We can disagree on what the XP means in published modules.
I don't know that adventure in question - but if you can "do the bits in any order", how granular are the bits? If it's just a question of you can do large blocks in any order, then I suspect ( but can't prove, and haven't looked closely, so can be wrong ) that the XP corresponds to the pre-calculated XP of that block. Perhaps if those block-ends are meant to be level-ups, then the blocks correspond to the average XP that the Character will need to go up over all levels; e.g. They need 300,900, and 2,700 - so a level up block comes out to 1,300.
I'd have to read the module and do some math to see if that's a viable hypothesis, or not - and I have to admit, I'm not likely to do so.
But If it's not what's going on - if you are suggesting the advancement rewards are just plopped down at places that feel about right and in amount that feel about right ( or the designers think, "yeah, that's about a generic level's worth of adventuring!" ) - then that's not game design. That's not any kind of design.
As for your statement "But let's say that the PCs instead decide on some other goal, I'd use that for milestones" - Yes. And you're right back to my point of a) you gotta move the Milestones, b) you should move the Milestone to a place where the Players have accomplished about the same amount of adventuring, c) the fairest way to do that is XP.
If you're ignoring XP or Player actions, if you're "running a more episodic campaign, level up every few adventures", that slams you back into Session Based leveling, and you are literally leveling up Characters for showing up and not dying.
The brilliant Player who engages the world, cracks the mystery, and saves the party gets treated no differently than the Player who slumps in, browses Facebook on their phone, has to be told the tactical position of everything in each and every round of combat, and hasn't bothered to learn any rules. It is quite literally the participation trophy method of Character advancement.
That might work for you. I don't like it personally.
As for making game design decisions around the fact that your Players might have to take care of sick child that night - you can create other management strategies for that. You don't have to lobotomize your entire advancement system.Off the top of my head, have a Player who is present run that Character as an NPC, and award the absent Player's Character the average XP earned by the present Players ( including XP bonuses ), springs to mind. You are neither rewarding or punishing the Player for needing to be absent, and you can keep individual Player rewards.
Ironically,I'm coming around to the idea that XP Rewards aren't the sole way to go for Player rewards for playing well, and accomplishing things in game - but I don't think RAW Inspiration is the way to go. The Inspiration mechanic is nebulous at best, right now - so much so that I usually see both DMs and Players forget about inspiration points that have been rewarded. If Players don't use, or value, rewards, there is no drive to earn them - and there is no incentive towards the behaviors which accrue them.
I think a combination of low XP rewards, revised Inspiration, optional mechanics such as Renown and Honor ( provided the DM implements and uses is well and effectively ) , etc. can "top up" reduced XP bonuses as Player rewards and encouragements without breaking the homogeneity of the Party leveling.
Between you and InquisitiveCoder, the picture you are painting of WoTC's ( increasingly so-called ) "game designers" is as a bunch of pulp-hack authors who slap down some material on paper, as long as it feels OK and enough people will buy it without there being too much whining, they go with it. I really hope you're not correct on this, and for the time being, I'll stick with the working assumption that WoTC is better than that.
But even if you aren't wrong, that doesn't make what is written balanced and fair, or even what I feed should befor my game. They may be goals that are extrinsic to the published rules or their intent, but I believe that good RPG game design should be balanced, fair, logical, consistent, clear, efficient, reward good Players ( however you want to define "good" ), and promote the aspects of the game which strengthen its intent and focus ( in D&D that's usually Combat, Socialization, Exploration ) but with room for individual GMs to promote facets of the game they value .
I also do not believe that "winging it" or running "seat of the pants" leads to many, if any, of these - with balance and consistency usually being the first victims. Sorry - but human beings just aren't that good at it. That's not a cynical assumption - that's the conclusion after decades of professional experience dealing with very intelligent people "winging it" in structured situations ( a cynical conclusion, if you like ).
I get the distinct impression that many DMs are personally invested in the idea that there isn't ( and more important - isn't supposedto be ) a lot of designed game structure underneath their role-playing despite the acronym RPG. If I was a cynical person, I may begin to suspect that's a justification for their own approach to game and adventure design; they don't have the time, energy, or inclination to be that rigorous and balanced in their approach, so they want to believe that the way they are doing things is the proper way to do it ( or at least it's not a failing on their part, that way ).
Which is completely unnecessary. If you want to run your game that way, and you and your players are enjoying it, you don't need external justification. You shouldn't give a damn what WoTC "intended", or what I think of your style. And ultimately, I shouldn't care if you or your players think of my approach.
I think the best we can hope for is to thrash out If you do X, it's likely to have Yeffect on the tone of your game and affect your Player behaviors in such-and-such a way. If you're OK with your Players acting that way, or think the impact of X is acceptable, run with it. I may really hate X, so I'm going to drop in this whole block of optional rules to mitigate it, where you won't. That doesn't make either of us intrinsically wrong ( although we'd likely be very unhappy as Players in each others' games ).
The intent of the OP was to get feedback of the implications, side-effects, and possible alternatives to altering the rest mechanic.
I think we've fallen down a couple of debate rabbit holes on the way.
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The Extended Rest and Scaling Long Rest both seems like some of the better options but I think you should be very careful when deciding that some abilities take a week to recharge, I feel like the max amount of time should be 24 hours, unless you were to add in an injury mechanic where serious wounds required significant amounts of time to recover from. Although one thing that you'd have to deal with for a lot of these variants is if players just spam short rests, if a 5th level Wizard decided to spam short rest they could regain all their spell slots in 7 hours because of Arcane Recovery. And also there's the matter of Elves who don't have to spend as much time resting.
Incremental Long Rest also sounds like it could be good, but you do still have to worry about short rest spams, although you are basically reducing the total number of spell slots casters have.
The next three options aren't as good as previous three IMO, Encounter Threshold is very railroady and I don't think many players would be okay with their DM implementing a house rule like that.
Monsters Never Give Up! Never Surrender! Is at least subtle about how railroady it is, and it could actually be fun for the players, occasionally. One of the big problems with this is it's just very situational cause not all areas should have monsters that keep attacking, and it also stops working when one of the players leans Leomund's Tiny Hut.
As a player, Scaling XP feels like it would be annoying cause the majority of the time you'll just be getting less exp.
If you end up using one these variant I am interested in hearing how it goes.
I agree with most of your assessments - not all them were meant to be viable - just spit-balling all possibilities.
I've used Incremental Long Rest in the last campaign I ran. It mostly worked, although spell slots were a pain - but I think it could work much better with the Spell Points variant rules, with X SP / hour of rest.
I agree that XP scaling is probably just annoying - which is too bad, because it's probably the easiest once you pre-calculate the XP chart for it.
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The number of encounters vs. rest periods seem to be a bit of a red herring. If it's only 2 encounters, but they're sufficiently taxing, there doesn't seem to be much change in resource consumption since abilities aren't in general per encounter (assuming the rest periods occurred after the same amount of resource consumption).
The main issue with respect to the balancing issue appears to be the ratio between short rests and long rests. The simplest solution seems to be to do something similar to how wizards can regain spell slots short rests, but the net ability to do so is still tied to long rests - the ability to benefit from short rests is tied to long rests, i.e. perhaps a character can only benefit from recovery from short rest twice before requiring a long rest to 'recover the ability to short rest', as it were.
I'd probably divorce this from any resource which is already tied to long rest in some fashion, even if they require a short rest to benefit from it (e.g. the aforementioned wizard ability, or HP restoration from hit dice). But otherwise, anything that would regenerate on short rest (e.g. warlock spell slots, monk ki) would only be recoverable twice between long rests, while taking a short rest. Still would have to resolve if you could defer the use (e.g. recover warlock spells on the 2nd and 3rd short rest periods but not the first) though based on how the wizard version works, that would probably be reasonable.
However, the OP appeared to be concerned more about the other direction (effectively, not enough short rests between long rests). I'm not sure this is actually addressable mechanically without resorting to campaign hooks of some kind; even if long rests take (in-game) months, if there aren't any mechanical consequences for it, there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce this without fiat. Normally this is done via campaign goals (if you take too long, the goblins wipe out/do more damage to the village) rather than say, XP specifically, but depending on your players certain incentives are likely to work better than others (e.g. every long rest costs a magic item at the end because the cultists are sacrificing them).
If you wanted to tie a specific, arbitrary mechanical XP penalty, the simplest one is probably to add 'XP debt' for taking a long rest. Effectively, taking a long rest sets (set, not add) the character's XP debt to some # of average encounters-worth. Until the characters work through the 'debt', they don't actually earn XP (or earn at some reduced rate, but x0 is probably simplest to understand and disincentivizes some ways to game the system). This is essentially a simplified version of the 'scaling XP' idea which should accomplish basically the same thing without a lot of additional book keeping.
As an example, if it was important to preserve ~7 average encounters per long rest:
- Start with -3 average encounters XP per long rest
- Increase XP awards by 50%
- 1, 2 encounters -> 0 XP
- 3 encounters -> 4.5 -3 = 1.5 average encounters of XP (stopping here effectively reduces advancement by 80%)
- 7 encounters = 10.5 - 3 = 7.5 average encounters of XP
Obviously this is tuneable depending on how much you want to force backloading.
I agree that the issue really isn't the number of rests.
A better measure is the amount of expended effort/difficulty between resource refresh or regeneration. The relative strength of opponent XP vs. Player XP vs. the times between resource recovery seems to be the most elegant mechanic for that. It translates out to a few Deadly combat encounters counting for more that the same amount of Easy of Medium encounters - which makes sense.
I think much of your suggestions would fall under the Incremental Long Rest Ability Recovery proposal, and/or the Scaling XP based on number of Encounters since the last Long Rest proposals.
The latter one is what you're suggesting for XP: the amount of earned XP for an encounter proportional not only to the strength ( XP value ) of the opponents, but the number of encounters the party has had since they were able to Long Rest. I agree this would have to be tuned and experimented with, a lot. I might not make the scaling that harsh: I've played around with the idea of the first encounter being worth 25% of book value, scaling by 25% for each successive encounter, so that encounter 4 is work 100%, and encounter 7 is worth 175% of book value. The party is free to rest whenever they wish, but Long Resting after every encounter would mean they would accumulated XP at 25% base rate.
My personal leaning would be to also incorporate the Incremental Long Rest Ability Recovery proposal, and do away with the Long/Short rest distinction entirely. That seems to be somewhat along the lines you're suggesting, but I think it can be extended to abilities only recoverable under a Long Rest under RAW.
Essentially, convert everything into points ( Hit Points, Ki Points, Spell Points, Hit Dice, and Feat Point - with the latter being applicable to recovering class abilities and feats normally only reset on a Long Rest under RAW ), and giving every Character a recovery rate for each per hour of rest. That recovery rate would need to be tuned based on the Character level and/or the number of Long Rest class abilities & Feats they have. Ki points would recover very fast; HP, Hit Dice, Feat points, and Spell point would be tuned to recover fully in 8 hours.
I might even have an XP Decay rate, with the percentage multiplier going down by 25% per 2 full hours of rest: Party sleeps for 2 days so they are at 25% base XP rate. They dungeon crawl and have 4 encounters, logged at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of book value. They rest for 2 hours ( regenerating HP; HD; Ki; plus Spell and Feat points ), and then push on for 4 more encounters - which drops them back to 75% for the next encounter, but 100%, 125%, and 150% for the 3 after that.
There is a, however, a potential for abuse with the idea of Feat Points - as a Player could conceivably load up their Character with "dump" Feats to drive up their Feat Point recovery rate, but only ever spend the rapidly accumulating points on a single Class ability or Feat.
This is - of course - all dependent on the idea that this needs to be tuned - which is still a debatable question.
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I also feel like the assumed 7 encounters per day is dependant upon level, cause at level 1 the Sorcerer only has two spell slots, but at level 20 they have 22 spell slots, Plus 20 Sorcerery Points, plus a few once per rest abilities.
It seems like it should scale with the amount of resources which they have at hand. Regenerating 25% of your resources means more when you have 10x the resources.
It's true that the amount of resources that an encounter should consume should also scale - but there's absolutely a lower limit as to how much recoverable resources is useful.
A 1st level Wizard with 4 spell points ( using that rule variant ) should only recover 1 point / 2-hours of downtime - but it take 2 points to cast a first level spell.
That doesn't seem very useful. They can't regain enough resources to be useful and not take an XP accumulation penalty - which seems really unfair.
The "slope" of the rate of increase should probably get "steeper" with level - and perhaps be flat for low levels.
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Just to clarify, my suggestion is not actually a linear scale to the earned xp per encounter. The values were the net xp earned including that encounter. All encounters would be worth a fixed multiplier of the 'normal' value (this is to make the desired number of encounter work) while taking a long rest would set the XP debt to a fixed value. All encounters would average to the same amount of XP, it's just the first however many after a long rest would effectively be worth nothing. This has the major benefit of being easy on bookkeeping while providing the same basic incentive (push on as far as reasonable on one long rest).
It's a bit misleading to say the first encounter is easier than the e.g. 10th, since it depends on how many resources you are willing (or able) to spend. If you spend minimal resources for the first encounter to save up for future encounters, it's not really any 'easier' than a later encounter that you spent the same amount of resources (it's arguably safer since you still have the opportunity to spend the extra resources if needed, but having to do so effectively hurts you in the long run regardless).
I think changing the long rest / short rest relationships too much somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise, which I took to mean taking advantage of the balance testing/theory the standard rules are bringing (at least in principle). Instead, it seems like the point is to try to establish ~2 short rests per long rest, which basically preserves the relative strength of the classes with one another (as well as the design allows, anyway). The main issue with the 'long rest every fight' is that that inherently messes up the ratio between long and short rests more than the fact the fights are overall easier (you can address the latter with harder encounters, but does not fix the former issue). So there needs to be an incentive for there to be sufficient opportunities to short rest between long rests, but not tons of short rests between long rests.
The latter is fairly easy to control by treating short rests as a resource tied to long rests, e.g. the party gets recovery as if 2 short rests between long rests (presumably they can take more than 2 short rests, but the resource they can get back thusly is limited to the equivalent of two short rests in total). The former can be controlled via incentives as discussed earlier, through XP, campaign objectives, or other incentives.
As a side note, I personally think magic items as 'performance bonuses' (e.g. tied to success in campaign objectives) and XP as 'story progression/participation rewards' tends to be a pretty good split. Not getting magic items usually doesn't wreck the campaign planning like falling behind in levelling progression, and magic items tend to eventually lose relative value (so they need to keep getting more) while XP is fully fungible and less exciting as immediate feedback.
I'm accruing XP at rate determined by a ( non-zero sloped ) linear function over the encounters - you're accruing at a fixed rate, but removing a part of the XP right up front, and have them work off a deficit. You're describing a step function while I'm describing a linear relationship.
I think that if you were to draw this out graphically, the area-under-the-curve of the XP would be similar ( or at least could be turned into similar results with some fine tuning ). The end results are similar: The longer they push on between long rests, the more experience they gain for each. They start below book value, but the average XP over the 6-7 encounters should average out roughly the same as awarding XP RAW, provided the Party completes all 6-7 encounters.
Your approach is much simpler from a book-keeping perspective - but I dislike the idea of the Party gaining essentially nothing for the first encounter or two. This is only because I'd like to award XP as soon as it is earned. "Congratulations, you defeated the Gerflings - everyone take 150 XP". That pushes XP bookkeeping on the Players, and gives them a concrete sense of of progress as they watch the XP meter ratchet upwards. I don't want to say "0 XP". Clearly if XP was being rewarded at the next Long Rest, or at the end of the adventure arc, there would be absolutely no downside to your system, as the Players would not even know that the first encounter or two had netted them 0 XP.
I agree that there isn't a strict relationship between the number ( or difficulty ) of the encounters and the resources necessarily expended. The party could - through incredible luck of the dice - blow through even a Deadly encounter or two with minimal expenditure of HP or Spell Slots/Points, etc. I think that's rare, and maybe keeping those resources is its own extra little reward over the short-term for such a complete triumph? Some system of tracking the difficulty of the encounter, v.s. the resources expended, and time since the last long rest could obviously be devised - but I think the complexity of the bookkeeping of such as system would outweigh the benefits - especially since I believe that long term averages would approximate that proportional relationship between XP of the opponents and the resources expended.
As for rests ...
The purpose of the exercise was to hit upon something that performed the same function as the "6-7 encounters, between 2 Long Rests, with two Short Rest intermissions, for these Class designs" bundle.
My initial thought ( which could be wrong ), was that the designers set it up this way so that average amount of available resources, for each encounter between Long Rests ,would be roughly in the ballpark of each other, for most Classes, taking long-term averages into account.
Any game mechanic which generally allowed each Class to accrue the same amount of "effectiveness" over the same amount of time, would be at least Class-balanced, to my mind.
Any system which also gave each fully resource-refreshed Character the ability to be able to slog through 6-7 Medium/Hard encounters ( proportional to their level ) before needing to do a full resource-refresh would, to my mind, be Game-balanced.
Provided that the 6-7 encounters between rests is a desirable goal ( jury's still out on that one ), I think the rest system does that, provided the so-called proper number of encounters happen between each Long Rest.
But it's not the only mechanic which can do that, which is why I rather like the idea of continuously accruing points towards resource recovery. If one assumes that the game designers have already tuned the overall recovery rates to be balanced, then resources that recover every Short Rest would regenerate at 3/8 of their total strength per hour of rest, while resources which refresh every Long Rest would refresh at 1/8 of their total strength. The math can get unwieldy, however, as you would likely need to track a separate pool of feat points for each ability. An ability with 3 uses per long rest would need a pool of 24 points, refreshing at 3/hour, and needing 8 points to buy a use. An ability with 2 uses per long rest would need a pool of 16 points, refreshing at 2/hour, and needing 8 points to buy a use. This seems clunky to me.
But overall, it makes for much more flexible resting, while keeping the Classes balanced.
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What I mean by saying that the number of encounters doesn't really matter is that, for the most part, encounter difficulty and number of encounters are more or less independent parameters determining resource consumption, and both can be tuned simultaneously (assuming a fixed amount of resources, you can increase the number of encounters the party can go through by reducing the difficulty of the encounters, and vice versa). More importantly, however, this is generally (or ideally) pretty independent of the party composition (there are variation due to resistances, melee vs. ranged vs. e.g. fliers, but assuming that this averages out over a 'balanced' party and a 'balanced' set of encounters). This should mean, given that each party composition brings roughly the same amount of resources per long rest, that a given set of encounters should be roughly the same challenge to any kind of party.
The reason I'm focusing on the long rest / short rest ratio is that changing this has a pretty significant impact in the available resources depending on the party composition. This is essentially what I thought the OP was getting at w.r.t. discussion about how the effectiveness of the wizard varies depending on the number of encounters per long rest. My point is that the key is not really the number of encounters, but the number of encounters per short rest; the problem is not so much that the wizard is overpowered in the one encounter scenario - since that one encounter can be tuned to be arbitrarily challenging - but that the warlock doesn't get all of their resources relative to the wizard if there is no opportunity for short rest between long rests.
It's quite possible the issue the OP was trying to resolve isn't quite what I thought it was. My interpretation was:
1) The game is designed around 2 short rests per long rest.
2) In particular, this ratio of replenishment is used to balance the classes against each other, resulting in comparable power (mostly) independent of party composition.
3) If (1) is violated, the resources available to the party (and as a corollary, the effective difficulty of the encounters) becomes more and more composition dependent.
4) Consequently, the playtesting for e.g. CR recommendations and number of encounters (based around the resources available to the party) becomes less and less accurate/relevant as the LR/SR ratio deviates from expectation.
5) This effectively results in playing a (somewhat) different game than intended, reducing the benefit of the playtesting given the original assumptions.
6) Therefore, in order to maintain (better) compatibility with playtested material, we want to preserve (1).
The continuous resource recovery solution preserve the LR/SR ratio. However, at that point effectively every class becomes recover-on-short rest (just not recovering 100%). This does change the dynamic of party resources because e.g. it becomes difficult to pool resources for the end of what used to be the long rest interval. Basically, if each encounter is effectively identical in difficulty, the end result is roughly the same, but if the encounters vary in difficulty significantly, the way the party can respond to the challenges might change under continuous resource recovery.
Essentially, SR resources are what should be used for basically every encounter (baseline burn rate of resources), while LR resources are intended to address spikes (insurance). The LR resource 'reserve' needs to be big enough to account for said spikes. By doing a continuous accumulation recovery, the party might end up wasting some of the recovery if the reserve is full (e.g. easy - easy - hard pattern of encounters).
I think a continuous recovery solution could certainly be made to work - it's just not clear what the real benefit would be and it seems like it could make the resulting system less compatible with playtesting benefits (which again I took to be the whole point). 'Chunky' recovery is, I think, in many ways a benefit in any case, as it makes the resulting resource management problem more interesting (the alternative becomes more and more of a cooldown system where the net result is 'use it or lose it', which removes much of the interesting decisions regarding saving/spending resources, as not spending is a net loss if you are constantly recovering increments).
We can disagree on what the XP means in published modules.
I don't know that adventure in question - but if you can "do the bits in any order", how granular are the bits? If it's just a question of you can do large blocks in any order, then I suspect ( but can't prove, and haven't looked closely, so can be wrong ) that the XP corresponds to the pre-calculated XP of that block. Perhaps if those block-ends are meant to be level-ups, then the blocks correspond to the average XP that the Character will need to go up over all levels; e.g. They need 300,900, and 2,700 - so a level up block comes out to 1,300.
I'd have to read the module and do some math to see if that's a viable hypothesis, or not - and I have to admit, I'm not likely to do so.
But If it's not what's going on - if you are suggesting the advancement rewards are just plopped down at places that feel about right and in amount that feel about right ( or the designers think, "yeah, that's about a generic level's worth of adventuring!" ) - then that's not game design. That's not any kind of design.
As for your statement "But let's say that the PCs instead decide on some other goal, I'd use that for milestones" - Yes. And you're right back to my point of a) you gotta move the Milestones, b) you should move the Milestone to a place where the Players have accomplished about the same amount of adventuring, c) the fairest way to do that is XP.
If you're ignoring XP or Player actions, if you're "running a more episodic campaign, level up every few adventures", that slams you back into Session Based leveling, and you are literally leveling up Characters for showing up and not dying.
The brilliant Player who engages the world, cracks the mystery, and saves the party gets treated no differently than the Player who slumps in, browses Facebook on their phone, has to be told the tactical position of everything in each and every round of combat, and hasn't bothered to learn any rules. It is quite literally the participation trophy method of Character advancement.
That might work for you. I don't like it personally.
As for making game design decisions around the fact that your Players might have to take care of sick child that night - you can create other management strategies for that. You don't have to lobotomize your entire advancement system. Off the top of my head, have a Player who is present run that Character as an NPC, and award the absent Player's Character the average XP earned by the present Players ( including XP bonuses ), springs to mind. You are neither rewarding or punishing the Player for needing to be absent, and you can keep individual Player rewards.
Ironically, I'm coming around to the idea that XP Rewards aren't the sole way to go for Player rewards for playing well, and accomplishing things in game - but I don't think RAW Inspiration is the way to go. The Inspiration mechanic is nebulous at best, right now - so much so that I usually see both DMs and Players forget about inspiration points that have been rewarded. If Players don't use, or value, rewards, there is no drive to earn them - and there is no incentive towards the behaviors which accrue them.
I think a combination of low XP rewards, revised Inspiration, optional mechanics such as Renown and Honor ( provided the DM implements and uses is well and effectively ) , etc. can "top up" reduced XP bonuses as Player rewards and encouragements without breaking the homogeneity of the Party leveling.
Between you and InquisitiveCoder, the picture you are painting of WoTC's ( increasingly so-called ) "game designers" is as a bunch of pulp-hack authors who slap down some material on paper, as long as it feels OK and enough people will buy it without there being too much whining, they go with it. I really hope you're not correct on this, and for the time being, I'll stick with the working assumption that WoTC is better than that.
But even if you aren't wrong, that doesn't make what is written balanced and fair, or even what I feed should be for my game. They may be goals that are extrinsic to the published rules or their intent, but I believe that good RPG game design should be balanced, fair, logical, consistent, clear, efficient, reward good Players ( however you want to define "good" ), and promote the aspects of the game which strengthen its intent and focus ( in D&D that's usually Combat, Socialization, Exploration ) but with room for individual GMs to promote facets of the game they value .
I also do not believe that "winging it" or running "seat of the pants" leads to many, if any, of these - with balance and consistency usually being the first victims. Sorry - but human beings just aren't that good at it. That's not a cynical assumption - that's the conclusion after decades of professional experience dealing with very intelligent people "winging it" in structured situations ( a cynical conclusion, if you like ).
I get the distinct impression that many DMs are personally invested in the idea that there isn't ( and more important - isn't supposed to be ) a lot of designed game structure underneath their role-playing despite the acronym RPG. If I was a cynical person, I may begin to suspect that's a justification for their own approach to game and adventure design; they don't have the time, energy, or inclination to be that rigorous and balanced in their approach, so they want to believe that the way they are doing things is the proper way to do it ( or at least it's not a failing on their part, that way ).
Which is completely unnecessary. If you want to run your game that way, and you and your players are enjoying it, you don't need external justification. You shouldn't give a damn what WoTC "intended", or what I think of your style. And ultimately, I shouldn't care if you or your players think of my approach.
I think the best we can hope for is to thrash out If you do X, it's likely to have Y effect on the tone of your game and affect your Player behaviors in such-and-such a way. If you're OK with your Players acting that way, or think the impact of X is acceptable, run with it. I may really hate X, so I'm going to drop in this whole block of optional rules to mitigate it, where you won't. That doesn't make either of us intrinsically wrong ( although we'd likely be very unhappy as Players in each others' games ).
The intent of the OP was to get feedback of the implications, side-effects, and possible alternatives to altering the rest mechanic.
I think we've fallen down a couple of debate rabbit holes on the way.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I think some of these seem interesting.
The Extended Rest and Scaling Long Rest both seems like some of the better options but I think you should be very careful when deciding that some abilities take a week to recharge, I feel like the max amount of time should be 24 hours, unless you were to add in an injury mechanic where serious wounds required significant amounts of time to recover from. Although one thing that you'd have to deal with for a lot of these variants is if players just spam short rests, if a 5th level Wizard decided to spam short rest they could regain all their spell slots in 7 hours because of Arcane Recovery. And also there's the matter of Elves who don't have to spend as much time resting.
Incremental Long Rest also sounds like it could be good, but you do still have to worry about short rest spams, although you are basically reducing the total number of spell slots casters have.
The next three options aren't as good as previous three IMO, Encounter Threshold is very railroady and I don't think many players would be okay with their DM implementing a house rule like that.
Monsters Never Give Up! Never Surrender! Is at least subtle about how railroady it is, and it could actually be fun for the players, occasionally. One of the big problems with this is it's just very situational cause not all areas should have monsters that keep attacking, and it also stops working when one of the players leans Leomund's Tiny Hut.
As a player, Scaling XP feels like it would be annoying cause the majority of the time you'll just be getting less exp.
If you end up using one these variant I am interested in hearing how it goes.
Thanks for the feedback :)
I agree with most of your assessments - not all them were meant to be viable - just spit-balling all possibilities.
I've used Incremental Long Rest in the last campaign I ran. It mostly worked, although spell slots were a pain - but I think it could work much better with the Spell Points variant rules, with X SP / hour of rest.
I agree that XP scaling is probably just annoying - which is too bad, because it's probably the easiest once you pre-calculate the XP chart for it.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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The number of encounters vs. rest periods seem to be a bit of a red herring. If it's only 2 encounters, but they're sufficiently taxing, there doesn't seem to be much change in resource consumption since abilities aren't in general per encounter (assuming the rest periods occurred after the same amount of resource consumption).
The main issue with respect to the balancing issue appears to be the ratio between short rests and long rests. The simplest solution seems to be to do something similar to how wizards can regain spell slots short rests, but the net ability to do so is still tied to long rests - the ability to benefit from short rests is tied to long rests, i.e. perhaps a character can only benefit from recovery from short rest twice before requiring a long rest to 'recover the ability to short rest', as it were.
I'd probably divorce this from any resource which is already tied to long rest in some fashion, even if they require a short rest to benefit from it (e.g. the aforementioned wizard ability, or HP restoration from hit dice). But otherwise, anything that would regenerate on short rest (e.g. warlock spell slots, monk ki) would only be recoverable twice between long rests, while taking a short rest. Still would have to resolve if you could defer the use (e.g. recover warlock spells on the 2nd and 3rd short rest periods but not the first) though based on how the wizard version works, that would probably be reasonable.
However, the OP appeared to be concerned more about the other direction (effectively, not enough short rests between long rests). I'm not sure this is actually addressable mechanically without resorting to campaign hooks of some kind; even if long rests take (in-game) months, if there aren't any mechanical consequences for it, there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce this without fiat. Normally this is done via campaign goals (if you take too long, the goblins wipe out/do more damage to the village) rather than say, XP specifically, but depending on your players certain incentives are likely to work better than others (e.g. every long rest costs a magic item at the end because the cultists are sacrificing them).
If you wanted to tie a specific, arbitrary mechanical XP penalty, the simplest one is probably to add 'XP debt' for taking a long rest. Effectively, taking a long rest sets (set, not add) the character's XP debt to some # of average encounters-worth. Until the characters work through the 'debt', they don't actually earn XP (or earn at some reduced rate, but x0 is probably simplest to understand and disincentivizes some ways to game the system). This is essentially a simplified version of the 'scaling XP' idea which should accomplish basically the same thing without a lot of additional book keeping.
As an example, if it was important to preserve ~7 average encounters per long rest:
- Start with -3 average encounters XP per long rest
- Increase XP awards by 50%
- 1, 2 encounters -> 0 XP
- 3 encounters -> 4.5 -3 = 1.5 average encounters of XP (stopping here effectively reduces advancement by 80%)
- 7 encounters = 10.5 - 3 = 7.5 average encounters of XP
Obviously this is tuneable depending on how much you want to force backloading.
I agree that the issue really isn't the number of rests.
A better measure is the amount of expended effort/difficulty between resource refresh or regeneration. The relative strength of opponent XP vs. Player XP vs. the times between resource recovery seems to be the most elegant mechanic for that. It translates out to a few Deadly combat encounters counting for more that the same amount of Easy of Medium encounters - which makes sense.
I think much of your suggestions would fall under the Incremental Long Rest Ability Recovery proposal, and/or the Scaling XP based on number of Encounters since the last Long Rest proposals.
The latter one is what you're suggesting for XP: the amount of earned XP for an encounter proportional not only to the strength ( XP value ) of the opponents, but the number of encounters the party has had since they were able to Long Rest. I agree this would have to be tuned and experimented with, a lot. I might not make the scaling that harsh: I've played around with the idea of the first encounter being worth 25% of book value, scaling by 25% for each successive encounter, so that encounter 4 is work 100%, and encounter 7 is worth 175% of book value. The party is free to rest whenever they wish, but Long Resting after every encounter would mean they would accumulated XP at 25% base rate.
My personal leaning would be to also incorporate the Incremental Long Rest Ability Recovery proposal, and do away with the Long/Short rest distinction entirely. That seems to be somewhat along the lines you're suggesting, but I think it can be extended to abilities only recoverable under a Long Rest under RAW.
Essentially, convert everything into points ( Hit Points, Ki Points, Spell Points, Hit Dice, and Feat Point - with the latter being applicable to recovering class abilities and feats normally only reset on a Long Rest under RAW ), and giving every Character a recovery rate for each per hour of rest. That recovery rate would need to be tuned based on the Character level and/or the number of Long Rest class abilities & Feats they have. Ki points would recover very fast; HP, Hit Dice, Feat points, and Spell point would be tuned to recover fully in 8 hours.
I might even have an XP Decay rate, with the percentage multiplier going down by 25% per 2 full hours of rest: Party sleeps for 2 days so they are at 25% base XP rate. They dungeon crawl and have 4 encounters, logged at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of book value. They rest for 2 hours ( regenerating HP; HD; Ki; plus Spell and Feat points ), and then push on for 4 more encounters - which drops them back to 75% for the next encounter, but 100%, 125%, and 150% for the 3 after that.
There is a, however, a potential for abuse with the idea of Feat Points - as a Player could conceivably load up their Character with "dump" Feats to drive up their Feat Point recovery rate, but only ever spend the rapidly accumulating points on a single Class ability or Feat.
This is - of course - all dependent on the idea that this needs to be tuned - which is still a debatable question.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I also feel like the assumed 7 encounters per day is dependant upon level, cause at level 1 the Sorcerer only has two spell slots, but at level 20 they have 22 spell slots, Plus 20 Sorcerery Points, plus a few once per rest abilities.
That's an excellent point.
It seems like it should scale with the amount of resources which they have at hand. Regenerating 25% of your resources means more when you have 10x the resources.
It's true that the amount of resources that an encounter should consume should also scale - but there's absolutely a lower limit as to how much recoverable resources is useful.
A 1st level Wizard with 4 spell points ( using that rule variant ) should only recover 1 point / 2-hours of downtime - but it take 2 points to cast a first level spell.
That doesn't seem very useful. They can't regain enough resources to be useful and not take an XP accumulation penalty - which seems really unfair.
The "slope" of the rate of increase should probably get "steeper" with level - and perhaps be flat for low levels.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Just to clarify, my suggestion is not actually a linear scale to the earned xp per encounter. The values were the net xp earned including that encounter. All encounters would be worth a fixed multiplier of the 'normal' value (this is to make the desired number of encounter work) while taking a long rest would set the XP debt to a fixed value. All encounters would average to the same amount of XP, it's just the first however many after a long rest would effectively be worth nothing. This has the major benefit of being easy on bookkeeping while providing the same basic incentive (push on as far as reasonable on one long rest).
It's a bit misleading to say the first encounter is easier than the e.g. 10th, since it depends on how many resources you are willing (or able) to spend. If you spend minimal resources for the first encounter to save up for future encounters, it's not really any 'easier' than a later encounter that you spent the same amount of resources (it's arguably safer since you still have the opportunity to spend the extra resources if needed, but having to do so effectively hurts you in the long run regardless).
I think changing the long rest / short rest relationships too much somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise, which I took to mean taking advantage of the balance testing/theory the standard rules are bringing (at least in principle). Instead, it seems like the point is to try to establish ~2 short rests per long rest, which basically preserves the relative strength of the classes with one another (as well as the design allows, anyway). The main issue with the 'long rest every fight' is that that inherently messes up the ratio between long and short rests more than the fact the fights are overall easier (you can address the latter with harder encounters, but does not fix the former issue). So there needs to be an incentive for there to be sufficient opportunities to short rest between long rests, but not tons of short rests between long rests.
The latter is fairly easy to control by treating short rests as a resource tied to long rests, e.g. the party gets recovery as if 2 short rests between long rests (presumably they can take more than 2 short rests, but the resource they can get back thusly is limited to the equivalent of two short rests in total). The former can be controlled via incentives as discussed earlier, through XP, campaign objectives, or other incentives.
As a side note, I personally think magic items as 'performance bonuses' (e.g. tied to success in campaign objectives) and XP as 'story progression/participation rewards' tends to be a pretty good split. Not getting magic items usually doesn't wreck the campaign planning like falling behind in levelling progression, and magic items tend to eventually lose relative value (so they need to keep getting more) while XP is fully fungible and less exciting as immediate feedback.
I'm accruing XP at rate determined by a ( non-zero sloped ) linear function over the encounters - you're accruing at a fixed rate, but removing a part of the XP right up front, and have them work off a deficit. You're describing a step function while I'm describing a linear relationship.
I think that if you were to draw this out graphically, the area-under-the-curve of the XP would be similar ( or at least could be turned into similar results with some fine tuning ). The end results are similar: The longer they push on between long rests, the more experience they gain for each. They start below book value, but the average XP over the 6-7 encounters should average out roughly the same as awarding XP RAW, provided the Party completes all 6-7 encounters.
Your approach is much simpler from a book-keeping perspective - but I dislike the idea of the Party gaining essentially nothing for the first encounter or two. This is only because I'd like to award XP as soon as it is earned. "Congratulations, you defeated the Gerflings - everyone take 150 XP". That pushes XP bookkeeping on the Players, and gives them a concrete sense of of progress as they watch the XP meter ratchet upwards. I don't want to say "0 XP". Clearly if XP was being rewarded at the next Long Rest, or at the end of the adventure arc, there would be absolutely no downside to your system, as the Players would not even know that the first encounter or two had netted them 0 XP.
I agree that there isn't a strict relationship between the number ( or difficulty ) of the encounters and the resources necessarily expended. The party could - through incredible luck of the dice - blow through even a Deadly encounter or two with minimal expenditure of HP or Spell Slots/Points, etc. I think that's rare, and maybe keeping those resources is its own extra little reward over the short-term for such a complete triumph? Some system of tracking the difficulty of the encounter, v.s. the resources expended, and time since the last long rest could obviously be devised - but I think the complexity of the bookkeeping of such as system would outweigh the benefits - especially since I believe that long term averages would approximate that proportional relationship between XP of the opponents and the resources expended.
As for rests ...
The purpose of the exercise was to hit upon something that performed the same function as the "6-7 encounters, between 2 Long Rests, with two Short Rest intermissions, for these Class designs" bundle.
My initial thought ( which could be wrong ), was that the designers set it up this way so that average amount of available resources, for each encounter between Long Rests ,would be roughly in the ballpark of each other, for most Classes, taking long-term averages into account.
Any game mechanic which generally allowed each Class to accrue the same amount of "effectiveness" over the same amount of time, would be at least Class-balanced, to my mind.
Any system which also gave each fully resource-refreshed Character the ability to be able to slog through 6-7 Medium/Hard encounters ( proportional to their level ) before needing to do a full resource-refresh would, to my mind, be Game-balanced.
Provided that the 6-7 encounters between rests is a desirable goal ( jury's still out on that one ), I think the rest system does that, provided the so-called proper number of encounters happen between each Long Rest.
But it's not the only mechanic which can do that, which is why I rather like the idea of continuously accruing points towards resource recovery. If one assumes that the game designers have already tuned the overall recovery rates to be balanced, then resources that recover every Short Rest would regenerate at 3/8 of their total strength per hour of rest, while resources which refresh every Long Rest would refresh at 1/8 of their total strength. The math can get unwieldy, however, as you would likely need to track a separate pool of feat points for each ability. An ability with 3 uses per long rest would need a pool of 24 points, refreshing at 3/hour, and needing 8 points to buy a use. An ability with 2 uses per long rest would need a pool of 16 points, refreshing at 2/hour, and needing 8 points to buy a use. This seems clunky to me.
But overall, it makes for much more flexible resting, while keeping the Classes balanced.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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What I mean by saying that the number of encounters doesn't really matter is that, for the most part, encounter difficulty and number of encounters are more or less independent parameters determining resource consumption, and both can be tuned simultaneously (assuming a fixed amount of resources, you can increase the number of encounters the party can go through by reducing the difficulty of the encounters, and vice versa). More importantly, however, this is generally (or ideally) pretty independent of the party composition (there are variation due to resistances, melee vs. ranged vs. e.g. fliers, but assuming that this averages out over a 'balanced' party and a 'balanced' set of encounters). This should mean, given that each party composition brings roughly the same amount of resources per long rest, that a given set of encounters should be roughly the same challenge to any kind of party.
The reason I'm focusing on the long rest / short rest ratio is that changing this has a pretty significant impact in the available resources depending on the party composition. This is essentially what I thought the OP was getting at w.r.t. discussion about how the effectiveness of the wizard varies depending on the number of encounters per long rest. My point is that the key is not really the number of encounters, but the number of encounters per short rest; the problem is not so much that the wizard is overpowered in the one encounter scenario - since that one encounter can be tuned to be arbitrarily challenging - but that the warlock doesn't get all of their resources relative to the wizard if there is no opportunity for short rest between long rests.
It's quite possible the issue the OP was trying to resolve isn't quite what I thought it was. My interpretation was:
1) The game is designed around 2 short rests per long rest.
2) In particular, this ratio of replenishment is used to balance the classes against each other, resulting in comparable power (mostly) independent of party composition.
3) If (1) is violated, the resources available to the party (and as a corollary, the effective difficulty of the encounters) becomes more and more composition dependent.
4) Consequently, the playtesting for e.g. CR recommendations and number of encounters (based around the resources available to the party) becomes less and less accurate/relevant as the LR/SR ratio deviates from expectation.
5) This effectively results in playing a (somewhat) different game than intended, reducing the benefit of the playtesting given the original assumptions.
6) Therefore, in order to maintain (better) compatibility with playtested material, we want to preserve (1).
The continuous resource recovery solution preserve the LR/SR ratio. However, at that point effectively every class becomes recover-on-short rest (just not recovering 100%). This does change the dynamic of party resources because e.g. it becomes difficult to pool resources for the end of what used to be the long rest interval. Basically, if each encounter is effectively identical in difficulty, the end result is roughly the same, but if the encounters vary in difficulty significantly, the way the party can respond to the challenges might change under continuous resource recovery.
Essentially, SR resources are what should be used for basically every encounter (baseline burn rate of resources), while LR resources are intended to address spikes (insurance). The LR resource 'reserve' needs to be big enough to account for said spikes. By doing a continuous accumulation recovery, the party might end up wasting some of the recovery if the reserve is full (e.g. easy - easy - hard pattern of encounters).
I think a continuous recovery solution could certainly be made to work - it's just not clear what the real benefit would be and it seems like it could make the resulting system less compatible with playtesting benefits (which again I took to be the whole point). 'Chunky' recovery is, I think, in many ways a benefit in any case, as it makes the resulting resource management problem more interesting (the alternative becomes more and more of a cooldown system where the net result is 'use it or lose it', which removes much of the interesting decisions regarding saving/spending resources, as not spending is a net loss if you are constantly recovering increments).