No More 15-Minute Adventuring Day: Campsites

[I'm A Banana]

So, this is an idea that has come out of me looking at adventure-based game design, and how to achieve a game that focuses on the whole adventure, rather than the encounters in the adventure.

One of the "big problems" with adventure pacing in 3e or 4e is that the party can retreat to rest at any time, recover in a day or two, and come back to the dungeon loaded for bear. There isn't any price for resting, and there is great incentive to rest, even when there may be a price, since getting back your highest-level resources and all of your HP is generally worth whatever price your DM may put in place. It's possible to add a "time cost" to your adventures, but that trick only works a few times before it becomes kind of old hat -- if EVERY MacGuffin needs to be retrieved within 3 days, it's just frustrating, not necessarily exciting. Similarly, wandering monsters can be used, but suffer from kind of the same dilemma: used repeatedly, they become more of an annoyance than a threat.

This is less of a problem in older editions because it takes a long time to recover your lost HP -- long enough that most groups stop short of it -- but it can be a problem in certain kinds of game there, too.

So without changing your e-of-choice too dramatically, I was thinking of how to make resting less of a player choice, and more of a DM choice: the DM determines when you can rest for the day.

The DM may do this by placing "campsites" in a dungeon (or adventure), places or points where the party can safely lie down one long rest. Depending on your favored edition, there may be better guidelines for this (forex, in 4e, placing a "campsite" roughly for every 2-3 encounters is probably best, and you might want to place a "rest stop" every encounter, so that they can take a Short Rest). Of course, the party can sleep whenever they want to, but they don't regain spells or HP for doing it. They only regain those at a "campsite." Each campsite can be used once, and then it goes away.

Campsites could take the form of safe areas in a dungeon, or of inns along a bandit-covered highway, or quiet sylvan glades in the wilderness. After stopping for a rest, however, the campsite can't be used again: now the bandits/monsters/dragons/whatever have tracked you here, and will know where to find you if you stay there again.

This is a pretty game-focused solution, I understand, but I don't think it's impossible to justify in the world of the game, the idea being that safe places are rare, and only safe for a few nights before they're unsafe again. Of course, the party can always "quit" the adventure, running back to a safe haven for a full recovery in the middle of their adventure, but that means the adventure is automatically failed, and that if they come back to the problem later, it will have repaired, resupplied, and changed around, just as they have.

Anyway, do you think it's a viable idea? Putting the "rests" in the DM's hands, rather than allowing the players to tell you when they're taking a rest, helps ensure that a DM can keep a party on their toes, and if the game has good guidelines for when these rests should be, a DM can make an educated decision about where to sprinkle them in his adventure or dungeon.

 

[Argyle King]

I think it's an idea that could work. Personally, as I player, I wouldn't care for it. However, that's not because I think it's a bad idea; I think it's a workable idea; it just doesn't fit into my ideal style of play.


I'm curious, in this system, if the players use resources (i.e. Magic Circle) to make an area safe, are they allowed to rest?

 

[the Jester]

One of the "big problems" with adventure pacing in 3e or 4e is that the party can retreat to rest at any time, recover in a day or two, and come back to the dungeon loaded for bear. There isn't any price for resting, and there is great incentive to rest, even when there may be a price, since getting back your highest-level resources and all of your HP is generally worth whatever price your DM may put in place.

There are a lot of assumptions in this, actually. I mean, sure, if the only price is that the bad guys recover their missing hit points too, that's usually a no-brainer win for the pcs. But a proactive dm might not- I'd say should not- always leave it at that.

Raise the price, even a little, and the equation might change.

What if the price is "the bad guys set up a bunch of traps and ambushes for the pcs' return trip"?

What if the price is "the bad guys come a-huntin' for the depleted party"?

What if the price is "the bad guys finish their ritual and open a portal to the Abyss"?

What if the price is "the bad guy flees the dungeon entirely and gets away with the Macguffin the pcs are questing for"?

IMHO the players should be in charge of deciding when and where to rest, but a poorly chosen place and time should have consequences. 3e and 4e, with long combat times and relatively low numbers of encounters-per-level, discourage wandering monsters, but if the pcs rest in an old rat-infested dungeon, there's no reason a rat swarm shouldn't interrupt their rest. In D&D's earliest days, oozes only appeared as treasureless wandering monsters. I remember when pcs would save a few spells to have in case of interrupted rests.

The 15-minute adventuring day is a problem, but intelligent monsters that respond to incursions during the time between assaults help to reward longer forays.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The 15-minute adventuring day is a problem, but intelligent monsters that respond to incursions during the time between assaults help to reward longer forays.

You're not wrong, but this puts a lot of demands on the DM to come up with interesting and creative consequences each time the party rests, and might throw out of whack the assumed amount of resting an adventure takes into account in 3e or 4e.

An idea that tells the players when they can rest, and makes it a resource that they use up, shifts the burdens from the DM back onto the players, who can then make strategic decisions about which resources to use where.

 

[Mercutio01]

I don't know if you're familiar with the XCrawl* setting from 3.0/3.5, but "break rooms" were built into the game. It definitely works within the context of that game, and I could see it working in a larger gamist atmosphere, but it doesn't really remove the shortened adventuring day. Really, it just codifies the 15 minute adventuring day by making it a fairly standard acceptable way to game. One of the way XCrawl limits it even further is that your time to clear a dungeon is limited (for scoring points), and the break rooms themselves are not predictable for when they appear in any given dungeon. It could be the second room or the twenty-first.



*If you are not familiar with the setting, it's not traditional high fantasy. It is a pseudo-present with fantastical races where dungeon crawling is a professional sport.

 

[the Jester]

So what happens if the party barricades themselves in a room they've cleared that is surrounded by other rooms that they've cleared and tries to rest, but it's not a designated rest area?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

So what happens if the party barricades themselves in a room they've cleared that is surrounded by other rooms that they've cleared and tries to rest, but it's not a designated rest area?

Throw X-Y encounters at them simultaneously, where X is the number of encounters they should have per day, and Y is the number they should have had.

While the PCs will have their defensive advantage, the opponents will have had time to study the improvised campsite.

Any spellcasting NPC of 6th-level or above could use Portal Jump (it's basically Arcane Gate as a ritual), or 10th-level plus could just use Portal Gate to teleport the entire group of opponents beyond the barricade. The latter occurs fast enough (I think it's a standard action, but might be a minor action) to catch all those sleeping, unarmored PCs.

 

[MichaelSomething]

This is less of a problem in older editions because it takes a long time to recover your lost HP -- long enough that most groups stop short of it -- but it can be a problem in certain kinds of game there, too.

Wouldn't this only be a problem in a cleric free party? If you have a healer, you rest one day, cast all healing spells until you're good, rest one more day to recover spells, and go back in!

Maybe you should just make it impossible to rest and just have them all use items for recovery...

 

[S'mon]

You can do it, but the players won't particularly like it.

Personally, I have had no problem with excessive resting in 4e. Reasons:

1. Most notably, I tend to default to spike encounters, typically 1 encounter/day but nasty enough to threaten PC death. In my Wilderlands game there's been a PC 1 save off death in both the last two sessions.
2. Uncertainty - I use wandering monsters etc, the PCs & players don't know for sure if they can take an extended rest, or what bad things might happen.
3. Reactive enemies - combined with uncertainty, it may be better to press on and complete the mission, rather than rile up the enemy then try to rest on their doorstep. I don't hold fixed encounters sacred, I'm happy to scrap the map and have the monster group encountered elsewhere.
3. Time pressure - "the goblins will wake at dusk". This is much the same as saying "You can't extended-rest now", but more accurately it's "You can start to rest, but you know you'll not get to complete it".

Edit: I think it's ok to say "The storm is too heavy for you to e-rest, you need cover" or "The orcs come through here far too frequently, you'll barely have time for short rest". Not all the time, though.

 

[The Shaman]

. . . [T]his puts a lot of demands on the DM to come up with interesting and creative consequences each time the party rests . . .

Well, coming up with the consequences of the adventurers' actons is part-and-parcel of running a living world, but really, does something "interesting and creative" need to happen every time the adventurers rest and regroup?