Daily Resources in D&D Next

One thing that the new D&D is still struggling with are daily powers and the 5-minute work day. Except now, I think they're making it potentially worse because monks and paladins are joining the ranks of the blast-and-rest group.

I wrote before about one simple fix, which is simply that all of your "daily" resources don't refresh when you rest. But now besides wizards, clerics, druids, rangers, and paladins having a daily amount of spell slots, most classes have additional daily powers:

• channel divinity - clerics & paladins
• wild shape - druids
• ki - monks
• rage - barbarians

So these classes can all suffer from out-of-resources syndrome. Then there's hit dice too, so even fighters and rogues can run out of those.

There are some attempts at fixing this though. Barbarians get another attack-type that they can use all day (get advantage by giving advantage) and wizards as well as druids who focus on spellcasting recover some low-level spell slots after short rests. At-will cantrips also give some options when spending daily resources seem excessive. But this doesn't change the fact that one rest basically replenishes everyone.

The hit die recovery mechanic for long rests is one way to help kill the five-minute work day. Currently you recover all your HP but only half your hit dice. I'm not sure that's the implementation that sings to me, but I like it. You don't get all your resources back. Now if they can apply this to spells and other daily features, that'd be great. Of course, there's really no reason that all of these things need to be different resources, they're all basically "spell slots". I'm not sure why wild shape can't be a set of druid spells (with wild-shape focused druids getting more of them and fewer other spells), or even turn undead could be a simple cleric/paladin spell.

Second Edition (and before?) had some version of this where, by the book, you needed a lot more time to memorize powerful spells. So you might have to really choose what to regain when you're resting during an adventure.

One objection to worrying about this is that the DM's responsibility is to ensure that games move along and to enforce plot-based reasons to avoid this problem entirely. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this point. I've rarely encountered this in games that I've played in or ran. However, a well-crafted game should ensure that most DMs won't find this well-known problem to be a problem.

Basically, resting should still be a reasonable option: you're trading time for some resources. The problem is when all your resources return with too little time spent. A simple mechanic would just be regain half your spent resources (round up).

That might be too simplistic though for the current set of rules. For spells, maybe you regain slots top-down so you do regain most of your big guns, but maybe not all the little ones (or go bottom-up so that you really have to think before using those big guns). But then with wild-shape, channel divinity, rage, and ki... you've got so little that it seems like maybe you should just regain one less than your maximum (minimum 1, I guess), so if you're 100% spent you still get most of your mojo back.

If I ran the show, I'd make all the daily points (spells, monk/psionic ki points, berserker rage, etc.) one system and then have a simple way for daily stuff to be recovered to around 75% capacity. Or, well, at least I'd heavily consider this, easier to apply an optional get-all-your-shit-back rule or grittier recover-slower rule and have the five-minute work day addressed in the base.

Days and time in RPGs

There's a lot of hullabaloo going around these days about daily powers in RPGs. Now, of course, this is focused on D&D Next, but it really has a broader impact than that. Its hard to say if the hatred for daily powers is even a matter of play style or simulation versus narration, because what does a daily power represent? This is the whole five minute work day issue, but also ties into the quadratic wizards, linear fighters issue. I'll try to focus here on the five-minute workday though. I think the issue is slightly odd day-based game-design in a game where days aren't the right time frame. I've talked about this before, but mostly in the context of healing. I want to focus on daily powers here.

First, Daily powers have a long history in D&D. The magic system, of course, has daily re-charges. But the paladin, monk, and many classes from Oriental Adventures all use the game day as a unit of rest. Daily power refreshing is a stable of D&D, but does it have to be? Does a daily refresh lead to a five-minute workday?

Even in the early days of D&D, spells weren't quite "daily". There was an extensive spell memorization requirement. It took 15 minutes per spell level to memorize a spell. So a low level magic user might study her spell book for an hour or two, but a high level magic user might literally take days to memorize her full allotment of spells. To be precise, that's six hours for a seventh level magic user to memorize all her spells, sixteen and a half hours for a 12th level magic user, and almost 35 hours of study for a 20th level magic user. Surely if you followed these rules in first edition, a party can't just "go nova", rest for a day, and then return to cast its way through the next level of the dungeon. Five minute work day? Not exactly.

Overcoming the D&D 15-minute workday

The Heroes of the Lance didn't have a 15-minute workday.

One of the often cited problems of the magic system in D&D (along with many class powers) is that it suggests that adventurers should use all their powers to solve their problems, wait a day to regain them, and do it again. In my experience with D&D, we rarely had this sort of problem, though occasionally there were discussions about waiting another day to regain spells and such. This is generally a problem of thinking about the resources over the story, but I can see how it could really be a major problem for certain players.

A further complication with this problem is that it means some types of adventures (i.e. journeys) might be played completely differently than short delves or investigations. Part of this, in 3.5 and 4e where map-and-mini combats are the norm, means that DMs are less inclined to have many encounters a day during wilderness treks (or just star-wipe to the dungeon's entrance and skip the journey altogether) because of the set-up involved. But adventures based on longer units of time will have this issue.

I think there are a few ways to alleviate this problem, but not all of them are equally good: