Why is it so important?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Honestly, I don't think anything _really_ needed to be added to the discussion, since most of us already have made their point, and nobody is willing to change his mind.

Most of the discussion now seems to be rephrasing things that were already said...

The discussion has reached a point where nobody of the regular participants will benefit further from it, and only newcomers that don't already have an opinion on the subject can gain anything from the thread.

[/IMO]

 

[Imaro]

#2 only to Dungeons & Dragons, actually.

And if you look at the top 5 selling RPGs in the second quarter, only one of them features per-day resource attrition.

In fact, only D&D bucks this trend. Does D&D's place at the top have anything to do with the almost-universal correlation most of the public (gaming and non-gaming alike) has between D&D and RPG, or is entirely attributeable to D&D design? And assuming for a moment that the brand name has nothing to do with its market share and D&D really stands entirely on its own merrits in terms of design, is the per-day resource attrition system really such a cornerstone that people think of it right when they think of classes, levels, funny-sided dice, armor class, and hit points?

Sorry, RC. This was one of your weaker arguments in this thread.

Uhm...he asked about market share, not best selling game for one quarter. The information you linked to doesn't give market share per say. Mutants and Masterminds could have outsold certain games (like Scion) in a particular quarter because Scionemigod was pushed back and there are no other books to buy for Scion, yet for M&M three new books were released, so for that particular quarter Scion sells less and M&M sells more. Yet overall Scion can still have a higher marketshare. I mean I know WoD has the second highest marketshare( a little less than 20% on average).

As far as games listed having per-day resources...they do and they don't. In Exalted you don't "loose" charms but essence does not come back fully in every encounter. A starting exalt has somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 essence points, you only recover essence when resting either 4pnts/hour for being at ease(leisurely stroll, enjoying entertainment, etc.) or 8pnts/hour if at total rest (sleeping or recieving a massage). Even at total rest it will take you somewhere between 8 to 10hrs to regain all your essence after expending it. It boils down to the same resource management as D&D, how much of my total resources do I spend in an encounter.

Scion's legend points work a little differently...it is totally up to GM fiat when you "recharge" so it's neither a per-day or per-encounter resource. It actually allows the most flexibility for GM and player and I think it works wonderfully.

nWoD is again a different case, it encompases alot of seperate games so I can't really comment on it as a whole...Vampire's vitae doesn't "recharge" in every encounter but there are ways to replenish it. A Mage's magic doesn't run out but he/she risks it not working or worse through paradox. Mortal "depletion" is made per-day through the use of health levels and die penalties, yet there's no easy way for a mortal to heal in nWoD so it becomes the major limiting factor. Never played or purchased Werewolf, so I'm not sure how they handle resources. I have Changeling the Dreaming, but haven't had a chance to read through it yet.


What I'd really like to see is D&D stay per-day but give ways that a character can recharge certain or all of his abilities (like when you feed in Vampire) or through GM fiat for certain actions(like in Scion), that way GM's have more control over the feel and type of game they're playing by limiting or expanding the opportunities for PC's to "recharge".

 

[Raven Crowking]

Sorry, RC. This was one of your weaker arguments in this thread.

No worries. It wasn't an argument; it was a rebuttal.

M&M is all about the four-colour world of the comics, where an issue is generally about a few mooks and one big fight. Although Spider-Man and Batman seem to go out when they're already wounded, it seldom seems to affect them too much (and Spider-Man is affected far more than the non-enhanced mortal, Batman). This is a very good fit.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that resource-attrition models, like Villians & Vigilantes, suffered from being too much like D&D.

As a comic shop owner, I would have to say that the sales of D&D based comics, even among D&D players, is dismal. I believe that this is because the type of action found in a typical D&D game doesn't translate well into comics. Likewise, attempts to make D&D action work on the screen -- big or little -- have been failures. IMHO, of course....some people liked the D&D movies, or were enthralled by Uni. Yet D&D novels sell fairly well.

I have to admit that trying to force the game to emulate narrative markets where it has consistently failed, with the expectation that this will make the game better/sell better astounds me. Of course, the designers seem to be moving away from this direction, and into a more MMORPG direction AFAICT, but there is definitely a vocal minority who would take the game into a more cinematic, more comic-booky direction.

Again, I think that this is a mistake. Moreover, I don't think that D&D as a MMORPG is going to compete well with the online versions. I'd rather see the philosophy of D&D return to its roots. Not that I am going to get what I want, of course.

RC

 

[IanArgent]

Dave Noonan addresses this issue in his recent blog entry

More D&D: A few weeks ago in the podcast, I said the thing that excited me most about 4e was revisiting adventure pacing...the whole "wizard is done at 9:05 a.m." problem.

(I know that "done at 9:05 a.m." is not always the best specific example of the problem, but it's a useful shorthand. Suffice it to say that when the characters in a cooperative game are on radically different "power attrition curves," it can make it awfully hard for them to, well, cooperate. And the power attrition curves of a fighter and a wizard could hardly be more different.)

 

[Jackelope King]

Uhm...he asked about market share, not best selling game for one quarter. The information you linked to doesn't give market share per say.

Yep. Sorry. Med student, not economics major here. All I knew was that according to the report, M&M was selling really well, so I felt the need to point it out.

What I'd really like to see is D&D stay per-day but give ways that a character can recharge certain or all of his abilities (like when you feed in Vampire) or through GM fiat for certain actions(like in Scion), that way GM's have more control over the feel and type of game they're playing by limiting or expanding the opportunities for PC's to "recharge".

That wouldn't be a bad system at all.

Personally, I think my ideal would be to build off of Psionic Focus and its relationship with the various psionic feats from the XPH, which is a sort of de facto per-encounter system. Certain abilities would be available to you while you were focused, but certain other abilities would require you to expend your focus as a free action to activate them, so you'd have a situation similar to Incarnum where you really had to choose on a round-by-round basis what you wanted your strengths and weaknesses to be.

I have to admit that trying to force the game to emulate narrative markets where it has consistently failed, with the expectation that this will make the game better/sell better astounds me. Of course, the designers seem to be moving away from this direction, and into a more MMORPG direction AFAICT, but there is definitely a vocal minority who would take the game into a more cinematic, more comic-booky direction.

Again, I think that this is a mistake. Moreover, I don't think that D&D as a MMORPG is going to compete well with the online versions. I'd rather see the philosophy of D&D return to its roots. Not that I am going to get what I want, of course.

RC

Well, we'll see soon enough. This is something I've wanted for awhile, and something my group has wanted for awhile. The audience of college-aged gamers didn't grow up reading Grey Mouser or the like, and the idea of "returning D&D to its roots" is really repugnant to a lot of younger gamers. And not just because of the idea that old = bad, but because the fiction that inspired old school gamers is completely alien to today's younger gamers. Today's entry-level gamers are coming in informed not by Conan and the Grey Mouser, but by Peter Jackson's LotR and 300. Such is the benefit of growing up in a time when fantasy is plentiful and eye-popping and popular. It's a wholely different idea of what "fantasy" is, and I think that it's much more than a vocal minority, based on what I know from people I've gamed with in my age bracket. The success of games like Exalted alone show that there's a desire for it. But as you say, time will tell whether or not this works for D&D.

My hope is that it does.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Well, we'll see soon enough.

True enough.

 

[Mallus]

Are you seriously contending that, as a DM, you could not initiate encounters in any edition of the game?!?

No. You're totally misunderstanding me.

What I'm saying is that the resource attrition model works best when the players control when they get into combat encounters, ie, in a dungeon crawl when they decide to push ahead from a 'cleared section' to an unknown one.

The more unexpected/unplanned encounters the DM throws at them, the less well that model works. It's hard to manage one's resources daily resources intelligently when you can't predict when the next encounter will be.

I prefer a system that makes the players 'ready for action' whenever that might start. I don' like it a game that supposed to be about fast-paced heroic action devolves into players trying to second-guess the GM over when to use their decisive (read: cool and ass-kicking) abilities.

 

[pemerton]

If an encounter may be lost unless you use your significant resources, it would be foolish to claim that the PCs can know which way the dice will roll ahead of time. A fight that can result, for example, in a TPK is only a threat of a TPK until it is over. It would be foolish players indeed to assume that "Hey, it hasn't happened yet, so let's not take prudent action!" However, it would be equally foolish to assume that the "threat" of any encounter would continue to be significant if said threat was divorced from any actual consequence.

My position on this has been extremely clear, over pages of posts, although I understand that it is far easier to answer a strawman position than the one that I am taking.

I agree your position is clear. I deny that it is true. I have given arguments in support of my denial. One of those arguments is the (imagined) example at post #1001. You have not responded to that post.

Frankly, I don't understand what you think the strawman is. But I also don't understand why you continue to insist that a party will always deploy its daily resources first, if it feels under threat, without considering in some detail what those resources, and their techniques of deployment, might be. It is this question that my example tries to investigate (drawing on the remarks made by other posters who play per-encounter systems, and the comments of the designers).

this was an example of the doublethink in Pemerton's examples.

As you probably know, "doublethink" is a term coined by George Orwell in 1984. It characterises the state of mind of an adherent of Ingsoc (and, by implication, a member of the British Communist Party of Orwell's time) to simultaneously believe inconsistent propositions (eg that Stalin is a great humanist, and that he murdered millions of people) as part of the system of ideological commitment.

I don't see that the term has any application to any participant in the current thread, given that none of us is engaged in the defence of any controversial political doctrine by way of inconsistent assertions.

(1) Your resources are almost depleted by fighting the BBEG.

(2) You need resources to have tactically challenging fights.

(3) Therefore mop-up cannot be tactically challenging.​

Coupled with

(1) Tactically challenging encounters can exist without resource depletion.

(2) Therefore you can have tactically challenging encounters that do not take resource attrition into account.​

This has nothing to do with doublethink. What you are alleging is contradiction. I have already tried to explain why there is no contradiction, particular in post # 1016. It is crucial to that explanation that the fight against the BBEG can be tactically challenging without necessarily leading to resource depletion (because it can threaten such depletion in an interesting manner, without leading to such depletion), and/or that the mop-up can be interesting even though it does not threaten resource depletion (because, for example, doing it in such a way that it is a success without per-day resources being used is itself an interesting tactical challenge).

If you take the view that there can be no interesting tactical questions about the deployment of per-encounter resources, and these questions cannot implicate in an interesting fashion the possibility (without necessarily the actuality) of per-day encounter resource use, then you will not be persuaded that I have escaped contradiction. That is why I posted the example in post #1001, to try and show that these possibilities are real. It is also why I made the comment in post # 1016, that these possibilities are not real in core 3.5, because the only classes who get the relevant sorts of choices are spell users, and these choices are only whether or not to consume per-day resources.

Because in the first case, the mooks can be designed so as to not threaten remaining resources, either

A. Pemerton is wrong, and per-day resources are not an impediment in the situation described, or

B. Pemerton is wrong, and resource attrition is required for tactically challenging encounters.

Or C, as I believe, per-encounter resources open up tactical possibilities that are simply not available in core 3.5.

All of Pemerton's examples boil down to "Per-day resource attrition is bad because it means that I cannot have five sequential encounters that use 25% of a party's resources each without them regaining resources between those encounters."

I have not asserted that per-day encounter resource attrition is bad. I have asserted, and still believe, that purely per-day encounter resource attrition places obstacles in the way of play based on thresholds of significance other than that of resource attrition or addition (which you have labelled "mechanical signficance").

The reason an encounter has to use 25% of the party's resources to seem significant is due to changes made between 2e and 3e. Moving to per-encounter resources will make the percentage of resources needed for an encounter to seem challenging even higher. I have given my reasoning for this on a point-by-point basis, which has not been answered in a way that demonstrates it wrong (IMHO, of course).

Naturally, I believe I have shown there to be errors in your reasoning, by showing that a particular type of mechanical interest can arise (but not mechanical signficance, in your sense, because it is an interest that depends on the threat of resource attrition, rather than the reality, and also on the interest in making effective resource-deployment choices within the context of an encounter), which at the moment is available only to spell users, and only if they choose to expend per-day resources.

You apparently do not believe that this aspect of play is interesting. Perhaps you do not even believe that it is possible. I would be interested to see why you think these things, in light of my example at post #1001.

(Sooner or later, the next phase will be "Per-encounter resource attrition is bad because it means that I cannot have encounters that use 125% of a party's resources." Then the bar will be set at "at will" abilities. And why not have every ability "at will"?

I don't think that this remark has any bearing on my arguments about mechanical interest, which are predicated on the interest generated by a system which mixes per-encounter and per-day resources.

It would be relevant to concerns about strictly non-mechanical thresholds of interest, like those of plot development or thematic exploration. I suspect that the 4e designers are going in the direction that they are going (mixing per-day and per-encounter) because this is the mix most likely to facilitat a wide range of playstyles (though not operational play as D&D has traditionally known it) whereas purely at-will abilities would remove a significant amount of tactical challenge from the game.

 

[pemerton]

No worries. It wasn't an argument; it was a rebuttal.

This is a distinction I don't understand. In the two disciplines I'm familiar with (philosophy and law) one rebuts by providing counter-argument.

 

[pemerton]

All of Pemerton's examples boil down to "Per-day resource attrition is bad because it means that I cannot have five sequential encounters that use 25% of a party's resources each without them regaining resources between those encounters."

Correct. That is, purely per-day resources place a constraint upon the pacing and sequencing of encounters, which for certain desired playstyles (which want a pacing and/or sequencing of encounters that violates those constraints) creates an obstacle.

the limitations I replied to were contrivances, and easily done away with.

It is no different than saying, for example, that if you expect the party to fight a CR 40 opponent at level 1, you'd better take that into account during your design. If you are contriving to create a problem when you do design an adventure; similarly, you must contrive to create potential solutions.

This has nothing to do with per-encounter or per-day resources.

There is a difference in posting obstacles, and in posting obstacles that are inherent with a given game set-up related to a given threshold of significance.

<snip>

So, yes, you can use per-day resources to provide an obstacle, regardless of what threshold of significance you are using, but, as I demonstrated, it is even simpler if you so desire to avoid an actual obstacle from being created if that is what is desired. IOW, "halfway competent DM"s do not artificially create obstacles without providing the means to get around them, if the goal in the game is to not have said obstacles.

I don't dispute that a group who for whatever reason want to play D&D can work around the obstacles it poses to their desired playstyle, for example by compromising that playstyle. It doesn't therefore follow that they will not be better served by a set of mechanics that don't impose that obstacle in the first place.

For example, in 3E, any plot-line which has the following two features, (i) that every encounter is mechanically interesting (in the sense that it threatens, or actually results in, resource depletion) and (ii) that 7 encounters occur in the same game day, is quite difficult to pull off. That is because it is hard to achieve goal (i) without actually depleting resources, because in core 3.5 all resources that require a choice to use them are per-day. And this depletion of resources then makes it hard to achieve goal (ii), because after the first 4 or so encounters the party (and particularly the party spellcasters) will have no resources left to use.

A mix of per-day and per-encounter resources has the potential to allow such a plot-line to be played in a satisfactory manner.

If your conention is that only a bad GM or silly players would attempt such a plot-line using the current D&D rules, that may be so, in that they are trying to use the rules for a purpose that the rules don't really support. But there is nothing absurd, or contrived, about wanting to enjoy such a plot-line in a fantasy RPG. It is therefore not obviously irrational for the designers of 4e to try to come up with a set of mechanics that can support such a plot-line.

I have to admit that trying to force the game to emulate narrative markets where it has consistently failed, with the expectation that this will make the game better/sell better astounds me. Of course, the designers seem to be moving away from this direction, and into a more MMORPG direction AFAICT, but there is definitely a vocal minority who would take the game into a more cinematic, more comic-booky direction.

Again, I think that this is a mistake. Moreover, I don't think that D&D as a MMORPG is going to compete well with the online versions. I'd rather see the philosophy of D&D return to its roots. Not that I am going to get what I want, of course.

And, for those of you who say "Resource attrition isn't important; we do without it fine in Game X" I'd like to ask, "What is the market share of Game X"?

I get the sense that this is your real concern, namely, that changing the D&D rules to support the sorts of encounter sequencings and pacings I and others have put forward in their posts would be a change for the worse, in that (i) it would lead to the game no longer really being D&D, and (ii) it would undermine the market appeal of the game.

I broadly agree with the first of these points. In fact, having grown up on Moldvay Basic and AD&D 1st ed, I find that 3E is not really D&D. But I don't see that WoTC have any good reason to stick with a game that is really D&D, if it will not sell.

That therefore takes us to the question of market share. As a comic store owner, and therefore someone in touch with the commercial side of the hobby industry in a way that I am not, you are better placed than me to make those judgements. On the other hand, I would note that 3E departed from the roots of D&D, and this did not seem to hurt its sales. I would be surprised if WoTC is now taking D&D in a direction that is not supported by market research. And, for what it's worth, my own sense of the zeitgeist is that operational play, of the classic D&D kind, is really not that appealing to the majority of the contemporary gaming market.