Ki points should be per-encounter.
But I really really want to kill the “adventuring day” dead. I think a lot of players would have significantly more fun if it wasn’t the core of DND.
The “adventuring day” is a relic of times when your entire campaign was exploring a megadungeon and you ran from one encounter to another, back to back, all night long. But barely anybody runs their game like that these days and the rules just never caught up with reality. Some people suggest having a constant time pressure on the party limiting long rests, and while it can work, it also puts a straitjacket on your story pacing where balance flies out the window if you ever let up on the pressure. “Guys, the apocalypse is merely hours away” quickly gets old when it’s been that way for months.
Well, that and 99% of the rules involve fighting or exploring. Anything the rulebooks have to say on social interaction boils down to “well, you just talk to the DM, and sometimes they might have you roll a d20, just figure something out”. D&D isn’t really so much a role-playing game as it is a weird dungeon-crawling boardgame with some role-play elements. Sadly, people are allergic to trying new systems so instead they’ll just try to bodge the one big-name king of TTRPGs, D&D, into doing things it was never built for, forever leaving them wondering why driving in screws with a hammer isn’t as fun as they expected.
Do you mean so it was balanced around encounters instead of rests? If so, yes please
Widely believed? First I’ve ever heard of it. Do people not short rest or just run through all their resources in the first two rounds of combat?
Yes, the modern style of play is 1-3 encounters per day with 0-1 short rests. No more dungeons, go nova on every encounter
I can understand strongly limiting long rests. Letting players long rest between every encounter makes difficulty non-existent. Short rests though… classes that get resources back on short rests are balanced around the fact that they’ll likely get them frequently.
It’s a big reason for why martials are losing relevance. If everyone’s going nova all the time then consistent damage per turn can’t keep up
This blew my fucking mind when I learned this.
Nothing about the game’s precarious balance works well if you don’t follow the adventuring day.
I push my players to the limit before they can take a long rest. If you blow your spell slots on stupid shit, you’re probably going to wipe later. If you take five days to find the lost children, they’ll be long eaten.
“Do you want to play a game that’s not a resource management game at its core?” “No we like DND”
I need to stop playing DND.
Back when I played D&D I followed the adventuring day except for during overland travel. The key thing is that not all encounters are combat. A riddle door, a trap, and a stubborn NPC are all encounters and the game is designed for you to include those too. I see kids these days saying 7 combats in a day is too much and I’m like “I agree, you don’t understand the adventuring day”. Instead of trying to learn, kids these days just ignore everything except combat and then complain combat is too slow
Yes, that’s true the advice is 6-8 medium “encounters” which aren’t usually fights. But D&D is kind of bad at codifying costs of non-combat encounters. It doesn’t have progress clocks so trade-offs like “let’s go around the gorge instead of using Fly” aren’t mechanically represented very well. It has shit for social rules so it’s hard to do a social encounter that taxes resources. It can be done, of course, but the rules aren’t really helping much.
I think some people also confuse “per day” with “per session”. I’ve had multiple people tell me there’s no way they can do six combats in a three hour session, and I’m like what are you even talking about. One in-game day can go many sessions. Some people even give their players a long rest at the start of the session automatically!
Some people even give their players a long rest at the start of the session automatically!
Bloody hell, no wonder you see so many posts and maymays about the game being broken, none of these chumps even know how to play!
Yup, it’s so hard to make resource expending non-combat encounters without effectively sidelining some of the party members. If you build an encounter that effectively requires spell slot expenditure, the martials are basically relegated to an audience position. And if you build an encounter where spell slot use isn’t absolutely necessary, the party will try every imaginable way of conquering it without using up resources first, defeating the whole point of forcing resource expenditure.
I guess one key part of this issue is that generally speaking, caster resources (slots) have universal uses in combat, exploration and social interactions, whereas martial resources only ever have combat applications. This, in presence of resource expending non-combat encounters, kind of creates a situation where your choice of caster or martial decides whether you want to participate in the game the entire time or just half of it.
Yeah, that is so frustrating as somebody who plays a character that requires short rests. Our sorcerer throws out her 5th level spells every encounter and I have 2 spell slots as a warlock…
Hear me out:
Double the number of Ki points. Double the cost of Stunning Strike.
The only resources a monk needs are his fists and feet. 🥊🦵
Doesn’t help if those deal less damage than a regular weapon.
That’s why you get to attack twice right off the bat, but only without a weapon.
I think ki points should be wisdom modifier + proficiency bonus.
