D&D General Time Pressure and Adventures

[James Gasik]

If some evil wizard is going to set off his magic nuke to destroy the city, he's not going to wait for 3 extra weeks just because the PCs decided to do a bunch of side-quests and got hammered in a pub and woke up without pants. That story has a time limit. These PCs will wake up without pants and without city if they decided to ignore that time limit.

 

[CleverNickName]

...but it did mean the party could not take long rests.

Them's fightin' words 'round here! Well, in certain threads, anyway. I've seen people come unwound about their characters not being "allowed" to take long rests on an adventure. Something about player agency, something else about action economy, something about what the game designers intended...

I love time pressure in my adventures. I think the party should literally miss the boat if they take too long getting to the docks. I think bounties should have expiration dates...and/or competitors who might get the quarry first. I think that waiting an hour to "grab a short rest" before chasing the bandits means that bandit is long gone. Take too many long rests in the desert, and you're going to run out of food and water. Wait too long to rescue the baron's son, you might be named an accessory to the crime. And so on.

I use time pressure in just about every adventure. I think it's an important part of the realism.

 

[Yaarel]

Every once in a while, a time limit can be fun. But overuse of a time limit gets objectionable.

 

[amethal]

Them's fightin' words 'round here! Well, in certain threads, anyway. I've seen people come unwound about their characters not being "allowed" to take long rests on an adventure. Something about player agency, something else about action economy, something about what the game designers intended...

I love time pressure in my adventures. I think the party should literally miss the boat if they take too long getting to the docks. I think bounties should have expiration dates...and/or competitors who might get the quarry first. I think that waiting an hour to "grab a short rest" before chasing the bandits means that bandit is long gone. Take too many long rests in the desert, and you're going to run out of food and water. Wait too long to rescue the baron's son, you might be named an accessory to the crime. And so on.

I use time pressure in just about every adventure. I think it's an important part of the realism.

I'm fine with all that, so long as the DM is okay with the hostage failing to get saved on occasion.

I'm much less keen on "save the world in 24 hours or die trying" sorts of adventure, where the characters have no opportunity to recover from a bit of bad luck early on, potentially leading to the players being forced into a TPK and presumably the entire campaign world being blown up and everything they'd ever achieved in the past being rendered meaningless.

(And an unfortunate part of me want to fail the adventure on purpose when that happens, just to see if the DM will go through with it - they must be more attached to their campaign world than I am, right?)

In our games we tend to have an unspoken social contract where the PCs will proceed heroically (rather than resting after every fight just because they can) but if they end up getting delayed they'll still arrive in the nick of time.

 

[iserith]

All of my adventures and campaigns have time pressure of various forms, so it's normal in my games. I think overall the game works better when different time pressures are in effect. This may be in the form of events that occur at a specific point, day, or time or something like wandering monster checks at regular intervals. These create a sense of urgency and present the players with meaningful choices to make with their resource of time relative to their other resources. To my mind, the more meaningful choices the players have to make per unit of real time, the more engaged they become with the game.

 

[CleverNickName]

I'm fine with all that, so long as the DM is okay with the hostage failing to get saved on occasion.

I'm much less keen on "save the world in 24 hours or die trying" sorts of adventure, where the characters have no opportunity to recover from a bit of bad luck early on, potentially leading to the players being forced into a TPK and presumably the entire campaign world being blown up and everything they'd ever achieved in the past being rendered meaningless.

(And an unfortunate part of me want to fail the adventure on purpose when that happens, just to see if the DM will go through with it - they must be more attached to their campaign world than I am, right?)

In our games we tend to have an unspoken social contract where the PCs will proceed heroically (rather than resting after every fight just because they can) but if they end up getting delayed they'll still arrive in the nick of time.

Yeah, this is all true. I've learned that if I'm going to be rigid with time pressure, I have to be flexible with consequences.

I've had NPC heroes show up to save the hostages (and collect the rewards, and the fame) when the party decided they needed to spend a week of downtime to buy a +2 longsword first. But the message eventually gets across: the players aren't the only band of heroes in town, and there's always someone willing to do what they aren't, for the right price.

And if the party arrives within an hour or two of the "deadline," I'm all for giving them the benefit of the doubt. Unless I have an awesome idea for what happens otherwise. Sometimes I can't decide if Ending #1 or Ending #2 would be the most fun, so I let the party decide for me. But I'm not going to punish them if a random encounter dropped their cleric and they had to take a knee.

 

[Tallifer]

I have played a few scenarios with a ticking clock, and it is fun to be thus challenged, However, I do prefer a leisurely exploration spread over forever.

 

[James Gasik]

Them's fightin' words 'round here! Well, in certain threads, anyway. I've seen people come unwound about their characters not being "allowed" to take long rests on an adventure. Something about player agency, something else about action economy, something about what the game designers intended...

I love time pressure in my adventures. I think the party should literally miss the boat if they take too long getting to the docks. I think bounties should have expiration dates...and/or competitors who might get the quarry first. I think that waiting an hour to "grab a short rest" before chasing the bandits means that bandit is long gone. Take too many long rests in the desert, and you're going to run out of food and water. Wait too long to rescue the baron's son, you might be named an accessory to the crime. And so on.

I use time pressure in just about every adventure. I think it's an important part of the realism.

I didn't write the adventure, but I couldn't see any other way to rule it; if you take damage while attempting a long rest, it's interrupted, right?

 

[R_J_K75]

These create a sense of urgency and present the players with meaningful choices to make with their resource of time relative to their other resources. To my mind, the more meaningful choices the players have to make per unit of real time, the more engaged they become with the game.

This is something I need to give more thought to in both planned campaigns and adventures as well as when improvising and roleplaying on the fly. My players have long since felt that the campaign world revolves around them and they can amble through it as they wish. This is good food for thought.

 

[R_J_K75]

I didn't write the adventure, but I couldn't see any other way to rule it; if you take damage while attempting a long rest, it's interrupted, right?

I think if its interrupted period by any meaningful activity its benefits are lost.