Sleepsintraffic suggested supplies could be a solution, and, it sorta maybe can be in some cases. (It seems like an opportunity to use tensors floating disk instead of a real challenge). But notice that it isn't a solution in my case, since we're walking overland 2 weeks to visit the shining city one way or another. I guess, for those who track arrows and have a all ranger party, you could use arrows(supplies) as a milestone like refresh - no more arrows till you cross the marsh. I guess in an all ranger party without a magic quiver, that could work.
Supplies are just a big piece in the tapestry of motivations...no single thing in the story is going to work ya gotta have a few.
Also I think you're confusing something. When we talk about milestones we are reffering to a system that someone suggested where the players could not get back their resources till they went through a specific number of combat encounters of a certain strength. Doesn't matter if your utility mage is entirely tapped before the first combat of the sequence, because he was doing his job and there wasn't a combat till after all the utility usage was needed, he still wouldn't be able to reprep until after the 4th or 5th fight. it is literally divorced entirely from the story.
Actually when we are talking about mile stone points we are talking about the one where you gain one mile stone point for surviving an easy encounter, two for surviving a normal encounter, and three for surviving a hard encounter. Then they can use these points to reduce the amount of time it takes to memorize a spell from a set time, the suggestion said 10 minutes per level but that is too low, so that a rest of 10 minutes can net the players extra spells. Then they combined the idea with shrines and libraries where a divine caster could reduce the time to memorize spells if they were at a shrine down to an extremely low amount, the suggestion said 1 minute but that time may be off, combined with full mile stone points this would mean an hour or two for a high level character to regain all spells. The DM could place shrines and libraries where they want the players to have an easy time to recover and all other times the players would have to rest for extremely long amounts of time to recover spells. Such a long time that even the random encounters would be an almost certainty.
Of course this still doesn't work for long trips through the wilderness. You rest 8 hours each day so even with no mile stone points and no shrines or libraries available you are still going to be able to memorize most of your spells each day.
So I think there has been some revisions since last I got a clear look at the system...A fault of having to discuss the same topic in about 4 or 5 different threads...that system is very different from the proposals I'd been hearing and is agreeable to me because it doesn't take the option of regaining spells away from the group entirely it just makes it less of an awesome option. Pair this with responsible spell design and it works better. 10 mintutes per spell level sounds like a good idea I mean for the level 10 character to prep a full list that is stil 5 hours. I do assume this is in addition to the 8 hour charge of a rest making the total resting time 13 hours, and you can only do it once per 24 hour period anyways. At 20th level your non shrine no points prep time is 15 hours (on top of the assumed 6-8 hour rest and this is basically impossible durring a journey). The "shrines" as 1 minute per spell level sound like a good idea. that makes it a half hour for a 10th level character (yet again assumed to be on top of the normal 6-8 hour requirement) I'd still reflavor the heck out of this because basically as a story writing subsystem this works better if the defined reasons for the quicker recharge should be somewhat variable to match the story. Though suggestions of libraries, shrines, labs, leylines, sacred places, holy ground stuff like that works. No need to tie any one specific thing to any one specific class. I still kinda dislike the milestones themselves it just feels forced, like trying to find an in game explanation for why killing things makes you reprep your magic more quickly just doesn't sit right with me but it isn't too bad. Like maybe if your some kind of blood caster...I think the explanation I would have to use is that fresh monster parts speed up the preperation process for any spell. Now how do milestone points effect prep time.
I do apologize for railing against this so hard if this fix to it has been in the proposal for an extended period of time...having to jump threads and respond to a bunch of people saying a bunch of crap that wasn't just, "how about we change the system we proposed to make it more agreeable to you", made it difficult to see your revisions to the sub system. Sorry if they have been there for a while.
It has been out there for awhile, but to be fair it was in the Mechanical Solutions thread.
It still has the problem of long trips, but they could just say that they aren't waiting around for 4-6 hours while the casters memorize and that they can't memorize while sleeping 6-8 hours.
Oh I will admit I totally missed this. I'm gunna entirely blame people that kept trying to argue a point this system has already conceded to and then fixed the actual problem with (with a fix I had agreed to/helped suggest long ago no less). Heck if you wanted to make it a tad harsher you could just straight limit the number of spell levels a caster can prep per day kinda like if you're using alternative HP recouperation rules you can only get a certain ammount of health back per day(only seems fair and is entirely sensible).
On the topic of travel adventures I personally have less of a problem with that...to me the 1 off attacks on the road are the time to show that everyone's powerful. I always feel bad for the attacking highwaymen you'd think they know how to spot someone they shouldn't rob better than that (just a joke I'm aware othe stuff attacks too). Especially if the attacks have nothing to do with any kind of over arching campagin or anything or are only barely connected (killin off mooks). Though tips in the encounter design sections on how to design encounters so that mundanes can shine along side casters would be required (it is possible without drilling a bunch of combats into one day but only barely). Also nothing stops a mini adventure from taking place along the way (where you do have full up days).
I do think it does help that in travel adventures supplies and feed become things that should be tracked. If you're travelling for 10 days straight before your next possible resupply gathering supplies is an important task, and considering those supplies are not infinite one should not expect to be able to take however long they like on the road. Although the smart adventurer plans for at least 3-4 extra days on the road, for whatever reasons that could arise to slow them down. At that point you could think of the supplies as a mechanical note. Every time they pass a certain period of time ( maybe 4 hours) check off a box in the supplies section. Buying a days worth of supplies gets you maybe 6 boxes in the supplies section (maybe change those numbers a bit). This is just a rough idea.
Quick question do they always have to reprepare their whole list every day or do spells already prepared last through sleeping.
We could have the dial, but people like me wouldn't use it so any benefit from the 5MWD would be lost on me...
I wouldn't use it either. In fact if it had an encounter recovery setting, I would use that instead.
That would only be an issue if the party was able to totally guarantee that they were able to hide where they cast their rope trick spell. I would say that a simple dog would be able to successfully track the party to where they were resting and canceling the rope trick is just a simple dispel magic away. Surprise!
Possibly, but now you're talking about opposition that has both a tracker and someone capable of casting detect magic and dispel magic. You're limiting the possibilities for what adventures qualify as valid.
It's everything I hated about running 3E, you had this giant checklist like: Must be able to detect invisibility, must be able to counter flight, must be able to cast dispel magic, must be able to track, must counter teleportation, and so on.
You ended up with a giant laundry list of stuff, the higher in level you got, and eventually all your adventures started to look more or less the same. The villain was always some powerful high-level spellcaster. His minions had a set makeup of stuff, and you always had to stick to that cookie-cutter mold or the adventure just didn't work all that well. And if you got into stuff liek Shivering touch and including cold immune monsters, that subset of adventures you can run got smaller and smaller. Your creativity was just stifled and suffocated by an overbearing checklist of prerequisites for every adventure.
And it sucked. I never want to go back to that. I want to be able to tell more stories, not less. I'm sick of trying to act as a crutch for bad game design. I have better things to do as a DM.
I can identify with that feeling. For me it was the the hour long grinding battles in 4e that just sucked the fun out of the game, so I am hoping that DnD Next will learn from the mistakes of that bad game design
And yet, I am supposed to believe that the 1 encounter per day is a valid tactic in a world that should expect that very thing. Its just not logical.
Well, the problem is that the world by default doesn't, because it makes for boring storytelling. It's not the kind of game you want to be running, despite being logical. Now the goal there is pretty much get the mechanics to conform to the way you want the adventure to look, as opposed to vice versa. I mean yeah, we could turn every dungeon into simply a hole where monsters flood from until they're all dead. It'd be boring as hell, but we could do it.
But if the mechanics encourage a setting we don't want, we should change the mechanics, not the setting. Otherwise we end up running a story we don't want to run, and what's the point of that?
The story we want to tell is a multi-room dungeon that PCs gradually explore and go deeper in. It's not an oriface on the surface of the gameworld that spewes an endless horde to attack the PCs. So why the hell don't we make mechanics that suit the style we want, instead of the other way around?
I am not sure what type of game would work well for this type of adventure, but certainly any mechanics set up for a dungeon crawl game are going to bite hard when we play something else.
The question is how do you trim down the time without messing with the tactical choices? I don't see any way that is particularly well thought out.
That would only be an issue if the party was able to totally guarantee that they were able to hide where they cast their rope trick spell. I would say that a simple dog would be able to successfully track the party to where they were resting and canceling the rope trick is just a simple dispel magic away. Surprise!
Possibly, but now you're talking about opposition that has both a tracker and someone capable of casting detect magic and dispel magic. You're limiting the possibilities for what adventures qualify as valid.
It's everything I hated about running 3E, you had this giant checklist like: Must be able to detect invisibility, must be able to counter flight, must be able to cast dispel magic, must be able to track, must counter teleportation, and so on.
You ended up with a giant laundry list of stuff, the higher in level you got, and eventually all your adventures started to look more or less the same. The villain was always some powerful high-level spellcaster. His minions had a set makeup of stuff, and you always had to stick to that cookie-cutter mold or the adventure just didn't work all that well. And if you got into stuff liek Shivering touch and including cold immune monsters, that subset of adventures you can run got smaller and smaller. Your creativity was just stifled and suffocated by an overbearing checklist of prerequisites for every adventure.
And it sucked. I never want to go back to that. I want to be able to tell more stories, not less. I'm sick of trying to act as a crutch for bad game design. I have better things to do as a DM.
I can identify with that feeling. For me it was the the hour long grinding battles in 4e that just sucked the fun out of the game, so I am hoping that DnD Next will learn from the mistakes of that bad game design
And yet, I am supposed to believe that the 1 encounter per day is a valid tactic in a world that should expect that very thing. Its just not logical.
Well, the problem is that the world by default doesn't, because it makes for boring storytelling. It's not the kind of game you want to be running, despite being logical. Now the goal there is pretty much get the mechanics to conform to the way you want the adventure to look, as opposed to vice versa. I mean yeah, we could turn every dungeon into simply a hole where monsters flood from until they're all dead. It'd be boring as hell, but we could do it.
But if the mechanics encourage a setting we don't want, we should change the mechanics, not the setting. Otherwise we end up running a story we don't want to run, and what's the point of that?
The story we want to tell is a multi-room dungeon that PCs gradually explore and go deeper in. It's not an oriface on the surface of the gameworld that spewes an endless horde to attack the PCs. So why the hell don't we make mechanics that suit the style we want, instead of the other way around?
I am not sure what type of game would work well for this type of adventure, but certainly any mechanics set up for a dungeon crawl game are going to bite hard when we play something else.
The question is how do you trim down the time without messing with the tactical choices? I don't see any way that is particularly well thought out.
Well, one attack roll and one damage roll, both rolled together. Designing monsters to be able to take 2-3 hits instead of 4-5 like 4E did. Getting rid of all the fiddly rules like the exception based design of 4E. There are a lot of little things that contribute to long combats. Getting rid of a lot of that from 4E would make for a tactical game with much shorter combats. Of course what we have now is combats that are so simple and easy they don't last hardly any time at all...
Sleeps - I don't think you got my scenario - the point was we were trying to give the beleaguered party a choice - push on and explore the ruins (knowing it will deplete their resources and make the rest of the travel through the swamp more risky), or bypass it and play it safe. If the trip through the swamp is multi-day, and no special dm rule prevents thedaily users from refreshing, then the ruins have no impact on the swamp - it may be dangerous, but they'll rest and recuperate all spells, hp, etc by the next day. As you say, the players don't know if the ruins is dangerous, so, maybe some parties will decide not to seek treasure. I guess. But, it doesn't capture the danger than a multi-day milestone system can provide effectively.
As for milestones only being combat related, I dont see why the system proposed must onlydeal with combat. No recent system (4e, fate) limited milestones to combat only. It's true that the example linked to talked about combat, but I see that as an oversight, not a requirement. As you point out, linking milestones only to combat undervalues non combat actors. However, if it makes your point, I conceed I was confused and hereby recommend milestone systems include non-combat as a recommendation.
hey maybe quote what I had said before...I moved on to another convo...if you could requote what i had said Ill dive back in no problem.
Posters saying that rope trick trouble says more about the spell than the 5MWD would be correct, were it not for the fact that at the start 4E lacked any quick resting/healing surge distribution rituals. 4 years later it includes many, most added to the game through official sources. It suggests to me that while people dislike the 5MWD, they do run in the problem were groups unexpectedly have to spend too many resources too early due to bad luck and bad planning on the players' side. Apparently groups don't conclude that they made the mistake, better luck next time, but the system does get blamed and options are added for mid-dungeon resting. For me it only confirmst that the 5MWD is a symptom with the root cause (daily resources - including hit points btw) also causing other issues .
In the end, I am a fan of the strategy part of the game. I like planning, and really dislike those resting rituals. I still would like to see some more mechanical incentives to both go on, to prevent going nova AND to prevent being suddenly out of resources due to bad luck. O well, it is a complicated issue and I wonder at what point such mechanics stop the game from being D&D...
In my job I'm on call and get paid for standing around for hours and sometimes days at a time, but then I get called out and get my time in the spot light. I personally don't want to play a game like that because it is boring when I'm not doing my job, but just standing around doing nothing. In real life I can watch TV or read a magazine or whatever, but while playing D&D that gets frowned upon.
Except that in D&D when your character isn't acting, something very interesting and entertaining is happening that can captivate you if you allow it. A story is being told. Drama is unfolding. And for the tactically minded battle is playing out, requiring contstantly shifting battle plans to be developed and either dicarded or revised. Waiting your turn in D&D is only boring if you don't pay attention.
The argument goes, that some idiot at the table might claim that because there is a "default" that is the only true way to play D&D. An idiotic misconception that should be quite easy to disprove just by reading the rules, coming to these forums, or sending a quick note off to Customer Support and sharing the inevitable response with the group. BTW, I'm not just talking about Next when I say this. Of course, D&D has always been this way since at least the late 70's when I began playing.
My First D&D - 1979 D&D Basic Set (6th Printing)Show
In my job I'm on call and get paid for standing around for hours and sometimes days at a time, but then I get called out and get my time in the spot light. I personally don't want to play a game like that because it is boring when I'm not doing my job, but just standing around doing nothing. In real life I can watch TV or read a magazine or whatever, but while playing D&D that gets frowned upon.
Except that in D&D when your character isn't acting, something very interesting and entertaining is happening that can captivate you if you allow it. A story is being told. Drama is unfolding. And for the tactically minded battle is playing out, requiring contstantly shifting battle plans to be developed and either dicarded or revised. Waiting your turn in D&D is only boring if you don't pay attention.
In my experience D&D games are rarely that interesting to watch from the sidelines for most people for that long - of it were the people are probably working in the entertainment business The exact time depends a lot on individuals and what is going on, but I doubt it is much longer than 15 minutes for most people (certainly the time I keep in mind when switching around between groups if they happen to split up).
Well no. See here's the thing. You can rest before doing four encounters. You just don't get your spells back. So what happens is that you can have a 10 day wilderness trip with 4 encounters and have the PCs still experience resource depletion during the journey.
Are they sleeping? Sure.
But they can't recover spells during the rest until they've completed some mechancial precondition that says "Okay we can recover spells after a rest now."
What it does is makes resource depletion a feature of every adventure without the DMing having to carefully set the pacing of his adventure to make that happen. And given that resource depletion is a balancing factor to the spellcaster classes, I think that's absolutely something we want, unless you want spellcasters to get all the advantages without any of the drawbacks.
Wow! Where is lokiare and his favorite word "contrived" when you need him?
The argument goes, that some idiot at the table might claim that because there is a "default" that is the only true way to play D&D. An idiotic misconception that should be quite easy to disprove just by reading the rules, coming to these forums, or sending a quick note off to Customer Support and sharing the inevitable response with the group. BTW, I'm not just talking about Next when I say this. Of course, D&D has always been this way since at least the late 70's when I began playing.
My First D&D - 1979 D&D Basic Set (6th Printing)Show
The argument goes, that some idiot at the table might claim that because there is a "default" that is the only true way to play D&D. An idiotic misconception that should be quite easy to disprove just by reading the rules, coming to these forums, or sending a quick note off to Customer Support and sharing the inevitable response with the group. BTW, I'm not just talking about Next when I say this. Of course, D&D has always been this way since at least the late 70's when I began playing.
My First D&D - 1979 D&D Basic Set (6th Printing)Show
But they can't recover spells during the rest until they've completed some mechancial precondition that says "Okay we can recover spells after a rest now."
Wow! Where is lokiare and his favorite word "contrived" when you need him?
That's why you sculpt the flavour of the mechanic so that it feels less contrived or not contrived at all. As Dwarfslayer is found of saying (and I will paraphrase here): why should recovering magic be like resting a muscle? This is a place where I think getting a mechanic first (or a series of mechanics) and then finding ways to make sure they do not feel contrived is a better approach, especially when no matter what you do, it is going from a system that people can grok, "ah, so getting magic back is like easing my back pain," to something else.
See my players and I get our enjoyment from the tactical side of things, and advancement is only valued because it opens more tactical options.
You say you enjoy tactics, then choose to play in a way that basically makes all tactical challenges the intellectual equivalent of Candyland. I refuse to believe you enjoy tactics at all.
He could also go into every combat with one arm tied behind his back or blindfolded or hopping on one leg, does the fact that he doesn't do that mean he is not looking for a tactical challenge? Maybe it would be best to understand that he is looking for a tactical challenge while using all of the legally allowed things that he can find in the rulesbook. In a tight system with no strange loopholes, this wouldn't be a problem, in D&D, it can lead to 5MWD exploits.
The exact time depends a lot on individuals and what is going on, but I doubt it is much longer than 15 minutes for most people (certainly the time I keep in mind when switching around between groups if they happen to split up).
