I can see the use of a timer if you have players who really drag their feet to the point it's ruining through game for everyone. It would suck to be sat there, knowing that they've spent everyone else's turn chatting away, getting to their turn, and then insisting on going through all 5 manuals to check what it is they can do, pick a shortlist, reread them all, pick one, double check it does what they think it does, try it out, check again to see if they did it right, and then 30 minutes later decide that they aren't going to use their Bonus Action after all. I've never had a use for it so far though, and even if I did, it certainly wouldn't be set to 6 seconds.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I can see the use of a timer if you have players who really drag their feet to the point it's ruining through game for everyone. It would suck to be sat there, knowing that they've spent everyone else's turn chatting away, getting to their turn, and then insisting on going through all 5 manuals to check what it is they can do, pock a shortlist, reread them all, pick one, double check it does what they think it does, try it out, check again to see if they did it right, and then 30 minutes later decide that they aren't going to use their Bonus Action after all. I've.neber had a use for it so far though, and even if I did, it certainly wouldn't be set to 6 seconds.
Glad I've never had to deal with a player like that.
Forgive me if my suggestion has been said before, but the only thing major enough to warrant a system-wide change is the adventuring day. I don't think I've ever played in a campaign that had 5 encounters in one long rest to long rest period, let alone 6-8. So many of the mechanics (be it CR or class features) are balanced by a statistic that I just don't think is practical for most groups.
I think the most prominent example of this is 'going nova'. This is a balancing problem in so many campaigns, where certain party members can use their high power limited use abilities (think paladin smites or high level spell slots) to just obliterate enemies while other party members (and the DMs attempts at balancing) are wasted. The standard answer to this is either: A. Put specialized encounters for the other party members, or B. Increase the number of encounters in the adventuring day. Answer B is what I have a problem with. Most groups don't have the session time to run 6-8 encounters, and trying to split adventuring days over sessions can be hard to keep track of and make players feel like they are less powerful than they are. A redesign of this system could eliminate the need for the wonky solution in the first place. Balancing around 3-4 encounters average would just make more sense for how the game is played currently.
Aside from that, a fact that annoys me immensely is that Rangers do not get the choice of a shortbow as starting equipment. This means that any small race ranger will have to use the longbow at disadvantage, immediately purchase a shortbow (which can be a problem in some campaigns), or specifically ask DM permission to start with the shortbow instead of longbow; something that (AFAIK) no other class has to do.
Six to eight encounters in an adventuring day is supposed to include 'chaff' encounters from random encounter lists, as the basic assumption was that the Dungeon Crawl would continue to be the standard mold to which all D&D games would apply. As narrative-focused play rose to prominence and 'chaff' encounters were dispensed with, the system started top gum up because D&D is and mostly always will be about attrition. It's why so many people complain that Challenge Rating doesn't work. It does work (as well as it's advertised to, anyways), but single encounters that can challenge a team of five to eight freshly-rested adventurers are supposed to be exceedingly rare. People assume that encounters exist in isolation and every encounter is - by itself and entirely unaided - supposed to challenge the party. This is not the case - the adventuring day is supposed to be a challenge, with individual encounters being a greater or lesser chunk of the overall challenge.
Redesigning the system to eliminate this might be beyond the scope of the "5.25" changes expected in 2024, but I do think a more realistic appraisal of encounter balancing and challenge would be very helpful. An alternative ruleset, or even just some DMG advice, for presenting challenge to players through fewer encounters would not at all go amiss. There's ways to do better than the DMG lets on, just like the whole idea that "high-level characters are impossible to challenge!" is nothing but Quitter Talk whining, but the DMG could very much go into better detail in both situations.
trying to split adventuring days over sessions can be hard to keep track of and make players feel like they are less powerful than they are.
D&D Beyond makes it so easy to log your expended resources and keep it recorded between sessions. I've never experienced this "one session adventuring day" and I don't understand why anyone would default to that. The game naturally makes your long rest a part of the adventure, by asking you to establish a watch order (is this still a thing, actually?), prepare spells, use race features like Trance or class features like Portent, and so on. You play through the rest, otherwise you miss stuff. I'm genuinely baffled. Is this how your group plays? Bookending every session with a long rest?
Six to eight encounters in an adventuring day is supposed to include 'chaff' encounters from random encounter lists, as the basic assumption was that the Dungeon Crawl would continue to be the standard mold to which all D&D games would apply. As narrative-focused play rose to prominence and 'chaff' encounters were dispensed with, the system started top gum up because D&D is and mostly always will be about attrition. It's why so many people complain that Challenge Rating doesn't work. It does work (as well as it's advertised to, anyways), but single encounters that can challenge a team of five to eight freshly-rested adventurers are supposed to be exceedingly rare. People assume that encounters exist in isolation and every encounter is - by itself and entirely unaided - supposed to challenge the party. This is not the case - the adventuring day is supposed to be a challenge, with individual encounters being a greater or lesser chunk of the overall challenge.
Redesigning the system to eliminate this might be beyond the scope of the "5.25" changes expected in 2024, but I do think a more realistic appraisal of encounter balancing and challenge would be very helpful. An alternative ruleset, or even just some DMG advice, for presenting challenge to players through fewer encounters would not at all go amiss. There's ways to do better than the DMG lets on, just like the whole idea that "high-level characters are impossible to challenge!" is nothing but Quitter Talk whining, but the DMG could very much go into better detail in both situations.
Yeah, CR relies heavily on the party being at least moderately taxed. D&D is a long game and their should be a long time without rests.
I think that in campaigns with less encounters per a day, the long rest is to good, you literraly regain everything after just one. If more abilities recharged after more than one long rest, it would allow DM's to have less dungeon crawls and more RP, with the combat still being hard.
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D&D Beyond makes it so easy to log your expended resources and keep it recorded between sessions. I've never experienced this "one session adventuring day" and I don't understand why anyone would default to that. The game naturally makes your long rest a part of the adventure, by asking you to establish a watch order (is this still a thing, actually?), prepare spells, use race features like Trance or class features like Portent, and so on. You play through the rest, otherwise you miss stuff. I'm genuinely baffled. Is this how your group plays? Bookending every session with a long rest?
Perhaps it's just because the groups I tend to play in are a bit newer to the game, but the one-session adventuring day was the standard for a good 2-3 years of play for me, and only went away once the DM got a handle on balancing encounters vs the power level of the characters. Some of the players wanted to rest whenever narratively possible, which led to silly things like a one encounter day, and most of the players just assumed a session end meant long rest (and once or twice even took a "long rest" during combat without the knowledge of the DM). Looking back, it was definitely a player problem (and a bit of a communication problem), but my experience was it was extremely hard for the DM to limit rests. This led the DM to up the difficulty of combat encounters by a lot to challenge the party's barbarian/paladin-with-20-CON frontline, which only made players want to rest even more after the combat encounter and also led to the cleric and bard just getting slapped whenever they engaged in combat. This was a vicious cycle that was only broken with a campaign reset with new characters, and still the DM had to have the tightest grip on making sure everyone wasn't resting between sessions. I figure that if all the groups I've ever played with have had this problem, others must be too. It's one of those things that's not hard for experienced players but it is a sticking point for newer/less rules-adherent players.
For the players that used D&D Beyond, it was somehow harder for them to keep track of their abilities/HP (for reasons I never understood; it was a problem with the players, not the software). I was still on the equivalent of paper n' pencil, and somehow I was the best at remembering between sessions. And setting a watch is still a thing (and kinda fun if done right), but in those campaigns with those players it really didn't make a difference.
As for arguing exactly why I think the adventuring day should be shortened, I think it should be 3-4 encounters mainly because of session time. Even with the most bestest DM I've played under, 4 encounters was the max before players were begging to take a long rest because they wanted their cool abilities and HP back. 6-8 is, I think, unrealistic except for dungeon crawls. Balancing around a lower number would help resolve a lot of the issues DMs have with CR, balancing, and party requests for rests.
It never even occurred to me to try a 1 session adventuring day. Hells, most of the time I’m lucky to get two combat encounters done in a single session, that would take the party from breakfast to elevensies, at most lunch. The day is the day, and most adventurers tend to sleep in the nighttime. 🤷♂️
Six to eight encounters in an adventuring day is supposed to include 'chaff' encounters from random encounter lists, as the basic assumption was that the Dungeon Crawl would continue to be the standard mold to which all D&D games would apply. As narrative-focused play rose to prominence and 'chaff' encounters were dispensed with, the system started top gum up because D&D is and mostly always will be about attrition.
It is worth noting that dispensing with 'chaff' encounters predate 5th edition. CR in 3/3.5e and Encounter Level in 4e had exactly the same problems as CR in 5e (prior editions didn't have the concept). You would think that game designers would learn, but apparently not.
It never even occurred to me to try a 1 session adventuring day. Hells, most of the time I’m lucky to get two combat encounters done in a single session, that would take the party from breakfast to elevensies, at most lunch. The day is the day, and most adventurers tend to sleep in the nighttime. 🤷♂️
Sometimes adventurers travel at night, especially if they have Darkvision.
I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Here's a basic example. My Barbarian character can currently Rage four times in a day. That's enough to do it when I need it, but not enough to do it all the time, because I only long rest at night, and even then only when it's safe. Let's assume this is the intended experience, which means the constantly-resting groups are not having the intended experience. The designers want players to have the intended experience, that's why they intended it, so they change things: now Rage refreshes twice a day. They cut the number of uses in half, right? Simple. Now I can only use it twice between rests, but I can rest at noon. Same numbers, basically. Except, Bob here has been playing in a "long rest twice a day campaign", so from Bob's perspective, he usually gets 8 Rages a day, and now you're cutting it down to just 4. Now Bob can't even Rage in every encounter. It's like he's not even allowed to do Barbarian stuff half the time, he says.
It never even occurred to me to try a 1 session adventuring day. Hells, most of the time I’m lucky to get two combat encounters done in a single session, that would take the party from breakfast to elevensies, at most lunch. The day is the day, and most adventurers tend to sleep in the nighttime. 🤷♂️
Sometimes adventurers travel at night, especially if they have Darkvision.
Absolutely. Or if there’s a ticking clock and they can’t afford to stop. But then that adventuring day goes into extra innings encounters. 😉
I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Well, you can compensate for fewer uses by making them recover on a short rest.
I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Well, you can compensate for fewer uses by making them recover on a short rest.
Yeah, you'de have to give your players time to take a short rest though and a lot fo campaigns dont do that.
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I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Well, you can compensate for fewer uses by making them recover on a short rest.
Yeah, you'de have to give your players time to take a short rest though and a lot fo campaigns dont do that.
If there's enough time for a long rest, there's certainly enough time for a short rest, and if you're only going to run a single encounter during a given day anyway, resting is irrelevant.
I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Well, you can compensate for fewer uses by making them recover on a short rest.
Yeah, you'de have to give your players time to take a short rest though and a lot fo campaigns dont do that.
If there's enough time for a long rest, there's certainly enough time for a short rest, and if you're only going to run a single encounter during a given day anyway, resting is irrelevant.
As I said earlier though, it depends on the campaign, you probably wont have enough time in, say, a dungeon crawl.
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As I said earlier though, it depends on the campaign, you probably wont have enough time in, say, a dungeon crawl.
Plenty of dungeon crawls have dungeons that are passive enough that you can take a short rest, but the whole point of changing this is because dungeon crawls are not what most people play.
As I said earlier though, it depends on the campaign, you probably wont have enough time in, say, a dungeon crawl.
Plenty of dungeon crawls have dungeons that are passive enough that you can take a short rest, but the whole point of changing this is because dungeon crawls are not what most people play.
True, that makes sense.
Maybe their could be different suggestions on how much you could use certain abilities relative to how many monsters your players face, for the next DMG when the new edition comes out?
Like, you could pick from a list of about how many monsters your players encounter per a day, and their it would say under it "For this type of play, you have ______ uses of _______ ability and it recharges after ________ as opposed to the normal amount of uses for the ability."
It would take a lot of work, but it would make the game a lot more flexible.
5e's item system is a complete mess. Rarity's correlation with power is tentative at best, with some items of high rarity being rather useless and some items of uncommon rarity being incredibly powerful. Add to that the lack of official gold values, meaning we have to consult third-party lists or just ad lib (suggested value based on rarity is not overly helpful given the disparate powers within tiers), and you have a system that is a step backward from prior editions.
4e's item system just worked. Each item had a rarity and a level, and items of the same type were available at different levels. So, a Dagger of Frost +1 might be a level 5 item; a Dagger of Frost +4 might be a level 20 item. Any abilities that weapon had also scaled with level, so it might do 1d6 extra damage when using an ability at level 5, and 4d6 at level 20. Wonderous items, which only existed by themselves and were not +X items, would be levelled to give an idea when that item would be appropriate for a player to have.
All told, this gave the 4e a wider range of loot at each level, while also providing more insight so a DM who just wanted to quickly find appropriate items did not have to go through a big old list and decide "what would be okay at this level?"
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I can see the use of a timer if you have players who really drag their feet to the point it's ruining through game for everyone. It would suck to be sat there, knowing that they've spent everyone else's turn chatting away, getting to their turn, and then insisting on going through all 5 manuals to check what it is they can do, pick a shortlist, reread them all, pick one, double check it does what they think it does, try it out, check again to see if they did it right, and then 30 minutes later decide that they aren't going to use their Bonus Action after all. I've never had a use for it so far though, and even if I did, it certainly wouldn't be set to 6 seconds.
Edited spelling errors.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Glad I've never had to deal with a player like that.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
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HERE.actually fun monsters & a cr system that actually works!
Forgive me if my suggestion has been said before, but the only thing major enough to warrant a system-wide change is the adventuring day. I don't think I've ever played in a campaign that had 5 encounters in one long rest to long rest period, let alone 6-8. So many of the mechanics (be it CR or class features) are balanced by a statistic that I just don't think is practical for most groups.
I think the most prominent example of this is 'going nova'. This is a balancing problem in so many campaigns, where certain party members can use their high power limited use abilities (think paladin smites or high level spell slots) to just obliterate enemies while other party members (and the DMs attempts at balancing) are wasted. The standard answer to this is either: A. Put specialized encounters for the other party members, or B. Increase the number of encounters in the adventuring day. Answer B is what I have a problem with. Most groups don't have the session time to run 6-8 encounters, and trying to split adventuring days over sessions can be hard to keep track of and make players feel like they are less powerful than they are. A redesign of this system could eliminate the need for the wonky solution in the first place. Balancing around 3-4 encounters average would just make more sense for how the game is played currently.
Aside from that, a fact that annoys me immensely is that Rangers do not get the choice of a shortbow as starting equipment. This means that any small race ranger will have to use the longbow at disadvantage, immediately purchase a shortbow (which can be a problem in some campaigns), or specifically ask DM permission to start with the shortbow instead of longbow; something that (AFAIK) no other class has to do.
Six to eight encounters in an adventuring day is supposed to include 'chaff' encounters from random encounter lists, as the basic assumption was that the Dungeon Crawl would continue to be the standard mold to which all D&D games would apply. As narrative-focused play rose to prominence and 'chaff' encounters were dispensed with, the system started top gum up because D&D is and mostly always will be about attrition. It's why so many people complain that Challenge Rating doesn't work. It does work (as well as it's advertised to, anyways), but single encounters that can challenge a team of five to eight freshly-rested adventurers are supposed to be exceedingly rare. People assume that encounters exist in isolation and every encounter is - by itself and entirely unaided - supposed to challenge the party. This is not the case - the adventuring day is supposed to be a challenge, with individual encounters being a greater or lesser chunk of the overall challenge.
Redesigning the system to eliminate this might be beyond the scope of the "5.25" changes expected in 2024, but I do think a more realistic appraisal of encounter balancing and challenge would be very helpful. An alternative ruleset, or even just some DMG advice, for presenting challenge to players through fewer encounters would not at all go amiss. There's ways to do better than the DMG lets on, just like the whole idea that "high-level characters are impossible to challenge!" is nothing but Quitter Talk whining, but the DMG could very much go into better detail in both situations.
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I agree with everything Yurei said.
I don't understand this assertion at all:
D&D Beyond makes it so easy to log your expended resources and keep it recorded between sessions. I've never experienced this "one session adventuring day" and I don't understand why anyone would default to that. The game naturally makes your long rest a part of the adventure, by asking you to establish a watch order (is this still a thing, actually?), prepare spells, use race features like Trance or class features like Portent, and so on. You play through the rest, otherwise you miss stuff. I'm genuinely baffled. Is this how your group plays? Bookending every session with a long rest?
Yeah, CR relies heavily on the party being at least moderately taxed. D&D is a long game and their should be a long time without rests.
I think that in campaigns with less encounters per a day, the long rest is to good, you literraly regain everything after just one. If more abilities recharged after more than one long rest, it would allow DM's to have less dungeon crawls and more RP, with the combat still being hard.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
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HERE.Perhaps it's just because the groups I tend to play in are a bit newer to the game, but the one-session adventuring day was the standard for a good 2-3 years of play for me, and only went away once the DM got a handle on balancing encounters vs the power level of the characters. Some of the players wanted to rest whenever narratively possible, which led to silly things like a one encounter day, and most of the players just assumed a session end meant long rest (and once or twice even took a "long rest" during combat without the knowledge of the DM). Looking back, it was definitely a player problem (and a bit of a communication problem), but my experience was it was extremely hard for the DM to limit rests. This led the DM to up the difficulty of combat encounters by a lot to challenge the party's barbarian/paladin-with-20-CON frontline, which only made players want to rest even more after the combat encounter and also led to the cleric and bard just getting slapped whenever they engaged in combat. This was a vicious cycle that was only broken with a campaign reset with new characters, and still the DM had to have the tightest grip on making sure everyone wasn't resting between sessions. I figure that if all the groups I've ever played with have had this problem, others must be too. It's one of those things that's not hard for experienced players but it is a sticking point for newer/less rules-adherent players.
For the players that used D&D Beyond, it was somehow harder for them to keep track of their abilities/HP (for reasons I never understood; it was a problem with the players, not the software). I was still on the equivalent of paper n' pencil, and somehow I was the best at remembering between sessions. And setting a watch is still a thing (and kinda fun if done right), but in those campaigns with those players it really didn't make a difference.
As for arguing exactly why I think the adventuring day should be shortened, I think it should be 3-4 encounters mainly because of session time. Even with the most bestest DM I've played under, 4 encounters was the max before players were begging to take a long rest because they wanted their cool abilities and HP back. 6-8 is, I think, unrealistic except for dungeon crawls. Balancing around a lower number would help resolve a lot of the issues DMs have with CR, balancing, and party requests for rests.
It never even occurred to me to try a 1 session adventuring day. Hells, most of the time I’m lucky to get two combat encounters done in a single session, that would take the party from breakfast to elevensies, at most lunch. The day is the day, and most adventurers tend to sleep in the nighttime. 🤷♂️
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It is worth noting that dispensing with 'chaff' encounters predate 5th edition. CR in 3/3.5e and Encounter Level in 4e had exactly the same problems as CR in 5e (prior editions didn't have the concept). You would think that game designers would learn, but apparently not.
Sometimes adventurers travel at night, especially if they have Darkvision.
I'll agree that a rebalancing to better match expectations would be good. But, it would also mean nerfing player characters, and that's not going to be popular.
Here's a basic example. My Barbarian character can currently Rage four times in a day. That's enough to do it when I need it, but not enough to do it all the time, because I only long rest at night, and even then only when it's safe. Let's assume this is the intended experience, which means the constantly-resting groups are not having the intended experience. The designers want players to have the intended experience, that's why they intended it, so they change things: now Rage refreshes twice a day. They cut the number of uses in half, right? Simple. Now I can only use it twice between rests, but I can rest at noon. Same numbers, basically. Except, Bob here has been playing in a "long rest twice a day campaign", so from Bob's perspective, he usually gets 8 Rages a day, and now you're cutting it down to just 4. Now Bob can't even Rage in every encounter. It's like he's not even allowed to do Barbarian stuff half the time, he says.
I dunno. Just a thought.
Absolutely. Or if there’s a ticking clock and they can’t afford to stop. But then that adventuring day goes into extra
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Well, you can compensate for fewer uses by making them recover on a short rest.
Yeah, you'de have to give your players time to take a short rest though and a lot fo campaigns dont do that.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
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HERE.If there's enough time for a long rest, there's certainly enough time for a short rest, and if you're only going to run a single encounter during a given day anyway, resting is irrelevant.
As I said earlier though, it depends on the campaign, you probably wont have enough time in, say, a dungeon crawl.
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HERE.Plenty of dungeon crawls have dungeons that are passive enough that you can take a short rest, but the whole point of changing this is because dungeon crawls are not what most people play.
True, that makes sense.
Maybe their could be different suggestions on how much you could use certain abilities relative to how many monsters your players face, for the next DMG when the new edition comes out?
Like, you could pick from a list of about how many monsters your players encounter per a day, and their it would say under it "For this type of play, you have ______ uses of _______ ability and it recharges after ________ as opposed to the normal amount of uses for the ability."
It would take a lot of work, but it would make the game a lot more flexible.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.4e's item system.
5e's item system is a complete mess. Rarity's correlation with power is tentative at best, with some items of high rarity being rather useless and some items of uncommon rarity being incredibly powerful. Add to that the lack of official gold values, meaning we have to consult third-party lists or just ad lib (suggested value based on rarity is not overly helpful given the disparate powers within tiers), and you have a system that is a step backward from prior editions.
4e's item system just worked. Each item had a rarity and a level, and items of the same type were available at different levels. So, a Dagger of Frost +1 might be a level 5 item; a Dagger of Frost +4 might be a level 20 item. Any abilities that weapon had also scaled with level, so it might do 1d6 extra damage when using an ability at level 5, and 4d6 at level 20. Wonderous items, which only existed by themselves and were not +X items, would be levelled to give an idea when that item would be appropriate for a player to have.
All told, this gave the 4e a wider range of loot at each level, while also providing more insight so a DM who just wanted to quickly find appropriate items did not have to go through a big old list and decide "what would be okay at this level?"