The Gaming Den

Kaelik wrote: You never gave a reason why you want fly to suck balls out of combat

Yeah, because I'm sure no one could ever think of something useful to do with Fly if it didn't have infinite sustainability and duration. Boy, it must utterly and completely suck balls then.

You just said. "There are different levels of fly spell! They must do different things!"

You know what, there's only so many times I'm willing to repeat myself. You've bloody quoted where I gave my reasons, and then just deny that that text is there. This is the last time I will repeat myself for you, because all you're doing at this point is trolling and derailing the thread that was getting helpful suggestions along the lines of my stated goals before you dropped in.

Among other things I've mentioned, I do not want things to work the way you are describing because it does not emulate the flavor of media the game is supposed to represent and prevents us from telling the kinds of stories we want to tell. I want sustainability of effects to be a reflection of power. Your ideas also significantly reduce the conceptual range of what the system is capable of representing.

I still haven't seen any reasons from you other than presenting false ultimatums.

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

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

Now you're setting up a false dichotomy of extremes. "If not everything is at-will, everything is limited specifically by per day resources and there is no way to dilute the 5 minute workday."

Kaelik wrote:Your fucking design goals are contradictory.

Funny, both I and other people commenting in this thread seem to have played games where both:

-Not everything is at-will and there are some limited resources.
-Players are encouraged to fight for more than one encounter before resting, and are rewarded for doing so.

That seems to indicate that, no, those things are not in fact contradictory, because they have managed to successfully coexist.

Frankly, if you're just going to ignore what people are saying then go "what the fuck" when you're informed of what was said in the, say, third post, and don't have any ideas on how to achieve those goals, then please, by all means, don't bother posting. The point of the thread isn't to figure out that you can avoid the 15-minute adventuring day by realizing that you can just make characters have everything be unlimited and at-will; everyone already knows that.

---

So now then, getting back on topic to where we were before Kaelik dropped in: I was interested in looking into the route of alternative limiting resources to per-day casting limits.

While it's not a particularly helpful statement, I try to avoid the 15-minute workday on all my casters simply because they would get really, really bored of the routine. "Get up, random encounter, blow all spells, rest for eight hours. Gee, sure wish we could've done something today, but I sure am beat."

Psychic Robot wrote:While it's not a particularly helpful statement, I try to avoid the 15-minute workday on all my casters simply because they would get really, really bored of the routine. "Get up, random encounter, blow all spells, rest for eight hours. Gee, sure wish we could've done something today, but I sure am beat."

Well yeah, that is entirely the point of avoiding the 15-minute workday.

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

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

#1 seems to negate that concern already. You *can't* blow all your casting resources in the time it takes to have one combat because you don't have cheesy abilities that let you do a dozen rounds worth of actions in one round.

OK, I too think your design goals are clearly contradictory.

In this case they aren't utterly irreconcilable, there are ways you could extend the fifteen minute work day into say, a 30 minute work day.

BUT YOU AREN'T DOING IT RIGHT.

1) [cutting to the chase, Buffs are short, buffs cost limited resources, you can't be mean and take time casting buffs before starting a combat]

I don't like it. There were some pretty extensive discussions on the problems with buffs at various points around here, you should probably find one because that looks like an ugly method that won't help you out.

Instead you have all sorts of book keeping as the buffs drop on and off in short time spans and multiple layers. Annoying in combat buff casting. An annoying meta game injunction against letting PCs or NPCs predict a combat or set up an ambush and cast multiple buff spells before hand. And all the potential Nova and 5 minute work day problems of a "normal" system... because it IS basically the "normal" system.

2) [cutting it short... Some HP are not a limited resource, but some of them ARE a limited resource, enough to make you eventually "lose".]

Which is really again not going to do very much of anything now to help the situation is it?

How is this significantly different to "standard" HP resource and renewal schemes?

3) [Rope trick is the key requirement of the 5 minute working day! Also leaving and coming back again doesn't count as a 5 minute working day! Even if they only work for 5 minutes!]

Sorry but making the 5 minute working day have a longer commute doesn't change it's nature.

Players will seriously try and discover the numbers of bandits in the bandit den and keep a tally as they do a running series of skirmishes. No really. And they won't even think that is bad, unusual or out of character, and they will be right!

4) [retreat before death, because of the 5 minute working day HP scheme being used]

Which is as far as I can see basically a line saying, "hey, five minute working day, you're OK in my books..., but we can't be seen in public together."

In this case they aren't utterly irreconcilable, there are ways you could extend the fifteen minute work day into say, a 30 minute work day.

I think I made it clear that I don't want an infinite work day, just a situation where players are more likely to stay the course for the length of a more reasonable work day, but still can become exhausted and need to quit. It's a matter of balancing interests, and not creating either extreme situation. It is in fact possible for a workday to be greater than 5 minutes (do one encounter, nova, leave, restore) and less than infinite (no consumables, no resource management over time, spike kills ONLY, final destination).

PhoneLobster wrote:

1) [cutting to the chase, Buffs are short, buffs cost limited resources, you can't be mean and take time casting buffs before starting a combat]

I don't think you could have misinterpreted what I said much more thoroughly, PL. You can take time casting buffs before starting a combat, and not all buffs are short. What I said was that many short-term buffs would suddenly become infinite-duration buffs when they're at will. See: The Warlock

An annoying meta game injunction against letting PCs or NPCs predict a combat or set up an ambush and cast multiple buff spells before hand.

Of course, you just totally made that part up yourself. Absolutely nothing is stopping anyone from buffing themselves and setting an ambush.

2) [cutting it short... Some HP are not a limited resource, but some of them ARE a limited resource, enough to make you eventually "lose".]

Which is really again not going to do very much of anything now to help the situation is it?

That's not there to help the workday problem, it's there to address the issue of having degrees of failure other than dying, as I said. It is an example of a limited resource that the benefits of not quitting for the day will have to be balanced against.

How is this significantly different to "standard" HP resource and renewal schemes?

See discussions of the subject on this board. I'd prefer to stay on topic.

Caedrus wrote:I think I made it clear that I don't want an infinite work day, just a situation where players are more likely to stay the course for the length of a more reasonable work day, but still can become exhausted and need to quit. It's a matter of balancing interests, and not creating either extreme situation. It is in fact possible for a workday to be greater than 5 minutes (do one encounter, nova, leave, restore) and less than infinite (no consumables, no resource management over time, spike kills ONLY, final destination).

So your problem is you want to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Okay, that explains a lot.

Here's a solution. Play D&D. As written. Make any character you want. Make sure you have wands of Lesser Vigor.

Done.

Caedrus wrote: I don't think you could have misinterpreted what I said much more thoroughly, PL. You can take time casting buffs before starting a combat, and not all buffs are short. What I said was that many short-term buffs would suddenly become infinite-duration buffs when they're at will. See: The Warlock

That is not in fact true at all.

And in addition if you weren't saying what I summarized that piece of waffle into then what the hell were you saying? I mean what is the plan here?

Of course, you just totally made that part up yourself. Absolutely nothing is stopping anyone from buffing themselves and setting an ambush.

So then... a once per 5 minute work day ambush buffo-nova. The alternative option to that injunction which I provided for you in the very next sentence of my prior post.

You have limited resource buffs that last less than one combat. You get to chose between injunction against ambush and once per work day ambush buffo-nova. You don't just get to vaguely describe basically the current status quo and say "look I solved it!"

2) [cutting it short... Some HP are not a limited resource, but some of them ARE a limited resource, enough to make you eventually "lose".]... That's not there to help the workday problem, it's there to address the issue of having degrees of failure other than dying, as I said.

IN A SEPARATE DAMN BULLET POINT.

Wow, that line really deserved capitals. You discussed your dishonor before death plan in bullet point 4. Bullet point 2 (with a whole other bullet point about how commuting means you aren't doing the 5 minute work day in between for good measure) was explicitly about the 5 minute god damn work day.

You discussed a strategy where you would give back all the PCs hit points between combat so they wouldn't 5 minute work day to fight at full health all the time.

THEN you added a strategy where you WOULDN'T give back ALL of the PCs hit points... so they WOULD 5 minute work day to fight at full health.

The contradiction in your 5 minute work day strategies is right there.

See discussions of the subject on this board. I'd prefer to stay on topic.

What the ?!

HP, limited resource, daily/intermittent renewal, SUBJECT OF THIS THREAD. Talking, Like, Kirk, AAAAAAAH!

Kaelik wrote: So your problem is you want to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Okay, that explains a lot.

So then I take it your answer to this question

Is the 15 minute workday even much of an issue under that model to begin with?

would just be "no."

PhoneLobster wrote: Bullet point 2 was explicitly about the 5 minute god damn work day.

And by "explicitly" you mean "I just assumed" right? This is your standard MO PL. Incidentally, I'm not interested in arguing about the original semantics with you. I have clarified my position, move on.

---

In another effort to try to get the thread back on track:

So does anyone have any more ideas how to encourage players to stay in the game longer (if not necessarily indefinitely) besides making everything at will and unlimited and eliminating all long-term resources like wealth, consumables, etc? (Because I'm already aware of that option, thanks) Or feedback on the ideas already presented by me and other posters in the first page?

Caedrus: I think you need to more clearly define exactly how many (and/or kind) resources you available, what time frame you want the to recharge at, and how often you want them to be used. If you want people to go through at least 5 encounters a day and be able to use 2 buffs and 3 super powers per encounter than each player needs 10 buff slots and 15 super powers for the work day.

To prevent novaing, it might be worth going for a limitation on the number of "daily" super powers a character can dish out in a single encounter but allow a large number over the day. That way I can't death ray spam for a whole encounter but can use it in X number of encounters over the day.

Having a charge up where you need X amount of "regular" hits to drop before you can unleash your super powers is always an option as well. I kind of like the idea of not only did you hit but by how much you hit by being considered in charging up super powers.

A seventh sea style flesh wound / dramatic wound system can be good for seeking a balance between minor and major damage. It gives you a threshold for damage taken before a serious wound is taken and all flesh wounds are cured immediately after a short rest. Whether you want to make dramatic wounds seriously effect the character or not and how easy they are to heal are another questions you'd want to consider.

ckafrica wrote:Caedrus: I think you need to more clearly define exactly how many (and/or kind) resources you available, what time frame you want the to recharge at, and how often you want them to be used. If you want people to go through at least 5 encounters a day and be able to use 2 buffs and 3 super powers per encounter than each player needs 10 buff slots and 15 super powers for the work day.

I was attempting to clarify that to some extent with the numbered list.

Anyways, consumable resources include:
-Wealth (kinda self-explanatory)
-Wounds (at higher levels, you will have access to ways to recover this that don't take such a long time, but they will cost resources like wealth and such. Healing that actually immediately puts your spleen back in is supposed to be more "special" here, rather than being a standby from 1st level. Anyways, if you get enough penalties racked up here, you'd probably want to retreat altogether instead of stopping in the middle of a hostile area, and this is supposed to be basically the next worse thing to a TPK. If you're retreating from the Big Bad, he's gotten away, succeeds in his evil plan, etc. If you're retreating from the big damn dungeon, the guards and fortifications and such will be replenished by the time you get back and you just have to start all over. The idea here is that you're accumulating those negative level-type penalties from something a little less severe than death because we want failure to still exist while making character death a more permanent affair)
-Items (Can actually include more than just potions. Breaking shields and stuff happens. Don't worry: It doesn't fuck over player WBL or force arbitrary wealth-replacement-by-DM or cripple players or anything like that. I've already accounted for those issues. But it will result in your shield being broken until you repair it or get a new one.)
-Action Points (Kinda self-explanatory)
-Some spells (or, alternatively, some way of sidestepping the issue of unlimited utility for certain effects to avoid spamming. This could include expending other resources, like wealth or XP or whatever, but then you're getting back to certain spells being a consumable resource anyways, if perhaps slightly more indirectly).
-People (if they die, they're gone. Likely to happen to henchmen and so forth. Resurrection doesn't really happen short of an adventure into Hades or something)

These things are not likely to go away as limited resources because that would compromise *other* design goals.

The exact time frame to recharge these things is variable. Want to get more action points? Well, those will be recharged either per-arc milestone, per-level, or by a system kinda like the one in the OP. Want to get more wealth? Go back to town and get some. Want more consumable items? Craft them or go back to town and buy them. Want more people? Well that'll take however long it takes to find new henchmen or whatever.

As for how many encounters per day, I would think that it would very often by a low number, like 1-3, simply because that's how narrative pacing works best in so many stories. However, I also think the game should be able to accommodate trekking through the giant dungeon maze and going through a larger number of encounters and traps without being forced to rest too fast, and I thought that a system of morale boosts like that mentioned in the original post might offset the impulse to stop for the day, regroup, and recover.

And of course, if you have a system where you can immediately recover after every "encounter" things like a maze of traps wearing you down just doesn't exist because that arrow trap wound just goes away immediately after it happens.

To prevent novaing, it might be worth going for a limitation on the number of "daily" super powers a character can dish out in a single encounter but allow a large number over the day.

That way I can't death ray spam for a whole encounter but can use it in X number of encounters over the day.

Yes, this is how I am doing things already. A character simply does not have the tools to pull off all his best powers in quick succession. The exact mechanics resulting in this differ from class to class, but all of them have various setup elements (such as a Rogue not being able to full sneak attack in D&D 3.5e until he is in a position to flank *and* starts the round within range, for a basic example). The game structure makes spamming the same ability over and over rather impractical and encourages a more dynamic action flow.

Having a charge up where you need X amount of "regular" hits to drop before you can unleash your super powers is always an option as well.

That is another example of a setup element, yeah. All classes have mechanics that have the same basic end result as that.

A seventh sea style flesh wound / dramatic wound system can be good for seeking a balance between minor and major damage. It gives you a threshold for damage taken before a serious wound is taken and all flesh wounds are cured immediately after a short rest.

This is actually the idea I'm already using. As I said before, most of your damage will just come back immediately as a result of Hollywood Healing, but serious, dramatic wounds have lasting effects.

Whether you want to make dramatic wounds seriously effect the character or not and how easy they are to heal are another questions you'd want to consider.

These wounds are difficult to heal. True fast-acting healing magic is a special affair and is relegated to higher levels and expenditure of meaningful resources like "Blessed Water of the Spring of the Sun and Moon"

PhoneLobster wrote:Maybe the five minute work day isn't the problem.

Maybe it's a problem with encounter scale.

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

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

That might be nice.

QFT.

This is really the heart of the matter. No one complains about the fifteen minute workday in Shadowrun because the security is expected to be adaptive and to be able to potentially call in reinforcements - at least eventually.

If the targets are treated as actual enemy installations with actual resources and alarms and shit, rather than as archaeological digs, then people will treat them like surgical assaults rather than as archaeological digs.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

PhoneLobster wrote:Maybe the five minute work day isn't the problem.

Maybe it's a problem with encounter scale.

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

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

That might be nice.

QFT.

This is really the heart of the matter. No one complains about the fifteen minute workday in Shadowrun because the security is expected to be adaptive and to be able to potentially call in reinforcements - at least eventually.

If the targets are treated as actual enemy installations with actual resources and alarms and shit, rather than as archaeological digs, then people will treat them like surgical assaults rather than as archaeological digs.

-Username17

I completely agree. This is why I say "usually very few encounters, like 1-3." The exception is when the adventure actually IS kinda like an archaeological dig, like when you're trying to get through the Tomb of Iuchiban.

Caedrus wrote:And by "explicitly" you mean "I just assumed" right? This is your standard MO PL.

SEPARATE FUCKING BULLET POINT.

You either are a liar or an idiot who can't even get a bullet point list right and fucked up his own post THEN became a liar to cover his own ass.

So yeah, Fuck you too.

Own your own fucking words or you get no fucking respect.

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

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

Pretty much you have to rewrite the magic system and all the spells if you want to do this. Here's an example.

The problem you're running into is the same problem as the Warlock. Let's consider an 8th level Warlock with that Charm thingy and a 7th level Enchanter. The Warlock can charm unlimited times, but at any one time he can only have one charmed minion. This means that any battle he can either throw save or loses against one enemy per battle or he can take refuge behind a charmed minion but not both. On the flip side, our 7th level Enchanter can dump 3 (or 4, if we believe in Focused Specialist) Charms a day. That means that he might only be able to dump save or loses in 2 battles or even one if things get hectic. But he keeps a minion for a week (2 weeks if he has a extension rod), and he can use one of his dailies anytime during that week to extend the duration by another week. By the time he as run through even a single day's worth of charms he probably has two minions to hide behind and that's just the first day. As you can see, the thrall army rapidly gets out of control even with a base spells per day of "one" on the Wizard chart. Some of that can be laid at the feet of all the ways you can get bonus spells, but mostly it's just the fact that these spells are nuts even if you cast them twice in a week let alone in a day. Or a combat.

So you're going to have to pull a Warlock conversion on every single effect you allow into the game if you want to go "at-will" or even "per encounter reset." Enchanters are only kept in check at all by their extremely harsh daily resource limits. Take that away, and things go off the rails more than they already have.

-Username17

I'm going to first caveat my statement with a disclaimer that putting words into the mouth of someone you are arguing with is at best lazy and at worst disingenuous. So while I disapprove of Phone Lobster's rhetorical style quite frequently, and find his argument construction in the thread to be both poor and offensive - he is basically right. Let's go back to the four bullet points:

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

Phone Lobster does - quite correctly discern out of your bullet points that the 15 minute adventuring day isn't really addressed. Unfortunately, he is very telegraphic about describing why that is, making it difficult for even people who agree with his reasoning to follow it. So here it is in long form:

People rest to reset their adventuring day because they are incentivized to do so. Normally in the form of running out of resources that are refreshed with sleep. But they also do so because for whatever reason they can.

Now as Kaelik has pointed out, in D&D it is frankly ridiculously easy to get Fast Healing up and running, and once that happens your between battle hit points aren't much of a resource that you care about. Which pretty much just leaves buff durations and spell slots as day-limiting resources. But you've brought in an additional concept of actually rate-limiting wound points in bullet point #2. And also you've specified that buffs and spells will be limited in bullet point #1. So you've actually specified that your system will have the same factors that encourage resting between combats and more besides. So even if you change the buff slots and durations and stuff around so that people can effectively go two or three fights without stopping or reducing effectiveness, they still aren't going to all things being equal because "go two or three more encounters" is still a capability that players will want to have in any fight. So resetting the day is still going to make sense no matter how many encounters they "could" take on in a row as long as that number is a finite number.

But the other part of course is the whole concept of being able to rest. And while you talk about ditching Rope Trick in bullet point #3, that doesn't actually matter as long as there is any safety anywhere. Indeed, the very next, point #4, you say that players should be able to get away from danger. At which point frankly the fact that aren't carrying base with them is pretty irrelevant. They are still able to get away and rest, which means that they are able to do a five minute workday.

So your bullet points ensure that they are incentivized to do a five minute workday (points #1 & #2), and able to do so (point #4). So they are going to do it. QED.

-Username17

Thanks for the translation from PL-speak, Frank. That's much easier to respond to.

Phone Lobster does - quite correctly discern out of your bullet points that the 15 minute adventuring day isn't really addressed.

I agree.

However, it was not the purpose of that post to explain how the 15-minute adventuring day is addressed or fixed. The purpose was to frame the issue and give it some context distinct from everyone just assuming standard D&D. If I was listing ideas on how the issue could be addressed, then I would have included things like, say, the morale boosts idea in the numbered list. That seems to be the misunderstanding that sparked this argument.

So your bullet points ensure that they are incentivized to do a five minute workday (points #1 & #2), and able to do so (point #4). So they are going to do it. QED.

-Username17

I agree.

The intention of the list was not to enumerate ways to counter the issue of the 15 minute adventuring day, but rather to enumerate factors that would frame it as an issue in the first place and give the discussion some context. Hence, note that I did not list the OP suggestion for offsetting the 15-minute workday within the list. This is the fundamental misunderstanding that seems to have set off PL, and I can see where I could have stood to be more clear.

I can agree that perhaps I was not clear on this point. Hopefully that is clearer now, and, with proper clarification, we can move on. Now, with the issue framed (more clearly, I think, with my response to ckafrica's post), I would appreciate some feedback on my idea or new ideas on how to handle the 15-minute workday issue that results from those mechanics. Everyone on the same page now, I hope?

As for pretty much everything *else* PL has had to say, I don't really feel I need to dignify that raving BS with a response.

___

So then, ideas for mitigating the 15-minute workday issue:

-You have a system of "morale boosts" for overcoming obstacles and milestones during an adventure. These grant something like Action Points or maybe increase your max HP (the kind that comes back after every combat) and such (like GW morale boosts). So, if you're doing well, you actually get more resilient further into the adventure and thus inclined to continue on, while if you're getting beat down badly and repeatedly suffering what ckafrica referred to as Dramatic Wounds, you'd be inclined to get out of there. The second idea (increasing max hp) also avoids the problem that Frank astutely pointed out, which is that after you use up those action points you are back to square one and want to end the workday. Moreover, it frees up action points to be used as a per-arc resource. So I'm now favoring using something like that in place of the action points idea.

What do you think of that revision then, Frank? Now that the "morale boost" is granting something that cannot be spent, instead increasing stuff like max HP and/or Defenses.

Caedrus wrote:As for pretty much everything *else* PL has had to say, I don't really feel I need to dignify that raving BS with a response.

Well, I guess I'll just go and be offensively correct in some other thread then.

Next time try telling people not to be "entirely correct" at you if that's what you are into.

Might also help if you worked on your bullet point lists and stopped quoting them yourself as evidence that they addressed a subject you later denied they addressed.

PhoneLobster wrote: Next time try telling people not to be "entirely correct" at you if that's what you are into.

PL, I in no way said that all the things you said were entirely correct or even that the majority of the things you said were correct, only that the conclusion that the list did not address the 15-minute workday was correct. Pretty much everything else you said is just senseless ranting, like you shouting BS about "different bullet point" or "lying" or "point 2 was explicitly about the 15-minute workday" (obviously, you don't understand the meaning of the word explicit. Nowhere in that entry do I mention the 15-minute workday). Among other things, the very notion that my list did not address the issue of the 15-minute workday was in disagreement with my position was a misconception on your part, if an arguably excusable one. Saying that a broken clock is right twice a day is not the same thing as saying the clock is in perfect working order.

Might also help if you ... stopped quoting them yourself as evidence that they addressed a subject you later denied they addressed.

A perfect example of another thing you're doing incorrectly. I said that Point #1 prevented the issue of being able to go nova with all your resources in a round or two, not that it prevented 15-minute workdays (said novas being only one element thereof, and getting rid of them does not wholly eliminate the issue for exactly the reasons Frank gave).

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.

-Username17

In other words - roleplay as a DM.

As far as limiting the '15 minute workday', you could always do what any good MMO does:

recharge times

For D&D, just give everyone an hp bar and mana bar. Mana bar total = all spells of various slots summed up. Mana regeneration rate = HP regeneration rate = (+10% max)/10 minutes.

Yay, after an hour you have 60% of your abilities back, and after 2 you have all of them.

If this is too slow of a workday/regen rate, simply make it faster. Also, this is crazy-slower than fast healing.

(Whoops, double post)

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.

-Username17

Consider all this done; I already DM my games like that in D&D and it's the general assumption for this new game.

If this alone seems to be enough, maybe I should just relegate the "morale boosts" idea to an optional rule or Spycraft-style "campaign quality" for DMs who deviate from such a playstyle.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:As far as limiting the '15 minute workday', you could always do what any good MMO does:

recharge times

For D&D, just give everyone an hp bar and mana bar. Mana bar total = all spells of various slots summed up. Mana regeneration rate = HP regeneration rate = (+10% max)/10 minutes.

Yay, after an hour you have 60% of your abilities back, and after 2 you have all of them.

If this is too slow of a workday/regen rate, simply make it faster. Also, this is crazy-slower than fast healing.

Isn't this basically the same thing as the 15-minute workday with the rest times *reduced* thus making it even more attractive?

And more bookkeeping?

Reduced and passived, yes.

The idea is that you can pretty much cast 1st level spells at will at level 10, and that you don't have to stop exploring a dungeon in order to rest for 8 hours. You can have switch-off teams of people scanning/disarming/being hit by traps.

Just a thought.

Maxus mentioned the Quest for Glory games. They go by a model that encourages that you press on and keep doing things. I think that QfG 2 is a particularly good example of this because of the time limit. Persona 3 does something similar as well.

Here's some ideas inspired by the aforementioned games:

- You know that something bad is going to happen every month or so. Generally, the stakes will up every time, and you will need to advance in power to keep up. (Persona 3 does this with a particularly nefarious monster manifesting every full moon. If it isn't stopped, it causes problems and radiates a passive negative effect over the city.)

- There is a limit to how much you can do in a day. If you go past this limit, you suffer a negative status effect that takes multiple days of diminished activity to recover. (In Persona 3, you become tired after dungeon crawling for a while. This weakens you slightly and requires rest to remove. If you don't retreat and rest, you become sick, which is really bad and takes days of work to cure.)

- If you don't do anything strenuous for a few days, you become more effective the next time you adventure until you hit the (higher than normal) activity cap. (Persona 3 gives you a beneficial tiredness-level status effect if you rest and use a few other options.)

- There are things to do in the downtime where you do not actively adventure. Some of these help when you do. (Persona 3 lets you build relationships with others to bolster your magic.)