Why is it so important?

[Crazy Jerome]

In fact it will be increased, assuming all classes now get limited use abilities. Previously 50% of the standard party, the fighter and rogue, had no operational resource management.

Or more likely, it will be slightly descreased, but feel like it is slightly increased. The Civ 4 design team had an interesting mantra they kept chanting when they were working on that game. They said that Civ 4 would not be, roughly, any more complex than Civ 3. However, they were adding complexity in certain places that they thought would be fun. Ergo, they were also removing complexity in certain places that they thought were less fun. They thought it was better to be upfront with this--maybe this Civ classic thing X was fun enough, but that's not enough to make the cut. It has to be not only fun enough to justify the complexity, but more fun than the other things that could use up the player's complexity tolerance. Naturally, when you design that way, no matter what you decide, you have a portion of the player base that would have chosen differently.

I'm getting a strong overall vibe from the 4E comments that the design team is doing something similar. Per day stuff is good, but wizard being maxed out as per day and fighter only worrying about hit points (translation, worrying about cleric cure spells)? OK, spread the per day stuff out. Traps are a classic, but make the party have a rogue, and only fun for the rogue? OK, give everyone something to do with the traps. (We only have hints on this one.) If everyone has something to contribute, then the rogue is useful, but not required. Face man gimped for combat because he is such a great face man? OK, spread out the social skills, and make it matter that most characters have them.

You spread something out, it gets thinner in the places where it used to be thick. There really isn't any pacing difference between, "we stop for the day because the cleric is almost out of cure spells," vs, "we stop for the day because almost everyone has used their second wind abilities," but if it feels different to the players, it might seem like a bigger change than it is.

 

[hong]

Not surprisingly, I didn't think that post sufficient to support your contention earlier, and I do not think it sufficient now.

Well, you would say that.

You seem to misunderstand me here, also. I am not saying that you are wrong. I am saying that you haven't evidenced that you are right. You may be right; you have simply failed to provide sufficient evidence for a reasonable person to accept this as a given.

I am conspicuously failing to find lots of people not accepting this as a given. Perhaps the new standard for being reasonable is to be unreasonable.

Thus, any reasoning that relies upon an appeal to authority must be regarded as fallicious (although the conclusion may still be correct, we don't have any means to know).

People have been making decisions on the basis of incomplete information for a long time. Trust me, I'm a statistician.

IMHO, of course.....and par for the course for the Interweb.

Unreasonableness? Indeed.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

The encounters that Wyatt describes are going to feel easy when they're taken out of the context of the adventure. Sure, when I don't really care about what's going on, losing 20 hitpoints out of 100 doesn't make a difference at all. When I know I'm facing a BBEG later on though, it takes on some significance and it's not something I'd call "too easy".

It would be considered too easy by my players. Mainly because that 20 damage can be healed by a 2nd level spell. It means they still have all their high level spells. The way 3.5e is balanced right now, even against the BBEG, as long as they have their 2 highest spell levels available, they are basically at 100% resources. Since, the average battle lasts about 5 rounds. Really hard ones last 7. This means that as long as you have your 7 "best" spells available" you can be at absolute maximum effectiveness.

By the time you have 100 hit points, I'm 11th level or higher and anything less than doing 100 hit points worth of damage to me is not going to register as a blip on my difficulty meter. Actually, it's very likely that even doing 100 damage to me is not going to register at all. I can heal it with one heal spell, leaving me with most of my spells left.

After 3 or so combats that manage to do over 100 damage to me (or about 15 combats that do 20 damage) I will start to feel it. If that damage is spread out amongst multiple PCs, however, it's ever easier to heal. If you carry enough magic items around and make sure to use wands and a lot of cure moderates instead of high level spells between combats, most parties can push this to about 5 combats of this difficulty before they feel the pressure.

People want long term familiarity with their PC. High amounts of PC death hurts that. Attrition of resources is a way of adding consequences to an encounter that isn't about life or death. Wyatt's comments makes it seem like life and death is the only thing he cares about, so an encounter without a significant risk of death is no fun. The problem, as occurs with killer DMs, is once you get hooked on "making the game entertaining by making it dangerous" is that the body count rises to the detriment of the game. Or, you start fudging dice, but that deception has a limited lifespan.

That's one form of play. However, not one that everyone follows. I ran a campaign where each player probably went through 10 characters each from level 4 through 16th. Even when I DIDN'T kill them, they ASKED me to allow them to switch characters so they could try out new classes, new feats or just new character ideas. I didn't fudge die rolls because a large amount of the fun for them was seeing how well their characters did against the challenges. They wanted to see "would they survive" and they wanted a chance to use their cool powers to kick enemy butt.

They know that if the enemy does some damage to them, they can rest up and come back before fighting the next one in at least 80% of situations.

 

[gizmo33]

I can heal it with one heal spell, leaving me with most of my spells left.

Yep, exactly. Every one of your explanations for why something is not difficult involves an assessment of your daily resources. If the damage (say 20 pts) doesn't not significantly impact your daily resources (ex. spells) then you don't consider it significant. All I'm doing is applying your reasoning to the proposed design where there are no more daily resources. You say "who cares that I took 100 points of damage, heal will bounce me back to full in no time". Now combine that with "who cares that I used a heal spell, I'll wait a minute and get it back".

The bottom line is that by removing long term resource consequences, it's removing the sense of risk, as IMO your examples demonstrate. The fact that your particular group doesn't find 20 pts of damage to be of consequence IMO is beside the point, which isn't about a particular hit point threshhold.

That's one form of play. However, not one that everyone follows.

Well sure, a high kill factor might be fun. But why design the game so that a high kill factor is the *only* way you can make it fun? Which is what I see this 4E situation proceeding towards.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

It matters IMO. There is a qualitative difference between the types of resources - as I tried to indicate with the WoW vs. TRPG comparison for example.

I can't recall; have you played WoW?

Continuing in that vein, I think WoW might actually be a good indication of how this sort of thing works.

My current favorite character is a Paladin (For the Horde!) and I have several different types of resources.

I have my blessings, which can be given to both myself and any allied characters. They take a ridiculously small amount of mana and last 5 minutes. They are, essentially, small, at-will abilities.

Then I have my seals, which are personal buffs. These, too, tend to not cost much mana. They are, for most purposes, at-will abilities.

Secondly, I can release those seals on an enemy, but this tends to be mana-intensive. Accordingly, I have a number of per-encounter abilities.

In the same vein are some area-effect spells and certain anti-undead and anti-demon abilities. They have a fairly long recharge time, which turns them into definite per-encounter abilities.

Similarly, my healing ability, which tends to cost a lot more mana than the seals and judgements, are per-encounter abilities.

Then, there's your long-recharge abilities, like Lay on Hands, using certain trinkets, etc. These can each be used once, but have a recharge time from about an hour to several hours. These are, certainly, "per-adventure" resources.

The resource management game is certainly alive and well in WoW - determining whether I should use my LoH now or wait until a more critical time is certainly analgous to whether or not a 3E wizard should drop his only fireball! - and that's with only a few "per-day" resources (generally, once you use your long-recharge items, you'll be done with whatever dungeon you're exploring before they come back).

Of course your first inclination in any fight is to turn to your at-will or per-encounter resources: they'll come back and be available much, much more quickly. That doesn't mean using a particular resource is not an important decision.

EDIT:

If I can arrange things such that all of my per-encounter resources have come back before tackling the next challenge, then I'm essentially operating at 100% capability for most of the time, which lets me do stupid things like attack three or four bad guys, each of which would be a moderately challenging encounter, simultaneously. (Or, as is more likely to happen, fight one guy, almost win, only to have his friend join in, when the 3rd guy rounds the corner.) However, this will probably cause me to dip into my per-day resources. But that's okay, because really, what I've done is just taken away that small safety net I used to have. All of my other resources are no less effective than they were before; I merely lack the opportunity to press the "Save my Butt" button.

Now, it's entirely possible that, as a player, the "smart" thing would be to press that "Save Me!" button and head back to the nearest inn until it comes back (analogous to Celebrim's belief on what will happen).

However, the number of WoW players you'll find who do that are vanishingly small (I'd say that none of them do, but I'm sure there's an outlier somewhere). Why? Because sitting in the inn for an hour after each fight is boring.

Instead, you say, "Yep - no more safety net. Maybe I'll be a bit more careful this time!" and then you continue on, hacking and slashing your way through the Keep until you find the BBEG. And maybe he beats you.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Yep, exactly. Every one of your explanations for why something is not difficult involves an assessment of your daily resources. If the damage (say 20 pts) doesn't not significantly impact your daily resources (ex. spells) then you don't consider it significant. All I'm doing is applying your reasoning to the proposed design where there are no more daily resources. You say "who cares that I took 100 points of damage, heal will bounce me back to full in no time". Now combine that with "who cares that I used a heal spell, I'll wait a minute and get it back".

And actually, that's the reason it WILL be fun. Because right now the only fight that IS fun is the one that actually challenges you.

It could be the first fight with an enemy that hits you for 150 damage per round that you need to use your Delay Death AND your Heal spell first round just to survive the first round. You survive, but it was cool because you needed your special abilities to survive.

Or it could be the last battle of the day where you have almost no resources left so you need to find some way to find the reletively minor damage the enemy is doing using the few resources you have. Which is also fun, since you need to do everything you can to survive and you will come close to death.

Or it could be no fun if the DM uses up all your resources THEN throws you up against the one big encounter, guaranteeing your death.

The idea is to turn EVERY battle into the first choice above. You NEED your special abilities to survive. The enemies will kill you for sure if all you do is just attack and hope they die before you run out of hit points. You need the party to work together and use all of their skills to survive. However, (and this is the key point) IF you do use your abilities, you have a very large chance of actually surviving.

In the above example, if the cleric has a delay death and a heal spell both prepared and the party can do the enemies hit points in damage during 1-2 rounds, then the party actually isn't in that much danger. It's fairly simple to defeat the enemy and not have anyone on your side die. However, one of your party members may drop below zero and require a powerful heal to bring back. It's exciting and the players are left thinking: "Glad we had the Cleric around, otherwise we might have died!" Thus, creating tension AND reinforcing the role and usefulness of the Cleric.

To accomplish this, you also need to limit the resources of the party somewhat as well. Make it so you can heal once per encounter...but you can heal ONLY once per encounter. Now, you can survive one round of that damage, but the second round? Thus, creating more tension.

 

[Celebrim]

However, the number of WoW players you'll find who do that are vanishingly small (I'd say that none of them do, but I'm sure there's an outlier somewhere). Why? Because sitting in the inn for an hour after each fight is boring.

Good story, and good commentary. I would like to point out how your analogy breaks down though. In your average pen and paper RPG, sitting in the inn for an hour after a fight takes like 6 seconds. Very few DMs will take the step of forcing the players to RP through an hour of tedium at the inn, and if they do and the still have players afterwards then they must have extraordinarily good relationships with thier players.*

The point being that the cost WoW players experience for resting (namely waste of real life time, tedium) is not paid by players of pen and paper RPGs. The situation is more analogous to playing a free form single player computer game, with a 'camp/rest' button. Unless there is a 'proactive' element like the risk of being ambushed while resting built into the game, the player of such a game will generally learn to 'camp/rest' (and/or save the game!) after every encounter.

*(I did heard a story once about a DM in 1st edition whose players insisted on marching through a driving rainstorm, and rather than creating ad hoc rules for fatigue and hypothermia and trying to impose them on the game, he insisted that the players take the actual game out into the very real rain going on at the time. Apparantly, after a few minutes in the rain, the players agreed with the DM that thier characters would probably prefer to find shelter.)

 

[gizmo33]

I can't recall; have you played WoW?

No. But I stayed at a holiday inn express. I also had a long conversation with a friend one time who is a WoW fan but he said it didn't compare to DnD in a lot of ways, and in the course of the discussion (and having a good sense of the technical limitations of computers to do what a human DM does) I wound up feeling like I had a good idea of what was going on. His list of things that he wished WoW had were all things having to do with versimilitude and the ability to feel like your actions meant something in the world. (I also played Neverwinter Nights, which I thought had a lot of the same feel as what my friend described for WoW. I was just going into a big fight, bashing a bunch of monsters, and then insta-boosting. Other than in a few narrowly defined areas, the NPCs never remembered anything about me and the world was pretty static.)

Your story, involving the part about the inn points this out. It's not that you can't have a 1/day ability in a computer game, that's easy enough. It's that you don't have reasonable ways to handle the consequences of daily resource usage. Nothing is going to happen in the inn unless it's programmed. Resting in the inn in WoW, apparently, doesn't mean that Sauron advances on the world and takes it over. That would be extremely complicated to program. It's a lot easier just to plop monsters and graphics down in a place and let the PC run through it. The result is that recovering 1/day abilities is boring, and of no particular consequence to the game.

So when Wyatt described the problem, it sounded like WoW. The way you handled the 9:00-9:15 problem as a DM IMO was to use techniques that are not available in WoW. The choice to rest becomes a difficult, or at least interesting one because the DM just isn't going to sit there with his dungeon of 10 rooms and wait for you to go back in.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Good story, and good commentary. I would like to point out how your analogy breaks down though. In your average pen and paper RPG, sitting in the inn for an hour after a fight takes like 6 seconds.

Yep. And if the world always pauses when that happens, then there's absolutely no difference between the "Rest 8 hours to get your powers back" and "Rest 1 minute to get your powers back" or "Rest 1 hour to get your powers back" rulesets.

On the other hand, if the world does not pause ...

 

[Geoff Watson]

This is, IMHO, the 3.X problem all over again.

3.X is a great system, if you play it in the same way that you would play 1e or 2e. However, 3.X doesn't reward that sort of play mechanically. Instead, it rewards play with a 15 minute adventuring day, lots of buffs, and all sorts of assorted problems that have sprang up specifically (IMHO) because the designers didn't understand what sort of play they were rewarding when the rules were being written.

It takes some time to realize that a new edition rewards different sorts of play, so it "shines" at first in initial playtest, and then the problems appear a year or more down the road, when the players have learned what the "winning" strategies are.

RC

Why are people playing 3e different to 1e and 2e?

There were groups who used the '15 minute adventuring day' style in 1st and 2nd ed.
1/2e rewards that style just as much as 3e does.

Geoff.