The thing I like most about having a large fanbase and an active Discord community – apart from having my big-a$& ego stroked constantly — is that I don’t have to pick my own fights anymore. Used to be that if I wanted a f$&%ing fight, I had to go out and start one. But now, I can just throw a controversial statement into an article or Patreon update or one of my Discord channels like piranha into a kiddie pool. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a controversial statement. A non-controversial one works just fine. Or no statement at all. If I wait long enough, fights just spring up wherever I am. I have that effect on people.

Better yet, I don’t even have to participate if I don’t want to. I can just sit back and watch. And then, when the fighters are dead-tired and completely done with that s$&%, I can stand up and clear my throat and say, “okay, I listened to both sides carefully and now I’m going to tell you why you’re both totally f$&%ing wrong.” Then, I can disguise my own viewpoint as a compromise between the fighters and everyone mistakes me for a brilliant sage who listens to everyone and finds the middle ground in everything.

It worked for f$&%ing Socrates and I’m at least at smart as that dress-wearing know-it-all. And I know poisoned hemlock when I sniff it.

Anyway, I’m bringing this s$&% up because today’s article — which is about some important game design and rule hacking principles — today’s article is a response to a big ol’ fight that happened in my Discord server. Well, not a fight really. No blood was shed. Not even metaphorically. My Discord server’s pretty tame. The people are all calm, reasonable, rational, and mostly polite. So it doesn’t sate my appetite for bloodsports as much as it used to. But you take what you can get.

The Fifteen Minute Workday Discord Bruahaha

Today, I’m talking about designing and hacking RPG rules. Well, I’m talking about game-designing and game-hacking principles. Three of them. And while two of them aren’t unique to role-playing games, they all have special importance in TTRPG design as compared to other, less fun kinds of games. And they all came up during a debate in my Patrons-only Discord server about the Fifteen Minute Workday in D&D. And how to solve it.

Maybe you have no idea what the Fifteen Minute Workday is. It’s this issue in D&D that arises because some characters — spellcasters mostly — have these abilities they can only use a certain number of times a day. And because there’s no practical limits keeping D&D parties from peacing out of the f$&%ing dungeon whenever they want, catching eight hours of sleep, and then getting back to slaying. And notice I said practical. I’ll come back to that. The end result is that the optimal strategy in the resource-management, attrition game that is D&D is to just blow all your resources in every fight and then go to sleep until they come back. That strategy always works. And it’s better, hands down, than any other resource management method.

Now, the Fifteen Minute Workday was an occasional issue in early editions of D&D, but it got serious when the third sequel to the franchise came out. D&D 3E included a lot more spellcasters on the core class last than previous editions. And many non-spellcasters had special abilities with diurnal limits on their ammo counts. It would have made Jack Vance proud. The problem got even worse in 4E — even though mechanics were introduced to counteract it — because, by then, every class had a slew of daily powers. And not only that, the healing rules meant you could take a critical hit to the sternum with a dwarven waraxe and just sleep it off. And 5E’s just more of the same, really.

Note, by the way, that I said there’s no practical limits on the players calling a retreat-and-rest whenever they damn well want to. And that’s because, even though there’s a hard limit of one beddy-bye time per 24-hour period, the fact is time is meaningless in D&D. That 24-hour prerequisite to sleeping off your owies can pass by in the blink of a single sentence.

Players: “We retreat from the dungeon and go to sleep.”
GM: “Like hell you do. It’s 9:15 in the AM. You have to wait at least 12 hours before you can rest again.”
Players: “Well, we’ll just go back to camp and sit around doing nothing until 9:30 tonight. Then we’ll rest.”
GM: “Fine, you go back to camp. You sit around doing absolutely nothing all day. Each hour passes more slowly than the next. The minutes drag on inexorably as you…”
Players: “Okay, we get it, screen-monkey. It’s boring. We sleep. And now we’re ready to go.”

Now, before you make an a$& of yourself in the comment section, take note that this article ain’t about the Fifteen Minute Workday. It’s not about whether it exists — it does — and it’s not about how to solve it. And it sure as hell is not about whether the game totally empowers the GM to solve the problem by imposing time limits and restocking dungeons and just saying no or any bulls$&% like that. It doesn’t. If you want to explore the Fifteen Minute Workday issue or how it’s not an issue or who should solve it how, please follow this link to WordPress and start your own blog. It’s free and super easy.

So, that’s the Fifteen Minute Workday. It’s been an occasional issue in D&D for 50 years and a significant issue for some groups and GMs for 20 years. And that’s what two of my patrons set out to deal with. And their fix was pretty simple. They proposed awarding an experience point bonus for each consecutive encounter a party handled before they stopped and slept. And then came the debate.

I’m not going to address the Fifteen Minute Workday. And I’m not even going to rehash the whole debate. I just want to address three specific game design issues that came up during the debate.

The GM’s Burden

The first objection Angry Discordians AgentCarr16 and Pidgey faced when they broached the topic of counteracting the Fifteen Minute Workday with an XP incentive went like this:

The Fifteen Minute Workday isn’t something you should fix with the game’s system. It’s an adventure design issue. GMs and adventure writers should write specific solutions for each adventure. Time limits to keep the players from resting, dungeon denizens who shore up their defenses in response to repeated incursions, and so on. Specific solutions that follow from the game’s fiction are preferable to abstract game mechanics.

And frankly, that’s the first objection that always arises whenever anyone talks about the Fifteen Minute Workday. Usually, it’s a little blunter than that. And more insulting. It usually sounds like, “maybe GMs should write better adventures to keep their players from resting whenever they want.” And that’s a really bad habit lots of internet GMs and content creators have. One that’s bad for everyone. And bad for the game itself.

You have to remember, first, that the kind of people who get riled up about game design debates on Discord and in comment sections; the kind of people who even follow content creators like me, let alone become content creators; they’re not the average GM. They’re usually pretty passionate. They care enough about this s$&% to, you know, get riled up in game design debates on Discord. S$&% like that. And because of their passion and practice, they’re usually pretty talented GMs. Well, they think they are. And I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Most of them are probably above average. Just remember that for later.

Internet GMs — the kind of people I’m talking about here — have this tendency when confronted with a design issue to fall back on the argument that specific solutions designed by empowered GMs are always better than in-built system solutions. And that’s not a completely stupid position. It’s true that, on the surface, an arbitrary XP bonus for playing the game right looks like a mechanics-first contrivance whereas a specifically-designed time-limit follows from the actual game it’s in.

The problem with that general position though — the position that it’s always better to let empowered GMs invent specific solutions — the problem with that idea is about approachability. Stick with me while I lay the whole thing out, though. This is going to take a couple of steps.

First, remember TTRPGs like D&D aren’t games. They’re systems. Engines. You can use them to make games, but they’re not games. Individual adventures and campaigns like Rhyme of the Ancient Frostmariner or Abdominal Vaults? Those are the games. So are the adventures GMs like me write for their own tables.

Second, remember that there’s certain things all games must have in order to provide complete, satisfying experiences. And with role-playing games, those include both the basic trappings of a well-crafted narrative and the basic elements of a well-designed game. In the former case, RPGs have to present complete stories with motivations, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. They have to be paced properly. And they need compelling and relatable characters. All that s$&%. You know.

For the second, they must include a goal, a way of measuring progress, mechanics that create surprise, aspects of player skill, and all the other s$&% I stole from Mark Rosewater’s blog years ago. No need to rehash it here.

That s%$&’s not optional. Except insofar as making a s$&%y game is an option. Some people say otherwise, but people also make s$&%y games all the time, so believe what you want. Now, just because you include all those ingredients, that don’t mean your RPG is going to be a masterpiece. It can still suck. But if you don’t include all the ingredients, it’s most definitely going to be crap.

Of course, it’s possible to do this game design thing totally right without actually knowing what you did or how you did it. Hell, that’s how most accomplished amateurs get by. That’s how I got by for many, many years. Some people have a natural talent for it. Keen senses that help them tell good games and stories from crappy ones. And most people get better at s$&% with practice. But it’s not easy for most people. That’s why I spend as much time as I do trying to explain this s$&% now that I’m capable of explaining it.

So, RPG systems aren’t games. Adventures and campaigns are games. And to have even a chance of being good, they need to have the right mix of narrative and game-design elements. With me so far?

Next, there’s three people involved in getting every game to a group of players. First, there’s the system designer. WotC. Paizo. Rob Schwalb. Those are the people who design the game systems. The rules. Second, there’s the adventure writer. The person who uses the game system to build a scenario. Third, there’s the GM. The person who executes the game and makes moment-by-moment rulings and adjustments.

Now people — and teams and companies — can double up on roles. WotC can design systems and publish adventures. Well, they can publish adventures in theory. And any given GM — me, for instance — can write an adventure and then run it for their own players. GMs can also hack the rules and design entire systems. And Mike Mearls can design a system, write an adventure, and run it for people. But the roles are still different.

Working together, those three people must invest a TTRPG scenario with all the s$&% it needs to work as a narrative and as a game. And, technically, it doesn’t matter who does what as long as it all gets done. Some published modules, for example, start off with some vague advice for the GM about how to start the adventure and get the players invested but otherwise rely on the GM to figure out the specifics. Those games get to the GM without narrative motivations or a gameplay hook. The GM’s got to add those vital elements. And most adventures rely on the GM to fix any s$&% that goes wrong when their murderhobos behave like murderhobos and f$%& everything up. In game design parlance, that GM might have to design a quick catch-up feature to let the players reverse their stupid fortunes.

That s$&%’s not as easy as it sounds though. It’s amazing anyone can run a game at all. Especially without formal training. And the more s$&% that a game’s missing before it gets to the GM, the harder it is on the GM. The more the GM has to do to fix it. Hell, that’s true of the system too. The more basic game elements the system’s — the engine’s — missing, the more the blanks the adventure writer has to fill in. Basically, a piece of gameplay or narrative design that gets skipped at one level just gets passed down to the next.

This brings me back to the whole approachability thing. System designers? They’re supposed to be the experts. They’re not just passionate, they’re educated and trained and experienced. In theory, anyway. And they’re actually profiting off what they do. They get paid to do what they do. So, they’ve got the means to do most of the heavy lifting and they’ve got the biggest stake in doing it.

GMs are way the hell at the other end of the spectrum though. They’re hobbyists. They’re doing this s$&% for fun. They’re really just another class of players. They’re consumers. Looking for a good time. They buy the game systems and the modules and invest their time and effort in the hopes of having a good gaming experience. That’s all. Now, that said, apart from the investment, it does take some amount of skill to run a game. And it takes practice to get good at it. But, hopefully, the payoff of a fun game is worth it. And if it’s not, you suddenly have a surge of people charging players to run games for them. And that, by the way, is a bad sign. But I digress.

The point is it takes some time, money, effort, and skill to run a game. And the more of each it requires, the fewer people will think it’s all worth it. Whenever you raise the bar, you reduce the number of people who can hurdle it. Put another way, the easier it is to start running games and have fun doing it, the more GMs you’re going to have.

What about adventure writers? Well, it’s easy to say they fall somewhere in the middle. No s$&%. Everyone that’s not on one end or the other is in the middle. Somewhere. But the middle ground is a big place. Some adventure writers are professionals. And they’re really good at it. And there’s a few folks out there who just write adventures. Folks like Frog God Games. And like Paizo before WotC gave them the old Nintendo Third-Party Curb Stomp. But most RPGs assume some number of GMs will create their own homebrew scenarios. D&D and Pathfinder burn a lot of pages telling GMs how to write their own games. And many smaller, indie RPGs do the same. And most of them don’t even publish scenarios for their games. It’s a tacit assumption in the RPG industry that many GMs — maybe most GMs — will eventually start creating their own homebrew content. In fact, that’s often been treated in the past as a f$%&ing selling point: “learn how to be a GM and you can build your own games for your friends.”

And thank f$&% for that or I’d be out of a job.

Game mastering and adventuring writing have to be approachable. That’s the only way this s$&% works. And frankly, it’s good for the community and the industry if they are. The more people who can happily run games, the more players who can find games. And the more people who can write adventures — and write reasonably good adventures — the more material that’s out there for everyone. And the less the game designers have to worry about supporting their game systems.

And that’s why we have to drop this s$&% about expecting the GM to build the basic, fundamental elements of game design into their adventures. Because that s$&% takes a level of expertise that the average GM doesn’t — and shouldn’t f$&%ing have to — have. And the people who make the biggest stink about how easy it is for GMs to fix basic, fundamental game design problems are not the average GM-on-the-street. They’re the people who give enough of a s$&% about game design to get good at it. Or at least, to think they’re good at it.

And make no mistake, this whole Fifteen Minute Workday thing is a fundamental f$&%ing game-design issue. The game includes a Perverse Incentive in its core mechanics that leads to a First-Order Optimal Strategy that precludes creative and strategic thinking once a party tumbles onto it. The mechanic creating the problem needs an offset. It needs Dynamic Tension.

And that is not the sort of thing your average gamer hobbyist who paid 150 bucks American to play your game should have to figure out for themselves. They’ve got enough to do to sell your game for you.

I Never Metagame I Wouldn’t Try

And while I’m calling attention to the gulf between expert game designer and average GM hobbyist, let me talk about the Metagame. Because if you want something that separates the game design men from the little hobbyist boys, the Metagame is it.

Whenever you talk about the Fifteen Minute Workday, someone’s going to invoke the Metagame. And it’s going to sound like this:

“If you build a mechanical bonus into the system — like an XP bonus — you’re encouraging your players to seek out that bonus even if there’s no reason in the fictional game world for the characters to do so. When the heroes are tromping through a dungeon and there’s no actual urgency in their quest, there’s nothing in the game world pushing them to take on the increased risk of going through extra encounters as their resources dwindle. But the players will push onward anyway because of the mechanical bonus. They’re not making the choices their characters would make. And that’s Metagaming and therefore it’s the worst thing to happen to gaming since FATAL.”

Metagaming occurs whenever there’s s$&% influencing a player’s actions that comes from an understanding of the underlying game’s systems. For example, if you’re playing D&D, you can pretty much count on your ability to take down any monster you encounter because, well, D&D tells the GM to balance all the encounters that way. No matter how scary the GM makes the monster seem, you know your heroes can take it down because otherwise, you wouldn’t encounter it. That’s Metagaming.

And it’s a fair enough concern. Because it really can take you out of the role-playing game experience. The whole point of role-playing — the phrase itself — is to project yourself into someone else’s mind and imagine what they’d do when faced with a particular situation. If you make gameplay decisions based on anything else, you’re not role-playing.

Except sometimes it’s literally impossible for you to do that. And sometimes, Metagaming can help bridge that gap by creating synchronicity between the players’ choices and the characters’ situations.

In real life, people don’t usually use the Fifteen Minute Workday strategy. Even when there’s no time pressure, people usually stick with tasks once they start them. And they feel urgency even when there isn’t any. One reason’s that people get f$&%ing bored sitting around for twelve hours doing nothing and waiting for bedtime. Another’s that people are keenly aware of the passage of time and wasting time accomplishing nothing actually hurts their brains. The more time you waste doing nothing and getting nowhere, the more depressed you become.

Come on, you’re a f$&%ing gamer. How many times have you uttered the phrase “just one more turn” or “just one more try against that boss” or whatever? Where the hell was that urgency coming from? How the hell can you lose yourself in a game for six hours only to discover you forgot to eat f$&%ing dinner? It’s hard for us to stop when we get going. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s something we’re enjoying or something we’re struggling with. Boredom, lack of stimulation, and lack of action are anathema to us. And inertia is wired into our dopamine pathways.

But, at the D&D table, you don’t feel the weight of wasted time pressing on your character’s soul. Crushing their sense of meaning and purpose. You can’t feel the surge of adrenaline pushing you forward the way your character can. And the fact that many players do get a little dopamine squirt from every victorious combat and want to keep going — the reason why the Fifteen Minute Workday isn’t more of a problem — just proves the point.

This s$&%’s not rational either. It’s not something you choose. It’s hardwired into your brain. And often, it gets in the way of rational decision making. But it affects your behavior nonetheless.

Players can make rational decisions for their characters easily enough. The problem is their decisions are often too rational. They can’t feel what the characters feel. They don’t have to fight the character’s biology and neurophysiology. They’re pretending they can, but they can’t. And that’s where the Metagame can step in. The Metagame can turn irrational aspects of human behavior into rational mechanical considerations that bring player and character into synch. For example, by encouraging players to push their characters into danger when their adrenaline is up.

Everything’s just game mechanics. And it’s all arbitrary as hell. Hit points? Being able to get really mad only three times a day? It’s bulls$%&. But it mirrors physical fatigue and exhaustion. I can’t feel how tired my character is. I can’t feel the certain dread that I’m one solid blow from passing out. But if I’ve got a little counter on my character sheet, I can make the rational decision to behave like I can feel it. And sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.

The Metagame is a really powerful game design tool. One that takes a lot of finesse to use right. And it’s one that has a lot of uses. Synchronizing player choices with character behavior is just one of them. But it’s a really good one.

The Perversity of Game Design

The final objection was actually raised by one of the Discordians who started all this s$&% in the first place. Either Pidgey or AgentCarr16. I can’t remember who and looking it up would require me to switch windows and scroll back like three whole pages through the Discord chat. And frankly, I don’t care enough to move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse right now.

Anyway, one of them got nervous that their XP incentive might create a Perverse Incentive if they weren’t careful. And that’s a very apt thing to worry about. Game designers have to stay ever vigilant against the dreaded Perverse Incentives. And, more broadly, against Unintended Consequences.

The argument was simple:

“If I give players a bonus for tackling a lot of encounters before they rest, will they push their characters too hard? Will they refuse to rest even when they really need it and end up getting their characters killed? Will they play so conservatively that they never use any of their daily resources out of fear that they might need them later?”

Now, technically, that’s more of an Unintended Consequence than a Perverse Incentive. An Unintended Consequence is just an outcome that arises from a choice you made that you didn’t foresee. Which is exactly what it sounds like. And they can be good or bad. Ask Tomohiro Nishikado. A Perverse Incentive is a specific kind of Unintended Consequence where the unforeseen result ends up driving exactly the opposite behavior from what you were originally trying to push.

Take Hanoi, for example. In 1902, Hanoi — which was part of what was then French Indochina — had a rat problem to rival Baltimore and Chicago put together. And the powers what was came up with a simple solution. They’d pay their citizens to fix the problem with a bounty. All you had to do was kill a rat and present its tail to your local government official and they’d pay you a small sum. Simple, right?

Well, it worked and it didn’t. The city fathers paid out a lot of bounties, but the rat problem got a lot worse.

See, some folks realized you didn’t have to kill any rats to get paid. You just needed rat tails. If you cut the rat’s tail off and let it go, you still got paid. Moreover, rats can live without tails. And they can make baby rats too. More rats, more tails. More tails, more bounties. Some people went so far as to start catching and breeding rats. Farming rats and harvesting their tails. And the rat population surged.

Now, I will say it is absolutely, provably possible for an RPG mechanic like this to create a Perverse Incentive. How do I know? Because that’s how we got to this Fifteen Minute Workday thing in the first place. So, you start with a game that’s about managing your resources as you plunder a monster-infested-catacomb. Play carefully, play conservatively, make sure you keep your hit points up, hold some spells for the big boss, avoid fights whenever you can, that kind of thing. Now, add a mechanic whereby you can recover your spent resources by retreating to camp and going to bed. And suddenly, now the best way to play is to blow all of your resources every time you run into trouble and then pass out for eight hours and wake up fresh.

Fifteen Minute Workday, thy name is Perverse Incentive.

That said, I don’t see AgentCarr16’s and Pidgey’s ideas about an XP inventive for not resting as something that’ll lead to a Perverse Incentive. Or an Unintended Consequence even. Of course, that’s a dangerous thing to say because the problem with Unintended Consequences is that you don’t see them coming. But I will say that this particular mechanic is very unlikely to cause an Unintended Consequence because of Dynamic Tension.

Now, I mentioned Dynamic Tension earlier. It’s not a game design term, though. It’s a marketing term invented by bodybuilder Charles Atlas to sell his exercise videos. Okay, not videos. It was the 1920s. But he trademarked the term for marketing purposes. That’s the point. Here though, I’m using it to refer to the idea that you’ve got two different game mechanics pushing the players in two different directions and the balance between those mechanics changes as the game plays out.

Opposing pairs of game mechanics usually lead to interesting gameplay decisions. You’ve got dwindling resources and hit points dragging you back and the promise of sweet, sweet bonus experience points pushing you forward in this case. At the start of the day, you’re flush with resources, so you don’t really feel the anchor weighing you down. But as the day goes on, the lack of resources really starts to hold you back. At the same time, that experience bonus just keeps getting bigger the longer you go. But how long can you go? There’s probably no right answer. It comes down to risk tolerance and risk assessment. Two players playing exactly the same character in exactly the same situation might make totally different decisions. And that’s a good sign. It means there’s depth of gameplay. It means there’s room in the system for each player to express their own style.

Now, 4E tried to pull this s$&% off with action points. But it didn’t work. In D&D 4E, you earned an action point every time you got through two encounters without bedding down for the night. And you could use action points the same way you can now use D&D’s Inspiration. If you remember you have it and if the GM remembers to give you any. Action points were a good idea. They just didn’t provide a strong enough incentive. They weren’t that valuable compared to the daily powers you’d recover whenever you took a long rest.

But back to the push-pull idea above. Let’s say you hit that sweet spot of balance between the siren song of bonus XP and the lure of the warm, comfy bed and the fresh pile of spell slots and rages waiting back at camp. Now, take one of the two forces out of the equation. Take away, for example, the dwindling resources and the bed that makes them come back. By itself, will the bonus XP drive some pretty extreme behavior? Yes. Yes, it will. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Because that mechanic doesn’t exist by itself and it never will. At least, it never should.

Basically, you’ve got two different forces that are both pulling the players to play the wrong way. You’re just pulling them to the opposite wrong ways to play. And that’s actually a good thing. Pulling people toward two different wrong ends of the gameplay spectrum usually means they won’t end up playing too wrong one way or the other. But it also means people won’t be able to land on one optimal way to play and keep doing that over and over. They’re always going to be stuck bouncing around “optimal play” without landing on it. And if they land too far from it, well, that’s gonna hurt them. But that’s also what you want. If players can make bad decisions and suffer for it, that means their choices affect the outcome of the game and also that they can get better at playing the game.

Now, I realize that last point’s going to be filtered through the lens of “but when players lose, their characters die forever.” That’s a whole different problem. But it does create a really powerful incentive to get good. You can’t deny that.