In addition to the math starting to break down at high levels, DND has a shitty magic system and a shitty recovery system.
A lot of spells are sort of flashy big deal fight enders. Like yeah there’s magic missile but there’s also Sleep. Sleep just ends the fight sometimes. The higher level spells tend to be more problematic.
As players level up, they get more spells per long rest (except warlocks, but more on that in a bit).
The game is allegedly designed around 6-8 medium encounters that slowly wear down your resources.
Most people don’t play like that. They do like one big encounter per rest. Maybe two. Definitely not 6 medium ones and not even four hard ones.
Well now you have your wizard and cleric loaded up with firepower that should take them through six scenes instead using all of them at once. And the other classes that aren’t built around long rest, like fighter warlock rogue monk, all suck in comparison.
It’s not as obvious at low levels when the wizard has like four spell slots. When they have 20? That’s a problem. They can just fireball every round.
It also causes a side problem in the decision space for long rest casters is big, and gets bigger over time. Your average intelligence player can probably manage having six spell slots and 20 options to pick from, maybe. A lot of people will struggle with 20 slots and 200 options. And they will slow down the table with them.
Anyway. You could do more encounters to wear them down but a. Most people don’t want to play that way and b. That’s really bad for pacing.
I see, thanks! Will see how it goes since all players are new and have 0 d&d experience, maybe limiting long rest opportunities could fix that on the short run.
Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.
That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.
All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.
Yeah, house rules like “sanctuary resting” and “gritty realism” are common responses to the problem. They work for some people.
They do not work for people who want to actually use their cool powers.
Like, if your group enjoys the resource management part of the game? Great. These can help. In my experience, most players do not.
Like let’s say a mid level party encounters a group of goblins. Let’s say the players see the goblins before they’re detected.
A lot of players are going to want to go “fireball!” and try to take them all out at once. Because that’s pretty cool, right? But if you’re playing with resource management in mind you have to think about if that’s really the optimal move. If you can sneak past without a fight at all, that’s better. Spends no resources. If you can do it with a lower level slot like invisibility, that’s also better. Save the fireball for a threat that can’t be dealt with with less. Hell, if you can come up with a good strategy to just take them out with tactics and minimal damage, that’s probably better, too.
But most players don’t want to play that kind of strategic thinking. Frankly, most people aren’t especially smart, and they’re not firing at 100% when they’re playing a game for fun.
So the players just want to do their cool powers, but the game’s design is still anchored to “make them count because you might need them later”
If you limit long rests you can help address the problem of the characters having too many resources, but it doesn’t really address the problem that players want to do cool shit. Players want to fireball more, not less
But you can’t really fix this in DND without doing a lot of rules changing. A lot a lot.
And this is one part of why DND kind of sucks. There’s not really a way around it.
It’s worth noting that “Encounter” doesn’t necessarily mean “Combat,” but the 6-8 encounter day is definitely bullshit. I think that framework is held over from very early releases, and if you want an idea of what a 6-8 encounter day would actually play like, Tyranny of Dragons’ “Flames over Greennest” module pushes players to exhaustion with that many encounters before a punishing boss fight that you’re intended to lose, and it’s definitely not fun, especially because those caster classes just do not have the slots to spare at level 1.
It’s clear how SR/LR resources evolved from daily/encounter powers in 4e, and that was a much more elegant way of handling resource expenditure, even if it did make all the classes play kind of the same.
In addition to the math starting to break down at high levels, DND has a shitty magic system and a shitty recovery system.
A lot of spells are sort of flashy big deal fight enders. Like yeah there’s magic missile but there’s also Sleep. Sleep just ends the fight sometimes. The higher level spells tend to be more problematic.
As players level up, they get more spells per long rest (except warlocks, but more on that in a bit).
The game is allegedly designed around 6-8 medium encounters that slowly wear down your resources.
Most people don’t play like that. They do like one big encounter per rest. Maybe two. Definitely not 6 medium ones and not even four hard ones.
Well now you have your wizard and cleric loaded up with firepower that should take them through six scenes instead using all of them at once. And the other classes that aren’t built around long rest, like fighter warlock rogue monk, all suck in comparison.
It’s not as obvious at low levels when the wizard has like four spell slots. When they have 20? That’s a problem. They can just fireball every round.
It also causes a side problem in the decision space for long rest casters is big, and gets bigger over time. Your average intelligence player can probably manage having six spell slots and 20 options to pick from, maybe. A lot of people will struggle with 20 slots and 200 options. And they will slow down the table with them.
Anyway. You could do more encounters to wear them down but a. Most people don’t want to play that way and b. That’s really bad for pacing.
Tldr:
I see, thanks! Will see how it goes since all players are new and have 0 d&d experience, maybe limiting long rest opportunities could fix that on the short run.
Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.
That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.
All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.
Yeah, house rules like “sanctuary resting” and “gritty realism” are common responses to the problem. They work for some people.
They do not work for people who want to actually use their cool powers.
Like, if your group enjoys the resource management part of the game? Great. These can help. In my experience, most players do not.
Like let’s say a mid level party encounters a group of goblins. Let’s say the players see the goblins before they’re detected.
A lot of players are going to want to go “fireball!” and try to take them all out at once. Because that’s pretty cool, right? But if you’re playing with resource management in mind you have to think about if that’s really the optimal move. If you can sneak past without a fight at all, that’s better. Spends no resources. If you can do it with a lower level slot like invisibility, that’s also better. Save the fireball for a threat that can’t be dealt with with less. Hell, if you can come up with a good strategy to just take them out with tactics and minimal damage, that’s probably better, too.
But most players don’t want to play that kind of strategic thinking. Frankly, most people aren’t especially smart, and they’re not firing at 100% when they’re playing a game for fun.
So the players just want to do their cool powers, but the game’s design is still anchored to “make them count because you might need them later”
If you limit long rests you can help address the problem of the characters having too many resources, but it doesn’t really address the problem that players want to do cool shit. Players want to fireball more, not less
But you can’t really fix this in DND without doing a lot of rules changing. A lot a lot.
And this is one part of why DND kind of sucks. There’s not really a way around it.
It’s worth noting that “Encounter” doesn’t necessarily mean “Combat,” but the 6-8 encounter day is definitely bullshit. I think that framework is held over from very early releases, and if you want an idea of what a 6-8 encounter day would actually play like, Tyranny of Dragons’ “Flames over Greennest” module pushes players to exhaustion with that many encounters before a punishing boss fight that you’re intended to lose, and it’s definitely not fun, especially because those caster classes just do not have the slots to spare at level 1.
It’s clear how SR/LR resources evolved from daily/encounter powers in 4e, and that was a much more elegant way of handling resource expenditure, even if it did make all the classes play kind of the same.