...the one thing I am not all that happy about is giving Wiz\Sorc\Cleric etc "per encounter" spells. To me, this is one of the biggest ways to make the fighter redundant, as he is no longer the one guy in the party that can play all day, now everyone can join in the fun.
I don't think the fighter was ever the guy who could play all day...
Frank the Fighter: Thanks Chad, I'm back up to full HP and rip-roarin' to go! Chad the Cleric: Yes Frank, but I spent the last of my three highest levels of spell slots during that battle. Its nap time. Frank the Fighter: But... but I'm ready! Chad the Cleric: Well, tough trail rations. Enjoy first watch. If you get bored, you can whittle me a new holy symbol with that over-sized meat cleaver of yours.
The sooner one party member has to nap, the sooner everyone has to stop, because I don't know a DM who plans his adventures assuming a certain number of characters will be dead or left behind at any point, and metagamey or not, the players know it.
Do you really think that you could rest into a dungeon, or dangerous place, without nothing bad happen? Would not the intelligent denizens of the dungeons reorganize, prepare trap or even get the hell out of dodge with their treasures while you rest? And did you brought enough food, water, torches? Assuming you work for or with someone else do you really think they will be happy when you use 2 weeks for a mission that should be solved in 2 days? And I don't mean use a strict time limit every single time but if you "waste" weeks to clean a single dungeon there will be conseguences (like a reputaion for cowardice, just to say one), the world should not stop to wait for the PCs. Or again let them do it once or twice, then make someone catch on how they work, follow them and, after they did a good share of the work (i.e. cleaning the dungeon), complete it and take the prize while they are taking one of their breaks.
Or again, the merchant that hired you to retrieve the macguffin of doom after two weeks without any news just think you are dead and hire someone else to do the same job, now you have competion.
I don't think any of these are unreasonable solutions to the 5 minutes workday.
Do you really think that you could rest into a dungeon, or dangerous place, without nothing bad happen? Would not the intelligent denizens of the dungeons reorganize, prepare trap or even get the hell out of dodge with their treasures while you rest? And did you brought enough food, water, torches? Assuming you work for or with someone else do you really think they will be happy when you use 2 weeks for a mission that should be solved in 2 days? And I don't mean use a strict time limit every single time but if you "waste" weeks to clean a single dungeon there will be conseguences (like a reputaion for cowardice, just to say one), the world should not stop to wait for the PCs. Or again let them do it once or twice, then make someone catch on how they work, follow them and, after they did a good share of the work (i.e. cleaning the dungeon), complete it and take the prize while they are taking one of their breaks.
Or again, the merchant that hired you to retrieve the macguffin of doom after two weeks without any news just think you are dead and hire someone else to do the same job, now you have competion.
I don't think any of these are unreasonable solutions to the 5 minutes workday.
Exactly my thoughts.
Having said that, it will only be a matter of time until someone complains that this is the actions of a DM railroading.
The only way to combat this with 4th Edition and the "per encounter" abilities is to make more stringent rules regarding fatigue\exhaustion and the like, negating the desire to simplify rules, otherwise the game turns from "5 minute work day" to an "unlimited hour work week" because now no-one needs to manage their resources.
I am amussed by all this because I have never had a problem in the games I DM or play in. Not because of DM railroading, but I think the game just gets boring if you expend all your resources every fight and then take 8 hours rest, hence the '5 minute workday'. Or it could be that in our games, if you are a cleric of the morning lord, for example, there is only 1 sunrise a day to pray at, so stop as long as you like, it still takes 24 hours for the next sunrise, and who wants to roleplay 23 hours and 55 minutes of keeping watch and rolling for random encounters?
One of my biggest gripes of a game was utilizing all your abilities in one enoucnter and not haveing enough oopmh for the rest of the adventure. Unless there is an opportunity to rest in a session thats basically it. The new edition addressis this issue. It by no means says that no one will ever run out of options per say but that the heavy hitting stuff will. Take the wizard for example. He gets seperated from his group and has to battle a raving pack of cockatrices and then face its mother a creature of immense proportions and all he has left are his per enouncter abilities? Minor enchantments at best? He would still have to come up with some ingenuity and smarts to win the day. That being said the game develpers are just trying to find a way to prevent the characters having to rest after every enounter just to be effective for the next. This become real poignant if you every play computer games especially the D&D based ones such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
I for one am looking forward to these new found abilities for spell casters. Also keep in mind that multiclassing will be different so a wiz/cler/drd will be significantly different in 4th than in 3rd so the power gap between multiclass pcs and single or dual classed ones wont be so significant.
Some good examples Sunfalcon04. Personally, if I was the wizard in your example, I would be doing one of two options.
a) put my head between my legs and kiss my but goodbye. b) seriously ponder using that "rainy day" last ditch emergency scroll (usually teleport) and saying to myself "it sure does look like the storm is coming in this little dungeon room".
Again, I am probably a minority, and as such my opinions will be ignored but from my perspective, just one of your sentinces has said it all to me.
"become real poignant if you every play computer games especially the D&D based ones such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights"
I have played both of these games, and while I like them, I in no way want DND to become like a computer game, that is why I play DND and Baldur's Gate\Neverwinter Nights seperately. The computer game market is already covered, and i don't think that DND should try and change itself so that it is. But I can see how younger players of the game could mix the two.
I'd say this is less of a radical change to how the system works and more of a convergence to the center of 3.5.
I think a 3.5 gish is pretty close to how things are supposed to work in 3.5. You can probably persist/extend a 1-4 spells/day into the hours per level range. Choosing which buffs you're going to prepare and persist that day is resource management but it's not expendable. You'll do most of your fighting in melee, but your most powerful abilities are still your spells, which are still a limited resource. After they've been expended, you're not useless, you're just not as versatile or powerful. What this lacks are per encounter abilities, which, IMO, are really just there to grant flexibility in campaign design since a 4 encounters per day model is no longer assumed.
So say you're playing 4th edition and you've created a fire based blaster mage. You can strike someone with a 5d6 damage jet of flame, hit everyone in a 15' cone with 2d6 fire damage, or reheat your coffee as many times per day as you like.
Once per encounter you can launch a 8d6, 20' radius fireball, disappear in a burst of flame and reappear somewhere within 50' dealing 3d6 damage to anyone adjacent to you, become immune to fire and cold damage for a round, and create a wall of fire that deals 3d6 damage to anyone that passes it and lasts until the encounter ends.
Once per day you can strike a single enemy with a blast of flame that deals 15d6 damage and may stun them for a round, or surround yourself in flame for the rest of the encounter to deal 2d6 fire damage to anyone that strikes you, or leap into an open fire to appear out of any flame within 5 miles.
Once per week when you are hit with an attack that would reduce you to -10 or fewer hit points, you can explode in a blast of flame, dealing 10d6 damage to anyone within 30' of you, and reforming 1d4 rounds later with 1/2 HP.
The party cleric can't heal you forever, your per day abilities must be conserved, you still have to manage your per encounter abilities, and your at-will abilities mean you're not useless if the DM decides to throw 6 or 7 encounters at you for a day.
Want to rest to recover those per day abilities so you can use them in that big, creepy tomb you've just uncovered? That's probably going to be fine.
Want to rest to recover those per day abilities so you can use them against those assassins that are trying to kill you and just caught up with the group? You're going to have to find some way to get away from them for 8 hours because they're certainly not going to wait for you.
Want to rest to recover those per day abilities so you can use them to stop the royal guard from assassinating the King? Probably not such a good job, as this is clearly a time sensitive situation and your DM is completely reasonably in making it so considering the nature of the situation. In fact, for this not to be time-sensitive would make very little sense.
I have played both of these games, and while I like them, I in no way want DND to become like a computer game, that is why I play DND and Baldur's Gate\Neverwinter Nights seperately. The computer game market is already covered, and i don't think that DND should try and change itself so that it is. But I can see how younger players of the game could mix the two.
Oddly, the old X/day spell system worked well in a computer game, but terrible in a pencil and paper game.
Take a classic game like Wizardry for example, one that used slot based magic to great effect. You start in this town. Your goal is to go through this massive dungeon wtih a bunch of random encounters and get down to level 9. Now, you never actually cleared any levels, so going to level 6 meant fighting your way through levels 1 through 5. There were elevators and such you could find to get from one level to another but anyway... you were fighting your way through this thing. And as you had more encounters your spells depleted. Whether it was spells to heal the fighters or to blast enemies you were constantly running out of slots.
And you always had the option of turning back and resting at town, or continuing deep with limited resources. The question of when to turn back was a big one.
Now, the reason Wizardry worked well was because of several factors.
You could only rest at town
You could not win by attrition. Infinite random encounters.
It was difficult to teleport in and out of the dungeon.
Now, using that in D&D, seriously none of that stuff is true. You can rest in dungeons with rope trick or just plain rest outside. Teleportation, at least at higher levels, is easy. And you can win by attrition.
So it seriously doesn't make sense, because the resources you're managing aren't even all that limited.
Now I like the idea of resource management, but make it a resource that people can actually run out of. Things like action points make nice expendable resources. You can't just rest and get them back. X/adventure is also a nice resource limitation.
X/day is just crap resource management because it doesn't have any hard limits based on the story. It could be the same as X/encounter in a wilderness journey, or it could be the equivalent to X/adventure in a time-intensive dungeon crawl. You don't even remotely know what it means. So how do you balance an ability that might get cast X/adventure or might get cast X/encounter? In short, you don't balance it.
Now I like the idea of resource management, but make it a resource that people can actually run out of. Things like action points make nice expendable resources. You can't just rest and get them back. X/adventure is also a nice resource limitation.
Per adventure doesn't work either if you run anything more then a chain of dungeons. If you run a more complex campaign the question of when an adventure begins or ends becomes very complex. I often have characters leaving and joining the party, going of on side quests and such. When this happens, the question of when an adventure stops and starts ends up being DM whim.
If a character leaves the party and goes off on a side quest while the rest of the party continues on another one, does the character who went off on the side get back per adventure abilities when he finishes a side quest? If he doesn't then he is in trouble if he has to two or more side quests. But if he does, the the main party is hosed because the character that went off gets more per adventure abilities.
Per adventure doesn't work either if you run anything more then a chain of dungeons. If you run a more complex campaign the question of when an adventure begins or ends becomes very complex. I often have characters leaving and joining the party, going of on side quests and such. When this happens, the question of when an adventure stops and starts ends up being DM whim.
I always look at adventures as goals.
So if your adventure is "locate the lost ark" then you refresh your abilities when you complete the goal. Really, any module is an adventure. And that tends to be the way most D&D games go. Much like an episodic series, each little adventure has its own plot and then a conclusion, then the adventurers ride off into the sunset or what not.
Now, sometimes you might have non-standard adventures that screw with that, like if you're playing a megadungeon or a game that's got relatively low questing and more politics.
If your game tends to be the more aberrant kind, then it might be easier to just use action points instead of per adventure. So your APs are your resource.
APs are a nice resource because they amount to X/level. And are pretty much across the board stable regardless of what you do.
About the only thing I don't like about X/level is that many players consider X/level to be a bit too long. Such that you may burn up all your action points fast and have lost a good chunk of your abilities.
I just want to come out and say that although I am sad that Vatican is being diminished, I do think that it was the best decision, and will diminish/eliminate 5 minute work day.
Vanician magic leaves the possibility for using the game in an unintended manner, nuking. One can hand wave it away by saying that only a poor DM would allow a player to rest whenever, or that only poor players would utilize the technique because it’s not heroic.
1. But if a dm were to not allow his PC’s to rest, he/she must first have justification for it. Out of the blue, PC’s will be attacked no matter what? What if the PC’s take reasonable measures to counter that? To what degree of creativity must PCs come up with in order to evade this happening, and when does it become blatant Dues ex Machina? Both not rewarding creativity and Dues ex are POOR Dming as they serve to downplay PC feeling of accomplishment in the first, as well as take the Player out of the game world. Assuming that the enemy is intelligent obviously solves this problem, at first glance, but then if the BBEG/master mind is actively trying to stop the PC’s and so doesn’t give them the time to rest, what’s to stop the BBEG from bombarding the PC’s until the croak? It's another tough pill to say that the Lich Lord of Necrotown has exactly 4 encounters worth of bad guys before he takes an 8 hour break in his assault.
Assuming all of these problems are surmounted in an acceptable manner, it all comes back to haunt you when PC’s must rest in a dungeon. Do the PC’s just so happen to find the place the DM designated to be OK to rest in? That seems like a pretty tough pill to swallow. Maybe the DM doesn’t have dungeons that are that long, and that’s fine, but doesn’t that mean that you have to keep your dungeons (in total) short? That’s poor game design because it cripples DM creativity.
Another alternative comes in the form of making time limits, in short that isn’t an acceptable answer as it isn’t believable that ALL dungeons are going to be timed, and even if one Dungeon isn’t timed then problem one still exists.
It should be noted that all of these problems MUST be addressed in order to stop another problem. As stated earlier, one reason that this wouldn’t/shouldn’t happen is because the players want to be “heroic”. Now, if the DM fails to solve these problems in a believable manner, then you will have players in an awkward position.
Rogue: That was awesome! You completely owned that thing! Mage: Yep, now I reckon we’d better rest. Rogue: What! Well that wouldn’t be very heroic! Mage: I’m out of powerful spells, I’m literally naked in the breeze here, are you suggesting that we go into the next room, a room which could very well contain some insurmountable challenge at less then 100%? The rogue has one of too responses either he, a sane rational Halfling, with a wife and 2 kids to support, says “Yes, let’s go forth into the unknown!” Or “Well, you shouldn’t have used all of your spells, don’t you know there’s 4 encounters per… d’OH!”
Long story short, “Because its Heroic” only gets you as far as your mechanical system. The mage can’t justify blowing his spells since he can always rest, and every second spent in combat is another unnecessary risk to himself and his allies. The player can PLAY his character “heroic” but the player KNOWS why he can (game is built around it), and that pulls him out of the game world.
Now, I'm not saying that this new system will completely solve all of the problems, in fact, it will take out the resource management I love, and since there will be SPD, it just makes the problem less acute.
The essential theme song-
Get a little bit a fluff da' fluff, get a little bit a fluff da' fluff! (ooh yeah) Repeat
Unless noted otherwise every thing I post is my opinion, and probably should be taken as tongue in cheek any way.
