What to do about the 15-minute work day?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Funny, Minigiant!

But even animals "dumber" than ogres are aware enough react to threats that ablate them. Wolf packs run away from stronger packs that encroach and kill...if they can. Ravens have been shown to avoid houses where one of their number was killed...a generation ago.

Conversely, ants & bees will swarm attack creatures that smell of their dead kin.

 

[LostSoul]

I voted "nothing," because I don't think it's a problem. The DM already has absolute control over this phenomenon: he or she controls the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations, time constraints, amount (or lack) of additional resources, etc.

By tweaking any of these variables, the DM can set the length of "the game workday" to anything he or she needs it to be to fit the pace and feel of the story.

Not broke, don't fix.

That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach. I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.

I guess this is one of those play style things. I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.

 

[steeldragons]

That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach. I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.

I guess this is one of those play style things. I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.

And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?

What happens/can change as a result of your actions? You can guess, I suppose...You can hope that your actions will have the results you desire...but...I simply don't understand this concept of "I should be able to control these factors."

As you said, a playstyle thing, I suppose. No one's right or wrong, here. I just hope 5e puts the controls [rightly, to my opinion] back in the DM's hands.

 

[CleverNickName]

That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach. I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.

I guess this is one of those play style things. I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.

It's true that both the player and the DM both have some measure of control over all aspects of the story. However, when problems arise, it falls upon the DM to resolve them. And while all participants of the game are working together to "write the story," it still falls upon the DM to provide the plot and the setting.

The DM narrates a situation and the players have to react to accommodate it. It doesn't work the other way around; the players do not tell the DM that they want to find a magic sword in the cave and the DM must react to accommodate them, for example. The same is true for all plot and setting devices: the number and type of monsters encountered, the distance to the nearest town, whether or not a cave is safe enough to camp in, etc.

 

[TwinBahamut]

And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?

What happens/can change as a result of your actions? You can guess, I suppose...You can hope that your actions will have the results you desire...but...I simply don't understand this concept of "I should be able to control these factors."

As you said, a playstyle thing, I suppose. No one's right or wrong, here. I just hope 5e puts the controls [rightly, to my opinion] back in the DM's hands.

I won't speak for LostSoul, but I agree with him on player empowerment and agency, so I'll say my own feelings on the matter.

Player agency is pretty much the one reason I have to play D&D. It's the one thing that the tabletop RPG genre offers that no other game does quite as well, except pure freeform roleplaying. The ability to have an impact on the world, particularly outside that of what my character does, is an extremely important part of that for me.

I mean, to take one example... In a recent game of D&D I've been playing, my DM let me create the entire civilization my character is from, down to every last detail. I've mostly been playing as a "stranger in a strange land", somewhat distant from that civilization, but it is not so far as to be irrelevant. I've even been asked to create a sizable number of NPCs from that civilization who could potentially show up in the game at any time. Doing all of this has been incredibly fun, and has gone a long way to really get me involved in the game and care about what has been going on it. It's way more fun this way than it might have been otherwise.

Really, creating things is a very large part of the fun of D&D. Normally, the DM hoards all the fun of the former, which does little more than create potential sources of friction and the possibility of players simply being uninterested in the result. I don't like that. It even deprives the DM of the unpredictability and excitement of seeing what other players might bring to the table. I think things work a lot better when the DM is just another player who happens to run the NPCs, and everyone at the table has an equal share in creating the setting and the story. DM disempowerment and greater player involvement brings more fun than DM empowerment. It even saves the DM a lot of effort, which is a great added benefit.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

All the article this poll was inspired by provided was DM advice, but here we are with 50% voting for actual mechanical fixes.

 

[LostSoul]

And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?

The DM narrates a situation and the players have to react to accommodate it. It doesn't work the other way around; the players do not tell the DM that they want to find a magic sword in the cave and the DM must react to accommodate them, for example. The same is true for all plot and setting devices: the number and type of monsters encountered, the distance to the nearest town, whether or not a cave is safe enough to camp in, etc.

I wasn't clear in my original post. I didn't mean acting outside of my character, I meant taking in-game actions in order to control the pace of the game.

[sblock=An example]For example: We're heading across monster-infested wilderness to do some dungeon crawling. As we're exploring, we stumble along a ruined tower during a wandering monster encounter (the DM generated the encounter terrain randomly). I think, "Hey, let's try and get this tower back in a decent condition so we can use it as a base of operations.

"Let's strike out from our tower, use all our resources in some hit-and-run attacks, and then head back. We'll hire some guys to guard the tower when we're gone because we know they'll eventually going to track us back there. We can ward it with an Alarm, too."

(If that tower doesn't exist, I might decide to build a little fort of my own.)

With that tower in place we can retreat safely and have some degree of control over the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations.

I'm playing a high-level fighter/magic-user in a 3.5 game right now, and the spells I have - Teleport and Plane Shift (well, Lesser Planar Binding) are the two big ones - grant me a pretty large amount of control over the above factors. We used to retreat to Sigil when things got too hot. (I don't see the 15-minute adventuring day in that game, since I have all of Mulhorand, Luskan, some drow, and probably others after me; I don't have time to dawdle.)[/sblock]

I want to be able to, through smart in-character play, control the factors CNN listed in the post I replied to.

 

[SteveC]

This is a real issue that will seriously return in 5E, and I dearly hope that the designers are aware of it. Any time your only resources are at-wills or daily, which is what 5E has shown us at this point, you'll have to deal with spending those resources outside of the norm.

I think it's likely to be doubled down if we go away from the notion that players can easily acquire the tools to avoid it (wands and consumable spellcasting devices). While we don't yet know that to be the case, if we're going to keep with the retro theme that 5E has going (which I hope is just an artifact of what we've seen in the public playtest, which is not much) then it's going to be worse.

I know that many GMs on Enworld are perfectly content to explain that the 15 minute workday is purely a playstyle issue, but even if that's so, it means you must play it within a more narrow confined playspace than either 3x or 5E. That happens to be a playstyle I don't particularly like.

To my mind, it's just a bad thing, since it's telling other GMs how they must play to be in the comfort zone for the new edition. If we're supposed to be in a "big tent," this time around, and excluding playstyles that are quite prevalent (and campaigns with this problem were VERY common) makes for a smaller tent.

I'll say this: my group did not have many problems with the 15 minute workday once the game progressed in levels in 3x, largely because they used wands to effectively play as long as they needed, and as soon as reserve feats came out, spellcasters could use them. It also was not a problem in 4E at all, but then that was by design.

It was the earlier editions where this was a real issue, and since we've only seen a very retro styled game so far (and very low level) that's what worries me.

 

[Lwaxy]

I wasn't clear in my original post. I didn't mean acting outside of my character, I meant taking in-game actions in order to control the pace of the game.

But would your example mean that your GM will only have all your games around that base of yours? Would you always be able to retreat there and have your safe 15 min workdays?

If my players throw a big firework of moves and spells close to their base and then retire, I'm fine with it. But 99% of their adventures won't be very close to where they stay in their downtime.

 

[Lwaxy]

I've never gone hungry either, but that doesn't mean that people aren't starving somewhere in the world. It's still a problem to be acknowledged and hopefully solved some day.

If it is not a problem for some of us, it means it doesn't really need to be a problem for anyone. Unlike your example, the only resource you need is a resourceful GM.

I dare to think that most GMs are able to plan ahead for resource management issues and, with a slight change of perspective, manage to keep the PCs in the game for more than one encounter a game day. Not saying that every game day needs more than one encounter, of course.

To me it seems that part of the problem might be the expectation of the players that their PCs will get rest after each and every encounter. Once you let that happen, you may have a harder time weaning them off it again, but it is either that or stop complaining about what is a matter of GMing and player cooperation.