This is one of the reasons I’m really not happy with DND. I just don’t want to play a resource management game. I want to do cool stuff.
There are lots of games that aren’t built around resource management and attrition, but unfortunately DND is so popular it sucks all the air out of the room.
I do feel that slowly, edition by edition, D&D is moving closer to it’s recourse management being tied to it’s round based action economy which I actually enjoy.
As a player, it’s already pretty easy to play this way, before counting subclasses, the rogue has literally no abilities that are limited by anything but once per turn, and if you pick some fun narrative spells as warlock and rely on invocations and eldritch blast, you can be totally effective without any resource management. Both of these exclude hitpoints of course but that is a pretty reasonable resource for a combat focussed fantasy game.
My understanding is that OneDnd was moving more towards per-long-rest instead of anything else. I haven’t been following it for a few months though.
I would vastly prefer if powers were based on something more granular than long rest.
Oh yeah it is but I’m not really counting that as a new edition, just a minor reshuffling of the 2014 rules.
You can play fighter or warlock. Dnd limits extreme power with spell slots and charges. Otherwise they’d have to nerf the upper power level. Can’t have people casting fire storm every few minutes. It’d ruin balance AND ensure you had to cast that every time to deal with increased threats.
Yes, but someone is probably going to play a long rest class and force the entire game to center around that cadence. And the long rest cadence kind of sucks for me.
There are other ways to do game balance.
Most classes are long rest classes. Any caster besides warlock is.
How do you do long rests that makes it annoying? Usually it’s:
Party: We would like to take a long rest.
DM: Sounds good, you are now rested.
If you let players take too many long rests in DND 5e it fucks over short-rest and no-rest classes. Long rest people get more Fun Stuff than everyone else. Feels bad.
Edit: also it does weird things to the story pacing. Any time sensitivity gets weird if the players are going a five minute adventuring day
So you say they can only benefit from a long rest each 24 hours.
They can try to long rest, but they will get an encounter and no benefit from resting.
For my group I have them make sure to secure the area as their rest may get interrupted if they don’t
But I also roll on a relevant encounter table when they do and add a modifier based on the groups checks for it being secure (usually a survival check, so usually it’s the ranger doing the rolling for that)
Short rests are a lot easier though
Random encounters aren’t the most interesting thing to do at the table for most people. Design choices that funnel the play time into them then seems like a poor idea.
If you’re playing the game just for the combat itself then it’s probably fine. But if you’re playing for any sort of story then fighting a random pack of spiders probably pays off less than fighting plot relevant stuff.
That’s my secret really, the players never see my random encounter tables. They roll the dice but they don’t see the table.
They include a lot of stuff relevant to what’s going on more than “random spiders”
A good example is when they were trying to locate an old run down keep that a local band of bandits were using as a hideout. The random encounter table included such things as: group of bandits on their way back after a raid (successful, not, injured, not, etc), group of recent hostages on their way to freedom (escaped, released, escorted, etc), a caravan being raided nearby by the bandits in question (or others), rival bandits on the same mission, etc. A couple entries are (of course) night passes peacefully and usually there’s 1 or 2 creature encounters (that can usually be avoided), and hell even a “sounds in the distance (insert kind of sound based on perception check(this may lead back to the earlier table))”. And even some stuff that may lead to new adventures.
It’s more work than just “creatures roll initiative” but IMO is way more rewarding, and my players seem to enjoy it a lot.
Random encounter tables is a vague term but unfortunately I think may be the correct one in this case.
Yeah it sounds like your “random tables” still hook into the story there. That’s not the “random encounter” I was thinking of exactly. I was thinking more of the “You’re traveling through the woods when you encounter… four spiders and a dire badger!” Those tend to be kind of shallow.
Personally I prefer to come up with scenarios and not roll on a table at all. Like, instead of thinking about “the bandits came back successfully” and also “they came back injured” I can just pick one and bake it more.
But this is kind of drifting off the topic I was trying to describe. I was objecting to the “Well we need 4-8 medium encounters for the game’s assumptions to hold, so I guess you’re fighting some random bears now” thing. Doing encounters just to wear down the party’s resources is a weird design in my mind.
Any suggestions
Fate is a general purpose RPG that doesn’t have any assumptions about a rest cadence. There are more specific games that use its rules (I think there’s a dresden files one that’s popular). Just the core rules work fine, but do require players to be more narratively minded and synchronized for it to really sing.
I don’t know gurps very well but I don’t think it’s built around rests at all.
I don’t think pbta games are generally built around a long rest cadence, either. They tend to have a lot of mixed success on ability use, rather than a hard limit.
The wod/cofd games aren’t centered around long rests, either. In vampire: the requiem, for example, the cool vampire powers are pretty much all at-will, require blood, or sometimes willpower. Blood is mostly narratively limited - you can get it whenever you can find someone to bite, generally. Willpower comes back over time but faster if you hit narrative beats. But generally if you have, say, Dominate, you can just do the vampire dominating gaze on people. The games typically aren’t played as dungeon crawlers though, and the limits tend to be more social or “should you?” rather than DND’s “can you?”.
One of the problems with the long rest cadence is the first fight is typically not a real threat. It’s only the last one where you’re strapped for resources that has real at hand tension. That kind of sucks, honestly. You see posts sometimes where people complain about filler fights that are just there to drain resources are kind of boring.
Making everything per-encounter is probably the easiest fix for a dnd-like game. Make some classes ramp-up, some ramp-down, and some steady.
Nice reply. Good content
4th edition had a lot of that, but it doesn’t really fit for the dungeon crawler gameplay, which they were trying to make more possible again with 5th edition. Part of that story archetype is seeing resources whittled down as you get deeper and deeper into the dungeon, always wondering if you should go back up or if you should push deeper to get that big score. That’s where the tension comes from for that style of play. Same thing for wilderness travel expedition-type games.
Those types of games aren’t for everyone, but DnD 5th edition has always been about trying to be everything for everyone. “Everyone’s 2nd favorite edition.” indeed lol.
You touch on an important point. The D&D long rest resource resource management system can make sense when you’re doing a dungeon crawl and you’re actually into the whole “do we have enough supplies to go deeper or do we turn back thing?” But my understanding is that’s not how most people actually play. There was a poll going around a couple months ago that revealed most D&D groups do one fight per long rest.
If you’re just doing one fight per long rest, you’re doing per-encounter powers badly. That screws over the on-paper short-rest classes, and forces the story’s pacing to be slow to account for the “ok you sleep for another day” thing.
Haha ya, I actually do it properly and I’ve had players think my style nerfed spellcasters too much by spacing out long rests between encounters. No, I’m just playing it as designed and giving chances for everyone to shine, the fights where spellcasters can nova and the fights where martial classes or warlocks can pull their weight, too.
Yeah, I hate that DnD is such a resource management game too. (More so that is is the ONLY game my group will consider playing.)
I tend to horde any limited resource. TTRPG or video game.
Is this group of mooks big enough to justify using power/spell/item X? Is there a bigger group around the corner? Is this just a lieutenant or the BBEG? Oh, this guy is monologueing, he must be the BBEG. But does his fight have multiple phases? OR is he just a puppet and the real BBEG is waiting for us to blow all our abilities.
Doesn’t matter how narratively I’m engaged in the plot. I’ve got a tactically aware mind and these thoughts are always there.
Same.
In my last DND game, where the wizard was extremely fast and loose with his spell slots, the DM gave him a free long rest in the middle of the final boss fight. It kind of sort of made sense for story reasons but not really. I was honestly kind of pissed. Like on the one hand the wizard was having fun. On the other like what’s the point if we’re going to do that. I’ve been here doing the tactical “this is how we can solve this problem with the fewest resources spent” and no one else is, and he gets this? Ugh.
Even Baldur’s gate 3 betrayed me like this. There’s a lengthy sequence that I did with like no resources spent. It was slow and cautious but I knew there was a big boss at the end of it. And then they put a fucking full-rest fountain right before the boss fight. I could’ve been fireballing everything instead of playing smart!
When it was my turn to DM, before the scene I just complained about, that wizard was practically begging for a long rest. No sir. You get multiple hard encounters and a race against enemies. Maybe don’t blow Hold Person on the fleeing civilian when the rogue has expertise and is ready to grapple next time.
I’m much happier now that we’re playing a different system.
Most abilities should be either “per round/turn” or “per encounter”.
Abilities that are too powerful for that should either not exist or require significant preparation (enough for the opposition to have a chance to discover and interrupt it).
Abilities that fall in the second category should automatically come with a less powerful variant in the first category.
Maybe as a middle ground some player abilities could use the “roll for recharge” mechanic from powerful monster abilities.
I kinda disagree with all of this. Big abilities that come with in-universe complications are the bread and butter of RPGs. E.G. Connection: Mafia: You know a guy in the mafia you can ask for help, but he might want a favor later…
Or think of things like Wish, etc.
It kinda sounds like you want a wargame with a bit of story connecting the battles. Which is fine, but then just play a wargame I guess?
I think we don’t actually disagree and I was just not precise enough in my original post.
What I described above applies to abilities that are relevant in combat and any other type of encounter that the respective system mechanically treats as a conflict similar to combat. That absolutely does not mean other abilities should not exist, just that they should not be practically usable during an ongoing combat-like short term conflict.
Also: Abilities that are useful in short term combat-like conflicts and abilities that are not should not compete for mechanical resources of any kind, that is never fun.
I like the idea of having a few OP abilities, but having them require non-trivial preparation within an encounter. E.g. “charging” for several turns without moving or taking damage.
That sounds nice in theory, but actually charging stuff for several rounds while the encounter is already ongoing practically just means one player is doing nothing for most of the encounter. Not ideal.
I was thinking more along the lines of preparation before the actual encounter even starts, e.g. setting up an ambush or the magical equivalent of building a trebuchet during a siege.
That seems pretty easy to design around. You could have powers that ramp up over turns instead of being nothing for several turns and then the big effect.
So like a maelstrom spell. The second round reduces movement speed of enemies, the third round does small damage, the third round immobilizes, the fourth round does big damage.
You can tweak a lot of variables there to make it tactically interesting. How many rounds before the first effect. How good are the intermediate effects. Consequences of being interrupted. Choices to make mid-channel. It could be a very cool way of doing spellcasters and it doesn’t need to be per-rest at all.
Spells that need a longer out of combat prep time would also be interesting, like your magical trebuchet.
Honestly if I was going to do a dnd-like game, sorcerers would be like my ramp up and wizards would be like your trebuchet. Wizards would be bad if they were surprised but they could build very specific spells ahead of time.
It sounds like the MCDM RPG will have abilities that charge up over the course of a battle, which kind of reminds me of your idea. It might be a good one, can’t wait to see how the playtests go.
MCDM RPG
I don’t think I’m familiar with this one. This one? https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mcdm-productions/mcdm-rpg
Yup! He had a video where he described some basic mechanics it will have, including one where classes will gain their resources over time as the battle continues - making players ramp up as the battle goes on. It seems to me like a clever way of letting them nova on big bosses and stuff, while theoretically the smaller encounters wouldn’t go long enough to do so, saving the drama for more appropriate battles.
Those abilities would not be able to be used outside of combat then.
Then you have casters blowing max slot every fight and trivializing them.
Abilities that are too powerful for that should either not exist or require significant preparation
Then you’re going to have boring spells that do damage akin to cantrips. No one wants homogenization.
I absolutely do want mechanical homogenization. Interesting variants can be handled with flavor without forcing everyone to learn completely new rules for every ability. The existence of generic rule systems (e.g. Savage Worlds) proves I am not alone with that view.
Cool. And that exists in that game. But that’s not the core of dnd.
It was my impression that we are at this point discussing (rp)game design in general, not specifically D&D. If your context was D&D specifically, that explains a lot of the disagreement between us.
I really like where D&D’s at, since it has multiple classes at every point along the “at will” to “once per day” spectrum, so players can pick what they like. D&D 4e tried homogenizing everyone into having mostly “at will” powers and players (myself included) hated it.
Agreed about not liking that D&D sucks all the air out of the room, though.
Unpopularly, me and my friends actually enjoyed 4e and I’ll probably start up a campaign again sometime soon… But I can see how it could be perceived as more of a boardgame-resource-managing type of game.
But oh well if we enjoy ourselves, why not?
We played like 3 sessions and didn’t like it, but I’ve been thinking about trying it again soon to give it another try. The trick is to find players who want to play with me who aren’t like “Eewww 4th edition”.
It’s funny how there are so many people that are like “ew 4th edition”, but there are also many threads where people propose fixes for 5e that reinvent 4th edition.
Yes, that can be the trick. Luckily, back then I worked with new, Dutch players, who didn’t know anything about 4e or its controversy in the first place.
NGL if you take out what’s left of the resources in 5e you’ll reduce the game to exclusively standing in front of the enemy taking turns hitting each other, instead of just mostly.
The truth is if you want a resourceless game you’re gonna have to play a different system, and if you’re gonna play a different system you’re gonna have to run it. Luckily, it’s very easy to get groups for new systems, because you just tell the 5e players it’s D&D and they probably won’t even notice the rules changed.
I’d love to play other systems. My weekly group finally agreed to try other things on the regular, and so far everyone has really enjoyed it. I think the core engine is called Year Zero? Honestly the guy running it maybe did a smart thing by giving the group a short Google doc with the rules summarized instead of the actual rule book. Getting players to read is embarrassing difficult.
Also, are you me? Because I have often half jokingly said that you could just change from 5e to another system and the average player wouldn’t notice because they’re so bad at the rules anyway.
I’m slightly joking, but it’s a lot less than half. My respect for 5e players took a massive nosedive after I actually played it, so I have run a few oneshots that have started with “oh by the way we’re using Pathfinder 2e tonight” because I just told the 5e players we were playing “D&D”.
If you like large power scales and epic stories I very much recommend Earthdawn.
Sounds like you want to be a thief, a fighter, or a warlock that casts Eldridtch Blast all day.
Someone else said similar in here, but as I said to them: that wouldn’t really solve the problem. Someone’s probably going to play a long-rest class, and the game will still have to be centered on that cadence.
Though a game of no long rest classes does sound pretty good. Fighter, rogue, warlock… different warlock? Pinning everything to short rests I think would work much better for how people actually want to play.
That aside, there’s a whole universe of other ways to balance games than per-rest. DND mostly just has the one and frankly I don’t enjoy it.
ELDRITCH BLAST
Guidance would also fit well.
I prefer the Warhammer Fantasy approach: if you can use magic, it’s at will as many times as you want it, but it can fail and, more importantly, backfire spectacularly.
Also, that DnD5 made cantrips scale up in power with player level is something I enjoyed at first, but the more I think about it, the less I like it. Especially when you can make a whatever 19 / warlock 1 and throw 4x 1d10 attacks at very long range at will.
Another system that does it well imo is Shadowrun. In 5th edition (never played the others) when you cast a spell you can take mental damage. If you cast the spell on a weak level you are fine but if you go full-out then you can KO yourself pretty quick. Especially if you roll bad on your damage resist roll.
In Shadowrun 5, you can take physical damage if you cast the spell at a powerful enough level.
5e is still balanced because of the opportunity cost. If you grab that 1 level in warlock, you’ll never get the level 20 perks of your main class. If you pick up that 1 warlock level when you’re around level 5 it means you’re postponing your next main class power spike by a whole level. The rewards have to be somewhat worth taking because of what you’re losing.
And to be fair, none of the official campaigns even play at level 20. It may sound OP doing that much damage at will but you’re missing the context. Your enemies at level 20 are basically going to be literal gods. You’re going to be playing a homebrewed campaign. Your DM has many tools available to make your level 20 cantrip balanced, not least of which is just scaling up the enemy HP.
I will take all the passive abilities please, I already have 5 hot keys assigned and will never remember anymore.
Yeah. I feel like as things keep changing, I’m growing less fond of TTRPG’s that are pure battles of attrition. It’s nice to have things you can use at will. Or if there is a limited resource, having a way to regain some of that resource on the fly makes for more dynamic game states.
PC Warlock (A): I finish my turn, open the door and take a short rest."
Me (GM): So you what, slump against the wall and take a nap?
PC Warlock (A): “Effectively.”
Me (GM): “You can clearly see an armored bandit in the next room, along with three skeleton archers and another set at the far wall.”
PC Warlock (A): “Can they reach me on this turn?”
Me (GM): “No?”
PC Warlock (A): “Can they hit me with a ranged attack, this turn?”
Me (GM): “Also no”
PC Warlock (A): “Short rest.”
Short rests take an entire hour though.
Those things don’t translate well to boardgame mechanics.
In my current 5e game, I have some items that have soft limits on how often you can use them, in that each time you use them you make a con save or gain a level of exhaustion, and the dc increases as you use them more, and the dc resets when you finish a long rest without any exhaustion.
What’s a good example of an item like that?
Not an item, but a barbarian’s relentless rage
There’s one that lets a player make up to 6 extra attacks when they take the attack action(declaring the number of extra attacks first), but after each attack they make the con save, and the dc starts at 10 and increases by 2 each time. I also had another one that allows for casting of spells up to 6th level without spending spell slots, with a number of saves equal to the level of the spell
I really dislike “per day” resource management, it really limits the way in which stories are constructed!
Same here, I’m always debating with myself:
“Should I use this? Should I save it for later? I’ll save it.”
Then I never use it…
Use it the first time it’s needed. Always use it. As a DM I often expect people to use their stuff. Besides, having low resources makes for interesting decisions. And the DM will know if you’re all out of resources anyways.
Disagree. If the party just uses Fly to get over the cliff instead of coming up with an interesting solution, that’s kind of boring. It also makes it harder for non-casters to shine.
Second, I don’t really like when the world scales with the party. The DM changing the world because the wizard blew all his slots stupidly feels bad. Why even have the choice of spending resources over a long period if everything is just going to scale with us?
Also it kind of sucks when you do get to the big boss and the wizard is tapped out because he’s been real loose with his slots
That’s exactly what fly is for. Level 10 parties aren’t challenged by simple terrain.
Also it’s a game. Your can run yours preplanned or improvised as much as you and your players like.
Barely making it through is more fun than casually strolling through
As a DM I usually make things to utilize my parties resources to the fullest so when they decide to hoard abilities and not use them it usually makes things harder than it has to be
Today my party will be encountering a creature with an aura of silence (like the spell but a bigger area) which will basically put half the party on survival duty (managing the layout of the encounter) while the other half are on combat duty (as they’re the only ones able to do damage)
It’s going to be rough but some encounters I make primarily focus on the abilities of some party members over others and it shifts about for who that is
Hell a few weeks ago I had an encounter where no one was very effective and it was super intense where a party member jumped in front of another shielding them and keeping them alive for the remainder of the fight even though they knew it would probably put them into death saves (didn’t by 2hp)
Basically what I’m saying is that sometimes the best tool for a power fantasy is having powerless moments, it helps to make the world more alive and encourages out of the box thinking
Barely making it through is more fun than casually strolling through
The way D&D is designed, you’ll very often stroll through the first couple encounters of the day. You have way more resources than you need to handle them, since a medium encounter is only designed to take like 1/6th out of you. The last fight or two in the adventuring day might be extra tense, but you have to do some filler first. I don’t like that. I’d rather have all the conflicts be meaningful.
Now, in 5e you could just run all deadly encounters, but this quickly creates several problems. Short-rest and no-rest classes don’t get to shine, for one thing. Secondly, if you’re doing a lot of long rests you can’t really have time sensitive plots.
You could instead run a different rules system that has the desired feel from the start instead of putting the round peg in the square hole. But as I said elsewhere in the thread, D&D is so mega popular it sucks all the air out of the room. It’s hard to find players for other games. Hard to find community discussion for other games. Plus, if you take someone who’s only ever played D&D and plop them into another kind of game, that’s often a difficult transition.
Could you recommend a few other systems to me to take a look at? I am interested in finding new ways to play :)
I posted some off the cuff answers elsewhere in this post: https://ttrpg.network/comment/3849752
But that was specific about the rest thing.
Fate is my game crush. It’s a general purpose RPG. And i know some people cram DND into any setting but it usually doesn’t work great. Fate is actually designed to work for any setting.
It’s very open and honestly I think requires more engagement from the players. If you have a bunch of wallflowers who look at their phone and then just say “I attack” on their turn, fate isn’t going to go well.
But if you have good players it can be fantastic.
The core of the game is “Aspects”. They’re free form short phrases about your character. “Fresh Faced Wizard”, “Last Knight of the Silver Shield”, “Royal Accountant”, or whatever. Those inform what your character can do, and you can invoke them to get a bonus on rolls.
The dice system is also more to my taste. It’s a fixed dice pool, so you tend to roll average results more than outliers. 1d20 means every outcome on the die is equally likely. I kind of hate that.
It also has better rules for succeeding at a cost. DND just doesn’t have any rules for that. The DM can handwaive something but it’s not codified at all.
It encourages anymore writer’s room approach where players are encouraged to add to the story. More than just being zeroed in on their character. Some people hate this. I like it.
I could go on, but I’m on my phone and supposed to be working. Fate is really cool though.
The world of darkness / Chronicles of darkness games are also very good. I like cofd more but I think that’s uncommon. Very clean dice system. Honestly could do fantasy with it without much changes.
I like that stats and health are pretty tightly constrained. You know that on average a person has 7 health. So you can be pretty sure that if you have a hammer that does two damage, and your dice pool gives you on average two hits, you’ll probably take them out of the fight pretty quick. Compare with DND where that bandit might have 8 HP or 20 or 40. There’s not really a way to gauge what you’re dealing with. Some people like it. It feels bad to me. Like the worst kind of video game where the red goblins have twice the hp as the green ones just-because.
The rules for supernaturals are also pretty good. Mage just blows DND magic out of the water with the flexibility and depth.
There’s also blades in the dark and related powered by the apocalypse games. They’re popular. They have a pretty simple but effective dice pool system. I’m not a huge fan but they’re worth checking out.
I could go on but I really should go back to work. Been fussing with this between tasks all day, heh.
Thank you very much for the detailed information. Fate looks really interesting but also a little bit intimidating. I will have to read up on it. Thanks again!
Switch to an in-universe time length.
‘This spell recharges at the next dawn, as long you have fleemed the scrabinator.’
‘This spell can be recharged by having a really good meal with your closest friends.’
‘To recharge this spell, you must sacrifice a male hare on an alter to your god under the full moon.’
This provides a sub-task that the caster is motivated to reach for, which helps with RP and moving the story along.
I’ve had electric magic items that recharge after getting hit by electric damage.
This is how most magic works in Unknown Armies, by the way. That game is fantastic and just drips with flavor and insight (2nd edition anyway. I haven’t read 3rd)
If your book mage wants to charge up, he has to go find some rare valuable books and add them to his collection. If the chaos mage wants a charge, she has to start taking some risks. You can do some crazy things with a major charge, but getting one is probably work. Or win Russian roulette if you’re a chaos mage.
In practice it can be difficult with a large group where everyone has their own obsession. It provides good down time options and plot hooks, though.
The biggest mistake I made with the Cleric I play in my current session is that I do have Guiding Bolt, a 1st level spell dealing 4d6 radiant damage with a spell attack, but not Word of Radiance, which deals 1d6 radiant damage against anyone whom I want to cast it on as a cantrip, or Sacred Flame, which does 1d8 radiant against a specific target, also as a cantrip. I’m pretty much going into my upcoming boss fight against a (presumed) vampire going “I want y’all to pin down and/or restrain the fucker, 'cause I get only one shot at this and I want to make it count.”
I’m on the complete other side of the meme, give my wizards crossbows and Locate-City bombs, please
Fun fact: At my table I ruled Primeval Awareness to be a “use per day equal to proficiency modifier” rather than spell slots (there’s more to our change but that’s the TLDR version)
It was so damn expensive that the ranger at the table never used it before I made the ruling because, “that’s way too expensive for so little use,” which I agreed with
Currently we’re still testing the new version of it but we’re liking it so far, it’s still open for tinkering before we “add it to the rules board” but it’s soon going to be put there at this rate
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It’s less about increasing the uses and more about allowing them to keep their spells and still use it
I once made a sorcerer that used nothing but Prestidigitation along with a super high deception skill to be like the Chris Angel of Faerun because it’s a cantrip and I never run out of casts for it like I would with real spells.
“I cast prestidigitation as I shout ‘fireball’ and turn my wand into a sparkler.”
“The kobolds piss themselves and run away.”
There’s a good reason for the going for the last one: Opportunity Cost.
If you’re in a situation and have an ability that can only be used once a day, you can never really know if this encounter will be the optimal use. So you hold off on it and thus get less utility. Even if you are regularly using it, having something you can always get utility out of is far more valuable than something that is strong but wasted sometimes.
If I can get wish, I will get wish.
I thought that before I started playing, but since then I have leaned further towards the first two.
Prestidigitates freely
