D&D 5E 5e Pacing Guide

[Reynard]

FYI I started a thread in General to discuss narrative issues in RPGs. I wanted to stop derailing this one.

 

[Remathilis]

Well, I'm also sorry I don't understand it, since I thought I was learning something from it. But I'm not going to give up that easily. Let's focus in very narrowly on this bit. You say above that it's not about what style is preferred. In the OP, you say this:

Why is this so important in a horror game? Is the implication that it's more important in a horror game than some other kind of game? If so, is it really so difficult to understand that it might not be important (to manage) at all in a location-based, exploration-focused game?

Okay, so it's also important in "action-adventure stories." What about games in which "rising tension" is not a priority, or more specifically, what about games in which the players, rather than the DM, are expected to manage tension through their own decisions about how to explore and interact with the environment the DM has created?

Says who? The DM? What if the DM just creates the location and populates it, and lets the players decide what they do? What if they decide to go right to level 2, get their butts kicked, and retreat to the easier stuff on level 1? Now encounter difficulty has started high and then subsided because the players chose an easier path. The DM can't manage encounter difficulty -- that's the players' job in this style of game.

If this really applies equally regardless of style of play, how do you reconcile that? How do you use this specific technique in a location-based, exploration-focused game? Do you use some kind of AngryDM techniques where you create keyed gates, like a video game, and simply don't allow the players to go right to level 2 until you want them to? If so, you're not supporting the location-based, exploration-focused style of play. If you're not using techniques like that and the players can go where they want and do what they want, how do you make sure encounter level difficulty is increasing? How do you use the pacing technique?

Edited for typo.

You are using one example (location-based exploration) to try and disprove the concept when LBE is one of many playstyles, and to be honest is one of the least used in the types of scenarios described in the OP.

The vast majority of D&D is not mindless dungeons crawls anymore. Far more often, PCs have reasons to go explore beyond XP and GP and these reasons create the tension. Stop a villain. Save a person. Find a powerful MacGuffin. Solve a mystery. These goals create establish pacing due to additional factors. Exploring a vampire's castle is one thing, exploring a vampire's castle because he's going to turn your PC's sister into his undead bride at midnight is quite a different one! The latter has a strict time scale that affects encounter pacing (many weak encounters waste time and burn resources, and PCs cannot easily stop to recover them) which heightens the drama of the event.

This is especially true to horror since its much harder to keep a "horror" atmosphere in your around a dining room table slurping soda and cracking Monty Python jokes. PCs are powerful beings all things said (compared to most horror protagonists) and keeping a sense of dread, horror, and fear is a delicate act. If you don't, a horror game quickly devolves into farce.

Even in your example, tension can be created to an extent. The classic dungeon is filled with ambushes, tricks, traps, hidden objects, and other unknowns. A Good DM can build tension simply by making sure the group is never fully in control; will they be able to return to the entrance easily? Is the door not trapped, or did they not roll enough find it? Is the monster behind the door an orc or an ogre? Tension builds. In fact, the only way I think to completely remove it to allow the PCs free exit to rest whenever they wish unimpeded. Nothing kills pacing, and tension, like 15 minute workdays.

 

[Libramarian]

Yeah, they go by quickly. A long rest can and usually does take about 5 seconds of real game time. That is not what we are talking about here.

You really don't think that restoring all character's power resets the tension in the game? If that is your position then I don't have anything more I can say.

And while sometimes there is exposition or comic relief in those scenes, they are much more about pacing than anything else. They are carefully managed in the editing room.

Yeah, I don't think a rest really in itself* affects the rhythm of the game, at least not in a sense that would warrant your analogy to scenes in movies. It's more like watching the action hero reload his gun.

I maintain that the balance of combat, exploration and social encounters is more important with regard to pacing.

*Now if the party tends to rest at times that correspond with a shift in emphasis to exploration or social encounters, then that will affect the pace of the game but it's not really the rest itself, it's just the fact that it coincides with a shift away from a combat emphasis. E.g. they tend to take a short rest after clearing out a dungeon area, which is then followed by an exploration emphasis as they scout out a new area, or they like to go back to town and long rest/level up which is then followed by primarily social encounters before embarking on a new adventure.

I do think it's desirable that resting usually coincides with this shift from combat to exploration/social roleplay, so it's not a bad idea to have 3ish encounters per dungeon "area", and 8ish per dungeon "level" (or quest) in your mind. But it's not critical that every adventure has the same rhythm, and variety is nice.

 

[Libramarian]

I think the 13th Age mechanic is pants-on-head dumb (never read or played that game, but I dislike almost everything I've heard about it).

My alternative suggestion is to give the PCs the benefits of a short rest after an exploration "encounter" (e.g. complex trap, puzzle, maze, finding the dungeon entrance or a new area), and the benefits of a long rest after resolving a quest or digging up a rumour for a new adventure.

 

[abirdcall]

Yeah, I don't think a rest really in itself* affects the rhythm of the game, at least not in a sense that would warrant your analogy to scenes in movies. It's more like watching the action hero reload his gun.

It's more like seeing the hero bright and new immediately.

Imagine if John McClane looked as good as new every scene. He gets a few breathers here and there, but we feel as though he is getting injured and tired.

That is the effect that long rests have in a D&D game.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I find things like encounters-per-day and XP budgets and CR to be, at best, useful guidelines and usually not even that. I prefer a game that is organic and improvisational in nature, in which exploration and interaction drive the pace and the story is an emergent quality. I am not saying this is the right way to play, but it is what happens at my table. I have developed it even for cons, where I run an open world, ongoing game over the course of 4 or 6 slots. I have never wanted for bottoms to warm seats. I think the need for structure is overstated by many. I mostly blame Paizo. They did not invent the structured campaign but they perfected it and the explosion of "adventure paths" steals what I think is the best quality of tabletop RPGs: the crazypants uncertainty about what can happen next.

Completely agree. The best part of RPGs is freedom to explore - the power of TRPGs is the boundless flexibility of the GM. AP's make RPGs slightly better than computer games, choice wise. But when the system is complex, like pathfinder, you cant improvise easily, so I see why they sell.

 

[Reynard]

Completely agree. The best part of RPGs is freedom to explore - the power of TRPGs is the boundless flexibility of the GM. AP's make RPGs slightly better than computer games, choice wise. But when the system is complex, like pathfinder, you cant improvise easily, so I see why they sell.

Off topic I know, but: I really like Paizo as a company, and Golarion as a world. I like the care they put into their APs and the way they treat their customers. I love them for keeping the spirit of D&D alive during the Dark times. But, i swear, I will never run PF again now that 5E is out. It is exactly what I was hoping for in a new edition of D&D.

 

[Remathilis]

Off topic I know, but: I really like Paizo as a company, and Golarion as a world. I like the care they put into their APs and the way they treat their customers. I love them for keeping the spirit of D&D alive during the Dark times. But, i swear, I will never run PF again now that 5E is out. It is exactly what I was hoping for in a new edition of D&D.

I with you there. I never want to feel like I need a spreadsheet to run a PC or monster ever again.

 

[Syntallah]

Fair question. I'd treat this much like the optional Rest Variants on page 267 of the DMG. There they have options like "long rest" is 7 days, so they are already divorcing sleeping from the mechanical recovery of a long rest.

Rest Variant for 5e patterned on 13th Age

• Every 3 encounters the characters gain the advantage of a short rest. The counter resets after every long rest, so it takes 3 more to have another short rest.
• Every 8 encounters the character gain the advantage of a long rest.

The DM should count particularly tough encounters as 2 or more. A rule of thumb is that a Hard encounter or one with other disadvantages for the party should be 2, and Deadly encounters or a Hard encounter with overwhelming disadvantage should count as 3, but this will vary by table.

Note: This doesn't count the "rest sooner but take a campaign setback" aspect of 13th Age because mechanical campaign setbacks are not a part of the 5e language. But it means exactly as it sounds if you want to use that as well.

This would have 8 Medium encounters being: long rest, 1, 2, 3, short rest, 4, 5, 6, short rest, 7, 8, long rest.

With Hard encounters occasionally it brings it down to the 6 or 7 that are also part of the common expectations from the DMG.

I have recently begun to hybrid this 13th Age idea with the milestone concept from 4E. That is, I break up the 'experience budget for the day' into eight chunks, and when the Party gains experience enough to cover three chunks, they may take a short rest (might be five minutes, might be an hour, up to them; the mechanics are only a Short Rest). After another three chunks, they may qualify for another short rest, and after an additional two (total of eight) they may take a long rest.

The Party has just spent five days on an Underdark journey, and the above seemed to work well. They've just taken their Long Rest in a myconid village after seven encounters [five combat, one exploration, one social; I spitball the non-combat encounters experience point-wise].

I tried to keep the mechanic invisible to the players to keep some level of immersion. I just told them that they "couldn't a take a long rest here, too dangerous". That is going to be my biggest challenge: balancing the milestone mechanic with the desire to let the PCs decide when to rest...

 

[Rhenny]

Call me crazy, but in not a fan of the automatic short rest mechanic. Part of what I like about 5e rests are that they are a meaningful choice that players make depending on game circumstances. There is a lot of tension in games where the DM makes occasional consequences for deciding to take 1 hour short breaks. As a player, I feel relef when we are able to rest with little chance of consequence, and tension when it is unclear, or when we know we can't rest and we have to press on without a chance to bandage and use hit dice to heal. As a DM, the 1 hour rest choice is another tool in my DM tool kit that helps me vary the tension level and feel of the game.