D&D 5E Need last-minute advice on tracking time in non-combat when characters are running against the clock...

MNblockhead · Apr 29, 2017

Tomorrow I'll be running an adventure where the players will be taking poison damage the longer they spend in a dungeon. They need to find their way out before succumbing to poison damage and exhaustion.

They take damage every hour and have to make a Con save or suffer exhaustion every hour.

I'm using a time wheel to check off time in 10' increments.

Movement is not going to be very useful for taking time. The dungeon is not so large that if they could just run through it that it would take long to do. But there are locked doors, traps, puzzles to solve, and combat.

For combat, determining time takes care of itself. Number of rounds the combat took times 6 seconds.

But how to you determine how long the party is taking to figure out a puzzle? Or to search a room? Check for traps? Etc.?

I've seen the following posted elsewhere:

10 min to search room
5 min to disarm trap/pick lock if proficient otherwise 10
10 min if too much disagreement or discussion
200 ft. movement (slow) per 10 minutes

These are fairly easy to implement but I don't like how they have not connection to the difficulty of the lock, the size and contents of the room, or the complexity of the trap.

Instead, I wiould like to base the time on the DC rating. DC ratings are already given for the traps, secret doors, etc. For other things, DMing 5e has already made me comfortable in determining a DC pretty much on the fly.

Do I'm thinking, for EACH attempt:

Pick lock / Disarm Trap: 30 seconds for each DC level if proficient in theives tools. Otherwise 1 minute per DC level.

Search Room
This is more tricky. Because perception and investigation is involved. And, are you looking for secret doors, or just rifling through things to find valuable items.
Secret doors will have a DC and, when needed, I'll give a room a DC for how hard it is to thoroughly toss it
I would say 30 seconds per DC as a general rule. If the players are trying to be discrete and hide the fact that they were there, I would double it to 1 minute per DC

This keeps it easy for me to remember, it is either 30 s or 1 m per DC.

As for "too much disagreement or discussion", I don't like to punish my players for playing how they want. Put in this instance, to create a sense of urgency, I'm thinking of using a 1 minute hour glass. If the hourglass runs out before they tell me what their characters are doing, I double the normal amount of time.

Any thoughts are tips would be appreciated.

The Crimson Binome · Apr 29, 2017

Puzzles should just be real-time. If they spend ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle, then their characters spend ten minutes trying to figure out that puzzle.

For searching, I would go per-square or per-hex. Searching a five-foot tile would be 1 minute for a cursory glance, 5 minutes for a standard examination, and 10 minutes for a thorough examination. You should be able to guess at the mechanical ramifications of those.

I definitely wouldn't link the time spent to the DC of anything, for two reasons: 1) The DC is already accounted for when they make the check; and 2) The DC is just a judgment call on your part, so it's better to not make your judgment even more deterministic than it already is.

aco175 · Apr 29, 2017

We have had discussions on skill checks here before, specifically on lock picking. One of the ideas was that you could pick the lock eventually, by eventually rolling a 20. Someone came up with the idea of failing only taking more time and each point failed by would take another minute to pick the lock. For example; The lock has a DC of 20 and your roll totaled 15, normally a failure but here it just takes you 5 minutes longer. You can roll a wandering monster check as a penalty or have the monsters on the other side get ready, or the group will know they failed the easy pick attempt and it will take a few minutes to pick and just decide to try and bash it down instead.

This can be the same for other skill checks. Once the PCs start taking levels of exhaustion, they may try to rush through checks and you can set the DC higher for a quick search and give them the opportunity to skip or waste minutes searching more detailed. If the normal DC was 15 and a rush job is now 20. They roll a 12 trying to rush and decide to take the time then you could tick off 8 minutes, but I may make searches 2x and tick off 16 minutes.

Shiroiken · Apr 29, 2017

I'm sure I'm too late to help, but just in case...

Because wandering monsters are important to the adventure I'm currently running, I've worked out what I refer to as Exploration Rounds. Each round equals a minute for dungeon exploration (wilderness and city times would be different). I figured out what the speed the party is traveling and what general activities they are doing (per normal exploration rules). When they come across a room, it starts a new round. Exploring a room takes 1 man-round per 10' square (i.e. 4 PCs can search a 20x20 room in 1 round), but other options are available (such as watching for wandering monsters). Combat is assumed to take 1 exploration round, unless it takes longer than 10 combat rounds, then it rounds up to 2 exploration rounds. I count doors as an extra 50' of movement (5 spaces) for time if the party does more than just open it (checking for traps, having to unlock it, listening, etc.), because unless it's really special, it shouldn't take a full exploration round.

By using these exploration rounds and a spreadsheet tracker, I can keep fairly accurate time for checking for wandering monsters. It should work for you needs too, but you'll just need to mark off the time on a scrap paper.

Quickleaf · Apr 29, 2017

MNblockhead said:
Tomorrow I'll be running an adventure where the players will be taking poison damage the longer they spend in a dungeon. They need to find their way out before succumbing to poison damage and exhaustion.

They take damage every hour and have to make a Con save or suffer exhaustion every hour.

I'm using a time wheel to check off time in 10' increments.

Movement is not going to be very useful for taking time. The dungeon is not so large that if they could just run through it that it would take long to do. But there are locked doors, traps, puzzles to solve, and combat.

For combat, determining time takes care of itself. Number of rounds the combat took times 6 seconds.

But how to you determine how long the party is taking to figure out a puzzle? Or to search a room? Check for traps? Etc.?

I've seen the following posted elsewhere:

10 min to search room
5 min to disarm trap/pick lock if proficient otherwise 10
10 min if too much disagreement or discussion
200 ft. movement (slow) per 10 minutes

These are fairly easy to implement but I don't like how they have not connection to the difficulty of the lock, the size and contents of the room, or the complexity of the trap.

Instead, I wiould like to base the time on the DC rating. DC ratings are already given for the traps, secret doors, etc. For other things, DMing 5e has already made me comfortable in determining a DC pretty much on the fly.

Do I'm thinking, for EACH attempt:

Pick lock / Disarm Trap: 30 seconds for each DC level if proficient in theives tools. Otherwise 1 minute per DC level.

Search Room
This is more tricky. Because perception and investigation is involved. And, are you looking for secret doors, or just rifling through things to find valuable items.
Secret doors will have a DC and, when needed, I'll give a room a DC for how hard it is to thoroughly toss it
I would say 30 seconds per DC as a general rule. If the players are trying to be discrete and hide the fact that they were there, I would double it to 1 minute per DC

This keeps it easy for me to remember, it is either 30 s or 1 m per DC.

As for "too much disagreement or discussion", I don't like to punish my players for playing how they want. Put in this instance, to create a sense of urgency, I'm thinking of using a 1 minute hour glass. If the hourglass runs out before they tell me what their characters are doing, I double the normal amount of time.

Any thoughts are tips would be appreciated.

Well...you need to consider a few things. A Rogue (Thief) can use Cunning Action to pick a lock as a bonus action. Personally, I dislike what that does to the narrative, but it's RAW so something you may need to pay attention to if you've a Thief in your group.

Fully agree with [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] about it being a bad idea to tie DC to time required.

I like your simple guidelines, to be honest.

[SECTION]
10 min to search room
5 min to disarm trap/pick lock if proficient otherwise 10
10 min if too much disagreement or discussion
200 ft. movement (slow) per 10 minutes [/SECTION]

That's the kind of thing you could put on notecards or on the outside of your DM screen for the players to have easy access to.

MNblockhead · May 2, 2017

Saelorn said:
Puzzles should just be real-time. If they spend ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle, then their characters spend ten minutes trying to figure out that puzzle.

For searching, I would go per-square or per-hex. Searching a five-foot tile would be 1 minute for a cursory glance, 5 minutes for a standard examination, and 10 minutes for a thorough examination. You should be able to guess at the mechanical ramifications of those.

I definitely wouldn't link the time spent to the DC of anything, for two reasons: 1) The DC is already accounted for when they make the check; and 2) The DC is just a judgment call on your part, so it's better to not make your judgment even more deterministic than it already is.

I like your per square/hex idea. The only issue with it, is it can be time consuming to count them. Even having to stop to count the length of a hallway is distracting to me. Already, I tempt to pre-count and write in the margins or on the map if not included in an adventure's room descriptions. I suppose I could add the area as well. More likely, I would guestimate to derive at a number rather than count squares.

MNblockhead · May 2, 2017

aco175 said:
We have had discussions on skill checks here before, specifically on lock picking. One of the ideas was that you could pick the lock eventually, by eventually rolling a 20. Someone came up with the idea of failing only taking more time and each point failed by would take another minute to pick the lock. For example; The lock has a DC of 20 and your roll totaled 15, normally a failure but here it just takes you 5 minutes longer. You can roll a wandering monster check as a penalty or have the monsters on the other side get ready, or the group will know they failed the easy pick attempt and it will take a few minutes to pick and just decide to try and bash it down instead.

This can be the same for other skill checks. Once the PCs start taking levels of exhaustion, they may try to rush through checks and you can set the DC higher for a quick search and give them the opportunity to skip or waste minutes searching more detailed. If the normal DC was 15 and a rush job is now 20. They roll a 12 trying to rush and decide to take the time then you could tick off 8 minutes, but I may make searches 2x and tick off 16 minutes.

Not sure I like the idea of just adding the difference in minutes. I think I would be more inclined to make it a significant amount of time to figure out, to incentivize the party to think of other options.

This is one area in the game where I liberally apply GM judgement and decide based on what makes sense and helps with the story for that situation rather than have a consistent number.

I ended up having a clock with six check boxes between each hour ticks. Every time if felt like 10 minutes had passed I would check a box. I loosely based it on DC, actual combat rounds, etc. But it was mostly guestimates and GM fiat. Mechanically, it isn't very satisfying. But it worked well in the game. I think my players would prefer I just loosely estimate rather than spend time trying to calculate precise times.

Now, if the party needed to pick a lock before a pursuing monster reached their location, THEN I think a mechanic that determined time required by DC would really be the best approach.

MNblockhead · May 2, 2017

Shiroiken said:
I'm sure I'm too late to help, but just in case...

Because wandering monsters are important to the adventure I'm currently running, I've worked out what I refer to as Exploration Rounds. Each round equals a minute for dungeon exploration (wilderness and city times would be different). I figured out what the speed the party is traveling and what general activities they are doing (per normal exploration rules). When they come across a room, it starts a new round. Exploring a room takes 1 man-round per 10' square (i.e. 4 PCs can search a 20x20 room in 1 round), but other options are available (such as watching for wandering monsters). Combat is assumed to take 1 exploration round, unless it takes longer than 10 combat rounds, then it rounds up to 2 exploration rounds. I count doors as an extra 50' of movement (5 spaces) for time if the party does more than just open it (checking for traps, having to unlock it, listening, etc.), because unless it's really special, it shouldn't take a full exploration round.

By using these exploration rounds and a spreadsheet tracker, I can keep fairly accurate time for checking for wandering monsters. It should work for you needs too, but you'll just need to mark off the time on a scrap paper.

Seems everyone like the per square/hex. I can see doing for hex exploration, but in a dungeon, for me, I would rather just assign a difficultly level for searching a room based on size, how much stuff is there to be searched, and other elements. For me, that is much quicker and requires less prep or disruption than counting squares.

MNblockhead · May 2, 2017

Quickleaf said:
Well...you need to consider a few things. A Rogue (Thief) can use Cunning Action to pick a lock as a bonus action. Personally, I dislike what that does to the narrative, but it's RAW so something you may need to pay attention to if you've a Thief in your group.

Fully agree with [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] about it being a bad idea to tie DC to time required.

I like your simple guidelines, to be honest.

[SECTION]
10 min to search room
5 min to disarm trap/pick lock if proficient otherwise 10
10 min if too much disagreement or discussion
200 ft. movement (slow) per 10 minutes [/SECTION]

That's the kind of thing you could put on notecards or on the outside of your DM screen for the players to have easy access to.

Everyone seems to dislike tie DC to time required. I don't understand why. Breaking into a bank vault does not just require more skill than lock bumping a barn door, it requires more time.

A large room packed with lots of debris and containers take more time to search than a small empty room.

I can intuitively and, most importantly, quickly assign a room with a DC for search. I can do that much more quickly than counting the squares.