This is circular. If the players don't care about the fiction because their pcs need anything from the world and no longer need to worry about the complications of past rest/recovery implementations they should care about it when it's called "story"....your showing why wotc is long overdue for supporting GM's better with tools to incentivize players in having reasons to care when "story" alone is considered unimportant to players
And that was my point. Why play a role-playing game - a game where story is the primary objective - with players that don't care about the story.
@Lanefan brings up a good point though. Their characters might still make a safer path, hence, resting more often. But, I just don't see it as a problem. If the world is reacting to your players, then there are narrative consequences. If the narrative consequences are strong enough to urge them forward, then so be it. They got some extra rests and easy-moded their way through (provided you don't balance the encounters based on the moment.)
No. Your previous post shows that the endless bar raising is not simply "what a good gm does" where you dismiss the overused doom clock expectations by listing several narrowly defined flavors of doom clock as if it were some wise elder xianxia elder bestowing profound mystical insight into the dao of truly grasping the deep mysteries of gming.
I am not trying to bestow profound insight, nor am I trying to pretend everything I do (or the DMs I play with) understand the game better than others. In fact, my post was quite the opposite. I was trying to understand your sense of what a doom clock was. I simply stated that time might be a better instrument, as opposed to doom + time. That's why I gave the example of missing a wedding, as opposed to the world is going to end.
Those create a lot of new problems resulting from LR & SR classes being impacted wildly different (huge nerf/giant buff) and many spells/abilities not having their duration scaled all it does is change some of the problems that come from the gm not having the mechanical hooks that once made it hard for players to not care about how an ignored doom clock would impact their pc.
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I think this is a valid reason to not implement those rules. So, since that is the case, maybe make your own. I know, I know, that is not ideal, and at some tables, not even welcome. But, I think it might be worth a shot if your table is having this problem consistently.
Until they've got whatever it is they went for, I've no concern that they'll keep exploring. But - and this does makes load of in-character sense - they'll try as best they can to do so at a pace that reduces their risk to the greatest reasonable extent, and that means resting back to full at every half-decent opportunity.
What I find, though, is that after they've got what they went for they tend to hightail it out of there rather than take the time to finish exploring the whole place, meaning they miss out on whatever xp, treasure, and (sometimes) key story beats and-or hooks for potential further adventures the unexplored parts might hold.
This is definitely true, especially that last part. But, in truth, I really don't see it as a problem for any game that I have been a part of. The last campaign I ran in D&D was a sandbox. They didn't get to 3/4 of the stuff. As a DM, I need to be okay with this. The story took us one way, and that is where it naturally ended. As a player, I itch a little when we leave obvious spaces unexplored, but when we do, we are often seeking an objective. In our last campaign, I had cast locate person, and we must have walked by five or six different explorable areas. There was no time to explore because we needed that person.
Errrr... Pacing? Story? Control of these?
A good DM runs the game at whatever pace the players tend to set, and though there may be some overarching DM-placed plots in place the actual story that emerges from that play is left for the game log the next day to sort out.
Yes, the players can help set the pace in D&D, but the DM ultimately has control of the pacing. They are the ones that can cut scene, move time around, determine rewards or consequences for inactivity, etc.
