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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Black Plauge" data-source="post: 4704034" data-attributes="member: 69833">That's a good point, and one I hadn't considered because I was mostly expecting the D/L to be close to one.  Indeed, my first draft didn't include it at all.  It wasn't until I got to writing up the examples that I realized there were some discrepancies in the relative difficulties of the Delves (in particular between January's delve, which I didn't use as a final example, and the ones that I did use).Ideally the factor should get bigger when D < L, smaller when D > L and equal to 1 when D = L.  It should also be easy to "invert" these rules to come up with the factor the the DM's score.  The one you propose does meet all these criteria, but so would countless others (including my original one).  Do you have any justification for the form you propose beyond the fact that it uses the difference between the D and L rather than the ratio (which I admit, makes it better than my original proposal).  In particular, why base 2 and a factor of 1/4 in the exponent?A DM stalling for time might hurt the player's time should they complete the Delve, but it also hurts the DM's time should he manage a TPKR (Total Party Kill or Rout).  Both the DM and the players are striving to complete their goal (TPKR in the case of the DM, a completed Delve in the case of the players) as quickly as possible.  So long as the eventual outcome of the Delve is in doubt it is within both the DM's and the Party's interest to act as efficiently as possible.  It's only once the outcome becomes obvious that stalling by the eventual loser becomes an effective tactic to hurt the eventual winner.  I assume that between self-interest early on and good sportsmanship later on, such tactics wouldn't take place.However, I'm not adverse to correcting the formula to take sportsmanship out of the equation.  I'm just not sure timing the players' and DM's actions seperately is an effective way of doing that.  A chess clock like timer would certianly take care of that, but that isn't a piece of equipment I would expect everyone to have ready access to.  I'd like to make this system as easy to use as possible without specialized equipment.  Since most watches come with stopwatches these days, I expected that to be a readily available resource.  Furthermore, it's very easy to start and stop a single stopwatch once.  If timing the players' and DM's actions seperately, it becomes necessary to "tap the clock" several times each round.  When one then considers Immediate actions and the possibility of chained readied actions, one can easily see that this kind of tracking system can become nightmarish.</blockquote>

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