D&D 5E Solving the 5MWD

[dave2008]

If that's the kind of game you're going for, then great. It wouldn't be a fun game for me though.

I would love a game where magic was much more rare and precious. I just don't think anyone who plays a D&D spell caster would like it!

EDIT: not sure what my players would think as we only have one full caster.

 

[Tony Vargas]

sometimes it simply makes sense in-character to have a day that consists of nova-then-rest. Add to that that it sometimes makes sense in the game world that this will be a good tactic and sometimes it's gonna come back to bite them when the next threat(s) show up sooner than expected.
Good points: the players have to be left open to playing their characters how they like.

They should be, but in D&D there are metagame issues with it.

A few things here:
First, you worry about class balance - particularly in the short-term - far more than I do

I just acknowledge that class (and encounter) balance in D&D is designed around a specific pacing, and suffers when you deviate from it, creating stark limitations on how the DM can run games, and perverse metagame incentives for the players.

Second, and to me far more important, is the revival of a really big problem I had with 4e design: what exactly defines an "encounter"?

In the WotC era of D&D, in general, a combat encounter prettymuch starts when your roll initiative and ends when the DM says it does - ostensibly when you stop running the game in initiative order. One rule of thumb, or house rule, I guess, I first used in 3e was that if a character (or monster) delays or readies, and it comes back to his turn with everyone else delaying, readying or not taking action, the encounter is over, and we're off the initiative cycle - if hostilities resume, re-roll initiative. It was a good idea to get that technical with it, because there was this bizarre tendency to try to 'Ready' when not in initiative order, in the expectation it'd give you a surprise action or re-set your initiative above the target, regardless of what you both rolled.

But oftentimes it's not obvious at all. Take travelling across the frozen tundra for a couple of days - it's risky, and resources have to be expended to keep people warm and upright - but there's no "encounters". No creatures met, no particularly difficult patches to travel through or over (e.g. crevasses, thin ice, etc.). Do you then define a specific block of time as an "encounter"?

In 3e or 5e, up to the DM. For that matter, in 4e up to the DM - if he formalizes the difficult travel as a Skill Challenge, it'd count as an encounter, for instance, for milestone purposes (and of course, for XP value), but it's up to the DM to do so (he could even design it as more than one challenge).

And third, it takes something that's pretty easy to grok in the fiction (e.g. only after a good night's rest can you pray/study your spells back) and moves it much more into the metagame

Nod. Something that concerns you a lot more than me. There's a tremendous resource-management metagame, anyway, as PCs "knowing" about hp & HD and slots and spell levels the like really doesn't make oodles of in-character sense.

in that the characters in the fiction can't really predict when their resources will refill.

Unnecessarily realistic, that.

(and if they could, this would soon result: "There's some Goblins. Great! We need to fight 'em because if we do it's our fourth battle and we'll get all our spells back right after!". Bleah.)

Heh. As opposed to the old "we've only been in the dungeon 15 minutes, but the wizard cast his one spells so he's so tired he needs to sleep."

 

[Lanefan]

I just acknowledge that class balance in D&D is designed around a specific pacing, and suffers when you deviate from it.

This to me seems more a WotC-era thing, though it's been around since 1974.

Nothing to do with 4e, actually (like 5e, it used "short rests" to recharge some abilities and long-rests, others - the short rests were just shorter - short-rest-recharge resources were called 'encounter' and long-rest 'daily'), but in WotC era D&D a combat encounter prettymuch starts when your roll initiative and ends when the DM says it does - ostensibly when you stop running the game in initiative order. One rule of thumb, or house rule, I guess, I first used in 3e was that if a character (or monster) delays or readies, and it comes back to his turn with everyone else delaying, readying or not taking action, the encounter is over, and we're off the initiative cycle - if hostilities resume, re-roll initiative. It was a good idea to get that technical with it, because there was this bizarre tendency to try to 'Ready' when not in initiative order, in the expectation it'd give you a surprise action or re-set your initiative above the target, regardless of what you both rolled.

Exactly; that largely falls under "obvious" encounter borders.

But what about a situation that would normally be three encounters (let's say at a castle: gate guards, pet wolves in the kennel, ogre blacksmith in the smithy) that gets turned into one long rolling battle - one of the gate guards flees his post and releases the wolves; the howling of the wolves alerts the ogre, and every few rounds another few foes join the battle - or just when the party think they've prevailed along comes another headache. Doesn't seem right to lump those all into one big encounter, but also doesn't seem right to arbitrarily break them out.

The neutral answer, then, becomes in-game time. 5e went this route with 1-hour rests and IMO overdid it; but the idea of powers refreshing daily (or even monthly or annually, for some special things) is far more believable in the fiction than having them refresh after x-number of battles and-or encounters.

Nod. Something that concerns you a lot more than me. There's a tremendous resource-management metagame, anyway, as PCs "knowing" about hp & HD and slots and spell levels the like really doesn't make oodles of in-character sense.

Can't speak to HD but for h.p. any character - while not knowing the exact numeric value, of course - is always going to have a reasonable idea as to how fatigued or hurt it is; and an arcane caster will usually have a reasonable idea as to how much is "left in the tank" (i.e. how well she remembers what she studied this morning). It does fall apart a bit for divine casters, though one could argue the casters' deities just tell them what they have left at any given time.

Heh. As opposed to the old "we've only been in the dungeon 15 minutes, but the wizard cast his one spells so he's so tired he needs to sleep."

In the fiction, though, the wizard knows from years of training that it takes sleep to recharge his magical powers; and the cleric knows it takes a prayer session each morning.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This to me seems more a WotC-era thing, though it's been around since 1974.

Yeah, prior, it felt as much like coincidence as design - plus the balance-of-imbalances of the TSR era wasn't just over an adventuring day, it was over the whole campaign.

what about a situation that would normally be three encounters (let's say at a castle: gate guards, pet wolves in the kennel, ogre blacksmith in the smithy) that gets turned into one long rolling battle

In any version of D&D that has anything like encounter design guidelines, if it /was/ three encounters, well, the party will be in bad shape and have completed three encounters. If it was three trivial non-encounters that finally add up to the equivalent challenge of one, it'll be one. Not particularly perplexing. I'm sure there may be middlegrounds, depending, where 3 easy encounters add up to one deadly or something, in which case, well, still kinda up to the DM, like basically everything else, huh?

In terms of a hypothetical encounter-based game (which D&D has never been), though, I'd say it's one encounter.

The neutral answer, then, becomes in-game time.

Nothing 'neutral' about it. Arbitrary, perhaps is the word you're looking for.

5e went this route with 1-hour rests and IMO overdid it; but the idea of powers refreshing daily is far more believable in the fiction than having them refresh after x-number of battles and-or encounters.

Nothing about n/rest resources is terribly believable. We're used to 'em, after decades in D&D, but they're really kinda nonsense.

Can't speak to HD but for h.p. any character - while not knowing the exact numeric value, of course

There you go. The players are dealing with meta-game numbers, the character is imagined as dealing with in-fiction pain (& disability, that is /never/ modeled in the rules). "Realistically," a human being can be on the verge of death and not even suspect it, or certain his time's run out and be fine.

In the fiction, though, the wizard knows from years of training that it takes sleep to recharge his magical powers; and the cleric knows it takes a prayer session each morning.

In 3e, the latter could be literally the case, the cleric just dinged at his appointed hour.
Complete aside, though, the 15MWD first came up in games I was actually in way back in the day, because of that need to sleep ('cause that's what the rules said) after casting one spell, as little as 15 minutes after waking up. (Wake up, memorize your spell, cast it... zonk! 15MWD.) It always seemed goofy. Anyway, in some REH pastiche, don't recall which one, sorcerers used "Black Lotus" to enter supernatural dreams that re-charged their powers. That might be an interesting (ie dangerous) option for casters wanting to recharge more frequently, especially in a gritty pacing game, or under FrogReaver's variant.

 

[Krachek]

I think the 5mwd is more a problem of style of play rather than mechanic.
if players focus on their character being hero on mission or adventuring, they will
do their best with their ressource, and eventually look for a long rest.
if players focus on their character sheet, spells, abilities, they will play accordingly to that.
DnD assume that players will willingly try to impersonate a hero and play accordingly to that.
expecting that the rules force players to do that is asking too much.

 

[5ekyu]

Exactly, though D&D doesn't make it easy with the base resting rules. If I have that three week trek across the frozen tundra, players are expecting a long rest every evening in 5e. Or there are times when there is no time pressure (not every adventure can or should have it) where the characters decided to rest.

That's where codifying it helps.

Huh?

Just to be clear, not every adventure should have factors that limit their rests and recoveries but it's better to codify in rules a recovery rate that always applies?

Those seem counter-intuitive.

"It wont be right to have our adventures always have time pressure that impacts recovery in limiting ways, but instead it's fine to define a recovery meta-game by encounter that is divorced from time passsge."

The key to 5e is, it will and should vary.
Sometimes it should be a redt a day with overland travel in wastelands eith maybe only a skirmish or two. Those are fine.
Sometimes it will be an advdenture or chapter within one where time is major and a long redt means failure and short rests are tough - with plenty of challenges. That's fine too.
Sometimes it may be just a known prepared quick raid in and out. That's fine too.

In 5e, those will play out very differently, because the resource conservation needs vary quite a bit. It's also quite possibly what seems like one switches into another and that can get real exciting.

But, if you instead apply some large system level meta-counter like "after four encounters" then all the encounters and challenges have the same pressure on resources. That quick raid while fresh will still just me "one in four" so if we go big there it costs us in three others - same as if it was a longer more complex castle rescue and ritual take-down.

With 5e, whatever pacing the scene and the choiuces create change the play and resources. In a strict system defined "encounter counter" it remains static - except for end boss fights after light work warm-ups stereotype setups.

To me, it's better for characters to decide "we can go all out" or "we need to conserve" for in-game indentifiable reasons like "can we fall back and rest safely or not" than it for player to decide it because they have been counting down one to four encounters or see they are near leveling up.

None of these to be play into balance or challenge.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Huh?
Just to be clear, not every adventure should have factors that limit their rests and recoveries but it's better to codify in rules a recovery rate that always applies?
Those seem counter-intuitive.

If there's a codified rate of recovery independent of the imagined events and environments the PCs experience, then the DM has a free hand in imagining those things. If there's not, then those events/environments/other factors become tools he needs to use to force PCs into the prescribed pacing in which the game isn't broken. (Or revel in the brokenness, your choice.)

Either way, there's a metagame consideration, in the 'codified rate' case, it's a metagame consideration that makes balance more robust, in the more usual case, it's a metagame consideration that distorts the DM's world/story, the PC's behaviors - or distorts the balance/playability of the game.

The key to 5e is, it will and should vary.
Sometimes it should be a redt a day with overland travel in wastelands eith maybe only a skirmish or two. Those are fine. Sometimes it will be an advdenture or chapter within one where time is major and a long redt means failure and short rests are tough - with plenty of challenges. That's fine too.

It's fine, in theory, if it averaged out.

But that'd mean a single-encounter day calls for an 11-15 encounter day to 'balance it out' - and that may not be entirely tenable. So, instead, you'd 'need' say, five 7-encounter days.

But, if you instead apply some large system level meta-counter like "after four encounters" then all the encounters and challenges have the same pressure on resources.

Yep. Which is beneficial in a cooperative game that features radically different resource mixes among the players, because it retains a semblance of balance among them, and avoids perverse incentives, allowing everyone to at least try to contribute to 'win' the game (succeed as a party).
But, comes at the price of limiting range of challenges faced, somewhat - though it frees up the DM to use whatever in-fiction pacing is called for.

So it's a give/take balancing act, either way. As long as you have significantly different quantity/power of resource & different recovery rates among the PCs.

To me, it's better for characters to decide "we can go all out" or "we need to conserve" for in-game indentifiable reasons like "can we fall back and rest safely or not"

The problem is that there's metagame factors 'contaminating' that decision, the only question is how perverse and obvious they are. In the 13A style codified recharge, pacing moves independently, so the metagame consideration is to conserve (budget) to fit the 4-encounter cadence, and go all-out at the climax of the story, which, though metagame and obvious, is not perverse. In the D&D-style recharge, the metagame impetus is towards the 5MWD to maximize the likelihood of success for the party, but which also maximized the disparity in contribution favoring daily-recharge classes over short-recharge & at-will, so there's a perverse, if not always obvious, incentive for the latter to push for longer days, so that their contributions matter (part of the objective of a cooperative game is that everyone contribute to success - 'pull their own weight'), but in doing so, they actually make the party overall less effective (hurting the main objective - the collective success of the party).
It's easy enough to cope with either - just adopt a more 'story' oriented approach in the former, and just gravitate to class-Tier 1 options in the latter.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

1. Tie ability recharges to level up. For example spell slots only recharge on level up. Obviously the number of slots needs increased but that should be doable.

I'm having trouble trying to get into the mindset of a wizard living in this world, who knows this to be true. Setting aside the issue of whatever language they use to describe the progression by which a wizard is capable of casting stronger spells, the character has no way of knowing how quickly they'll progress, and they certainly can't afford to waste a spell slot now if they might need it six months down the line. Even if I have a hundred spell slots, there's no telling how many years I'll need to make those last.

It's the same issue I had with the Wand of Cure Light Wounds, in Pathfinder. Even if it works out in practice, that the expected treasure from any high-level encounter will more than off-set the hundreds of GP worth of magic wands, I don't want my character to need to make that assumption.

 

[ccs]

Do you ever run your ideas past those you actually game with?

 

[FrogReaver]

Do you ever run your ideas past those you actually game with?

Nope - nearly an infinite amount of ideas and only about 1 game a week.