What to do about the 15-minute work day?

[MarkB]

I never played 4E...I tried it for about two weeks, but I couldn't get past the healing mechanics. So there are a lot of things about that edition that I am fairly ignorant of. But I gotta tell ya--this sounds HORRIBLE.

The players get to tell the DM what treasure they find?! I'm sure there are checks and balances in place to prevent abuse...but I can't help but imagine it going something like this:

DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power! Your quest is finally at an end!

PLAYER: Sword.

DM: Huh?

PLAYER: Sword of Power. Remember, I told you I wanted a sword for my character...that was like, ages ago.

DM: But it's an altar of Odin. Odin's weapon is a spear.

PLAYER: Then change it to Thor, then.

DM: What?!

PLAYER: We are in Thor's temple, and I walk up to Thor's altar to claim Thor's Sword of Power. What's the big deal?

DM: Thor's weapon is a hammer!

PLAYER: Then go with Freya or Loki or something. Surely there is at least one swordy Norse god you can use. What are my sword's stats?

DM: *headdesk*

If this "expectation" still exists in D&D Next, then I'm gonna have to pass.

Your example is a little extreme, given that the actual suggestion is simply for a wish-list of items that the DM may, optionally, work naturally into his adventure.

That said, I'd take even that extreme example over the alternative.

DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power! Your quest is finally at an end!

Player: Spear, huh? Umm, hands up who's good with spears? ...No? Ah well, put a cork on it and stick it in the bag of holding - we'll offload it with the rest of the junk back in town.

 

[tlantl]

Your example is a little extreme, given that the actual suggestion is simply for a wish-list of items that the DM may, optionally, work naturally into his adventure.

That said, I'd take even that extreme example over the alternative.

DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power! Your quest is finally at an end!

Player: Spear, huh? Umm, hands up who's good with spears? ...No? Ah well, put a cork on it and stick it in the bag of holding - we'll offload it with the rest of the junk back in town.

Or maybe a 1e barbarian raises his hand. When he gets it he snaps it in two for the experience points.

 

[mlund]

Or maybe a 1e barbarian raises his hand. When he gets it he snaps it in two for the experience points.

Cue the Angry DM dropping the Celestial Neck-Arrows of Odin in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

I mean, if it has to be a Spear instead of a Sword to fulfill the Great Narrative Prerogative then obviously breaking it for the XP calls for a flipped table and hurt feelings. I mean, these rotten players are ruining my brilliant novel.

- Marty Lund

 

[Elf Witch]

Well, the flip side of it is: why do they feel the /need/ to keep the wizard from doing that? It's because doing so makes the character going nova over-powered - it's ruining the game for everyone else, the DM included.



Right, subordinate the needs of your campaign/story to the needs of balancing the nova-capable classes.

It's an answer, yes. It's not as good a solution as a mechanical one, though.


Nod. 4e retained daily powers. While it gave them to everyone and that solved the class imbalance issue with the 5-minute work-day, it didn't make it go away, and there are still encounter-balance issues the DM has to grapple with once the party clues into that weakness of the system. It's less pronounced than in high-level 3e and early, but it's not gone.

To give another example: "'D&D' Gamma World" came out a while back, and it's a bit like 4e, except that combat is encounter-based, you don't have dailies or surges, you just start each combat with all your hps and all your powers restored. The only 'resource' that gets expended from one encounter to the next is Omega Tech, and it's random. There is zero impetus to take extended rests in that game, and you don't see players - even those who rest every chance they get in 4e - doing so.

It's a matter of a mechanical incentive. Remove the incentive, and the problem is gone - and the DM (and players) free to use whatever pacing feels right to them.

It's exactly the same, in kind, just much less in degree, yes.

If everyone at the table is okay with playing this way then there is no issue you just play that way. No one is saying you have to play this way. It is an issue if the rest of the players don't want to stop just because the wizard went nova.

I have never once had to suboridante my campaign needs to handle the nova problem and I have never once had a conversation with DMs I know that have had a campaign issue with handling nova by lighting a fire under the PCs rumps and getting them moving instead of resting after every freaking encounter.

In your opinion is not as good a s mechanical solution others feel differently.

It solved the game balance issue and made the game unplayable for a lot of us. Maybe because we would rather have more control over how to balance our game than have rigid rules that make bland characters.

You also take away the chance for any creativity and thinking outside the box because you have the same abilities every encounter. I have noticed that in games that have this kind of rule set players figure out the most effective way to handle any issue and always do it. After awhile it becomes tedious and stale.

One of the guys I played Shadowrun with loved 4E when it came out he said he would never go back to 3.5 several months ago he went to Pathfinder because while he still thinks 4E does a certain play styles really well and is much easier to DM at high levels. He and the rest of his group had gotten bored with it.

Even the game designers have said that one of its issues is that it basically says this is the way you play DnD and any other way was wrong.

 

[Elf Witch]

Almost everyone wants a narrative flow that makes some sense to them. Chopping things up with a Nova-Rest-Nova routine cuts into the narrative flow badly. The DM can come up with ways to avoid it but the Players also have incentive to look for the best risk-reward deals they can find in the system. Going into a challenge at less than 100% reflects an increased risk vs. going into a challenge at your best. What reward do players receive for that? None.

Killing 10 bands of kobolds over 10 days gives the same exact rewards as killing them all in one day. you get the same loot and XP. One is clearly more dangerous than the other, so until the DM takes a stick to beat the players in line all the game incentive is for a 15 minute work-day.

The reflect the higher level of challenge (and reward the higher level of drama and narrative flow) why don't the XP awards go proportionately for tackling more in less time? The DMG is going to have XP budget recommendations per character level to design level-appropriate challenges. For each additional budget unit beyond the first that you tackle in a work-day (between Extended Rests) you could get +10% XP.

Now players have an incentive where none previously existed. There's also no need to apply what might be perceived as an adversarial "stick" to herd the players with. Players are on XP and swag like funk on Comic-Con.

- Marty Lund

I have been playing since the game came out and I look for more rewards besides XP and loot. I enjoy a challenge that requires me to use my creativity to overcome it. The encounters I remember the most are the ones that were tough where we may not have had all our resources. Where we had to come up with new tactics.

One of the best sessions I ever played in was where we had lost all our weapons, armor, magic items and we were stuck knee deep in enemy territory with them hunting us.

We had to depend on our wits and each other to make it through.

My incentive and most of the people I play with now is to get great role playing opportunities to have interesting encounters. While leveling is nice we all use a slow XP progression and we don't tend to play or run high magic item campaigns.

Our incentive for not going nova is because we would like to do more that have one encounter then rest for an entire day we want the action and the story to move forward.

For us mechanical limits or mechanical rules that refresh abilities faster does not appeal to us. So my hope is that 5E won't be as hard wired as 4E was and allow our play style to be supported as much for people who want a more 4E style.

 

[mlund]

My incentive and most of the people I play with now is to get great role playing opportunities to have interesting encounters. While leveling is nice we all use a slow XP progression and we don't tend to play or run high magic item campaigns.

Thankfully, 5E is all about having the Magic, Loot, and XP dials available so the settings can be customized for the game you want to play. If you like low-magic, slow-level, and high-risk games you can certainly have your fill without anyone else's fun getting in your way.

For us mechanical limits or mechanical rules that refresh abilities faster does not appeal to us. So my hope is that 5E won't be as hard wired as 4E was and allow our play style to be supported as much for people who want a more 4E style.

As above, the dials are going to be there for you to adjust as needed. Nothing's going to stop you from opting out of it any more than you'll be stopped from gaining XP at half the default rate or seeing less magic items.

The only thing I see that might not mesh with your play-style is the currently-existing paradigm of various modules or adventure paths assuming that your characters level on the way through them: stuff like Reavers of Harkenwold or Red Hand of Doom. Still, if the challenges are as easy to scale and modify as they were in 4E it'll be a snap to adjust.

- Marty Lund

 

[Elf Witch]

I keep reading this in these threads. And for the same reason I and other have stated, it's not true.

Consider the following scenario: the PCs are mid-to-high level, well-respected operatives of an ancient, now fading empire. They spend their mornings investigating ancient ruins, trying to learn secrets of the empire and methods for restoring it to glory. They spend their afternoons back in the imperial palace, politicking with other factions over who will get the benefits of their latest discoveries. (The commute beteween palace and ruins is via teleport spells.)

I have run a version of that scenario, in Rolemaster. It is not a scenario for a static world. The world is dynamic and in motion. The PCs are up to their ears in plotting and scheming. Nevertheless, the imbalance it creates between casters and non-casters (ie daily, nova-capable PCs and at-will, non-nova-capable PCs) is extreme. In the morning exploration, the caster use their nova potential to dominate the action. Because commute is via teleport, they control when the party goes in and comes back out (and the non-casters are highly reliant on the casters to avoid getting straned in the ruins with no means of escape themselves). And then, during the politicking in the afternoons, the casters still tend to dominate because (in RM as in classic D&D) even low level enchantment and enhancement magic (charms, illusion, glibness etc) can provide a huge buff to social encounters.

The actual upshot in that game was the everyone played a caster. That is one "solution", but it has nothing to do with the staticness or otherwise of the world.

But why shouldn't it be the fighter who saves the day in that situation, with a heroic burst holding off the demonic hordes and then cutting down the big boss? Why does it have to be the wizard?

In classic D&D, the only way for the fighter to have a heroic burst of that sort is to get lucky dice rolls, or to drink a potion (of heroism, giant strength, invulnerabiliy etc). You don't need to go to 4e-style dailies to give the player of the fighter the option to nova his/her PC. [MENTION=49096]Mu[/MENTION]strumRidcully has mentioned in several posts over multiple threads the option of making Action Surge a more significant part of the fighter's quota of resources.

Correct. Especially the last sentence.

In the example you give then having renewable resources helps make that game play better. In other games maybe the focus is different wouldn't it be nice if we could both run our games with a rule set that does require a lot of house rules but gives us options on which rules to use for the best outcome of our games.

Who says the fighter doesn't save the day? I have been in encounters were the mages have gone nova and the bad guys keep coming and it was the fighters and rogues who won the day in the end. It really is a team game.


The fighter issue is an old won and yes the fighter needs fixing and one way I would like to see the fighter fixed is giving him cool things to do all the time not based on daily or encounters

 

[CleverNickName]

Someone needs to write a book titled something like, "Dr. StrangeDM or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game."

Heh...nice reference.

Honestly, I don't worry about it. This whole thread started with people worrying about a "15-minute workday," a phenomenon that I've never actually witnessed in play. And until I read this thread this morning, I had never even heard of a "wish list." (Or getting XP for breaking a magic item. Seriously?) I've been loving the game, worry-free, for a good long time now.

Other people seem to have a problem with it, though. From [MENTION=23094]Patryn of Elvenshae[/MENTION]'s XP comment, it would seem that I'm not alone, and that people complain about these wish lists fairly regularly. That means the design team should probably give them a closer look.

Same thing for the 15-minute work day (pardon me while I steer the thread back on track). While I've never noticed it being an issue, many people have. So the 5E design team should probably work on it.

 

[mlund]

From [MENTION=23094]Patryn of Elvenshae[/MENTION] 's comment, it would seem that I'm not alone, and that people complain about these wish lists fairly regularly. That means the design team should probably take a closer look at it.

Well, the "wish list" thing isn't even a rules mechanic. It's in the advice for successful DM'ing in the DMG about communicating and managing expectations re: treasure. That advice was basically a response to the old AD&D problem of rolling random treasure tables and getting loot no one can use, or playing a module and getting one-size fits all treasure you can't use. Some DM's don't have any use for that advice. Fine for them. Some people even just run around using the idea to troll the internet (like Edition Warriors and Operating System Fan-bois).

It's truly a rare bird that's deeply offended and convinced that such advice in the DMG is somehow actively inciting his players to rebel against their nigh-godly authority over the narrative as DM.

Same thing for the 15-minute work day (pardon me while I steer the thread back on track). While I've never noticed it being an issue, many people have. So the 5E design team should probably work on it.

Well, I at least see some mechanical balance issues here in terms of risk-reward and incentive. The system in a vacuum creates an incentive for 15-minute work days. Many times players forego that flaw in the system for the spirit of adventure. Sometimes DM's break out sticks to discourage it. I'd rather the system simply provide its own incentive in favor of drama and risk than have to paper over it or turn a blind eye.

(Or getting XP for breaking a magic item. Seriously?)

You've never read the original AD&D Barbarian Class introduced Unearthed Arcana? -9001 Nerd Points, sir. Next thing you'll be telling us you have a girl-friend and don't live in your parents' basement. For shame!

Seriously though, the Barbarian was absolutely kooky. He couldn't use Magic Items at low levels and was basically forced to break them and get XP for it instead of taking them as loot. He also got on with the Wizard like a Paladin got on with a Thief-Assassin. Hilarity ensues. Trust me.

- Marty Lund

 

[CleverNickName]

Depends on where in a city you are and what is going on.

In bad parts, there's toughs and lowlifes of all kinds...and undead & other threats of some kinds. Heck, you could stumble on a fight between to rival dojos or gangs (that actually happened to me). You could be mistaken for someone worth robbing...or who comitted one. And of course, there are drunken sailors on shore leave.

Elsewhere in the city? Perhaps you are accused of a crime by a noble scion lying to protect his own actions. Or two rival magic schools decide on a showdown...

High City? Get challenged to a duel because you OBVIOUSLY trying to rise above your station. Or you are carrying weapons you shouldn't be...

Is there a war on? Perhaps you missed curfew- and some fantasy cities are defended By the undead warrior ancestors of the inhabitants. Maybe a raiding party crosses your path. Or a spy thinks you saw too much...

Indeed. And if you include non-combat encounters (such as traveling merchants with exotic wares, beggars, lost children, pickpockets, recently-mugged citizens needing help, a shady-looking guy peddling some questionable merchandise, guards doing random weapon checks, etc.), you can have a wide variety of random encounters in a city all day long. Not every encounter should end in bloodshed, IMO.