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

[Doug McCrae]

It could be people are meaning quite different things by '15 min day'. I took it to mean, not a literal 15 minutes, but any instance of a party resting to recover spells and hit points while there are still undefeated encounters nearby but only a relatively short period of time has passed, say a couple of hours*.

I suppose one could also take it to mean the PCs choosing to take on less than the assumed number of encounters, four in 3e.


* The slow dungeon travel in 1e, which assumed the PCs were carefully checking for traps and mapping, went a long way towards preventing this.

 

[Celtavian]

It's simply false to say that mechanics are irrelevant to this.

I was speaking solely for DnD. A game like GURPS for example doesn't have a fifteen minute adventuring day because their system is completely different.

As far as DND goes, the mechanics are irrelevant. You can either allow the 15 minute adventuring day or take steps to elminate it as I have done.

The mechanics do not create the 15 minute adventuring day, the players do using metagame thinking to do so. So you must create encounters that discourage that type of metagame thinking.

That means running encounters so that it is advantageous for the party to continue fighting because if they don't the BBEG will have time to regroup and retaliate.

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

I've already come to the conclusion that I differ from most players. I always liked the image of being the wizard who turns the tide of a losing battle. I didn't mind waiting until I was needed.

I understand that not everyone likes to play the low key wizards that unleashes his power at key moments.




I'll tell you how I solved the 15 minute adventuring day a a DM.

I lumped my encounters together. I generally ran modules with a large focus on some BBEG or long adventure arc.

I would break the arc down into a series of events. Each event was a long battle meant to last quite a few hours which I glossed over with roleplaying. Rather than spread my monsters out to be killed individually, I packed the monsters together and had them make war like an organized, intelligent force never letting the PCs rest unless they earned that rest by killing their enemies and holding their ground.

For example, in the module City of the Spider Queen the party was forced to fight a non-stop battle against the entire compound once they attacked the first guard post. The vampire leaders of the compound did not sit static and wait for the party to arrive to kill them. Instead the alert was sounded and the entire compound descended to try to kill the the party and the fight wasn't over until they squared off and finished enough of the forces to force the vampire leader to her coffin.

I do this with almost ever module I can. I don't leave monsters standing around in their room waiting to be killed unless it is an exploration adventure with random, ruined rooms. But coordinated areas of humanoids and the like go on alert and start what I refer to as domino encounters: large-scale encounters that set off as a series of events.

That is how I used encounter design to elminate the 15 minute adventuring day. If the mage or priest was foolish enough to blow off all their spells in one big burst, the party was most likely going to die.

It may not be a fun way to run for all people, but my players got very good at resource conservation to the point where they still practice it in 4E. They fear to let off dailies because they are never sure when they are going to get a break.

I'm glad myself and my players were forced to play this way. It elminates cheesiness like the 15 minute adventuring day and forces them to think like a soldier might think with limited ammunition when he is at war. The luxury of unlimited resources due to the 15 minute adventuring day was something I will not tolerate from my players.

It ruins my view of what an epic encounter should be like. As far as I'm concerned an epic encounter should require a coordinated effort by the party that leaves them feeling exhausted, spent, and like they just barely escaped death to achive victory.

I didn't feel that following the standard module design of compartmentalized encounters allowing for the 15 minute adventuring day created the epic feel I wanted in my campaigns. So I ran it a much different way.

That's how I elminated the 15 minute adventuring day. It's not everyone's cup of a tea. But since people enjoy playing in games I run, I'm going to keep running it the way I like to run it.

If some people don't mind the 15 minute adventuring day, they can use the compartmentalized encounter system found in most modules just as they are written. It encourages the type of play that leads to a 15 minute adventuring day.

 

[Doug McCrae]

per-adventure* resources

That's a great idea. An alternative would be resources which recover only after multiple encounters - say 3 or 5 - which would mean you wouldn't have the problem of defining 'adventure'.

Imo D&D has never (and I would include 4e in this) handled dungeon resource management as well as it should have, particularly when it's supposed to be a great strength of the system. Every edition is vulnerable to the 15 min day, requiring the DM to fix it with revenge squads and time dependent adventures. The typical dungeon isn't time dependent and tombs and similar ancient loot storage facilities don't have revenge squads. It's very weird that the D&D system isn't particularly well geared towards handling dungeons and fails completely when you try to run a tomb. I guess DMs have got so used to coming up with work arounds for these problems, they just don't notice it any more.

On a bit of a tangent, here's another example. Monte Cook's (in many ways brilliant) module, Vault Of The Iron Overlord, falls down dead if the PCs break through the walls, forcing the writer to create a ludicrously implausible fix - an imperceptible ever present magical gas which kills the PCs if they cheat. If the PCs come up with a way to bypass the gas the adventure becomes a non-adventure. Just another example of the way D&D doesn't handle dungeons particularly well.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I have heard of people doing it as far back as the late second edition days but still it was only on the net.

Did you ever play any 3e Necromancer Games modules?

Even discounting the psychology of some players to "go nova," there were A LOT of Necromancer modules-- indeed, any kind of "status quo" adventure-- where the players, through no fault of their own, were depleted after one or two rooms/encounters, such that continuing would be folly.

And so, they (wisely) retreat and replenish. That's just smart play.

And so when I personally talk about fixing the 15 minute adventuring day, that's primarily what I am talking about. I see no reason to "penalize" the PCs 23 hours for smart play that arises primarily from campaign verisimilitude!

I'd much rather give them some "quick rest" mechanic to get them back into the adventure in a reasonable and realistic way.

It's not about curtailing "go nova" behavior. It's about preserving verisimilitude. To me, it is more damaging to campaign verisimilitude to have the players rest for 23 hours than it would be to just "reset" the clock on their daily powers and let them continue with the story.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

As a DM, I've never seen a party who conscious observed the 15 minute workday.

However, I was forced to design adventures around this concept, because under the previous editions, effectiveness declines steadily and rapidly as more encounters appear.

Sure, you can push your players on. But with hit points non-recoverable, spells limited, and etc., you can only push so far before they're absolutely certain to die, even if they do everything 'right.' There's a point where one more hit is going to kill, and if the healing spell rolls are low, then it may take several in-game DAYS to recover to the point where you can actually have an encounter again.

Personally, although I like the characters to have risks, obviously, in an adventure, I don't like executing them. And the old system forced the DM to either implicitly acknowledge the 15 minute work day, or 'execute' the party.

Under 4e, the idea is that the party can be less effective than their peak (by using up all their dailies), but they'll always have a chance.

Under the older systems, once they'd gotten past a basically set number of level-appropriate encounters, they were utterly DOOMED if you sent a bunch of gimpy kobolds against them. So you either had to lay off, or just accept the near-certainty of a TPK.

So yes ,the 15 minute workday has been abolished ,or at least extended. There are other major problems with 4e, IMO, but this is one area where, again IMO, the design was successful.

 

[Imaro]

This...

As a DM, I've never seen a party who conscious observed the 15 minute workday.

However, I was forced to design adventures around this concept, because under the previous editions, effectiveness declines steadily and rapidly as more encounters appear.

Sure, you can push your players on. But with hit points non-recoverable, spells limited, and etc., you can only push so far before they're absolutely certain to die, even if they do everything 'right.' There's a point where one more hit is going to kill, and if the healing spell rolls are low, then it may take several in-game DAYS to recover to the point where you can actually have an encounter again.

Personally, although I like the characters to have risks, obviously, in an adventure, I don't like executing them. And the old system forced the DM to either implicitly acknowledge the 15 minute work day, or 'execute' the party.

So you state that the 15min workday was based around healing, yet further down...

Under 4e, the idea is that the party can be less effective than their peak (by using up all their dailies), but they'll always have a chance.

Under the older systems, once they'd gotten past a basically set number of level-appropriate encounters, they were utterly DOOMED if you sent a bunch of gimpy kobolds against them. So you either had to lay off, or just accept the near-certainty of a TPK.

So yes ,the 15 minute workday has been abolished ,or at least extended. There are other major problems with 4e, IMO, but this is one area where, again IMO, the design was successful.

You seem to be arguing that 4e has eliminated it by upping power availability. Now the problem I see with this line of thinking is that ultimately 4e characters are still limited by their healing surges. There are very few ways of healing that don't require you to have a healing surge left, so once those run out you're adventuring day is pretty much over. Now this could be overcome through workarounds like healing potions in 3e, but in 4e a healing potion requires a healing surge to work.

And even though you have a higher amount of hit points in 4e...so do the monsters so that means more chances to be hit and to loose hit points. This seems like a wash to me, it gives the illusion of vastly greater durability while not really extending it by that much. A hard encounter will still burn through alot of hit points and healing surges.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Did you ever play any 3e Necromancer Games modules?

Even discounting the psychology of some players to "go nova," there were A LOT of Necromancer modules-- indeed, any kind of "status quo" adventure-- where the players, through no fault of their own, were depleted after one or two rooms/encounters, such that continuing would be folly.

So it wasn't just Paizo and Dungeon?

Does this mean that the writers did not entirely understand the whole encounter/adventure design outlined in the DMG, or that they simply did not enjoy it when designing or play-testing the adventure?

I basically said it before, I think it is definitely the latter.

Under the older systems, once they'd gotten past a basically set number of level-appropriate encounters, they were utterly DOOMED if you sent a bunch of gimpy kobolds against them. So you either had to lay off, or just accept the near-certainty of a TPK.

Well, this isn't entirely true. As long as the party has Wands of CLWs or similar items, the gimpy Kobolds don't matter (at least not after 3rd to 4th level). The problem is that you can't create any really "interesting" encounters any more, at least not if the spellcaster player doesn't like sitting back...

 

[Vocenoctum]

So it wasn't just Paizo and Dungeon?

Does this mean that the writers did not entirely understand the whole encounter/adventure design outlined in the DMG, or that they simply did not enjoy it when designing or play-testing the adventure?

I basically said it before, I think it is definitely the latter.

I'm not a fan of Necromancer adventures, because for me their "1st edition feel!" was nothing more than over CR encounters designed to "challenge" by being difficult. It's easy to make a level 5 dungeon "challenging" by stocking it with CR9 beasties.

For me, the biggest offender though was the Mearls Dungeon (Three Faces of Evil sound right?) where there's a center room, with three temples branching off it. It temple was numerous encounters of CR equivalent.

So, the DMG says a CR equivalent encounter depletes 20% of your resources in spells and expenditures. The module had no place for the characters to logically hole up in. It was not readily accessible to fight & retreat, and the only way the temples would not notice half their buddies missing was through the mechanic of "the temples don't really socialize".

For me the 15MinuteDay is when the party sees a hallway with 2 doors to either side, and a set of double doors at the end. They clear the 4 side rooms, but since the monsters therein were all CR=PL, they are now underpowered to continue, so they retreat. When they are renewed again, they return to face whatever is behind the double doors and continue on.

 

[Vocenoctum]

That's a great idea. An alternative would be resources which recover only after multiple encounters - say 3 or 5 - which would mean you wouldn't have the problem of defining 'adventure'.

You get action points for milestones anyway, I think it'd be easy to give a Daily Power Recovery feature to action points. I think a paragon path or two may have something like this already, but you can make the cost higher. If you're already keeping track of action points, it would be one less thing to add.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

For me the 15MinuteDay is when the party sees a hallway with 2 doors to either side, and a set of double doors at the end. They clear the 4 side rooms, but since the monsters therein were all CR=PL, they are now underpowered to continue, so they retreat. When they are renewed again, they return to face whatever is behind the double doors and continue on.

That's right. The PCs behavior in this instance is perfectly reasonable, and intelligent both in-game and out.

Let's say, furthermore, that the adventure in question is a mummy's tomb; the outer chambers contain some low-level undead, and the main chamber is the final resting place of the mummy lord.

A DM who would arbitrarily deny the party the chance to retreat here is just being a jerk. So the party will retreat for the equally arbitrary but necessary 1 day, twiddle their thumbs, and then come back to finish the job.

It's just silly. If I'm going to handwave a day, I can just as easily handwave the daily requirement and refresh the party so that play can continue.


On another issue raised above:

In an "adventure resource" mechanic, it's not actually that hard to come up with reasonable milestones.

You could divide up the dungeon level into "bundles" of what you intend for each day's encounters (ie, every four EL=PL) and give the party an equal number of adventure resources. If the PCs happen to pick apart those encounters slower or faster than expected, you can expect them to use the adventure resources at the same rate.

"Defeat the BBEG" almost always works as a reasonable refresh milestone. In a typical dungeon crawl, I'll also refresh or add adventure resources whenever the players find the stairs to the next level, regardless of whether they need or use them at that time.