# What to do about the 15-minute work day?



## MatthewJHanson (Jul 16, 2012)

So the fifteen-(or five) minute work day is the hot topic of discussion on the boards. I figured it was time for a poll. What do you think?


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## Ahnehnois (Jul 16, 2012)

If you have a resource system (spells/day, hp, etc.), then those resources should be expended regularly during the course of play. If and when that happens, characters who have expended their resources should be substantially disadvantaged. If these things are not the case _there is no reason to track resources in the first place_.

If you have a game where players like to retreat and rest regularly, you need to either design a time-sensitive scenario that attaches a cost to doing so, or simply accept that players like to rest their characters and work with it. Real fighters retreat when they're hurt and rest when they can and rarely engage in combat for extended periods of time; it's not a disaster if this happens in D&D. There is nothing difficult or counterintuitive about either of those options. Nor is there anything wrong with characters being at death's door or out of spells; it's actually quite heroic.

Personally, I'd cut back on resource management to the bare minimum (i.e. health), and change the /day concept to something more intuitive and malleable, such that this doesn't come up as much, but they don't seem to be going that way.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 16, 2012)

Other.

They should ensure the game is balanced regardless of whether you have a 15 minute workday or 24 hour workday (and also work the 12 hours of the night).

That doesn't mean that people can actually can go any distance or any number of encounters, just that the balance between the characters is not affected. 

That may mean that every character has  daily resources that are equally powerful and last equally long. (Those don't have to be all spell or spell-like abilities / daily powers - even hit point attrition can be part of that economy.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 16, 2012)

I voted "nothing," because I don't think it's a problem.  The DM already has absolute control over this phenomenon: he or she controls the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations, time constraints, amount (or lack) of additional resources, etc.

By tweaking any of these variables, the DM can set the length of "the game workday" to anything he or she needs it to be to fit the pace and feel of the story.

Not broke, don't fix.


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## Minigiant (Jul 16, 2012)

Any major single aspect of the game that has a large amount of fan hatred should have for those who dislikes it:

ADVICE to discourage it
Optional MECHANICS to remove or alter it

There should be at least a page on advenute pacing and at lest 2 modules (milestones, XP penalties, recharge magic) that remove or discourage 5 minute workdays.


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## hamstertamer (Jul 16, 2012)

Not a problem.  

Never seen a group try to pull that nonsense with one exception; when I sat and played a 4th edition game with people at a gaming store.  It was quite a different world then I was used to.  We killed everything in a dining hall in this castle and just decided to go to sleep.  No players posted guards or even bothered to close doors and bar entrances.  I complained but I just got strange looks. We didn't need to worry though because nothing happened.  No enemies came to see what happened in the dining hall or checked to see why so and so never returned and no guards were on patrol.  All the "encounters" were patiently waiting in their areas so we could get some shut eye.  Sadly we all died on the very next balanced encounter even though we were at maximum effectiveness ( I guess we beat the coded probabilities with bad rolls).  That was the last time I tried playing the 4th at that gaming store.

If the players feel that the world their characters live in is a breathing living world then the so-called 15 minute adventuring day should not happen. There is nothing artificial about a world that reacts to your characters' actions.   I've never played with the idea I could just take full rests wherever I want, whenever I want without some potential consequences.  We wouldn't even leave our horses unguarded for fear of being stolen or eaten.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 16, 2012)

Don't remove the 15 minute adventuring day. If the party or the story demands it (after all, you can't always have more than one fight in a combat).

I mean, you can try to put up incentives and all, but in the end, it will either happen or it won't. What shouldn't be is that the 15 minute adventure day wrecks with balance. It shouldn't turn one group of characters into game-dominating power-houses and the other into bystanders that don't have much to contribute buy armor afterwards saying "I worked the 15 minute adventure day and I all I got was this lousy chain mail."

If one classes major power comes from daily resources, than all classes should have such resources. Maybe you don't need 4E martial dailies. Maybe you can get away with giving Fighters a ton of extra actions per day and more hit points or hit dice, I don't know.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 16, 2012)

> If the players feel that the world their characters live in is a breathing living world then the so-called 15 minute adventuring day should not happen. There is nothing artificial about a world that reacts to your characters' actions. I've never played with the idea I could just take full rests wherever I want, whenever I want without some potential consequences. We wouldn't even leave our horses unguarded for fear of being stolen or eaten.




I agree, which is why I voted for "ADVICE"- some GMs simply don't get it.


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## Minigiant (Jul 16, 2012)

Ogre 1: Where Jon?
Ogre 2: He ded. Found body.
Ogre 3:  Wat happen?
Ogre 1: Me send Bob to find out yesterday. He not come back.
Ogre 2: Wen lunch?

DM Advice: Don't use ogres. They are too stupid to reinforce themselves.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 16, 2012)

It's never been a problem on our tables.


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## El Mahdi (Jul 16, 2012)

*What to do about the 15-minute workday?*

More short rests, and more at-will or encounter based spells/resources.

I agree with those above though, about realistic and organic responses to parties leaving to rest and then coming back.  The "dungeon" is going to respond and adapt...


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## TwinBahamut (Jul 16, 2012)

Answered both "mechanics to discourage" and "other".

What really needs to be done is to change the entire framework of the game so that it simply isn't a problem. If you simply remove the possibility of going nova and being unable to progress, then there is nothing to worry about. That requires a rather fundamental shift if how things like D&D magic work, but I'm totally okay with that. I've never really been a fan of "daily" powers, anyways. 

Even having a "full refresh" mechanic that is totally different than "extended rest" would be nice. Something that could be used to describe a full team recovery that doesn't require 24 hours of time to pass would itself solve some of the problems. Other problems are solved by properly balancing classes so that one class isn't vastly more powerful than the rest when going nova is an option.

I've seen this managed fairly well in all kinds of games. Saying this is just a problem with DMing and that the DM needs to be the one to work hard to solve this is just poor effort on the designer's part and something approaching badwrongfun-ism on the part of others.

I have no desire to play a game that is only balanced in the context of a dungeon delve when I pretty much never actually use dungeons in D&D.


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## Shadeydm (Jul 16, 2012)

TwinBahamut said:


> I have no desire to play a game that is only balanced in the context of a dungeon delve when I pretty much never actually use dungeons in D&D.



So the designers have said that DDN is only balanced in the context of a dungeon delve? Wow I really need to read those articles more carefully.


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## MarkB (Jul 16, 2012)

Explore resource regeneration options other than daily or encounter. FATE does this very well, though I don't think the mechanic could be adapted wholesale.


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## Croesus (Jul 16, 2012)

MatthewJHanson said:


> So the fifteen-(or five) minute work day is the hot topic of discussion on the boards. I figured it was time for a poll. What do you think?




Thinking back to my OD&D and 1E days, I'm wondering if this is more a question of  adventure and encounter design, not specific rules. 

Take a group of 5th level 1E characters. They're in the dungeon and encounter a dozen orcs. Sure they could just stand back and have the magic user throw a _fireball_ to clean out the room. But that's the magic user's only 3rd level spell. And the 5th level fighters can easily clear out a dozen orcs - if the dice don't cooperate, the cleric can throw a quick _bless_ on the party. Then they loot the room and move on.

But if every encounter is designed to match the party, or use up 1/4 of the party's resources (ala 3.x), then sure, players are going to nova whenever, wherever. Change this so that an adventure only has a handful - or just one - really challenging encounter, and groups will tend to play through. 

One other thing - players need a way to evaluate the opposition, even if only with a ballpark guess of it's strength. If any given orc can be a 12th level barbarian, players will tend to assume every encounter is so dangerous, they have to go in with all guns blazing. I'm not suggesting telling players exactly what they're facing - what's the fun in that? . But the more clueless they are, the more difficult it will be to convince them to ration limited resources.


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## Griego (Jul 16, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> It's never been a problem on our tables.




I've never gone hungry either, but that doesn't mean that people aren't starving somewhere in the world. It's still a problem to be acknowledged and hopefully solved some day.


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## BobTheNob (Jul 16, 2012)

hamstertamer said:


> If the players feel that the world their characters live in is a breathing living world then the so-called 15 minute adventuring day should not happen. There is nothing artificial about a world that reacts to your characters' actions.   I've never played with the idea I could just take full rests wherever I want, whenever I want without some potential consequences.  We wouldn't even leave our horses unguarded for fear of being stolen or eaten.




Pretty much.

The 15 minute day only occurs in a static world. Thats just a bad habbit DM's get into. Get in the habbit of making sure your creatures arent just target dummy's waiting for the party to come and shoot them and the 15 minute day stops happening.


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## Pour (Jul 16, 2012)

Other: Make enticing alternatives based around regenerative resources and temporary level advancement. 

Turn the 5MW into a tactical option, but not always the best one, through good design and the proposed advice. You can't give advice on how to avoid a symptom of the system. Rather, provide alternatives in the system and let parties weigh the pros and cons of resting for level-appropriate resources, or investing in regenerative options, or pushing on ahead for temporary level-ups through a sort of heroics/momentum rule.


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## Minigiant (Jul 16, 2012)

BobTheNob said:


> Pretty much.
> 
> The 15 minute day only occurs in a static world. Thats just a bad habbit DM's get into. Get in the habbit of making sure your creatures arent just target dummy's waiting for the party to come and shoot them and the 15 minute day stops happening.




Ogre 1: Statick World? Dat where socks go?
Ogre 2: Me more interested where other wolfies go?
Ogre 1: Wat? It right there.
Ogre 2: No. Me used have ten wolfies. Now Larry and 3 wolfies gone. And Jon and Bob and eleven wolfies before that.
Ogre 1: Me cant help youse with that one. Me can't count past 3. 
Ogre 2: Want play Throw Pointy Stick?
Ogre 1: Sure Me still have two eye.


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## steeldragons (Jul 16, 2012)

I'll preface this with the fact that I didn't bother to read beyond this post...



CleverNickName said:


> I voted "nothing," because I don't think it's a problem.  The DM already has absolute control over this phenomenon: he or she controls the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations, time constraints, amount (or lack) of additional resources, etc.
> 
> By tweaking any of these variables, the DM can set the length of "the game workday" to anything he or she needs it to be to fit the pace and feel of the story.
> 
> Not broke, don't fix.




I voted "nothing" also. This isn't a problem unless the DM makes it/allows it be a problem.

Yes, you COULD have mechanics to discourage it or ADVICE to discourage it...but it all boils down to the DM. Will they take the advice? Will they USE the mechanics presented? Yes or no...it's down to the DM.

If the DM discourages it, the players will fall in line. Or...rather...not "fall in line" but_ learn from the experience!_

Can I [the wizard] nova all of my spells (or any other class' "Dailies" or what have you) on a single encounter in the first hour of the adventure day...and look really cool doing it? Yes. Yes you can...and then, when other things happen during the day...you have NO RIGHT to whine or kvetch that you have "nothing to do." That's not the "system's" fault...that's the player's.

YOUR character. YOUR resources...YOUR call. You made a bad choice...perhaps...or perhaps not...but, if so, you know better for the next [in game] day. And if you do and convince everyone to "rest" again...the DM is under no compulsion to "hold" the goings-on of the game world.

Yes. I know I come at the game from a differnt place than many of you...but the fact of the matter is, particularly for 5e, it is [or should be] up to the DM where the "work day" ends. If they want to allow you a rest every hour of the day...that's on them...and will make a better or worse experience for you as a player.

The advice and/or mechanics should not or, I believe, _can_ not dictate that for you.
--SD


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 16, 2012)

Funny, Minigiant!

But even animals "dumber" than ogres are aware enough react to threats that ablate them.  Wolf packs run away from stronger packs that encroach and kill...if they can.  Ravens have been shown to avoid houses where one of their number was killed...a generation ago.

Conversely, ants & bees will swarm attack creatures that smell of their dead kin.


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## LostSoul (Jul 16, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> I voted "nothing," because I don't think it's a problem.  The DM already has absolute control over this phenomenon: he or she controls the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations, time constraints, amount (or lack) of additional resources, etc.
> 
> By tweaking any of these variables, the DM can set the length of "the game workday" to anything he or she needs it to be to fit the pace and feel of the story.
> 
> Not broke, don't fix.




That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach.  I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.

I guess this is one of those play style things.  I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.


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## steeldragons (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach.  I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.
> 
> I guess this is one of those play style things.  I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.




And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?

What happens/can change as a result of your actions? You can guess, I suppose...You can hope that your actions will have the results you desire...but...I simply don't understand this concept of "I should be able to control these factors."

As you said, a playstyle thing, I suppose. No one's right or wrong, here. I just hope 5e puts the controls [rightly, to my opinion] back in the DM's hands.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> That's interesting - I wouldn't have considered this approach.  I like, as a player, to (well, attempt to, heh) control these factors through my decisions.
> 
> I guess this is one of those play style things.  I think I'd feel a loss of agency if I didn't have some degree of control over those factors.



It's true that both the player and the DM both have some measure of control over all aspects of the story.  However, when problems arise, it falls upon the DM to resolve them.  And while all participants of the game are working together to "write the story," it still falls upon the DM to provide the plot and the setting.

The DM narrates a situation and the players have to react to accommodate it.  It doesn't work the other way around; the players do not tell the DM that they want to find a magic sword in the cave and the DM must react to accommodate them, for example.  The same is true for all plot and setting devices: the number and type of monsters encountered, the distance to the nearest town, whether or not a cave is safe enough to camp in, etc.


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## TwinBahamut (Jul 17, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?
> 
> What happens/can change as a result of your actions? You can guess, I suppose...You can hope that your actions will have the results you desire...but...I simply don't understand this concept of "I should be able to control these factors."
> 
> As you said, a playstyle thing, I suppose. No one's right or wrong, here. I just hope 5e puts the controls [rightly, to my opinion] back in the DM's hands.



I won't speak for LostSoul, but I agree with him on player empowerment and agency, so I'll say my own feelings on the matter.

Player agency is pretty much the one reason I have to play D&D. It's the one thing that the tabletop RPG genre offers that no other game does quite as well, except pure freeform roleplaying. The ability to have an impact on the world, particularly outside that of what my character does, is an extremely important part of that for me.

I mean, to take one example... In a recent game of D&D I've been playing, my DM let me create the entire civilization my character is from, down to every last detail. I've mostly been playing as a "stranger in a strange land", somewhat distant from that civilization, but it is not so far as to be irrelevant. I've even been asked to create a sizable number of NPCs from that civilization who could potentially show up in the game at any time. Doing all of this has been incredibly fun, and has gone a long way to really get me involved in the game and care about what has been going on it. It's way more fun this way than it might have been otherwise.

Really, _creating things_ is a very large part of the fun of D&D. Normally, the DM hoards all the fun of the former, which does little more than create potential sources of friction and the possibility of players simply being uninterested in the result. I don't like that. It even deprives the DM of the unpredictability and excitement of seeing what other players might bring to the table. I think things work a _lot_ better when the DM is just another player who happens to run the NPCs, and everyone at the table has an equal share in creating the setting and the story. DM _dis_empowerment and greater player involvement brings more fun than DM empowerment. It even saves the DM a lot of effort, which is a great added benefit.


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## thecasualoblivion (Jul 17, 2012)

All the article this poll was inspired by provided was DM advice, but here we are with 50% voting for actual mechanical fixes.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> And this is one of those things that is interesting to me...Why, as a player, do you feel entitled to some kind of agency as to what goes on in the game world, outside of your character?






CleverNickName said:


> The DM narrates a situation and the players have to react to accommodate it.  It doesn't work the other way around; the players do not tell the DM that they want to find a magic sword in the cave and the DM must react to accommodate them, for example.  The same is true for all plot and setting devices: the number and type of monsters encountered, the distance to the nearest town, whether or not a cave is safe enough to camp in, etc.




I wasn't clear in my original post.  I didn't mean acting outside of my character, I meant taking in-game actions in order to control the pace of the game.

[sblock=An example]For example: We're heading across monster-infested wilderness to do some dungeon crawling.  As we're exploring, we stumble along a ruined tower during a wandering monster encounter (the DM generated the encounter terrain randomly).   I think, "Hey, let's try and get this tower back in a decent condition so we can use it as a base of operations.

"Let's strike out from our tower, use all our resources in some hit-and-run attacks, and then head back.  We'll hire some guys to guard the tower when we're gone because we know they'll eventually going to track us back there.  We can ward it with an _Alarm_, too."

(If that tower doesn't exist, I might decide to build a little fort of my own.)

With that tower in place we can retreat safely and have _some_ degree of control over the number of encounters, the amount of down-time between encounters, the length of travel and availability of safe resting locations.

I'm playing a high-level fighter/magic-user in a 3.5 game right now, and the spells I have - _Teleport_ and _Plane Shift_ (well, _Lesser Planar Binding_) are the two big ones - grant me a pretty large amount of control over the above factors.  We used to retreat to Sigil when things got too hot.  (I don't see the 15-minute adventuring day in that game, since I have all of Mulhorand, Luskan, some drow, and probably others after me; I don't have time to dawdle.)[/sblock]

I want to be able to, through smart in-character play, control the factors CNN listed in the post I replied to.


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## SteveC (Jul 17, 2012)

This is a real issue that will seriously return in 5E, and I dearly hope that the designers are aware of it. Any time your only resources are at-wills or daily, which is what 5E has shown us at this point, you'll have to deal with spending those resources outside of the norm.

I think it's likely to be doubled down if we go away from the notion that players can easily acquire the tools to avoid it (wands and consumable spellcasting devices). While we don't yet know that to be the case, if we're going to keep with the retro theme that 5E has going (which I hope is just an artifact of what we've seen in the public playtest, which is not much) then it's going to be worse.

I know that many GMs on Enworld are perfectly content to explain that the 15 minute workday is purely a playstyle issue, but even if that's so, it means you must play it within a more narrow confined playspace than either 3x or 5E. That happens to be a playstyle I don't particularly like.

To my mind, it's just a bad thing, since it's telling other GMs how they must play to be in the comfort zone for the new edition. If we're supposed to be in a "big tent," this time around, and excluding playstyles that are quite prevalent (and campaigns with this problem were VERY common) makes for a smaller tent.

I'll say this: my group did not have many problems with the 15 minute workday once the game progressed in levels in 3x, largely because they used wands to effectively play as long as they needed, and as soon as reserve feats came out, spellcasters could use them. It also was not a problem in 4E at all, but then that was by design.

It was the earlier editions where this was a real issue, and since we've only seen a very retro styled game so far (and very low level) that's what worries me.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I wasn't clear in my original post.  I didn't mean acting outside of my character, I meant taking in-game actions in order to control the pace of the game.




But would your example mean that your GM will only have all your games around that base of yours? Would you always be able to retreat there and have your safe 15 min workdays? 

If my players throw a big firework of moves and spells close to their base and then retire, I'm fine with it. But 99% of their adventures won't be very close to where they stay in their downtime.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

Griego said:


> I've never gone hungry either, but that doesn't mean that people aren't starving somewhere in the world. It's still a problem to be acknowledged and hopefully solved some day.





If it is not a problem for some of us, it means it doesn't really need to be a problem for anyone. Unlike your example, the only resource you need is a resourceful GM. 

I dare to think that most GMs are able to plan ahead for resource management issues and, with a slight change of perspective, manage to keep the PCs in the game for more than one encounter a game day. Not saying that every game day needs more than one encounter, of course.

To me it seems that part of the problem might be the expectation of the players that their PCs will get rest after each and every encounter. Once you let that happen, you may have a harder time weaning them off it again, but it is either that or stop complaining about what is a matter of GMing and player cooperation.


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## SteveC (Jul 17, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> If it is not a problem for some of us, it means it doesn't really need to be a problem for anyone. Unlike your example, the only resource you need is a resourceful GM.
> 
> I dare to think that most GMs are able to plan ahead for resource management issues and, with a slight change of perspective, manage to keep the PCs in the game for more than one encounter a game day. Not saying that every game day needs more than one encounter, of course.
> 
> To me it seems that part of the problem might be the expectation of the players that their PCs will get rest after each and every encounter. Once you let that happen, you may have a harder time weaning them off it again, but it is either that or stop complaining about what is a matter of GMing and player cooperation.



Simply put, this notion does not follow at all.

For certain types of playstyle, and certain players, this is not an issue. What if you as a GM don't want to run that kind of game, or what if your players don't see eye to eye? A game system that runs a narrow set of games well is not going to bring in as many players or GMs as one that's more inclusive.

Saying "just run it this way, and players: just play like this!" is, well, it's a solution, but it's not one that's going to get me to run or play in that kind of game.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 17, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> But would your example mean that your GM will only have all your games around that base of yours?




Without railroading, how can the DM force you to leave your base?*

And once you get mid-level transportation magic, how can he stop you from going to-and-fro?

* Not considering, of course, the metagame, "Hey, guys - I'd like to run an adventure where you travel to [etc.] ..." method.


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## dagger (Jul 17, 2012)

I voted other since in our 1e and PF games we don't have this problem and never have.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 17, 2012)

"Provide Mechanics to discourage it" was close enough, but the best answer, IMHO, would have been:  "Do not provide mechanics that disproportionately reward it."

The problem with the 5 minute workday isn't that some days have only one encounter, the problem is that the mechanics of every ed reward parties that choose to minimize encounters/day - and that older editions rewarded certain classes with wildly more power than others when that happened.

It's a problem of mechanics stepping on play style and campaign pacing.


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## the Jester (Jul 17, 2012)

Both advice and mechanics (the mechanics should be in a module, however).


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## Herremann the Wise (Jul 17, 2012)

I voted for both mechanics and advice.

I notice two attitudes that concern me here:

1) People saying that they've never noticed it and so why bother addressing it.
2) People acknowledging it as something the DM is doing wrong, as if they are not keeping their world believable.

My 5MW experiences that you are more than welcome to debate:

In a 3.x Age of Worms campaign, the wizard/archmage became so strong that encounters were basically run at two speeds - the wizard at full and the wizard slightly less than full. [Now remember we are talking very high level here (up to 19th) but the issues started becoming pronounced around the 13th level mark]. The disparity in party level between these two situations was incredibly noticeable.

As such, picking a median level meant that an encounter was a walkover for the party at full but very dangerous if the party was down on resources with the wiz/arch being the most obvious factor. Now the advice (that seems quite trite to me having been in the above situation) is that one should have time sensitive scenarios as well as believable encounters (and wandering monster encounters to boot). Now this is fine to a point at lower levels. But there becomes a point in power level where this no longer works because:

a) You can only run so many time sensitive scenarios before the group get sick of being pulled from one situation to the next (loss of player agency).
b) The group becomes so powerful that they effectively determine the "when" 9 times out of 10 encounters they face. There is too much powerful magic and powerful defensive magic where the PCs effectively decide whether they fight or not.

Now you could contrive scenarios to combat this but they would not be believable. You can artificially create time sensitivity or you can artificially create an enemy that can get through the party's defenses to force an encounter but neither of those things are something I like to pull on players just to challenge them. By contriving such a thing, I feel that I'm loosing the DM curtain from its rod and revealing the man behind the screen - which to me is effectively giving up on providing that believable world. Admittedly high level 3.x is its own beast but the 5MW is pretty much a given if you are trying to maintain a believable world. [4e addressed this for me but did not completely fix it; I think 5e can do better again if they try.]

And so, this is why I would like mechanics that reduce the range of a party at their best and a party at their worst so that they don't feel the need to stop unless it is due to their health, and I don't feel the need to challenge their resources just to have a combat where the mundane guys get to have a turn. I would hope for advice on the system so I can have some measure of DM agency to keep things going - so I know what expected levers I have to maintain my world. 

I suppose the big issue here is the Vancian mechanics. An idea:

What if rather than getting all your spells back in a one hour study session, you instead spend a greater amount of time studying to prepare a single spell but this could be done at any time, rather than just after an extended rest (with the higher the level, the longer the time - let's say 10 minutes per level of the spell). In this way, the wizard can have a break and prepare their big spell(s) and keep going. It is only when the wizard dries up all their resources that they are going to have to have some serious time off to get them all back. I'm sure you could play with the rate here to catch the sweetspot. I see two advantages with this:

1) Lower level casters have more control over their resources and do not runout as often.
2) The power disparity between a group at max resources and a group at a lower resource level is lessened as it is easier for a wizard to keep their power level up. [The assumption is that a wizards highest spell is significant but not over-powered.]

Food for thought anyway.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise


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## Ahnehnois (Jul 17, 2012)

Herremann the Wise said:


> But there becomes a point in power level where this no longer works because:
> 
> a) You can only run so many time sensitive scenarios before the group get sick of being pulled from one situation to the next (loss of player agency).
> b) The group becomes so powerful that they effectively determine the "when" 9 times out of 10 encounters they face. There is too much powerful magic and powerful defensive magic where the PCs effectively decide whether they fight or not.



It seems to me like you are saying that high-level magic is game-breaking. This is obviously true. There is no logical reason why a double-digit level party would fight more encounters in a day than they chose to, unless there was some serious business going down that needed to be dealt with right away (which should happen sometimes but not constantly in most games).

I'm just not seeing where it's a big problem. High-level D&D is a style unto itself that gets towards superhero fiction, where the same convention (i.e. the heroes fight on their terms) applies. In what scenario would it be important that the PCs *not* rest after every battle on a regular basis?

Moreover, you've left out the other point about high-level play, which is that PCs have so many resources they rarely run out at that point.



> In a 3.x Age of Worms campaign, the wizard/archmage became so strong that encounters were basically run at two speeds - the wizard at full and the wizard slightly less than full.
> ...
> As such, picking a median level meant that an encounter was a walkover for the party at full but very dangerous if the party was down on resources with the wiz/arch being the most obvious factor.



Seems to me like you're describing a pretty tactically interesting and enjoyable game.



> I suppose the big issue here is the Vancian mechanics.



I would expand that to per-day mechanics. Having more flexible spell-point systems and the like means that characters aren't out of resources for quite a while. Using warlocks and nonmagic characters also works. D&D magic is kind of a hackneyed style that does impose annoying limitations. I don't think the 15 MAD is the big reason to change it, but it certainly could stand to be changed.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> But would your example mean that your GM will only have all your games around that base of yours? Would you always be able to retreat there and have your safe 15 min workdays?
> 
> If my players throw a big firework of moves and spells close to their base and then retire, I'm fine with it. But 99% of their adventures won't be very close to where they stay in their downtime.




I like to set goals for my PCs instead of having the DM set them.  If I want to tame the wilderness and turn my little fort into a tower that rains doom and despair across the land, then that's what the game is going to be about.  I doubt that I'd always be able to retreat (or even that I'd achieve that goal!), but I want that option to exist if there's a reasonable chance that it _could_ exist.

I don't mind the 15-minute adventuring day, but I want it to be a real choice.  That means that I have to _balance_ that option against my other options.  I don't want resting to always be the best option available, but I do want it to be an option.

I expect a game that contains limited resources and the ability to refresh them to have a balance between refreshing those resources and going on without them.  Or at least help to provide that balance.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

Griego said:


> I've never gone hungry either, but that doesn't mean that people aren't starving somewhere in the world. It's still a problem to be acknowledged and hopefully solved some day.




I had to shake my head at this come on comparing game rules to hunger.

You realize that there are people out there who have issues with some aspect of the game if you try and fix everything that some people complain about you end up with a game no one really wants to play.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

Herremann the Wise said:


> a) You can only run so many time sensitive scenarios before the group get sick of being pulled from one situation to the next (loss of player agency).
> b) The group becomes so powerful that they effectively determine the "when" 9 times out of 10 encounters they face. There is too much powerful magic and powerful defensive magic where the PCs effectively decide whether they fight or not.




An aside...

After playing high-level 3E I have the desire to write a book that helps DMs come up with some kind of idea of the resources available to high-level NPC organizations.  In my game I messed up and got the whole (Forgotten Realms) nation of Mulhorand after me.  Which is pretty cool.  The problem is that neither I nor the DM has any idea how to figure out how many resources they have on hand, and what the cost of using those resources would be.

You could run the NPC demographics from the DMG for every settlement throughout the land, but that still wouldn't do it - not every NPC is going to be available to the leaders, and some of it will have to be used for day-to-day events.  (Such as a war with a neighbouring country.)  Then the DM would have some kind of place to start from, and I could have my PC try to gather information about what's going on.

I guess in a way this is related to the 15-minute adventuring day, because that's my favourite way to deal with it - have the game detail appropriate resources for NPCs and let them use it in any way they see fit.  Then there's a cost to hanging out and getting your spells back, because your enemies are active.  Basically: Take the advice that the game world should be in motion, then help DMs put it into motion.  

It'd be a big project, but that's why you pay for it.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Without railroading, how can the DM force you to leave your base?*
> 
> And once you get mid-level transportation magic, how can he stop you from going to-and-fro?
> 
> * Not considering, of course, the metagame, "Hey, guys - I'd like to run an adventure where you travel to [etc.] ..." method.




He can't force you to leave you base you can sit there all nice and snug while the bad guys have free reign over the world. Or he can say since you guys don't want to play anymore today lets wrap the game up. 

So you clear out an area of the dungeon and teleport home to your bed I hope you are ready to clear out that level again because your handy work has been discovered and now they are ready for you.

The king hired you to rescue his daughter instead of paying the ransom but instead of continuing on you teleport home to sleep in a comfy bed. Meanwhile your activities have been discovered and the bad guys realize they king does not intend to pay so he sends the king his daughter's head. Now the king has a bounty on your heads.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

I think the best way to handle this is mainly advice and for those who want them optional rules for handling resources.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I like to set goals for my PCs instead of having the DM set them.  If I want to tame the wilderness and turn my little fort into a tower that rains doom and despair across the land, then that's what the game is going to be about.  I doubt that I'd always be able to retreat (or even that I'd achieve that goal!), but I want that option to exist if there's a reasonable chance that it _could_ exist.
> 
> I don't mind the 15-minute adventuring day, but I want it to be a real choice.  That means that I have to _balance_ that option against my other options.  I don't want resting to always be the best option available, but I do want it to be an option.
> 
> I expect a game that contains limited resources and the ability to refresh them to have a balance between refreshing those resources and going on without them.  Or at least help to provide that balance.




It sort of sounds like you are saying the DM is your bitch. 

What if they DM is planning on running nothing but city encounters or an Adventure Path that takes place on the sea? 

As a DM my fun comes in planning what is going on in the world and how the world reacts to what the PCs do.

I am not saying I won't work with the PCs to help reach their goals if those goals can be fit into the campaign I am running. 

But it is a two way street and there are more than just you at the table.


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## Herremann the Wise (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> So you clear out an area of the dungeon and teleport home to your bed I hope you are ready to clear out that level again because your handy work has been discovered and now they are ready for you.



Funnily enough, I could see this working the other way with my PCs. They smash the dungeon with _shock and awe_, before retreating back to safety while magically watching the area. A tribe of dungeon denizens seeing that they are "outmatched" organise an evacuation plan over the next couple of days taking the dungeon's McGuffin with them. The PCs now having rested and at full resources scry teleport attack the isolated tribal leader taking his McGuffin with minimal effort before returning to the dungeon to "pick up the coppers".

I suppose my point is, sometimes it does not make sense that a dungeon is going to restock itself within anywhere near the speedy timeframe that the PCs can. Sometimes the measures you take to combat the 5MW are just as contrived as the ones leading to the 5MW in the first place and unfortunately to maintain a believable ecology, you are going to end up encouraging the 5MW as many times as discouraging it.

This is why I would like to see this addressed at a mechanical level, so it is not left to the DM to always have to push and pull the levers.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise


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## Griego (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I had to shake my head at this come on comparing game rules to hunger.



Maybe it was a bit heavy-handed, but only thing I could think of on the spur of the moment. 



> You realize that there are people out there who have issues with some aspect of the game if you try and fix everything that some people complain about you end up with a game no one really wants to play.



Now now, let's not stray into straw man territory here. Fixing certain problems does not mean the game automatically becomes unplayable. There may be a workable solution that suits a lot of peoples' tastes and playstyles. And this is a problem that merits working on, judging by the amount of discussion it gets. 

For what it's worth, I think the solution could be had in both mechanics and advice. As far as mechanics go, I dunno what would be best. Milestones seem like a step in the right direction. But as for advice, the DM's Guide could include exhortations not to put things like dragons magically disguised as kobolds in the dungeon too often, because the players' likely response would be to go nuclear on everything they encounter, because at that point you never know.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> It sort of sounds like you are saying the DM is your bitch.




Okay.



Elf Witch said:


> What if they DM is planning on running nothing but city encounters or an Adventure Path that takes place on the sea?
> 
> As a DM my fun comes in planning what is going on in the world and how the world reacts to what the PCs do.
> 
> ...




I tailor my goal to the campaign.  In a city, maybe my goal would be to take over the thieves guild, or to set up a trade route with the help of permanent teleport circles.  I'd present the rest of the group with my goal and see if it would work; if not, I'll come up with a new one.

I am not interested in playing through an Adventure Path.  Neither am I interested in playing through a DM's pre-plotted campaign - though that's a complicated topic only partially relevant to this discussion.  (Not that you were talking about pre-plotted campaigns; I just want to clarify what sort of game I enjoy.)  For example, I don't mind a game with a strong initial situation - in fact, I like that, it gives me some guidance in character creation - but I don't want the DM to have any preference as to how the campaign will play out.


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## Hussar (Jul 17, 2012)

Herreman, I really like your idea of letting wizards (or any Vancian Caster for that matter) regain spells after resting for a short while.

But, doesn't that basically make every caster an "encounter" caster?  If you are going to go this way, why not go all the way and back to AEDU?


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## Raith5 (Jul 17, 2012)

I dont think this problem is a general issue for a whole edition. There has been no 15 minute workday problem at any point in my 4th campaign (levels 1-18) but it was a significant problem in lowish 3rd ed campaign (especially levels 1-5) but higher levels of 3rd it was not a problem.

As such I favor mechanics that give some form of encounter resources or a recharge mechanism. I also like the idea that the mechnics can give an incentive to press on - maybe  some from of recharging of power per milestone or encounter.

I also think that some form of second wind/self healing mechanic would solve a lot of these problems because a lack of healing magic was the core problem for my group in 3rd.


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## Lanefan (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I tailor my goal to the campaign.  In a city, maybe my goal would be to take over the thieves guild, or to set up a trade route with the help of permanent teleport circles.  I'd present the rest of the group with my goal and see if it would work; if not, I'll come up with a new one.



Problem is, the DM has goals too - be it a story she wants to tell, an adventure module she wants to run, whatever - that might not have much to do with your goal of setting up a teleport network nor the equally-non-adventuring goals of the other players/PCs.

Which, oddly enough, tangentially impacts the topic at hand: not only is there the 15-minute workday in the field, there can also be the 15-minute session at the table.  By that, I mean you've got only a short time where everyone is on the same page and actually getting on with some adventuring as opposed to pursuing their own non-adventuring projects.



> For example, I don't mind a game with a strong initial situation - in fact, I like that, it gives me some guidance in character creation - but I don't want the DM to have any preference as to how the campaign will play out.



Why not?  It's her campaign too...

As for the original topic, I can offer only 5 words: *wandering monsters are your friend*.  Yes, both you and your players might get bored senseless playing out all the little combats that come up when wanderers stumble on the party; never mind that any interruption to the rest period means nothing can be recovered next morning (no spells, no h.p., etc.) - eventually the players learn to manage their resources and keep going.  

Conversely, when they do keep going to the point of serious risk it's never a bad idea to back off on the wanderers a bit and let them rest...

Lanefan


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> Problem is, the DM has goals too - be it a story she wants to tell, an adventure module she wants to run, whatever - that might not have much to do with your goal of setting up a teleport network nor the equally-non-adventuring goals of the other players/PCs.




I don't want to experience the DM's story, so I don't play in those games.  Adventure modules are okay as long as the outcome isn't pre-planned.  That's why I am not interested in Adventure Paths.

Creating a network of teleport circles seems like an adventuring goal: you need XP and GP in order to do it, and that means adventure...  eventually to other cities, which is a nice way to add depth to the city campaign.



Lanefan said:


> Why not?  It's her campaign too...




I want my choices to have an influence on how the situation unfolds.  If the DM wants the situation to unfold in a certain way - and, I guess, takes steps to ensure that happens - then my choices aren't influencing the situation and there's not much point in me playing.  I see that as _her_ campaign instead of _our_ campaign.


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## Campbell (Jul 17, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> Problem is, the DM has goals too - be it a story she wants to tell, an adventure module she wants to run, whatever - that might not have much to do with your goal of setting up a teleport network nor the equally-non-adventuring goals of the other players/PCs.
> 
> Which, oddly enough, tangentially impacts the topic at hand: not only is there the 15-minute workday in the field, there can also be the 15-minute session at the table.  By that, I mean you've got only a short time where everyone is on the same page and actually getting on with some adventuring as opposed to pursuing their own non-adventuring projects.
> 
> Why not?  It's her campaign too...




This is an area where I feel more communication at the game table would be fruitful. Everyone playing has a responsibility to the rest of the table. If a character goal results in uninteresting play choose a goal that does result in interesting play that fits with what has already been established in play.


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## Lanefan (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I don't want to experience the DM's story, so I don't play in those games.  Adventure modules are okay as long as the outcome isn't pre-planned.  That's why I am not interested in Adventure Paths.
> 
> Creating a network of teleport circles seems like an adventuring goal: you need XP and GP in order to do it, and that means adventure...  eventually to other cities, which is a nice way to add depth to the city campaign.



True, as long as all agree this will be a city-based campaign.



> I want my choices to have an influence on how the situation unfolds.  If the DM wants the situation to unfold in a certain way - and, I guess, takes steps to ensure that happens - then my choices aren't influencing the situation and there's not much point in me playing.  I see that as _her_ campaign instead of _our_ campaign.



This probably needs its own thread...

If I as DM have pre-determined (to use an extreme example) that the campaign world will blow itself up exactly 5 years after the start of the campaign unless the PCs fix it, but would rather not tell the PCs (or the players!) this right away in order to be able to use it to crank up the tension down the road; and I've got a bunch of vaguely-connected adventures in mind that will eventually lead to fixing it but will take close to 5 years to complete, and you as player decide that after you've spent a few months in the field getting rich you're going to spend three years building a tele-net, something's gotta give.  Either I have to chuck out the whole rationale behind the campaign (which means I've wasted my time designing it in the first place), or you have to accept the world blowing up not long after your shiny new tele-net opens for business because you've left the adventuring until far too late. 

Lan-"my campaign world of Telenet was named as a short form of 'teleport network', a key element of that world"-efan


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## Herremann the Wise (Jul 17, 2012)

Hussar said:


> Herreman, I really like your idea of letting wizards (or any Vancian Caster for that matter) regain spells after resting for a short while.
> 
> But, doesn't that basically make every caster an "encounter" caster?  If you are going to go this way, why not go all the way and back to AEDU?




Sort of but not quite; and good question by the way. Some points:

a) A lot of this is dependent upon the number of Vancian slots a caster gets to manage. If you compare this to a 3.x caster, I would compress things so that lower level casters get a little more but higher level casters get quite a bit less.

b) Encounter powers are automatically returned at a short rest. With my idea, you can do the study but you don't have to (you could do the healing thing instead). As well, you might make the fatigued and exhausted conditions a little more a factor with the caster requiring a non-fatigued state to study and prepare. At higher levels, you might not have enough time to get all your slots back and so you have to carefully manage the resources as to what to prepare (the main "feature" of the Vancian system in my opinion).

c) I think you'd need to be careful that the game didn't become a situation of always waiting for the caster. I think the Vancian slots need to be supported by further magic systems be they at-wills, charged items or something else entirely.

d) I've come to the conclusion that going back to a Vancian daily format is going to cause as many issues as it solves. It is also a little contentious in terms of the whole favouring 3e or 4e equilibrium thing for those that worry about whether "their" edition is being fairly represented. If it can be modified so that its still there, but heh there's this lever you can use to get something a little more workable (or discard it if not), then it plays more to the middle unifying ground.

e) Perhaps most of all, it makes sense. Why can a wizard prepare spells at some times but not others? In 3.x you can leave slots open and prepare them later anyway (but not if the slot is used within 6 hours of the main study session). Throw out the convoluted restrictions and do something that works within more natural restrictions: does my wizard have the time? is my wizard fatigued? This works better than 4e's "no you can't" encounter power mentality in that it makes simple sense.

So yeah, arcane encounter powers by stealth but not quite.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

Herremann the Wise said:


> Funnily enough, I could see this working the other way with my PCs. They smash the dungeon with _shock and awe_, before retreating back to safety while magically watching the area. A tribe of dungeon denizens seeing that they are "outmatched" organise an evacuation plan over the next couple of days taking the dungeon's McGuffin with them. The PCs now having rested and at full resources scry teleport attack the isolated tribal leader taking his McGuffin with minimal effort before returning to the dungeon to "pick up the coppers".
> 
> I suppose my point is, sometimes it does not make sense that a dungeon is going to restock itself within anywhere near the speedy timeframe that the PCs can. Sometimes the measures you take to combat the 5MW are just as contrived as the ones leading to the 5MW in the first place and unfortunately to maintain a believable ecology, you are going to end up encouraging the 5MW as many times as discouraging it.
> 
> ...




I am not saying that it should happen all the time. What I am saying is if you vary the game enough so that your players don't know what to expect then it makes for a more interesting game. 

If a game is always four encounters and say two random encounters every session that is boring. 

As a DM shaking up the routine is something they should strive for. In my current game the players always have a routine they do,  they are fighting  the same group Tiamat's spawn they don't kill everything sometimes the bad guys get away and report what is going on. The NPCs have the same tools as the PCs. At a higher enough level they can teleport and scry too. 

So soon the PCs are going to face an encounter that turns their SOP right back on them. 

I am not suggesting finding ways just to screw the players over. But bad guys have some of the same resources use them where it makes sense.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

Griego said:


> Maybe it was a bit heavy-handed, but only thing I could think of on the spur of the moment.
> 
> 
> Now now, let's not stray into straw man territory here. Fixing certain problems does not mean the game automatically becomes unplayable. There may be a workable solution that suits a lot of peoples' tastes and playstyles. And this is a problem that merits working on, judging by the amount of discussion it gets.
> ...




I know what you were trying to say but it was so over the top it was hard to take seriously. It is sort of like someone complaining that they are so broke they can't put gas in their car and someone else saying well you want poor look at those people in Somali who only have a donkey. 



I don't think it is a strawman though 4E was meant to fix a lot of the issues that people had with 3E and it did for some and for some of us it turned us off  and we stopped giving WOTC our support. And here we are 4 years later looking at some of the same issues. 

I think there are ways to fix issues without major rule changes one way is giving DMs more advice on how to run and tailor a game and the second is to offer options on how to tailor your game. 


Sometimes it feels like the squeaky wheel is the only thing that gets attention.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> Okay.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Thank you for clarifying. That is really different than how it sounded. 

I don't enjoy DM preplots for the most part but that is not what I do. I have an idea and  I develop it to the point that I am ready to run the game then I let the PCs lose and adapt the plot to what they are doing. I never have an a plan on how it is going to end. 

I have players who could be like I have these goals for my PCs and I don't care what kind of campaign you are running you better work them in. Made me want to slap them into next year.


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## TwinBahamut (Jul 17, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> If I as DM have pre-determined (to use an extreme example) that the campaign world will blow itself up exactly 5 years after the start of the campaign unless the PCs fix it, but would rather not tell the PCs (or the players!) this right away in order to be able to use it to crank up the tension down the road; and I've got a bunch of vaguely-connected adventures in mind that will eventually lead to fixing it but will take close to 5 years to complete, and you as player decide that after you've spent a few months in the field getting rich you're going to spend three years building a tele-net, something's gotta give.  Either I have to chuck out the whole rationale behind the campaign (which means I've wasted my time designing it in the first place), or you have to accept the world blowing up not long after your shiny new tele-net opens for business because you've left the adventuring until far too late.



If a DM tried to pull that kind of thing on me I'd walk away from the table and never play a game with him ever again...

Seriously, something like "the world will explode in 5 years" needs to be laid out on the table explicitly from the beginning, before the game even starts. Keeping the central premise of a campaign a secret from the players is a DMing sin. It's unforgivable and utterly despicable. "I'll keep it a secret so I can ramp up the tension later, but it's not my fault if no one learns about it, so I'll just destroy whatever they do enjoy playing out if spite" is simply being a pathetic and petty human being. It breaks every rule of storytelling and the entire premise of the DM/player social contract.

Sorry, but in that example, the thing that needs to give is the DM's ego. Absolutely no question at all. Not even close to being ambiguous.

The DM absolutely needs to make the premise of a campaign clear to the players from the beginning. After all, he's asking them to dedicate a lot of time and energy to the campaign. Who cares if the DM invests "more" time if its built on deception and a disregard for the time and interests of the other players? This is why having the group sit down and talk about what they want to do with the campaign and what they want from it is absolutely essential before the DM even starts planning anything.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

TwinBahamut said:


> If a DM tried to pull that kind of thing on me I'd walk away from the table and never play a game with him ever again...
> 
> Seriously, something like "the world will explode in 5 years" needs to be laid out on the table explicitly from the beginning, before the game even starts. Keeping the central premise of a campaign a secret from the players is a DMing sin. It's unforgivable and utterly despicable. "I'll keep it a secret so I can ramp up the tension later, but it's not my fault if no one learns about it, so I'll just destroy whatever they do enjoy playing out if spite" is simply being a pathetic and petty human being. It breaks every rule of storytelling and the entire premise of the DM/player social contract.
> 
> ...




I don't think a DM needs to lay out the world will end in five years if you guys don't stop, it want to play. 

Instead he could say that he wants to run a game where an Apocalypse is coming and the PCs have a chance of stopping it. 

I don't see why you would lay out when it s going to happen before you even roll up characters. That kind of thing should be slowly found out by the players. 

There is nothing wrong with a DM coming up with an idea before even talking to the group. It is pretty simple he tells the group this is what I want to run the players either say yay or nay. If they say nay then the DM can shelve it or look for a group who wants to play it. 

I worked on my game for a year before I presented it. It started from reading Races of the Dragon and I ended up building my home brew world.  When I felt I was ready to run a game in it. I asked if anyone wanted to play it and I found players who did. 

My roommate DMs but she only DMs adventure paths  everyone who plays in it knows this and understands that with an adventure path you need to fit your character into one that works with the adventure. 

When I am the player I find out what the DM has in mind and I build a character that fits into his game. I may ask is this possible if he says no then I accept it. If the game does not sound fun to me I don't play.


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## TwinBahamut (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I don't think a DM needs to lay out the world will end in five years if you guys don't stop, it want to play.
> 
> Instead he could say that he wants to run a game where an Apocalypse is coming and the PCs have a chance of stopping it.
> 
> ...



I'm a bit too tired right now to really sort out the minor philosophical differences, but...

As long as the conversation takes place, and the DM and the players are on the same page about whether the game is going to be "stop the apocalypse" or something else, it's all good. Talking things over with the players before serious work begins on the campaign and its setting is my preference, though. The problems appear if that conversation never takes place and the players and the DM inevitably end up completely at odds over what they want the campaign to be.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 17, 2012)

Herremann the Wise said:


> So yeah, arcane encounter powers by stealth but not quite.
> 
> Best Regards
> Herremann the Wise



I kinda like it, but I am not sure it solves the problem I see with the "balance" in a 15 minute adventure day. The problem is not just that you need to rest to get powers back, but that when you can rest, your spellcaster just has so much more power than those that don't have such daily resources.

I really wonder how many spells per day over all the spell levels a D&D Next character will have. I think in 3E, it was just too much. There are a lot of low level utility spells that you could slot to be a non-combat power house to have enough to also become a combat power house. You'd be prepared for most situations.  You could even intentionally leave a few slots open to prepare for a situation you didn'T expect.

If D&D Next will have casters with maybe 2 spells per level (not counting cantrips), it may be better to balance - the choices would become much more harder - do I prepare a utility spell or a combat spell? And the non-spellcasters may even have daily resources like more hit points and extra actions per day or whatever to match the power of those spells.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Without railroading, how can the DM force you to leave your base?*
> 
> And once you get mid-level transportation magic, how can he stop you from going to-and-fro?
> 
> * Not considering, of course, the metagame, "Hey, guys - I'd like to run an adventure where you travel to [etc.] ..." method.




Well, transportation magics can be limited, but in those games I don't have them limited, a lot can happen still. Antimagic fields (usually just limited to poreventing teleports and gateways), spellthieves, mana drains, wizard incapacitated, ritual needed that may be disrupted... I usually come up with something that makes sense. 

Of course, now I remember I had a whole big party stick to their base for almost a game year, but it was still fun as I just put them under some time pressure to turn the 15 min workdays into 1-hrs workdays at least 

Metagaming can be very helpful to get on the same page, I wouldn't really throw adventures at my players when I am not sure they would enjoy them. Like, my beloved murder mysteries wouldn't work in all of my groups.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

SteveC said:


> A game system that runs a narrow set of games




Narrow set of games? Why would planning and managing resources from both sides of the table limit your choice of game? You can still go all hack and slash or role play heavy, or urban play or dungeons. Can't think of a style that would run into problems just because the GM decides to eliminate the 15 min issue.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I like to set goals for my PCs instead of having the DM set them.  If I want to tame the wilderness and turn my little fort into a tower that rains doom and despair across the land, then that's what the game is going to be about.  I doubt that I'd always be able to retreat (or even that I'd achieve that goal!), but I want that option to exist if there's a reasonable chance that it _could_ exist.




But there might also be a reasonable chance they don't exist. They will sometimes and sometimes they won't, so you couldn't expect them every time. 

Goals for your PC are for you to set and for the GM to figure out how to fit them in. If your goal is to have a tower of operation that manages to control a fair bit of area and get back to there easily, I think that could be done without necessarily limiting your work day 



> I don't mind the 15-minute adventuring day, but I want it to be a real choice.  That means that I have to _balance_ that option against my other options.  I don't want resting to always be the best option available, but I do want it to be an option.




Ah, if you don't mind short days, it is of course less of an issue already. It isn't that hard for a GM to add useful options here, either, like "rest here and lose precious time/the guy you are chasing (with the option to find him later)/miss some event or go on and risk not having all your options." 



> I expect a game that contains limited resources and the ability to refresh them to have a balance between refreshing those resources and going on without them.  Or at least help to provide that balance.



That's the point, I think. It makes the occasional short day not an issue. My groups usually think similar, so it is not that we don't have short days (I think record was 5 min battle and rest afterwards) it is just not been an issue.


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## Leatherhead (Jul 17, 2012)

Ok, so you have a mechanic that prevents the players from going nova and blowing all of their resources all at once.

Now what happens when the players _need_ to go nova? 

Perhaps they have had a string of bad rolls, perhaps they aren't brilliant tacticians, perhaps they are fighting the BBEG and need to make them fall no mater the cost.

I don't think removing the option to nova is a good idea.


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## Herremann the Wise (Jul 17, 2012)

Leatherhead said:


> Ok, so you have a mechanic that prevents the players from going nova and blowing all of their resources all at once.
> 
> Now what happens when the players _need_ to go nova?



They retreat, they fluke a victory or they suffer a defeat. Sometimes things just get too tough and the PCs have to work out how to get out of a bad situation. Requiring a caster to Nova just suckers the PCs in to keep fighting when they should bug out. Extending the range of the PCs into "Nova" range gives too much discrepancy between a party at their best and a party at their average. This is the factor I believe is at the heart of the whole 5MW thing - being a central issue for some but not others.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 17, 2012)

Leatherhead said:


> Ok, so you have a mechanic that prevents the players from going nova and blowing all of their resources all at once.
> 
> Now what happens when the players _need_ to go nova?
> 
> ...



I have experienced exactly that problem with the 3E Warlock. Some people look at "what, xd6 damage at will - that's OP". Until they get in their first EL = PL +4 or more encounter and see that xd6 damage cannot be boosted to turn the tide in this encounter.

No, that's why they need to adress the balance problem, without necessarily fixing the potential of going nova. The balance problem is that only some classes can go nova at all, since they are the one with daily limited powers, and these abilites are balanced only with the idea in mind that there is an average number of encounters and they must spread them out. Forget that assumption - assume in fact that people do never have encounters that fall in the average, and give every class "nova" capabilities. 

That's exactly what D&D 4 did. If I have a 15 minute adventure day there, the WIzard and Cleric/CoDZilla doesn't get to dominate the game. Everyone contributes with his own daily resources.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> Either I have to chuck out the whole rationale behind the campaign (which means I've wasted my time designing it in the first place), or you have to accept the world blowing up not long after your shiny new tele-net opens for business because you've left the adventuring until far too late.




[sblock=On teleport networks and the end of the world]I think there's some kind of miscommunication going on here.  What I'm reading this as is "You're not adventuring unless you do what the DM expects you to do."  I don't think that's what you're saying, though, so maybe a clarification of what you mean by "adventure" would help?

I think creating a teleport network is adventuring because: at low levels you need to gather cash, XP, and contacts.  The best way to get this is to adventure.  At mid-levels you might start using your cash on research to develop a way to create a teleport network without having to cast 9th-level spells.  This would probably mean political intrigue - getting access to a library to research, getting access to NPCs who can do the research, gaining allies and dealing with enemies.  At high levels you put what you've discovered into place and start heading out to other cities - which gives the DM a chance to add city elements that wouldn't fit in the original city, the "added depth" - to forge treaties, fight wars, and work out trade deals.

As this is going on, you're getting involved in the plots and backstory of the campaign world - so if there is something that will end the world in five years, its likely that you'll stumble across it.  Obviously "the end of the world" is an extreme example, because there's no option - how much energy should I put in my teleport network vs. saving the world isn't really a choice.  If the backstory was something smaller, like some guys are trying to perform regime change, then I've got some decisions to make.  Can I work with these guys?  Who do I want to support?  What will be best for my teleport network?

Is that what you meant by putting off adventure - single-mindedly pursuing a goal to the exclusion of all other considerations?  That's not what I had in mind when I said I like to achieve the goal I set for my PC.  It's more like: given this campaign setting, what goal will be interesting for everyone at the table?  Once that question is settled, I want to make choices - about how best to achieve my goal given the challenges that the campaign world poses, how to balance that with the goals of my strongest allies (the other PCs), and if I want to change what my goal is.[/sblock]

One of the problems with the 15-minute adventuring day and goal-oriented play is that, as I said before, if taking a rest doesn't have any cost then I might as well do that.  (Assuming that taking a rest is going to refresh those resources that help you achieve your goals.)  I want to make a choice about pressing on vs. resting.  How much can I get done today while still making sure I'm safe if a group of drow decide to get their revenge for my past deeds?

I think this is a difficult thing to do as DM, but I think it's relatively _easy_ for the system to do it.  The system can have rules for wandering monster checks, a method to determine how much more powerful NPCs and their organizations get, and other ways to spend your down-time, among other things.  If the novice or lazy DM (like me!) decides not to spend too much time thinking about that but instead applies the (hopefully) simple rules, he can say, "Hey, look at that, the NPCs whom the PCs have pissed off just got access to an assassin squad.  Off to kill the PCs, then!"  Or other things: that vein of gold in the ground is now being mined by duergar.  The bandits who kidnapped the princess didn't get their ransom and now the peace her marriage was going to create hasn't happened.

I think a system can be a great asset here.  Coming up with a good one that gives various DMs enough flexibility for different campaigns is tricky.


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## LostSoul (Jul 17, 2012)

I think we're in agreement, but I wanted to expand on this a little more:



Lwaxy said:


> But there might also be a reasonable chance they don't exist. They will sometimes and sometimes they won't, so you couldn't expect them every time.




I agree.  One of the things I find interesting about D&D is that these situations crop up - where you get yourself into trouble.  I enjoy it when it's my own poor choices that lead to these situations: "Crap, I spent too much time building my stupid little fort.  Now the bandits have gathered allies by promising them a share of _my_ loot, and my fort's not strong enough to protect me."

[sblock=Effect and cause]In my 3E game: Mulhorand is after me because...
< we killed a lot of important NPCs because...
< we burned down the Mulhorandi fleet because...
< we were greedy and over-confident because...
< we didn't do a very good job gathering intel because...
< we were over-confident and wanted to get our mission to gather intel on the fleet for the Thayans over with as quickly as possible because...
< the Thayans made us an offer we couldn't refuse because...
< we ended up on a Thay-controlled island by mistake because...
< Plane Shift is only accurate to 5 - 500 miles and we had to cast it because...
< we were in Sigil selling our loot without drawing attention from the drow because...
< we tried to kill a drow princess but she got away with a Word of Recall because...
< I miscast Teleport and ended up in a drow-controlled dungeon because...
< I had to cast Teleport to get the loot we left behind in a dungeon because...
< Plane Shift is only accurate to 5 - 500 miles and we had to cast it because...
< we had to Plane Shift to Sigil to get a high-level Cleric to cast Restoration because...
< we triggered an Enervation trap because...
< we weren't very careful when looking for traps.

(I'm leaving out the part about the Geas-ed adult red dragon, the ancient green dragon vampire, and the pride and belligerence that led to it all.)[/sblock]


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## erleni (Jul 17, 2012)

I'll go for mechanics. If you have sound mechanics then the rest will follow.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 17, 2012)

LostSoul said:


> I think we're in agreement, but I wanted to expand on this a little more:




*chuckle* Such chain of events happen all the time. You know you really turned the game world upside down when your GM request a toilet break and takes his game books with him.


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## Lanefan (Jul 17, 2012)

TwinBahamut said:


> If a DM tried to pull that kind of thing on me I'd walk away from the table and never play a game with him ever again...
> 
> Seriously, something like "the world will explode in 5 years" needs to be laid out on the table explicitly from the beginning, before the game even starts. Keeping the central premise of a campaign a secret from the players is a DMing sin. It's unforgivable and utterly despicable.



So, in other words, you would rather know how the book ends before you read it.

It's the same thing.  I admit I used an extreme example, but the premise remains.

Can't speak for you, but as a player going into a campaign I don't want to know what ideas the DM has for what will happen 5 years down the road - I'll either find out through play or I won't; and if the world blows up because I and my party screwed up either through ignorance, bad luck, or bad intention then so be it. (I've actually been in a campaign just like this - as a party we knew we had to either do something or prevent something from being done but we weren't sure which, or what (we weren't that good at information gathering) - so we did what we could and thought we'd fixed things, but we hadn't; and next full moon the world blew up.  End of a 10-year campaign.  I still play under that same DM, and have for the 20-odd years since this happened.)



> "I'll keep it a secret so I can ramp up the tension later, but it's not my fault if no one learns about it, so I'll just destroy whatever they do enjoy playing out if spite" is simply being a pathetic and petty human being. It breaks every rule of storytelling and the entire premise of the DM/player social contract.
> 
> Sorry, but in that example, the thing that needs to give is the DM's ego. Absolutely no question at all. Not even close to being ambiguous.
> 
> The DM absolutely needs to make the premise of a campaign clear to the players from the beginning. After all, he's asking them to dedicate a lot of time and energy to the campaign. Who cares if the DM invests "more" time if its built on deception and a disregard for the time and interests of the other players? This is why having the group sit down and talk about what they want to do with the campaign and what they want from it is absolutely essential before the DM even starts planning anything.



So letting the plot unfold (and morph, they always do) on its own, with the players learning about it as they go, isn't good enough?

It's not ego, it's maintaining a mystery.

I'm not sure, but I rather suspect if I took a poll of the players and DMs in our crew they'd prefer not knowing the ending (assuming a "hard" ending is even planned) ahead of time either.  But, I'll ask, and get back to you in a few days.

Lanefan


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 17, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> *chuckle* Such chain of events happen all the time. You know you really turned the game world upside down when your GM request a toilet break and takes his game books with him.



I think I've been there. But for less than LostSoul's example.


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## TwinBahamut (Jul 17, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> So, in other words, you would rather know how the book ends before you read it.
> 
> It's the same thing.  I admit I used an extreme example, but the premise remains.
> 
> ...



First off, I'll say that I'm probably one of the most spoiler-averse people you will ever meet. I despise knowing the endings to books or shows or whatever. I despise even knowing what happens in the first episodes of a show before watching it. I prefer to go into stories as blind as possible.

Of course, that has nothing to do with D&D, which is why your analogy fails at the most fundamental level.

D&D is not a book or movie or whatever. D&D is not a story. D&D is an act of cooperative storytelling. It isn't even possible to know the ending to a D&D campaign ahead of time, because that ending won't even exist until the players have played through it. The story is being created by the players and DM, and is something that can and does change dramatically from moment to moment. I don't think the DM should even attempt to write an ending ahead of time, since all that does is detract away from the entire point of the game.

The real point behind my comments isn't about "knowing the ending", it's about having everyone at the table agree to the basic premise of the game. "The world is doomed and you're all going to die if you don't save it" isn't the ending, it is the basic premise of the story. This isn't something you keep hidden as a big mystery, it's something you make crystal clear in the very first scene of the game. This is really a very basic principle of storytelling...

Indeed, this really is more comparable to knowing whether the book you are going to be sitting down to read is a murder mystery or a romantic comedy. This isn't the ending of the book that must be kept a total mystery, the is the basic concept that should be clearly laid out on the back of the book so people will know what the book is even about. You don't want people to walk into a movie expecting to watch a peaceful romantic drama and then turn the whole thing into a graphically violent horror film filled with protracted torture scenes without warning. You want people to walk into such a movie knowing that the horror is lurking behind the facade of the peaceful drama and that it isn't a movie for people who don't like gruesome horror.

You comments are particularly silly if you consider the fact that, unlike a book or movie, the DM can change his or her mind about the ending of the story at any time. If the players are enjoying a totally different kind of game, the DM is completely free to just drop the entire world-destruction plot and pretend it never existed. On the other hand, if the DM insists on destroying the world, the players are hard-pressed to ignore it. This means that any DM who does insist on such a thing is pretty much just doing so to be a jerk and ruin everyone else's fun. The "mystery" or "ending" should never be so sacred that a DM should sacrifice everyone's good time or ability to choose their own path.


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## MarkB (Jul 17, 2012)

Okay, here's the germ of an idea I've been considering for countering nova tactics: A game mechanic that makes it difficult to spam mutliple high level spells. Call it Focus.

A spellcaster begins combat with a Focus score equal to his level, representing his level of concentration upon controlling magical energies. Each spell he casts deducts a number of points equal to its level from his Focus, and he cannot cast a spell whose level is higher than his current Focus.

Each round, the caster regains 1 Focus automatically. Additionally, each At-Will spell he casts helps to keep him centred and actually generates an additional point of Focus. Finally, he can spend an action to Refocus, which gains him back half his level in Focus.

This system would make it difficult for a caster to nova, as he couldn't expend more than one or two high-level spells in a row before resorting to low-level spells or at-wills to recharge.

It might even be practical to use this system in conjunction with a non-Vancian spellcasting system, using it in place of limited spell resources.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

Herremann the Wise said:


> They retreat, they fluke a victory or they suffer a defeat. Sometimes things just get too tough and the PCs have to work out how to get out of a bad situation. Requiring a caster to Nova just suckers the PCs in to keep fighting when they should bug out. Extending the range of the PCs into "Nova" range gives too much discrepancy between a party at their best and a party at their average. This is the factor I believe is at the heart of the whole 5MW thing - being a central issue for some but not others.
> 
> Best Regards
> Herremann the Wise




And what if it is the big boss fight and retreating means letting him finish his plans and open the gate to hell and allow demons  to run freely over the material plane?

This happened in a game I played in we had to use everything we had to defeat him some of us died but failure and running away was not an option. I would have hated being in that situation where the wizard was limited to how may spells he could cast in a day based on some mechanic to stop 15 minute adventuring issues. 

It seems to me that some of this is wanting mechanics to stop players from making tactical unsound plans.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

TwinBahamut said:


> First off, I'll say that I'm probably one of the most spoiler-averse people you will ever meet. I despise knowing the endings to books or shows or whatever. I despise even knowing what happens in the first episodes of a show before watching it. I prefer to go into stories as blind as possible.
> 
> Of course, that has nothing to do with D&D, which is why your analogy fails at the most fundamental level.
> 
> ...




On the whole I agree with everyone being  on the same page but I have played in games where an Apocalypse happens that was not originally in the DMs mind but came along later. As were playing we started getting clues of it coming and ways to stop it. We failed stopping it and then had to deal with a world that had been changed because of it.

I remember in that game the DM said hey any one want to try out the new edition which was third? We were just getting ready to take a break from Shadowrun.

He really didn't discuss much ahead of time. As a matter of fact most of the games I have played in  the DM didn't really say more than I am running a game either a module or a homebrew want to play.


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## El Mahdi (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> It seems to me that some of this is wanting mechanics to stop players from making tactical unsound plans.




Interesting point.  I don't know if that is an intentional motivation for this, but it may be subconscious or just an unwanted side effect.

This just reinforces for me how much I want more At-Will type aspects.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 17, 2012)

El Mahdi said:


> Interesting point.  I don't know if that is an intentional motivation for this, but it may be subconscious or just an unwanted side effect.
> 
> This just reinforces for me how much I want more At-Will type aspects.




At Wills is one way to do it it is not my preferred way of doing things.

I think there is a difference between I want to be able throw difficult challenges at my players and have them have the ability to handle them and still be able to continuing adventuring and facing some more challenges. That is where changing how vancian works can fix that.   

As opposed to the wizard goes nova and then demands the entire party rest when it is not needed. Yes at wills can solve this too but so can other methods.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 17, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> It seems to me that some of this is wanting mechanics to stop players from making tactical unsound plans.



I think it's more about keeping things flowing even if the players do make the occasional tactically unsound plan (or conversely, even if they're a bunch of Sun Tzus).  That is, it's great for an RPG to have a tactical/strategic aspect and reward good planning, but it's not so great for it to over-reward it to the point that it becomes all about planning, with actually playing through and resolving challenges being a mere formality.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 18, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> I think it's more about keeping things flowing even if the players do make the occasional tactically unsound plan (or conversely, even if they're a bunch of Sun Tzus).  That is, it's great for an RPG to have a tactical/strategic aspect and reward good planning, but it's not so great for it to over-reward it to the point that it becomes all about planning, with actually playing through and resolving challenges being a mere formality.




My players are no Sun Tzus and they manage to keep the game flowing just fine. 

I think there are two issues being discussed here not one. 

To me when someone complains about a 15 minute day as a problem my first thought is that the wizard has gone nova just because he can and didn't need to. I think it is easy to fix this by rewarding good tactics and letting bad ones bite the PC in the butt.  This is more of a resource management issue and maybe a newbie player or player with bad tactics. Changing the mechanics of the game to deal with this issue is like putting a tourniquet on a paper cut. 

But that is not what others are saying they are saying that they don't like the idea of one class being able to go nova and want to bring a more balanced approach or they want the PCs to face more challenges where the power for the day stays some what constant. Or they simply don't like how long it takes to get spells back. This issue is the one that needs the rule change. 

If the issue is number 2 then all the advice that the rest of are giving for waht we think is issue number 1 is not going to be what they are looking for.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> My players are no Sun Tzus and they manage to keep the game flowing just fine.



OK.  What I was trying to say was that players being too tactically 'brilliant' could mess up the flow of your game as much as them making 'dumb mistakes.'  If, that is, the game 'swings' too much based on such things, vs putting a fairly large chunk of effectiveness in the characters, themselves, I suppose... anyway, that's getting tangential, I think.




> To me when someone complains about a 15 minute day as a problem my first thought is that the wizard has gone nova just because he can and didn't need to. I think it is easy to fix this by rewarding good tactics and letting bad ones bite the PC in the butt.  This is more of a resource management issue and maybe a newbie player or player with bad tactics.



So, your first reaction to the complaint is that anyone who notices the problem must be stupid or inexperienced?  I hope you can see how that might not be too constructive.  

The '5 minute workday' is not a consequence of bad tactics or inexperience or anything of that nature.  It's a consequence of the system providing disproportionate mechanical rewards (re-gaining potent spells and other resources) for resting, leading to the party doing so as much as they can contrive to.  An inexperienced group could stumble onto that fact, or a group of hard-core 'system masters' could knowingly exploit it - either way, it's there, and it's a mechanical issue.



> Changing the mechanics of the game to deal with this issue is like putting a tourniquet on a paper cut.



I think the mechanical solution is more preventative - so, wearing kevlar gloves to avoid papercuts, perhaps?    Still sounds silly, that is, if the class and encounter imbalances and pacing issues caused by the 5-minute workday phenomenon were trivial.  I'm afraid the 5MW is a metaphorical paper-cut that severs arteries.

One way to partially address the multiple problems the 5-minute workday causes is to give all characters comparable daily resources, that way there's not class imbalance when it happens.  But, it doesn't /stop/ it from happening, and it'll still distort encounter balance.

A very obvious and effective way of dealing with the issue is simply doing away with daily resources, entirely, replacing them with encounter resources (resting or waiting a day isn't an issue) or 'story' resources (the DM decides when they recharge, period).  That still wouldn't /stop/ characters from resting after a given combat, it just wouldn't give them any reward for doing so.



> But that is not what others are saying they are saying that they don't like the idea of one class being able to go nova and want to bring a more balanced approach or they want the PCs to face more challenges where the power for the day stays some what constant. Or they simply don't like how long it takes to get spells back. This issue is the one that needs the rule change.



Nod, possibly very different rule changes, if the idea is to use power re-charge rates to shape player choices or campaign feel.  Or, the game could be made to avoid favoring any one pacing or style...


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## Elf Witch (Jul 18, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> OK.  What I was trying to say was that players being too tactically 'brilliant' could mess up the flow of your game as much as them making 'dumb mistakes.'  If, that is, the game 'swings' too much based on such things, vs putting a fairly large chunk of effectiveness in the characters, themselves, I suppose... anyway, that's getting tangential, I think.
> 
> 
> So, your first reaction to the complaint is that anyone who notices the problem must be stupid or inexperienced?  I hope you can see how that might not be too constructive.
> ...




Well you have just stated the obvious players can mess up the DM plans and the flow of the game. In other news water is wet.

When someone says how do I stop the wizard from going nova and using all his spells then wanting to rest then yes I think that part of the issue could be inexperienced players or DMs. Or DM s who allow this kind of behavior by letting the players do it over and over with no consequences. 

I have read plenty of advice from old game designers back in the old days of the 1E and 2E dealing with this issue and the advice was always don't let them rest, use time limits make them realize that they need to manage their resources better. 

I have players come into my games and other games I have played in who played wizards who would nova when it was not necessary and using these tactics stopped them from doing this. 

And being inexperienced or not great with tactics has nothing to so with being stupid but be my guest and just assume that is what I am saying. 

I have noticed that a lot of newbies who play magic users often have trouble with going nova it is a learning curve it is like dealing with healing learning when to bite the bullet and waiting to being healed and knowing that waiting is a bad idea. 

If you choose to play 1,2 or 3 you need to be aware that this can be an issue and know how to handle it as a DM. 

I am going to disagree with you that it is just a mechanical issue I have seen people complaining about the 15 minute day in 4E as well. Part of this is a playstyle where players don't want to take on any challenges unless they are fully powered. 

Yes one way is to do encounter resources but here is a news flash not all of us want that in our role playing games because it does not fit our play style. I don't want the okay encounter is over lets rest here so we can get our powers back that to me is the same as resting because you went nova. 

Which is why I said you needs to fist identify exactly what the problem is to find the fix that works best with your game.


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## Jester David (Jul 18, 2012)

I like my investigative modules. The problem with these is they tend to take place over multiple days and end with a single battle. They were tricky with 4e as bad guys had to have minions or be a solo, and because the PCs could drop Dailies and nova. 
More than any other edition, 4e changed how I wrote and planned adventures. I changed the stories I told to accommodate the rules.  

I don't want hard mechanics preventing 15-minute workday. I'd rather know how to deal with it.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> When someone says how do I stop the wizard from going nova and using all his spells then wanting to rest then yes I think that part of the issue could be inexperienced players or DMs.



Well, the flip side of it is:  why do they feel the /need/ to keep the wizard from doing that?  It's because doing so makes the character going nova over-powered - it's ruining the game for everyone else, the DM included.





> I have read plenty of advice from old game designers back in the old days of the 1E and 2E dealing with this issue and the advice was always don't let them rest, use time limits make them realize that they need to manage their resources better.



Right, subordinate the needs of your campaign/story to the needs of balancing the nova-capable classes.

It's an answer, yes.  It's not as good a solution as a mechanical one, though.




> I am going to disagree with you that it is just a mechanical issue I have seen people complaining about the 15 minute day in 4E as well.



Nod.  4e retained daily powers.  While it gave them to everyone and that solved the class imbalance issue with the 5-minute work-day, it didn't make it go away, and there are still encounter-balance issues the DM has to grapple with once the party clues into that weakness of the system.  It's less pronounced than in high-level 3e and early, but it's not gone.

To give another example: "'D&D' Gamma World" came out a while back, and it's a bit like 4e, except that combat is encounter-based, you don't have dailies or surges, you just start each combat with all your hps and all your powers restored.  The only 'resource' that gets expended from one encounter to the next is Omega Tech, and it's random.  There is zero impetus to take extended rests in that game, and you don't see players - even those who rest every chance they get in 4e - doing so.  

It's a matter of a mechanical incentive.  Remove the incentive, and the problem is gone - and the DM (and players) free to use whatever pacing feels right to them.



> Yes one way is to do encounter resources but here is a news flash not all of us want that in our role playing games because it does not fit our play style. I don't want the okay encounter is over lets rest here so we can get our powers back that to me is the same as resting because you went nova.



It's exactly the same, in kind, just much less in degree, yes.


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## mlund (Jul 18, 2012)

Almost everyone wants a narrative flow that makes some sense to them. Chopping things up with a Nova-Rest-Nova routine cuts into the narrative flow badly. The DM can come up with ways to avoid it but the Players also have incentive to look for the best risk-reward deals they can find in the system. Going into a challenge at less than 100% reflects an increased risk vs. going into a challenge at your best. What reward do players receive for that? None. 

Killing 10 bands of kobolds over 10 days gives the same exact rewards as killing them all in one day. you get the same loot and XP. One is clearly more dangerous than the other, so until the DM takes a stick to beat the players in line all the game incentive is for a 15 minute work-day.

The reflect the higher level of challenge (and reward the higher level of drama and narrative flow) why don't the XP awards go proportionately for tackling more in less time? The DMG is going to have XP budget recommendations per character level to design level-appropriate challenges. For each additional budget unit beyond the first that you tackle in a work-day (between Extended Rests) you could get +10% XP.

Now players have an incentive where none previously existed. There's also no need to apply what might be perceived as an adversarial "stick" to herd the players with. Players are on XP and swag like funk on Comic-Con.

- Marty Lund


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## Primitive Screwhead (Jul 18, 2012)

IMHO the only real mechanical 'fix' for the 5MW is to remove all recharge powers {spells, etc..} from the PCs. Limiting to only encounter powers is reinforcing the 5MW play style as it build the nova to rest as the standard. 



			
				Tony Vargas said:
			
		

> The '5 minute workday' is not a consequence of bad tactics or inexperience or anything of that nature. It's a consequence of the system providing disproportionate mechanical rewards (re-gaining potent spells and other resources) for resting, leading to the party doing so as much as they can contrive to. An inexperienced group could stumble onto that fact, or a group of hard-core 'system masters' could knowingly exploit it - either way, it's there, and it's a mechanical issue.




I disagree. The 5MW is a consequence of living in a static world that only exists or changes when the PCs actively interact. Yes, there is a mechanical advantage to resting and being as powerful as possible.
 There is a story disadvantage that your mission may fail by your inactivity... but this disadvantage only applies if the GM has the world react to the players inactivity.

To me, the 5MW is like a bad video game where you battle the Orcs in room A, look into room B through the open door to see another pile of Orcs... and hit the 'rest' button for 8 hours before attacking.

The funny thing is that if you tell your players that the world is a living, breathing entity and their enemies will react intelligently to attacks... you don't have to worry about managing the living, breathing world because your players will push through to avoid having the situation change on them.

So my answer... keep the resource management options {dailies, spells, etc..} and provide solid advice on managing the pacing and keeping the world living. Heck, sometimes its really fun for the party to go NOVA!!1!!!1!! {and equally fun for the monsters to NOVA right back!}

Having a means to burn these resources in non-combat scenarios would help balance out the combat vs investigation process... but that's a bit harder to work out effectively.

YMMV, of course


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2012)

Primitive Screwhead said:


> IMHO the only real mechanical 'fix' for the 5MW is to remove all recharge powers {spells, etc..} from the PCs. Limiting to only encounter powers is reinforcing the 5MW play style as it build the nova to rest as the standard.



Heh.  Yeah, if encounters have the power of dailies, every encounter is like a nova encounter.   



> I disagree. The 5MW is a consequence of living in a static world that only exists or changes when the PCs actively interact. Yes, there is a mechanical advantage to resting and being as powerful as possible.



Thought experiment:  You have a party with no daily resources at all:  they're all Fighters, I guess, with no daily magic items, no Stunning Blow feats, and bags of holding full of healing potions.  

Case 1: They're in a world that reacts to their inactivity - monsters re-spawn over night, enemies improve their fortifications every day, the villains' union requires hostages be killed at midnight, etc, etc...   

What do they do?  They fight their way through everything, pausing only long enough to guzzle healing potions as they go.

Case 2: They're in a static world that doesn't react to their inactivity - if a monster's living in that cave, he just chills there, he doesn't go out every morning and dig another pit trap, if the monster gets killed, he doesn't re-spawn in 24-hours, if the evil bandit kidnaps the princess he might wait more than 24 hrs for the ransom (or sell her into slavery) rather than promptly kill her.  

What do they do?  They fight their way through everything, pausing only long enough to guzzle healing potions as they go, returning to town to buy more only after going through all of them.


The 5MWD is a /consequence/ of a mechanical incentive to rest as often as possible.  Vancian casting is an enormous part of that incentive, but any renewable daily resource contributes.  Distorting the game world to force adventures onto a 3-5-encounters-day time-table may eliminate the 5MWD, if done in a sufficiently draconian manner, but failing to be draconian is not the cause.  The mechanical incentives built into the system are the cause.



> the 5MW is like a bad video game where you battle the Orcs in room A, look into room B through the open door to see another pile of Orcs... and hit the 'rest' button for 8 hours before attacking.



Yes, yes it is.  And what inspired those video games?  Classic D&D.



> The funny thing is that if you tell your players that the world is a living, breathing entity and their enemies will react intelligently to attacks... you don't have to worry about managing the living, breathing world because your players will push through to avoid having the situation change on them.



Well, or they won't.  They may want to assault a fortress, but figure watching it for a few days until the guards become lax and then staging the attack might be better.  Or they, may start a guerilla campaign, taking out anything of value outside the fortress, so that patrols get sent out, then ambushing some of the patrols...  Or they might systematically abuse a few spells to get a lot of money and make some magic items.  Because, really, in a living world, /someone/ is going to go and deal this or that grave threat, even if their one specific band of adventurers doesn't, right?


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## Primitive Screwhead (Jul 18, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> Thought experiment:   [snip]



  Yes, remove the mechanical benefit of the 5MW and the countering penalty of a living world becomes moot. ... from the perspective of combat effectiveness.




Tony Vargas said:


> Well, or they won't.  They may want to assault a fortress, but figure watching it for a few days until the guards become lax and then staging the attack might be better.  Or they, may start a guerilla campaign, taking out anything of value outside the fortress, so that patrols get sent out, then ambushing some of the patrols...  Or they might systematically abuse a few spells to get a lot of money and make some magic items.  Because, really, in a living world, /someone/ is going to go and deal this or that grave threat, even if their one specific band of adventurers doesn't, right?




Yes, and those are all good things. But in a living world they won't find the hidden hideout of the bandits, attack them and defeat half of the bandits before retreating to rest and power back up... and then go back and expect the bandits to be sitting there waiting for the fight to start back up after the PCs called _TIME OUT_. Odds are the bandits, realizing they are over-matched, will grab the loot and depart the area.

Will someone take care of the grave threat? How cool would the story be if someone didn't?
  Or, how boring would it be if someone else did take care of the threats, leaving the PCs to wander around and.. um....?


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## SteveC (Jul 18, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> Narrow set of games? Why would planning and managing resources from both sides of the table limit your choice of game? You can still go all hack and slash or role play heavy, or urban play or dungeons. Can't think of a style that would run into problems just because the GM decides to eliminate the 15 min issue.



Unless you're thinking of some way of doing this other than what's being discussed, the removal of the 15 minute workday creates a situation that is the playstyle. I can this sort of campaign "Fantasy Vietnam," since it (of necessity) turns the game into a situation where you have to deal with the possibility of attack and death at any time, and can't reliably rest and recover resources except when allowed by the GM. Perhaps you were thinking of some other means of "managing resources from both sides of the table?" 

I wonder how an urban, high roleplaying campaign can deal with this, how do you have a series of random combats while in a city? Does everything always have a strict timetable?

The kind of games that are being discussed here as dealing with this issue are really not the sort I'm interested in playing. Now that's fine (no badwrongfun here: really!) but there are fewer types of games you can run with this kind of system. If you need to either have strict time crunch issues for the entire campaign, or random battles simply to block rests, that's not a game I'm interested in.

As I've said: this isn't an issue I've seen much with 3x and not at all with 4E, but in earlier editions? All the time! In this way, 5E would be a major step backwards if it didn't address the issue.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2012)

Primitive Screwhead said:


> Yes, remove the mechanical benefit of the 5MW and the countering penalty of a living world becomes moot. ... from the perspective of combat effectiveness.



And out-of-combat effectiveness where it rests on renewable daily resources (and, with Vancian casting so versatile, it very often does).  Just about any kind of effectiveness, really - if do-anything daily spells can add to it.  

The point of the 'experiment' is simply that a mechanic that doesn't over-reward 'resting' works fine whether you're running a fairly static game or a 'living world,' without distorting either.  

With a system - like Vancian casting or AEDU - that encourages the 5MWD, you have to adjust the style of play and pacing of the campaign to compensate for it.  Whatever your style was, you have to sacrifice it to make up for the mechanical imbalance, whether that imbalance is in encounters or among characters or both.  




> Will someone take care of the grave threat?



Possibly.  In a 'living,' verisimilitudinous world where the PCs are just one among many bands of adventurers, it's possible someone better than them will 'jump their claim' if they hesitate on any adventure - it's also entirely possible for them to hand something off if they decide they can't handle it.  They're not really the protagonists of /the/ story, just the protagonists of their own story.  :shrug:



> How cool would the story be if someone didn't?



Might be pretty aweful.  Or maybe it would create more opportunities for the PCs?  Depends on the situation. That's the kind of thing you have to think about.  Is putting it all on the line to stop the evil wizard really a great idea?  Or might it be better to prey on his allies, scooping up the loot they gather from the countryside, while collecting kudos for 'standing up to' his evilness.



> Or, how boring would it be if someone else did take care of the threats, leaving the PCs to wander around and.. um....?



Pretty boring, but that's a feature of the style.  The PCs aren't the center of attention, if they let an opportunity pass, they may be bored for a while, if they jump in half-cocked, they might get killed.  It's a balancing act - lots of risk/reward evaluation.


I think, ultimately, however much you dress it up as 'good tactics' on the party's side and 'living world' on the DM's side, the 5MWD and it's counters come down to metagaming on both sides of the screen.  The mechanics dictate a huge advantage to the rested party, the party would be foolish not to maximize such advantage, the DM must therefor counter it constantly.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 18, 2012)

> I wonder how an urban, high roleplaying campaign can deal with this, how do you have a series of random combats while in a city? Does everything always have a strict timetable?




Depends on where in a city you are and what is going on.

In bad parts, there's toughs and lowlifes of all kinds...and undead & other threats of some kinds.  Heck, you could stumble on a fight between to rival dojos or gangs (that actually happened to me).  You could be mistaken for someone worth robbing...or who comitted one.  And of course, there are drunken sailors on shore leave.

Elsewhere in the city?  Perhaps you are accused of a crime by a noble scion lying to protect his own actions.  Or two rival magic schools decide on a showdown...

High City?  Get challenged to a duel because you OBVIOUSLY trying to rise above your station.  Or you are carrying weapons you shouldn't be...

Is there a war on?  Perhaps you missed curfew- and some fantasy cities are defended By the undead warrior ancestors of the inhabitants.  Maybe a raiding party crosses your path.  Or a spy thinks you saw too much...


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 18, 2012)

> Possibly. In a 'living,' verisimilitudinous world where the PCs are just one among many bands of adventurers, it's possible someone better than them will 'jump their claim' if they hesitate on any adventure - it's also entirely possible for them to hand something off if they decide they can't handle it. They're not really the protagonists of /the/ story, just the protagonists of their own story. :shrug:




That's how I run things, as does at least one other GM in our group.


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## pemerton (Jul 18, 2012)

BobTheNob said:


> The 15 minute day only occurs in a static world.



I keep reading this in these threads. And for the same reason I and other have stated, it's not true.

Consider the following scenario: the PCs are mid-to-high level, well-respected operatives of an ancient, now fading empire. They spend their mornings investigating ancient ruins, trying to learn secrets of the empire and methods for restoring it to glory. They spend their afternoons back in the imperial palace, politicking with other factions over who will get the benefits of their latest discoveries. (The commute beteween palace and ruins is via teleport spells.)

I have run a version of that scenario, in Rolemaster. It is not a scenario for a static world. The world is dynamic and in motion. The PCs are up to their ears in plotting and scheming. Nevertheless, the imbalance it creates between casters and non-casters (ie daily, nova-capable PCs and at-will, non-nova-capable PCs) is extreme. In the morning exploration, the caster use their nova potential to dominate the action. Because commute is via teleport, they control when the party goes in and comes back out (and the non-casters are highly reliant on the casters to avoid getting straned in the ruins with no means of escape themselves). And then, during the politicking in the afternoons, the casters still tend to dominate because (in RM as in classic D&D) even low level enchantment and enhancement magic (charms, illusion, glibness etc) can provide a huge buff to social encounters.

The actual upshot in that game was the everyone played a caster. That is one "solution", but it has nothing to do with the staticness or otherwise of the world.



Elf Witch said:


> And what if it is the big boss fight and retreating means letting him finish his plans and open the gate to hell and allow demons  to run freely over the material plane?
> 
> This happened in a game I played in we had to use everything we had to defeat him some of us died but failure and running away was not an option. I would have hated being in that situation where the wizard was limited to how may spells he could cast in a day based on some mechanic to stop 15 minute adventuring issues.



But why shouldn't it be _the fighter_ who saves the day in that situation, with a heroic burst holding off the demonic hordes and then cutting down the big boss? Why does it have to be the wizard?

In classic D&D, the only way for the fighter to have a heroic burst of that sort is to get lucky dice rolls, or to drink a potion (of heroism, giant strength, invulnerabiliy etc). You don't need to go to 4e-style dailies to give the player of the fighter the option to nova his/her PC. [MENTION=49096]Mu[/MENTION]strumRidcully has mentioned in several posts over multiple threads the option of making Action Surge a more significant part of the fighter's quota of resources.



Elf Witch said:


> I think there are two issues being discussed here not one.
> 
> To me when someone complains about a 15 minute day as a problem my first thought is that the wizard has gone nova just because he can and didn't need to.
> 
> ...



Correct. Especially the last sentence.


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## pemerton (Jul 18, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> The DM narrates a situation and the players have to react to accommodate it.  It doesn't work the other way around; the players do not tell the DM that they want to find a magic sword in the cave and the DM must react to accommodate them, for example.



A quibble - in the 4e DMG, there is an expectation that if a player tells the GM s/he wants her PC to find a magic sword, the GM will provide it, if not in this cave perhaps in the next cave along.

But otherwise, I tend to prefer a game in which the GM exercises primary control over scene framing. That doesn't mean that I completely disagree with LostSoul, however.



CleverNickName said:


> it still falls upon the DM to provide the plot and the setting.



I dont' really agree with this. I play a fairly traditional game where I, as GM, have primary responsibility for the setting. But the players are able to introduce plenty of setting elements themselves, both via PC backstory and in the course of play. And as far as plot is concerned, I very much prefer that that emerge out of play. I don't want the GM to provide it (either when GMing, or when playing).



LostSoul said:


> I am not interested in playing through an Adventure Path.  Neither am I interested in playing through a DM's pre-plotted campaign





LostSoul said:


> I don't want to experience the DM's story, so I don't play in those games.





LostSoul said:


> I don't mind a game with a strong initial situation - in fact, I like that, it gives me some guidance in character creation - but I don't want the DM to have any preference as to how the campaign will play out.



I'm not interested either in GMing or in playing Adventure Paths, nor pre-plotted campaigns. I quite like strong initial situations, though my own approach is to escalate the situation as the campaign progresses - I tend to find that this fits well with the general thrust of traditional fantasy RPGing, with the scope (thematic, geographical, metaphysical) growing as the PCs gain levels.

I must confess that I do have preferences as to how the campaign will play out, at least in the sense of having aspects of the PCs that I find interesting and want to push harder. That's not necessarily a preference as to plot outcome, but is a preference about thematic and genre content, I think. And to put up a negative example: I have a player who is into military history, and wargame-y board games, and would really like to play out an extended war scenario. Whereas I really don't want to run such a game, and even when he tries to build in hooks and prods to take the game in that direction, I as GM repeatedly fail to bite.

Luckily for both of us, the same player also enjoys the mythic history aspect of fantasy RPGing, and the scope that creates for a PC to be connected to the various metaphysical factions and their plots and schemes and conflicts. And this is stuff I also really enjoy, so I follow his leads in this department instead.



LostSoul said:


> I want my choices to have an influence on how the situation unfolds.  If the DM wants the situation to unfold in a certain way - and, I guess, takes steps to ensure that happens - then my choices aren't influencing the situation and there's not much point in me playing.



For me, it's the "taking steps" that is crucial. But "unfold" is also interesting. If, as GM, I find some aspect of a PC that the player has introduced, and started bringing out in play, interesting, then I might design an encounter or situation that tests that aspect somehow (simple eg the player has the PC expressing frustration at a lack of power resulting from following the gods' prescriptions; I might have an imp or quasit turn up to make an offer of an alternative path to success!).

That's my interests, as GM, making me take steps to have the situation unfold in a certain way - ie how does this PC (played by this player) respond to temptation. But I don't think it means the player's choices are failing to influence how the situation unfolds. It was framed in response to earlier choices they had made, and creates room for them to make new choices that will affect the framing of future situations.



LostSoul said:


> I want to be able to, through smart in-character play, control the factors CNN listed in the post I replied to.



I certainly agree that smart, in character play should affect the nature of the adversity that a PC faces. That is, it should affect the plot. I'm not so sure about what effect I like it to have on the duration, intensity, frequency etc of that adversity. As a GM, I tend to assume primary responsibility for those things, in order to keep pushing the game forward.


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## pemerton (Jul 18, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> it's great for an RPG to have a tactical/strategic aspect and reward good planning, but it's not so great for it to over-reward it to the point that it becomes all about planning, with actually playing through and resolving challenges being a mere formality.



I have found this to be a serious issue with high level Rolemaster.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 18, 2012)

pemerton said:


> I have found this to be a serious issue with high level Rolemaster.



High Level 3E D&D had that problem as well. 

One of the players said he prepared his entire character each session for several hours to know all the spell s he could use and how to combine stuff. Then anothe rhour or so might have been spend each session for the group to organize all the buff spells so that everyone could eek out the last enhancement bonus or deflection bonus or whatever. People made attack matrixes for their fighters to cover all the various scenarios and buffs. I once played a shapeshifter prestige class and looked for good forms to take for various situations (my favorite, the Elephant, was not a good choice. The Delver was awesome, and the Annis Hag wasn't too bad either) and wrot edown all the variable stats.

A lot of time each session was spent preparing the characters for whatever could come. But the combats itself were often not that exciting. (But to 3E credit, some definitely were. Usually those that involved novaing against an opposition that would "counter-nova" ...)


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## pemerton (Jul 18, 2012)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> A lot of time each session was spent preparing the characters for whatever could come.



The particular variant of Rolemaster my group played (Rolemaster is very much a "pick and choose what you like from oodles of supplements" system) made "meta-magic" techniques quite important. One of these was Stored Spells - a bit like a contingency, but able to be triggered at the active desire of the one who has the Stored Spell. The downside of a Stored Spell is that you can't cast other spells. Unless, of course, you use the Bypass Stored spell utility. (And then there is the possibility of having an Additional Stored Spell, which triggers the need for Bypass Additional Stored Spell.)

So one important feature of planning at high levels was mapping out all the Stored Spells, and making sure they were layered across the various PCs in the correctly nested sequence, so that they could be smoothly unloaded to give effect to the plan. (And one subset of this tactical game was working out how to get Stored Spells onto the fighters, who don't need to be able to cast their own spells to do stuff. The whole thing can become very mechanically self-referential when you're trying to work out which fighter should have the Stored Spell that, when cast, will let someone else they touch - presumably a caster, who is going to put a spell into play of his/her own spell points -  Bypass an Additional Stored Spell, so that the whole intricate sequence will unfold correctly. Also, being Rolemaster, the line of dominoes can be knocked over by a failed casting roll - and then we all have to start it over again!)


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## Lwaxy (Jul 18, 2012)

SteveC said:


> I wonder how an urban, high roleplaying campaign can deal with this, how do you have a series of random combats while in a city? Does everything always have a strict timetable?




If no one waylays you in the city, you don't have a 15min workday, because you aren't using up your resources. So if you are doing diplomacy, research and such it's not an issue at all. 

And if you are to break into somewhere etc you will need to do some planning and such, and probably do the breaking in it at night, after which you rest anyway. 

Maybe your party is on guard duty, then it's a lot more likely you get into trouble. Someone mistakes you for an old enemy. You take a wrong turn and end up in the bad parts of town. You come to a murder scene and are mistaken for the killers. Or you are looking for someone who does not like being asked after. A bar fight happens in the tavern you pick.

Plenty of possibilities if there is really a need for the GM to drain your resources. If there is not, it is not a problem. 

I think urban situations would be less likely to suffer short workdays. Isn't it more of an issue when you travel through dangerous terrain and already got attacked twice before midday?


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## CleverNickName (Jul 18, 2012)

pemerton said:


> A quibble - in the 4e DMG, there is an expectation that if a player tells the GM s/he wants her PC to find a magic sword, the GM will provide it, if not in this cave perhaps in the next cave along.



I never played 4E...I tried it for about two weeks, but I couldn't get past the healing mechanics.  So there are a lot of things about that edition that I am fairly ignorant of.  But I gotta tell ya--this sounds HORRIBLE.

The players get to tell the DM what treasure they find?!  I'm sure there are checks and balances in place to prevent abuse...but I can't help but imagine it going something like this:

DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power!  Your quest is finally at an end!

PLAYER: Sword.

DM:  Huh?

PLAYER:  Sword of Power.  Remember, I told you I wanted a sword for my character...that was like, ages ago.

DM:  But it's an altar of Odin.  Odin's weapon is a spear.

PLAYER:  Then change it to Thor, then.

DM:  What?!

PLAYER:  We are in Thor's temple, and I walk up to Thor's altar to claim Thor's Sword of Power.  What's the big deal?

DM:  Thor's weapon is a hammer!

PLAYER:  Then go with Freya or Loki or something.  Surely there is at least one swordy Norse god you can use.  What are my sword's stats?

DM:  *headdesk*

If this "expectation" still exists in D&D Next, then I'm gonna have to pass.



pemerton said:


> I dont' really agree with this. I play a fairly traditional game where I, as GM, have primary responsibility for the setting. But the players are able to introduce plenty of setting elements themselves, both via PC backstory and in the course of play. And as far as plot is concerned, I very much prefer that that emerge out of play. I don't want the GM to provide it (either when GMing, or when playing).



I agree with you; I think we are thinking of different definitions of "plot."  The _*plot,*_ is the reason that the party is in the dungeon in the first place, and the conflicts and complications of it.  The player doesn't decide that there is a princess that needs rescuing, and that the princess will be guarded by a dragon, for example...that is decided by the DM.  But the actions and decisions made by each player must have a significant impact on the *story* that develops...whether or not the party is successful in finding and rescuing said princess, and whether they slay (or hoodwink, or befriend) the dragon.


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## mlund (Jul 18, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> I can't help but imagine it going something like this:
> 
> DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power!  Your quest is finally at an end!
> 
> ...




Someone needs to write a book titled something like, "Dr. StrangeDM or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game."

The game is for amusement purposes only. If you want to run a game with a weapon as the key treasure / artifact feature and your primary weapon-user has specialized in using swords then why shouldn't the artifact should be a sword? Put the Sword of Tyr, One-handed in the shrine. Odin's the head of that pantheon anyway. Everyone who pays homage to Thor or Tyr or Freya has to bow to the All-Father.

I know DM's aren't mind-readers. You can't anticipate players just deciding on a whim one day that he wants a sword. DMs and Players need to share their expectations and goals and the game needs to evolve around those. It's nobody's novel. The DM isn't the player's monkey. The players aren't the DM's subjects. It's *cooperative* fun.

The playing's the thing.



CleverNickName said:


> The player doesn't decide that there is a princess that needs rescuing, and that the princess will be guarded by a dragon, for example...that is decided by the DM.




Dude, I'd practically give my left kidney for one of my players to jump out and suggest or interject that there is a princess in the clutches of a dragon that needs rescuing. I might die of a heart-attack if a player told me that while in town they are searching for anyone with a similar tattoo to the slavers that kidnapped his brother 3 years ago. While I don't want player's gaming the system with unlimited power by ret-conning unreasonable advantages into the world around them at every turn, I'd give eye teeth to have people look at the game world beyond their character sheets as a creative canvas by default rather than the DM's exclusive sandbox box of spiky death and plot-hooks.

There's a reason so many PCs have no families, friends, mentors, servants, businesses, or loved ones. The stereotypical caricature of D&D is that these built-in plot hooks give the DM more control over PCs and give players no influence over the rest of the world. So players generally just stick to the sheet.

- Marty Lund


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## MarkB (Jul 18, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> I never played 4E...I tried it for about two weeks, but I couldn't get past the healing mechanics.  So there are a lot of things about that edition that I am fairly ignorant of.  But I gotta tell ya--this sounds HORRIBLE.
> 
> The players get to tell the DM what treasure they find?!  I'm sure there are checks and balances in place to prevent abuse...but I can't help but imagine it going something like this:
> 
> ...




Your example is a little extreme, given that the actual suggestion is simply for a wish-list of items that the DM may, optionally, work naturally into his adventure.

That said, I'd take even that extreme example over the alternative.

DM: You enter the ancient crypt, and there upon the altar of Odin, you find the legendary Spear of Power!  Your quest is finally at an end!

Player: Spear, huh? Umm, hands up who's good with spears? ...No? Ah well, put a cork on it and stick it in the bag of holding - we'll offload it with the rest of the junk back in town.


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## tlantl (Jul 18, 2012)

MarkB said:


> Your example is a little extreme, given that the actual suggestion is simply for a wish-list of items that the DM may, optionally, work naturally into his adventure.
> 
> That said, I'd take even that extreme example over the alternative.
> 
> ...




Or maybe a 1e barbarian raises his hand. When he gets it he snaps it in two for the experience points.


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## mlund (Jul 18, 2012)

tlantl said:


> Or maybe a 1e barbarian raises his hand. When he gets it he snaps it in two for the experience points.





Cue the Angry DM dropping the Celestial Neck-Arrows of Odin in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

I mean, if it has to be a Spear instead of a Sword to fulfill the Great Narrative Prerogative then obviously breaking it for the XP calls for a flipped table and hurt feelings. I mean, these rotten players are ruining my brilliant novel. 

- Marty Lund


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## Elf Witch (Jul 18, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> Well, the flip side of it is:  why do they feel the /need/ to keep the wizard from doing that?  It's because doing so makes the character going nova over-powered - it's ruining the game for everyone else, the DM included.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




If everyone at the table is okay with playing this way then there is no issue you just play that way. No one is saying you have to play this way. It is an issue if the rest of the players don't want to stop just because the wizard went nova. 

I have never once had to suboridante my campaign needs to handle the nova problem and I have never once had a conversation with DMs I know that have had a campaign issue with handling nova by lighting a fire under the PCs rumps and getting them moving instead of resting after every freaking encounter. 

In your opinion is not as good a s mechanical solution others feel differently.

It solved the game balance issue and made the game unplayable for a lot of us. Maybe because we would rather have more control over how to balance our game than have rigid rules that make bland characters. 

You also take away the chance for any creativity and thinking outside the box because you have the same abilities every encounter. I have noticed that in games that have this kind of rule set players figure out the most effective way to handle any issue and always do it. After awhile it becomes tedious and stale.   

One of the guys I played Shadowrun with loved 4E when it came out he said he would never go back to 3.5 several months ago he went to Pathfinder because while he still thinks 4E does a certain play styles really well and is much easier to DM at high levels.  He and the rest of his group had gotten bored with it. 

Even the game designers have said that one of its issues is that it basically says this is the way you play DnD and any other way was wrong.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Almost everyone wants a narrative flow that makes some sense to them. Chopping things up with a Nova-Rest-Nova routine cuts into the narrative flow badly. The DM can come up with ways to avoid it but the Players also have incentive to look for the best risk-reward deals they can find in the system. Going into a challenge at less than 100% reflects an increased risk vs. going into a challenge at your best. What reward do players receive for that? None.
> 
> Killing 10 bands of kobolds over 10 days gives the same exact rewards as killing them all in one day. you get the same loot and XP. One is clearly more dangerous than the other, so until the DM takes a stick to beat the players in line all the game incentive is for a 15 minute work-day.
> 
> ...




I have been playing since the game came out and I look for more rewards besides XP and loot. I enjoy a challenge that requires me to use my creativity to overcome it. The encounters I remember the most are the ones that were tough where we may not have had all our resources. Where we had to come up with new tactics.

One of the best sessions I ever played in was where we had lost all our weapons, armor, magic items and we were stuck knee deep in enemy territory with them hunting us.  

We had to depend on our wits and each other to make it through. 

My incentive and most of the people I play with now is to get great role playing opportunities to have interesting encounters. While leveling is nice we all use a slow XP progression and we don't tend to play or run high magic item campaigns. 

Our incentive for not going nova is because we would like to do more that have one encounter then rest for an entire day we want the action and the story to move forward. 

For us mechanical limits or mechanical rules that refresh abilities faster does not appeal to us. So my hope is that 5E won't be as hard wired as 4E was and allow our play style to be supported as much for people who want a more 4E style.


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## mlund (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> My incentive and most of the people I play with now is to get great role playing opportunities to have interesting encounters. While leveling is nice we all use a slow XP progression and we don't tend to play or run high magic item campaigns.




Thankfully, 5E is all about having the Magic, Loot, and XP dials available so the settings can be customized for the game you want to play. If you like low-magic, slow-level, and high-risk games you can certainly have your fill without anyone else's fun getting in your way.



> For us mechanical limits or mechanical rules that refresh abilities faster does not appeal to us. So my hope is that 5E won't be as hard wired as 4E was and allow our play style to be supported as much for people who want a more 4E style.




As above, the dials are going to be there for you to adjust as needed. Nothing's going to stop you from opting out of it any more than you'll be stopped from gaining XP at half the default rate or seeing less magic items.

The only thing I see that might not mesh with your play-style is the currently-existing paradigm of various modules or adventure paths assuming that your characters level on the way through them: stuff like Reavers of Harkenwold or Red Hand of Doom. Still, if the challenges are as easy to scale and modify as they were in 4E it'll be a snap to adjust.

- Marty Lund


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

pemerton said:


> I keep reading this in these threads. And for the same reason I and other have stated, it's not true.
> 
> Consider the following scenario: the PCs are mid-to-high level, well-respected operatives of an ancient, now fading empire. They spend their mornings investigating ancient ruins, trying to learn secrets of the empire and methods for restoring it to glory. They spend their afternoons back in the imperial palace, politicking with other factions over who will get the benefits of their latest discoveries. (The commute beteween palace and ruins is via teleport spells.)
> 
> ...




In the example you give then having renewable resources helps make that game play better. In other games maybe the focus is different wouldn't it be nice if we could both run our games with a rule set that does require a lot of house rules but gives us options on which rules to use for the best outcome of our games. 

Who says the fighter doesn't save the day? I have been in encounters were the mages have gone nova and the bad guys keep coming and it was the fighters and rogues who won the day in the end. It really is a team game.  


The fighter issue is an old won and yes the fighter needs fixing and one way I would like to see the fighter fixed is giving him cool things to do all the time not based on daily or encounters


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Someone needs to write a book titled something like, "Dr. StrangeDM or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game."



Heh...nice reference.

Honestly, I don't worry about it.  This whole thread started with people worrying about a "15-minute workday," a phenomenon that I've never actually witnessed in play.  And until I read this thread this morning, I had never even heard of a "wish list."  (Or getting XP for breaking a magic item.  Seriously?)   I've been loving the game, worry-free, for a good long time now.

Other people seem to have a problem with it, though.  From       [MENTION=23094]Patryn of Elvenshae[/MENTION]'s XP comment, it would seem that I'm not alone, and that people complain about these wish lists fairly regularly.  That means the design team should probably give them a closer look.

Same thing for the 15-minute work day (pardon me while I steer the thread back on track).  While I've never noticed it being an issue, many people have.  So the 5E design team should probably work on it.


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## mlund (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> From [MENTION=23094]Patryn of Elvenshae[/MENTION] 's comment, it would seem that I'm not alone, and that people complain about these wish lists fairly regularly.  That means the design team should probably take a closer look at it.




Well, the "wish list" thing isn't even a rules mechanic. It's in the advice for successful DM'ing in the DMG about communicating and managing expectations re: treasure. That advice was basically a response to the old AD&D problem of rolling random treasure tables and getting loot no one can use, or playing a module and getting one-size fits all treasure you can't use. Some DM's don't have any use for that advice. Fine for them. Some people even just run around using the idea to troll the internet (like Edition Warriors and Operating System Fan-bois).

It's truly a rare bird that's deeply offended and convinced that such advice in the DMG is somehow actively inciting his players to rebel against their nigh-godly authority over the narrative as DM. 



> Same thing for the 15-minute work day (pardon me while I steer the thread back on track).  While I've never noticed it being an issue, many people have.  So the 5E design team should probably work on it.




Well, I at least see some mechanical balance issues here in terms of risk-reward and incentive. The system in a vacuum creates an incentive for 15-minute work days. Many times players forego that flaw in the system for the spirit of adventure. Sometimes DM's break out sticks to discourage it. I'd rather the system simply provide its own incentive in favor of drama and risk than have to paper over it or turn a blind eye.



> (Or getting XP for breaking a magic item. Seriously?)




You've never read the original AD&D Barbarian Class introduced Unearthed Arcana? -9001 Nerd Points, sir. Next thing you'll be telling us you have a girl-friend and don't live in your parents' basement. For shame! 

Seriously though, the Barbarian was absolutely kooky. He couldn't use Magic Items at low levels and was basically forced to break them and get XP for it instead of taking them as loot. He also got on with the Wizard like a Paladin got on with a Thief-Assassin. Hilarity ensues. Trust me.

- Marty Lund


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Depends on where in a city you are and what is going on.
> 
> In bad parts, there's toughs and lowlifes of all kinds...and undead & other threats of some kinds.  Heck, you could stumble on a fight between to rival dojos or gangs (that actually happened to me).  You could be mistaken for someone worth robbing...or who comitted one.  And of course, there are drunken sailors on shore leave.
> 
> ...



Indeed.  And if you include non-combat encounters (such as traveling merchants with exotic wares, beggars, lost children, pickpockets, recently-mugged citizens needing help, a shady-looking guy peddling some questionable merchandise, guards doing random weapon checks, etc.), you can have a wide variety of random encounters in a city all day long.  Not every encounter should end in bloodshed, IMO.


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## mlund (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> Not every encounter should end in bloodshed, IMO.




True, though I think the "random encounter" tied back to the 15-minute work-day is the sense that threats from Ye Olde Wandering Monster Table (yes, there was totally a wandering monster check in AD&D) created incentive to not blow all your resources and count on being able to restore them all unmolested. Sketchy merchants and the wandering harlot table aren't the kind of encounters you worry about cropping up because you're short on HP and out of Fireballs.

Raiders, Thieves, Spies, Bullying nobles? Yeah, those could go badly. The idea is that you don't use all your combat resources at once because there's a significant possibly someone or some*thing* else could pick a fight with you before you get them back and it'll all end in tears.

- Marty Lund


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## pemerton (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> The players get to tell the DM what treasure they find?!  I'm sure there are checks and balances in place to prevent abuse...but I can't help but imagine it going something like this



Agreeing with others that there is no real need for inane caricature.

It's not a player power to retcon. But there is a GM who posts here (I can't remember who) who describes the masses of riches the PCs find in general terms, and then lets them specify back at home base exactly what it was they came away with. Schroedinger's Treasure!



CleverNickName said:


> The player doesn't decide that there is a princess that needs rescuing, and that the princess will be guarded by a dragon, for example...that is decided by the DM.



In my case, who the opposition is, and the precise form of adversity, is something that emerges out of both player and GM contributions. The players will often introduce general conceptions of who their enemies, allies, relationships etc are. I tend to work out the details of how those things are under threat.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Thankfully, 5E is all about having the Magic, Loot, and XP dials available so the settings can be customized for the game you want to play. If you like low-magic, slow-level, and high-risk games you can certainly have your fill without anyone else's fun getting in your way.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I am willing to adapt my play style for modules and adventure paths. 

This is my hope for 5E that it will be easy to take things out and add things in without worrying to much about breaking the basic balance.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

MarkB said:


> Your example is a little extreme, given that the actual suggestion is simply for a wish-list of items that the DM may, optionally, work naturally into his adventure.
> 
> That said, I'd take even that extreme example over the alternative.
> 
> ...




Talk about  extremes, how about your quest is over you have found the lost spear of Odin.

Player awesome we now have the tool we need to close the gate to the abyss.


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## mlund (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> Talk about  extremes, how about your quest is over you have found the lost spear of Odin.
> 
> Player awesome we now have the tool we need to close the gate to the abyss.




Player: "Dude? What are you talking about? If we close the gate to the Abyss how are we going to get to Orcus to kill him and take his stuff? I've got to find some place to pawn this stupid stick so I can get a Holy Avenger before we leave ..."

D&D takes all kinds - from the Thespians to the Boot-'em and Loot-'em types.

- Marty Lund


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Player: "Dude? What are you talking about? If we close the gate to the Abyss how are we going to get to Orcus to kill him and take his stuff? I've got to find some place to pawn this stupid stick so I can get a Holy Avenger before we leave ..."
> 
> D&D takes all kinds - from the Thespians to the Boot-'em and Loot-'em types.
> 
> - Marty Lund




Yes it does which is why I found both examples rather extreme and a little silly.

A good DM should have some kind of clue of what motivates and rewards his players. 

Though I have heard complaints from fellow DMs about players who feel they should be able to dictate what items they want. It is one thing to give me some clues about what you want and another to expect me to cough them off exactly when and where and how you want. 

I did find it a little off putting that they put the magic item list in the PHB in 4E  I really don't think it belongs there.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Well, the "wish list" thing isn't even a rules mechanic. It's in the advice for successful DM'ing in the DMG about communicating and managing expectations re: treasure. That advice was basically a response to the old AD&D problem of rolling random treasure tables and getting loot no one can use, or playing a module and getting one-size fits all treasure you can't use. Some DM's don't have any use for that advice. Fine for them. Some people even just run around using the idea to troll the internet (like Edition Warriors and Operating System Fan-bois).




This is it exactly.  Wish lists are a player's way of saying, "Hey, DM - I think it'd be really cool if Ragnar the Bloodthirster had a flaming sword."

Which lets the DM go, "Hmm ... I bet if I drop a rumor or two about a bandit king doing damage to the countryside and burninating peasants' houses with his flaming sword, I'll have two PCs buying in immediately: the paladin to stop the injustice, and Ragnar for the cool sword."

DMs are, of course, free to ignore such wish lists ... but why would you?


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## mlund (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I did find it a little off putting that they put the magic item list in the PHB in 4E  I really don't think it belongs there.




Well, in AD&D -> 3.5 Edition they padded the page-count of the PHB with 100+ pages of Vancian Spell Lists. 4E cut that out so they had to replace it with *something*. They cut almost all the Magic Items out of the Essentials player's books (leaving in only a few examples) but then again they cut the words-per-page count down by like 30% or so and dropped 3 classes each - still hitting that 300+ page sweet spot.

Actually, I found it more off-putting that the mechanical balance of the monsters and challenges assumed players would get useful magic item enhancement bonuses to their attacks ranging from +1 to +6 over 30 levels or the players couldn't hit anything, and it actually restricted use by level to keep players from jumping ahead and messing up balance. It totally cut into the stingy-bloke DM and the Monty Haul DM's prerogatives. You had to do all sorts of rebalancing to compensate for not going along with the math.

Likewise 3rd Edition with its DR and AC escalation and spell output escalation was always assuming weapon-based combatants were advancing their enhancement bonuses on gear as well.

In both editions one of the worst things you could do to a fighting character was take their stuff. I once had a table nearly implode because a Living Greyhawk module has Hill Giants with Improved Sunder and giant axes. Seriously, one guy had to talk this girl back to the table when the +3 Elvencraft Longbow (the one that doubled as a quarterstaff so the ends were enchanted individually for melee too) she'd dumped 2 years worth of accumulated loot value into got turned into a pile of broken sticks in a single swing. It was crap-tacular.

- Marty Lund


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## Fifth Element (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> DMs are, of course, free to ignore such wish lists ... but why would you?



Well said. While some try to paint wish lists as the ultimate in player entitlement, they can actually be very useful in generating hooks, if you choose to use them that way.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> In both editions one of the worst things you could do to a fighting character was take their stuff. I once had a table nearly implode because a Living Greyhawk module has Hill Giants with Improved Sunder and giant axes. Seriously, one guy had to talk this girl back to the table when the +3 Elvencraft Longbow (the one that doubled as a quarterstaff so the ends were enchanted individually for melee too) she'd dumped 2 years worth of accumulated loot value into got turned into a pile of broken sticks in a single swing. It was crap-tacular.



Ouch.  I had a similar problem at my table, when a player's fighter ran afoul of a rust monster.  The player got so mad he wadded up his character sheet and threw it at me, and loudly hurled a few non-grandmother-friendly adjectives.  It took almost an hour to calm him down.



Fifth Element said:


> Well said. While some try to paint wish lists as the ultimate in player entitlement, they can actually be very useful in generating hooks, if you choose to use them that way.



I agree; DMs and players alike should work together to create a meaningful and fulfilling story.  Maybe that means being a bit of a Santa DM, maybe not...it depends on the style of game and the attitudes of the players.

In my defense, I don't play 4E.  So today, in this thread, was the first time I had ever heard of a "wish list," and it was described to me as a player expectation, not as a DM suggestion.  Clearly I interpreted it wrong.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> In my defense, I don't play 4E.  So today, in this thread, was the first time I had ever heard of a "wish list," and it was described to me as a player expectation, not as a DM suggestion.  Clearly I interpreted it wrong.




First off, let me say a hearty "Thank you!" for admitting the misunderstanding.  For some reason, it's hard to do on message boards (as I admit to knowing at least as well as most).  

But I'm going to springboard a bit here, and point out why so many, many people who like 4th Ed go absolutely insane when trying to discuss it and its mechanics and its DMing tools, etc., around people who don't.  (And, for the record, while I really, really like 4th Ed., I've actually played it a really, really small amount, because most of my gaming group decided they didn't want to buy all new books, and so we stuck with 3.5E and later Pathfinder for the most part.  "Most" of my "4E Experience" is actually taking pieces of 4E design and philosophy and backfitting it into a sort of 3.75 framework while DMing, and it's worked, I think, really, really well in that fashion.  And, because I need to use the word more often in this paragraph: really.)

Anyway, back to my point.

You, an admitted non-4E player, were _introduced_ somewhat off-handedly to a 4E concept (player-generated magic-item wishlists) and, _on the basis of that alone_, felt confident enough in your understanding to lampoon the idea with a fairly ridiculous example and declare, in no uncertain terms, your opposition to it appearing in D&D Next.

Do you see why this is counterproductive to good discussion, and why it hurts the efforts to get D&D players of all stripes together and discuss their favorite parts of the various editions, in order to make Next as good as it can be?


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> This is it exactly.  Wish lists are a player's way of saying, "Hey, DM - I think it'd be really cool if Ragnar the Bloodthirster had a flaming sword."
> 
> Which lets the DM go, "Hmm ... I bet if I drop a rumor or two about a bandit king doing damage to the countryside and burninating peasants' houses with his flaming sword, I'll have two PCs buying in immediately: the paladin to stop the injustice, and Ragnar for the cool sword."
> 
> DMs are, of course, free to ignore such wish lists ... but why would you?




I try and give my players cool things but some players can get a little greedy and want things that are either to powerful, to game breaking or it does not fit in the campaign.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

mlund said:


> Well, in AD&D -> 3.5 Edition they padded the page-count of the PHB with 100+ pages of Vancian Spell Lists. 4E cut that out so they had to replace it with *something*. They cut almost all the Magic Items out of the Essentials player's books (leaving in only a few examples) but then again they cut the words-per-page count down by like 30% or so and dropped 3 classes each - still hitting that 300+ page sweet spot.
> 
> Actually, I found it more off-putting that the mechanical balance of the monsters and challenges assumed players would get useful magic item enhancement bonuses to their attacks ranging from +1 to +6 over 30 levels or the players couldn't hit anything, and it actually restricted use by level to keep players from jumping ahead and messing up balance. It totally cut into the stingy-bloke DM and the Monty Haul DM's prerogatives. You had to do all sorts of rebalancing to compensate for not going along with the math.
> 
> ...




I don't know if I would have the heart sunder a weapon that took 2 years of loot to get.

In most of my games I don't give a lot of powerful items. I prefer to take one item and improve it as the game goes on. The sword the cleric has bee using which looks like a plain masterwork weapon is in actuality a very special sword and will eventually become his holy sword and work its way up to being intelligent. 

I don't have magic marts and most of my NPC wizards are low level. So important things are found in ruins or on quests.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I try and give my players cool things but some players can get a little greedy and want things that are either to powerful, to game breaking or it does not fit in the campaign.




There's no time requirement on a wish list.

Let's say someone's got a holy avenger on it - a relatively high-level magic item.

To me, as a DM, that's almost as good as it gets, because I can drop hints, I can plan adventure seeds, I can toss around hooks re: the story of a particular holy avenger or rumors of one resurfacing or evil things that are trying to pervert one for a long, long time - and as long as the player is making progress towards that holy avenger, they'll be really happy.

Maybe they get to the site where a demon is defiling a holy avenger just a moment too late, and now they've got a much-weakened sword, and restoring it to its true power (as a bulwark of GOOD!) is another whole series of adventures.

I mean, sure, are players going to ask for things that are too powerful or don't fit the campaign?  Sometimes - but then all you do is say, "Hey, Dave - just want to let you know that the _Deck of Many Things_ doesn't exist in my world; want to try for something else?"


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## Libramarian (Jul 19, 2012)

TwinBahamut said:


> I won't speak for LostSoul, but I agree with him on player empowerment and agency, so I'll say my own feelings on the matter.
> 
> Player agency is pretty much the one reason I have to play D&D. It's the one thing that the tabletop RPG genre offers that no other game does quite as well, except pure freeform roleplaying. The ability to have an impact on the world, particularly outside that of what my character does, is an extremely important part of that for me.
> 
> ...



I prefer a pretty hard distinction between the DM's control over the setting, the player's control over their characters, and the play's control over the story. I consider it a useful restriction to assume that the player is not going to have any control over the setting. It prods the DM to make sure the player has a feeling of responsibility and agency from an in-character perspective. To me, if a player is spending too much imagination-time at the level of  the broader setting and other out-of-character concerns, that means  they're feeling bored and disenfranchised on the character level, and I  need to up the pace and challenge of the game to offer them more  dramatic and interesting decision points from the perspective of their  character.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> There's no time requirement on a wish list.
> 
> Let's say someone's got a holy avenger on it - a relatively high-level magic item.
> 
> ...




I ask my players to give me some ideas of special magic items they might like.

I have found that I get three responses the first is the player who says what ever I don't really care  and I have not given it any though. The second is a list that is three pages long and worth millions of gold pieces and has a lot of relics and artifacts on it. The third is one with a few times maybe one or two special ones.

The first two drive me batty. One does not care enough the other is just greedy.

I had a player get pissy when I told him that he was not getting the legendary Sword of Kings in a Kalamar game. That I would design a holy avenger and even eventually let it become intelligent but the Sword of Kings was not in the offering.

This was for several reasons but mainly I had an entire sub plot around the sword that dealt with freeing the paladin whose soul powered it. 

The Sword of Kings is a major item in the game world. It didn't fit his character at all. And since the Sword is not stated so DMs have the freedom to do what they want with it I could design one just as for him that fit his god. 

Another time a player really wanted a vorpal sword and my answer was if the PCs have access to that kind of weapon then so the NPCs the rest of the players were like noooo. 

Other times it is because the item is going to make their character to powerful  or make them step on another players toes. If I don't fill a wish there is usually a good reason for it.


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## Campbell (Jul 19, 2012)

You can pretty much lampoon any particular play style if you assume that its participants have no regard for the play experience of the other people sitting around the table. Frankly, I think that sort of attitude is harmful to the play experience no matter what sort of activity you're engaging in. Is it too much to ask too assume that basic social skills be assumed? Everyone should be stewards of the game experience - not just the DM.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> But I'm going to springboard a bit here, and point out why so many, many people who like 4th Ed go absolutely insane when trying to discuss it and its mechanics and its DMing tools, etc., around people who don't.



No explaination needed; it is the same reason that the people who don't like 4th Edition go insane when trying to discuss it around people who do.  Nobody likes to learn that something they enjoy isn't enjoyable for everyone.  I forgot that some people can be very sensitive about it.


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## steeldragons (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> But I'm going to springboard a bit here, and point out why so many, many people who like 4th Ed go absolutely insane when trying to discuss it and its mechanics and its DMing tools, etc., around people who don't.




Excellent. FINALLY!...Why?



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> (And, for the record, while I really, really like 4th Ed., I've actually played it a really, really small amount, because most of my gaming group decided they didn't want to buy all new books, and so we stuck with 3.5E and later Pathfinder for the most part.  "Most" of my "4E Experience" is actually taking pieces of 4E design and philosophy and backfitting it into a sort of 3.75 framework while DMing, and it's worked, I think, really, really well in that fashion.  And, because I need to use the word more often in this paragraph: really.)




uh...huh...



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Anyway, back to my point.
> 
> You, an admitted non-4E player, were _introduced_ somewhat off-handedly to a 4E concept (player-generated magic-item wishlists) and, _on the basis of that alone_, felt confident enough in your understanding to lampoon the idea with a fairly ridiculous example and declare, in no uncertain terms, your opposition to it appearing in D&D Next.




Well, knowing that much, "player-generated magic-item wishlists" ARE nonsensical and completely anathema to my understanding of a D&D experience. I certainly don't want to see it/them in 5e.

But that's neither here nor there...

...the 'why' is coming along here some...where?



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Do you see why this is counterproductive to good discussion, and why it hurts the efforts to get D&D players of all stripes together and discuss their favorite parts of the various editions, in order to make Next as good as it can be?




Um..sure...but I am still not getting the, "point out why so many, many people who like 4th Ed go absolutely insane  when trying to discuss it and its mechanics -snip-  around people who don't."

Was that answered? Did I miss it?


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> I forgot that some people can be very sensitive about it.




This isn't a "sensitivity" issue.

This is a, "Please don't make schtuff up about rules you don't understand in order to rail against them" issue.  It is a "Don't strawman" issue.

It's an "I don't go on long diatribes about 1E demesne ruling rules because I don't know them, so please show 4E rules the same respect" issue.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> Was that answered? Did I miss it?




Someone who has no clue what he was talking about because he's never read the "rule," never used it before, and in fact only learned about it today explains why it is ridiculous and should be kept far away from Next.

This happens a lot in 4E-related discussions.  "I don't / have never played 4E, but I don't like ..." "I never really got in to 4E, but [X] doesn't work because ..."

I'm sorry - I thought the point was pretty patently obvious.



			
				steeldragons said:
			
		

> "player-generated magic-item wishlists" ARE nonsensical




Please explain - especially when, as I believe you are, you're coming from a 3.XE background where player-generated magic-item wishlists are often turned into player-generated magic items through the relatively easy magic item creation rules.


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## steeldragons (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Someone who has no clue what he was talking about because he's never read the "rule," never used it before, and in fact only learned about it today explains why it is ridiculous and should be kept far away from Next.
> 
> This happens a lot in 4E-related discussions.  "I don't / have never played 4E, but I don't like ..." "I never really got in to 4E, but [X] doesn't work because ..."
> 
> I'm sorry - I thought the point was pretty patently obvious.




Sooo...4e doesn't have player generated wish lists? That's interesting. I've been misinformed.

But...huh. yeah. Just thick, I guess...who am I to argue with a guy with a patent?


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> Sooo...4e doesn't have player generated wish lists? That's interesting. I've been misinformed.




Of course it has player-generated wishlists.  Please see the rest of the thread after CNN's post on how they work.

And please see my follow-up question as to why they're "nonsensical."

I mean, I know even back in the 2E days I'd say things to my DM like, "Hey - I want to go on an adventure to find a magic sword.  Can we do that?"


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## Hussar (Jul 19, 2012)

Heh, it's funny.  We had wish lists way back in AD&D.  Only, then, we called them "sages" and we had to "research" in game to find out where those items were and then we could go get them.  Yet, funnily enough, if we the players actually spent some time and resources, those items almost always fell into our hands.

Completely, and utterly different from how 4e wish lists are supposed to work...


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## pming (Jul 19, 2012)

Hiya.

  Never had a problem with this so-called "5/15 minute work day" thing. Thirty+ years of playing, never a problem because it never came up I guess. If the party takes out a few kobolds, then an ogre guard, then opens up with a (what do the kids call it now?...nova?...) as the kobold chieften and his two giant lizards investigates the commotion...so be it. But they always knew that if they get a bad wandering monster roll, or didn't scout enough and get attacked from behind by the kobold army and we get a TPK...it's *not* the games fault. That is squarely on the players heads.

^_^

Paul L. Ming


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## pemerton (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> So today, in this thread, was the first time I had ever heard of a "wish list," and it was described to me as a player expectation, not as a DM suggestion.  Clearly I interpreted it wrong.



You didn't misunderstand the way I use it - ie directions from the players to the GM as to what items they want. I regard items in 4e as bascially one component of PC build.

My objection to your "example" wasn't that it got the power relation wrong, but that it got the method wrong - the players don't have a power to rewrite the GM's narration. They have a power to direct the GM to include certain items, which the GM then narrates into the game.

You could think of it as somewhat analogous to a game the has relationships (eg Burning Wheel, maybe HERO?) - the player pays points for a relationship, and thereby directs the GM to include that NPC in the game. That doesn't mean that the player gets to override the GM's descriptions of encoutered NPCs - just that, if the GM never narrates an encounter or dealing with that _particular_ NPC, s/he is not going along with the game rules.


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## pemerton (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I try and give my players cool things but some players can get a little greedy and want things that are either to powerful, to game breaking or it does not fit in the campaign.



Items in 4e have a level, which plays an important role in regulating when the PCs are eligible to recieve them. (If you're using the pre-4e treasure-placement rules as written.)



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> There's no time requirement on a wish list.



In combination with the above, this works!



Hussar said:


> Heh, it's funny.  We had wish lists way back in AD&D.  Only, then, we called them "sages" and we had to "research" in game to find out where those items were and then we could go get them.



This is an area of the game where I'm pretty happy to cut out the middleman!



Elf Witch said:


> I don't know if I would have the heart sunder a weapon that took 2 years of loot to get.



This is my objection to a whole range of mechanics, including some forms of SoD: if the GM doesn't have the heart to do it - ie if the mechanic runs a danger of breaking the game if the GM actually plays it heard - then what is it doing there?

I don't want soft-hearted GMs, nor players who worry about the integrity of the story. I want rules that will allow GMs to push hard, and players who push back with their PCs, to produce a great play experience, with a story that works for them, _even though no one has that as their goal at any particular moment of action declaration_.


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## steeldragons (Jul 19, 2012)

Apologies for not the most prompt of responses. It was..oooo very late (like "sun coming up early-late") in my neck of the woods.

But here I am! 



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Please explain - especially when, as I believe you are, you're coming from a 3.XE background where player-generated magic-item wishlists are often turned into player-generated magic items through the relatively easy magic item creation rules.




Actually I am coming from PRE-3e land. So crafting items was never that common a thing and if it did come up probably involved a lengthy side-quest (if not main plot) to find the materials needed to make it.  



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Of course it has player-generated wishlists.  Please see the rest of the thread after CNN's post on how they work.
> 
> And please see my follow-up question as to why they're "nonsensical."




The idea that the players should or would be told, in the rules, that they can tell the DM what items they should be getting and when is, as I said, the antithesis of a D&D experience.._.to me_. So to my eyes, it looks pretty nonsensical that it would happen at all, let alone be condoned in the rules.

But I see from the earlier post (I _did_ go back and read  that it is in the DMG as a "suggestion"? That it rather interesting as that is never how I have ever read it portrayed anywhere. It's spoken of as a given...a "gimme given"...and that just irks me.



Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> I mean, I know even back in the 2E days I'd say things to my DM like, "Hey - I want to go on an adventure to find a magic sword.  Can we do that?"




Sure. That's normal...did it in Basic did it in 1e...2e...sure. "Would be nice if..." or "Could we research and go on a quest to find..." Great!

That is not the same thing as "I'm third level! I'll take my +2 shield of screaming whininess now. Pony up DM." [or whateaver items there are to choose in 4e]

But the fact it is a "suggestion" makes it all kinda moot. 

...but then one comes across something like the following...



pemerton said:


> You didn't misunderstand the way I use it - ie directions from the players to the GM as to what items they want. I regard items in 4e as bascially one component of PC build.
> 
> -snip-
> 
> - the players don't have a power to rewrite the GM's narration. They have a power to direct the GM to include certain items, which the GM then narrates into the game.




Yeah, see this makes it sound significantly less like a "suggestion."

And the bottom line, really, is it doesn't fly for my kind of play. As the DM, of COURSE I am going to give players things they can use! My players understand that...and even things that seem kinda "useless" at first often turn out to be useful at some point.  

They do not need to "direct me" to improve their "PC build." It's just not in the way we think/play...and strikes me as mildly amusing and slightly confusing way to desire playing...I simply don't get it. a.k.a. it strikes me as "nonsense."

Of course, to each their own, play what you like and all of that.
--SD


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## Sadrik (Jul 19, 2012)

This seems like a very simple solution. Provide both aspects one in the form of a rules module. Easy peasy. 

For instance, the module might say after a short rest recover your HP and for casters recover your caster level in spells 5th level caster recovers 5 levels of spells. Bam and done. Rules module I would even be tempted in trying. This would be a good option for campaigns where combat is a major focus. This system has problems with spell recovery (take a bunch of or short rests and recover all of your spells) but in a game where combat is a focus and constant threat it may be ok.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Someone who has no clue what he was talking about because he's never read the "rule," never used it before, and in fact only learned about it today explains why it is ridiculous and should be kept far away from Next.
> 
> This happens a lot in 4E-related discussions.  "I don't / have never played 4E, but I don't like ..." "I never really got in to 4E, but [X] doesn't work because ..."



Remember though, liking/playing 4E is not prerequisite to being able to discuss it (or laugh at it).  Some of us have played it, decided it was not our cup of tea, and moved on.  That does not make our opinions of the system invalid or less important (or even "ridiculous.")

One of the primary design goals of 5th Edition is to unite all gamers under a common edition.  They cannot achieve that goal if certain opinions are "kept far away from Next."


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## pemerton (Jul 19, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> But I see from the earlier post (I _did_ go back and read  that it is in the DMG as a "suggestion"? That it rather interesting as that is never how I have ever read it portrayed anywhere. It's spoken of as a given...a "gimme given"...and that just irks me.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



The force of your last line is somewhat blunted by the overall tone of your post. Of course I love playing my game with "shields of screaming whininess". I assume yours comes with "viking hats of GM pigheadedness".

But anyway, like the post that I was responding to in the post you quoted, you misstate the method of wishlists. The player doesn't get to say "I'll take my item now  - pony up!" Wishlists don't give players narration rights. Their functioin (as I use them) is to shape the GM's narration. As I noted in the same post that you quoted, it is somewhat analogous to a "relationship" mechanic.

As to your comments about not being directed - I don't really see the functional difference between (i) the players directing the GM via a wishlist, and the GM duly incorporating the wished-for items in a scenario, and (ii) the players asking the GM to incorporate an item into a scenario, and the GM doing as they ask.

In the real world, of course there is a difference between asking for something and directing them to hand it over. But magic items are not real. It does not cost anything for the GM to include them in the game. The only function of (ii) that I can see is to try to engender a needless sense of gratitude towards the GM on the part of the players - needless, because the GM is _not actually giving them anything_.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2012)

pemerton said:


> The force of your last line is somewhat blunted by the overall tone of your post. Of course I love playing my game with "shields of screaming whininess". I assume yours comes with "viking hats of GM pigheadedness".



I actually enjoy gaming with ample "potions of DM control."  Especially the single-malt ones.



pemerton said:


> But anyway, like the post that I was responding to in the post you quoted, you misstate the method of wishlists. The player doesn't get to say "I'll take my item now  - pony up!" Wishlists don't give players narration rights.



Woah.  This, right here, is the crux of this whole thread. 

I think narration rights are what most of us are really discussing in this thread when we talk about the 15-minute work day.  The DM wants to narrate the story one way, the players want to narrate the story differently, and sometimes the two are in conflict.

"We need to rest."
"You can't rest."

"You find a spear."
"I wanted a sword."

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the DM provides the plot and the setting, the players provide the characters and action, and both work together to write the story...but I didn't think of it in terms of "narration rights."  I think you hit the nail on the head...sometimes there is a struggle over who gets to tell the story, and/or whether the story is being told to their liking.  This can't really be mandated or regulated in rules; it is something that must evolve over time, and depends heavily on the preferred style of play and the DM/Player relationship.

You have given me much food for thought.


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## pemerton (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> Woah.  This, right here, is the crux of this whole thread.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> You have given me much food for thought.



I'm always happy to have done that! Especially with a post with such a high quotient of throw-away snark!



CleverNickName said:


> I think narration rights are what most of us are really discussing in this thread when we talk about the 15-minute work day.  The DM wants to narrate the story one way, the players want to narrate the story differently, and sometimes the two are in conflict.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> In an earlier post, I mentioned that the DM provides the plot and the setting, the players provide the characters and action, and both work together to write the story...but I didn't think of it in terms of "narration rights."  I think you hit the nail on the head...sometimes there is a struggle over who gets to tell the story, and/or whether the story is being told to their liking.  This can't really be mandated or regulated in rules; it is something that must evolve over time, and depends heavily on the preferred style of play and the DM/Player relationship.



I know that referring to The Forge is a bit tendentious on these boards, but I think it's hard to over-emphasise how significant some of the work done by The Forge has been in tackling this issue. (It's where I learned about it. Games like Burning Wheel and Maelstrom Storytelling tackle it in a pracitcal sense, but I don't think I could have understood those games - or 4e skill challenges, for that matter - without having read threads and essays at The Forge.) One way of understanding the whole Forge approach to RPG theory and design is to invent rules and methods of play in which these conflicts over narrative rights don't occur, _but_ nobody is being railroaded.

Of course you're right that, to some extent, it depends upon player-GM trust - the "social contract". But that's equally true of all mechanics and mechanical resolution (players not cheating die rolls, GMs not adding extra hp to their monsters part way through the encounter, etc).

I can't pretend to be an expert in all, or even many, of the techniques that can solve the problem. But I think that solving the problem is helped by being clear on some distinctions. Following Ron Edwards' long post (reply 10) in this thread, I think it can be helpful to distinguish Background from Situation/Scene from Plot from (what Edwards calls) Narration.

Background is what it sounds like. In traditional D&D the GM controls it. Players can generally introduce bits and pieces of background - what their mother's name was, for instance - but often the GM has an overall veto over this stuff, in the interests of preserving consistency of the shared fiction. A wishlist is, in a way, a player introducing new Background - "There's a Shield of Whinging Screaminess out there somewhere with my name on it!". My own view is that there is one big plus to players introducing background - it increases their buy in and engagement - and one big potential minus - if they can establish all the circumstances surrounding their PCs, then they might be tempted to write in a background that makes their PCs' lives easier, given that their job is to "inhabit" and advocate for those PCs. But that would make for a boring game. (This blog talks about this issue.)

The wishlist issue shows both the plus and the minus at work. Plus: players get items they want that suit their PCs. Minus: players might ask for stuff that is overpowerd.

4e solves this problem by permitting the wishlist, but relying upon the GM to use the scenario-building tools (encounter-building guidelines that regulate the award of XP which in turn determine the PCs' level, and treasure placement guidelines that establish the pacing of treasure acquisition relative to level gain).

But this leads to the issue of Situation/Scene. 4e's tools only work if the GM has the authority to establish situations/frame scenes. If the players can choose their own encounters, then the guidelines for GMs become pointless (and players can't be relied upon to apply the guidelines to themselves - even if they know this might make the game more fun, they have a contary incentive to make life easy and rewarding for their PCs). This is why 4e takes out spells and abilities that undermine GM control over scene-framing (eg no teleport, no insta-charm, no insta-diplomacy, no SoD on the PC side, etc).

The advantage of GM-controlled scene-framing is that the players don't have to worry about the conflict of interest between a fun game (which requires adversity for their PCs) and a cushy life for their PCs (which, when playing their PCs, they should rationally want). The disadvantage is that, if the GM frames crappy scenes that the players don't want their PCs to be in, then the game sucks for everyone. (I personally think 4e has lots of tools to help avoid this problem, at least for those who like a certain sort of mythic fantasy. But that's another topic.)

So in 4e the problem with the adventuring day - if there is one - isn't that the GM can't stop the PCs from resting - generally s/he can, because it is hard for the players to control or avoid or change adversity that the GM throws at them (not much Rope Trick, Teleport, Stone Shape etc). It's more that, if the GM frames a combat scene when the PCs/players are low on resources, then the scene may suck - in that the PCs can't do anything meaningful and have to surrender, or get TPKed, etc. (I'm not saying it definitely will suck. I've TPKed my party - by accident, not design - and it turned out not to suck at all. But I wouldn't want to do it very often, because the trick I used to make it not suck - a capture/escape scene as the next scene following the TPK - could get old pretty quickly.)

In AD&D, and I think 3E, the problem of the adventuring day is probably similar at low levels, but at high levels - once PCs get abilities like teleport, 8 hr Rope Trick, etc - the playes get a high degree of control over scene framing, and then they get to set the pace. And because they have an incentive to make life easy for their PCs (because they're meant to be roleplaying them as sensible people, at least in the typical case), they rest when they can. And now the problem is that the game becomes boring.

The suggested solution of wandering monsters looks to me like a technique for the GM to retake control of scene framing ("Hey, guys, here come some bulettes - what do you do?"). But whether that is good scene framing, or "I'm boring everyone to death with these endless encounters with bulettes" scene framing, will depend a lot on what sort of game everyone is looking for. Those might be good encounters in a certain sort of operational game, for example, but might be tedious encounters that spoil the game in a more heroic game.

Plot is something different again - it's about how scenes resolve - what happens, the big reveal. I prefer to let this emerge out of play - once the scene is framed, the action resolution mechanics are used to work out what happens.  [MENTION=9037]Elf Witch[/MENTION]'s comment upthread, that she would hesitate before using the action resolution mechanics to Sunder a PC's uber-item that the _player_ saved for 2 years to enchant, shows a different approach to Plot. She is stipulating a key part of the plot - "your weapon won't get sundered" - without reference to the relevant action resolution mechanics. (To an extent this is a matter of degree - for example, by playing the monsters in an encounter I can shape the plot quite a bit - eg do or don't we play "stacks on the wizard". But there are no action resolution mechanics for "aggro" in 4e, so I'm not actually ignoring mechanics. One reason 4e drops mechanics like Sunder is precisely so the GM can choose to go hard without having to worry that the outcomes will suck. The 4e mechanics, in my view, create a bigger space in which the GM can let go of concern for plot, and focus more on framing the situation and then pushing the scene hard to see how the players, via their PCs, respond. Of course, there is a trade off - you will never get a story where a PC's beautiful sword was cut in two by a giant - whether the trade off is a problem or not is a matter of individual taste, I think.)

In the context of this thread, an example of the GM exercising strong authority over plot would be the PCs going to rest in a scene, and the GM just telling the players that the PCs wake up some time later but haven't recovered their resources. The GM is just stipulating an outcome without framing a relevant scene and letting the PCs engage the action resolution mechanics. (Sometimes this is OK - eg long distance travel is often handled like this. But it's probably not a good way to handle resting.)

Finally, there is what Edwards calls Narration. By this he means filling in the details of the action resolution - for example, who moved where exactly, and how, and what did it look like. (So this is different from the narration rights I talked about upthread, which are more like authority over situation and/or plot). I don't think that this, on its own, is such a big source of conflict at many tables, but it can sometimes cause confusion (eg I thought your PC was walking on his hands, and so fell head-first down the pit, when in fact he was walking on his feat and so feel feet-first, an important difference).

Sorry, that's a long post.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 19, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> The idea that the players should or would be told, in the rules, that they can tell the DM what items they should be getting and when is, as I said, the antithesis of a D&D experience.._.to me_. So to my eyes, it looks pretty nonsensical that it would happen at all, let alone be condoned in the rules.



The "magic item wishlist" is not a player rule. It's a suggestion for the DM how he can handle treasure. The "rule" part only goes so far as to tell what level of items the game is balanced against, what items he puts in there is up to him.
He can take that suggestion and shove it in his round folder, or he can use it and ask the player for a wish list. He can ignore that list if he finds items he doesn't like, he can use parts of it, he can weave them into the adventure story, or he can just be lazy like me and try not to forget the wishlist and use it when it's time for a magic item reward.


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## Patryn of Elvenshae (Jul 19, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> Remember though, liking/playing 4E is not prerequisite to being able to discuss it (or laugh at it).




Enjoying something is not a prereq to criticism, but ignorant criticism is useless.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 19, 2012)

pemerton said:


> Items in 4e have a level, which plays an important role in regulating when the PCs are eligible to recieve them. (If you're using the pre-4e treasure-placement rules as written.)
> 
> In combination with the above, this works!
> 
> ...




I think the guidelines for what level as magic item should be given is a good thing especially for new DMs. As long as they are a guideline and not a hard fast rule.

Just because I can be  soft about sundering a special item does not mean that I don't the rule should be in the game. There are a lot of times sunder is very effective both for the NPCs and PCs.

Just because a rule is in the game it does not mean it needs to be used all the time. And it is a game while I don't believe that players should act like brats over things I also think a DM should use a little judgement on if I do this the player is going to be very upset and find it not fun at all.


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## Campbell (Jul 19, 2012)

I think its fairly common to confuse treasure parcels with player wishlists because they are located so closely together in the DMG. 4e assumes less plentiful acquisition of magic items and also has a design ethos that encourages DMs to be mindful of the content included in their games. There's a strong undercurrent of DM as designer. They talk about designing monsters, designing encounters, designing quests, etc. The basic conceit of the game is that there should be an underlying reason for every decision a DM makes. Treasure parcels tie into this. 4e assumes that a DM knows his players better than WotC ever will. This is why adventures did not include prescribed treasure.

Wishlists are simply a reminder that active communication between players and DMs is important for a quality game experience. This is a philosophical change from the idea that if you were not happy with your game experience your best course of action is to manipulate the game through your character's actions towards a desired result even if its not in the interests of the other people at the game table.

Of course some people don't believe that experience at the table should warp to player and DM concerns. Personally, I'm not really a fan of incidental fun in a game where people have such varying agendas. As always play the way you like.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 19, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> It is an issue if the rest of the players don't want to stop just because the wizard went nova.



The 5MWD?  Yes, if you have characters with different resources, only some of which have a mechanical incentive to rest frequently, you'll get conflicts like that, it's part of the problem.



> I have never once had to suboridante my campaign needs to handle the nova problem and I have never once had a conversation with DMs I know that have had a campaign issue with handling nova



Your anecdotal evidence is noted and weighted according to it's sample size of 1.  The problem still exists, in spite of your immunity from it or blindness to it, however.



> In your opinion is not as good a s mechanical solution others feel differently.



You an 'feel' however you want, but a mechanical problem remains however you work around it.  


When we talk about the 5MWD, we aren't making it up.  It happens, it happens a lot, and the reasons it happens are right there in the mechanics of the game in black & white.  Disputing it based on anecdotal evidence and rejecting solutions because of imagined consequences will not make it go away.  It'll just make a lot of D&D players go away if WotC listens to you.



> You also take away the chance for any creativity and thinking outside the box because you have the same abilities every encounter.



 Thinking 'outside the box' is always an option - the kind of option (like the DM using house rules) that really /can't/ be taken away.  You could as easily say that Vancian casting takes away 'outside the box' thinking because rest and re-memorize is always a solution.  You'd be just as wrong, but it'd be just as (in)valid.



> Even the game designers have said that one of its issues is that it basically says this is the way you play DnD and any other way was wrong.



One of them has, yes.  It's ironic that after preaching 'no one right way to play' and 'D&D: Next is going to be for everyone,' he'd go on record with /one right way to play/, necessitated by making D&D: Next exclusively for those who demanded the return of Vancian casting.


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## Hussar (Jul 20, 2012)

SteelDragons said:
			
		

> The idea that the players should or would be told, in the rules, that they can tell the DM what items they should be getting and when is, as I said, the antithesis of a D&D experience...to me. So to my eyes, it looks pretty nonsensical that it would happen at all, let alone be condoned in the rules.




So, you don't think 3e is D&D?  After all, in 3e, by the rules, PC's can buy whatever item they want, providing they find a large enough population center, or simply make whatever they want, providing they have the appropriate feats/level.


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## steeldragons (Jul 20, 2012)

Hussar said:


> So, you don't think 3e is D&D?  After all, in 3e, by the rules, PC's can buy whatever item they want, providing they find a large enough population center, or simply make whatever they want, providing they have the appropriate feats/level.




Nooo. I have no problem, nor have said anything about having a problem with the _characters_ interacting in whatever ways they can with the game world. If your game world has Magi-marts in the big cities or easily available materials for item crafting...the DM doesn't mind (obviously, since they've put it in the game world)...go for it!

That is not the same as the_ players _making demands on or "offering direction" the DM.

Please don't try to pick an argument with me over apples when I talk about oranges.


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## Campbell (Jul 20, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> Nooo. I have no problem, nor have said anything about having a problem with the _characters_ interacting in whatever ways they can with the game world. If your game world has Magi-marts in the big cities or easily available materials for item crafting...the DM doesn't mind (obviously, since they've put it in the game world)...go for it!
> 
> That is not the same as the_ players _making demands on or "offering direction" the DM.
> 
> Please don't try to pick an argument with me over apples when I talk about oranges.




Is it specifically because we're talking about magic items here? Would you have an issue if a player approached you after the game and asked if his strained relationship with the local thieve's guild could come up more or suggested more opportunities for intrigue in the setting? That sort of communication pretty much defined my early AD&D experience.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 20, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> I think narration rights are what most of us are really discussing in this thread when we talk about the 15-minute work day.  The DM wants to narrate the story one way, the players want to narrate the story differently, and sometimes the two are in conflict.
> 
> "We need to rest."
> "You can't rest."
> ...


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## Lanefan (Jul 20, 2012)

Patryn of Elvenshae said:


> Please explain - especially when, as I believe you are, you're coming from a 3.XE background where player-generated magic-item wishlists are often turned into player-generated magic items through the relatively easy magic item creation rules.



3e's allowing of PCs to so easily make their own magic items was, IMO, one of its biggest failings.

When I first read the 4e DMG (shortly after it came out) and saw the bit about wish lists my face and palm had a brief meeting.  They had a second, longer meeting when I saw the magic item list had been put in the PH.

That said, if a specific character wants to take the party out and try to find a specific item I'm usually cool with it provided the item in question is vaguely reasonable for the game - if nothing else, it's a self-hooking adventure.   And there's still no guarantee she'll succeed (says he, having over time watched numerous parties utterly fail to find a key item in an adventure simply because they didn't look hard enough).

Lan-"besides, the easiest way to get more magic items has always been to steal them"-efan


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## Elf Witch (Jul 20, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> The 5MWD?  Yes, if you have characters with different resources, only some of which have a mechanical incentive to rest frequently, you'll get conflicts like that, it's part of the problem.
> 
> Your anecdotal evidence is noted and weighted according to it's sample size of 1.  The problem still exists, in spite of your immunity from it or blindness to it, however.
> 
> ...




Unless the characters all have the same resources and play like a hive mind then there will always be a possibility for this issue to arise. Not all players play the same even at the same table. So even if they have the same number of resources you still have one go nova and the rest hold back.

You realize anything said here is all anecdotal evidence because I doubt anyone has done a a real statistical study of the issue with enough gamers to prove anything. 

There is more than one of us saying this is a not an issue in the games we play.

Just because some people have an issue does not always make it a bad design. 

I have found that a lot of games that renew resources before every encounter end up playing out the same unless the DM works hard to counter their resources and make them come up with different ideas otherwise you go with the tried and true and what has always worked best. You see this is games that don't renew resources  but they have the ability to force the players do try different things if the resource they normally use is not available.  

Well listening to the complaints about 3E and the development of 4E made a lot of players go away. So hopefully this time they are listening to a lot of people not just the squeaky wheels. 

No one is denying that the 15 day is an issue for some groups. What I am disagreeing with is the idea that it is only caused my mechanics and that is the only way to fix it. 

So all of us who love vancian magic should just sit back and shut up because there are people who don't like. Well screw that. If DnD next is supposed to be for all players then vancian magic should be one option available  for use in the game.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 20, 2012)

Lanefan said:


> 3e's allowing of PCs to so easily make their own magic items was, IMO, one of its biggest failings.
> 
> When I first read the 4e DMG (shortly after it came out) and saw the bit about wish lists my face and palm had a brief meeting.  They had a second, longer meeting when I saw the magic item list had been put in the PH.
> 
> ...




This is one my big issues with 3E as well The way I have seen most DM I play with handle it is they keep you so busy you don't get enough time to be churning them out.

I was like WTF when I saw the list in PHB and then went no way when I read the part in the DMG. We all know that magic items are necessary but I really don't like the idea of you have to have a specific item or your character is sub optimal.


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## billd91 (Jul 20, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> Your anecdotal evidence is noted and weighted according to it's sample size of 1.  The problem still exists, in spite of your immunity from it or blindness to it, however.




And what's the sample size of the anecdotal evidence you're using to prove the problem exists?


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## Campbell (Jul 20, 2012)

It really does no good to keep pushing anecdotes in each other's faces in an attempt to deny the experiences we all have had. Have I seen players choose to play clerics and psychic warriors in 3e when they would rather play fighters? Sure. Do I doubt that setting based constraints have served to balance fighters and wizards effectively in other people's games? No. They're experiences are their own. Can we ever 'educate' each other to the point where the other embraces our play style? I sure hope not. The diversity of the community is a strength - not a weakness. Can't we all agree that some people find the setting based constraints harmful and for others mechanical solutions remove what they see as essential features of the game? The only right answer here is to provide tools for both viewpoints within the base game.


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## MarkB (Jul 20, 2012)

billd91 said:


> And what's the sample size of the anecdotal evidence you're using to prove the problem exists?




<Scrolls up to poll result> Well over 80 so far, around double the "it's not a problem" numbers. Plus, enough people expressed concern to inspire a WotC article dedicated to the subject.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 20, 2012)

MarkB said:


> <Scrolls up to poll result> Well over 80 so far, around double the "it's not a problem" numbers. Plus, enough people expressed concern to inspire a WotC article dedicated to the subject.




Actually, it's _75_ at this point.  Which is not as many as those who don't think there should be mechanical solutions baked into the game design (87) which may be an amalgam of people who do not believe it exists and those who believe it exists, but that it is solvable with non-mechanical means.


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## steeldragons (Jul 20, 2012)

Campbell said:


> Is it specifically because we're talking about magic items here?




It very well may be. Perhaps extending to the whole area of "treasure."



Campbell said:


> Would you have an issue if a player approached you after the game and asked if his strained relationship with the local thieve's guild could come up more or suggested more opportunities for intrigue in the setting? That sort of communication pretty much defined my early AD&D experience.




Oh mine too! I would have NO trouble with the kind of plot idea/suggestion/desire you pose above. 

I think, upon reflection with all of this...it can all be lumped into the issue of "entitlement" that I've seen mentioned and expressed the passed few years.

To my mind/view/enjoyment of the game, the players should not have any inkling of "how the story ends." They have a SAY in whether or not they get there, through their characters' actions. They have a say, even perhaps THE say, in how it ends once they've arrived. That's all part of building the communal story.

And they have the greatest say in the pace and plot of the story itself...Without the players' characters interacting with the game world there would BE no game/story. The DM causes appropriate reactions in the world to those actions and the game/story moves on.

But the idea that the player knows they're getting X amount of treasure at the end of the rainbow...with Y and Z items that they requested (because the books said they should/could)...the expectation that they WILL get to the end of the rainbow, at all, because everything they come up against will be "balanced" or "level appropriate" or should be "designed to be overcome"...that they expect to succeed, practically regardless of their choices, and if they somehow don't the DM is "doing it wrong" or "screwing them" somehow...These things just all elicit a knee-jerk reaction from me of "NUH UH!"

Where's the challenge? Where's the risk? Where's the fun of the adventure? Just give them whatever they ask for. Ok, you're all uber epic lords and masters of your respective classes. We'll spend another hour making you another batch of heroes [or superheroes] without ever having to roll a single die.

If the books are basically telling them, both players AND DMs, that this is how the game is supposed to work then it's difficult to argue anything else...Can be done, certainly (house rules and all of that). But just much more difficult to get certain types of players to agree to it...usually, "cuz the book(s) sez so!" And I don't want to see that in 5e.

But...this seems to all be getting a bit off topic of the 15 minute work day. It's all connected...somehow, hahaha, in my head...but I can't really put it into clearer terms. 

The books should not be presenting the game as "you _will be_ able to this and you _will_ receive that for your troubles." You are _trying_ succeed in the game world and situations set before you. You are not entitled or should even necessarily expect to succeed at everything. 

Not sure if that clears anything up or muddies the waters further. hahaha. But there it is.

Happy Friday all.
--SD


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## MarkB (Jul 20, 2012)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Actually, it's _75_ at this point.  Which is not as many as those who don't think there should be mechanical solutions baked into the game design (87) which may be an amalgam of people who do not believe it exists and those who believe it exists, but that it is solvable with non-mechanical means.




I was counting both those who voted for a mechanical fix and those who voted for a guidelines-based fix, seriously rounded down because at least some will have picked both options. I would assume that those who are in favour of there being advice about fixing the problem believe it exists just as much as those who want a mechanical fix. Why would they want space in the rulebook taken up by advice on fixing a problem that doesn't exist?


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 20, 2012)

> Why would they want space in the rulebook taken up by advice on fixing a problem that doesn't exist?




Spirit of compromise- you may not believe the problem exists, but you know there are people who do.  In that case, advice throws those people a bone and does not compromise the mechanics of a game with what you think would compromise gameplay.

Personally, I voted advice because- despite never having seen the 15MWD- believe it is a problem for some.  I believe that it is also something that doesn't require a mechanical fix because:

1) I have heard complaints about it in most editions of D&D _and_ in other RPGs as well, and

2) that the _reason_ I have not seen it in person is because of game master techniques I have seen used or used myself over the last 30+ years.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 20, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> Unless the characters all have the same resources and play like a hive mind then there will always be a possibility for this issue to arise. Not all players play the same even at the same table. So even if they have the same number of resources you still have one go nova and the rest hold back.



That's an extreme take.  If characters have comparable resources that are reasonably balanced, that's more than sufficient - for balance.  But, whether some characters have daily abilities or all do, the 5MWD is still a mechanical issue.



> You realize anything said here is all anecdotal evidence because I doubt anyone has done a a real statistical study of the issue with enough gamers to prove anything.



Anything anyone says about their home game, yes.  Analysis of the mechanics, no.  The mechanics are right there, we can all see them, there's no dispute over what they are.  So if there's a mechanical issue we can discuss it meaningfully.   



> There is more than one of us saying this is a not an issue in the games we play.



And there's more than of us saying it is.  So that's a wash.  More importantly, the mechanics introduce the issue.  Sure, both mechanics and whether you compensate for the flaws of those mechanics intentionally or unwittingly are both part of the issue.  But one part is concrete and the other part is personal experience and unverifiable anecdote.



> Just because some people have an issue does not always make it a bad design.



No, it's just a symptom.  Being a bad design makes it a bad design.  Kludging the bad design does not make it a good design.



> Well listening to the complaints about 3E and the development of 4E made a lot of players go away. So hopefully this time they are listening to a lot of people not just the squeaky wheels.



Probably not, it most likely just going to be one of the penduluum deals, where they listen to whoever makes the most noise and over-compensate.



> No one is denying that the 15 day is an issue for some groups. What I am disagreeing with is the idea that it is only caused my mechanics and that is the only way to fix it.



It is /caused/ my mechanics.  Kludging the mechanics by distorting your game - or failing to notice their flaws because your play style happens to make an end run around them - is not a solution.  Failing to implement a non-solution is not part of the problem.

The root problem is the mechanics.  They could be a lot better, allowing for more styles of play instead of forcing one style.



> So all of us who love vancian magic should just sit back and shut up because there are people who don't like.



And because you've had it for 34 of the last 38 years, and still have it in the SRD and Pathfinder, and yet are still demanding it be forced on the rest of us.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 20, 2012)

billd91 said:


> And what's the sample size of the anecdotal evidence you're using to prove the problem exists?



The mechanics, themselves, are the evidence.  They're not in dispute.  What's in dispute is whether they should be fixed, themselves, or left to each DM to work around.


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## billd91 (Jul 20, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> The mechanics, themselves, are the evidence.  They're not in dispute.  What's in dispute is whether they should be fixed, themselves, or left to each DM to work around.




And since people have been using mechanics to counteract the tendencies you see toward a 15 minute day, I'd say they're not indisputable.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 20, 2012)

> The mechanics, themselves, are the evidence. They're not in dispute. What's in dispute is whether they should be fixed, themselves, or left to each DM to work around.




If it were purely a mechanical problem, then it would occur more often than it seems to, and would not be found at all in systems using mechanics purported to fix the issue.

But the problem isn't absent in those systems.  In fact, away from ENWorld, I hear about it in other systems about as often as I hear about it in D&D.

To me, this means it boils down to "it's a playstyle problem" which means introducing mechanical solutions could raise just as many problems as it purports to solve.  Thus, my personal opposition to using mechanics as the solution.

I'm all for good mechanics & improving the game, but I simply don't see a need for change here.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 20, 2012)

I can't be certain, but I think some of my players have been stopping in this forum and reading these threads.  Last night, for the first time ever, one of my players mentioned a "fifteen-minute workday."  By name.  And in context.

The party randomly encountered a hydra en-route to the dungeon.  Since it was a fairly difficult encounter for their level, and it was early in the day, I decided they had stumbled upon it while it was sleeping and caught it off-guard...you know, give them a chance to avoid a difficult encounter.  "I got an idea," said Greg.  "Let's just hit it with everything we got, then sleep for the rest of the day and get our spells back.  You know, take a fifteen-minute workday."

My eye twitched involuntarily.

The idea seemed to have never even occurred to this group.  One player rolled her eyes and said "don't be so meta, Greg."  This caused an argument about metagame awareness and in-game awareness...just a distraction, nothing too heated.  Ultimately the party decided to leave the sleeping hydra alone, and they went on to the dungeon, retrieved the McGuffin from the Big Bad, and there was cake.  But it really bothered me at the time.

The timing seemed awfully convenient.  And Greg was so excited about it, too, like he had just discovered the potion glitch in Skyrim.   I have a sneaking suspicion that I have not seen the last of the "fifteen minute workday."


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## Elf Witch (Jul 20, 2012)

Campbell said:


> It really does no good to keep pushing anecdotes in each other's faces in an attempt to deny the experiences we all have had. Have I seen players choose to play clerics and psychic warriors in 3e when they would rather play fighters? Sure. Do I doubt that setting based constraints have served to balance fighters and wizards effectively in other people's games? No. They're experiences are their own. Can we ever 'educate' each other to the point where the other embraces our play style? I sure hope not. The diversity of the community is a strength - not a weakness. Can't we all agree that some people find the setting based constraints harmful and for others mechanical solutions remove what they see as essential features of the game? The only right answer here is to provide tools for both viewpoints within the base game.




I have never denied that some people have an issue. What I find frustrating in these conversations is the attitude that if you are having a problem then the game must change to accommodate you. And that those of us who are not having the issues are dismissed because we are using our anecdotal evidence, but of course so is the person with the issue but they don't seem to recognize the irony of that. 

I do think big enough issues can be fixed by mechanical fixes but I do think it is is a huge mistake to try and fix everything this way instead of just giving good advice on how to deal with some issues. I really think there should be a lot more of this kind of advice in the DMG.

I also think one really good way to fix some issues is to have options. 

I have also used many a house rule I have gotten from here from other DMs to help fix issues I have had in my own game. EnWolrd has been a valuable resource over the years for Dming advice.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 20, 2012)

MarkB said:


> I was counting both those who voted for a mechanical fix and those who voted for a guidelines-based fix, seriously rounded down because at least some will have picked both options. I would assume that those who are in favour of there being advice about fixing the problem believe it exists just as much as those who want a mechanical fix. Why would they want space in the rulebook taken up by advice on fixing a problem that doesn't exist?




I don't think people are denying it exists what most of seem to be saying is that it is not necessarily a mechanical issue and that advice may be the best way to fix it.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 20, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> That's an extreme take.  If characters have comparable resources that are reasonably balanced, that's more than sufficient - for balance.  But, whether some characters have daily abilities or all do, the 5MWD is still a mechanical issue.
> 
> Anything anyone says about their home game, yes.  Analysis of the mechanics, no.  The mechanics are right there, we can all see them, there's no dispute over what they are.  So if there's a mechanical issue we can discuss it meaningfully.
> 
> ...




I don't care how identical the amount of resources each PC has all it takes to throw this carefully balanced mechanic out of whack is to have some players who go nova and some who don't at the same table. I have seen this in a game with two players both playing wizards one would just throw all their high level powerful spells at a drop of the hat while the other played more conservatively. 

I know that you refuse to acknowledge that this is also a play style issue but my refusing to see that you are being blind to the fixes that can help with that. Mechanics can't fix everything.

As Danny pointed out this issue has raised its head in a lot of games I have seen it brought up in Shadowrun, Hero and Runequest. I have read posts about it in 4E games. All these games have different mechanics just the issue still happens in some people's games. That alone tells me it is not just a mechanical issue. 

At this point we are going around and around so I suggest we just end it. We are never going to agree on this.


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## mlund (Jul 20, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> The mechanics, themselves, are the evidence.  They're not in dispute.  What's in dispute is whether they should be fixed, themselves, or left to each DM to work around.




True enough. There is no incentive innate to the system to reward doing anything other than Nova-Rest-Nova. It's just the macro version of searching every 10' square for traps so automatically that the local inn doesn't even need to pay someone to sweep their floors anymore.

The DM or adventure writer has to invent one. Most commonly the invention is some sort of punishment / stick. Players are generally tolerant of this as long as it doesn't upset their sense of verisimilitude or fair-play.

How well that sells to any given player rests entirely on the act of sale between the player and the DM and/or writer.

On the other hand, if the system addressed the innate defect and had some sort of reward to encourage players to accept the additional risk that deviating from the Nova-Rest-Nova macro entails, there'd be a lot less need for sticks.

- Marty Lund


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## MarkB (Jul 20, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I don't think people are denying it exists what most of seem to be saying is that it is not necessarily a mechanical issue and that advice may be the best way to fix it.




I wasn't responding to most people. I was responding to one question from a specific person who _was_ questioning whether the problem existed.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 21, 2012)

MarkB said:


> I wasn't responding to most people. I was responding to one question from a specific person who _was_ questioning whether the problem existed.




bill91 was not questioning if it exists he was questioning Tony Vargas on why is it not anecdotal evidence when it is people complaining about an issue but it is anecdotal when we say it does not happen in our games.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 21, 2012)

Actually, that was bild91, not me.

The way I see it, though, is that _at best_ this is a thread of dueling anecdotes.  My personal experience leads me to believe that- while the problem exists for some gamers- it is:

1) so vanishingly rare that mechanical changes are more likely to harm the game than help it.

2) extant even in games with mechanics that supposedly correct it, so mechanical solutions would seem to be ineffective.

The actual truth of the matter can't be seen without a real and rigorous statistical analysis- with controls from D&D and other RPGs- and that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 21, 2012)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Actually, that was bild91, not me.




It is now becoming a blur. All of it.

I just reread everything you posted and I still don't see how anyone can claim that you are saying it is not an issue. Unless of course I am losing my ability to comprehend languages.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 21, 2012)

One could fairly say I see it as an issue, but don't see it as an _*ISSUE.*_

In a way, someone could view me as the doctor who has been told "My wrist hurts when I do this", and responds, "Well, don't do that."

But as someone who grew up in a medical family, and who is also old enough to start seeing accumulating health issues (for myself and my parents), sometimes the answer really is "don't do that" because the treatment may be as problematic as the ailment...or worse.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 21, 2012)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> One could fairly say I see it as an issue, but don't see it as an _*ISSUE.*_
> 
> In a way, someone could view me as the doctor who has been told "My wrist hurts when I do this", and responds, "Well, don't do that."
> 
> But as someone who grew up in a medical family, and who is also old enough to start seeing accumulating health issues (for myself and my parents), sometimes the answer really is "don't do that" because the treatment may be as problematic as the ailment...or worse.




This is how I look at it too.


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## Minigiant (Jul 21, 2012)

That is why the treatment should be optional and ignorable

Advice if you want it
Fixes if you want it


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## mlund (Jul 21, 2012)

Minigiant said:


> That is why the treatment should be optional and ignorable
> 
> Advice if you want it
> Fixes if you want it




Nah, apparently on *this particular issue* it's just non-negotiable to take up rule-book space for a module. Some people consider it a "non-issue" due to their ad hoc play-style decisions so it just *must not be*. I mean, that's precious real-estate we could be dedicating to a bigger list of Vancian Spellcasting Options, am I right? 

- Marty Lund


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## billd91 (Jul 21, 2012)

mlund said:


> Nah, apparently on *this particular issue* it's just non-negotiable to take up rule-book space for a module. Some people consider it a "non-issue" due to their ad hoc play-style decisions so it just *must not be*. I mean, that's precious real-estate we could be dedicating to a bigger list of Vancian Spellcasting Options, am I right?
> 
> - Marty Lund




Nah, wandering monster tables.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 22, 2012)

mlund said:


> On the other hand, if the system addressed the innate defect and had some sort of reward to encourage players to accept the additional risk that deviating from the Nova-Rest-Nova macro entails, there'd be a lot less need for sticks.



Or if the system simply didn't encourage the Nova-Rest-Nova thing in the first place, of course.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 22, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> "Let's just hit it with everything we got, then sleep for the rest of the day and get our spells back.  You know, take a fifteen-minute workday."





Happened to me once, a while back. I just made it clear that they had just gotten up and weren't tired, so they would not be able to sleep. And none of them had any spells for a restful sleep, either. Solved the issue quickly.


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## MarkB (Jul 22, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> Happened to me once, a while back. I just made it clear that they had just gotten up and weren't tired, so they would not be able to sleep. And none of them had any spells for a restful sleep, either. Solved the issue quickly.




4e does that explicitly - you can't benefit from an extended rest until at least 12 hours after your last one - and 3e effectively enforced it for divine casters, who don't get their spells back immediately after resting, but must instead meditate at a specific time of day.

However, this often just results in the players taking 24 hours off to rest instead of 8.

It can also screw things up even for legitimate parties, if an area is structured awkwardly. I've been playing a 4e game using one of the WotC-published epic-tier modules, and whilst our party have ample options to safely retreat and rest, the dungeons in the module tend to consist of endless strings of rooms with combat encounters and not much else to do. The result is that, even without any novas, we can easily go through 6-8 encounters and be down to our last few healing surges within only a couple of hours of in-game time, and be in desperate need of retreating to rest while still having ten hours left on the clock.

It'd be nice to find a solution to the two-hour working day as well.


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## Jester David (Jul 22, 2012)

*Question:*
Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game? 
Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jul 22, 2012)

Jester Canuck said:


> *Question:*
> Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
> Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?



Depends. If you always come up with reasons why the PCs can't do it, I think it's eliminated that careful playstyle. If you reduce the reasons to take such rests, no. 

If you design the classes so that everyone benefits equally from rests, then the play style doesn't cause mechanically imbalanes anymore - and 15 minute adventure days don't become a spellcaster's paradise and 12 hour adventuring days aren't a spellcaster nightmare anymore than there are a fighter's nightmare.


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## pemerton (Jul 22, 2012)

steeldragons said:


> To my mind/view/enjoyment of the game, the players should not have any inkling of "how the story ends."
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



This post seems to assume that the pay-off for play, the "big reveal", is finding certain treasure "at the end of the rainbow" after struggling against great dangers to recover it. This is a very significant assumption about playstyle.

In a game with wishlists, the payoff for play is obviously going to be something different.

Here's a comparison: in some RPG systems, what benefits a PC gets at level gain is randomly determined. So one payoff for play can be learning what you get when you level. But in AD&D or 3E, the only randmoly determined aspect of level gain is hit points - you mostly get to choose your benefits of levelling, or have them dictated by known rules. So the payoff from play is something else - say, doing more stuff with your PC, or having interesting and exciting adventures.

4e played with wishlists is much the same. Gaining treasure produces the same sort of satsfaction as other decisions about PC build. But the payoff from playing is something eles.


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## Lwaxy (Jul 23, 2012)

MarkB said:


> It'd be nice to find a solution to the two-hour working day as well.




Definitely. In the case of such dungeons, I'd just rule that everyone is exhausted and could rest. While this wouldn't solve the 2hrs issue, it would at least prevent the 24hr waiting time.

As most of the casters in our group don't do vancian and spell points regenerate a little, it probably wouldn't be as bad an issue. Even the two vancian casters get spell regeneration depending on how long they don't cast anything without resting, but only for their specially chosen spell (which is usually some attack or defense magic, of course). 
The latter is not the best solution but I think we kind of managed to keep the feel for vancian magic management somewhat.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2012)

Jester Canuck said:


> *Question:*
> Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
> Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?



Yes, mechanically /preventing/ it, would.  Eliminating imbalanced rules that favor it over others, however, would not.

This is something that comes up a lot, actually.  Someone will pipe up that this or that ed or system or whatever "doesn't support" this or that style.  What he really means is that it doesn't over-reward that style or punish other styles.  Not that the style isn't possible within the system.

Right now - and by right now I mean for it's entire history - D&D overwhelmingly favors the 15 minute workday, and it's only by DM intervention or player restraint that every encounter isn't followed by a complete re-charge of player abilities.  

That's a flaw.  That it's a long standing one that many are accustomed to kludging or living with doesn't make it a feature.

At least, with 5e, they're going to design the classes to balance at a point in the adventuring 'day' and tell you what that point is.  So the DM at least knows to force days to a certain length to reduce the likelihood of class imbalance.  FWLTW.


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## Hussar (Jul 23, 2012)

Mustrum_Ridcully is really hitting the nail on the head IMO.  It's not necessarily having the 15 MAD that's the problem.  After all, there are all sorts of scenarios where it's not a problem to have one big fight and then fall back.  I'm not saying that this is the only scenario, simply that these scenarios are not all that uncommon either.

The problem is that the Vancian casters and the non-Vancian characters are playing fundamentally different games.  The balance of the game can radically change depending on the pacing of the game and this can be an issue in some groups.

There's a reason that some groups adopt, or try to adopt, the 15 MAD - it's an effective strategy.  IMO, the best way to reduce 15 MAD is to reduce that effectiveness.

AD&D did it by having very, very strong restrictions on casters and by having martial characters that were far, far more powerful than the opponents that they faced, at least on an individual level.  It wasn't unreasonable for a fighter type to get through a combat without expending any resources, or at least minimal enough resources to ignore.  So, why bother going nova with the casters when your fighter types can just blow through the encounter anyway?

4e went another direction and made everyone have the same resource base.  

I'm not really sure where the proper answer lies.  But, I do think that simply giving advice isn't it.  I went around the block several times with [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], with him showing far more patience than he probably should , trying to show me how he gets the results that he gets.  Now, I still don't understand.  I have too many questions to be able to adopt his advice into my games.  

Granted, even at the times when we did have 15 MAD, I never really saw it as a problem because I just thought that that's how D&D is played.  IME, it's always been there as an option and, because it makes a lot of strategic sense, whenever the situation allows, I'd pretty much presume that that's what the party would do.  It's no different than sending scouts ahead or searching rooms or any other standard operating proceedure that groups fall into after a fairly short time.

3e makes it a much larger issue since the casters get SO much more powerful at higher levels.  Virtually any problem that comes up becomes an exercise in patience and throwing enough magic at it.  And I can see how the non-casters can feel very sidelined by this.  Watching the change in one campaign where a player playing a paladin who died brought in a cleric as a replacement character that suddenly dominated virtually every encounter was a real eye-opener.

We didn't really have 15 MAD for most of our games, but that's because we didn't play core casters very much.  No cleric, we had a Favored Soul.  The druid in a later campaign had reserve feats.  And the running joke in the group was that wizard was the cursed class because every wizard player wound up quitting the game after only a few sessions. 

Honestly, my solution to all this would be to go that direction - use things like Favored Souls or Shadow Casters (from Tome of Magic) as the baseline for casters.  Sorcerers as the model for Vancian magic instead of the Wizard.  It reins in the power creep from extra books and keeps everyone on a much more even footing for resources.

I'm tired of half my players playing different games.


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## Elf Witch (Jul 23, 2012)

Jester Canuck said:


> *Question:*
> Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?
> Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?




I think it can impose one play style and basically say that your play style is not the way we the designers feel you should play.

That was one big flaw of 4E to me that I felt it supported only a narrow margin of play styles. A good DM can tweak any game and make it playable and I do think most DMs end up tweaking her and there. I have only played in one or two games that didn't have at lest one house rule in it. 

I think the way to avoid this in 5E is to give options but also advice on how to tailor the rules to your play style.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2012)

Elf Witch said:


> I think it can impose one play style and basically say that your play style is not the way we the designers feel you should play.



That's exactly what the last L&L article did.  It declared that there was one right way to play D&D - a certain 'crystal clear' number of rounds per adventuring day that the DM was going to have to enforce one way or another (with more or longer encounters).  



> That was one big flaw of 4E to me that I felt it supported only a narrow margin of play styles.



I think that 'feeling of being supported' varies.  I feel a game supports a play style if I can play in that style without needing to change rules to avoid problems.  When I hear someone objecting to the balanced approach 4e took as "not supporting" some play style, and ask for and actually get (which is rare) some clarification, it comes down to the system not rewarding that style over others.  

I think 5e, which is supposed to 'support' many different styles, needs to avoid the latter sense of 'support.'  'Support' for a play style should not be rewarding that style disproportionately or punishing other styles - it should simply be allowing that style without needing to distort the game (mechanics or campaign).



> I think the way to avoid this in 5E is to give options but also advice on how to tailor the rules to your play style.



While rules fixes are one way to 'support' multiple styles in the "reward" sense - one at a time, assuming DMs or groups willing to do the requisite re-design work - they don't support multiple styles at the same table or in organized play.  

An ideal solution might be a style-neutral 'core' that doesn't force or reward any style, and could be a fair basis for more open forms of organized play, /and/ a variety of modules and rules-adjustment advice to allow DMs to choose a style of play and encourage their players to adopt it using mechanical rewards and punishments.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 23, 2012)

Jester Canuck said:


> *Question:*
> Doesn't mechanically preventing and/or limiting the 15-minute workday impose a playstyle on the game?




Not meaning to be trite, but any mechanic imposes an influence on playstyle, the onlynquestionnisnhow much.



> Isn't that implying to players that their style of game is unacceptable?



I hadn't thought about it, but I think you're right.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 23, 2012)

Lwaxy said:


> Happened to me once, a while back. I just made it clear that they had just gotten up and weren't tired, so they would not be able to sleep. And none of them had any spells for a restful sleep, either. Solved the issue quickly.





MarkB said:


> 4e does that explicitly - you can't benefit from an extended rest until at least 12 hours after your last one - and 3e effectively enforced it for divine casters, who don't get their spells back immediately after resting, but must instead meditate at a specific time of day.
> 
> However, this often just results in the players taking 24 hours off to rest instead of 8.



The thing that troubled me about the whole deal was that this was the first time the topic had ever come up at my table with this gaming group.  Ever.  And when it did, the player mentioned it _by name_.  I think at least one of them has been cruising the internet forums and taking notes on how to exploit certain parts of the game.  *sigh*

It didn't come up at our game this weekend, so maybe that was the last we've heard of it.


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## mlund (Jul 23, 2012)

CleverNickName said:


> The thing that troubled me about the whole deal was that this was the first time the topic had ever come up at my table with this gaming group.  Ever.  And when it did, the player mentioned it _by name_.  I think at least one of them has been cruising the internet forums and taking notes on how to exploit certain parts of the game.  *sigh*




Sorry, but I can't help but remember discussions over a decade ago about how fun and balanced a game Magic: the Gathering was until those rotten kids started copying good decks off the Internet.

- Marty Lund


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## pemerton (Jul 24, 2012)

mlund said:


> Sorry, but I can't help but remember discussions over a decade ago about how fun and balanced a game Magic: the Gathering was until those rotten kids started copying good decks off the Internet.



The game doesn't seem very robust if it depends upon ignorance of the possible mechanical options and scope for it to work.


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## Lanefan (Jul 24, 2012)

pemerton said:


> The game doesn't seem very robust if it depends upon ignorance of the possible mechanical options and scope for it to work.



There's a big difference in figuring something out for yourself or just reading how someone else did it.  And if you/your group never figure out some mechanical option, what's the difference.

In this way at least, the internet has taken some of the fun out of complex games like M:tG and D&D.

Lanefan


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## Zustiur (Jul 24, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> Or if the system simply didn't encourage the Nova-Rest-Nova thing in the first place, of course.




I can't imagine a system with recoverable resources that doesn't encourage that. It's a sensible tactic if there are no other considerations.


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## BlueBlackRed (Jul 24, 2012)

Simple mechanic that seems to not get used much anymore: If the party rests in an unsafe place, roll for random encounters which interrupts their rest.

Though the length of combats certainly can make that distasteful in recent editions.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 24, 2012)

Zustiur said:


> I can't imagine a system with recoverable resources that doesn't encourage that. It's a sensible tactic if there are no other considerations.



Automatic recovery after each encounter wouldn't encourage additional resting, but that's not really saying much.   Recovery not linked to resting or some other player-decided (however DM-discouraged) mechanism would also do the trick.  For instance, if recovery happened at a milestone, chapter, or other story-based point chosen by the DM.

OTOH, if player-timed recovery of resources is deemed desirable, then, to avoid class imbalances, it would make sense to give all classes comparable resource distributions - very different resources, perhaps, but comparable in how many and how often/easily they're recovered.


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## Derren (Jul 24, 2012)

Zustiur said:


> I can't imagine a system with recoverable resources that doesn't encourage that. It's a sensible tactic if there are no other considerations.




Exactly. But instead of adding "other considerations" to the adventure, people are demanding mechanical and most often gamist obstacles.


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## Hussar (Jul 25, 2012)

Derren said:


> Exactly. But instead of adding "other considerations" to the adventure, people are demanding mechanical and most often gamist obstacles.




To be fair, it's an entirely gamist problem, so, a gamist solution does seem to be the best answer.  After all, it's been repeatedly pointed out that "other considerations" means that the system is now dictating my campaign to me.  If the only way to stop 15 MAD is random encounters or time based adventures, then every single adventure has to have either one of those two and probably both.

What if I don't want that?  Why should D&D be limited to only your style of gaming?  After all, if you don't like the gamist solutions, don't use them.  That way you can still have your style of game and I get my style of game and we're both happy.

But, if there are no mechanical solutions, then you're happy and I'm left out in the cold.  I mean, even in 4e, it's trivially easy to get an AD&D style game - use Essentials characters and change the healing rates.  Done.  And, because the game is so transparent, you can pretty easily predict what any knock-on effects, if any, are going to occur.

I have no idea why the concept of having mechanical solutions to this issue is so hard to accept.  If you don't like them, because the math is so transparent, it's trivially easy to change.  But, if they're not there at all, then I can't really get what I want.  

I can get a 4e style game in 3e - healing wands and reserve feats, coupled with some of the later splat book classes generally get there.  It's doable, but, it took quite a while to have what I needed.  Going the other direction is much, much simpler.  With transparent systems with functional math, removing subsystems becomes very, very easy.


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## Primitive Screwhead (Jul 25, 2012)

Why do 'other considerations' have to be all or nothing approaches?

Mission has a time limit.. stop the thief before they get out of town or the bad guys move away and the group has to search for them.

Mission has complications if delayed, reinforcements arrive and defended built

Two missions are exclusionary, and political ramifications occur based on the players choice

Bad guy ambushes resting party after finding out that the group is on to him

Environmental hazards force the party into continueing... or stopping at a convienant cave where orcs ambush them.

Another group is after the same mcguffin

A bigger bad guy takes over the bad guys...

Or,  the dm talks to the players and finds out that they really enjoy the Nova to rest to Nova cycle...so she brings the encounters up to par and Nova right back. Pretty much like Mike mearls talks about with the xp budget for adventuring day.


Lots of other considerations there...and one of them is specifically gamist.

Sent from my Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2


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## Tovec (Jul 25, 2012)

Primitive Screwhead said:


> Why do 'other considerations' have to be all or nothing approaches?
> 
> Mission has a time limit.. stop the thief before they get out of town or the bad guys move away and the group has to search for them.
> 
> ...




My problem is that a lot of those solutions are expected to be used as sticks in this problem. I view a LOT of those solutions more as carrots, to motivate them and not to punish if they fail to get the job done. I realize that is largely the same thing but it feels really artificial if I have to use those situations over and over just to motivate my group.

For every one of these solutions there is a "yeah, but why" moment that my players may ask. When I use them for fun, as a carrot, then that reason is built in. When used as a stick those reasons are often contrived. WHY must we recuse the princess from the dragon in 5 days but not 6 or 7? It can't be due to our efforts. If he was going to eat her then he was going to do it regardless of our actions, if our actions provoke him then that is all the same issue so reinforcements don't really matter in that way either. It can't be that that is how long it takes for the dragon to get home, and it takes us the same amount of time. The travel speeds are relatively fixed per day so that seems artificial to bring up an arbitrary stopwatch to gauge our actions.

The problem for me has never been getting the party to press on. Rarely does it become, "shall we clear out everything today or do it over the course of the next 2 or three days instead". That almost never happens actually. The problem IS going NOVA because so often, too often, the party can plan their own path and adventure. That is a benefit of the system which opens itself up to this flaw.

If the party can choose their assignments, if the good king isn't always summoning them to do heroic quest A or B, then the party can usually choose how to spend their resources. If they have income for disposable equipment and magic items then they can even set their healing/stamina rate too, so that becomes less of an issue.

The solution of pushing them for some reason, or stopping them from getting a good nights sleep doesn't address this problem. Choosing how or when to nova is part of it. Why don't we focus on their capablilty to nova, which would solve both the timing problem (and force encounter solution) AS WELL as the root problem of nova-ing being a viable choice in the first place.

That is why I voted "other". It isn't that I don't believe that nova-ing isn't a problem or that 15 minute work days aren't a problem. It is that I disagree that mechanics or advice alone are the solution, unless those mechanics are reducing the potential for nova in the first place. (And I know that's not what the question meant when it proposed mechanics as a choice.)

Just my two cents.

TL/DR version: It seems like we need to look at the potential for nova as opposed to how to make players not want to nova (stick solutions only).


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## pemerton (Jul 25, 2012)

Primitive Screwhead said:


> Bad guy ambushes resting party after finding out that the group is on to him
> 
> Environmental hazards force the party into continueing... or stopping at a convienant cave where orcs ambush them.
> 
> ...



What would be good woudl be for the rulebooks to have some discussion of the circumstances in which this sort of thing will and (probably) won't work.

Some potential pitfalls of these methods: the GM ends up creating a TPK, or some comparable mechanical hosing of the PCs.

Or, if the extra threats aren't serious enough to do that, are they irritating distractions from the main focus of play - in which case, including them looks like it might reduce the overall quality of the play experience?

Only if (i) the extra encounters aren't enough to generate a TPK, and (ii) aren't experienced by the players as an irritating distraction, do we have a solution to the 15 minute day: the players try to end the day by resting, but the GM keeps the day going by introducing further encounters! That's a technique that I've used (see the description here).

To use the technique reliably, a GM (i) needs tools to measure the threat posed by an encounter (so as to avoid unintended TPKs), and (ii) needs to be able to judge what will or won't be experienced by the players as an irritating distraction. In the absence of anything like an explicit Belief mechanic, this requires good informal communication between players and GM to keep everyone on the same page as to what the game is about.



Primitive Screwhead said:


> Mission has a time limit.. stop the thief before they get out of town or the bad guys move away and the group has to search for them.
> 
> Mission has complications if delayed, reinforcements arrive and defended built
> 
> ...



Let's assume that, if the PCs fail to meet the time limit, the campaign goes on: the GM comes up with new scenarios which the players can run their PCs through.

What, then, is the cost of the time limit for the players? It's that the story of one particular scenario doesn't end as they hoped. For the players to be sufficiently invested in the scenario to take risks with their PCs to pursue the ending they want, it seems (i) that they have to be confident that the GM isn't just going to TPK them, and (ii) the scenario has to be one that they care about as part of the overall play experience.

This seems to give rise to the same requirements, of good tools for the GM to measure encounter difficulty, and good communication to keep all the game participants on the same page.

Mearls seems to be saying the right sort of things about encounter-building tools. I haven't heard anything yet about player buy-in into the stakes and themes of scenarios - hopefully they are thinking about that too.


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## Zustiur (Jul 25, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> Automatic recovery after each encounter wouldn't encourage additional resting, but that's not really saying much.   Recovery not linked to resting or some other player-decided (however DM-discouraged) mechanism would also do the trick.  For instance, if recovery happened at a milestone, chapter, or other story-based point chosen by the DM.



Hmm. Ok, Story-based recovery would definitely make for a solution. I'm not sure how D&D it is, but sure, that could work.



> OTOH, if player-timed recovery of resources is deemed desirable, then, to avoid class imbalances, it would make sense to give all classes comparable resource distributions - very different resources, perhaps, but comparable in how many and how often/easily they're recovered.



If I read that correctly, what you're referring to is the 4E standardization of power access. Also known as 'everyone is the same'.



			
				Derren said:
			
		

> Exactly. But instead of adding "other considerations" to the adventure, people are demanding mechanical and most often gamist obstacles.



Yes, for once in my life I managed to say it with two sentences instead of a post-asaurus.

 [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] I have a question for you. How much do you personally think the problem is the 15 minute pattern, and how much do you think it's to do with nova-ing and class balance.
In other words, would removing the 15 minute pattern prevent the nova? Would it resolve the class balance issues?

My own answer is as follows:
The more I read these threads the more I'm convinced we're focusing on the wrong problem. Fix the class balance first. That should automatically reduce the 15MAD issue (because it won't be highlighting the difference between classes any more). Then, if required, fix the nova issue. With both of those fixed, I'd be surprised to see the 15MAD at all, and even if we did, it wouldn't have the same negative impact that it does in 3E.


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## Primitive Screwhead (Jul 25, 2012)

pemerton said:


> Let's assume that, if the PCs fail to meet the time limit, the campaign goes on: the GM comes up with new scenarios which the players can run their PCs through.
> 
> What, then, is the cost of the time limit for the players? It's that the story of one particular scenario doesn't end as they hoped. For the players to be sufficiently invested in the scenario to take risks with their PCs to pursue the ending they want, it seems (i) that they have to be confident that the GM isn't just going to TPK them, and (ii) the scenario has to be one that they care about as part of the overall play experience.
> 
> ...




Absolutely.. all the 'other considerations' are in essence "this isn't working out as planned".... which won't work if the players don't have a plan other than gamist character advancement. If the players are vested in the story, preferably by bringing in hooks with their character background and seeking out plot lines.. then these other considerations work very well.

 And yes, guidance on how to toe the line between 'really hard' and 'TPK' is much needed for many GMs.


One of my last resort 'sticks' for garnering player involvement is to have *nothing* happen. NPCs don't seek out the group for help, local areas have been cleared out, peace breaks out locally. Basically drop the ball for the plot into the players lap and wait to see what they do with it.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 25, 2012)

Zustiur said:


> If I read that correctly, what you're referring to is the 4E standardization of power access. Also known as 'everyone is the same'.



Some sort of common advancement scheme would be a simple, elegant way to achieve that, but it wouldn't have to be AEDU.  Just every class gets some daily and some at-will abilities, comparable in number and effectiveness however different they may be in the details.  

As to 4e making classes "the same" that's one of those lies of the edition war that's been repeated so often it's commonly taken as true.  I don't see how refuting it, yet again, at this late date would add anything to the discussion, though.  So, let's just go with it:  Yes, if you want class balance, you must make classes 'the same' in the sense that they're 'the same' in 4e and in outright classes systems.  If you make one class vastly and situationally more powerful than others by giving some classes powerful dailies and others nothing, that's not balanced, and that particular type of imbalance is going to both lead to, and really be highlighted by, the 5MWD.




> My own answer is as follows:
> The more I read these threads the more I'm convinced we're focusing on the wrong problem. Fix the class balance first. That should automatically reduce the 15MAD issue (because it won't be highlighting the difference between classes any more). Then, if required, fix the nova issue. With both of those fixed, I'd be surprised to see the 15MAD at all, and even if we did, it wouldn't have the same negative impact that it does in 3E.



Fixing both the nova and class-balance issues would mean having no classes with 'daily' powers, at all.  That's entirely doable, and would have the bonus of being much easier to balance.  There are precedents of daily-less martial and arcane classes in 3.5 and Essentials/4e.  'D&D' Gamma World works that way, with just about everything (except it's oddball card mechanic) being wholly encounter-based.  Out-of-combat healing could be moved to a different (preferably adjustable by the DM to fit campaign pacing) time scale and supplemented with consumables rather than with renewable powers.


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## Crazy Jerome (Jul 25, 2012)

The true design trade-off is not between balance and variety, but between getting the mix of those right versus the time to do it and test it.  Making everything truly the same throughout is one way to get balance.  Ignoring balance entirely is one way to get variety.  The more difficult but rewarding method is including another monkey in the barrel, yet nonetheless making it work well enough.  

Or in other words, even 3E didn't give all fighters a flat 10 hit points and all wizards 20 slots of a spell that does 11 points of magic missile damage to all selected targets in sight.  And even 4E didn't make a wizard standing next to a fighter a null question, which would have been the case had half the things said about its sameness had any basis in fact.  So where "nirvana" equal some perfect mix of balance and variety, we are talking about a scale more like this, than 3E and 4E on opposite poles:

No balance ------------- 3E -------- Nirvana -------- 4E ------------- No variety.

(Don't read anything into relative differences on the graph, here.  It is not that exact of a comparison. )


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 25, 2012)

Crazy Jerome said:


> The true design trade-off is not between balance and variety, but between getting the mix of those right versus the time to do it and test it.  Making everything truly the same throughout is one way to get balance.  Ignoring balance entirely is one way to get variety.  The more difficult but rewarding method is including another monkey in the barrel, yet nonetheless making it work well enough.



I have to disagree in a fundamental way:  Variety is part of balance.  Balance is about having meaningful and viable choices - the more the merrier.  Imbalanced variety isn't variety at all, it's a few obvious-best choices, a few broken combos, and a whole lot of non-choices that might as well not exist.

Maybe:


Total Imbalance------------------Just OK-----------------Perfect Balance.
-----------------3e--AD&D----4e----------------------------------------
One Viable Choice---------------------------------------Unlimited viable choices.
Infinite Trap Choices-------------------------------------No trap choices.


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## Crazy Jerome (Jul 25, 2012)

Tony Vargas said:


> I have to disagree in a fundamental way: Variety is part of balance. Balance is about having meaningful and viable choices - the more the merrier. Imbalanced variety isn't variety at all, it's a few obvious-best choices, a few broken combos, and a whole lot of non-choices that might as well not exist.




Sure, but that's on a different axis than the point I'm trying to make.  To put it in your terms, trying to introduce a new meaningful and viable choice is a risk of imbalance--or more work to get balanced so that the new choice is meaningful and viable.  

I suppose the distinction is one of theory versus practice, though I'm sure you didn't mean it as simplistically as I'm about to say it.    In theory, if having 5 meaningful, balanced choices is good, then having 6 or 10 or 20 or 50 is getting better.  In practice, there's a point at which they aren't going to all be meaningful, balanced choices any longer.

This is especially true when all choices are allowed to fully affect all other choices--thus siloing.  So only 1 silo with N things in it is dull.  But so is N silos each with one 1 thing in them.  Neither is particularly balanced, except by luck, and even that minimal balance is likely to be illusion.  But D&D has never been particularly close to either extreme, in any version.  

As the old joke goes, once we get everyone to agree about the nature of the relationship, then we can discuss costs.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Jul 26, 2012)

> No balance ------------- 3E -------- Nirvana -------- 4E ------------- No variety.




Or as Michael Moorcock might put it:

Absolute Chaos ------ 3E ----- Nirvana ----- 4E ------ Absolute Stasis (Order).


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