In D&D 4e, the major narrative unit is the much-maligned Encounter. Everything that matters in D&D 4e is an encounter – skill challenges, fights, climactic sequences. Anywhere that you’re rolling dice against obstacles to achieve a goal is an encounter. Anything that isn’t an encounter isn’t an encounter. But that made me wonder, why more of these narrative units were not invented in D&D 4e to encompass larger blocks of time.
For example, we all know encounters take place in Adventures. Why wasn’t an “Adventure” made up as a unit of narrative? You could have had rituals with “adventure-long” powers and consequences. You could have had a model of action points kind of like D&D 3.5 did. You had loads, but you had to wait a level to get more if you used all of them. With this model, you could bide your resources across an adventure, allowing you to use more of them or less as the situation requires.
But, time to answer my own question. An adventure, being a longer unit of time than an Encounter which is just a single thing, is a more nebulous idea than an Encounter and thus harder to spell out without sounding draconian about its length, or worse, confusing people as to what it consists of. D&D 4e, as far as encounters are concerned, has always shot for very sharp, precise timings. An encounter is exactly a single fight or a single skill challenge. An encounter, outside of encounters, means exactly 5 minutes. Exactly 2 encounters is a milestone. Exactly 8 hours is an Extended Rest which you can only have exactly 1 of every day (basically) since you have to wait 12 hours for another one.
But how the hell long is an “Adventure”? It could be 4 encounters or 8 or 12 depending on what it is. This timekeeping would rely too much on the DM’s wims, and 4e’s narrative unit structures are all meant to be more precise than that.
But if “Adventure” was a unit of time in D&D 4e, here’s some stuff I’d let it handle:
•Have diseases or injuries that last “adventure-long” but allow Endurance checks to suppress their effects within Encounters. So you could bring back D&D 3.5 Fatigue or something, but when the chips are down, an endurance check can allow you to function nonetheless. Overcoming injury is a cool plot thread in my opinion, as long as it can be overcome. Many disagree. You could even have a much freer way of handling disease and injury – have it be an Adventure-Long Skill Challenge, with each day being one of the checks in the Skill Challenge. When you’re fresh out of an extended rest, roll that skill challenge check for the day. After a few consecutive successes, you are free of the adventure-long injury etc etc.
•Have action point pools that last adventure-long. You can use up to 2 action points within each encounter. At the start of an adventure, each player rolls for action point pools (or the DM rolls once and each person gets that many). You can use action points not only to take extra actions, but to do cool stuff. (You should clearly outline what sorts of cool stuff you allow in your game, by the way, and what sorts you don’t want.) What is rolled to determine action points could vary: I would go with 3d4, so everyone is guaranteed at least 3. Every milestone, players without action points would gain 1 action point as normal. However, if you know an adventure will have less encounters than 8 or 12, you can roll 2d4 or even 1d6.
•Have rituals with “adventure-long” effects, and more of the above-mentioned Adventure-Long Skill Challenges. For example, you can have a war campaign where each day of battle, you roll one check of the Adventure-Long skill challenge. If you seized objectives or performed key tasks (in either diplomacy or battle) then for that day of the war, the party rolls a check, with an appropriate bonus or appropriate penalty (if you failed). This doesn’t take care of all the logistics of such a thing, but it can be a cool and simple way to handle it for DMs that don’t want to figure out more in-depth ways.
An Adventure would have to last quite a number of encounters (this includes skill challenges, and is taken to mean “important scenes” in this context) for these adventure-long rules to not be completely wonky inside it. Look at a published Wizard’s module like Keep On The Shadowfell. Count the number of encounters in it, and you have a ballpark estimate of how many encounters an “Adventure” consist of. The main point though is how far they are spread out – is the adventure one day, two days, a week?
But of course, the beauty is that all of these effects are easy to change if your Adventures are shorter.
Have a short adventure of only 4 encounters? Roll 1d6 action points instead of 3d4. Want an adventure-long skill challenge? Count the days you’ve spread out your encounters and use that to measure the time that each check is made, in half-days (12 hours) or full days. Each half or full day would consist a check depending on the length. Adventure-long rituals would be more nebulous things like blessings or curses, but if your adventure is short, just cut the effect duration so that there’s a chance it can run out at some point.
Overall, I’m kind of excited about this thought, and I’m going to try it in my next game.
EDIT: There was a great comment below by Syrsuro which got me to expand upon this a bit more for a scale of Single-Day adventures. Here is what I wrote below in the comments:
The same concepts here can apply to the Day as a unit of narrative, that is to say, containing the actions that can be done within a day. You just have to downsize things – rather than a war, a battle is what is fought in a day, and you would go with things on an hour by hour scale (or even Encounter by Encounter, since an Encounter’s time is rather nebulous – some skill challenges make absolutely no sense if they are counted in six-second turns for example, even if actual combat works that way well enough.)
Diseases would not work well in a Day, but Poisons can be used instead. As opposed to injuries, like broken arms, you could have shocks or traumas to overcome, again on an encounter by encounter or an hour by hour basis. Skill Challenges are so flexible that having each person have a personal “Overcome Poison/Trauma” skill challenge that happens across a day is perfectly acceptable.
It is an application of the same concepts, but the scope is made smaller to accommodate.
As for Action Points within a Day as opposed to within an Adventure, I would go with 1d6 as my action point roll and use the same rules for recovering at milestones if you have no action points.
Thank you for your question by the way…I would never have thought of applying these concepts to a day without you spurring me to!
For some examples of the different scales:
Encounter: One battle – say, a tavern brawl; or anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or two worth of a prolonged skill challenge.
Day: A very long, climactic event – the battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings (movie version, I’ve read the book but can never recall the details of this event from memory, the movie is vivid in my memory however) is a day-scale event that is a combination of encounters, day-long skill challenges, short skill challenges, and so on.
Adventure: The Red Hand of Doom, a D&D 3.5 module, illustrates a sort of “adventure-long” narrative with lots of “adventure-scale” consequences and decisions to be made.
Why not ‘day’ for the next Narrative Unit?
Carl
Days are already accounted for by 4e in a way, in the form of Daily Powers and Extended Rests.
However, the same concepts here can apply to the Day as a unit of narrative, that is to say, containing the actions that can be done within a day. You just have to downsize things – rather than a war, a battle is what is fought in a day, and you would go with things on an hour by hour scale (or even Encounter by Encounter, since an Encounter’s time is rather nebulous – some skill challenges make absolutely no sense if they are counted in six-second turns for example, even if actual combat works that way well enough.)
Diseases would not work well in a Day, but Poisons can be used instead. As opposed to injuries, like broken arms, you could have shocks or traumas to overcome, again on an encounter by encounter or an hour by hour basis. Skill Challenges are so flexible that having each person have a personal “Overcome Poison/Trauma” skill challenge that happens across a day is perfectly acceptable.
It is an application of the same concepts, but the scope is made smaller to accommodate.
As for Action Points within a Day as opposed to within an Adventure, I would go with 1d6 as my action point roll and use the same rules for recovering at milestones if you have no action points.
Thank you for your question by the way…I would never have thought of applying these concepts to a day without you spurring me to!
For some examples of the different scales:
Encounter: One battle – say, a tavern brawl; or anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or two worth of a prolonged skill challenge.
Day: A very long, climactic event – the battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings (movie version, I’ve read the book but can never recall the details of this event from memory, the movie is vivid in my memory however) is a day-scale event that is a combination of encounters, day-long skill challenges, short skill challenges, and so on.
Adventure: The Red Hand of Doom, a D&D 3.5 module, illustrates a sort of “adventure-long” narrative with lots of “adventure-scale” consequences and decisions to be made.
It’s difficult to measure the length of an adventure, it is basically a story arc and the time between the beginning and the end of the story varies greatly. I like the idea of a pool of action points available throughout an adventure/story arc, but I could also see players completely hoarding the points for the end of the adventure on the assumption that it is when they will need it the most.
The adventure long ritual is a fantastic idea, though it’d be difficult to explain why the ritual only lasts til the end of the adventure.
My suggestion would be to frame the narrative unit by quests instead of an adventure and to reward quest points at the beginning of the quest that are used specifically towards advancing and completing the quest. The ritual would also fit the quest as a narrative unit much more nicely as you could say that the ritual is quest specific ex: a priestess performs a blessings of pelor ritual on the adventurers so that they be emboldened to brave the pit of the zombie king and destroy the evil artifact that keeps leaking necrotic energy into the region.
The other thing about a quest as the narrative unit is that you could have multiple quests going on in a single adventure, they could crossover multiple adventures adding complications and interesting player choices.
There is no functional difference I can see between a “quest” and an “adventure”. The terms to me are completely interchangeable…picking one or the other to transform into a shorter unit of time looks arbitrary.
The example you gave also seems to me as something that fits under the Adventure Scale, since the Adventure Scale is already mutable to shorter adventures. What matters is across how much time your encounters are spread out and how many of them are there. In your example, even if it only takes a day to clean up the dungeon, adventure scale still works. When the adventure officially began, you rolled for AP, got the duration on that ritual nailed down, and you knew the time scale you were working with and you adjusted for it. So the Adventure Scale was shortened to meet your needs.
I also don’t see it as difficult to explain an adventure-long ritual, not for D&D 4e, which already has plenty of things you explain by “magic” or “rule of cool”. This is all the explanation it needs.
As for hoarding action points, that’s why you have cool stuff they can do to spend them sooner, and a per-encounter limit. This way, if they save all their action points for the final battle, they’re boned. They can only spend 2. The idea of hoarding is a problem in D&D 4e that will never go away, and I don’t really concern myself overtly with it. Everything in D&D 4e can be hoarded to the end – the trick is to give players incentives (or smash them so hard) to spend resources.
I guess I figured that a quest would fit into an adventure easier than an adventure would fit into a quest if that makes any sense, plus you could use quest cards!!! I love quest cards.
I totally forgot you could only use 1 action point/encounter, my thought line was based on the way my group uses action points, the way we play is that you can use’em if you got’em which would be fucken mental if you saved up half a dozen action points for the last encounter.
I could see the final climactic battle being a group of mid heroic tier adventurers facing a early paragon tier villain with magically infused weapons to give them attack bonuses against the specific creature and a crap load of action points, they would really have to stratergize to avoid getting hit while using their action points and positioning to max out there damage output to take the damn thing down before it goes nuclear.
Or you could use Adventure Cards. I love Adventure Cards!
I can sort of understand what you’re saying. However, it’s rather simple to fit what you would call a “quest” too. Just downsize the Adventure Scale!
The way I treat it, it’s so loose (since it’s mostly pertaining to rituals, skill challenges and metagame concerns like action point distribution that are very mutable and free) that making up new scales is easy, because it’s the same ideas over longer or shorter stretches of time. Hell, make a Year Scale for stronghold management. Even if that is totally not what D&D 4e is good at doing.
The idea is really that “Encounters handle powers, and days handle daily abilities well – but what about other roleplay concerns?” Hence, for things like skill challenges, injury, disease, rituals and action points, which are right now written with an encounter or “day” mindset (by which I mean “Extended Rest” mindset since that’s what really governs them), you can change them to operate across greater stretches of time when the situation calls for it.
It also occurs to me that the RPGA Living Forgotten Realms does in fact have a mechanism that operates on the narrative unit of “the adventure” (or, more precisely, the game session): The rewards cards. These are cards which grant some immediate benefit (e.g. reroll an at-will attack) when used with the option to add a small bonus to a die roll later in the session after having been used. But they do operate on the ‘narrative unit’ of a single session.
Carl
A single session is also a wonderful narrative unit. Cthulhutech, for example, gives out Drama Points per session. I’m an avid play-by-poster, so “session” can be weird for such, but it works well nonetheless for metagame concerns. In fact, action points and rewards tokens are probably best handled in a session fashion. Thanks for your input!
[...] has a post with ideas for using current mechanics in new ways. I’ve had similar ideas before so I wholeheartedly endorse any and all playing around with the mechanics to produce [...]