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## An Idea re: Countering the 15-Minute Adventuring Day

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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Sun May 17, 2009 9:22 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:Basically what you are looking for in life is a system that is "mission based." That is, if people go into an "adventure" with a limited set of goals and all enemies on the map, then resource conservation systems make a lot more sense.
> The thing that makes the whole five minute workday a reality and an annoyance is the fact that the enemies "off map" are treated like computer mobs that haven't spawned yet. Put the entire castle into active status and people will go back to saving their fireballs for the bigger groups of enemies instead of belching everything first go and then resetting.

The problem is that hit and run tactics are easy in D&D. In shadowrun, you actually care that they know you're coming, increased security and doubled the guards.
In D&D it just means that it takes a few more days to achieve your objective. But seriously, everything except rule 0 plot devices are totally reversible in D&D, so you don't care. Big deal if the hostages get killed, you just resurrect them. Not to mention that Lord Evil hiring more goblins doesn't even fucking matter because you aren't really afraid of goblins in the first place.
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Caedrus
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Post by Caedrus » Sun May 17, 2009 10:16 pm

> RandomCasualty2 wrote:

> > FrankTrollman wrote:Basically what you are looking for in life is a system that is "mission based." That is, if people go into an "adventure" with a limited set of goals and all enemies on the map, then resource conservation systems make a lot more sense.
> > The thing that makes the whole five minute workday a reality and an annoyance is the fact that the enemies "off map" are treated like computer mobs that haven't spawned yet. Put the entire castle into active status and people will go back to saving their fireballs for the bigger groups of enemies instead of belching everything first go and then resetting.

> The problem is that hit and run tactics are easy in D&D. In shadowrun, you actually care that they know you're coming, increased security and doubled the guards.
> In D&D it just means that it takes a few more days to achieve your objective. But seriously, everything except rule 0 plot devices are totally reversible in D&D, so you don't care. Big deal if the hostages get killed, you just resurrect them. Not to mention that Lord Evil hiring more goblins doesn't even fucking matter because you aren't really afraid of goblins in the first place.

Well, this is helped by the point that there are some more irreversible things in the game I'm making. You can't snap your fingers to resurrect (or even to *heal* in a way that's not flavorfully similar to "Path to Inner Peace"). You can't just scry-teleport straight to the BBEG, either, because while Scry and Teleport still exist, they no longer work quite that way.
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Amra
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Post by Amra » Mon May 18, 2009 12:21 pm

I've found this thread interesting, because I've never really noticed the 15-minute workday being an issue. Strictly discussing D&D for now, I honestly believe that the problem isn't the magic system, the hp system or anything else systemic, but - as suggested by others here - the design of a typical encounter and the approach of DM's to how NPC's act and react.
Anecdote: we've just run a 2nd-level party through the Rose Quarry suite of encounters in Shadows of the Last War... and we did the lot, in a session, without a rest.
So... that's a total of 13 Glass Zombies, 11 soldiers (2nd-level warriors), 4 skeletons, 1 2nd-level necromancer, 1 2nd-level fighter and 1 5th-level cleric. Quite a handful for 5 2nd-level characters (particularly when one of them only meaningfully acted twice in the 30-or-so total rounds of combat, but that's another story).
Because the players and the DM assumed intelligence of the part of the NPC's, the player characters never believed that they'd be able to take out a handful of bad guys then rest up. Everybody worked on the basic assumption that if any of Team Evil went missing, the others would go on high alert; patrolling the area better, setting up traps, potentially getting reinforcements from somewhere and generally digging in. So, despite the massive odds, the PC's devised a strategy that treated the entire village as a single encounter, divided into a series of set-piece battles... and working on the basis that whilst we were in one fight, the people we were up against could and would make intelligent choices and call for aid from their associates, which they did.
And at the end of all that, once we'd beaten the rather large roster of enemies, we still weren't out of options. We could easily have handled another fight or three. The adventure as written, from what I could glean, a) assumed that a 2nd-level party couldn't and/or wouldn't take on the main force in the camp, and b) that they'd go from one "encounter area" to another, killing things and then retreating to rest up inbetween. However, given the total size of the area involved and the noise associated with combat, everybody around the table agreed that the notion of dispatching one group without alerting another was simply preposterous.
/Anecdote
The point I'm making is that nobody treated the NPC's as "mobs" who remained inactive until the PC's entered their little area, which meant that the player characters weren't making assumptions about being able to blow all their resources in a single fight.
If you're going to try to design encounters to encourage a longer working day, it's actually easier to do at low levels where you don't encounter you-must-be-this-tall monsters. If the PC's continually run up against creatures that require a particular buff in order to fight effectively, once the party's capacity for that buff is exhausted you've pretty much given them no choice but to rest up.
Another issue seems to be what level people pitch their encounters at. Now, I admit, I've only been thinking about the meta-aspects of encounter design since coming here and reading the sort of stuff that Frank and K post, but - almost by chance - I have always designed adventures and encounters around the notion that most of what the party encounter is less tough than they are. And so, I suspect, a significant contributing factor in why I've never noticed a problem with the 15-minute working day in all the years I've been running D&D is that the majority of the threats my PC's encounter are below their CR.
They spend most of their time not busting out the big moves... and then every so often they'll hit something with a CR/EL two or more levels greater than the party level and all their best stuff comes out.
Here's an article on that very subject that I found quite interesting. For those who can't be bothered to go and read it all, I've quoted the salient argument here:

> The Alexandrian wrote:
> MISREADING 3rd EDITION
> So what happened in 3rd Edition?
> As far as I can tell, everybody misread the rulebook. Here's what the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide had to say about "Encounters and Challenge Ratings" (pg. 100):

> > A monster's Challenge Rating (CR) tells you the level of the party for which the monster is a good challenge. A monster of CR 5 is an appropriate challenge for four 5th-level characters. If the characters are higher level than the monster, they get fewer XP because the monster should be easier to defeat. Likewise, if the party level [....] is lower than the monster's Challenge Rating, the PCs get a greater reward.

> And a little later it answered the question "What's Challenging?" (pg. 101):

> > Since every game session probably includes many encounters, you don't want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs' level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources -- hit points, spells, magic item uses, etc. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party's level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain their spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.

> And, at that point, everybody apparently stopped reading. Because this was what seeped into the collective wisdom of the gaming community: Every encounter should have an EL equal to the party's level and the party should have four encounters per day.
> I literally can't understand how this happened, because the very next paragraph read:

> > The PCs should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with Encounter Levels higher than their party level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party's level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels below that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on.

> And if that wasn't clear enough in saying that the PCs should be facing a wide variety of ELs, the very next page had a chart on it that said 30% of the encounters in an adventure should have an EL lower than the PCs' level; 50% should have an EL equal to the PCs' level; 15% should have an EL 1 to 4 higher than the PCs' level; and 5% should have an EL 5+ higher than the PCs' level.
> But all of that was ignored and the completely erroneous "common wisdom" of "four encounters per day with an EL equal to the party's level" became the meme of the land.

People are very keen - and rightly so - on the idea that D&D adventures should be at least a little consonant in how they play out with the high-fantasy sources that the game draws from. Thing is, whilst your major heroes in fantasy novels may potentially fight many a long battle before stopping to rest, how many of those battles are with opponents of equal calibre?
Now I'm not claiming a widespread review of the literature by any means, and a lot of people here can doubtless produce counter-examples straight out of their heads, but in the handful of books I've pulled off the shelves and flicked through (Conan, some of Eddings' hogwash, Fritz Leiber, Feist, Tepper, Brooks) it looks to me very much as though the main protagonists are mostly facing enemies who are significantly weaker than themselves. They are, by and large, facing enemies that don't require them to bust out their big moves, and so they don't. They tend to spend some time beating on mooks before having one combat where they're facing a real threat and need to pull out all the stops before retiring to lick their wounds. One significant devation is, tellingly, Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, in which characters typically can only manage one combat encounter before having to rest, but that's to be expected.
I tend to set adventures that take the fighting-weaker-opponents principle even further than is recommended in the DMG. I reckon probably 60% of encounters are with enemies of around CR-2 to CR-3, and I would generally expect my gaming group to plough through maybe 8 encounters (including one really tough one) before resting. Is this down to encounter design, player attitudes, some combination of the two or none of the above? I really don't know...
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Roy
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Post by Roy » Mon May 18, 2009 1:01 pm

Sounds like a very weak party you got there, if they still can't even handle Easy Mode that well.
I was with you until that part though.
Thing is, you can pretty much plow through NI mooks and not care on any level as they are not interesting, they aren't threatening, and they probably won't get to move. Aside from being an excellent way to bore everyone...
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Amra
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Post by Amra » Mon May 18, 2009 1:24 pm

Um... I have no idea what you mean about the party not handling Easy Mode that well. What are you referring to?
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Roy
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Post by Roy » Mon May 18, 2009 1:46 pm

> Amra wrote:Um... I have no idea what you mean about the party not handling Easy Mode that well. What are you referring to?

If the encounters are level - 2 or 3 then they're either fighting one very weak enemy (owned by non level appropriateness + Action Economy Advantage) or a larger number of even weaker enemies (owned by more non level appropriateness).
While it is possible to get creatures 2 levels lower capable of actually being dangerous, it requires they be in a highly synergistic group and very well built. Further, only specific builds can actually do this, but in any case it pushes the encounter level to more normal levels. Which, by the way means below level encounters only 10% of the time. 20% what basically amounts to Puzzle Monsters, 50% routine, equal level encounters and 20% some level of actually difficult.
Further, anything greater than 2 levels lower is lucky to even appear on the proverbial radar. So basically those sorts of encounters are the sort where the first PC to go wins the combat off some trivial resource like Glitterdust when you have 8th level spells, the enemies are lucky to even get an action and if they do it's nothing you care about, so you can fight anywhere from dozens of these guys to a near infinite number and still have power left. Further, because all the encounters are so trivial it's pretty blatant there's no risk involved so it's basically 'I cast Glitterdust. Got them all. Again. So where's the interesting encounter?'
Only being able to handle 8 of something that barely qualifies as a pebble in the road, much less an actual speed bump indicates a very weak party. So does having to 'go all out' vs an encounter that's only a little over routine, aka 1, maybe 2 levels higher than routine instead of just using a better, but by no means best trick. Going all out is for the super BBEGs, 4 or more levels higher that you collectively encounter 5% of the time, and thus about twice per three levels.
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Amra
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Post by Amra » Mon May 18, 2009 3:39 pm

> Roy wrote:
> Only being able to handle 8 of something that barely qualifies as a pebble in the road, much less an actual speed bump indicates a very weak party. So does having to 'go all out' vs an encounter that's only a little over routine, aka 1, maybe 2 levels higher than routine instead of just using a better, but by no means best trick.

Firstly, the "I cast Glitterdust, I win" thing is pure hyperbole. Glitterdust is a great spell, but depending on the level and makeup of the party and the nature of the opponents, it's far from an automatic win. It's not as hard as you make out to create interesting challenges that are still lower level than the party without resorting to "Kobolds pull lever, rocks fall, everybody dies" type tactics.
And... who said anything about them handling 8 of something that "barely qualifies as a pebble in the road"? I said I'd expect them to get through roughly 8 encounters (by no means an exact figure) and I've already made it clear that I play around 60% of encounters at lower levels than the party. Of those 8ish encounters, 4 or 5ish will be lower level than them, probably 1 or 2 at their level or a little higher and one absolute doozy. Those aren't the figures recommended in the DMG, but I never said they were.
It must also be said that having a reasonable number of encounters that PC's absolutely "own" is a good thing. Having - from time to time - a reasonable expectation of defeating their opponents without being seriously threatened lets them try all sorts of things that they wouldn't do if they were likely to get taken out in a hit. Being able to do things like knock out the bad guys instead of killing them, pulling outre combat maneouvers, subduing the ravening beast and making a pet of it / returning it to its natural habitat and, you know, hero stuff.
It lets players feel good about their powers and abilities when they can triumph over their enemies to the point where they don't even have to bother killing them. Being the guys who can kill a dragon is cool, but being the guys who can bring that same dragon back to town on a leash is awesome.
Yup, this is all IMC, and IMO. But my personal feeling is that only having encounters where the party are stretched is in itself boring. It's like console RPG's where all the monsters level up at the same rate you do, so when you return to Darkglade Forest ten levels later the giant spiders are just as much of a threat as they were when you did your first quest. Part of the fun for me and my group is getting a few levels under our belts, then going back and blacking the eye of the neighbourhood bully, so to speak.
When the townsfolk ask the 5th-level party to deal with a pack of marauding trolls, I expect the PC's to have some really tough do-or-die fights with no quarter expected or given. When the townsfolk ask the 11th-level party to do the same thing, I expect the PC's to be able to march straight in and demonstrate their ass-kicking skills to such an extent that they force the troll chieftain to sit down and parley with them to see if anything can be worked out because it's clear that if he won't then his entire tribe is toast.
My players get a kick out of encounters where they are so much tougher than the opposition that they aren't forced into a kill-or-be killed situation.
Anyway, your mileage may well vary, but I'm still of the opinion that using a wider range of encounter levels could well account for the fact that my gaming groups have never suffered from the 15-minute workday, which was my main point. The fact that making such encounters sufficiently challenging and interesting that they're worth doing is actually not hard is entirely secondary.
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Roy
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Post by Roy » Mon May 18, 2009 4:23 pm

Nope, not really. Being several levels lower both means they are less likely to have the countermeasures (immunity to blind) and have worse saves. Once blind they basically can't use ranged attacks, and will auto miss nearly every time in melee. So you can pretty much stand there scratching yourself until there's about 2 rounds left on it and then annihilate them if you felt like fucking around.
Similarly, being several levels lower means they're less likely to be able to do something you care about. And by 'less likely' I mean 'basically can't at all without heavy optimization, then they rarely can if not too many levels behind'.
Glitterdust even does this sometimes to routine and better encounters, but it's definitely one of the best measures for shoving mooks aside so you can get to fights you actually care about because it's cheap and extremely cost effective.
As for 'defeating opponents without being seriously threatened' that's what the routine encounters are for. Aka, equal level. You just plow right through them, burn a few Lesser Vigor wand charges, and keep going with minor resource loss. These aren't supposed to seriously threaten you, just wear you down a little. And technically you are fucking around there, as using your best resources is pointless when using low to mid end resources is good enough to deal with them.
Along the same lines, the reason why people don't just KO things that want you dead is because it's immensely stupid to do so. You do not wound what means to kill you, as it means you're leaving proven enemies alone to strike again. And pretty much everything competent literally cannot be taken prisoner in any case.
Your troll example is only different in terms of level. They aren't doing anything different, they're just doing their thing as usual... except because they're only up against mooks you get curbstomp after curbstomp until the DM and players get bored and handwave off the rest. And really, the entire combat there could just be handwaved instead of rolling dice, because they just can't bother you. It'd save everyone a lot of time.
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