Why is it so important?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

"Safe" is a relative term. In general, I would say that a party will continue so long as it is safer/more beneficial to continue than it is to rest. Those parties who have 15-minute adventuring days do so because no amount of attrition is safter than 0 attrition. Therefore, "safe enough" is 0 attrition.

Resolving the problem requires altering the safety levels of attrition and rest. For example, consider the following:

party believes:

resting safer than continuing - party rests

continuing safer than resting - party continues​

The constant mention of timelines is to add a condition where the party is forced to believe that there are potentially dire consequences to resting.

Judging from my experience, the 15 minute adventure day is usually not caused by fearing that 0 attrition is bad. It comes from the fact that you simply can lose that many resources in a few encounters. Sometimes the fault is simply the encounter design itself. Instead of using the standard EL = PL rule, encounters are actually harder (I am guilty of doing that a in my own adventures, too, but I see the same in many adventure paths I have only played in).

One of the reasons is the same that might be a consequence of an encounter-based design paradigm: You can always get your resources back if you rest long enough. Sure, it takes a day, but effectively this means each individual encounter will never threaten you. So, why care at all, unless you are under time constraints?

A system that is balanced by encounter cannot entirely remove this fear. In fact, encounters might be intentionally designed more dangerous than they are in D&D 3.x. But I suspect the end result is the same, because the guidelines of the 3rd Edition are followed less in many adventures.

Personally, I have no real problem with most encounters becoming a little bit dangerous (or being as dangerous as they effectively are "today"). If the difference between a fight against minions and the fight against the big boss is not the difficulty, but the encounter setup, I am all for it.
In D&D 3, a mook fight shows off how awesome your character has become, since you don't break a sweat but in the end, you are standing on a pile of corpses. In D&D 4, you show off how heroic you are because you fought till your last breath and didn't give up despite the odds, and now stand bloodied and tired on a pile of corpses. (A minute later, you might - mechanically at least - lost most traces from the fight, but you know things could have done differently...)

 

[3catcircus]

The sacred cow of some "units" (characters) have different "logistics" (resource management) than others.

Considering the fact that having different logistics is the way it works in almost every other game and in real-life, what is the big deal?

Monopoly example: do you add another house or wait until you have enough for a hotel?

Military wargame (and real-world) example: Armor units are more concerned with the number of spare hummvee engines they have than the number of 5.56mm ammo. Infantry is just the opposite.

Whoah. Item crafting is a 3.x innovation (effectively); and is by far a small part of the wizard's role. The wizard's role is (and always has been) artillery/offensive support. The cleric's role has been (and they want to change that) the hit Point battery. Turning undead is a stunt, and a terribly complicated one at that.

The 4ed mentaility is that a character should fulfill his role in every encounter, and every round within that encounter. That doesn't necessarily mean the wizard should have a fireball for every round, but that he should be able to do something that the fighter cannot do (the stereotypical example, shoot crossbow) with his action.

This is a major change from previous editions, and I for one welcome it.

As was pointed out by someone else, item crafting has existed prior to 3.x.

Simple question - do you believe that a character should be able to do something appropriate to his class and role all the time, or not. And if so, why not?

No - because there will always be situations where a character's skills are totally unsuited for. More importantly, because resource management is one of several areas that prevent the game from becoming totally one-sided in favor of the PCs.

Just because it is "cool," doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it whenever and wherever you want.

Let's look at the prototypical fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard mix, with all at 1st level.

In a CR1 combat situation, the fighter has the best chance of hitting and has one more feat than everyone else - assuming he took Power Attack and Cleave, he can potentially hit and even kill two opponents in one round, more if he gets an AoO. He is designed for combat and combat alone. He can't cast spells, do sneak attacks, turn undead, find traps, or make magic scrolls,

The cleric doesn't have the same chances of hitting, but he can cast a spell or turn undead. In a combat against undead, even though he has less chance of hitting, he can be more effective than the fighter by turning undead. He can chose to cast a spell in combat, or save it for out of combat. He can do stuff the fighter *can't* do outside of combat, and he can throw the change-up - spontaneously casting a heal spell in a pinch during combat.

The rogue has the same chances of hitting as the cleric in combat. He can't cast spells, but he can potentially do more damage than the fighter due to his sneak attack. He is probably the most useful outside of combat - detecting traps, appraising items, breaking into a dungeon room, etc.

The wizard has the same chances of hitting as the cleric and rogue. He can cast spells like the cleric (but has one less total number of spells). Unlike the cleric, he has a helper (familiar) that can aid in combat or out of combat, and, he can do something the others can't do - create magic scrolls.

The bottom line is that each of the classes has their own strengths and weaknesses and just because a class is less effective than another in combat is no reason to try and have them do more in combat than they could in previous editions. Classes that are less effective in combat are more effective in non-combat activities.

 

[IanArgent]

OK - I'm exagerating a little when I talk about "every round, do something appropriate to your class and role". But I find that D&D causes primary spellcasters to have to act as crappy fighters by falling back to crossbow or mace far too often. I vastly prefer Shadowrun's style of magic where as long as you can hack the drain, you can keep casting; all day every day and twice a round with reflex enhancement.

Sorry - the drastic limits on spellcasting that D&D places on characters (especially low-level spellcasters) bugs the ever-loving crap out of me - it's why I played a single-class caster exactly once.

Let's try that without the hyperbole:

Any character should be able to use his core class abilities in most encounters. I have no problem with the odd encounter that locks off a character from using his core abilities from time to time. But in the end, a spellcaster should be able to be as effective in his role as a non-spellcaster; in as many encounters as the non-spellcaster can be effective in their role; in the same circumstances. So given the same amount of rest/reload; a spellcaster shoudl be able to go just as far as a non-spellcaster on the same level of class abilities, and be able to use his class abilities.

Hence, all classes have a mix of at-will, per-encounter, and per-day abilities. Fighters get powered up a little, spellcasters get powered down a little.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Judging from my experience, the 15 minute adventure day....comes from the fact that you simply can lose that many resources in a few encounters.

I agree. This is definitely part of it. This is part of the reason why, IMHO, those that suffer a 15-minute adventuring day now may potentially suffer a 5-minute adventuring day under 4e.

A. The play styles that tend to result in a 15 minute adventuring day do not require discretion on the part of players re: resource usage.

B. Because resource conservation is not a factor, battles tend to be designed to challenge a party with all its resources.

C. Per-encounter resources narrow the benchmark of challenge.


RC

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Considering the fact that having different logistics is the way it works in almost every other game and in real-life, what is the big deal?

Monopoly example: do you add another house or wait until you have enough for a hotel?

That's not differing logistics. It's the same logistics for every player in the game, they are all given the same choices.

Military wargame (and real-world) example: Armor units are more concerned with the number of spare hummvee engines they have than the number of 5.56mm ammo. Infantry is just the opposite.

Sure, but the logistics themselves are the same: Do I have enough of what I need to continue?

D&D has a closer analogy to a situation where Armor is concerned about whether they have enough tank shells to keep firing, but they only brought 4 with them. They'll get a new shipment of 4 tomorrow, but can they hold off the enemy until then? Best to hide in the tank and do nothing until a big enough threat comes along to waste one of them. Or, you could exit the tank and try to take out the enemy with a knife.

While the infantry are stocked with so much ammo that they could fire their guns continuously for days and not run out. Plus, they get regularly resupplied so they never worry about running out.

One group worries about logistics, the other one doesn't. That doesn't happen in real life. Instead, logistics in D&D is used as a balance on power. Since the tank can easily take out almost any target the infantry can(and with overkill), it wouldn't be very much fun to be the infantry if you could just send in the tank to do everything. So you put restrictions on the tank in order to make sure they don't do EVERYTHING.

As was pointed out by someone else, item crafting has existed prior to 3.x.

I don't count the item crafting in 2nd edition(and 1st was similar) as being item crafting, per se. There was a large section of the DMG dedicated to explaining how each magic item was supposed to be unique. In order to craft ANY item at all, you needed strange and rare magical components and that each item should be the result of 2 or 3 adventures worth of gathering components to make one.

There weren't any "rules" for it either. It was more like "Your DM can tell you what you'll have to do to make an item and whether or not you can have it based on how powerful it is."

The bottom line is that each of the classes has their own strengths and weaknesses and just because a class is less effective than another in combat is no reason to try and have them do more in combat than they could in previous editions. Classes that are less effective in combat are more effective in non-combat activities.

The problem is in the TIME it takes to do those activities and the involvement in them. As I've pointed out in other threads that in an average session 4 hour session of my home game, 3 hours of it are spent in combat. In an average 4 hour session of Living Greyhawk or Xen'drik Expeditions, about 3 hours are spent on combat.

The remaining hour is spend partially on the party discussing courses of action with each other, partially describing things to the party, partially role playing, and partially solving non-combat encounters.

On average, I say our wizard spends...maybe 10 minutes per session on non-combat activities. The Rogue spends maybe 10. The bard or diplomat in the party spends maybe 15 talking to people and doing their thing.

For the other 3 hours of the session, the other players would like to feel that they have some reason to sitting at the table. They don't like being told "Well, you knew by not playing a fighter you weren't going to be good at fighting. So, just sit there and wait for your 10 minutes of shining."

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I agree. This is definitely part of it. This is part of the reason why, IMHO, those that suffer a 15-minute adventuring day now may potentially suffer a 5-minute adventuring day under 4e.

A. The play styles that tend to result in a 15 minute adventuring day do not require discretion on the part of players re: resource usage.

I've already said this isn't true. Groups I've ran who have the 15 minute problem DO use discretion with their powers. They don't open up with their most powerful abilities. They use only enough to get the job done.

The only reason they had the 15 minute problem is that *I* as the DM kept using harder and harder enemies against them because it was no fun for me or a number of the players to constantly run 1 hour long battles which used only a couple of resources and whose ending was a foregone conclusion.

If this same party was able to:
A. Fight a battle where they had to use a significant number of resources
B. Felt like the battle might turn against them if they didn't try hard enough
C. Got all their resources back afterwards

I think it would be a lot of fun. And by the way, I consider per encounter abilities to still be resources. To me it matters more if someone got to cast a cool and flashy spell each that was significantly better than "I attack with my crossbow" each round for 6 rounds than it matters that the PCs lose resources for the next battle.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I've already said this isn't true.

That doesn't make it so, however.

The only reason they had the 15 minute problem is that *I* as the DM kept using harder and harder enemies against them because it was no fun for me or a number of the players to constantly run 1 hour long battles which used only a couple of resources and whose ending was a foregone conclusion.

IOW, you removed their ability to act with discretion. Again, this is something that I covered in my analysis Lo! these many pages ago.

I have to wonder how you will react to 4e if it is no fun for you or a number of your players to constantly run 1 hour long battles which use only a couple of resources and whose ending is a foregone conclusion?

This is a point that I have been trying to make for a very, very long time.

RC

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

My first point: it's somewhat misleading (not intentionally) to remove, from the example, the dice rolling, other PCs, and so on, basically simplifying the encounter and then say that the expected result was uninteresting. I may have missed the point of your example, but the example's simplifications AFAICT seemed to create a situation that doesn't really exist in a typical DnD game. It also removes most all of the interesting aspects from an operational standpoint.

The point is, although it's more complicated than what I've said (PCs are individually taking damage, the cleric is healing them, they are using magic items, each party member is doing damage or missing each round), what it comes down to it is that in each round the party loses so many resources such as hit points, spells, magic items and the enemies lose so many resources. If you take an enemy out of the battle, you remove its damage from your party.

Most of the time a good party can figure out quickly that their resources are capable of handling the enemy without any REAL risk of death("They did 13 damage first round and 18 damage second round. The cleric can heal the damage each round with a cure moderate. We are perfectly fine.").

However, they know that if their cleric wasn't there to heal them, and they only had 30 hitpoints, they'd be dead in 2 rounds. So they aren't about to stop healing to "conserve resources". They NEED to use those resources to survive, but it is a fairly big no-brainer than they'll win using the resources.

Secondly, the resource attrition game is not "bypassed" by resting. Resting is one of the options in a resource attrition game. That's like saying that killing a monster "bypasses" the DnD monster encounter. Resting is one of the ways that you deal with low resources. Now people have complained about resting for two reasons IIRC - one is that they think it hurts the "story", the second is that they think it's a 100% certain situation and thus a formality and tedious, or unreasonably frustrating and deadly if it's not a 100% certain situation. I've tried to address each of these objections in detail in previous posts.

I haven't seen anything that could explain to me why those aren't two valid points. The story is often hurt by resting. Although, strangely enough, my concern had more to do with a situation when there were no story concerns at all for resting.

I was running a party through RTTToEE and then Castle Maure afterwards. RTTToEE has built in options for "What happens if the PCs leave for a week and then come back. However, at low levels they were tedious and lame. Each section of the temple would hire a small number of new guards in a week. So, when the PCs were at low levels and they'd walk to a major town to get items sold and buy new ones, they'd merely have to fight the entrance encounter again. By the end of 1-2 game sessions, the party would have enough treasure that they'd want to sell it again(or they'd be out of resources) and would leave the dungeon and come back in a couple of weeks.

So, then, we'd spend one session fighting all of the battles we fought two sessions ago, run out of time, then have the party continue to actually get further into the dungeon on the following session. Then, they'd realize that they had too much loot to carry and they were out of resources, so they took the opportunity to leave and sell their stuff again. So, every second session was fighting the same battles over and over again. Which got boring for me as a DM. I wanted to get to the cooler part of the adventure instead of rolling the same 12 crossbow shots from the entrance guards again.

So, I gave up allowing the temple to recruit new people so that we'd get somewhere. I figured they'd run out of possible candidates after a while. Then, the party realized this and started resting in the dungeon in areas they'd already cleared out, sealing the doors so no one would bother them. When they realized they could do this and get away with it, they started resting more often and more often. There really were no story concerns except that the PCs knew that the temple was up to something big and they needed to stop it. But there was no urgency in the PCs because they were fairly certain that I wouldn't let the temple succeed before they got to the end of the dungeon.

Once they got high enough level to teleport, I didn't have to worry about restocking the dungeon at all anymore or whether or not someone would discover them while sleeping. They'd simply teleport out as soon as they felt they had used enough resources or they had enough treasure and teleport in the next day, fully rested. Since there were no story concerns and no consequences to resting, they did it whenever they wanted.

The only REAL concern was it didn't seem very "realistic" for them to be exiting the dungeon after every battle just because they could. It seemed like they should WANT to push on, to reach the leaders of the temple and wipe out the den of evil as soon as they could before their plan could be unleashed.

Also, resting does bypass the resource attrition game. It doesn't bypass resource management, that's a different game though: "Will I need my fireball against the BBEG?" is a
different question than "Will I have enough spells left to survive against the BBEG?"

Running out of any one spell or spell level may not be enough reason to rest, but there reaches a critical point where you CANNOT continue with the resources you have. I want to remove this limit.

Your statement here does what Wyatt's did originally AFAICT - it seems to discount the fact that there are often consequences for resting, and thus the events that lead up to you being forced to rest (the three "uninteresting" battles) are actually very interesting to players that aren't naive/uninterested about resource issues in the game. Granted, if resource issues aren't a party of the playing style then this is probably the case. But if they are, then weathering the first three encounters with enough resources intact that you can continue with the adventure is an important part of the challenge of those three encounters.

But as was pointed out previously, if you fight the 3 "uninteresting" battles, end up with not enough resources to continue, then you either risk death by resting or death by continuing on. You don't have enough resources for another battle one way or another.

The only real solution to this is to rest after 2 "uninteresting" encounters to make sure that you have enough resources left to fight any random encounter that might attack at night.

Failing to do so is a kind of non-deadly failure that I like to have in the game. It also vaguely mimmics reality where resource depletion is often a reason for failure. The alternative, with an "all-per-encounter" resource design is that the PCs just keep fighting until everything else is dead or they're dead.

Exactly, and that's what I want. I want it to be that the ONLY reason heroes fail is that they didn't try or they went in WAY over their head. Failing due to the fact that you used too many magic missiles against those orcs is...not very heroic feeling. It's very "realistic". But that's not what I'm going for when I play D&D.

Agreed. IME my players develop a pretty good sense of the impact that resource usage is having on their success during the overall adventure because there are often consequences to resting. Without these sorts of experiences that allows players to put things in this context, I can start to see how the battles are just tedious.

It's just that unless you push the PCs forward, that they can find a solution to 90% of all consequences to resting: Leave the dungeon and come back tomorrow or spike the door shut are the two biggest and easiest(I've also seen rope tricks, illusions and silence spells, and any number of other adventurer tricks).

It IS possible to push a party to continue with story reasons, but that almost always ends up in a TPK. After all, if a party is stuck in a situation where they have to fight the BBEG with almost no resources or rest and have the BBEG kill the kidnapped villager, then they HAVE to continue if they want to be the heroes. Forcing a party to fight a battle they can't handle will often cause a TPK.

A party put in that situation runs into a lose-lose situation. The only win in that situation was to conserve enough resources that you don't get into the lose-lose situation. Which basically asks the questions "Was luck on the PCs side?", "Did the wizard use a crossbow while the cleric attacked with his mace for the at least one of the combats?", and "Did the DM plan out the strength of the encounters correctly?"

 

[Mallus]

I have to wonder how you will react to 4e if it is no fun for you or a number of your players to constantly run 1 hour long battles which use only a couple of resources and whose ending is a foregone conclusion?

I play Mutants and Masterminds, so that's not a problem for me!

 

[Raven Crowking]

I play Mutants and Masterminds, so that's not a problem for me!

I am currently running a heavily modified version of 3.x with per-day and per-encounter abilities. I was previously running a lightly modified version of 3.0. Under neither of these systems did I experience the 15-minute adventuring day problem for the simple reason that, when the characters decided to rest, the world went on.

But I would be foolish to claim that, because I didn't have a "15-minute adventuring day" problem, that the problem didn't exist. Nor is my ability to easily run games without this problem in 3.0 evidence that 3.0 solves this problem. While I am continually reading "I run X without this problem" as proof that the system in X solved the problem, if I believed that line of reasoning I would also have to conclude that the system presented in 3.0 solved the problem.

Clearly, this is untrue. It therefore follows that "Person Y can run System X without Problem Z" is not evidence that System X solves Problem Z.

Moreover, if "Person Y can run System X without Problem Z" and "Person A cannot run System X without Problem Z", then I conclude that it is likely that the problem does not exist because of System X, but rather because of some difference as to the way Person Y and Person A approach the use of System X.