The 15 min. adventuring day... does 4e solve it?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The whole post was excellent, but the above bits are key, I think.

Thanks!

In my high-level RM games, two solutions have emerged. In the game mentioned above, everyone plays a wizard (and thus all play the 15-minute day). Verisimilitude was preserved when the game was a tomb-looting one, as tombs stay put and are fairly static over time. When the story changed to a "hunt-the-bad-guy in his demiplane" scenario, the game eventually came to an end with a TPK as the 15-minute day prevention measures (both time pressures and anti-teleport mechanics that had been implemented) made play unworkable.

The alternative solution (in the current game) has been to play only Fighters, some of whom have self-buffing capabilities (which are not as Power Point intensive), with the healer and the diviner as NPCs (who therefore don't have any metagame influence on the play) and the only PC Wizard our best player from the rules-mastery point of view, who is therefore able to play effectively even when unable to optimise his Power Point use vs rest time.

In a way, 4E is doing both at the same time - everyone has its encounter related powers, and everyone has its daily powers. That solution could only work because the system was redesigned, of course. If you already have existing classes, and some class following the "daily" paradigmn and others do follow an encounter paradigm, your only choice to fix the conflict between the two by limiting yourself to only one.

In my experience most players want to play, not watch.

Of course, it is apparent that some players can find the watching part enjoyable if they know there will be a reward for them later when their character is needed. This doesn't only pertain to wizard vs fighter, but also with bards vs the whole rest, or say a Shadowrun Decker vs a Street Samurai.
The question is - is this more rewarding to be useful all the time to them? And this is a question a player in this mindset has to ask himself when deciding what to look for in a game system.

I am tempted to call this "delayed gratification" vs "constant gratification".

I don't think there is a "generic" answer. I would think that the latter is more common, or at least that's what the 4E design team assumed (possibly based on real data). (But this doesn't imply a value judgment.)

 

[fba827]

This is one of thosae things I've only heard about on line and never seen in any game I've been part of.

Same.

But as I read it,

from a player's perspective, I think "gee that would be boring -- no thrill and intelligent management of resources, do I really want to play with these people?"

as a DM I think "gee, that would be boring -- no thrill and lazy ass PCs, do I really want to play with such weenies?"

Yes, every situation is different. I'm not saying it's 'always bad' just on concept alone as written in a vacuum of all other circumstances it just sounds so exceptionally dull to me. I am glad I have never experienced this as of yet.

 

[delericho]

If one wanted to remove the 15 minute adventuring day entirely, one just has to create a mechanic to recharge daily powers and healing surges without resting. Maybe I'll post some house rule ideas on that in some time.

For my theoretical house system, I was toying with giving characters only per-encounter and per-adventure* resources to track. (And possibly buffs that remain active until dropped, but which tie up some resource that then can't be used elsewhere while they are running.)

This would mean that players would only really take a break to have their characters rest when it made sense to do so (as in, at the end of the day), but also that they couldn't just keep going forever - eventually they're going to have to run the end credits.

The big difficulty with such a system, though, would be in making sure that characters didn't blow through their per-adventure resources too quickly, and thus fail in all their adventures. I never did see a good solution to that.

* Technically, this would be "you need several weeks/months of rest to regain these resources" (where the exact length of time is conveniently undefined to give the DM appropriate flexibility, and for story purposes).

 

[delericho]

Those adventure paths have about 90% too much combat for my taste.

I think that's at least partly a consequence of the format (20 levels in 12 adventures), and of D&D's reluctance to give out XP for non-combat challenges. If the Adventure Paths instead marked out a number of 'key' encounters, and said PCs should level once they have completed six 'keys' (adjust numbers to taste), that would probably go a long way to reducing the need for combats.

Of course, doing that in 3e, where spellcasters burn XP for some spells and to craft magic items, has some problems.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For my theoretical house system, I was toying with giving characters only per-encounter and per-adventure* resources to track. (And possibly buffs that remain active until dropped, but which tie up some resource that then can't be used elsewhere while they are running.)

"Per Adventure" is also an interesting concept, of course - how long is an adventure? What constitutes as an adventure?

And I think you might want to change the existing daily powers a lot to make them work at the scale of "per adventure".

 

[Fenes]

I think that's at least partly a consequence of the format (20 levels in 12 adventures), and of D&D's reluctance to give out XP for non-combat challenges. If the Adventure Paths instead marked out a number of 'key' encounters, and said PCs should level once they have completed six 'keys' (adjust numbers to taste), that would probably go a long way to reducing the need for combats.

Of course, doing that in 3e, where spellcasters burn XP for some spells and to craft magic items, has some problems.

We haven't used XP since before we started 3E.

 

[delericho]

We haven't used XP since before we started 3E.

Out of curiosity, what do/did you do about crafting and spellcasting XP costs?

 

[delericho]

"Per Adventure" is also an interesting concept, of course - how long is an adventure? What constitutes as an adventure?

As with "per-encounter", it was going to be fairly undefined - just as a 4e character's per-encounter powers are refreshed after a short rest, so too would the per-adventure resources be replenished after a lengthy period of rest (of the order of some weeks or months spent in relative comfort - so a return to the base town, or a spell of "shore leave"/"R & R").

Campaign circumstances permitting, the PCs would generally be able to declare they were taking such a break, but whereas taking a day out for resting might not let the dungeon inhabitants rebuild and reinforce, taking several weeks out would be a bigger proposition (any time-dependent objectives would be shot, any casualties in the dungeon would be replaced, BBEG schemes would advance significantly, and so forth).

And I think you might want to change the existing daily powers a lot to make them work at the scale of "per adventure".

At the time that I was toying with the idea, I was thinking of it more as a 3e-replacement. So, I wasn't really thinking in terms of at-will/encounter/daily powers. In fact, at first the only per-adventure resource was going to be hit points (I was going to split the pool in half, with half replenishing on a per-encounter basis, and the other half being per-adventure). Later, I considered assigning per-adventure powers to some magic items, but never went anywhere with that idea.

In the event, 4e turned out to be much better than I had feared, I have at least three 3.5e campaigns I want to run, Pathfinder looks interesting, and anyway I have half a dozen non-D&D (ish) campaigns I want to run. All in all, I decided I wouldn't need such a system for a long time, if ever.

 

[Fenes]

Out of curiosity, what do/did you do about crafting and spellcasting XP costs?

Those are handled individually. For crafting exotic ingredients are needed, and most of the spells requiring XP are not in game.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I have never seen the "15 minute adventuring day" in previous editions, and I don't see it in 4e either.

I am seeing 1st-2nd level characters taking on more encounters in 4e than they did in 3e.

Regards