Fivey: The Adventuring Day

Oh geez.

So I’ve been reconsidering the scheme I laid out in my earlier Fivey post about character builds, where each feat is part of an action economy and you spend # feat points per day on whichever feat you want to use. Now it feels kind of overly restrictive because every feat exists on the same scope as every other scope, and each one has to make sense with spending a token. Giving a character 1 feat per level plus 1 is enough; does it need really the additional scaffolding? But that's just what got me thinking.

Something I realized is actually kinda neat is Fifth Edition’s own economy of short and long rests. Short rests (1 hour of chill time) are typically between encounters while long rests (8 hours of sleep time) are typically between sessions, and characters have features which refresh on one or the other cycle. Typically, spellcasting characters have to manage their spell slots throughout the course of a day (i.e. between long rests), while non-casters have powers which they use typically once per encounter (i.e. between short rests). The intended outcome is that non-casters have less powerful powers which they can use consistently, whereas spellcasters have more powerful powers which they must spend stringently. It's variety. It's strategy. We love it.

As many people have tried and would tell you, it doesn’t really work out that way most of the time. The default rest durations make two grand assumptions: (1) that the length of a session is 1 day long in the game world, and (2) there will be something like 6-8 combat encounters each session (hence, “the adventuring day”). Neither one of these assumptions hold up in practice, since often multiple in-game days pass within a single play session, and rarely do we participate in more than two encounters during that time. As a result, spellcasters will always have enough spell slots to do their thing, outshining non-casters. I was lucky that, in high school, we played 6-hour sessions using the rules as intended; it was only in this context that I couldn’t tell there was an issue!

Let’s think about it in damage output, which is kind of annoying but at least gives us a frame of reference. The ideal scenario is that endurance characters deal D extra damage per encounter due to whatever special abilities they use, and there are E encounters per session. The sprint character needs a per-session output of D × E, except having to manage their powers throughout a session rather than during a single encounter. Let’s fill in these blanks with numbers: say our fighter deals 2d6 damage extra each encounter, and there are 2 encounters in a session. An equivalent spell, cast only once per day, might be dealing 4d6 damage. The fighter is overall less effective but more consistent, whereas the spellcaster is more impactful but more stringent. Notice the difference between this and, if there were 6 assumed encounters per day, the spell dealing 12d6 total damage. Now imagine that, but you only really get to do 2 encounters. 4d6 versus 12d6. That sucks.

I appreciate what my friend Dwiz from the A Knight at the Opera blog has argued in favor of the ‘gritty realism’ variant (and I owe much of my thinking above to him) where a short rest becomes 8 hours long and a long rest becomes 1 week long. It’s often been floated as a solution to the disparity between sprint and endurance characters so to speak. Now, even as multiple days pass throughout the course of the session, or even as multiple sessions pass without a week-long vacation, sprint characters still have to carefully manage their spell slots and similar resources to use them when they count, and endurance characters can actually function as consistent and reliable as they were intended to function.

As Dwiz points out, however, the issue is not with the structure of the “adventuring day” per se as much as that, when the assumption is that 1 session lasts 1 day but really lasts multiple days, the impact is lost. Or, rather, it works great when you have 6-8 encounters between long rests, whether that long rest is 8 hours or 1 week long in the game-world, but it falls apart outside that context. Endurance characters are not going to shine unless sprint characters spread out their special powers over 6-8 encounters. The gritty realism option is certainly more feasible than the default durations, but it feels like a way of reapplying existing rules to a different context rather than recalibrating the rules themselves. What if the rules simply assumed a different number of encounters, per session and/or per game-day? What if I wanted multiple short rests and one long rest per session?

For these reasons, I’m pretty comfortable treating a short rest as 1 hour and a long rest as 8 hours, but only if the expectations for a session (and character math) have been tempered appropriately. It should be assumed that you’re probably going to have 2 encounters per session, sometimes 1, sometimes 3, but something more sensible. Assuming that sprint and endurance characters have the same number of abilities but just refresh them at different rates, the sprint character’s abilities just need to be about twice as powerful as the endurance character’s abilities. Sprint characters basically get lucky if they have only one encounter in a day, and endurance characters get the spotlight if there’s a surprise third encounter when the sprint characters are already tuckered out.

I was going to include a stamina rule as part of this post, so that instead of having X short-rest abilities, you have X points to spend on whichever short-rest abilities you want between short rests. However, that seems besides the point of talking about pacing a session in general.