The Five-Minute Workday
I love to see that the D&D Next crew is taking a look at the tropes of D&D from both sides, especially as Mike tackles the five-minute workday.
Mike summarizes it pretty well:
The mind-blowing part of that to me is “leaving to rest.” What kind of dungeon complex just lets you wander back out? Why haven’t they made plans to stop you when you come back in? And if you rest in the dungeon, how are you not discovered in the middle of the night?
The solution that the D&D team appears to be currently exploring is that of tweaking: making a rest worth just enough that you only want to take one ever so often. It’s a strangely high-level approach.
As usual I tried to look at how other games deal with the gating of abilities based on recuperation time, but I couldn’t really find any that were dealing with it the way D&D does. A Burning Wheel spell might sap your strength, which you recover over time, but it’s not in such a time correlation as D&D’s “you need X time and you get Y spells.” Many games have a similar cycle, but few of them share the five-minute adventuring day.
I think the root issue might be that the designers are attacking this on such a high level, and through only one avenue. They’re presuming that there’s a set amount adventurers should be able to get done in a day, more or less, and designing back from that. The resulting system isn’t fictionally-rooted, but it’s mathematically solid. Which, to me, sounds like a great recipe for a boardgame.
So much of the weirdness of spells and five-minute days comes from designing for effect. A world where wizards a) have only so many spells per day, b) get those spells back by resting, and c) can go to and from the site of an adventure at will leads to wizards who go, fire all their spells, and make it back for brunch. This isn’t a broken design, it’s just a design that doesn’t match up with the world the designers (and presumably enough players to make the five-minute adventuring day a trope) imagined.
What kind of world would have a longer adventuring day?
- A world where the number of spells a wizard has is slightly unpredictable, leading to pushing your lock
- A world where stopping to make camp is not an easy choice to make
- A world where spells aren’t limited per day, but instead on something else
There are many other worlds that lead to the same thing. To me, the world that’s dangerous enough you don’t always want to make camp in it is the easiest to establish while still keeping the D&D tropes; it’s particularly true to early D&D.
The five-minute day, like healing, is a side-effect of D&D growing from a game that meticulously tracked time to one that cares only about time in combat. In Moldvay making camp is a tense decision that requires certain planning and invites particular risk. In that climate there is no five-minute adventuring day because no sane adventurer would stay in one place longer than they must and risk another encounter.
It’s a little sad to see the solution to the five-minute day be “a crystal clear guideline on how many rounds of combat a group should tackle before resting.” It’s a high-level solution, almost a metagame one. It’s a fine solution for that type of game, and I like it for that, but with D&D Next trying to be so many things it’s a tough fit, based on what we know of the design so far.
“…a crystal clear guideline on how many rounds of combat a group should tackle before resting” sounds like the most boring thing ever.
The last thing D&D Next needs are more systems divorced from the specific fictional circumstances of play. These kind of lifeless “solutions” are the reason for the five-minute workday in the first place. What, the fix is now the 16-round workday? Bleh. Terrible.
Yeah, pretty much. The solution to the five-minute workday is to specify a workday longer than five minutes, not to create an engaging consistent world where adventurers naturally want to do more than five minutes of work.
The way John Harper has tackled this problem in Agon is worth a look. The GM has a fixed pool of “strife” points to create the obstacles and encounters, and gain a certain amount of extra points when the players decide to call an interlude to rest and heal. Then the GM can use this extra points to add new obstacles or raise the difficulty of certain conflict. This certainly can be simply applied to D&D.
For sure! The Marvel RPG does some similar stuff, as does Mouse Guard and a lot of other games. There are many solutions depending on how you look at the problem.
Agon and Marvel look at it more or less as a story issue: how much more bad stuff should happen?
Mouse Guard views it more as an in-character issue: how many more things can go wrong?/how much trouble are we in?
(Also, funny side note: the John who commented up thread is that John Harper.)
Funny indeed!
Great occasion for me to thank him for the beautiful game that Agon is!
Sage, do you know if Mike Mearls reads your blog ?
I have no clue if Mike reads this! We’ve met once or twice, I hear he’s read Dungeon World, and we have some mutual friends. But no idea if he reads these.
If he does it might actually be a bit awkward. I stand by everything I say here, but I’d rather say it over a beer in a two-sided conversation.
Looks like it’s a solution in search of a problem. All versions of D&D, up to and including 3e, already had the solution: random encounters. They ARE part of the game, and if nobody cared to use them, it’s the fault of many DMs, not of the game, where they are clearly described. Many fault 3e for having created this problem, but it’s described in crystal clear terms in the 3e DMG that random encounters are part of the game.
Yup, Random Encounters are one of the classic time pressures. So long as there’s a time pressure so that sitting down for 12 hours isn’t an obvious choice the 5 minute work day just doesn’t occur.