D&D 5E The Adventuring Day XP budget makes sense when you consider it is a budget for you to stock your dungeons

[mamba]

We shouldn't have to say, "Well, I need to structure the story this way or else I'll run into adventure day XP budget problems." I think that's an indication that the game is foundationally broken in a pretty significant way.

I disagree, you have that in every game, otherwise you can throw an unlimited number of enemies at the players, which is a lot more broken

You often can't withdraw and long rest because there's nowhere to go. If you need to long rest -- and I think the module authors assume you will -- you've got to hole-up in place.

yes, nothing wrong with that

No, I did. Under the assumption that if you want the issue you're trying to fix to stay fixed, then you can't eliminate it without the same issue returning.

then why do you then complain about having this constantly affecting your downtime activities… the answer is for it to not be constant and the only one making it constant is you

No, but the first round is seldom the most dramatic or exciting, and the first mile is rarely the fastest, either.

because they study their opponent / pace themselves, not because they are not at the peak of their abilities for the day

That's only one possible solution. The point is to reward the players for progress, not do exactly the first thing I happen to suggest. The point is that narrative solutions require you to twist the game.

and you rather twist the game with new rules, got it

They limit your options as a DM, or require you to repeatedly punish the players

I still disagree with it being you punishing them when there are consequences for them bumbling along and napping half the day. Also, rules limit the DMs options more than not having rules

A better solution would be to eliminate "daily" powers entirely, and instead do what nearly every other TTRPG does. Have limited use abilities recover per scene or per set of scenes.

not sure this is true for nearly every other TTRPG. I am sure I do not like it, that just makes everything meaningless.

Your ‘set of scenes’ being one adventure day works just fine. Why should your powers arbitrarily reset because you entered the fifth room today, doing so after a long rest makes much more sense.

You're no less able to pass a skill check at 1 hp compared to max hp. That's about as realistic as a fireball.

so your answer is to remove realism everywhere because we do not have it in some places?

 

[Krachek]

No, that sounds nice but that logic leads us to the conclusion that there is no problem if the PCs long rest after every encounter. The difference in the design of Fighter and Wizard pretty significantly contradicts that.

What is the problem with one fight a day.
Wizard cast their best spells, Warlock too, fighter do action surge and maneuvers, 5 rounds later it is done anyway. Loot time, go back to inn, do a little social, and repeat. Some table have fun with that pace and don’t bother with ressources management and tactical choice.

 

[Minigiant]

I certainly didn't read it that way. I reached the same conclusion as the OP 8 years ago because I try to play games as they are designed, not try to play it how I want to play it then complain about something being wrong with the game. "This screwdriver is really bad at driving nails into plywood - it must be the screwdriver's fault!"

My core point was that there are more than one way to design dungeon play. 5e does a certain style of dungeoneering and is difficult to switch to another dungeon style without information not in the core books.

Therefore it is interesting that 5e choose a dungeon style that doesn't match the preferred style of many of the fans it attracted.
Which begged the question if WOTC did market research before making 5e.

 

[mamba]

My core point was that there are more than one way to design dungeon play. 5e does a certain style of dungeoneering and is difficult to switch to another dungeon style without information not in the core books.

Therefore it is interesting that 5e choose a dungeon style that doesn't match the preferred style of many of the fans it attracted.
Which begged the question if WOTC did market research before making 5e.

pretty sure there was a playtest for it… that is about as much research as they can do.

 

[Minigiant]

pretty sure there was a playtest for it… that is about as much research as they can do.

That was the mistake.

WOTC focused on current and past players and DMs for 5e.
They didn't do any research from I found on potential and future players and DMs. Or not enough.
It would have help make an adventure day XP budget and dungeon mechanics closer to the preferences of what would become a huge chunk of their customer base.

 

[mamba]

They didn't do any research from I found on potential and future players and DMs. Or not enough.

not sure how they would go about that, and given 5e’s success it seems to have worked for them

It would have help make an adventure day XP budget and dungeon mechanics closer to the preferences of what would become a huge chunk of their customer base.

you can always have fewer encounters

 

[iserith]

My core point was that there are more than one way to design dungeon play. 5e does a certain style of dungeoneering and is difficult to switch to another dungeon style without information not in the core books.

Therefore it is interesting that 5e choose a dungeon style that doesn't match the preferred style of many of the fans it attracted.
Which begged the question if WOTC did market research before making 5e.

They did do market research. Years ago. And somehow it dominates the market. Weird. But also, there are a ton of dungeon crawling RPGs out there. Just pick one that works for you if D&D 5e ain't it.

What I find tedious about these exchanges is that someone posts a nice thread on the kind of play D&D 5e does support well - not exactly news to some of us, but great to see someone stumble upon it. And instead of talking about how to make great play experiences in the face of that reality, we have the usual D&D 5e haters crapping in the thread. How about for once we don't do that?

 

[MichaelSomething]

There's always 4E!

 

[nevin]

I think the bigger problem is that PCs recover all their abilities so easily, and they are at maximum effectiveness immediately after a long rest. And there is no mechanical reason to encourage players to progress to the end of the adventuring day. As written, unless there's some peculiarity of the narrative preventing it, PCs should long rest after every encounter.

It's just such a weird design. They tied attrition to HP recovery during short rests (limited by HD, which are also the only thing that long rests don't fully recover), so long rests are required to reliably heal. So you can't block long resting without introducing death spirals. But that means you can't make it so the PCs have to achieve something in adventuring day completion (e.g., 75% of the XP budget) before you can try to recharge your abilities because that's also linked to a long rest.

You could combat it by rewarding PCs as they progress through the adventuring day, but the game doesn't do that at all. And short rests are just worse. But what kind of reward could you give? A permanent one like XP or bonus treasure is a bad idea, because now you're giving long term rewards for short term behavior. So you need something like abilities or bonuses that turn on when you reach a threshold, but that expire when you long rest.

Why is ability recovery and HP recovery so tightly linked? Why are PCs at maximum effectiveness at the start of the adventuring day? Why is the game built around a daily XP budget at all if the game mechanics implicitly tell the players to long rest as often as possible?

it's no different than adventuring back in 1e. If you could retreat back to town and recover you did. It was a problem for DM's that let thier players just walk away and recover then as well. The big difference now is they tried to make the game more like an MMO to attract a younger audience so we got MMO mechanics. Now retreating and recovering is codified in the rules so everyone does it.