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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:23PM
#291
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If your point of view is that the D.m. has no control over the scope of encounters, the possible p.c's solutions to the challenges presented or the likely resources that might be intelligently expended then perhaps you should not be the Dungeon master.
I have no idea where you got the impression that I think the DM has no input on this. I've been DMing for 35 years, thanks. I am pretty sure I have a basic handle on how it goes. There's PLENTY of scope for things to happen that the DM doesn't anticipate, both in terms of player actions and in terms of just luck and unforeseen circumstance.
Yes everyone does have an encounter occasionally that spends more of the p.c.'s recourses to conquer and p.c's do and should die sometimes during gameplay, that's why it's an adventure and not knitting class. If a system which encourages "padding" to overcome the p.c.'s lack of insight in general is the plan of action to ensure that meta gaming doesn't happen you have become what is known as an enabler.
Look, if the system allows for variation, AND provides for that variation (bad choices, bad luck, extra good tactics, etc) to have a bit less extreme impact on the play such that once you make one mistake you're insta-ganked that's not especially a bad thing. We can differ on how MUCH 'padding' there is but if your logic was sound then wouldn't the best possible game be the one where every mistake is death and everyone has one hit point? This isn't some sort of 12 step program, its a GAME. One where the players will usually have more fun when they get some degree of slack. That's my 35 years of experience talking. D&D isn't some sort of macho exercise where the DM's job is to make sure that the adventure is so lethal that it kills you every time you do something that isn't the exact right thing, that's called Zork. Deadly is fine, and people's tastes will vary, but IME and IMHO its not a bad idea to dial it back a BIT from OD&D levels. That's all 4e did for instance. You can still quite easily make mistakes that get you killed, or even just die from bad luck, but it doesn't have to happen EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Players can be taught to play with intelligence and some forsight Example: The fist time the door is bashed in and it happens to be a spike trap on a spring set this will train players to look before they leap. The first time they have bad behavior curbed they learn not to go sleeping in the dungeon where the monsters patrol their home just as the town gaurd does back at the village or Keep on the Borderlands. It is a playstyle problem that needs to be rectified.
No, no it isn't. Nothing needs to be 'rectified'. This is a fantasy game where you pretend to be an elf or a wizard (or both). It is not some sort of exercise in being the studliest DM or the studliest player. It is just a fun game. It will be MORE fun if the resource rules are such that when you burn your big spell or whatever that there are mechanics in the game that let you press on and possibly (at a reduced chance of success) still succeed, or at least keep contributing to some extent beyond tossing darts from the back row. Nothing is going to 'cure' 5MWD and it doesn't HAVE to be cured, but it is a more useful game when it happens less often, because it is more fun.
Now if you allow these things as an everyday occurance you are part of the problem and not the solution. Blowing your wad on the orcs when you are hunting down the Wizard who has orginized them into his shock troops is just plain dumb. Expecting to rest and regain spells just anywhere to be able to Nova after every encounter is Just plain dumb. Allowing that to take place is asking for metagaming. Letting the players suffer for blatant munchkin style play is not punishment it's poetic justice. It inforces the letter of as well as the spirit of the rules.
Who is to say what the spirit of the rules are? The rules say the wizard can go rest and get his spells back. What **** wizard would march on into danger with no spells? lol.
Of course there can be better and worse play, and remarkably what I've been saying is that being able to run around and Nova and run away every encounter is not a good thing. I and many others have only suggested that the rules would be better if the consequences of doing that were not so dire that you were FORCED to run away if you made one little mistake one time, or something went slightly wrong, or you weren't aware of the fact that said bad guy even existed yet. You shouldn't HAVE to always rest like that. The game can't really prevent it, but it needn't punish not doing it overly.
In any case, in terms of 5e and what Mike said the real question here is if making the game revolve around a specific number of encounters and then trying to balance different resource use systems to that one number is a very good idea. I don't really think it is that great an idea. At least 4e gave us ONE resource mechanic, so the running out would generally happen pretty reliably at the same point for the whole party, AND once you were low on resources you weren't totally SOL. 5e is doing it the hard way, and has less leeway. The amount of leeway is always arguable and situational, but I think balancing HP vs Daily spells probably won't work.
That is not dead which may eternal lie
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:23PM
#292
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Date Joined:
Feb 12, 2009
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Okay I'm going to cite my second to last game session as an example.
In this game I started out completely fresh. Fully healed and fully rested. I had all of my dailies and every healing surge. After the first encounter I had 3 healing surges left. After the second encounter I had 0 healing surges left, I didn't have full health, and my daily was gone. Thats when we heard the screaming in the city we were standing outside of. There was literally no option to rest. I didn't even have enough time to use the comrades succor ritual to grab some healing surges from others that had them left. We could not rest, I wanted to as a player, but in character my fellow party members and I decided that saving other people came first. We needed to save the people in the city we were outside of so we went on in. I was not even the only player tapped on daily resources. at least two other people in our 5 man party had tapped their resources quite a bit. They had healing surges left for the most part (at least enough to cover getting healed twice and spending a second wind), but I think maybe one or two people had a daily left. Frankly the only valid reason to ever press on at that point is plot. We shouldn't get punished if we want to rest then we just shouldn't want to rest then. If we had rested then something terrible would have happend and the plot would have changed, but there would have been nothing wrong with any of that. Although it would have been completely out of character for one or more of the characters (hence why it didn't happen).
the runing low on healing surges to me is somthing rare to happen in game.
there was just such a big amoutn of them you had to grind trough as a DM.
And the players i played 4th edition with tended to hoard daily powers, so would probrbly not have expanded any of them in the first 2 encounters, unless they contained solo monsters, or i went above what was recomended as a very hard encounter in the DMG.
if i stuck with the DMG guideline it rould take 7 or 8 encounters before the first player would be without surges.
if i stuck with the DMG guideline it rould take 7 or 8 encounters before the first player would be without surges.
I couldn't agree more. In order to challenge my players I had to go far outside the bounds of the encounter building system. If you followed the rules for encounter building in 4e it was a snoozer. My fighter types never got anywhere near 0 surges. My rogue maybe a couple times.
Why is - "The DM can fix this" not criticized in 4e encounter building?
We are level 3 and I am a bard I have 8 healing surges. We got ambushed and surrounded by undead in the first fight. Also I have a mount that I can heal with my own surges. I think it may be a house rule letting me do that, but it only cost me like 2 of my healing surges. The second encounter was in fact vs an elite that was right at the difficulty cap for our level and he required that I put my daily up on him so as to allow my fellow players to not die. The third fight was a combination of the first two. Since we now knew what we were dealing with it was a little easier to know the right moves to make for the third encounter.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:25PM
#293
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Date Joined:
Jul 25, 2010
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I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. I've played every version of the game since then. The only time I ever have encountered a five-minute workday is when I played the many Dungeons and Dragons computer games.
As a DM I have yet to ever have had my players try to initiate a five-minute workday in any of my tabletop RPG sessions. As a player in tabeltop I have also never initiated a five-minute workday. I guess I've been lucky not encountering such a thing in my 32 years of tabeltop RPG. I fail to see how any of the versions of the game (other than the computer versions) have had this happen. I guess I'm just naive,
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:29PM
#294
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Who is to say what the spirit of the rules are? The rules say the wizard can go rest and get his spells back. What **** wizard would march on into danger with no spells? lol.
You know, in sports there is a rule that says you have to allow time for an 'injured' player to be taken off the field. This often takes several minutes, and at least in the game of football, the player needs only spend one play on the sideline.
So...if I'm Peyton Manning, do I have one person each play get 'injured' so we can have extra time for me to rest between doing Peyton Manning-ish things? I mean, he's bound to be tired out there in all that equipment. Who's to say that that isn't within the spirit of the rules...? What Peyton Manning-caliber player would play when he's tired?
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:30PM
#295
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I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. I've played every version of the game since then. The only time I ever have encountered a five-minute workday is when I played the many Dungeons and Dragons computer games.
As a DM I have yet to ever have had my players try to initiate a five-minute workday in any of my tabletop RPG sessions. As a player in tabeltop I have also never initiated a five-minute workday. I guess I've been lucky not encountering such a thing in my 32 years of tabeltop RPG. I fail to see how any of the versions of the game (other than the computer versions) have had this happen. I guess I'm just naive,
31 here and the exact same thing. We should buy a lottery ticket, the way our luck's working. 
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:40PM
#296
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Date Joined:
Jun 24, 2009
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I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. I've played every version of the game since then. The only time I ever have encountered a five-minute workday is when I played the many Dungeons and Dragons computer games.
As a DM I have yet to ever have had my players try to initiate a five-minute workday in any of my tabletop RPG sessions. As a player in tabeltop I have also never initiated a five-minute workday. I guess I've been lucky not encountering such a thing in my 32 years of tabeltop RPG. I fail to see how any of the versions of the game (other than the computer versions) have had this happen. I guess I'm just naive,
Well, you are just super.
You do realize, however, that many, many people DO have this problem right? I'm not quite sure why you think that coming on the boards and saying, 'I don't have this problem' helps.
Personally, I don't have too much of a problem with Vancian Magic, but I recognize that some people do. I don't jump into their posts and say, 'I've never had a problem with Vancian magic', as if that somehow helps them.
What we're trying to do is find solutions for people who do encounter this problem. And the Mearls article did precisely nothing to find any.
"What is the sort of thing that I do care about is a failure to seriously evaluate what does and doesn't work in favor of a sort of cargo cult posturing. And yes, it's painful to read design notes columns that are all just "So D&D 3.5 sort of had these problems. We know people have some issues with them. What a puzzler! But we think we have a solution in the form of X", where X is sort of a half-baked version of an idea that 4e executed perfectly well and which worked fine." - Lesp
"They are making it clear that when modern design and common sense come into conflict with tradition, tradition wins." - Thecasualoblivion
"When I DM Next I feel that I might as well be running a game based off of notes scribbled on a paper napkin." -Reinhart
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:41PM
#297
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Date Joined:
Nov 21, 2009
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I buy wrecan’s assertion that this article was not meant to provide the tools, but that there will be tools. I suppose my earlier post was more about my initial disappointment in the lack of rules or concrete examples in the article, rather than the article be objectively poor. However, I am not sure that I buy wrecan’s assertion that there will be no default, and everything will be options. From a pure rules perspective, this is technically accurate, but it misses an important aspect – presentation. The game as presented in the physical (or digital) products has to have an assumed composition on many issues to make entry for novices easier. As new players become more comfortable with the baseline, they can explore options and modules. The PHB kept me happy for long time as a kid, but eventually I wanted more. Back to the point about tools. I want look for a way to add tools to the game based on what we know already. The game is going to be designed around adventure days and adventure XP budgets and an assumed amount of combat per adventure day. When played with these assumptions, the resource depletion between at-will players (e.g., fighters and rogues) and discrete players (e.g., wizards and clerics) will be relatively balanced. To me, this is composed of three basic elements of story style and pacing – in game time, health, and power (effectiveness). The base assumption of the game is that over the course of one day (in game time) the party’s HP will be nearly depleted (health) and the party’s daily spells (power) will be exhausted and that both of these will be fully restored after an extended rest (start of a new day). The tools that the game needs to provide are how to adjust each of these three components, what those changes mean, and examples of how to put these three components together in ways to create distinct story styles. For example, I may have a caravan guarding campaign and I decide the adventure day should instead be an adventure week. I also prefer somewhat grittier healing, so only half HP gets restored at the start of an adventure week. I have no problem with “daily” spells (or other “daily” resources like the fighter’s surge), fully restoring at the start of an adventure week – these “daily” spells are now “weekly” spells. If the group understands and agrees to the settings of these three rules “dials,” then they can do whatever they want within that framework. If the group was okay with changing on the fly (clearly some would not), when we take a side trek into an ancient ruin, we could change the adventure “segment” from a week to a day or an hour. If you create a story around clearing a 100 room haunted mansion in a day, the adventure “segment” could be 5 minutes. For an intrigue or exploration heavy campaign, you could reduce the refresh rate of health or power so that you only regained one or two combats worth of resources on a segment reset (extended rest) and build more story or quest rewards into the XP budget (e.g., this adventure has a 1000 XP budget, but only 300 comes from likely combats).
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:42PM
#298
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Date Joined:
Mar 22, 2008
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I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. I've played every version of the game since then. The only time I ever have encountered a five-minute workday is when I played the many Dungeons and Dragons computer games.
As a DM I have yet to ever have had my players try to initiate a five-minute workday in any of my tabletop RPG sessions. As a player in tabeltop I have also never initiated a five-minute workday. I guess I've been lucky not encountering such a thing in my 32 years of tabeltop RPG. I fail to see how any of the versions of the game (other than the computer versions) have had this happen. I guess I'm just naive,
31 here and the exact same thing. We should buy a lottery ticket, the way our luck's working.
29.5 here and I've experienced a few groups over the years who did that, but not many. Most of the time, the 5 minute workday only popped up once in a while during a particularly hard part of some adventure when either by design or poor design, the encounters were harder than usual and each fight took a lot of resources that we needed, so we took the risk of resting to get the resources back. Sometimes we ended up with an encounter and in a worse position, and sometimes not. However, even in those groups we didn't do the 5 minute workday as a normal routine.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:45PM
#299
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Date Joined:
Feb 12, 2009
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If I as an adventurer, struggle through a difficult encounter, that leaves me beat up, mentally drained and tired:
What is the big deal if I take the rest of the day off???????
There isn't one, unless you know the plot says otherwise, but if the plot doesn't demand forward progress of some kind at that moment there ain't nothing wrong with going to camp it up. It makes sense to do so. I have had some games that were during character down time. We didn't have anything important hapenning so we went on a dragon hunt or went to go have a night on the town. or stole a boat from someone else just because it was bigger and faster(pirate game). No real time crunch so we did things at the pace we wanted to. No problems to be had by anyone.
So if it's a plot issue, why not leave it up to the plot to drive the decision to press on? Why is there a need for some sort of mechanical contrivance in the rules?
There shouldn't be one. It should entirely be a plot option.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 16, 2012 - 1:46PM
#300
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Date Joined:
May 25, 2012
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I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. I've played every version of the game since then. The only time I ever have encountered a five-minute workday is when I played the many Dungeons and Dragons computer games.
As a DM I have yet to ever have had my players try to initiate a five-minute workday in any of my tabletop RPG sessions. As a player in tabeltop I have also never initiated a five-minute workday. I guess I've been lucky not encountering such a thing in my 32 years of tabeltop RPG. I fail to see how any of the versions of the game (other than the computer versions) have had this happen. I guess I'm just naive,
I am with you. It just isn't an ongoing issue for me and my players. If we haven't had to deal with it much over the years and others deal with it every encounter and every game over 35 years what does that speak to? Differences in playstlye and the enforcement of rules as a Dungeon Master. I have also played for over 24 years myself. But maybe we are supposed to just walk blindly into a premise that has to do with playstyle and change a ruleset to please those who cannot get a handle on their own games. I think it's laughable that a D.M. is so shortsighed that he can have his players make one mistake, and just kill his adventure or exaust their resources every fight and take advantage of him claiming circumstances happen every day(If so maybe you need to rescale your encounters) that cause the five minute workday situation to happen so it's alright if this happens cuz the rules are broken. Fix the D.M and the problem lessens dramatically. This just shouldn't be happening all the time.
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