Why is it so important?

[gizmo33]

Camp in the area? How quaint.

I suppose they could just set up a disco.

Only if you think of RPGs purely in resource-depletion terms. Which is just so videogamey.

Actually Pacman just kept going on until he either finished the level or got killed. It would have hurt the plot to have made him rest I suppose.

 

[hong]

I suppose they could just set up a disco.

Or teleport to one.

Actually Pacman just kept going on until he either finished the level or got killed. It would have hurt the plot to have made him rest I suppose.

Exactly.

 

[Celebrim]

Many stories and movies. Heroes fight battle after battle and keep going strong. You never see them rest after a few fights.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but the classic hero's tale requires him to be defeated halfway into the journey, only to recover and comeback with new found power. So, in a sense you always see the hero rest someway into the conflict. It is difficult for me to think of, for example, a movie with a central heroic protagonist where the hero did not.

 

[gizmo33]

Many stories and movies. Heroes fight battle after battle and keep going strong. You never see them rest after a few fights.

Yea, like that time when the Fellowship was in Moria...um...well. Like that time that Conan was in the Tower of the Elephant and he fought all those...uh...he fought one spider. Then there's the Princess Bride - I think he fights the duellist, then the giant, then the poison drinking thing really isn't a fight, then he fights a rodent of unusual size...wait, I'm getting close to 4. Then he surrenders! Dagnabbit! Hopefully I'm forgetting a battle somewhere. I was so close.

Hey, what about the new Halloween movie? I'm sure Michael Myers kills more than 4 teenagers before camping. And who says they're not an appropriate EL?

Hmmm. Sarcasm is cumbersome when written. Are you sure those stories involved APL=EL encounters? Maybe in those stories the monster's CR was far below the party's level. I actually can't think of any movies with more than four combats a day. Certainly not Predator (boy that's a movie about resource attrition if I've ever seen one). Willow? the Latest Harry Potter? Maybe I should just wait for your response.

(edit: How about 300! I don't quite remember the details but there had to be more than 4 fights a day for those dudes. Of course one could quibble about just how chipper and refreshed they were after 4 fights, but it was hard to tell because the lighting was dark in spots. Maybe they had just as much energy after 4 fights as they did when they started?)

 

[hong]

Yea, like that time when the Fellowship was in Moria...um...well. Like that time that Conan was in the Tower of the Elephant and he fought all those...uh...he fought one spider. Then there's the Princess Bride - I think he fights the duellist, then the giant, then the poison drinking thing really isn't a fight, then he fights a rodent of unusual size...wait, I'm getting close to 4. Then he surrenders! Dagnabbit! Hopefully I'm forgetting a battle somewhere. I was so close.

Yes. You were so close to recognising the fundamental point, namely the conspicuous lack of a 4-encounters-per-day paradigm in all of these. (LotR is basically a whole bunch of days where nothing happens in terms of "encounters", with a few days where there's one fight, and then one or two massive, all-day set-piece battles. As was pointed out by Karinsdad, IIRC.)

Hmmm. Sarcasm is cumbersome when written.

Nah.

 

[IanArgent]

Relevant or not to the conversation...

Take a look at NWN2. A game where "resting" is a quick affair - essentially rutning all of your per-day abilities into per-zone abilities (or even per encounter abilities). One that that made me go "oh, my, how broken" at first: NWN2 does not enforce material components, and you can have a sorcerer with stoneskin as a known spell...

This basically means that my "stopping point" is when the stoneskins wear out. It also means I don't have to tote a cleric around becaue no-one takes HP damage(which is good, because at the point I am in-game, I don't have a cleric). At any rate, hitting the "rest" button refills the party's hitpoints anyway. Essentially, my party's hit point totals are irrelevant (or mostly so); it's the amount of damage left on the stoneskin. The game is still quite fun, fairly challenging (I have been TPK'd by what I assume are appropriate-level encounters since I'm not going out of my way to grind XP); but the essential resource-management paradigm of TT D&D is entirely out the window.

 

[Grog]

I didn't mean to suggest this if I did. I don't actually DM like this. I don't do anything in order to keep my players from doing anything. I run the adventure according to whatever seems logical to me (I know that's pretty general.)

Oh. Well, someone else claimed that you had suggested this, and you didn't contradict the post, so I thought you had accepted it. But maybe you just didn't see the post.

In any case, if you don't think that wandering monsters are a cure to the short adventuring day problem, then we are in agreement on that point. The short adventuring day does not stem from resting per se, but rather from the mechanic that forces the PCs to rest after (generally) every four encounters.

What I'm arguing for is that camping is not a situation of auto-recharge the way Wyatt seems to treat it in the blog entry.

Well, what you have to realize is that there's really no middle ground here. Either the PCs can rest when they need to, or they can't. (There is no partial resting in 3E the way there was in 1E - eight hours of rest gives the PCs all their spells back, and anything less than that gives them nothing). And if they can't rest, they stand a strong chance of being killed by the encounter that prevented them from resting, and even if they survive it, they're not going to be able to do anything else until they can rest, because they don't have any resources remaining.

 

[pemerton]

For extra credit I'll also say that the DM fudges dice reguarly because for every "woohoo we got lucky and won" situation that occurs, those same characters are killed a week later by a "uh-oh, we got unlucky and lost". The DM has fixed this through fudging.

An alternative is that the players have earned "plot control" tokens - Fate Points or whatever - and have spent them in the unlucky cases. And these tokens need not necessarily be resources, in the sense at issue in this thead, if the players earn them through their own choices pertaining to thematic exploration (or if in some other way the players, rather than the GM, get to make the choices that determine the distribution of these tokens).

I should add, I don't say this by way of disagreement, but more by way of observation and comment. I've already asked if anyone has any insight into how 4e will use Action Points. I'll ask again, because this seems very relevant to understanding the force of the criticisms that Gizmo33 and others are making of per-encounter resources.

 

[pemerton]

To:Jackelope & Hong...

I hope you'll accept an answer from someone else.

The problem with assuming that the 9-9:15 problem will be solved by per-encounter is this...

If, as has been suggested, I am able to throw more "significant" encounters in terms of in-combat resource expenditure(thus life/death) type of encounters then the average of PC's being killed or even a TPK rises significantly with each encounter(law of averges). The PC's will always be at more risk than a single monster encounter for dying, having more "significant" encounters, as defined above, raises this exponentially. And in fact can end up putting a longer halt on gameplay than a days' rest(no ressurection at lower levels).

B.) If I am throwing "insignificant" encounters at them, well first I can do the same in 3e by having monsters with way lower CR's than the characters. But then this leads to(as has been defined by Hong) numerous boring encounters. So what exactly has been accomplished by per-encounter abilities to solve the 9-9:15 problem? It seems like a smokescreen that confuses the issue but results in nothing.

If "signficance" is defined as "impacting on the resources available in future encounters, including living party members" then it is correct that the only way to get significant encounters in a per-encounter system is to have more life/death encounters.

Furthermore, if "signficance" is defined in that way then non life/death encounters will tend to be insignificant (= boring) in a per-encounter system.

But "signficance" does not need to be defined in this fashion. If defined in some other fashion, then we can see the attraction of per-encounter for some people: it permits the use of encounters that are significant in this alternative sense, without the issue of per-day resource management getting in the way.

<snip>In the per-encounter model there is no granularity in my encounter design, it is either a live/die encounter where I have built it so that they're in-combat resources are all expected to be used or an insignificant encounter where only per-encounter and at-will abilities should be used.

The defenders of per-encounter are not using "signficance" as equivalent to "having an effect on the number of resources available in the future". Hong, Jackelope King and I have all canvassed alternative notions of signficance.

 

[pemerton]

I am also, I admit, skeptical of the claim that party resources can be balanced both in terms of how good they are and how often they can get used, while still maintaining the flavour and party roles that makes having more than one class mean having more than one type of experience in the game.

This comment seems to presuppose that the overwhelming determinant of the experience of a class is its resource-management aspects. It is possible, however, that the 4e designers are looking to other aspects of play and the play experience. These could include aspects as diverse as flavour text (hugely important in many RPG experiences), resolution method, the relationship between movement, actions and resource deployment, etc.