Quote from: Azure Lord;561030So fuck 'em.  I'd like a D&D that feels and plays like D&D.  They can stick with 4e.

That's encapsulates why D&D5e is doomed to fail.

Regarding the "15 minutes adventuring day", I started DMing at 14 years old and I found the concept baffling even then.

A party charges into a goblin cave, cleans out the first three rooms and then "returns home to rest etc."

?

In the best of cases they can expect, the second time around, traps, ambushes, barricades, the help of a nearby tribe, maybe an ogre, all of the above.

In the worst of cases, the goblins rally all the tribes in the area and launch a retaliatory attack against "the homely PCs' village" that razes it to the ground.

Imagine when the PC open a long lost crypt, look inside, see a powerful undead, and decide "to go back to town and rest". If they are lucky, they are lynched directly by the town population. If they aren't, they are beaten to near death by the villagers and offered to the undead as a "we are sorry, here are the molesters, please leave us alone" gesture.

I can totally imagine the raid that took out Bin-laden played in D&D: "After neutralizing the perimeter guards, the US Spec Ops return home to rest and rearm. Tomorrow they will try for the main compound and Binny himself. Here is Mike Mearls, reporting for CNN..." :rolleyes:

My group is of course in the middle of the Castle Delve campaign.  They recently took a month off to train up a couple of characters.

In the interim, a group of gnolls set up a "gnollbooth" ( ) on the way to the castle, and manned it (gnolled it?) with about 20 of their kin.  It was a small wooden palisade.  They also captured travelers and sent the stronger ones to Castle Delve, which the bulk of their force (60+) were now working on reinforcing and making their own, after making deals with the creatures in the upper levels.  

The party only just managed to overcome the lot at the palisade, and have now arrived (after going back to town to drop off characters that'd been taken to death's door during the fray at the palisade fort) at Castle Delve to find it undergoing repairs by the gnoll's slaves, and must now cope with them, the reinforced upper works, and then they can reenter the dungeons...

SHIT DOES NOT JUST NOT HAPPEN OVER THE COURSE OF A MONTH even if that month is only thirty or forty minutes of actual play time!

Quote from: thedungeondelver;561179SHIT DOES NOT JUST NOT HAPPEN OVER THE COURSE OF A MONTH even if that month is only thirty or forty minutes of actual play time!

Again with this logic thing. You sure you're playing the game correctly?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;561179SHIT DOES NOT JUST NOT HAPPEN OVER THE COURSE OF A MONTH even if that month is only thirty or forty minutes of actual play time!

Quote from: Exploderwizard;561162Have you actually ever read or played AD&D ?

Have you ever had an original thought?

Quote from: Benoist;561124I know. You are actually dumb and don't understand the post. It's cool.

Encounter... You know those things that deplete resources.  They aint talking about some random roll 26-45 Uncertain but 55% prone toward negative
on a chart where the group "encounters" a dead dog that the group, in actual play, spends the next 35 minutes poking with a stick.

Quote from: Benoist;561124And that's basically nonsense that doesn't refute anything I have said.

Well done. You just proved you are a moron talking out of his ass.

Again.

Lets see this BS you be spewing.
Encounters, Combat, and Initiative
4 paragraphs talking about 1minute round length and well nothing else.  verbose though.
then "encounter" sequence
Onto surprise..and well that's it?  Where is all this
"The center-piece of game play in 1e is the "milieu", which means the game world, the set up of the environment, and more specifically as it relates to adventuring, the dungeon and wilderness (and through them, the maps that represent them). The encounter in a 1e sense, in this context, is an organic component of game play that is not planned in advance but occurs as the group proceeds and explores the environment (cf. Encounters, combat and initiative, 1e DMG, p.61). It's the 'encounter' as the actual, common English word implies (i.e. an unexpected meeting of different parties).[/I"
at in Encounters, Combat, and Initiative?

Quote from: Reckall;561175A party charges into a goblin cave, cleans out the first three rooms and then "returns home to rest etc."

?

In the best of cases they can expect, the second time around, traps, ambushes, barricades, the help of a nearby tribe, maybe an ogre, all of the above.

In the worst of cases, the goblins rally all the tribes in the area and launch a retaliatory attack against "the homely PCs' village" that razes it to the ground.

I'm curious what your standard was.  Do your PCs always take out an entire dungeon in a single day?  

In my experience, we'd almost always have to stop at some point in the middle of a dungeon adventure to rest and recharge spells - generally multiple times unless it was a really short module.  It wasn't typically after three rooms, but that wasn't unheard of.  One possible difference is that we tried to keep reserves.  i.e. We would stop and go on the defensive well before we were drained of nearly all our hit points and spells.  

It seems to me that this breaks down into competing strategies.  The "blitzkrieg" strategy means you charge in and don't stop until the other side is wiped out.  The "commando raid" strategy is to engage in a battle of attrition - wipe out a few, and then go on the defensive until you recharge.  

The blitzkrieg approach works best against an enemy unprepared for violence.  If the monsters of the dungeon have been living peacefully, and have no fortifications or guards or traps - then the blitzkrieg is good for taking them out before they have a chance to prepare and become dangerous.  On the other hand, if the enemy are prepared or are simply too numerous, then the blitzkrieg can get you killed.  The commando raid approach is better for dealing with either unintelligent and/or disorganized enemies; or conversely enemies who are already organized and prepared.  

Both of these have their strengths and weaknesses, but unless I have reliable information about the opposing forces, I would choose the commando raid approach as being less risky.

Quote from: Sommerjon;561093I think there is like a spell or two that easily gets around this idea.

Then don't do that.

Nobody is forcing you to use those spells to play the game a stupid way.

Quote from: jhkim;561189I'm curious what your standard was.  Do your PCs always take out an entire dungeon in a single day?  

In my experience, we'd almost always have to stop at some point in the middle of a dungeon adventure to rest and recharge spells - generally multiple times unless it was a really short module.  It wasn't typically after three rooms, but that wasn't unheard of.  One possible difference is that we tried to keep reserves.  i.e. We would stop and go on the defensive well before we were drained of nearly all our hit points and spells.  

It seems to me that this breaks down into competing strategies.  The "blitzkrieg" strategy means you charge in and don't stop until the other side is wiped out.  The "commando raid" strategy is to engage in a battle of attrition - wipe out a few, and then go on the defensive until you recharge.  

The blitzkrieg approach works best against an enemy unprepared for violence.  If the monsters of the dungeon have been living peacefully, and have no fortifications or guards or traps - then the blitzkrieg is good for taking them out before they have a chance to prepare and become dangerous.  On the other hand, if the enemy are prepared or are simply too numerous, then the blitzkrieg can get you killed.  The commando raid approach is better for dealing with either unintelligent and/or disorganized enemies; or conversely enemies who are already organized and prepared.  

Both of these have their strengths and weaknesses, but unless I have reliable information about the opposing forces, I would choose the commando raid approach as being less risky.

I think there's nothing wrong at all with engaging in a hit-and-run campaign against the local goblin lair or whatever. In fact, it could be cool. The thing is, in a reactive world, the hit-and-run campaign would require strategy and tactics to be a step ahead of the goblins as they try to deal with the incursions.

From what I'm hearing, games where the 15 minute workday is ubiquitous tend to assume that some sort of magic "pause" button is hit when the PCs decide to bug out and regroup/replenish. It's that kind of thinking that leads to "Well, why not use up all our resources on the first enemy we meet?"

Quote from: Dimitrios;561198From what I'm hearing, games where the 15 minute workday is ubiquitous tend to assume that some sort of magic "pause" button is hit when the PCs decide to bug out and regroup/replenish. It's that kind of thinking that leads to "Well, why not use up all our resources on the first enemy we meet?"

I think this is a natural product of how dungeons are typically designed and prepared.  From very early on in D&D, most dungeons were written up as keyed areas.  i.e. When you go into room #4, what you find there is what is in the room #4 description - including monsters.  This preparation implies that the dungeon is generally static - with exceptions as written in.  

This doesn't make a lot of sense, but it is easy to run and can be fun to play.  

I don't mind moving away from this - but what annoys me is DMs who make their monsters become dynamic only because of successful PC strategy.  i.e. If the players blitzkrieg, then the DM keeps the monsters static - so the PCs aren't ambushed by the remaining monsters near the end.  If the player's commando raid, though, then the DM makes the monsters come out of their rooms and organize.

From the earliest days, those dungeons had random encounters.  Heck, in Keep on the Borderlands, it's explicitly spelled out that the monsters may work together.  So I disagree that the dungeons were designed to be static like what we see in early video games.

If I'm not mistaken, from an early date (either the LBBs or AD&D 1e), the rules specifically state that GMs should restock dungeons if the party goes away for any length of time.

Also, Sacrosanct beat me to it re: wandering monsters.

I'm not saying that all dungeons from the start are completely rigidly static with no wandering monsters.  

However, the idea of a mostly-static dungeon isn't purely an invention of rare munchkin players.  An awful lot of dungeon play has proceeded with the default that when you go into room #9, you encounter what is in the room #9 description.

Quote from: jhkim;561218I'm not saying that all dungeons from the start are completely rigidly static with no wandering monsters.  

However, the idea of a mostly-static dungeon isn't purely an invention of rare munchkin players.  An awful lot of dungeon play has proceeded with the default that when you go into room #9, you encounter what is in the room #9 description.

I don't disagree with how people actually played them.  Just that they really weren't necessarily designed that way.

Glad to have you back B.T.

How was your vacation?