Daily powers that don't encourage 5 minute workdays

[OgreBattle]

Is there such a thing? That is, a daily power which is useful in an emergency, but not so utterly necessary that you'd consider going to take a nap before you open the Black Door to face Zanbar Bone.

I figure this means having a daily move that is actually not as strong as your 'refreshes after a 3 minute breather' powers.

Or is this a fool's errand and dailies should just be discarded completely?

[Lago PARANOIA]

You have three options, pretty much.

1.) Make regaining the daily spell inconvenient. You can do this in an associated way such as having to have a month of downtime to regain or a dissociated way such as having the DM play the 'quest complete!' music. The fewer/more power the daily spells are, the more inconvenient you'll have to make it. If you give people only 5 spell charges you'll need to make regaining them like a 3-day affair if you don't want them bailing out in the middle of an adventure. If you give people 20 spell charges, you only need to give players 8 hours off. Of course there's also considerations of how powerful the charges are and how many players are expected to use, but that's the basic idea.

2.) Compensate people for adventuring without spell charges. For example: when you burn through a power, you get a generic +1 to attack or defense or whatever until you regain the power. You can and probably should combine it with option 1. For example, in Kingdom Hearts 2 there's an action ability -- Berserk Rage -- that turbo-charges your attacks when you're out of MP. If you have it, it provides an incentive not to turtle while you're waiting for your MP to come back. However, since MP is used for useful things like the Reflect and Cure line, people aren't overly incentivized to just burn through their charges and go to town with Berserk Rage. Some players do it anyway and it's a legitimate tactical choice. But the point is that if being out of spell charges changes your tactical setup rather than gimping you people will bail out of a workday less frequently.

3.) Give people a finite number of spell charges that they can't replenish on their own. For a real world, if stupid, example d20 Modern did this with action points. But this setup doesn't have to be retarded. If the game is set up so that you're constantly being rewarded spell charges and you're not allowed to bank them in their downtime -- for example, you only get spell charges by touching randomly generated leylines but they only last for an hour before disappearing -- then players aren't compelled to bail out of the adventure if they run out of charges.

But those are pretty much your only three options to avoid the 5-minute workday.

[PhoneLobster]

Your question seems to rely on a lot of assumptions, or is just poorly framed.

I mean IF there is the option to restore ANY resources, daily, or turn by turn based, whatever, I don't give a crap, before ANY encounter, much less a major one... why wouldn't you?

Your design question shouldn't be "what sort of insanely marginal dailies can I make so people don't even care about them?".

It should be things like "In what situations do I actually want to provide the option for resting between challenges?"

And "How do I include mechanics that regulate restoration of resources/rests such that they occur when I decided I wanted them to occur?".

And the answers to those questions could tip your possible "dailies whatever who cares" schedule resources into areas where it is or isn't worthwhile to take the apparently offered rest before the boss fight at the end of the level.

But as long as your premise is "You can just go take that nap, whatever" then the answer is no, there isn't such a thing, what are you even thinking?

[K]

Charge mechanics encourage 5-minute workdays. There really is no way around that without creating recharge mechanics so generous that you invalidate having the original charge mechanic.

[PhoneLobster]

But those are pretty much your only three options to avoid the 5-minute workday.

Or you could just do everything at will.

Or you could just embrace the 5 minute work day and run all your resource replenishment mechanics on a very short turn by turn basis and actually expect that shit to go down in combat time and accept that any significant pause will see those resources back to full.

There isn't especially any particularly good reason for "daily" powers to exist at all. Once you stick "daily" on a power, using almost any variation of "daily" mechanics, you almost may as well just have written in "restores at arbitrary interval by negotiation with your GM".

If you want something more advanced than that for your resource management, trash dailies, extend the span of your encounters so you don't have a bullshit room by room dungeon where the orcs the next door over simply sit waiting for eternity, and have actual formalized refresh times that clearly interact directly with (and ideally in a deliberate scale to) actual combat time units.

[Username17]

If your daily powers are time saving abilities, it doesn't make sense to press the rest button to get them back. An ability that lets you gain an extra amount of travel distance in a day is potentially useful, but not necessarily worth ending travel for the day and asking time to pass in order to get it back. An ability that gives you some wealth each day is potentially useful, but not worth abandoning other actions during the day to wait for it come back.

And so on. If you want to have abilities that are used a finite number of times in a day and you don't want people to simply wait around for a new day before pressing on in order to have them again, then the simplest solution is just to make the abilities be the equivalent of having extra time dedicated to time consuming tasks.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

By that reasoning an ability that did a lot of damage very quickly is just a time saver for getting fights finished quickly. So no one would bother resting to get it back before the boss fight, because hey, what a waste of time right?

The only way your reasoning works on preventing rests before the boss fight is if the time savers are not in fact directly combat related. Which, unsurprisingly, all of your examples were in fact not directly combat related.

Which is basically just a reiteration of the OPs implied concern that basically "Daily abilities you wouldn't rest for" can basically only exist if the abilities are irrelevant to the event you might be resting up for.

edit: Oh and also, a daily type ability for boosting travel speed that is designed specifically to provide less benefit than the cost of refreshing it is exceptionally lame and basically worse in all respects than granting a passive ability that just increases a character's travel speed.

Daily cash boost ability with the same limitations even more so. Why would people bother writing that instead of a passive income rate increase? Is there an example of "non-optimal time saver daily ability" that is even good enough even within it's field to even bother writing?

What about "(1 Per Day, requires 1 Night rest to refresh) gain +5 Gold income from hard labor profession" is ever better than "gain +5 Gold from each day of hard labor profession"?

[Username17]

By that reasoning an ability that did a lot of damage very quickly is just a time saver for getting fights finished quickly. So no one would bother resting to get it back before the boss fight, because hey, what a waste of time right?

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Did you drink too much of that Australian paint thinner? WTF is your problem?

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

What you said something which amounted to "If you write really shitty unrelated abilities then people wont bother 5 minute work daying them before the boss fight!"

And pretended it was some sort of valid way of achieving anything anyone cared about. Rather than a really shitty way of writing unremarkably minor passive abilities like "+5 Over Land Travel Speed".

Seriously, what sort of "daily time saver" that would be worth being used in a boss fight but would NOT be worth resting for before a boss fight? That's the OPs question isn't it?

[OgreBattle]

By that reasoning an ability that did a lot of damage very quickly is just a time saver for getting fights finished quickly. So no one would bother resting to get it back before the boss fight, because hey, what a waste of time right?

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Did you drink too much of that Australian paint thinner? WTF is your problem?

-Username17

I finally understand the meaning of Giant Frog now.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

PL, I'm kinda drunk right now, so please humor me. What in the Funk&Wagnalls does that have to do with your previous post where you insinuated (I'm guessing sarcastically) that a daily power that modified movement speed was the same as a power that increased damage output?

[PhoneLobster]

Sure I will humor you.

If Frank's claim that "Time Saver!" abilities will not be refreshed by players holds true then it needs to hold true for abilities that are actually useful in combat.

If it doesn't then the ACTUAL claim he is making is that as long as abilities are not relevant to combat... players won't bother refreshing them before combat! (Duh, nice one...)

You don't like the "Ability that deals damage!" example? Well, its just the nicest clearest example of an actual combat time saver.

Feel free to insert "increase your combat move speed for a turn" or "Take an additional combat action for a turn" or "heal yourself in combat". Or indeed ANY ability that you would use in combat at all.

Because seriously "Oops did I need to add that I was only talking about out of combat bullshit irrelevant to the encounter being rested up for?" Is a pretty fucking big omission. One that renders his entire claim about how he totally has this proposition that deals with the 5 minute work day effectively worthless.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I am unfortunately less drunk now.

Doesn't that only hold true if the result of a combat are as much a forgone conclusion as, say travel is?

[PhoneLobster]

I am unfortunately less drunk now.

Doesn't that only hold true if the result of a combat are as much a forgone conclusion as, say travel is?

Well no. Because then the omission in Frank's claims is more...

"People won't bother recharging Daily abilities as long as the abilities only effect things they are going to automatically succeed at anyway!"

Which... still makes it a trivial and worthless claim. And one which again somewhat ignores the basic premise from the OP of whether you can incentivise avoiding a refresh of presumably relevant daily abilities before a combat encounter.

Not that travel should precisely be a fore gone conclusion, or that combat shouldn't to some degree be. That in itself is a grey area. But largely not a relevant one.

[hyzmarca]

+5 overland travel speed is extremely fucking powerful in a strategic wargame style of play. It's not too good at high-level, but if your MC lets you have armies of tiny men at a level where anyone cares about armies of tiny men, your Brisk March spell is fucking overpowered, but still not worth resting for.

Even if he doesn't, if you're playing at the level where your primary mode of transportation is a donkey cart and you have time-sensitive things to do, then such a spell is also very powerful and very useful.

You're mistaking low-level abilities for worthless abilities.

Anyway, you beat the five-minute work day by giving diminishing returns such that it costs a player more to recharge his spells than it does to just slog on without them.


You see, the phrase "time saving spells" makes one particular assumption, that time is a resource that matters. The five-minute work-day makes the opposite assumption, that time is effectively unlimited.

D&D's default assumption is that the monsters just wait around until the PCs show up and don't actually do anything until them. This is the same as the default assumption of JRPGs that let you spend several dozen hours performing inane sidequests while the world teeters on the brink of annihilation. When can call this Schrodinger's Time, the villain is simultaneously successful and defeated until a PC collapses the wave-function.

For any time-based resourced management scheme to work properly, you need use San Dimas time. The clock is always running. Ozymandius blew up New York while you were recovering your spells-per-day.

When your game is running on San Dimas time, rather than Schrodinger's time, spending eight hours to shorten a fight by ten seconds is potentially a very stupid thing to do.

So lets say that the Princess is going to be sacrificed at the stroke of midnight in about 13 hours, the villain's lair is 8 hours march from the Castle, and you just blew your load fighting a small army of half-dragon goblins who are male but wear women's clothing, which are collectively known as drag-oblins. So you spend 8 hours resting, use your Brisk March spell to double your overland speed and arrive in 4 hours, giving you a total of 1 hour before the Princess has her heart cut out and eaten by the cross-dressing dragon god. Obviously, spending that 1 hour and seven more to recover spells will mean that you automatically fail your mission.

This is the issue. If time-saving matters then time matters. If time matters then recharging your spells by spending time is something that you need to think carefully about.

The important thing is that whatever resource you use to recharge is important. That's why high-level spells have expensive material components and XP costs, because money and XP are usually more important than time.

[Username17]

I really should not debate with PhoneLobster about well, anything. Because he is a disingenuous twat. But since it serves as a reasonable foil for hopefully talking about things that are actually interesting, let's go for it.

Well no. Because then the omission in Frank's claims is more...

"People won't bother recharging Daily abilities as long as the abilities only effect things they are going to automatically succeed at anyway!"

This is, of course, complete bullshit. We know it's completely full of shit because it's something PhoneLobster said, and he is a man who would simply cease to exist if somewhat beat the shit out of him. But also in this case because it is transparently obvious that what I said on this fucking page doesn't boil down to that at all.

For example: if your task is to move from Point A to Point B, and there is some sort of time limit or opposition, then you are in no way guaranteed success. That as much should be obvious to everyone. And I think it is also obvious to PhoneLobster, but he's being a shithead in order to torpedo this discussion. Not so much that he is being a shithead again, but that he never stopped being a shithead and his shitiness is ongoing. And an ability that increases the amount you can move towards Point B over the course of the day is something which in no way encourages you to skip using any of your other abilities that move you towards Point B while you wait for it to recharge. Heck, even if the "ability" in question is just your own inherent foot-having capabilities, every kilometer you walk towards Point B is a kilometer closer you get to Point B than you would have been if you just sat around waiting for your distance hop to recharge.

More generally speaking, if the thing you spend to get your ability back is something that would otherwise advance the same goal as the ability in question if it wasn't spent, then recharge the ability is a dubious proposition. You're not going to frequently spend a combat turn to recover a combat action unless that combat action is worth two rounds of using your at-will abilities. You're not going to frequently hurt yourself to recover a healing ability unless the healing is bigger than the self harm. And so on.

If your "daily" abilities come back next dawn, and are equivalent to you having extra hours in the day to perform various tasks, you'd be pretty silly in most instances to ask for a screen wipe to the next dawn just to get the abilities back. You know this. I know this. PhoneLobster even knows this, but he's too much of an arrogant cockhole to admit that there was a way of looking at the problem under discussion that he hadn't thought of when he hand wavingly announced that there was not and could not be a reason why you wouldn't ask for time jumps to get powers back that could be inherent to the powers themselves.

But of course, time jumps are simply a cost. And if the powers themselves are equivalent to bonus time then asking for a time jump to recharge the power falls under the general case of "Spending A to get A", which is a general case power recharge scenario that is usually "Not Worth It".

-Username17

[Grek]

A fifth? option is to make it so that the daily ability is somehow dependent on what you do while it's recharging. Example:

You have a Daily healing power. You can use it once per 24 hours. It instantly heals 1hp per use of your at will healing ability, 10 per use of your Encounter healing ability and 5 for every time you cure a poison/disease, all up to a maximum of 100hp.

If you're injured, it does not make sense to wait 24 hours to let your daily recover, since, in order for the daily to be any good, you have to cast a bunch of healing spells to "charge it up". And if you're casting a bunch of healing spells, you may as well use them on yourself to get you healed and not bother with recovering the daily until 24 hours have passed normally.

[Slade]

Instead of Daily you could have a it recharge after killing a CR equivalent foe, that requires you to keep fighting to get back your big spell so it recharges.
Granted, that isn't the normal way of doing in D&D.

[Orion]

Following our travel paradigm, you would presumably want to refresh your big heals with a blood sacrifice. If you have to do more damage to yourself than the spell heals, it's not worth it outside of downtime.

[PhoneLobster]

I really should not debate with PhoneLobster about well, anything.

Well as long as you post nothing but insults and selectively quote me and attack me for not saying something I said like two lines after your quote...

Desdan suggested that the difference between the example of Combat Time Savers that essentially undermines your claim about time savers in the one field actually relevant to the OP was that your examples were all basically autosuccesses while combat was not.

I specifically stated that was an uncertain assumption and importantly an irrelevant assumption.

As if we do assume all your examples are in auto success fields it tells us dick about the 5 minute work day and resting before boss fights. And if we DON'T assume that we go back to your examples continuing to be non-combat examples, that tell us dick about the 5 minute work day and resting before boss fights. And the definitive combat "time saver" examples continue to directly undermine your claims.

Try actually addressing the basic point you have only responded to with frothing yelled insults.

What actual in combat "time saver" abilities we might reasonably use in a boss fight would you not bother refreshing before a boss fight if given the chance?

Because otherwise you are just assing about with pure wankery and avoiding the basic point that I've already raised and that others have mentioned which is that...

If time-saving matters then time matters.

And the premise of the OP casually assumes otherwise with the basic implication that you could choose to rest and refresh dailies before the boss fight.

The actual equivalent in the over land travel example is that you if COULD choose to refresh your (needlessly complex) daily distance booster ability because time pressures were weak then you would. And whenever a player CAN have that ability off cool down they WILL. They will use it right at the end of their traveling day every day, and they will never use it early or NOT rest to refresh it any time there isn't a pressing time pressure of some kind involved.

Exactly the way they will behave with combat relevant abilities any time there isn't a pressing time pressure involved.

You either have a means of creating and regulating that time pressure or you just flat out don't and that is NOT in fact inherit in a daily "time saver". It relies on other aspects of a formalized time system, or, more commonly on pure DM fiat.

[Voss]

Is there such a thing? That is, a daily power which is useful in an emergency, but not so utterly necessary that you'd consider going to take a nap before you open the Black Door to face Zanbar Bone.

I figure this means having a daily move that is actually not as strong as your 'refreshes after a 3 minute breather' powers.

Or is this a fool's errand and dailies should just be discarded completely?

Funny story. Neverwinter (as opposed to Neverwinter Nights) is the 4e MMO that everyone expected when 4e came out (rather than after it has already been shot in the head). It has at wills and encounters (though encounter powers are just on a timer), feats and all. But according to some of the closed beta footage that is wandering around the youtube, they kept the daily powers, but kicked the mechanics to the curb, and replaced it with a charge mechanic that builds up as you attack with other things. So after X at-will/encounter attacks, you can use your daily (and then again and again, so long as you do X attacks between uses). They are also going to change the name (probably something like 'ultimate' or whatever.

So if the MMO version of 4e is discarding the basic setup of the 4e system as stupid and unworkable, then yeah, it is probably a bad idea.

[Doom]

Funny story. Neverwinter (as opposed to Neverwinter Nights) is the 4e MMO that everyone expected when 4e came out (rather than after it has already been shot in the head). It has at wills and encounters (though encounter powers are just on a timer), feats and all. But according to some of the closed beta footage that is wandering around the youtube, they kept the daily powers, but kicked the mechanics to the curb, and replaced it with a charge mechanic that builds up as you attack with other things. So after X at-will/encounter attacks, you can use your daily (and then again and again, so long as you do X attacks between uses). They are also going to change the name (probably something like 'ultimate' or whatever.

So if the MMO version of 4e is discarding the basic setup of the 4e system as stupid and unworkable, then yeah, it is probably a bad idea.

I played that at the last E3, it's pretty good and alot of fun (though I admit the E3 effect exists). The hysterical irony of a 4e-based game that uses the words of 4e but changes the meanings of those words was not lost on me.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The hysterical irony of a 4e-based game that uses the words of 4e but changes the meanings of those words was not lost on me.

I love this board sometimes.

[hogarth]

Charge mechanics encourage 5-minute workdays.

Actually, in my experience 4E daily attack powers don't encourage a 5 minute workday. Why? Because they're only slightly better than encounter attack powers so you only get a slight advantage by resting early, which is counteracted by the obvious disadvantages you usually get from resting early (e.g. you're giving your enemy time to set up traps, get reinforcements, etc.).

[tussock]

It's all adventure setup that makes daily powers work, IME. Anything that encourages people to not spend them all on the first fight (unless that happens to be a boss fight, which is fine).

[*]Safe points to rest where you can't recover dailies because you're not at one yet, so you measure out your daily powers to ensure you get to one (which might be all the way back home, making them per-adventure powers).

[*]Rewards that increase on a per-fight basis, on average. Like high-XP treasure deep beyond walls of low-XP random battles that can refresh or remove treasure as you rest. Daily powers measured out to ensure you maximise XP returns per cycle. That meets ideas like living dungeons with emergent time constraints.

[*]Similarly, highly randomised fight difficulty, so you try not to throw too much of the good stuff on round 1 in case this is an easy fight and the next one isn't. Hell, easy fights, anywhere, to discourage thought-free novas.

[*]Differential and gradual recovery, where you can recover some, but not all your daily powers with a normal rest cycle (and some take more recovery units than others). This allows you continue to adventure after you're past your bed time if there's any point to it, often with the very biggest spells (most difficult to recover) delayed for just such an occasion.


OK, spell design too, because powerful short-duration buffs in daily slots, and being able to stack up huge masses of them, that leaves you with more daily budget potentially spent on fight 1 only, which is a bad thing in this context. Spells that last for half a dozen fight scenes or more encourage you to hit a lot of fights, spells that last all day in daily slots are even better (swappable constant effects).

With less potential or reward for pre-spending spells, you can have more in-combat limits like casting time, where it's not possible to drop everything in one fight, or even five, so you have to pick which works best in this fight. For 4e, a limit of one daily power per fight, or per 5 rounds or whatever would work once you have two or more of them. After enough rounds it should be obvious if you need another one.