I think it might indeed have been better for D&D to forego the duration or frequency of rests in terms of hours (1 hour, 8 hours, no more than 1 long rest a day, etc), to have simply said that a rest counts as a short rest only after so many XP were earned, then another short rest after that amount is earned again, then counts as a long rest after this amount. Rest all you want in between that but you get no mechanical benefits. (Which was suggested multiple times on this thread, I know.)
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I think it might indeed have been better for D&D to forego the duration or frequency of rests in terms of hours (1 hour, 8 hours, no more than 1 long rest a day, etc), to have simply said that a rest counts as a short rest only after so many XP were earned, then another short rest after that amount is earned again, then counts as a long rest after this amount. Rest all you want in between that but you get no mechanical benefits. (Which was suggested multiple times on this thread, I know.)
Yeah - which is pretty much exactly what 13th Age does.
It might be a bit incongruous to suddenly reset to full HP and spells in the middle of a dungeon but it has some other benefits - like encouraging parties to push on inside dungeons when seriously depleted on resources (say after encounter 5 in the above example) as they know one more fight will get them to reset to full strength - and they also know retreating to "safety" gains them nothing.
Well, you could always rule that you need to have earned a certain # of XP, and be in a safe place, to gain the mechanical benefits of a short or long rest.
Also if that "one more fight" is deadly they're hosed.
I think it might indeed have been better for D&D to forego the duration or frequency of rests in terms of hours (1 hour, 8 hours, no more than 1 long rest a day, etc), to have simply said that a rest counts as a short rest only after so many XP were earned, then another short rest after that amount is earned again, then counts as a long rest after this amount. Rest all you want in between that but you get no mechanical benefits. (Which was suggested multiple times on this thread, I know.)
And if you don't do XP leveling? Also not every encounter is going to result in a XP so tying the ability to rest and regain things on a system that the writers have called legacy is not a good option either.
My opinion is always that encounters are what they are. But if they don't use up resources in someway then they are indeed trivial. However I don't take that to mean they weren't an encounter. We also have examples of this in adventures, where on the random table there are non combat encounters. Running CoS and rolling up a grave is an encounter by the book. But likely will not use up any resources.
Them being tied to length of day can also be important in causing tension. You have some sort of encounter but the important NPC gets away. Do the PCs rest or chase? Chasing would lead them to possible success, but if they don't have the resources they need to rest and in turn, lose 1 or more hours of trailing the BBEG.
I think it might indeed have been better for D&D to forego the duration or frequency of rests in terms of hours (1 hour, 8 hours, no more than 1 long rest a day, etc), to have simply said that a rest counts as a short rest only after so many XP were earned, then another short rest after that amount is earned again, then counts as a long rest after this amount. Rest all you want in between that but you get no mechanical benefits. (Which was suggested multiple times on this thread, I know.)
And if you don't do XP leveling? Also not every encounter is going to result in a XP so tying the ability to rest and regain things on a system that the writers have called legacy is not a good option either.
My opinion is always that encounters are what they are. But if they don't use up resources in someway then they are indeed trivial. However I don't take that to mean they weren't an encounter. We also have examples of this in adventures, where on the random table there are non combat encounters. Running CoS and rolling up a grave is an encounter by the book. But likely will not use up any resources.
Them being tied to length of day can also be important in causing tension. You have some sort of encounter but the important NPC gets away. Do the PCs rest or chase? Chasing would lead them to possible success, but if they don't have the resources they need to rest and in turn, lose 1 or more hours of trailing the BBEG.
For this conversation xp doesn't have anything to do with a character or party leveling up. The xp and/or CR of monsters is used exclusively for the DM to build encounters using the guidelines laid out in the DMG regarding the desired challenge of an encounter to the PCs and what combinations of monsters are needed to obtain that challenge.
Again, no they DO NOT. You should really read the section in its entirety, as each level of difficulty has its exact description:
All of which are wrong, unless it's pretty late in the day. Just renaming the encounter categories to "trivial, easy, moderate, challenging" without changing any numbers would fix quite a bit.
The other problem is that balancing assumes short rest abilities are usable about 3x/day and something like 20 rounds of combat per day, so if you have fewer than three encounters per day the balance of long vs short rest abilities is off, and if battles are short but intense unlimited use abilities are undervalued relative to spike abilities.
Again, these are just definitions. And after that, to each his own but I don't find them that bad. Easy when you lose very few resources, hard when someone might bite the dust, deadly when someone might die, there are appropriate description.
Those would be appropriate descriptions if they were true. A rested party is not going to have someone bite the dust from a merely hard encounter, and has a negligible chance for someone dying unless you're way over the minimum threshold for Deadly (as Deadly has no cap, you can certainly crank it up to the point where it will have a good chance of killing PCs, but it's like 200% of budget).
And again, this is might be more true for the first hard encounter, but what about the 3rd or 4th, especially when characters really manage their resources thinking that it might be far from over (more encounters or the BBEG next door) ?
That's not the way people think about things. People don't think Hard means "Hard if you've already ground through another three fights", they think Hard means Hard without any other context.
I don't think the math used in the DMG based on how the game works as intended with the core rules should be blamed for how other's think it should be or how they choose to play the game. If I hold a baseball bat at the wrong end and attempt to use it like that in a game it's not the bat's fault that I suck.
AFAIK nowhere in the DMG is there stated that the encounter difficulty is based on having x amount of other encounters.
I don't think it also says that a typical adventuring day consists of 6-8 encounters or that it's normal.
What it actually says, on page 84 of DMG is that under normal adventuring conditions you can expect your players to handle that many encounters. As in, you probably won't kill them if you make them fight that many times and all those will be medium/hard difficulty.
Is there something more about the AD actually being defined as consisting of 6-8 encounters? Because that sure doesn't sound to me as a definition of how the day should look like, more like "if you want to, you can do this much relatively safely without worrying".
I prefer milestone since it makes it feel like you want to roleplay and accomplish things and not grind monsters, but if you mainly award exp for roleplaying and smart thinking that's great
I would agree if there was not an explicit explanation right in the middle of the section, that no-one apparently reads before criticising the system...
I have no idea what you're talking about, which at a minimum suggests bad editing/layout.
And again, this is might be more true for the first hard encounter, but what about the 3rd or 4th, especially when characters really manage their resources thinking that it might be far from over (more encounters or the BBEG next door) ?
That's not the way people think about things. People don't think Hard means "Hard if you've already ground through another three fights", they think Hard means Hard without any other context.
Indeed that's what I thought until I realised that both the adventures I have played in under other DMs and the ones I have DM'd have all been way too easy despite them falling into the Hard or Deadly basket.
Sure they'd be hard or deadly if we did a 6 encounter grind before hand. On their own or even after 2-3 encounters, the party merely blitzes through it.
My own thinking is if your campaign is more narrative based with battles being logical outcomes of the story, then deemphasise combat. It's literally there as part of the story but it serves no purpose save to further the story.
Eg Next combat encounter for my Level 7-8s is an old abandoned brewery with a handful of thugs/bandits sleeping in their long johns. They will probably be dazed and confused when the party shreds through them. Most likely it will be a massacre.
But the point will be that they find key evidence in implicating a duke in criminal activities.
Originally I was going to character sheets for the bad guys to make them tough. But given my adventurers just slaughter everything with ease, I thought why go to that effort, especially when from a narrative perspective the bad guys would be fast asleep. No point in giving them super awesome armour if they will have been asleep in their long johns and will probably have disadvantage in first turn due to being rudely awoken by a berzerker stabbing the hell out of them.
I would agree if there was not an explicit explanation right in the middle of the section, that no-one apparently reads before criticising the system...
I have no idea what you're talking about, which at a minimum suggests bad editing/layout.
Come on, why don't you try reading the section once, completely, from beginning to end rather than cherry picking things that you don't like because you are taking them out of context ? And obviously, any encounter will be harder at the end of the day when you've already gone through a lot rather than at the start of the day when you are still fresh. Do you really need guidelines to explain this to you in great detail ?
The explanation about encounter difficulty is right at the start of the section labelled "Creating a Combat Encounter" and you've been pretending to ignore these simple definitions ever since the beginning of this discussion. How much clearer can you get ? And when these very definitions mention things like "They might lose a few hit points" or "One or more of them might need to use healing resources", does it not spell out that it is about resources attrition during the day ?
Honestly, the section is not that long and is well organised, but obviously it needs to be read to be understood.
The explanation about encounter difficulty is right at the start of the section labelled "Creating a Combat Encounter" and you've been pretending to ignore these simple definitions ever since the beginning of this discussion. How much clearer can you get ? And when these very definitions mention things like "They might lose a few hit points" or "One or more of them might need to use healing resources", does it not spell out that it is about resources attrition during the day "
I think it's evident it's attrition based. That's my issue with it. Literally they're forcing people to play 6-8 encounter grinds to keep the system balanced. Anything less and it's a walkover. It should have been designed with far less encounters needed to achieve balance.
See I don't agree that there is inherently an issue with DnD 5e. I am running 3 campaigns currently, and have been running 5E for several years now. I have no issue creating encounters for my parties that put them under real danger of death.
I don't doubt it, your the GM of your game, killing of characters is always within the realm of the GM's god powers, that really isn't being put to question here. If you run raw 5e however, if you run it by the rules and intended design of the game, killing a 5e character is extremely unlikely in a even modestly competent group especially past 3rd-4th level. Put the system in the hands of veteran players and the only way anyone is going to die is if the DM breaks RAW or just extremely bad luck, but D&D 5e RAW is designed very specifically to make sure character death is rare and unlikely and its the only threat to the players even at these incredibly unlikely odds.
There is no level drain, or permanent injuries, no psychology effects or loss of ability scores, there are no instant death effects like traps etc. Its all a generally very safe environment for the characters and of course a DM can crack RAW and make it deadlier, but then you get hit by the 5e modern gaming atmosphere where doing such things is considered really poor form. You say your game is dangerous but when was the last time you put a player to a save or die situation. The game design is safe because thats how modern D&D culture wants it, 5e wasn't designed in a bubble, this is how the community wanted their game and so this is the way it is.
I think its perfectly fine and I get why people like it, believe I recognize that my preferences are not the standard for modern gamers. I do worry however that as the game becomes less contentious that the spirit of the fantasy adventure is kind of disappearing. I have played in quite a few 5e games and I have to tell you that my reflection on it is that it was just boring and though everyone at the table claimed to be enjoying themselves, they all look super bored to me. It felt to me that it was almost as if they don't know what an exciting fantasy adventure looks like. Like, it was exciting but only because they never experienced anything else.
I mean sure.. hyper dangerous games where characters are under constant threat of death is an anxiety inducing and very stressful experience, it can be very upsetting and is definitely going to draw out all sorts of emotions. I totally get why that wouldn't be for everyone, but even if you don't go to those extremes I feel the game has gone a bit too far the other way. Like its not only not dangerous, its safe. I'm fairly certain that I'm more likely to die in the real world then a 5e D&D character is in the fantasy world.
EDIT: I think for me the big concern is that the game just doesn't have enough suspense and tension, real suspense and tension, not the story kind, but the player kind.
I pretty much stick to RaW in fact the house rules I have probably make it easier for the players in some ways, drinking potions is a bonus action, a short rest is 30 mins and for one campaign level 7 onwards players can use a bonus action to cast a level 2 or lower second spell. We have those really tense moments where players are standing, watching dice, screaming and crying with joy or desperation as the fates determine what happens. I don't fix dice rolls, in fact in combat all my dice rolls are open in front of everyone, I don't have to artificially create those moments, what I do use is the rules to shape encounters and challenges that really push my players make them think about how they will position themselves, where will the tank sit in the combat, how will they protect the squishy players, I use the environment, the players own weaknesses and throw different combinations of spells, attacks and challenges at them in each major encounter. But it might also be the way we paint the picture of the encounter, I largely run theatre of the mind with maybe a static map to provide context.
Just to throw into the mix that 13th Age has rules for when the party "Long Rests" and it's basically after every 4th encounter. Period. "Long rest" in this case is a full reset of power the same as the Long Rest in 5e.
I agree that it's probably pretty balanced (and an interesting game approach) to say:
2 encounters -> Short Rest -> 2 encounters -> Short Rest -> 2 encounters -> Long Rest
Just rename "Short Rest" something like "Mini Reset" and "Long Rest" to "Full Reset" and decouple the concept of rests from time in the game world.
It might make a more CRPG feel and maybe drives a train through the more simulationist games but it's probably more balanced.
Sometimes my players will go several days in game time with nothing happening to them, sometimes in a day they will have multiple things happen, it depends on the narrative, where they are what they are doing where the campaign is happening in my world and what is around them so this system would not work, in fact in dnd this system would only really work for those who run an old school dungeon crawl adventure.
I would agree if there was not an explicit explanation right in the middle of the section, that no-one apparently reads before criticising the system...
I have no idea what you're talking about, which at a minimum suggests bad editing/layout.
Come on, why don't you try reading the section once, completely, from beginning to end rather than cherry picking things that you don't like because you are taking them out of context ? And obviously, any encounter will be harder at the end of the day when you've already gone through a lot rather than at the start of the day when you are still fresh. Do you really need guidelines to explain this to you in great detail ?
The explanation about encounter difficulty is right at the start of the section labelled "Creating a Combat Encounter" and you've been pretending to ignore these simple definitions ever since the beginning of this discussion. How much clearer can you get ? And when these very definitions mention things like "They might lose a few hit points" or "One or more of them might need to use healing resources", does it not spell out that it is about resources attrition during the day ?
Because you're ignoring the other half of the definitions:
A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players.
A hard encounter could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.
A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.
All three of those statements are usually false -- an accurate description is
Easy encounter: This combat is too trivial to bother resolving.
Medium encounter: Use the description of an Easy encounter.
Hard encounter: use the description of a Medium encounter.
Deadly encounter: use the description of a Hard encounter.
Deadly+ (150% or more of deadly budget): use the description of a Deadly encounter.
Then add a sentence: at the end of a long day of adventuring, when the PCs are down significant resources, an ordinarily easy encounter becomes more difficult. Increase estimated difficulty by one step.
Sure - the above assumes 2 medium to hard encounters. You can easily replace that with X Amount of XP.
My Author Page: www.peterjblake.com
Novels Published: Reynard's Fate, Kita's Honour, Okoth's War and Callindrill
I think it might indeed have been better for D&D to forego the duration or frequency of rests in terms of hours (1 hour, 8 hours, no more than 1 long rest a day, etc), to have simply said that a rest counts as a short rest only after so many XP were earned, then another short rest after that amount is earned again, then counts as a long rest after this amount. Rest all you want in between that but you get no mechanical benefits. (Which was suggested multiple times on this thread, I know.)
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Yeah - which is pretty much exactly what 13th Age does.
It might be a bit incongruous to suddenly reset to full HP and spells in the middle of a dungeon but it has some other benefits - like encouraging parties to push on inside dungeons when seriously depleted on resources (say after encounter 5 in the above example) as they know one more fight will get them to reset to full strength - and they also know retreating to "safety" gains them nothing.
My Author Page: www.peterjblake.com
Novels Published: Reynard's Fate, Kita's Honour, Okoth's War and Callindrill
Well, you could always rule that you need to have earned a certain # of XP, and be in a safe place, to gain the mechanical benefits of a short or long rest.
Also if that "one more fight" is deadly they're hosed.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
And if you don't do XP leveling? Also not every encounter is going to result in a XP so tying the ability to rest and regain things on a system that the writers have called legacy is not a good option either.
My opinion is always that encounters are what they are. But if they don't use up resources in someway then they are indeed trivial. However I don't take that to mean they weren't an encounter. We also have examples of this in adventures, where on the random table there are non combat encounters. Running CoS and rolling up a grave is an encounter by the book. But likely will not use up any resources.
Them being tied to length of day can also be important in causing tension. You have some sort of encounter but the important NPC gets away. Do the PCs rest or chase? Chasing would lead them to possible success, but if they don't have the resources they need to rest and in turn, lose 1 or more hours of trailing the BBEG.
For this conversation xp doesn't have anything to do with a character or party leveling up. The xp and/or CR of monsters is used exclusively for the DM to build encounters using the guidelines laid out in the DMG regarding the desired challenge of an encounter to the PCs and what combinations of monsters are needed to obtain that challenge.
All of which are wrong, unless it's pretty late in the day. Just renaming the encounter categories to "trivial, easy, moderate, challenging" without changing any numbers would fix quite a bit.
The other problem is that balancing assumes short rest abilities are usable about 3x/day and something like 20 rounds of combat per day, so if you have fewer than three encounters per day the balance of long vs short rest abilities is off, and if battles are short but intense unlimited use abilities are undervalued relative to spike abilities.
Those would be appropriate descriptions if they were true. A rested party is not going to have someone bite the dust from a merely hard encounter, and has a negligible chance for someone dying unless you're way over the minimum threshold for Deadly (as Deadly has no cap, you can certainly crank it up to the point where it will have a good chance of killing PCs, but it's like 200% of budget).
That's not the way people think about things. People don't think Hard means "Hard if you've already ground through another three fights", they think Hard means Hard without any other context.
I don't think the math used in the DMG based on how the game works as intended with the core rules should be blamed for how other's think it should be or how they choose to play the game. If I hold a baseball bat at the wrong end and attempt to use it like that in a game it's not the bat's fault that I suck.
AFAIK nowhere in the DMG is there stated that the encounter difficulty is based on having x amount of other encounters.
I don't think it also says that a typical adventuring day consists of 6-8 encounters or that it's normal.
What it actually says, on page 84 of DMG is that under normal adventuring conditions you can expect your players to handle that many encounters. As in, you probably won't kill them if you make them fight that many times and all those will be medium/hard difficulty.
Is there something more about the AD actually being defined as consisting of 6-8 encounters? Because that sure doesn't sound to me as a definition of how the day should look like, more like "if you want to, you can do this much relatively safely without worrying".
I prefer milestone since it makes it feel like you want to roleplay and accomplish things and not grind monsters, but if you mainly award exp for roleplaying and smart thinking that's great
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
I have no idea what you're talking about, which at a minimum suggests bad editing/layout.
Indeed that's what I thought until I realised that both the adventures I have played in under other DMs and the ones I have DM'd have all been way too easy despite them falling into the Hard or Deadly basket.
Sure they'd be hard or deadly if we did a 6 encounter grind before hand. On their own or even after 2-3 encounters, the party merely blitzes through it.
My own thinking is if your campaign is more narrative based with battles being logical outcomes of the story, then deemphasise combat. It's literally there as part of the story but it serves no purpose save to further the story.
Eg Next combat encounter for my Level 7-8s is an old abandoned brewery with a handful of thugs/bandits sleeping in their long johns. They will probably be dazed and confused when the party shreds through them. Most likely it will be a massacre.
But the point will be that they find key evidence in implicating a duke in criminal activities.
Originally I was going to character sheets for the bad guys to make them tough. But given my adventurers just slaughter everything with ease, I thought why go to that effort, especially when from a narrative perspective the bad guys would be fast asleep. No point in giving them super awesome armour if they will have been asleep in their long johns and will probably have disadvantage in first turn due to being rudely awoken by a berzerker stabbing the hell out of them.
I think it's evident it's attrition based. That's my issue with it. Literally they're forcing people to play 6-8 encounter grinds to keep the system balanced. Anything less and it's a walkover. It should have been designed with far less encounters needed to achieve balance.
I pretty much stick to RaW in fact the house rules I have probably make it easier for the players in some ways, drinking potions is a bonus action, a short rest is 30 mins and for one campaign level 7 onwards players can use a bonus action to cast a level 2 or lower second spell. We have those really tense moments where players are standing, watching dice, screaming and crying with joy or desperation as the fates determine what happens. I don't fix dice rolls, in fact in combat all my dice rolls are open in front of everyone, I don't have to artificially create those moments, what I do use is the rules to shape encounters and challenges that really push my players make them think about how they will position themselves, where will the tank sit in the combat, how will they protect the squishy players, I use the environment, the players own weaknesses and throw different combinations of spells, attacks and challenges at them in each major encounter. But it might also be the way we paint the picture of the encounter, I largely run theatre of the mind with maybe a static map to provide context.
Sometimes my players will go several days in game time with nothing happening to them, sometimes in a day they will have multiple things happen, it depends on the narrative, where they are what they are doing where the campaign is happening in my world and what is around them so this system would not work, in fact in dnd this system would only really work for those who run an old school dungeon crawl adventure.
Because you're ignoring the other half of the definitions:
All three of those statements are usually false -- an accurate description is
Then add a sentence: at the end of a long day of adventuring, when the PCs are down significant resources, an ordinarily easy encounter becomes more difficult. Increase estimated difficulty by one step.
I don't think the monster multiplier helps here - I think it overstates the difficulty.
I have started a new thread in relation to this.
Bandit camp?
1.Survive bandit ambush. (Hard)
2.Find the bandits' trail. (Easy)
3. Deal with the trap/s along said trail. (Easy)
4. Deal with bandit scouts. (Medium)
5.Eliminate/evade bandit sentries. (Medium)
6.Attack main bandit camp. (Deadly)
There's your adventuring day.