5 Minute Work Day

Dungeons and Dragons Next. Its what they are calling 5th edition, which they are play-testing now and probably going to release in 2014.

here is their forum http://community.wizards.com/go/forum/v … Discussion

Yes, that is exactly it Beedo. Have you ever actually seen that sort of "problem" at a game table? Makes no sense to me, but I think there is a large portion of the current player base that plays D&D very differently than I ever did.

Any system that requires you to rest overnight to recharge can be guilty of the "5 minute workday" so I think it's much older than 3E.

DDN actually has less of that because they have more "at will" powers, so they don't have to burn spells just to do something.
The opposite of the 5 minute workday is the prima donna effect, where the spellcasters don't cast anything because they don't want to have spent their spells when they might need it later in the day.

Wilderness and or slow exploratory adventures are less prone to this, but in classic dungeon crawls (expectations of lots of combat) it becomes an issue.

You know, I suspect the 5-minute workday is a symptom primarily of 3E just because spellcasters become so important in later levels.  In older D&D, you aren't so gimped when the mage runs out of spells.  Just my theory.

What level does that kick in at? I always seem to play below 14 so the high magic combat arena is kind of foreign to me.

In my experience, the five-minute workday isn't really level-dependent (if anything it's almost more likely to come up at lower levels), or directly system-dependent. It's more of an attitude thing, players who decide to play a spell-caster and then expect to be able to cast spells whenever they want. I think that overall many modern players have bought into the idea that things like wandering monsters (and a lot of other old-school ideas) were just not any fun, and they got tossed without (it seems to me) much in the way of consideration for the effects of that removal. The five-minute-workday was just one example of this: everyone generally agreed that it was a bad thing, and there were pretty obvious ways to avoid it present in earlier editions, but no-one seemed to actually be willing to accept that putting time-pressure on the PCs (ie: wandering monsters) was really much more than a DM power-play.

Edit to add: Don't want to double-post, but I think I should mention that I did see a bit of the whole ''five-minute workday'' thing in AD&D back in the 70s and 80s. If the players (myself included - and I often played a M-U when I wasn't DMing) could get away with it they would totally fire off everything they had and then immediately rest back up. But at the same time you also saw a lot of situations where the casters would be very stingy with their spells, for fear of getting caught defenseless by a tough random encounter.

Last edited by kaomera (2012-12-19 05:35:35)

One thing to keep in mind is that while the internet has increased the homogeneity of D&D play somewhat there is still some really significant variance from one playgroup to the next, regardless of edition / system. For all the talk of playing by RAW pretty much every game has it's own house-rules, one way or another. IME, what 3e and 4e have done (in small part) is to push the idea that the players should be at least partially in charge of what is and is not part of the game / which direction you go in, system-wise. Ideally that's a great thing, unfortunately some players end up nbot giving good thought to the implications of what they want. A big part of this, I think, is that a lot of players don't really want the responsibility of making such decisions, but they don't want to pass control back to the DM either. As a result they end up picking stuff up online / from magazines / from discussions with other players / etc. that may have worked great for the group that originally came up with it, but may or may not work out in your game.

One of my personal pet peeves is players who see something they're sure is cool in a supplement (especially problematic in 3e during the ''d20 boom'' when there might be a dozen or so third-party products of varying styles / types released in a given month...) but they can't actually express or just flat-out do not know how it's cool... Which ends up with me trying to take choices the player has made (that I may completely disagree with) and guess how to make them cool for that player.

This is one of the big reasons I like OGL stuff... Most of the people I play with are going to groan and roll their eyes if I whip out Lamentations or whatever, but they'll play and they'll expect me to tell them what the game is about / how it plays. I end up with more players dropping out because it doesn't do what they want it to, but we are at least on the same page.