An Idea re: Countering the 15-Minute Adventuring Day

[Caedrus]

Maybe could have some incentive to avoid the 5 minute workday (other than, of course, just plain removing all limited resources that can be replenished through rest). The cause of the 5-minute workday is declining resources that come back after rest, so it seems only natural that if you wanted to counter it somewhat you'd provide a resource that builds up as you remain active and goes away when you rest. Like, each time you complete an encounter you get an AP and that goes away when you sleep. So you might be worn down by the time you reach the boss, but you'll be revved up for action and ready to pull out your clinch skills. Actually, this also is nifty in that it's an immediate encounter reward that needs no calculation. An immediate problem that comes to mind with this idea is: It just seems like it's asking for people to "build up" encounters in order to prepare a nova for the day. This may be able to be solved by refining what kind of accomplishments during the day reward you and how you are rewarded, even if it becomes a bit DM-fiat-y. Maybe there could be some evolution of this concept that could work.

Anyways, the idea is basically that you get some sort of "morale boost" when accomplishing stuff that makes you better in general until you call it quits for the day to rest up. This of course would be in conjunction with conventional ways of reducing the PCs' ability to just drop in and drop out to rest, like with Rope Trick or Teleport.

Any thoughts, input, feedback, suggestion, hatred?

Edit: Another possibility is to have these "morale boosts" contribute to things that cannot be *spent,* like maximum hp or a buff to attributes or defenses that lasts until you rest. This avoids the problem Frank brought up with using Action Points for this.

Edit: To give some context to the system I'm working with, see here: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=94555#94555

[Username17]

Keep in mind that once you've spent your nova of action points in that scenario, you'll be down on resources and have no action points. So you'll rest. Call it the twenty five minute adventuring day.

-Username17

[Caedrus]

Keep in mind that once you've spent your nova of action points in that scenario, you'll be down on resources and have no action points. So you'll rest. Call it the twenty five minute adventuring day.

-Username17

Point taken. Of course, you'd get an AP from topping that encounter, as well, so you wouldn't actually have *no* AP.

How would you solve the 15-minute adventuring day, Frank? Besides "you are fully recovered after every encounter and everything is at-will; parties cannot be worn down and will never be forced to retreat from a dungeon"?

[Lich-Loved]

I know it is a big change to the game, but my mind is still on removing the limits on the the spells per day. The trick of course is replacing the spells/day mechanic with something that is reasonable. However, since the primary caster classes are already very powerful for their level once they reach levels 5-7, I believe there is room for reduction here.

The problem is, I still don't have a decent mechanic for this. Does the Den have a thread on a D&D variant with this feature?

[Caedrus]

Note that I'm not necessarily assuming D&D as a system here.

The goal is to have a general fantasy system (like D&D) in which you have a scenario where players will want to stay in the game and keep going for another encounter, even though they do have declining resources and retreat is there as an alternative to actually being defeated by death. Consumables are expended, wounds are accumulated, and (possibly) characters become exhausted (like spellcasters running out of slots). What I don't want is to create a system where a party is immune to attrition in all forms (e.g. unlimited spells, no consumables, life recovery is a non-issue, etc), and the only way they can be defeated is in a focused burst in a short period of time (thus making things like, say, trapped mazes totally irrelevant).

[Roy]

There is exactly one way that kind of sort of works, but it's very risky because it involves cranking the difficulty to about 11... meaning non competent parties will get annihilated and even the competent ones will have a hard time.

The solution is that you can level, assuming you're entitled to level while in the dungeon provided you have a breather. Then you design things such that there are several days worth of encounters in there. You can break off (possibly with consequences) but if you stay you'll level up and gain more spell slots if a spont caster or if a Wizard same thing except you take 15 and hit the books to fill them. This in turn lets you go on a LITTLE longer. If the encounters themselves are hard (level = 2 or more higher than party) the levels will come with some regularity. And since they aren't forced to fight them all at once, the only issue comes in when the group pushes too hard or just ticks everyone in the base off. That combined with buff durations gives serious incentive to complete the mission quickly, even if it's intended to be a bit slower.

Be very careful with this one, it is high risk high reward.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have to ask:

What's the difference between a 15-minute workday and a unlimited-hour workday where sometimes the judges hold up Law cards stating 'you can't use Green powers this combat?'

I really can't think of one. Most proposals I've seen of an extended workday has been resetting the resources after every combat encounter--which is basically like a 15 minute workday where you rest all of the time.

The other one I've seen is arbitrarily limiting players from resting until it reaches an appropriate point in the narrative. Railroading issues aside, why can't DMs just go 'okay, you start at half hit points because you're tired and you also take a -2 penalty to attack rolls and defenses?' It pretty much works out the same.

[PhoneLobster]

Maybe the five minute work day isn't the problem.

Maybe it's a problem with encounter scale.

Rather than aiming for an encounter scale of "a few guys" in discrete little single room packets encounters should be designed on a scale of "the whole dungeon" or some similar larger multi room, multi enemy arrangement.

If PCs really are supposed to go and take on the temple of cultists up on the hill maybe it should be designed to happen in one great big all in temple vs party brawl where PCs are all like "I'll hold this room against these 10 guards, you guys take the left passage and try for the high priest before he busts out some demon re-reinforcements, while Bob takes the right passage and prevents the minotaurs from ganging up on me or joining the main battle".

That might be nice.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So what do you do when you want to have a random encounter through a forest or thwart an assassination squad? Should the DM artificially inflate the adventure?

And what happens if the PCs just go 'screw this, let those orphans starve. Let's go take a nap'?

[Maxus]

Well, the Quest for Glory series encouraged you to put in a full day. You had a health, stamina, and mana meter, which decreased as you got hurt/fought/cast spells, but you could restore them with rest or items.

I'm not suggesting make people keep track of their health, stamina, AND mana, but having some restorative items would work. Mana potions or pills or whatever you want to use, could keep spellcasters in the game and stop the party from having to break every so often. On the other hand, it lets them cast their spells all over again (a problem in DnD).

Edit: Oh, Quest for Glory encouraged keeping going as long as you could because your skills and stats increased as you used them. So you could slack off, but your numbers wouldn't be as big as if you went back out and fought another few goblins. And I think we can all agree that we want big numbers.

[PhoneLobster]

So what do you do when you want to have a random encounter through a forest or thwart an assassination squad? Should the DM artificially inflate the adventure?

You can let the squad be bigger in numbers or bigger in level.

Or you can let it be a minor lower level encounter, which is a big deal to scrappy low level characters but just a five minute piece of cake to the guys who go and fight temples on their weekends.

And what happens if the PCs just go 'screw this, let those orphans starve. Let's go take a nap'?

It doesn't matter how big you make your encounter increments, if resources deplete and renew at all then the "ticking time bomb" vs "let's go take a nap" scenario will always be in play.

Fighting the whole temple at once is a step in the right direction because you don't get "Well, we cleared the 2 guards on the welcome mat, lets nap before we try opening the doors and taking on the entry hall".

And also because you can do some cool variations on "ticking time bomb" where you step into the temple, start the "all of temple encounter" and the time bomb gets to tick in actual combat time as the cultists drag the orphans through to the altar and start sacrificing them instead of bullshit informal out of combat time where the cultists just start hacking those kids up if the GM feels you've been tardy.

[RandomCasualty2]

Well, one possibility is for resources to not replenish when you rest (or at least not quickly enough to care)

If you get shot in the leg, a good night's sleep isn't going to do much to help you walk, and in the morning you'll still be wounded and have the exact same number of bullets in your clip. In fact, your wound may have gotten worse if you didn't go to a hospital as it starts to get infected, or any number of other complications. And yet going to a hospital costs you money and resources.

The idea that a good night's sleep cures all may be the concept we want to eliminate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you get shot in the leg, a good night's sleep isn't going to do much to help you walk, and in the morning you'll still be wounded and have the exact same number of bullets in your clip. In fact, your wound may have gotten worse if you didn't go to a hospital as it starts to get infected, or any number of other complications. And yet going to a hospital costs you money and resources.

The idea that a good night's sleep cures all may be the concept we want to eliminate.

Then what happens is that you have the Shadowrun system of people having days or even weeks of downtime instead of hours. This works in that system because there really aren't any pressing standing issues that appeals to the kind of adventurers this game is supposed to create.

But in D&D, this isn't an improvement at all, unless you're going to railroad players into their 'workday'.

And also because you can do some cool variations on "ticking time bomb" where you step into the temple, start the "all of temple encounter" and the time bomb gets to tick in actual combat time as the cultists drag the orphans through to the altar and start sacrificing them instead of bullshit informal out of combat time where the cultists just start hacking those kids up if the GM feels you've been tardy.

Look, if your system rewards people for making roleplaying decisions that runs counter as to what you expect in the genre then you have a bad system. If your game is trying to recreate heroic fantasy but punishes people more for acting according to genre conventions as opposed to bucking them then you have a major problem.

[Caedrus]

Edit: For the sake of clarification, realize that what I am listing in this post is not the direction I am taking to solve the 15 minute adventuring day, but rather the elements of the current model I'm working with that frames the 15 minute adventuring day as an issue worth considering.

The direction I'm thinking of going is something like...
1) While casting resources are limited just so that you don't have buffs with any multi-round duration turn into a "will always be fully buffed at the start of a combat because these things are going to be maintained infinitely" situation. However, assuming you're not just doing stuff like spamming things a hundred times out of combat, you should have easily enough to maintain your effectiveness throughout many battles, and you can't really go nova during a single round simply because the nova tools of games like 3.5e aren't there, and a player's per-round influence is limited by their actions. Maybe the anti-non-combat spam limitation could be done by something other than a daily mana reserve limit or something? Some other consumable resource that isn't replenished daily?
2) A percentage of players' hp is "critical hp" or "wound points" or what have you that are difficult to recover, while the rest is the stuff that comes back with Hollywood Healing. The more you're getting your ass kicked, the more your max HP is going down for the next encounter, and it takes time and resources to rest and recover to get back up to 100%. The idea here is to have a "death penalty" kinda like Guild Wars without the players actually dying. Which of course could lead to players retreating and ultimately losing. However, they live to fight another day.
3) Abilities like Rope Trick that let you sleep peacefully in a hostile area are just gone. So napping in the enemy's base is just going to end badly and you won't be able to get actually restful rest (which is what you would need) without actually fully withdrawing and thus, in most cases, just plain aborting whatever you were trying to do and failing.
4) It's important that there are degrees of failure other than actually dying because it's a heroic fantasy game where players generally want their characters to last a while, *and* there is also a desire for death to be more meaningful and permanent and a reduction of stuff like Resurrection. Hence the wounding and retreating.

Is the 15 minute workday even much of an issue under that model to begin with? And if so, my idea was basically to have a system of morale boosts, similar to GW. In that game, when you do stuff like beat a boss enemy or complete an objective, your max hp and energy goes up, but this bonus goes away when you, say, go back to town. By contrast, if you die and get revived a few times, you might want to break off the adventure and go back to town, but then you have failed and have to start over. I thought that was a nifty model to emulate, having a good balance between a desire to stay in the game and having to retreat if things go badly.

[Fuchs]

If PCs really are supposed to go and take on the temple of cultists up on the hill maybe it should be designed to happen in one great big all in temple vs party brawl where PCs are all like "I'll hold this room against these 10 guards, you guys take the left passage and try for the high priest before he busts out some demon re-reinforcements, while Bob takes the right passage and prevents the minotaurs from ganging up on me or joining the main battle".

That might be nice.

I run my adventures like that - no "this encounter here, the other there... and then comes that one here...", I usually build one fight, which can be spread out over a few locations, or happen all at once, depending on how the PCs act.

Often, that means the BBEG is the only foe we really play the combat out with, the other encounters are handled with narrative, or a few diplomacy or initiative rolls - to see if an attacked guard gets to shout before he dies, or if the PCs manage to get the key to the backdoor, etc.

[Tsuzua]

I'm more in favor with the Champions/Hero System approach where the vast majority of stuff automatically regenerates (Stun, END) unless you take a disadvantage saying that it doesn't (charges). Depending on the game and builds, Body can fall into either category. It's effectively 5 minutes days that are only 5 minutes long, so you can quickly move on and then fight the cultists or whatever.

This especially works well if you keep the number of combats small per adventure and just do the important ones. If your adventure has 3 combats where you first encounter the threat, find the threat's henchmen or fight the guardian for a McGuffin, and then defeat the threat, you can spend more time making sure each fight is interesting, balanced, and allows lots of time for them. Why do you really care as a player fighting the 3 orcs guarding a pie in a side room? Sure it's a fight, but all it'll do is take 25% of your resources and that's all it's meant to do. Why do I want to spend time on it as a player?

[PhoneLobster]

Look, if your system rewards people for making roleplaying decisions that runs counter as to what you expect in the genre then you have a bad system. If your game is trying to recreate heroic fantasy but punishes people more for acting according to genre conventions as opposed to bucking them then you have a major problem.

Which would be the case if there were anything about that statement that bears any relevance to running encounters on a scale where you can support ticking time bomb adventures within a formalized and fair frame work instead of just having informal resolution of the same where the GM just makes the bomb go off depending on how impatient or annoying he is.

Often, that means the BBEG is the only foe we really play the combat out with, the other encounters are handled with narrative, or a few diplomacy or initiative rolls - to see if an attacked guard gets to shout before he dies, or if the PCs manage to get the key to the backdoor, etc.

Ideally you would play out all the little component encounters within the same ongoing encounter using formalized combat rules or at least rules that interact with them directly on a combat time scale.

[Kaelik]

Maybe if making a D&D like game that is not D&D, you could have all at will abilities.

But then you could have multiple systems of preventing all buffs being always on:

1) Like Binders, you can only have certain sets up at a time, and it takes a non trivial time to switch. Every buff is one fewer attack attack. So if we are talking about old TNE stuff, you can either have:

Shadow Stride/Clinging Shadows/Shadow Beast/Dark Ray/and Wall of Dark

And you can teleport awesomely with your move actions, have concealment, a shadow creature that attacks, and you can use standard actions to Fire a ray of shadow damage or to wall people off with shadow energy.

or you can have:

Clinging Shadows/Whispers from Beyond/Darkling Claws/Shadow Armor/and Form of the Dark

and you have concealment, knowledge of opponents weaknesses, claws, armor, and tentacles everywhere, and you spend your move actions running up and your standard actions smacking the crap out of people.

2) Short duration buffs, maybe only like 5 rounds, Or longer duration but longer casting, IE ten minute casting ritual but lasts for an hour. This means that action economy alone demands they have a limit on buffs.

3) Cooldowns on buffs that are longer then their duration. Bull's Str lasts 30 rounds, but can only be cast once per hour. When you enter combat, roll a d6 and d10, that's how many rounds it's been since you last cast it.

4) Limit on number of active buffs. This could be like stances, or it could be short durations that take swift actions to activate, so that anyone who can is always twisting 2-4 buffs, whatever the duration is. Basically extended Monk fighting styles.

Other stuff?

[Caedrus]

If you'll recall, Kaelik, the issue I mentioned was with unlimited out of combat utility.

e.g. Fly (for a minute) becomes Overland Flight (fly cross-country) because *you can just use it repeatedly.* Talking about the action economy in combat or about simultaneous buffs that are relevant for combat is not really mitigating the issue.

I would really prefer a system where you have Yoda being a whirlwind of jumping lightsaber death for a brief period, but then going back to walking with a cane after the fight's over because *he can't maintain that all day.* As soon as "Force Speed" and "Force Agility" or whatever you'd call that stuff goes from being a brief buff activated with a Swift action to something that can be used at-will, Yoda is now sprinting around all the time. And I don't want that. See what I mean?

[Kaelik]

If you'll recall, Kaelik, the issue I mentioned was with unlimited out of combat utility.

e.g. Fly (for a minute) becomes Overland Flight (fly cross-country) because *you can just use it repeatedly.* Talking about the action economy in combat or about simultaneous buffs that are relevant for combat is not really mitigating the issue.

I would really prefer a system where you have Yoda being a whirlwind of jumping lightsaber death for a brief period, but then going back to walking with a cane after the fight's over because *he can't maintain that all day.* See what I mean?

1) If your buffs last five rounds, then yes you can talk about action economy outside combat. Because action economy makes it so they can only have X buffs going at once.

2) Fly is supposed to be overland flight. If it isn't, then a really long hallway with pit traps is so strenuous that your badass character has to rest in the middle, which is dumb.

3) If you are not in combat, you should be able to do cool things, at the cost of doing different cool things, or at the cost of enemies showing up and you being off your game.

[Caedrus]

If you'll recall, Kaelik, the issue I mentioned was with unlimited out of combat utility.

e.g. Fly (for a minute) becomes Overland Flight (fly cross-country) because *you can just use it repeatedly.* Talking about the action economy in combat or about simultaneous buffs that are relevant for combat is not really mitigating the issue.

I would really prefer a system where you have Yoda being a whirlwind of jumping lightsaber death for a brief period, but then going back to walking with a cane after the fight's over because *he can't maintain that all day.* See what I mean?

1) If your buffs last five rounds, then yes you can talk about action economy outside combat. Because action economy makes it so they can only have X buffs going at once.

And that doesn't matter because it's not a problem with how many buffs you have, it's a problem with Fly turning into Overland Flight. Generally the only time you really care about having a ton of buffs *at once* is when you're doing something quite time-dependent, like combat. If it's not, then you can just do step 1 that requires power 1, switch to power 2 and do step 2, etc.

2) Fly is supposed to be overland flight. If it isn't, then a really long hallway with pit traps is so strenuous that your badass character has to rest in the middle, which is dumb.

Unless your "really long hallway" is the size of a small sea, then that shouldn't be a problem. If it is the size of a small sea, yes it should be trouble for, say, Nightcrawler to get across through repeated short-range teleportation. Likewise, Aang flies regularly in combat, but he can't fly across the ocean (and failed when he tried), he needs Appa for long range flight. What do you have against a game that reflects that? Don't be like Roy with sundering, dude. "Oh, breaking stuff is badwrongfun."

I've stated the design goals, and giving "solutions" that run counter to those goals is about as useful as 4e's skill challenge rules, and for the exact same reasons.

3) If you are not in combat, you should be able to do cool things, at the cost of doing different cool things, or at the cost of enemies showing up and you being off your game.

Who said you couldn't do cool things? All I said was that there is and should continue to be a difference in the out-of-combat coolness of Fly vs Overland Flight, and I didn't want to eliminate sustainability of out-of-combat powers as a measure of advantage. Higher level abilities allow you to top greater obstacles and increasing the scale of accomplishments (flying over a castle wall vs flying across the ocean) is a common way to demonstrate escalating character power.

[PhoneLobster]

Unless your "really long hallway" is the size of a small sea, then that shouldn't be a problem.

So... we're talking the "Inland Sea of Gozo" then because that's pretty small.

But really you know what?

While it is rather bad for some out of combat utility thing you didn't pay combat resources for to give you an in combat ability it isn't actually entirely the same in reverse.

Combat is highly formal and supposed to be fair. Out of combat is largely fairy tea party with a few vague directions like "I can fly to Mexico and back!". Out of combat isn't actually fair, or formalised, and "out of combat" abilities don't need to be nearly half as fair or balanced because they basically can all be negated or ridiculously enhanced by the most fickle and acceptable of GM whims.

So you have a "fly in combat" combat ability that is perfectly fair and balanced within combat? I don't give a damn if it lets you fly all day out of combat, because out of combat rules aren't fair and balanced and that is OK.

[Kaelik]

Who said you couldn't do cool things? All I said was that there is and should continue to be a difference in the out-of-combat coolness of Fly vs Overland Flight, and I didn't want to eliminate sustainability of out-of-combat powers as a measure of advantage. Higher level abilities allow you to top greater obstacles.

Except that you are talking about designing a new system, and in that new system you shouldn't have Fly an Overland Flight, you should just have fly.

You shouldn't even have the two of them in D&D.

If you want abilities to not be per day, then you have to fucking realize that people are going to be able to overcome all your pit traps.

Hell, half the options I gave involved actual serious repercussions for having fly be one of your abilities. And one of them even forces people to take multiple hours to pass the hallway of pit traps.

[Caedrus]

Except that you are talking about designing a new system, and in that new system you shouldn't have Fly an Overland Flight, you should just have fly.

Why? I gave explicit reasons why I want there to be a seperation between being able to fly vs being able to fly all the time in a sustained manner. What is your reason for why that shouldn't be the case? Is it wrong to have the flavor that it is the design goal to create? That's badwrongfun, right?

If you want abilities to not be per day, then you have to fucking realize that people are going to be able to overcome all your pit traps.

You are the one insisting on everything being at-will, not me.

And one of them even forces people to take multiple hours to pass the hallway of pit traps.

And that same option also means that you can't accomplish *two* design goals. Now you can't have Aang suddenly whip out his glider and start flying when the fighting starts, it has to take forever and thus is not viable as an in-combat cast buff. How is that helpful?

[Kaelik]

Why? I gave explicit reasons why I want there to be a seperation between being able to fly vs being able to fly all the time in a sustained manner.

No you didn't. You just said. "There are different levels of fly spell! They must do different things!" You never gave a reason why you want fly to suck balls out of combat or even why you need different level abilities of fly that the same character gets instead of just one that scales.

You are the one insisting on everything being at-will, not me.

What the Fuck! So you want per day abilities that last for short times and you want to remove the 15 minute day? Those are fucking contradictory.

If you just replace Fly with Overland Flight, people actually fight longer adventuring days, because they have a bunch of buffs they can count on. It's only people using a charge of flight, and then not being able to use another one that makes the 15 minute day happen in the first place.

Your fucking design goals are contradictory.

And that same option also means that you can't accomplish *two* design goals. Now you can't have Aang suddenly whip out his glider and start flying when the fighting starts, it has to take forever and thus is not viable as an in-combat cast buff. How is that helpful?

No, that same option means he has a 50% chance of starting a combat with fly, and a 50% chance of not. It's random yes. That might be a problem. It does not prevent them from flying in combat.