4th edition Dungeons & Dragons fixed an old problem of D&D. Now that D&D Next is undoing that fix, the discussion of the problem is back in full swing. The problem is called "the five-minute workday", and works like this: In the old editions of D&D, as well as in D&D Next, spellcasters work fundamentally different from non-spellcasters. Spellcasters have powerful limited resources, non-spellcasters have a more constant damage output. Imagine a fight in which both a wizard and a fighter are both always using their best possible damage output. Now you plot their total damage output over number of rounds. What you get is the wizard starting off much stronger than the fighter, but then running out of spells and after X round being reduced to a rather low damage output. The fighter has a nearly constant damage output round after round, so in the first rounds he looks weak compared to the wizard, but in a longer fight he actually deals more damage than the wizard.

The problem pops up when the group has finished a fight and the DM asks them what they want to do next: The spellcasters will want to recharge their power, by having whatever the editions equivalent of "a night's rest" is. Thus the five-minute workday, if you count it on the in-game time scale. 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is the only edition which doesn't have this problem built in as a conflict between character classes. You could still have a problem if one player uses up all of his daily powers every fight and wants to rest then, but the number of daily powers tends to be small, so all characters can work perfectly well after just a short rest with their at-will and encounter powers. And there is no inherent difference between classes, as each class has the same number of daily powers.

Mike Mearls of Wizards of the Coast discusses the five-minute workday and proposes the same solution that some players on the forums do: Let the DM fix the problem by preventing the party from resting. He says: "What does this mean for the five-minute adventuring day? DMs will have a crystal clear guideline on how many rounds of combat a group should tackle before resting. If the group spends less time in fights, casters grow stronger. If the characters spend more rounds fighting, the fighter and rogue grow stronger. The solution to the problem rests in the DM's hands, who can use the tools and guidelines that we provide, plus keep track of how long fights take and adjust adventures accordingly.". I find that to be a rather bad solution. Yes, of course I can think of ways of preventing my party from resting by adding some Deus Ex Machina devices to the adventure: Time limits, competing adventurer groups rushing past them, whatever. But do I really want to add such a constraint to EVERY SINGLE ADVENTURE I'm running? What if I am using a pre-made adventure in which such an added restriction doesn't fit with the story at all?

Sorry, but if a rules system causes an inherent problem all the time, the obvious solution is to change the rules so that the problem disappears or is mitigated. 4th edition clearly showed that it could be done: Just give every class about the same number of daily powers, and make the difference in damage output between using your strongest daily power and your at-will powers small enough that players don't feel that their workday is effectively over once they used their dailies. Don't force the DM to mutilate his stories to fix a rules problem!