D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

Harzel said:

It's interesting @CaptZapp chose to post now with a reference to that Angry article, since Angry just posted this http://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/ a few days ago, which seems to reflect a slightly different attitude.

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I should probably clarify that his article was just a convenient way for me to get everybody up to speed on the issue, complete with exactly the kind of dismissive attitude that to me suggests that the poster haven't thought the issue through, at depth.

Thanks for the new link; I'll have to check it out later!

Edit: I did, and... http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ime-Encounter-pacing-and-Resting-restrictions

Flamestrike said:

All of which have time constraints ranging from broad: 'Stop the cult before the ritual is complete and Tiamat wins'

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Sorry but everybody instantly calls your bluff.

Having vague nonspecific threats like that is what every module uses. It's super thin and easily ignored.

What it boils down to is the lack of specifics. As long as you don't know and can't know how far gone the ritual is, there simply isn't any actual information to base your resting decisions on. And in every single such case, this means there really aren't any consequences for taking "just one more rest".

Sure I can as DM add things like "a divine messenger appears to tell you the ritual is likely 87% complete" or even "your research tells you the ritual is likely targeting completion by the summer solstice, which is 5 days away".

The point is, the published adventures don't.

down to 'youre stuck in a castle overnight and have to recon the mill/ rescue the prisoners/ capture a dragonclaw by dawn.'

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This is a completely different ball-game. Here you present a highly specific time limit that can be converted to short and long rests.

I would have loved this idea of yours in official modules, Flamestrike!

I've yet to see a published adventure that does this.

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It's a given that the GM is supposed to handle things like that. No written scenario will account for all possibilities.

A few years ago, I ran an adventure in which the party figured out early who the BBEG. They crafted a plan, and they essentially jumped him in the street. The dice went their way the entire combat, and they finished him off in a matter of rounds, and escaped virtually untouched. They gambled huge, and it payed off.

Needless to say, that wasn't how it was supposed to play out. As the guy running the game, I had to figure out what this sudden power vacuum meant; how the world would react in order to continue the campaign. Because sure as heck nobody foresaw that possibility.

Which is just an extreme version of the scenario in which the party hits a guard house or a brigand camp and retreats to hit them after they rest. The world has to move on, but the rules or adventure notes themselves aren't going to tell the GM what to do. This is where the GM ea me his keep.

Flamestrike said:

You refuse to set any time constraints on any quests you hand out to your players, resulting in a boring quest that lacks any tension or narrative drive. The players are free to ignore the quest because there are no consequences for failure or success. Nothing changes if they succeed or fail, and they are free to do something else and then come back to the boring quest you've laid in front of them. They can leave a place where they've murdered dozens of people, return weeks later and nothing has changed.

When you sit down to design your adventures/ hooks/ quests, start with: PCs must [do X] before [time Y] or else [bad thing Z] happens.' From there, design your individual encounters, and the consequences for failure.

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And you, my dear Flamestrike, consistently and repeatedly refuse to acknowledge either of
a) published modules seldom to never do this
b) I might not WANT to do this (for a change)
c) I might run a sandbox where this simply isn't on the table.


It all boils down to the practical conclusion: the game needs to work without these story-based time constraints, or it simply is an inflexible less-open edition of D&D.

CapnZapp said:

The problem is: how does the PCs get advance warning the Drow is closing in?

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The adventure gives you instructions on how to us the many NPCs the party has available to foreshadow the drow pursuit at the beginning and then if the drow get close later the party starts encountering their scouts to push the party along.

I mean, the hunting party only works as a rest deterrent if the PCs have useful info to act on. Otherwise we're just back to square one and the general vague threat that far too many scenarios rely on to motivate the heroes - not just to act, but to act now.

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The group I am DMing has eluded the drow pursuit but their path is predictable so if they linger long any where their trail will be picked up again.

When running the WotC adventure paths I find the 6-8 encounters per 1 long rest and 2-3 short rests per one long rest to be a useful guideline, not in how to run the adventure but in predicting what my players will do. I look at what is ahead and gauge what encounters they will run into and the relative difficulty of those. After 2 or 3 non-trivial encounters they will likely want a short rest to spend some HD and recharge class features and somewhere around 4-6 they will start considering a long rest. As DM I decide whether and how to apply time pressure to keep them moving.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using EN World mobile app

CapnZapp said:

I would much rather they were hardcoded in the game (as variants, he said to prevent people from bursting a blood vessel), so I would be freed from having to think up ever-new story complications, and the game would just work even if I present the players/characters with a wide-open sandbox.

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Variant resting rules:

PCs must overcome two or more medium+ (or hard+) difficulty encounters after a long or short rest before they can take a short rest.
PCs must overcome six or more medium+ (or hard+) difficulty encounters after a long rest before they can take another long rest.
PCs may take no more than two (or three?) short rests between long rests.

Done. Now regardless of timeline, sandbox or how many days the party spends sleeping in the dungeon, their short and long rest recharges happen only on a mechanical encounter schedule that "works" with the game.

CapnZapp said:

At low levels everything works.

Then you get teleportation and pocket dimensional magicks.

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And the NPCs get scrying and teleportation and the like as well.

The game gets harder to both run and play at high levels. This is true.

My table group is 12th level and playing through the Ravenloft portion of Curse of Strahd. They quckly figured out the Warlock can just cast Fly and they can come and go from the castle at will....which will be fun for them until 10 swarms of bats force some concentration checks...if that fails the devil Strahd has some other tricks he can use. They'll be less keen on flying too high then.

Leatherhead As for the Official published supplements, they are supposed to to be somewhat easy.
They are meant for use with the Adventurers league

CapnZapp said:

No they aren't.

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From page 11 D&D adventure league v6.1 pdf about hardcover adventures
These adventures typically use the following ranges and can be played by characters of a higher level, provided they are within the adventure’s level range when they begin playing the adventure. A character is only “playing” one hardcover adventure at a time. For example, a character that starts playing CoS and then jumps over to an SKT game and advances outside of the level range for CoS can’t play that adventure anymore. This rule only applies to other DDHC adventures. Similarly, if an adventure directs you to run a specific portion of another hardcover adventure, the second adventure is considered the same adventure unless you continue playing it outside of the section referred to in the first. I’ve gone cross-eyed.
Levels 1-7 or 8-15. Used in HotDQ and RoT, these level ranges allow for mixed-tier parties.
Levels 1-10+. This level range is typical for most other hardcover adventures, and allows for mixed-tier parties.
Tiers. Tales from the Yawning Portal uses specific tiers of play for each dungeon instead of a single level range for the entire book, as follows:
• Sunless Citadel: Tier 1
• Forge of Fury: Tier 1
• Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan: Tier 2
• White Plume Mountain: Tier 2
• Dead in Thay: Tier 2
• Against the Giants: Tier 3
• Tomb of Horrors: Tier 3
end of cut and paste
Lt zapp is doing his best not to see the any rebuttal. Now AL does not hand hold DMG about what to do when a group does any type of rest during an AL adventure which has a time limit. Through try and error, I found what best for me is for every short rest, reduce the time for the ritual by 2 rounds.

AntiStateQuixote said:

Variant resting rules:

PCs must overcome two or more medium+ (or hard+) difficulty encounters after a long or short rest before they can take a short rest.
PCs must overcome six or more medium+ (or hard+) difficulty encounters after a long rest before they can take another long rest.
PCs may take no more than two (or three?) short rests between long rests.

Done. Now regardless of timeline, sandbox or how many days the party spends sleeping in the dungeon, their short and long rest recharges happen only on a mechanical encounter schedule that "works" with the game.

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Check and Mate... Now CapnZapp can go play in his sandbox, and is forever freed from the heavy burden of having to think up story complications. And the Forums lived happily ever after because of the valiant AntiStateQuixote!

Until one day when...

*Deleted by user*