I haven't had this problem at all. As the referee, I have the authority, within the rules, to frame the PCs into situations of conflict and challenge. If I think the players are being slack, I use that authority!I remember I became frustrated in 4e when the urgency of the in-game fiction for the characters did not carry through to the players - so they would declare rests often and refresh their abilities. It forced me to design every combat encounter challenging enough to warrant their rests. I'm curious, did no one else experience this or have a problem with it?
In your game, what was happening at the table - what did you say to the players when they declared their rests? Or (turning from metagame to ingame), if the ingame situation was urgent but the PCs were sleeping all the time, why didn't the cultists sacrifice the prisoners (or whatever)?
I'm a bit puzzled by the questions.Sure, they have a reason to make haste (in-game fiction), but is there a possibility of failure. Are your players aware of this - do they even fear failure? i.e. are the consequences heavy enough to actually warrant the characters making haste. Where/what are those limits where you say they have just taken too long? How do you measure them?
What do you mean by "possibility of failure"? Do you mean - did the players know that the prisoners might be sacrificed? Yes, they did - as I posted upthread, because of their less-than-fully-brave approach to fighting the cultists (ie turtle at the front entrance and defeat-in-detail their way in), one of the prisoners was killed. And did this affect the players? Yes - they changed their tactics, and made safeguarding the prisoners a higher priority.
I also don't understand why you ask "are the consequences heavy enough to actually warrant the characters making haste", when you open the passage with the statement that the PCs hav a reason to make haste. That statement answers your question!
If you are asking whether the players have a reason to have their PCs make haste, the answer is that they do - namely, they want their PCs to successfully save the prisoners! I don't have any trouble getting my players to engage the ingame situation. And I've never had any trouble managing the backstory together with my scene-framing so as to keep the pressure up!
Leaving aside the use of skill challenges to ration rests (such that resting isn't under the player's sole control), my players know that if they try to rest while they still have resources left then I'm likely to frame them into some conflict that makes them draw on those resources. By pushing on with their goal, they get to take charge of the direction of the campaign, rather than hand the initiative to me.
Time will not create dramatic tension if the players aren't in control of it.If time passing bears no consequence then yes, it will be less of a tool to inject dramatic tension. You can argue that certain adventures are more predicated for the use of time but not that time is an imprecise resource measure that it lacks the ability to impose dramatic tension.
For instance, if the players know that the GM is working with a clock, but they can't see the clock, and can't control or perhaps even tell how much their actions cost them on the clock, then I don't think there will be much tension.
At most there is gambling - gambling that spending time now to eg build up resources will not be the trigger for the GM declaring that the clock has reached midnight.
This question was not directed to me. But one answer might be, becaue a skill challenge allows the players both (i) to see the clock and (ii) to know what effect their decisions are having on the movement of the clock.can you tell me why a SC focused on time creates dramatic tension for your players to save a bunch of unknown NPCs from being sacrificed by a bunch of cultists, but your players will not find the above 'losses' dramatic enough in campaign-arc which takes time into account.
In other words, a skill challenge gives the players the requisite information to generate tension.
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As a rough example, information that might be gained by taking the left side of the passageway, which could lead to easier exploration throughout the remaining dungeon. This is all dependent if one is actually utilising a map.
I'm not sure who is following the map - the players, or the GM? I'm assuming that you are referring to a GM who is drawing upon a pubished map for the module.If I am following a map of the ToEE then going left or right can make quite a difference - in terms of alliances made, enemies fought, further options to investigate, treasure found, information obtained, prisoners freed...etc
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the PCs take a decision to investigate a corner or everything left so as to mark off that they have investigated the left side of the map - that to me is strategic decision on their part - they do not need to be more informed!
If the players don't know which path has the information, then choosing to go left or right is simply a gamble. If the players don't know what is in the dungeon, then choosing to clear the left side rather than the right is also a gamble, and strikes me as essentially an aesthetic or perhaps a record-keeping decision. It doesn't seem very strategic - what is the strategy? (If the module has been designed with a clear "spine" to the dungeon, and with the left and right sides each being somewhat balanced and self-contained, that would be a good reason for the GM not to swap stuff around on a whim, but that reason doesn't have much to do with illusionism.)
If the players couldn't know which path has the information, or couldn't know whehter or not it is rational to clear the eft side first, because the game (or perhaps just their PC builds) doesn't provie them with the requisite scrying, rumours etc, then the choice could never be anything but a gamble.
There are some playstyles where that sort of gambling is the main point of play, but that's not how I personally approach the game.
Illusionism would mean that everything is done covertly - whether it be on a die roll, a map or adjusting hit points of monsters during combat.
What decisions? If yu mean decisions about maps, can you be clearer whose decision you're talking about? Or are you talking about a hypothetical decision? In which case, can you spell out more about the hypothetical so I can understand what is going on.It becomes important when people, who define Illusionism - and paint it negatively, and ascertain that their decisions exclude any form of illusionism when to others the Illusionism in their decisions is so evidently displayed.
The first extended exploration skill challenge that I ran was based in the Night's Dark Terror scenario. I had a map of a woods (from that module), and I had a list of events that would occur on successes or failures (again, constructed by reference to the module). The events were more-or-less in the order they would occur, but some were noted as being feasible only in a certain part of the forest, or only at a certain time of day, and so if one of them came up in a fictional context that wouldn't permit it to occur (PCs at the wrong place or the wrong time) I would just move to the next on my list.
In the context of this skill challenge, the players' decision to have their PCs travel to this or that part of the woods had only modest implicatons for what they might encounter. And they were never going to find the goblin lair they were looking for (the fortress of the Wolfskulls) until the conclusion of the challenge. (This was much like the module, which had all these other events/encounters built in as preludes to finding the Wolfskulls.)
That didn't mean that I paid no attention to where they went on the map, because that did have a modest effect on encounters ( the idea being to preserve the integrity of the backstory - eg you won't meet Viper goblins unless you're in the general vicinity of the Viper lair). But those decisions about where to go weren't very meaningful. They were colour. The real action was in successfully engaging with the various events that the challenge through up, thereby allowing the players (and PCs) to collect information and show what they were made of, until they got the clues they needed to head to the Wolfskull fortress in the SE of the forest.
No illusionism. The players knew they were looking for the Wolfskull lair. They knew that this required gathering information and following leads - which they were doing. They could see how their dice rolls for the challenge were either helping them (by taking them to new encounters with helpful or at least useful beings) or hurting them (failures with consequences like a horse throwing a shoe, or losing some gear along the trail).
Given that they knew nothing about the forest other than what they were learning from progressing through the skill challenge; and given that the inhabitants of the forest had no placement, in the fiction, outside the stipulations of the skill challenge (which reflected some geographical considerations, as I've noted already); no choices were subverted or undermined by using the skill challenge structure rather than a more traditional encounters-placed-om-a-map-which-the-players-explore structure.