# D&D Never Worked From a Pacing Standpoint tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/dungeons-and-dragons ![[D&D Never Worked From a Pacing Standpoint (cover).png]] *Hourglass icon © Lorc / game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)* Sometimes a conversation is useful because it leads you to assemble thoughts in a new way. I had never *really* sat down and dissected my problems with modern **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** pacing. It's useful to be forced to think sometimes.   I'm going to say something heretical (as if that was unusual for me). **Dungeons and Dragons** never worked from a pacing point of view. Let me soften that a bit, having stated the most extreme version of it. 0E worked because, by comparison, it had very few moving parts. It was immediately obvious for anyone running the game what the pace of encounters and experiences during a session should be — and I specifically refer to a *session*. There weren't a lot of things that could only be done a certain number of times or a certain number of ways during a certain period, except for spells. There were vastly fewer things to keep up with and track on a cyclic basis. Essentially, you just had dailies, and in order to get those back, you went to sleep and got a good night's rest. Very simple to track, very easy to understand cognitively. Very few classes had special things about them other than spells. Because it was just spells — you knew up front it was something that you were going to track in the Vancian architecture. Fighters and rangers basically could do whatever special thing they had all the time, and most of the time that was just access to better weapons and armor. You had a better attack matrix. A thief had to deal with percentile chances, no ticking cooldowns, no resource expenditure, just a straight roll and its outcome (which was purely binary). It worked or it didn't. The classes were asymmetrical in terms of what they could accomplish and really how they went about it, but they were much simpler. Essentially, all you were tracking was ammo, and that applies to spells as well. The necessary understanding of pacing was simple, but obvious. Not interesting, but anybody can look at the stuff in their pocket and say, "I don't have enough for the next fight. Let's go deal with that." Moreover, there was actually, in a weird way, *less focus* on the gamist aspects than simulationism. Ironically, and I can't believe I'm going to say this, the lack of trying to drag narrativism into the structure simplified pacing. All you had to do was simulate what would happen. It didn't matter how many fights you had before you reached the big bad, bring the right amount of stuff, figure out a way to get access to it, or just don't go fight him. Which brings us, perversely enough, to one of the games elevated to iconic status in the **D&D** pantheon: 3.5, specifically the **Tome of Battle**. High-level martial classes were basically hit-things-harder-and-faster machines. They didn't have a whole lot of special stuff that they could do, so they gave fighters and monks "maneuvers." They didn't want you to have to track the number of cool things you could do during a day of in-game play. So they basically said if you got to take a five-minute break, you'd recharge your pile. Essentially, they introduced the "per encounter" tracking right there. By itself, it doesn't seem like a big deal. It makes sense, in a way, from the simulationist point of view. Something you can do during a period of exertion a certain number of times, and then if you take a break, cool. Awesome. You get your cool thing that you can do back. Not a lot of long-term planning necessary, just a short-term limitation. The definition of short rest, keep in mind, is not that you get an hour. It's five minutes. Five minutes is important to keep in mind here because essentially it's the time between fights. This was always *the* definition. Then came 4E and the regularization of these things — to apply to all classes all the time in every situation. It wasn't *inherently* a bad idea. I actually like how it turned out. It got rid of the annoying Vancian memorization. It regularized being able to understand the pacing and tied it more literally to the experience. It gave you more things that you could do in every fight that were cool, and you knew exactly how many times you could do them. At-wills: you could do all the time. Per encounter: once per fight you could do this cool thing. A daily: you did it once in the chain of fights you were expected to be having during a session. 4E extended rest was just 6 hours of uninterrupted downtime. Interestingly, it doesn't specify sleep, just downtime. It could be meditation, it could be just resting at camp, it could be a couple of 3-hour power naps. As long as you took 6 hours in a row doing something that wasn't strenuous adventuring, your HP reset, your healing surges reset, and all your dailies were ready to go again. Full reset, easy to track, easy to understand what happens. Then the absolute fuckheads who wrote 5E came along. God knows consistent design and awkward pacing were already hard to do but as implemented pre-5E at least made sense if you approached them from a simulationist point of view. They were too jealous of the indie narrativist architectures (without understanding them) and stupidly reactionary to the way their intended audience responded to 4E. In 4E, a short rest is 5 minutes. The length of time that it takes you to sit down, lean against the dungeon wall, look at the rest of the party and go, "Holy shit, we lived. Let me catch my breath." From a simulationist point of view, it makes sense. From a narrativist's point of view, it also makes sense. I've done something strenuous. I used my strenuous ability. It tired me out a bit, and now I need to rest just for a moment, catch my breath, straighten my tie, and we're off to the next fight. Perfectly narrativist in its way. Perfectly simulationist in its way. In 5E, a short rest requires an hour of sitting around. No one sits around for an hour after a fight. It doesn't make sense from a simulationist point of view if you're in a dungeon and pushing into the next room, where there is going to be another fight or something else challenging that's going to require your abilities. It implies that the party will be sitting around for an hour at some point during this ongoing situation. Not only does that not work in terms of pacing for simulation, because it doesn't match any sensible way of dealing with it, but it doesn't make any sense from a narrative point of view, because no stories do that either. It doesn't mimic anything anywhere. It's entirely untethered from any experience. Pacing was always hard from a narrative point of view in **D&D**, but when you approach it with the right mindset, actual play mostly worked itself out in an intuitive manner. 5E is where it went completely fucky. Anybody who ever thought about it for five minutes, *including* the old school grognards who ended up establishing OSR, knew that then and know that today. It's one of the things I appreciate about them. They may not be able to express it in these terms, but they intuitively get it, for the most part. 5E is an abomination of game design, and everyone that's been involved with it should be dragged out behind the chemical sheds. I have a lot of problems with the OSR mindset, but they understand why the pacing of their games is as it is. They don't always understand why it should be that way or why it might ought to be different, but they understand why it is *what it is*. I have a theory that the people who designed 5E never played the game. Mike Mearls — the designer in the video Spyder's responding to — leans into that when he talks about how he plays it. He bases *his* decisions on an entirely different set of calculations than the book does. I don't think any of them ever played *the game*. I don't think playtesting mattered. I think they went in with a design intent that never got tested against the user experience, to put it in software terms. Anyway, here's why it doesn't work. Here's why it's always been a little bit fucked up. Here's why it's probably never going to get better within **D&D**. Luckily, there are about 10,000 better games.