D&D 5E Camping outside the BBEG's door: yea or nay?

[Fauchard1520]

I always found that napping outside the BBEG's chamber door strains my suspension of disbelief. If you're playing fast and loose with short rests times then OK. A two minute pause to catch your breath seems fair. But the full-on 8-hour sleepy time always struck me as a bit much.

Comic for illustrative purposes.

Do you guys press on when it's dramatically appropriate, or do you put on the jammies and regain your spells regardless of your surroundings. If so, how do you justify that mess within the fiction?

 

[Aldarc]

If they were polite, they would invite the BBEG to join them for roasting marshmellows and telling horror stories about their experiences with LG paladins around the campfire.

 

[Dausuul]

If the BBEG is sealed in its lair and can't come out to engage us, sure, we'll take a rest. Why not?

If the BBEG is not sealed in its lair, and we've killed a bunch of its minions so it knows we're coming, which is normally the case, then making ourselves prone and vulnerable to surprise right before combat seems like a bad idea.

 

[Mort]

[/B]Do you guys press on when it's dramatically appropriate, or do you put on the jammies and regain your spells regardless of your surroundings. If so, how do you justify that mess within the fiction?

While it's certainly up to the players when and how long to rest, it's the DMs job to determine the consequences.

Resting right on the BBEGs doorstep is likely to have extremely foreseeable, unfavorable consequences for the players - unless they have some means of mitigating those consequences.

 

[Celebrim]

If you rest somewhere unsecure, expect to be attacked. If you don't keep a watch, there is a good chance this is a "You are all dead.", TPK as enemies with even decent stealth will probably be able to coup de grace several or all party members before anyone's alert enough to do anything about it. Even with a watch, things can go bad really fast because one PC can be incapacitated fairly quickly.

Also keep in mind what staying in an area for 8 hours means. It means urine and feces from everyone in the party (and their animals). Nature's call isn't usually worth worrying about, but if the PC's unreasonably ignore things have a plan for dealing with natures call or everyone will deal with unsanitary conditions. (In my typical dungeons, there are often areas designed by the original inhabitants to deal with these issues. The PC's are off course free to make use of any barracks, wells, garderobes, and so forth that remain in the dungeon in whatever degree of serviceability they are found.)

I also demand Endurance checks of varying difficulty to sleep successfully in uncomfortable conditions. If you try bedding down in an closet with a stone floor, in armor, with no sleeping gear, do not expect to rest successfully. Things will be worse if you are wet, hot, cold, or infested with parasites. Resting in poor camping spots with no real ability to rest is a good recipe for having Fatigue conditions inflicted on you.

 

[aco175]

I usually allow the PCs to take a rest, but they need to pull back and hide someplace which is normally designed into the adventure even if they do not find it. In 4e Keep on the Shadowfell, there was a place at the end of the hall with a illusionary wall you could see through from the inside. This was a great place to rest and keep guard, but allowed the game to continue. I would roll for wandering monsters and even active patrols if the monsters were smart.

The best thing is to pull back to outside the dungeon or all the way back to town. This forces the DM to shuffle things to keep realism active more than needed. The monsters would flee, or dig in and make traps and fortify things preparing for another attack. This now forces the DM to come up with new encounters for the areas that the PCs already went through since he does not know when the PCs are going to rest. I may come up with one or two new encounters if I have the week to plan, but if we are playing through the rest, I now have to throw something together to make it feel a bit more real and the players may get it, but if feels lacking to what would really happen.

 

[iserith]

Time is an important resource in my adventures. It's yours to waste, but much like wasting hit points or spells, there may be consequences. In many cases, the longer you give the villain to prepare or complete his or her goals, the harder things get. To some extent, that may be desirable from the player's perspective as it potentially means more XP, but that must be weighed against the likelihood of success.

As for resting in unsafe places, that will not go unanswered. But again, maybe the players want a nighttime ambush to burn off the last of their remaining resources before gaining the benefits of a long rest so as to maximize their XP gain on that adventuring day. If they don't want this, they can take steps to mitigate or eliminate the chances of it occurring by withdrawing (which may or may not have consequences with the passage of time as noted above).

 

[Fenris-77]

How silly this is really depends on the actual bad guys. If the players just cleaned out the entire evil mage tower, slaying every minion they could find, but stopped just short of opening his study door then yeah, it's dumb. Essentially any bad guy that now knows you're coming makes this a ridiculous idea. Something more beast-y makes it less dumb.

Part of the blame needs to lie with the DM too (maybe), as there is possibly some encounter design that wasn't up to snuff. Sometimes the players eff that up despite the best laid plans of course, but that's different. But if the big bad is 8 encounters deep from the front door then it's already pretty likely that the players will get to the final encounter with significantly diminished resources, and that's assuming you can find narrative space for a short rest or two in there somewhere, which is a whole other problem.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Back when I first started running, I was extremely reticent to kill PCs. As such, I did allow them to do so without consequence.

Nowadays, if they were to do so, I would likely give them a gentle warning. "Are you sure you want to make camp here? This area looks fairly trafficked." If they still decided to do so, then odds are they're going to be attacked during the night and whatever happens, happens. Admittedly, if they pull back it gives the enemy a chance to fortify or escape. In order to circumvent the issue, I try to either design dungeons that can be completed in a single adventure day, or include features that grant the benefits of a long rest (a desecrated temple to a good deity which, if cleansed, will grant the benefits of a long rest one time). Another example would be the classical healing fountain, if the adventure isn't two full adventure days.

Of course, sometimes things go wrong, the players have a string of bad luck, and are able to complete less than a full day. In those cases, they need to decide on whether to gamble and push on anyway, or retreat and accept the consequences that result.

 

[Seramus]

I will rarely kill off a party who chooses to sleep in an extremely unwise place, but I will probably hit them with some kind of dangerous situation that drains a lot of resources and makes the the final battle really damn hard. There are been times where the party even gave up, and accepted the consequences of having to back out of a dungeon.

But sometimes the narrative allows it, so sure.