as-DM need to do is make it boring and they'll get their characters doing something instead of resting.

Put another way, the answer is to encourage chaotic independent characters rather than lawful cautious team-first types.

Resting takes all of 20 seconds in my games. It's simply not a boredom inducing mechanic

 

[FrogReaver]

This is not a 5MWD issue as much as it is a recovery issue. All you need to do is change up the recovery rate.

EDIT: There was a mammoth thread on Enworld discussing just this - a different resting mechanic which could accommodate any locale (dungeon, city, overland).

The 5MWD is a recovery issue LOL.

Changing up the recovery rate always to some constant value tied specifically to infiction events always leads to mechanics that can't handle some fictional pacing - which inevitably means changing your world to accommodate the mechaincs. That's one of the biggest things I want to avoid!

You could try would be variable recovery rates but that seems like a much worse solution than the one I'm suggesting. It ties resting to fictional events and then fails to make those events consistent. UGH! That's worse IMO than tying recovery to no in fiction event at all.

 

[FrogReaver]

Why give short-rests an arbitrary time-frame?

Have the recovery rate tied to a skill check which becomes harder and harder as you keep short-resting - with the risk of exhaustion. Have the long rest abilities be recovered in the same way but be much harder based on the time taken from your last long rest, but have a proper long rest require a full 24 hours of doing nothing.

We have been using such a system for well over a year with no issues.

BUT overly cautious players will be overly cautious players. There is no way getting around that.

What exactly is adding variation to your recovery rate doing?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I mentally dislike the notion of always having a specific number of encounters per recovery period, even though i'm sure it plays well.

Can't disagree, and 13A /does/ let the DM vary it a bit, if he wants, and the players to rest early for a 'campaign loss' or something like that. So it's not completely inflexible. But, 13A set out to be that love-letter to D&D, and that meant D&D-style class 'balance,' which meant doing /something/ to enforce pacing.

That's why I think recovery rate should be tied not to encounters but to XP (And certainly not to in game player declared resting). 1 encounter that's twice as difficult as another should theoretically count for 2 encounters. But getting beyond those fractional values is quite difficult and that's why I would base it fully on XP.

Oddly enough, two encounters /do/ burn resources differently than one encounter that's twice as hard (… though, hey, that's not necessarily twice the xp… hmmm). For instance, if you're a raging barbarian, or you're over-fond of a certain all-encounter concentration spell, you only use it once for the twice-as-hard encounter, but that's two uses if you want to use it in both the half-as-hard encounters... which might be below the threshold, so you don't use it at all.

...just thinking out loud, not sure there was even a point there.

 

[FrogReaver]

What eventually becomes clear is that 5MWD isn't the root of the problem, but only a symptom that often manifests, and that most "solutions" only paper it over.

This is 100% true. 5MWD is what I'll continue to call it but it's not really the root of the problem. The problem stems from player advocacy for their characters and then giving the players/characters direct in fiction control of their ability recharge rate.

The at-will/rest recovery differences in classes then amplify that problem so that it's apparent for all to see - due to the balance issues it causes.

The only things that really solves the root problem of the 5MWD is removing player/character direct in fiction control of their ability recharge rate.

That's one place the 13A mechanic can fail - is in sandbox play and the nature of what constitutes an encounter (though an arbitrary xp minimum could always be put on an encounter in order for it to count as a resource recharging encounter). Of course this drives a separate kind of play style I'm not particularly fond of - even with the xp minimum requirement. It makes it so that expending resources on anything that won't directly win the encounter is a bad strategy. It forces you more into direct combat. Whereas an XP based solution can incentivize you for finding ways around direct combat situations - even if doing so costs resources.