I think having classes be balanced around short/long rests was a mistake
How would you have done it?
Long recharge abilities, then powers that you are always assumed to have ready for each fight, with some things you can always reliably do repeatedly.
Personally I like splitting off the long recharge cycle from literal days and tying it into narrative achievements but that's very anti-simulationist. Folks mileage might vary on how that suits them.
Indeed the mileage may vary! I do not like this, because I feel like this solution would very much feed into the "5-minute workday" notion, and I very much hate that idea.
So I'll explain because it's the exact opposite, it actively cripples the concept of "5-minute workday".
You don't refresh long recharge powers until you've hit a significant goal. If you don't hit a goal then resting doesn't do anything for you. If you stop short and feel you can't press on anymore you basically cry uncle to the DM. You give them narrative permission that says you failed and a bad thing you do not like will happen in the story. The ritual completes, the princess marries Humperdink, or even just the party's favorite Inn is burnt to the ground. Then you get to refresh all your stuff and deal with consequences.
This does make it explicit that a DM has to curate groups of challenges but frankly DMs have always done this to some extent.
My only crash-and-burn-game DM did exactly this and it's why we quit
We weren't on an important quest and ran out of spells fighting a bunch of wolves, rested and were told we didn't get spells back. We pointed out that he all but handicapped our all-long-rest-classes party by doing this, DM said that it was better for the narrative
We said okay well pull off to a roadside inn and rest until we get our spells back. He reiterated that spells don't come back that way, only after our characters complete certain milestones.
We got into loud, angry, real-life shouty argument about "How the fuck did I ever get my spells back in the first place at the temple or mage school or druid circle? Does this apply to NPCs? If a dragon breathson us can we just dip and come back later knowing his main attack is gone forever because he hasn't achieved a narrative device to recharge his spells yet?"
It actually ruined the friendship between the 5 of us and the DM once swearing came into the picture and he called someone a retard for using the argument that it felt "gamey" because this is a game, and his wife told him to STFU, and whew
AFAIK they still have actual in real life relationship fights over some of his DM decisions for a campaign that lasted for all of 2 games
The moral of the story is make sure your players are absolutely okay with it. Also make sure you're even addressing something your players feel is a problem
It sounds like you quit because your DM got abusive, which good job there.
The variant absolutely requires the DM to curate encounters and pretty much ditch the entire concept of random encounters. I've had enough "fun" slamming my head against RNG walls I don't find it very interesting but it absolutely makes things more "game-ish". Which it is very much a game so I'm totally down making sure it is a good game with interesting choices to be made. I'll admit that DMs understanding half of a narrative design concept and using it to shackle players is a thing that bad DMs do all the time.
As for springing such a massive rules change after it comes up, that's just clown shoes.
One thing that would make this ruleset impossible for me to use: How do you balance this around the fact that much of D&D is social? Do you just encourage spellcasters to only invest in combat spells? If you can't recover them, why would you ever cast Major Image to pull a prank on a guard or any number of things players do when they're faffing about
I have a hard time wrapping my head around a system for resource recovery that is wholly divorced from what's going on in the world.
eg:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "Not until tomorrow, I'm sorry, I'm totally exhausted"
vs:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "No, I need to do something unspecified for god to give me the ability to cast spells again"
Utility spells should just be rituals. They should occupy the same vein of resource that skill feats do. So rogues get cool shit that makes them almost or actually supernaturally good at climbing and hiding, rangers can nullify terrain disadvantages or find food even in the Nine Hells, and fighters can lift boulders or lead armies or wrestle demigods.
One thing that would make this ruleset impossible for me to use: How do you balance this around the fact that much of D&D is social? Do you just encourage spellcasters to only invest in combat spells? If you can't recover them, why would you ever cast Major Image to pull a prank on a guard or any number of things players do when they're faffing about
I have a hard time wrapping my head around a system for resource recovery that is wholly divorced from what's going on in the world.
eg:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "Not until tomorrow, I'm sorry, I'm totally exhausted"
vs:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "No, I need to do something unspecified for god to give me the ability to cast spells again"
"Doesn't your arcane will let you cast the spell again?" "No, Throk, my occult knowledge lets me utilize lesser magicks at will. I need to absorb manna from a leyline or a font of power, like my staff, to unleash more potent sorceries. One of those is miles from here. The other is drawing ether from the air as we speak, but shall take a fortnight to reach capacity."
Edit: this is why Vancian casting is cool narratively, but entirely stupid in their mechanical execution of it. You should get a certain amount of memory. Spells should take up that space based on complexity rather than level. So higher powered spells cost more memory, and you can memorize more complex versions of spells. Finger of Flame -> Fireball -> Meteor Swarm. You get a minor amount of memory boost over time, but not to the degree of 20 more spells per day or whatever that casters do.
My players didn't give a shit about the timeline of the Death Curse on day one. Now its day 25-something of open world jungle humping later and they still don't give a shit.
So neither do I. "Death Curse bad. Got it. Lets splunk through the new Tomb of Horrors!" Is good enough for us.
I mean, frankly, if this campaign of mine was tied onto a larger narrative, I might not have relented so much. But these character are, most likely, going to be dead or retired after we (eventually!) Finish this module. So whatevs
I haven't run that campaign yet but if i did, is fine them a super hard encounter super early on, sure to kill some of them. Have a friendly NPC res them. Ok, take all the time you want as your max hp ticks down....
Personally, I would get rid of Daily powers completely. I think everything should be Encounter or At-Will. The mechanics should be driving PCs toward the next encounter, not away from it.
You need to use the proper terminology when talking about 5e! It's not "encounter" it's "power that recharges on a short or long rest!" It's not "daily" it's "power that recharges on a long rest!"
yadda yadda but this isn't a bad idea, actually. You can still sort of do the ticking clock when a short rest takes significantly longer than 5-minutes, and the short rest is actively long enough that if you're in a "dungeon" environment you can give the enemies much smaller narrative victories (things like "they heard the commotion and knew you were coming, so they're prepared instead of just hanging out")
When my CoS party choose to take a short rest in a rope trick inside Strahd'd castle after alerting the defenses, instead of leaving the castle, i figured by the time their hour was up there would be local residents looking for them at their last known location. So i rolled up 6 random encounters in groups of two each, and placed each of the 3 clumps within 50 feet in a random direction from where they were last seen.
Personally, I would get rid of Daily powers completely. I think everything should be Encounter or At-Will. The mechanics should be driving PCs toward the next encounter, not away from it.
You need to use the proper terminology when talking about 5e! It's not "encounter" it's "power that recharges on a short or long rest!" It's not "daily" it's "power that recharges on a long rest!"
Right right right sorry, what I meant to say was "Personally, I would get rid of features, abilities, or spells that can't be used again until that character finishes a long rest. I think every feature, ability, or spell should either be able to be used again after that character has finished a short rest, be able to be used as long as the character is able to perform the action type required to use the feature or ability, or be a cantrip."
Ahh, so many more words to charge for much easier to understand!
So natural!
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Wonder if 5E would be more interesting if the general rule is that a "long rest" is when the party gets to take a week off in a location of safety (e.g. town), and "short rest" is when you sleep for the night out in the wilds. Also get rid of stuff like Rope Trick that lets you cheat at resting. Solves a lot of issues that bug me: why don't we long rest after every encounter, why don't we short rest after every encounter, why do we care whether we have a ranger that helps bypass overworld terrain, etc. Might be a bit harsh on "long rest" classes, particularly at low levels, though.
The general issue is one of resource scopes. Former "Die, Monster!" players, I'm sorry for ripping the bandaid off, but it makes for a pretty good reference point:
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The campaign goal is to defeat a vampire lord in his manorial palace before he can complete the ritual that will freeze the heavens in place and quench their last pure light. The party has three campaign-scale resources. The first one is time, which they must expend to travel to the palace and can expend to participate in various other activities at their choosing. They've actually "gotten some time back" by making good rolls to travel through the wilderness. The second is coin, jink, treasure, whatever you want to call it. Earn it and it's yours, spend it and it's gone. The third is concordance, which is a pool of resources spread among the artifact weapon that previously defeated the vampire, the spirit of its former wielder, and the relics he and his allies wielded to aid in his quest. The party can recharge concordance by performing certain specific tasks that often involve spending time or treasure.
The campaign has four main locations: the mountain pass at the end of the vampire's territory, a small town on the way to the manor, the castle town attached to the manor, and the manor itself. Each of these locations is effectively a story arc. The party's story arc resources are a little more nebulous, but they can be roughly weighed as the collective good will of the inhabitants of these places, and the resources available to them. For example, the party stopped at the small town intending to restock their food supply, but the town itself was in the grip of poverty and famine and they might have been able to convince people to part with a single day's rations for an exorbitant sum. They needed to take actions to either alleviate the famine or prove to the people they could be trusted.
From these arc hubs the party departed on various adventures. The party's adventure resources are, well, anything on their character sheet that could be permanently lost. Gear, mostly, except for a couple of character-defining items like the fighter's signature weapon, the paladin's icon of faith, the bard's heirloom songbook, the ranger's companion wolf, the druid's token of his land, and the rogue's thieves tools. Not even these things are completely immune, but their players are guaranteed to be able to spend story arc or campaign resources to get them back. Generally, there should be some place within a story arc for the party to acquire adventure resources, generally by trading in campaign or story arc resources.
Inside the adventures are various scenes. The party's scene resources are anything on their character sheet that could be replenished with a little time and care, usually temporary penalties to various statistics but sometimes positive things that are acquired within scenes, like points the druid generates to spend on specific animal powers, or that the paladin or fighter generate to protect other party members, or temporary boosts like the rogue's momentary evasion of an enemy long enough for him to have the opportunity to backstab it. Not all adventures actually contain multiple scenes.
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You can pretty easily convert daily resources into adventure or story arc or even campaign resources by providing either an explicit countdown (a hard time deadline) or an implicit countdown (when the PCs return to safety to rest, things have gotten worse in their absence), and if you do an implicit countdown it should probably have explicit steps where things are slowly getting even more messed up. But you always need to set that scale explicity, and D&D is a game that, through daily limits on spellcasting, is setting a known value of daily resources - and since spells and hit points are most often things that need daily resources like rests and spell slots to come back, making time a resource can put you in a position where a run of bad luck will just clean the PCs out of it.
Genuine question: what is the fun part of running out of combat resources? Suppose you have a party that has spent their daily powers and are considering resting before continuing on toward the big bad at the end of the adventure. You present them with the choice: either continue on as you are, with only your encounter and at-will powers, or take a "campaign loss".
Is the campaign loss supposed to be a deterrent against resting? Is a drawn out fight of spamming at-wills against the boss what you want to happen? Or are the players supposed to see a boring fight ahead of them and be jazzed about the campaign loss? Are both choices supposed to suck, and that's fun for someone?
Genuinely, where is the fun in this? It's not my style and I'm struggling to wrap my head around it.
The logic is not that you spring it on the party at the very end right before bed, but that they become aware as the day goes on that they need to conserve their resources, which forces them to take more risky fights as they save their big stuff (or at least a big thing) for when the shit finally hits the fan, with them ragged as the price they paid, but in return having the resources to manage the final push.
Also, there's multiple things that are fun in an encounter. Blowing your big daily? Sure, nice empowerment moment. But it's also fun to be the underdog and win through strategy and clever use of your limited resources.
Genuine question: what is the fun part of running out of combat resources? Suppose you have a party that has spent their daily powers and are considering resting before continuing on toward the big bad at the end of the adventure. You present them with the choice: either continue on as you are, with only your encounter and at-will powers, or take a "campaign loss".
Is the campaign loss supposed to be a deterrent against resting? Is a drawn out fight of spamming at-wills against the boss what you want to happen? Or are the players supposed to see a boring fight ahead of them and be jazzed about the campaign loss? Are both choices supposed to suck, and that's fun for someone?
Genuinely, where is the fun in this? It's not my style and I'm struggling to wrap my head around it.
I think part of it is when exploring a dungeon is that you have to make choices - As a DM you balance encounters somewhat to the party, but not every encounter in every room is necessary to accomplish what the party wants to do. Like there's the obvious side-quest where there's a hole in the ground of this room behind a secret door, and the party is pretty sure there's going to be an encounter (and maybe loot!) if they go down that path for a hot second. while the quest is in the other direction.
I'm not pro arbitrary resource wasting - but having the party make a choice of risk vs reward, should have the risk be meaningful. Take this encounter and risk not being able to finish the rest of the actual quest? If the party can gain back everything they've spend and get the reward with no influence on the quest they were busy completing, the only tool the DM has left in his tool box is make the encounters more difficult - which doesn't increase player agency either.
My players didn't give a shit about the timeline of the Death Curse on day one. Now its day 25-something of open world jungle humping later and they still don't give a shit.
So neither do I. "Death Curse bad. Got it. Lets splunk through the new Tomb of Horrors!" Is good enough for us.
I mean, frankly, if this campaign of mine was tied onto a larger narrative, I might not have relented so much. But these character are, most likely, going to be dead or retired after we (eventually!) Finish this module. So whatevs
I haven't run that campaign yet but if i did, is fine them a super hard encounter super early on, sure to kill some of them. Have a friendly NPC res them. Ok, take all the time you want as your max hp ticks down....
Which kinda breaks down, imo, because unless there is some DM trickery, it takes weeks and weeks of straight humping through the jungle to even get to Omu. How many parties starting the adventure have that many HP spare?
My players didn't give a shit about the timeline of the Death Curse on day one. Now its day 25-something of open world jungle humping later and they still don't give a shit.
So neither do I. "Death Curse bad. Got it. Lets splunk through the new Tomb of Horrors!" Is good enough for us.
I mean, frankly, if this campaign of mine was tied onto a larger narrative, I might not have relented so much. But these character are, most likely, going to be dead or retired after we (eventually!) Finish this module. So whatevs
I haven't run that campaign yet but if i did, is fine them a super hard encounter super early on, sure to kill some of them. Have a friendly NPC res them. Ok, take all the time you want as your max hp ticks down....
Which kinda breaks down, imo, because unless there is some DM trickery, it takes weeks and weeks of straight humping through the jungle to even get to Omu. How many parties starting the adventure have that many HP spare?
Modify the rules some. Everytime they take a long rest, roll a d20. On a 1, they permanently lose 1 hp. Next time they make this roll, it's if they roll a 1 or a 2, then a 1, 2 or 3....
This resets every time they lose an hp. As the numbers go up, play it up. Worsening dreams, a feeling a being followed, so on and such. When it resets, "something" is sated, and the oppressive fog lifts...for now.
My players didn't give a shit about the timeline of the Death Curse on day one. Now its day 25-something of open world jungle humping later and they still don't give a shit.
So neither do I. "Death Curse bad. Got it. Lets splunk through the new Tomb of Horrors!" Is good enough for us.
I mean, frankly, if this campaign of mine was tied onto a larger narrative, I might not have relented so much. But these character are, most likely, going to be dead or retired after we (eventually!) Finish this module. So whatevs
I haven't run that campaign yet but if i did, is fine them a super hard encounter super early on, sure to kill some of them. Have a friendly NPC res them. Ok, take all the time you want as your max hp ticks down....
Which kinda breaks down, imo, because unless there is some DM trickery, it takes weeks and weeks of straight humping through the jungle to even get to Omu. How many parties starting the adventure have that many HP spare?
Modify the rules some. Everytime they take a long rest, roll a d20. On a 1, they permanently lose 1 hp. Next time they make this roll, it's if they roll a 1 or a 2, then a 1, 2 or 3....
This resets every time they lose an hp. As the numbers go up, play it up. Worsening dreams, a feeling a being followed, so on and such. When it resets, "something" is sated, and the oppressive fog lifts...for now.
Right. DM Trickery.
Which is fine, and I'm all for DM's making calls or modifications as they see fit. But in this scenario, something would be needed.
Genuine question: what is the fun part of running out of combat resources? Suppose you have a party that has spent their daily powers and are considering resting before continuing on toward the big bad at the end of the adventure. You present them with the choice: either continue on as you are, with only your encounter and at-will powers, or take a "campaign loss".
Is the campaign loss supposed to be a deterrent against resting? Is a drawn out fight of spamming at-wills against the boss what you want to happen? Or are the players supposed to see a boring fight ahead of them and be jazzed about the campaign loss? Are both choices supposed to suck, and that's fun for someone?
Genuinely, where is the fun in this? It's not my style and I'm struggling to wrap my head around it.
Some of this is you're positing your question from the failure state. The point of it isn't really the decision point of "press on or rest up" but what leads up to it. That shepherding of resources is one of those classic D&D things. In the at-will/encounter/daily system it is what lets dailies be so powerful and feel so important.
A lot of this is manipulation of the mind state of your players. Ideally you don't ever invoke the campaign loss rules but you have them constantly concerned they're going to eat one if not for their clever/awesome/heroic play that really saved all the party. The reality is you're not going to wipe the party in any game where characters matter. You want that same tension, that they think you will but somehow they always manage to just avoid it by their heroic actions. Campaign loss is a bit of misdirection while also a safety net. You can hand one out without ending a campaign and thus you're more likely to actually give one out. (It also serves as a backstop for newer DMs, things can only go *this* bad then players get a chance to recover.)
For me it really comes down to trying to add tension to a game where all the stakes are make believe.
Alright, you young rapscallions with your bee-bops and doo-dads and things that are not pencils and paper....
In an effort to get my far flung friends to play more often, I want to come to them with a fully formed plan to get six 40-somethings into playing D&D using Hangouts (where we already chat) and Roll20 (where I opened an account in 2013 apparently and never did anything with it.). I have started a new game on Roll20 and plunked in a map I stole from the internets (Redbrand Hideout) as a simple encounter. I will have to convince the rest of these chuckleheads to make an account too.
All of us are various levels of internet savvy, one is an IT professional, so its not like this should be hard. But I'm the only one of the group that really goes after it online. And we're old and are used to a certain way of doing this thing. So change will not be easy. We briefly discussed just doing a group video chat over hangouts and see how that goes. But if we're going to go online, then why not go all the way?
I'm sure its not as easy as all the marketing people tell you it is.. so, now what do?
Alright, you young rapscallions with your bee-bops and doo-dads and things that are not pencils and paper....
In an effort to get my far flung friends to play more often, I want to come to them with a fully formed plan to get six 40-somethings into playing D&D using Hangouts (where we already chat) and Roll20 (where I opened an account in 2013 apparently and never did anything with it.). I have started a new game on Roll20 and plunked in a map I stole from the internets (Redbrand Hideout) as a simple encounter. I will have to convince the rest of these chuckleheads to make an account too.
All of us are various levels of internet savvy, one is an IT professional, so its not like this should be hard. But I'm the only one of the group that really goes after it online. And we're old and are used to a certain way of doing this thing. So change will not be easy. We briefly discussed just doing a group video chat over hangouts and see how that goes. But if we're going to go online, then why not go all the way?
I'm sure its not as easy as all the marketing people tell you it is.. so, now what do?
So I know, I know, but Discord with video is way more stable/less troublesome than Hangouts IME. Do not even think about using Roll20's built in stuff as it is very bad.
For the group you're working with I'd avoid messing around with dice rollers and macros and whatever. Just have folks roll their own dice and say the results. You have to trust folks but it's a friend group and not random strangers on the internet.
The big thing for you is going to be tokens to have a map. Maybe play with setting up the pictures/size in Roll20 to give a visual representation. Ideally all the PCs would find cool pictures too for that.
Only other thing would mess around with the tools for revealing/hiding portions of the map I think.
I struggle how I can work a "campaign loss" into storm kings thunder because the party wants to rest and get their resources back while they're dicking around in the city
Am I just not running campaigns right or something? The "overarching objective" is usually like, weeks, months, or years off, and the party's current quest usually has a fair bit of freedom. Right now in both campaigns I'm running they don't even know what the end threat actually is, I've never run a campaign where it's a set of objectives the party is sprinting towards (the party frequently decides they're going to do something I wasn't expecting)
Like I have those things WITHIN a campaign, - soon they're going to arrive in the dwarven capital and an event will let them know the fire giants are up to something, the party has a frost giant with them that will want to set out immediately, at midnight, and if the party doesn't go she's going to go by herself (and die if she does). If the party takes 5 weeks to get moving, a giant invincible adamantine golem will destroy the area, if they rest in the middle of Ironslag, well, by the end of their rest there will be 40 fire giants queued up to dip them into the molten iron and make commemorative keychains out of them.
Most official campaigns seem to work this way, once the rubber meets the road in a quest the DM shouldn't just have everything sit around and wait for the party to rest. The lion's share of the session to session play though? Yeah sure rest whenever you want, you can only fit one into each 24 hour period by RAW anyway
I struggle how I can work a "campaign loss" into storm kings thunder because the party wants to rest and get their resources back while they're dicking around in the city
Am I just not running campaigns right or something? The "overarching objective" is usually like, weeks, months, or years off, and the party's current quest usually has a fair bit of freedom. Right now in both campaigns I'm running they don't even know what the end threat actually is, I've never run a campaign where it's a set of objectives the party is sprinting towards (the party frequently decides they're going to do something I wasn't expecting)
Like I have those things WITHIN a campaign, - soon they're going to arrive in the dwarven capital and an event will let them know the fire giants are up to something, the party has a frost giant with them that will want to set out immediately, at midnight, and if the party doesn't go she's going to go by herself (and die if she does). If the party takes 5 weeks to get moving, a giant invincible adamantine golem will destroy the area, if they rest in the middle of Ironslag, well, by the end of their rest there will be 40 fire giants queued up to dip them into the molten iron and make commemorative keychains out of them.
Most official campaigns seem to work this way, once the rubber meets the road in a quest the DM shouldn't just have everything sit around and wait for the party to rest. The lion's share of the session to session play though? Yeah sure rest whenever you want, you can only fit one into each 24 hour period by RAW anyway
Nothing here sounds wrong to me. Everything is as I usually have things play out as well. Are you and your players having fun? If so, all is good and working as intended, I'd say.
I do get other people's points of ways they'd rather do magic, but for my group and I, the system's been great and we haven't had any issues creep up because of the short rest/long rest classes or the time management of certain "timetable sensitive" missions. I know mileage varies here but I'm at least glad I don't have a need to try and reinvent the system.
The logic is not that you spring it on the party at the very end right before bed, but that they become aware as the day goes on that they need to conserve their resources, which forces them to take more risky fights as they save their big stuff (or at least a big thing) for when the shit finally hits the fan, with them ragged as the price they paid, but in return having the resources to manage the final push.
Part of what I think Denada is getting at is this, though: What if they don't? What if you tell them about your campaign loss system in advance and emphasize that it's supposed to force them to manage their resources better and they smile and nod and blow all their spell slots immediately anyway? You have to analyze the system from the failure state because the failure state has to have teeth for the prospect of failure to impact player behavior. If they fail to manage their resources and you just let them get their shit back because working within the failure state is un-fun, all it teaches them is that this system you've constructed doesn't actually matter.
Which means that to make it matter, you have to be willing to enforce the failure state on them, at which point the party has to answer the question Denada's proposing: Grind out a boss fight with at-wills, or rest and eat a campaign loss?
I think it's true that neither prospect is interesting or fun, but I also think that the choice as framed is predicated on an important assumption that doesn't have to be true: The choice to grind out a boss fight with at-wills presumes that you can beat the boss that way because the DM won't actually let you lose. It's basically the pixel-bitching/exploit solution to the resource management challenge: "I can bypass the failure penalty for resource mismanagement by resorting to an unintended strategy that isn't fun to play but can't lose." There's no risk/reward decisionmaking involved because there's no actual risk.
If you tune your boss fights so that defeat is a real possibility and tune the price of defeat so that it effectively gives 2-3 campaign losses, then you re-enforce an actual risk/reward decision: Try to take on a difficult fight while short on resources and risk a major loss, or eat a minor loss up-front to improve your odds of avoiding the major one? We're no longer talking about grinding out a boring fight because instead we're talking about trying to survive a dangerous one, and the tension and stakes preclude it from being boring.
Basically I think the necessary ingredient to make that sort of campaign loss system fun is that it must include a real risk of actual failure, at which point the fun comes from weighing risk vs reward and finding out how close to the sun you can fly before you get burned.
The issue is that the question started as one thing ("why is resource management fun?"), but ended as another ("when failure leads to campaign end?"). I was only answering the former.
Also, this entire argument seems to be assuming that DMs are building encounters so perfectly balanced that they can tell when using only basic abilities will be a loss for the party, but using more advanced resources will be a win. Despite the D20's lack of a bell curve. Which either implies that you're a galaxy brain DM or that your encounters are incredibly static and dull, in which case your problems are bigger than needing to fudge rolls.
Sorry I kinda dropped that question and then dipped out.
What I'm not jiving with is ... hmm I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to state it. I'm going to have to be long-winded.
Okay, so let's say that your campaign is about stopping an invasion of vampires in some valley. Every 500 years, the world's suns and moons align such that the valley will be plunged into endless night for, I don't know, 10 years or something. No one believes this is real because the last time it happened was 500 years ago and elves aren't immortal in this campaign setting. In any case, the Super Eclipse is coming in 8 weeks, and your PCs have to find a way to stop it by ending the war between the mountain dwarves and star gnomes so that they can stop fighting and rebuild the Great Mirrors.
So you're throwing some encounters at them, you go a couple of sessions without resting. They've been conserving their combat resources so those fights have been kinda eh, but they know there's a dwarven general coming up that they really want to be able to go all out on. And they know that if they don't conserve and instead try to rest, the general is going to get away and burn down a gnome encampment and the party is going to lose out on a week of time trying to repair that damage.
What I question in this scenario is, why are those extra fights there? Why drain the resources instead of just saying "you've fought your way to the general, time to go all out!" If those intermediary encounters are interesting on their own and that's why they're there, why should the players suffer consequences for engaging with the content that was put before them?
I think what I'm ultimately getting at is my disdain for daily combat resources. I think the PCs should have all their toys to play with in every fight, unless you're running through the part of the superhero movie (a part which I usually hate) where the hero loses their powers for a while and learns a new appreciation for what they had right before they get them back (but better this time).
You know, reading through what I just wrote, I think it's probably just a style difference. I see D&D as fundamentally a power fantasy, and I like it like that. If I wanted like a character drama, or to explore the danger of unchecked power, or trying to be a hero in a world that doesn't care about heroes, I'd probably play a different game.
What I question in this scenario is, why are those extra fights there? Why drain the resources instead of just saying "you've fought your way to the general, time to go all out!" If those intermediary encounters are interesting on their own and that's why they're there, why should the players suffer consequences for engaging with the content that was put before them?
So the short answer is that they should not unless they engaged in foolish ways with the content before them.
The slightly longer answer is that ideally the content should be curated so that they can go all out when they get there. By level 5 wizards have 9 spell slots and may have ways to get some of those back(sorcerer) or other daily type resources(enchantment, divination). If you use 1 slot per encounter on 6 encounters that last 2-3 rounds each(which would be long for a medium encounter) you still have 3 rounds of full spell slot usage left for your big showdown. Which is plenty given that 5 rounds is an exceptionally long fight in 5e even if the fight is super hard. And 7 encounters with the last one being hard is a long "combat day" by any estimation.
The alternate is that the long rest based champions get to the end fight with 9 spells and have no limits. Either they do not exhaust their slots because they have 9 slots for a 5 round fight... Or they do exhaust their slots and the fight either went on way too long (the martial classes are probably getting really bored at this point) or was way to easy... not as a result of the fight itself but as a result of them having all their spells.
Any system with daily resources will have a problem in that its difficult to construct encounters that work both when you're full and expected to do more the same day and when you're not. 4e has this problem too in that you could just blow all your dailies and classes/characters which were designed around encounter length dailies were left out in the cold a bit as a result of this in these situations. The only way to fix this is to make all encounters have the exact same resources available. But no one wants this, encounters get too samey, it breaks some of the verisimilitude when there are no costs to fighting
You know, reading through what I just wrote, I think it's probably just a style difference. I see D&D as fundamentally a power fantasy, and I like it like that. If I wanted like a character drama, or to explore the danger of unchecked power, or trying to be a hero in a world that doesn't care about heroes, I'd probably play a different game.
Well it is and it isn't. A power fantasy isn't a power fantasy if you don't feel like you overcame something powerful. You would otherwise just start at level 20 and go massacre goblins. Sure you're powerful but you don't really feel it. You have to strike a balance between power and challenge.
Which is to say that if you get to the end of that general fight with half your resources left you might not feel like you've accomplished as large a feat as if you get to the end of that fight with 5 HP and no slots.
What I question in this scenario is, why are those extra fights there? Why drain the resources instead of just saying "you've fought your way to the general, time to go all out!" If those intermediary encounters are interesting on their own and that's why they're there, why should the players suffer consequences for engaging with the content that was put before them?
So the short answer is that they should not unless they engaged in foolish ways with the content before them.
The slightly longer answer is that ideally the content should be curated so that they can go all out when they get there. By level 5 wizards have 9 spell slots and may have ways to get some of those back(sorcerer) or other daily type resources(enchantment, divination). If you use 1 slot per encounter on 6 encounters that last 2-3 rounds each(which would be long for a medium encounter) you still have 3 rounds of full spell slot usage left for your big showdown. Which is plenty given that 5 rounds is an exceptionally long fight in 5e even if the fight is super hard. And 7 encounters with the last one being hard is a long "combat day" by any estimation.
The alternate is that the long rest based champions get to the end fight with 9 spells and have no limits. Either they do not exhaust their slots because they have 9 slots for a 5 round fight... Or they do exhaust their slots and the fight either went on way too long (the martial classes are probably getting really bored at this point) or was way to easy... not as a result of the fight itself but as a result of them having all their spells.
Any system with daily resources will have a problem in that its difficult to construct encounters that work both when you're full and expected to do more the same day and when you're not. 4e has this problem too in that you could just blow all your dailies and classes/characters which were designed around encounter length dailies were left out in the cold a bit as a result of this in these situations. The only way to fix this is to make all encounters have the exact same resources available. But no one wants this, encounters get too samey, it breaks some of the verisimilitude when there are no costs to fighting
I disagree that having the same resources available every encounter makes them too samey. It frees up the DM to get really creative with encounters, because there is a reliable base level of competency that can always be counted on. If you always know that your "PC" dial will be turned to a certain number, then you can tweak every other dial without having to psychologically manipulate (I'm being intentionally hyperbolic with that phrasing because of course it isn't really that) your players into turning their dial at the right speed so that it might be at the number you want when they hit this encounter.
You know, reading through what I just wrote, I think it's probably just a style difference. I see D&D as fundamentally a power fantasy, and I like it like that. If I wanted like a character drama, or to explore the danger of unchecked power, or trying to be a hero in a world that doesn't care about heroes, I'd probably play a different game.
Well it is and it isn't. A power fantasy isn't a power fantasy if you don't feel like you overcame something powerful. You would otherwise just start at level 20 and go massacre goblins. Sure you're powerful but you don't really feel it. You have to strike a balance between power and challenge.
Which is to say that if you get to the end of that general fight with half your resources left you might not feel like you've accomplished as large a feat as if you get to the end of that fight with 5 HP and no slots.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
This all boils down to style difference as you wrote out, though maybe not quite as clear as a "power fantasy". I think it's an honest question and I'm pretty sure during the development of 5e, it probably came up, even just in passing, of the way you suggested. In the end, the game went the way it went and decided to balance around it's older, more traditional route of spellcasting system. And losing more and more spellslots as you go further in a dungeon/adventure day, I believe anyway, was made purposeful with the game WANTING resource management to be in the mix. It might not be for everyone, obviously, but I don't think it's wrong they went that way; just a choice. Just as it's not wrong for someone not to like it or to want to tweak the game to match more of what they want, but depending on how much tweaking they do, I'd agree that maybe looking at another system might be a cleaner call.
D&D has always had a history of resource management being a part of the game. Even in 4e, Daily powers were still separate from Encounters. It's just always been there in some way and I think at this point it's just very "D&D", as vague as that might be.
Now, that aside, I actually don't know offhand of a system like you're describing. I "think" even the World of Darkness systems have limits and resources in place, so I couldn't say there for certain. Unsure about all the other Exalted stuff and what not. I only bring this up as I'd be curious to see how a system handles a "Resource Resetting Per Encounter" thing is balanced and all that.
The issue is that the question started as one thing ("why is resource management fun?"), but ended as another ("when failure leads to campaign end?"). I was only answering the former.
Also, this entire argument seems to be assuming that DMs are building encounters so perfectly balanced that they can tell when using only basic abilities will be a loss for the party, but using more advanced resources will be a win. Despite the D20's lack of a bell curve. Which either implies that you're a galaxy brain DM or that your encounters are incredibly static and dull, in which case your problems are bigger than needing to fudge rolls.
Nah, you don't need perfect balance for the system to work that way. You just need to have designed your shit in a way that is balanced enough that you have more information about the difficulty of upcoming encounters than the party does, which is pretty easy. You're not designing against perfect information, you're designing against the decidedly imperfect information that is "the party's best guess about how many resources they need to beat the next fight".
Also none of this has anything to do with the campaign ending. Losing a fight doesn't mean the campaign is over, and in fact the assumption that it does mean that is a big part of why a lot of DMs are generally reticent to ever put the party in real danger, which in turn is the whole reason most risk/reward decisions players get asked to make end up being basically meaningless and uninteresting.
Losing a boss fight doesn't mean the campaign is over, it means the boss gets to enact whatever nefarious thing he was trying to do, giving Team Bad Guy a leg up at the same time that Team Hero loses a week or two collecting the Magical Doodads necessary to resurrect the Cleric who died in the fight, which lets Team Bad Guy move forward in a way that causes Bad Things A and B to happen to well-liked Character C while City D is sacked by Monster E, leaving the players with only a short time to stop Monster E before it sacks City F, too.
D&D has always had a history of resource management being a part of the game. Even in 4e, Daily powers were still separate from Encounters. It's just always been there in some way and I think at this point it's just very "D&D", as vague as that might be.
Dailies weren't the real limit on a party's progress in 4e, though. They were Cadillac Powers that were awesome to have (and which players were frequently tempted to rest early for) but not really required to operate at near-full capacity. The much more important daily resource was Healing Surges, which are a little closer to what it sounds like Denada probably wants - a limited set of healing surges did place a cap on how far a party could go in a day, but being low on healing surges didn't make you perform worse in combat. Daily powers aside (and the Essentials classes mostly didn't even have them), you basically went into every fight at 100% performance but also had a per-day stamina bar that depleted over time without directly degrading your character's abilities until it was completely empty. The resource management mattered, but you generally didn't have to hold back in fights just to save resources (indeed, you were incentivized to do the opposite - the faster and more decisively you could end a fight, the less damage you'd take and the fewer surges you'd consume, letting you adventure longer without resting).
Dailies weren't the real limit on a party's progress in 4e, though. They were Cadillac Powers that were awesome to have (and which players were frequently tempted to rest early for) but not really required to operate at near-full capacity. The much more important daily resource was Healing Surges, which are a little closer to what it sounds like Denada probably wants - a limited set of healing surges did place a cap on how far a party could go in a day, but being low on healing surges didn't make you perform worse in combat. Daily powers aside (and the Essentials classes mostly didn't even have them), you basically went into every fight at 100% performance but also had a per-day stamina bar that depleted over time without directly degrading your character's abilities until it was completely empty. The resource management mattered, but you generally didn't have to hold back in fights just to save resources (indeed, you were incentivized to do the opposite - the faster and more decisively you could end a fight, the less damage you'd take and the fewer surges you'd consume, letting you adventure longer without resting).
I'm not arguing 4e had LESS resource management. I'm just still pointing out it STILL had resource management. Even if you consider Dailies "Cadillac Powers", they were still a bump and thus a resource, as were Healing Surges. I was just pointing out that D&D, to some extent, still always had SOME resource management when it came to spells.
Now we've obviously moved closer back into older editions than 4e in terms of these managements but a lot of people like it this way. And a lot of people don't. I was just making a point that it's always been there to SOME degree. The degree can be debated, of course, but again the only point I was trying to make was that in some manner, D&D has never operated at having ALL powers for every fight.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I wouldn't go that far and it comes off as adjacent to gatekeeping the game of "Well if you're not playing this way, then don't play". I'm not saying that's your intent but I am saying it could be perceived as such.
On top of that, the developer(s?) have said that they balance encounters based on parties being at full health and resources because they don't know WHEN the party is going to rest in a dungeon and what not. I think that was Crawford or something. So though encounters would definitely have to be adjusted throughout, I'd say it wouldn't be impossible TO balance encounters around just getting everything back after each encounter. Off the top of my head, a couple of more enemies and/or giving all enemies MAX HP instead of a fixed amount might go a long ways. I mean all it really is if you hand wave resource management away is just adding a bit of something to balance it back out. And for a group's enjoyment (assuming everyone wants to play that way) it's probably worth the investment to figure that out. Certain spells would have to be adjusted too. Like say Haste or 9th level Foresight, maybe have them end per Encounter instead of their duration or everyone would have haste always. I'm not saying it's not without a learning curve to figure out but I wouldn't say that the entire D&D game isn't for you if you want to try.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I don't want to be that guy but you just said that D&D isn't a series of encounters and then went on to describe how it's a series of encounters.
And again I posit that, if you're a DM and you need the PCs to have spent a certain amount of resources - but not too many - before they engage with the capstone of the adventure, or Big Encounter if you'd like, otherwise said capstone is, I don't know, too easy I guess, why not just make the capstone fight harder? What is gained by softening them up first with Small Encounters that, thematic though they may be, were never intended to have any significance to the story other than as set dressing?
And yes my initial statement was that I want D&D to be designed differently. All the trash mobs and dungeon timers just feels too video-gamey to me.
Also I do recognize that this is mostly just a stylistic difference. I think there's some game design stuff in there too but it's largely personal preference.
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think dungeon timers can be useful, as sometimes it's exciting and thematic to have the heroes race against the clock to save the world from Armageddon. It's a tool best used very sparingly though, lest it lose its thematic weight.
I like draining the party of resources via attrition. I like not-so-random and maybe-not-so-meaningless fights during the course of any given adventure. Adventuring is hard. Dungeons are populated with things that want to kill you and probably eat you. That is reasonable and believable, imo, in a fantasy world of monsters and heroes. At the end of a given day. they should be bruised, beaten, bloody, and wiped out. Then I'll be very pleased to give them that solid 8 to rest. It may not be where the party chooses, but in my games there is always a safe(ish) place to rest somewhere in the "dungeon".
But! I also very much do not want them limping, half dead with 0 spells left, into an epic boss fight. That's no fun. If they got there by their own stupidity, then so be it, but if there is to be an epic boss fight? Then by all means, lets have an EPIC boss fight!
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I wouldn't go that far and it comes off as adjacent to gatekeeping the game of "Well if you're not playing this way, then don't play". I'm not saying that's your intent but I am saying it could be perceived as such.
I'm saying if you try to play this game without keeping resource management in mind, then you're going to be deeply frustrated. There is no right way to play DnD but there are plenty of wrong ones and this is one of them.
n top of that, the developer(s?) have said that they balance encounters based on parties being at full health and resources because they don't know WHEN the party is going to rest in a dungeon and what not. I think that was Crawford or something. So though encounters would definitely have to be adjusted throughout, I'd say it wouldn't be impossible TO balance encounters around just getting everything back after each encounter. Off the top of my head, a couple of more enemies and/or giving all enemies MAX HP instead of a fixed amount might go a long ways. I mean all it really is if you hand wave resource management away is just adding a bit of something to balance it back out. And for a group's enjoyment (assuming everyone wants to play that way) it's probably worth the investment to figure that out. Certain spells would have to be adjusted too. Like say Haste or 9th level Foresight, maybe have them end per Encounter instead of their duration or everyone would have haste always. I'm not saying it's not without a learning curve to figure out but I wouldn't say that the entire D&D game isn't for you if you want to try.
I'm not really willing to argue against a designer ruling that may or may not exist. If you have a source, then we can chat. Even then we all know that CR, the actual-in-book-official way to balance encounters, is a rule of thumb at it's absolute peak usefulness.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I don't want to be that guy but you just said that D&D isn't a series of encounters and then went on to describe how it's a series of encounters.
No, I said it isn't just a series of encounters. To be more clear, it isn't a series of encounters connected solely by the fact that the same players are running into them. The setting and story matter, and having to manage resources with the setting and story in mind gives more depth to the world and more agency to the player.
And again I posit that, if you're a DM and you need the PCs to have spent a certain amount of resources - but not too many - before they engage with the capstone of the adventure, or Big Encounter if you'd like, otherwise said capstone is, I don't know, too easy I guess, why not just make the capstone fight harder? What is gained by softening them up first with Small Encounters that, thematic though they may be, were never intended to have any significance to the story other than as set dressing?
And yes my initial statement was that I want D&D to be designed differently. All the trash mobs and dungeon timers just feels too video-gamey to me.
Also I do recognize that this is mostly just a stylistic difference. I think there's some game design stuff in there too but it's largely personal preference.
I don't need my players to have spent anything, and my fights aren't there solely to soften up the players. I use small fights to further the story, and sometimes even hint at or set the stage for the bigger fights. They fight a few small groups of goblins because that informs them of the risk to the nearby town should they fail. They are in a big, populated goblin warren. If they don't kill the leader, Hamletsville is in trouble.
I can also use encounters to set the stage by giving the players lower risk examples of enemy tactics. These two goblin archers know how to utilize cover. When they get to the big goblin general and they see he has a bow, they'll be ready to deal with that. The weird goblin shaman can shadowstep. They'll need to keep that in mind if, instead of a bow, the general has got the same weird carved skull hat as the shamans, or maybe he has both, and likes to use the shadow step to stay behind cover, which is even more fun.
If all your encounters do is drain resources, then the problem isn't the resource management that's baked into the game, it's the encounters you're designing.
The resource management keeps the glue of the campaign in the players' minds. It forces them to always consider how the small encounter is happening in the context of the bigger story. They have to think about how they are in a full goblin warren, and how to manage their scarce resources to deal with that. They are not in a series of fights that they approach at full strength so there are no long term costs to using whatever spell whenever. They have to think about the small encounter they are in, and the story and setting tying the small encounters into a bigger one.
On top of that, the developer(s?) have said that they balance encounters based on parties being at full health and resources because they don't know WHEN the party is going to rest in a dungeon and what not
This is true. But they also don't balance encounters to be "hard" in the sense that it would be difficult. A hard encounter is one that is expected to drain x% resources from a fully prepared party(which is like... 20 to 30% i think?). A medium encounter drains less.
In this way "encounters are balanced around full parties" but they're also definitely balanced around not full parties. The consistent balancing point gives a rough idea of how many encounters are left before failure (running out of resources for real) becomes a significant issue.
Now, that aside, I actually don't know offhand of a system like you're describing. I "think" even the World of Darkness systems have limits and resources in place, so I couldn't say there for certain. Unsure about all the other Exalted stuff and what not. I only bring this up as I'd be curious to see how a system handles a "Resource Resetting Per Encounter" thing is balanced and all that.
They do. They have global limits you need to spend time replacing (blood etc)
Dailies weren't the real limit on a party's progress in 4e, though. They were Cadillac Powers that were awesome to have (and which players were frequently tempted to rest early for) but not really required to operate at near-full capacity. The much more important daily resource was Healing Surges, which are a little closer to what it sounds like Denada probably wants - a limited set of healing surges did place a cap on how far a party could go in a day, but being low on healing surges didn't make you perform worse in combat. Daily powers aside (and the Essentials classes mostly didn't even have them), you basically went into every fight at 100% performance but also had a per-day stamina bar that depleted over time without directly degrading your character's abilities until it was completely empty. The resource management mattered, but you generally didn't have to hold back in fights just to save resources (indeed, you were incentivized to do the opposite - the faster and more decisively you could end a fight, the less damage you'd take and the fewer surges you'd consume, letting you adventure longer without resting).
I'm not arguing 4e had LESS resource management. I'm just still pointing out it STILL had resource management. Even if you consider Dailies "Cadillac Powers", they were still a bump and thus a resource, as were Healing Surges. I was just pointing out that D&D, to some extent, still always had SOME resource management when it came to spells.
Now we've obviously moved closer back into older editions than 4e in terms of these managements but a lot of people like it this way. And a lot of people don't. I was just making a point that it's always been there to SOME degree. The degree can be debated, of course, but again the only point I was trying to make was that in some manner, D&D has never operated at having ALL powers for every fight.
Essentials 4e pretty much did.
I'm not arguing that resource management hasn't always been a part of DnD, just drawing a line of distinction between a style of resource management that discourages active play ("You only have eight good turns today. You have to hold back and spend them wisely, filling the rest of your time with bullshit turns, or you'll be tapped out for the important fight later") and a style that encourages active play ("You have all your shit available every fight and you need to use it as decisively as possible in order to protect your Resource Meter.")
The former leaves players dithering around with cantrips and unaugmented attacks trying to be moderately effective for minimum resource expenditure, while the latter encourages them to play the whole character all the time and be maximally effective in order to prevent resource expenditure. If you want a mechanical system that encourages players to press on and drives them to conclude the adventure quickly rather than 5-minute-workday grinding through it, the latter is gonna get you a lot closer than the former.
Narratively, I like the idea of the monk saving her Ultimate Supreme Devastation Technique to use against the true danger, rather than being free to just slap around any old goblin with the USDT. If characters get to long rest between every encounter, then the USDT comes out more often. Same goes for the fighter, the wizard, etc.
Narratively, I like the idea of the monk saving her Ultimate Supreme Devastation Technique to use against the true danger, rather than being free to just slap around any old goblin with the USDT. If characters get to long rest between every encounter, then the USDT comes out more often. Same goes for the fighter, the wizard, etc.
Generally speaking I think this is a case where gameplay ought to take precedence over narrative BUT if you want to have some sort of Limit Break technique that is limited in use for narrative reasons, then its recharge rate should probably also be narrative-based...which just kinda circles us back around to the idea of only letting the party recharge their good shit when they reach some sort of narrative milestone, rather than every time they camp for the night.
Otherwise you end up introducing a resource system that undermines quality of gameplay in favor of narrative quality, but the narrative impact turns out to be 'monk uses Ultimate Supreme Devastation Technique on passing random encounter goblin because she knows the party will camp before going into the dungeon with the lich in it' - which is exactly what you were trying to avoid in the first place, only now you've made combat less fun and still have the exact same problem you started with.
My Five Finger Palm Exploding Heart Technique is to be used only on Bill, nobody else.
That's why I think my idea was a best of both worlds approach. Everyone gets 1-2 "trademark" attacks per day but the majority of their stuff is available every fight. The limited number of trademark attacks means they get saved for when they're most useful instead of spammed at the earliest convenience, but they're powerful enough to make your players feel like they turn the tide of battle when they're used.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I don't want to be that guy but you just said that D&D isn't a series of encounters and then went on to describe how it's a series of encounters.
No, I said it isn't just a series of encounters. To be more clear, it isn't a series of encounters connected solely by the fact that the same players are running into them. The setting and story matter, and having to manage resources with the setting and story in mind gives more depth to the world and more agency to the player.
And again I posit that, if you're a DM and you need the PCs to have spent a certain amount of resources - but not too many - before they engage with the capstone of the adventure, or Big Encounter if you'd like, otherwise said capstone is, I don't know, too easy I guess, why not just make the capstone fight harder? What is gained by softening them up first with Small Encounters that, thematic though they may be, were never intended to have any significance to the story other than as set dressing?
And yes my initial statement was that I want D&D to be designed differently. All the trash mobs and dungeon timers just feels too video-gamey to me.
Also I do recognize that this is mostly just a stylistic difference. I think there's some game design stuff in there too but it's largely personal preference.
I don't need my players to have spent anything, and my fights aren't there solely to soften up the players. I use small fights to further the story, and sometimes even hint at or set the stage for the bigger fights. They fight a few small groups of goblins because that informs them of the risk to the nearby town should they fail. They are in a big, populated goblin warren. If they don't kill the leader, Hamletsville is in trouble.
I can also use encounters to set the stage by giving the players lower risk examples of enemy tactics. These two goblin archers know how to utilize cover. When they get to the big goblin general and they see he has a bow, they'll be ready to deal with that. The weird goblin shaman can shadowstep. They'll need to keep that in mind if, instead of a bow, the general has got the same weird carved skull hat as the shamans, or maybe he has both, and likes to use the shadow step to stay behind cover, which is even more fun.
If all your encounters do is drain resources, then the problem isn't the resource management that's baked into the game, it's the encounters you're designing.
The resource management keeps the glue of the campaign in the players' minds. It forces them to always consider how the small encounter is happening in the context of the bigger story. They have to think about how they are in a full goblin warren, and how to manage their scarce resources to deal with that. They are not in a series of fights that they approach at full strength so there are no long term costs to using whatever spell whenever. They have to think about the small encounter they are in, and the story and setting tying the small encounters into a bigger one.
Okay, so D&D isn't just a series of encounters. If I'm not using a series of encounters to enforce resource management, then that's one of the wrong ways to play D&D. But I don't need my players to have spent anything, because the series of encounters is actually there to further the story and set the stage for the bigger encounters, perhaps by serving as a sort of Nintendo Method level design vehicle. But the resource management that the series of encounters enforces is important to the campaign, because without costs to using their abilities (costs that must persist throughout the series of encounters), the players won't understand the story that the series of encounters is telling. I can't just describe a goblin warren and perhaps have some back and forth with the players describing how the characters have snuck and/or fought their way through it to reach their goal, which is the big goblin shaman-archer general. And I can't go through that series of encounters with the same combat powers available to the PCs in every encounter because without resource management they won't have to think about how the series of encounters with goblins in the goblin warren showed them that the goblin warren was full of goblins, and the goblin shaman-archer general will rally those goblins to attack Hamletsville if they don't kill her, which is the whole reason the characters came to the goblin warren in the first place.
Alright now that I've gotten all my snark out of my system. I think what you're trying to get at is, for the way you like to run D&D, long-term resource management is a fundamental part of adventure design, and you feel that the world is richer and the experience more rewarding when the PCs have to weigh long-term costs vs benefits when they use their powers.
What I'm trying to challenge is D&D's inclusion of combat effectiveness in that long-term resource management. I don't find the choice of being effective right now vs not being as effective later all that interesting or fun - in general. Sure there are times when limiting power is interesting (when used very sparingly, and done artfully, which is hard to do, which is one of the reasons I don't often do it), but for the most part, in the kind of genre that D&D is, combat effectiveness should remain largely consistent.
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One thing that would make this ruleset impossible for me to use: How do you balance this around the fact that much of D&D is social? Do you just encourage spellcasters to only invest in combat spells? If you can't recover them, why would you ever cast Major Image to pull a prank on a guard or any number of things players do when they're faffing about
I have a hard time wrapping my head around a system for resource recovery that is wholly divorced from what's going on in the world.
eg:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "Not until tomorrow, I'm sorry, I'm totally exhausted"
vs:
"Can't you remove the curse?" "No, I need to do something unspecified for god to give me the ability to cast spells again"
"Doesn't your arcane will let you cast the spell again?" "No, Throk, my occult knowledge lets me utilize lesser magicks at will. I need to absorb manna from a leyline or a font of power, like my staff, to unleash more potent sorceries. One of those is miles from here. The other is drawing ether from the air as we speak, but shall take a fortnight to reach capacity."
Edit: this is why Vancian casting is cool narratively, but entirely stupid in their mechanical execution of it. You should get a certain amount of memory. Spells should take up that space based on complexity rather than level. So higher powered spells cost more memory, and you can memorize more complex versions of spells. Finger of Flame -> Fireball -> Meteor Swarm. You get a minor amount of memory boost over time, but not to the degree of 20 more spells per day or whatever that casters do.
I haven't run that campaign yet but if i did, is fine them a super hard encounter super early on, sure to kill some of them. Have a friendly NPC res them. Ok, take all the time you want as your max hp ticks down....
When my CoS party choose to take a short rest in a rope trick inside Strahd'd castle after alerting the defenses, instead of leaving the castle, i figured by the time their hour was up there would be local residents looking for them at their last known location. So i rolled up 6 random encounters in groups of two each, and placed each of the 3 clumps within 50 feet in a random direction from where they were last seen.
The general issue is one of resource scopes. Former "Die, Monster!" players, I'm sorry for ripping the bandaid off, but it makes for a pretty good reference point:
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The campaign goal is to defeat a vampire lord in his manorial palace before he can complete the ritual that will freeze the heavens in place and quench their last pure light. The party has three campaign-scale resources. The first one is time, which they must expend to travel to the palace and can expend to participate in various other activities at their choosing. They've actually "gotten some time back" by making good rolls to travel through the wilderness. The second is coin, jink, treasure, whatever you want to call it. Earn it and it's yours, spend it and it's gone. The third is concordance, which is a pool of resources spread among the artifact weapon that previously defeated the vampire, the spirit of its former wielder, and the relics he and his allies wielded to aid in his quest. The party can recharge concordance by performing certain specific tasks that often involve spending time or treasure.
The campaign has four main locations: the mountain pass at the end of the vampire's territory, a small town on the way to the manor, the castle town attached to the manor, and the manor itself. Each of these locations is effectively a story arc. The party's story arc resources are a little more nebulous, but they can be roughly weighed as the collective good will of the inhabitants of these places, and the resources available to them. For example, the party stopped at the small town intending to restock their food supply, but the town itself was in the grip of poverty and famine and they might have been able to convince people to part with a single day's rations for an exorbitant sum. They needed to take actions to either alleviate the famine or prove to the people they could be trusted.
From these arc hubs the party departed on various adventures. The party's adventure resources are, well, anything on their character sheet that could be permanently lost. Gear, mostly, except for a couple of character-defining items like the fighter's signature weapon, the paladin's icon of faith, the bard's heirloom songbook, the ranger's companion wolf, the druid's token of his land, and the rogue's thieves tools. Not even these things are completely immune, but their players are guaranteed to be able to spend story arc or campaign resources to get them back. Generally, there should be some place within a story arc for the party to acquire adventure resources, generally by trading in campaign or story arc resources.
Inside the adventures are various scenes. The party's scene resources are anything on their character sheet that could be replenished with a little time and care, usually temporary penalties to various statistics but sometimes positive things that are acquired within scenes, like points the druid generates to spend on specific animal powers, or that the paladin or fighter generate to protect other party members, or temporary boosts like the rogue's momentary evasion of an enemy long enough for him to have the opportunity to backstab it. Not all adventures actually contain multiple scenes.
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You can pretty easily convert daily resources into adventure or story arc or even campaign resources by providing either an explicit countdown (a hard time deadline) or an implicit countdown (when the PCs return to safety to rest, things have gotten worse in their absence), and if you do an implicit countdown it should probably have explicit steps where things are slowly getting even more messed up. But you always need to set that scale explicity, and D&D is a game that, through daily limits on spellcasting, is setting a known value of daily resources - and since spells and hit points are most often things that need daily resources like rests and spell slots to come back, making time a resource can put you in a position where a run of bad luck will just clean the PCs out of it.
Is the campaign loss supposed to be a deterrent against resting? Is a drawn out fight of spamming at-wills against the boss what you want to happen? Or are the players supposed to see a boring fight ahead of them and be jazzed about the campaign loss? Are both choices supposed to suck, and that's fun for someone?
Genuinely, where is the fun in this? It's not my style and I'm struggling to wrap my head around it.
Also, there's multiple things that are fun in an encounter. Blowing your big daily? Sure, nice empowerment moment. But it's also fun to be the underdog and win through strategy and clever use of your limited resources.
I think part of it is when exploring a dungeon is that you have to make choices - As a DM you balance encounters somewhat to the party, but not every encounter in every room is necessary to accomplish what the party wants to do. Like there's the obvious side-quest where there's a hole in the ground of this room behind a secret door, and the party is pretty sure there's going to be an encounter (and maybe loot!) if they go down that path for a hot second. while the quest is in the other direction.
I'm not pro arbitrary resource wasting - but having the party make a choice of risk vs reward, should have the risk be meaningful. Take this encounter and risk not being able to finish the rest of the actual quest? If the party can gain back everything they've spend and get the reward with no influence on the quest they were busy completing, the only tool the DM has left in his tool box is make the encounters more difficult - which doesn't increase player agency either.
Which kinda breaks down, imo, because unless there is some DM trickery, it takes weeks and weeks of straight humping through the jungle to even get to Omu. How many parties starting the adventure have that many HP spare?
Modify the rules some. Everytime they take a long rest, roll a d20. On a 1, they permanently lose 1 hp. Next time they make this roll, it's if they roll a 1 or a 2, then a 1, 2 or 3....
This resets every time they lose an hp. As the numbers go up, play it up. Worsening dreams, a feeling a being followed, so on and such. When it resets, "something" is sated, and the oppressive fog lifts...for now.
Right. DM Trickery.
Which is fine, and I'm all for DM's making calls or modifications as they see fit. But in this scenario, something would be needed.
Some of this is you're positing your question from the failure state. The point of it isn't really the decision point of "press on or rest up" but what leads up to it. That shepherding of resources is one of those classic D&D things. In the at-will/encounter/daily system it is what lets dailies be so powerful and feel so important.
A lot of this is manipulation of the mind state of your players. Ideally you don't ever invoke the campaign loss rules but you have them constantly concerned they're going to eat one if not for their clever/awesome/heroic play that really saved all the party. The reality is you're not going to wipe the party in any game where characters matter. You want that same tension, that they think you will but somehow they always manage to just avoid it by their heroic actions. Campaign loss is a bit of misdirection while also a safety net. You can hand one out without ending a campaign and thus you're more likely to actually give one out. (It also serves as a backstop for newer DMs, things can only go *this* bad then players get a chance to recover.)
For me it really comes down to trying to add tension to a game where all the stakes are make believe.
In an effort to get my far flung friends to play more often, I want to come to them with a fully formed plan to get six 40-somethings into playing D&D using Hangouts (where we already chat) and Roll20 (where I opened an account in 2013 apparently and never did anything with it.). I have started a new game on Roll20 and plunked in a map I stole from the internets (Redbrand Hideout) as a simple encounter. I will have to convince the rest of these chuckleheads to make an account too.
All of us are various levels of internet savvy, one is an IT professional, so its not like this should be hard. But I'm the only one of the group that really goes after it online. And we're old and are used to a certain way of doing this thing. So change will not be easy. We briefly discussed just doing a group video chat over hangouts and see how that goes. But if we're going to go online, then why not go all the way?
I'm sure its not as easy as all the marketing people tell you it is.. so, now what do?
So I know, I know, but Discord with video is way more stable/less troublesome than Hangouts IME. Do not even think about using Roll20's built in stuff as it is very bad.
For the group you're working with I'd avoid messing around with dice rollers and macros and whatever. Just have folks roll their own dice and say the results. You have to trust folks but it's a friend group and not random strangers on the internet.
The big thing for you is going to be tokens to have a map. Maybe play with setting up the pictures/size in Roll20 to give a visual representation. Ideally all the PCs would find cool pictures too for that.
Only other thing would mess around with the tools for revealing/hiding portions of the map I think.
Am I just not running campaigns right or something? The "overarching objective" is usually like, weeks, months, or years off, and the party's current quest usually has a fair bit of freedom. Right now in both campaigns I'm running they don't even know what the end threat actually is, I've never run a campaign where it's a set of objectives the party is sprinting towards (the party frequently decides they're going to do something I wasn't expecting)
Like I have those things WITHIN a campaign, - soon they're going to arrive in the dwarven capital and an event will let them know the fire giants are up to something, the party has a frost giant with them that will want to set out immediately, at midnight, and if the party doesn't go she's going to go by herself (and die if she does). If the party takes 5 weeks to get moving, a giant invincible adamantine golem will destroy the area, if they rest in the middle of Ironslag, well, by the end of their rest there will be 40 fire giants queued up to dip them into the molten iron and make commemorative keychains out of them.
Most official campaigns seem to work this way, once the rubber meets the road in a quest the DM shouldn't just have everything sit around and wait for the party to rest. The lion's share of the session to session play though? Yeah sure rest whenever you want, you can only fit one into each 24 hour period by RAW anyway
Nothing here sounds wrong to me. Everything is as I usually have things play out as well. Are you and your players having fun? If so, all is good and working as intended, I'd say.
I do get other people's points of ways they'd rather do magic, but for my group and I, the system's been great and we haven't had any issues creep up because of the short rest/long rest classes or the time management of certain "timetable sensitive" missions. I know mileage varies here but I'm at least glad I don't have a need to try and reinvent the system.
Part of what I think Denada is getting at is this, though: What if they don't? What if you tell them about your campaign loss system in advance and emphasize that it's supposed to force them to manage their resources better and they smile and nod and blow all their spell slots immediately anyway? You have to analyze the system from the failure state because the failure state has to have teeth for the prospect of failure to impact player behavior. If they fail to manage their resources and you just let them get their shit back because working within the failure state is un-fun, all it teaches them is that this system you've constructed doesn't actually matter.
Which means that to make it matter, you have to be willing to enforce the failure state on them, at which point the party has to answer the question Denada's proposing: Grind out a boss fight with at-wills, or rest and eat a campaign loss?
I think it's true that neither prospect is interesting or fun, but I also think that the choice as framed is predicated on an important assumption that doesn't have to be true: The choice to grind out a boss fight with at-wills presumes that you can beat the boss that way because the DM won't actually let you lose. It's basically the pixel-bitching/exploit solution to the resource management challenge: "I can bypass the failure penalty for resource mismanagement by resorting to an unintended strategy that isn't fun to play but can't lose." There's no risk/reward decisionmaking involved because there's no actual risk.
If you tune your boss fights so that defeat is a real possibility and tune the price of defeat so that it effectively gives 2-3 campaign losses, then you re-enforce an actual risk/reward decision: Try to take on a difficult fight while short on resources and risk a major loss, or eat a minor loss up-front to improve your odds of avoiding the major one? We're no longer talking about grinding out a boring fight because instead we're talking about trying to survive a dangerous one, and the tension and stakes preclude it from being boring.
Basically I think the necessary ingredient to make that sort of campaign loss system fun is that it must include a real risk of actual failure, at which point the fun comes from weighing risk vs reward and finding out how close to the sun you can fly before you get burned.
Also, this entire argument seems to be assuming that DMs are building encounters so perfectly balanced that they can tell when using only basic abilities will be a loss for the party, but using more advanced resources will be a win. Despite the D20's lack of a bell curve. Which either implies that you're a galaxy brain DM or that your encounters are incredibly static and dull, in which case your problems are bigger than needing to fudge rolls.
What I'm not jiving with is ... hmm I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to state it. I'm going to have to be long-winded.
Okay, so let's say that your campaign is about stopping an invasion of vampires in some valley. Every 500 years, the world's suns and moons align such that the valley will be plunged into endless night for, I don't know, 10 years or something. No one believes this is real because the last time it happened was 500 years ago and elves aren't immortal in this campaign setting. In any case, the Super Eclipse is coming in 8 weeks, and your PCs have to find a way to stop it by ending the war between the mountain dwarves and star gnomes so that they can stop fighting and rebuild the Great Mirrors.
So you're throwing some encounters at them, you go a couple of sessions without resting. They've been conserving their combat resources so those fights have been kinda eh, but they know there's a dwarven general coming up that they really want to be able to go all out on. And they know that if they don't conserve and instead try to rest, the general is going to get away and burn down a gnome encampment and the party is going to lose out on a week of time trying to repair that damage.
What I question in this scenario is, why are those extra fights there? Why drain the resources instead of just saying "you've fought your way to the general, time to go all out!" If those intermediary encounters are interesting on their own and that's why they're there, why should the players suffer consequences for engaging with the content that was put before them?
I think what I'm ultimately getting at is my disdain for daily combat resources. I think the PCs should have all their toys to play with in every fight, unless you're running through the part of the superhero movie (a part which I usually hate) where the hero loses their powers for a while and learns a new appreciation for what they had right before they get them back (but better this time).
You know, reading through what I just wrote, I think it's probably just a style difference. I see D&D as fundamentally a power fantasy, and I like it like that. If I wanted like a character drama, or to explore the danger of unchecked power, or trying to be a hero in a world that doesn't care about heroes, I'd probably play a different game.
So the short answer is that they should not unless they engaged in foolish ways with the content before them.
The slightly longer answer is that ideally the content should be curated so that they can go all out when they get there. By level 5 wizards have 9 spell slots and may have ways to get some of those back(sorcerer) or other daily type resources(enchantment, divination). If you use 1 slot per encounter on 6 encounters that last 2-3 rounds each(which would be long for a medium encounter) you still have 3 rounds of full spell slot usage left for your big showdown. Which is plenty given that 5 rounds is an exceptionally long fight in 5e even if the fight is super hard. And 7 encounters with the last one being hard is a long "combat day" by any estimation.
The alternate is that the long rest based champions get to the end fight with 9 spells and have no limits. Either they do not exhaust their slots because they have 9 slots for a 5 round fight... Or they do exhaust their slots and the fight either went on way too long (the martial classes are probably getting really bored at this point) or was way to easy... not as a result of the fight itself but as a result of them having all their spells.
Any system with daily resources will have a problem in that its difficult to construct encounters that work both when you're full and expected to do more the same day and when you're not. 4e has this problem too in that you could just blow all your dailies and classes/characters which were designed around encounter length dailies were left out in the cold a bit as a result of this in these situations. The only way to fix this is to make all encounters have the exact same resources available. But no one wants this, encounters get too samey, it breaks some of the verisimilitude when there are no costs to fighting
Well it is and it isn't. A power fantasy isn't a power fantasy if you don't feel like you overcame something powerful. You would otherwise just start at level 20 and go massacre goblins. Sure you're powerful but you don't really feel it. You have to strike a balance between power and challenge.
Which is to say that if you get to the end of that general fight with half your resources left you might not feel like you've accomplished as large a feat as if you get to the end of that fight with 5 HP and no slots.
I disagree that having the same resources available every encounter makes them too samey. It frees up the DM to get really creative with encounters, because there is a reliable base level of competency that can always be counted on. If you always know that your "PC" dial will be turned to a certain number, then you can tweak every other dial without having to psychologically manipulate (I'm being intentionally hyperbolic with that phrasing because of course it isn't really that) your players into turning their dial at the right speed so that it might be at the number you want when they hit this encounter.
Well yes, and the thing I'm questioning is whether resource limitation is a good way to accomplish that feeling of overcoming a challenge. I mean don't get me wrong, there is something to be said for players being able to get creative because they can't just cast Wish again. Artificial limitations can be a good thing in certain contexts. But when it comes to combat, unless it's a puzzle encounter, why not just make the fight harder?
This all boils down to style difference as you wrote out, though maybe not quite as clear as a "power fantasy". I think it's an honest question and I'm pretty sure during the development of 5e, it probably came up, even just in passing, of the way you suggested. In the end, the game went the way it went and decided to balance around it's older, more traditional route of spellcasting system. And losing more and more spellslots as you go further in a dungeon/adventure day, I believe anyway, was made purposeful with the game WANTING resource management to be in the mix. It might not be for everyone, obviously, but I don't think it's wrong they went that way; just a choice. Just as it's not wrong for someone not to like it or to want to tweak the game to match more of what they want, but depending on how much tweaking they do, I'd agree that maybe looking at another system might be a cleaner call.
D&D has always had a history of resource management being a part of the game. Even in 4e, Daily powers were still separate from Encounters. It's just always been there in some way and I think at this point it's just very "D&D", as vague as that might be.
Now, that aside, I actually don't know offhand of a system like you're describing. I "think" even the World of Darkness systems have limits and resources in place, so I couldn't say there for certain. Unsure about all the other Exalted stuff and what not. I only bring this up as I'd be curious to see how a system handles a "Resource Resetting Per Encounter" thing is balanced and all that.
Nah, you don't need perfect balance for the system to work that way. You just need to have designed your shit in a way that is balanced enough that you have more information about the difficulty of upcoming encounters than the party does, which is pretty easy. You're not designing against perfect information, you're designing against the decidedly imperfect information that is "the party's best guess about how many resources they need to beat the next fight".
Also none of this has anything to do with the campaign ending. Losing a fight doesn't mean the campaign is over, and in fact the assumption that it does mean that is a big part of why a lot of DMs are generally reticent to ever put the party in real danger, which in turn is the whole reason most risk/reward decisions players get asked to make end up being basically meaningless and uninteresting.
Losing a boss fight doesn't mean the campaign is over, it means the boss gets to enact whatever nefarious thing he was trying to do, giving Team Bad Guy a leg up at the same time that Team Hero loses a week or two collecting the Magical Doodads necessary to resurrect the Cleric who died in the fight, which lets Team Bad Guy move forward in a way that causes Bad Things A and B to happen to well-liked Character C while City D is sacked by Monster E, leaving the players with only a short time to stop Monster E before it sacks City F, too.
Dailies weren't the real limit on a party's progress in 4e, though. They were Cadillac Powers that were awesome to have (and which players were frequently tempted to rest early for) but not really required to operate at near-full capacity. The much more important daily resource was Healing Surges, which are a little closer to what it sounds like Denada probably wants - a limited set of healing surges did place a cap on how far a party could go in a day, but being low on healing surges didn't make you perform worse in combat. Daily powers aside (and the Essentials classes mostly didn't even have them), you basically went into every fight at 100% performance but also had a per-day stamina bar that depleted over time without directly degrading your character's abilities until it was completely empty. The resource management mattered, but you generally didn't have to hold back in fights just to save resources (indeed, you were incentivized to do the opposite - the faster and more decisively you could end a fight, the less damage you'd take and the fewer surges you'd consume, letting you adventure longer without resting).
I'm not arguing 4e had LESS resource management. I'm just still pointing out it STILL had resource management. Even if you consider Dailies "Cadillac Powers", they were still a bump and thus a resource, as were Healing Surges. I was just pointing out that D&D, to some extent, still always had SOME resource management when it came to spells.
Now we've obviously moved closer back into older editions than 4e in terms of these managements but a lot of people like it this way. And a lot of people don't. I was just making a point that it's always been there to SOME degree. The degree can be debated, of course, but again the only point I was trying to make was that in some manner, D&D has never operated at having ALL powers for every fight.
D&D isn't just a series of encounters, it's small encounters, including combats, tied together by the story and setting into bigger encounters which may also be tied into bigger encounters still. They fought four bands of goblins before making it to the chief because they're in a goblin warren. The four bands of goblins are small encounters in the big encounter of the warren.
They have X resources to get them through the big encounter, so how do they spend those on the small encounters? There's the push and pull and decision making. When they manage their resources well, and overcome the big encounter, that's a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when they kill 3 goblins in a side cave.
This sort of resource management is baked into this game at a pretty fundamental level. If you're looking to run a game that doesn't rely on it as much, then D&D is not your game.
I wouldn't go that far and it comes off as adjacent to gatekeeping the game of "Well if you're not playing this way, then don't play". I'm not saying that's your intent but I am saying it could be perceived as such.
On top of that, the developer(s?) have said that they balance encounters based on parties being at full health and resources because they don't know WHEN the party is going to rest in a dungeon and what not. I think that was Crawford or something. So though encounters would definitely have to be adjusted throughout, I'd say it wouldn't be impossible TO balance encounters around just getting everything back after each encounter. Off the top of my head, a couple of more enemies and/or giving all enemies MAX HP instead of a fixed amount might go a long ways. I mean all it really is if you hand wave resource management away is just adding a bit of something to balance it back out. And for a group's enjoyment (assuming everyone wants to play that way) it's probably worth the investment to figure that out. Certain spells would have to be adjusted too. Like say Haste or 9th level Foresight, maybe have them end per Encounter instead of their duration or everyone would have haste always. I'm not saying it's not without a learning curve to figure out but I wouldn't say that the entire D&D game isn't for you if you want to try.
I don't want to be that guy but you just said that D&D isn't a series of encounters and then went on to describe how it's a series of encounters.
And again I posit that, if you're a DM and you need the PCs to have spent a certain amount of resources - but not too many - before they engage with the capstone of the adventure, or Big Encounter if you'd like, otherwise said capstone is, I don't know, too easy I guess, why not just make the capstone fight harder? What is gained by softening them up first with Small Encounters that, thematic though they may be, were never intended to have any significance to the story other than as set dressing?
And yes my initial statement was that I want D&D to be designed differently. All the trash mobs and dungeon timers just feels too video-gamey to me.
Also I do recognize that this is mostly just a stylistic difference. I think there's some game design stuff in there too but it's largely personal preference.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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But! I also very much do not want them limping, half dead with 0 spells left, into an epic boss fight. That's no fun. If they got there by their own stupidity, then so be it, but if there is to be an epic boss fight? Then by all means, lets have an EPIC boss fight!
I'm saying if you try to play this game without keeping resource management in mind, then you're going to be deeply frustrated. There is no right way to play DnD but there are plenty of wrong ones and this is one of them.
I'm not really willing to argue against a designer ruling that may or may not exist. If you have a source, then we can chat. Even then we all know that CR, the actual-in-book-official way to balance encounters, is a rule of thumb at it's absolute peak usefulness.
I don't need my players to have spent anything, and my fights aren't there solely to soften up the players. I use small fights to further the story, and sometimes even hint at or set the stage for the bigger fights. They fight a few small groups of goblins because that informs them of the risk to the nearby town should they fail. They are in a big, populated goblin warren. If they don't kill the leader, Hamletsville is in trouble.
I can also use encounters to set the stage by giving the players lower risk examples of enemy tactics. These two goblin archers know how to utilize cover. When they get to the big goblin general and they see he has a bow, they'll be ready to deal with that. The weird goblin shaman can shadowstep. They'll need to keep that in mind if, instead of a bow, the general has got the same weird carved skull hat as the shamans, or maybe he has both, and likes to use the shadow step to stay behind cover, which is even more fun.
If all your encounters do is drain resources, then the problem isn't the resource management that's baked into the game, it's the encounters you're designing.
The resource management keeps the glue of the campaign in the players' minds. It forces them to always consider how the small encounter is happening in the context of the bigger story. They have to think about how they are in a full goblin warren, and how to manage their scarce resources to deal with that. They are not in a series of fights that they approach at full strength so there are no long term costs to using whatever spell whenever. They have to think about the small encounter they are in, and the story and setting tying the small encounters into a bigger one.
This is true. But they also don't balance encounters to be "hard" in the sense that it would be difficult. A hard encounter is one that is expected to drain x% resources from a fully prepared party(which is like... 20 to 30% i think?). A medium encounter drains less.
In this way "encounters are balanced around full parties" but they're also definitely balanced around not full parties. The consistent balancing point gives a rough idea of how many encounters are left before failure (running out of resources for real) becomes a significant issue.
They do. They have global limits you need to spend time replacing (blood etc)
Essentials 4e pretty much did.
I'm not arguing that resource management hasn't always been a part of DnD, just drawing a line of distinction between a style of resource management that discourages active play ("You only have eight good turns today. You have to hold back and spend them wisely, filling the rest of your time with bullshit turns, or you'll be tapped out for the important fight later") and a style that encourages active play ("You have all your shit available every fight and you need to use it as decisively as possible in order to protect your Resource Meter.")
The former leaves players dithering around with cantrips and unaugmented attacks trying to be moderately effective for minimum resource expenditure, while the latter encourages them to play the whole character all the time and be maximally effective in order to prevent resource expenditure. If you want a mechanical system that encourages players to press on and drives them to conclude the adventure quickly rather than 5-minute-workday grinding through it, the latter is gonna get you a lot closer than the former.
Generally speaking I think this is a case where gameplay ought to take precedence over narrative BUT if you want to have some sort of Limit Break technique that is limited in use for narrative reasons, then its recharge rate should probably also be narrative-based...which just kinda circles us back around to the idea of only letting the party recharge their good shit when they reach some sort of narrative milestone, rather than every time they camp for the night.
Otherwise you end up introducing a resource system that undermines quality of gameplay in favor of narrative quality, but the narrative impact turns out to be 'monk uses Ultimate Supreme Devastation Technique on passing random encounter goblin because she knows the party will camp before going into the dungeon with the lich in it' - which is exactly what you were trying to avoid in the first place, only now you've made combat less fun and still have the exact same problem you started with.
That's why I think my idea was a best of both worlds approach. Everyone gets 1-2 "trademark" attacks per day but the majority of their stuff is available every fight. The limited number of trademark attacks means they get saved for when they're most useful instead of spammed at the earliest convenience, but they're powerful enough to make your players feel like they turn the tide of battle when they're used.
Okay, so D&D isn't just a series of encounters. If I'm not using a series of encounters to enforce resource management, then that's one of the wrong ways to play D&D. But I don't need my players to have spent anything, because the series of encounters is actually there to further the story and set the stage for the bigger encounters, perhaps by serving as a sort of Nintendo Method level design vehicle. But the resource management that the series of encounters enforces is important to the campaign, because without costs to using their abilities (costs that must persist throughout the series of encounters), the players won't understand the story that the series of encounters is telling. I can't just describe a goblin warren and perhaps have some back and forth with the players describing how the characters have snuck and/or fought their way through it to reach their goal, which is the big goblin shaman-archer general. And I can't go through that series of encounters with the same combat powers available to the PCs in every encounter because without resource management they won't have to think about how the series of encounters with goblins in the goblin warren showed them that the goblin warren was full of goblins, and the goblin shaman-archer general will rally those goblins to attack Hamletsville if they don't kill her, which is the whole reason the characters came to the goblin warren in the first place.
Alright now that I've gotten all my snark out of my system. I think what you're trying to get at is, for the way you like to run D&D, long-term resource management is a fundamental part of adventure design, and you feel that the world is richer and the experience more rewarding when the PCs have to weigh long-term costs vs benefits when they use their powers.
What I'm trying to challenge is D&D's inclusion of combat effectiveness in that long-term resource management. I don't find the choice of being effective right now vs not being as effective later all that interesting or fun - in general. Sure there are times when limiting power is interesting (when used very sparingly, and done artfully, which is hard to do, which is one of the reasons I don't often do it), but for the most part, in the kind of genre that D&D is, combat effectiveness should remain largely consistent.