How do clerics pray for spells in a dungeon?

[Hypersmurf]

Still, why did the designers include these time-specific mechanics in the game when we are playing in pre-industrial fantasy settings that have no clocks or watches? (Please, don't bother posting that there are "water clocks" or candles that burn down at calculable rates.)

Once you hit 8th level, you've got no problem. Just cast a spell that has a 1 hour/level duration at caster level 8. When the spell expires, eight hours has elapsed

-Hyp.

 

[Infiniti2000]

But if there's no obvious effect, you might not know the spell ends.

 

[Jack Simth]

Once you hit 8th level, you've got no problem. Just cast a spell that has a 1 hour/level duration at caster level 8. When the spell expires, eight hours has elapsed

-Hyp.

Caster level 4. 1st level spell: Mount; duration 2 hours/level (also deals with the "no obvious effect" clause).

 

[Nightfall]

Trust me, the god of clerics says "Pray to me and you'll get your damn spells alright..."

 

[Wonzling]

People from societies that don't have access to clocks and such usually have a very good internal sense for telling the time of day. This sense might get scrambled after several days without sunlight, but on the other hand having a set prayer schedule might actually help the party keep its dayly routines in the absence of a real day/night-cycle.

 

[The Forsaken One]

Again, a level 0 or 1 spell (prolly level 1 due to the duration :\ ) which just mentally lets you know the position of the sun or gives a mental ding every time an hour lapses with a duration of 24 hours. Don't see any problem with it, and since I actually never bothered with keeping track of time in dungeons for praying clerics I might just introduce it myself hehe. Make it a divine spell to boot so he can memorize it anyway unlike having a wizard who would have to create or buy it or a sorc to waste a spellslot on it.

 

[Menexenus]

Once you hit 8th level, you've got no problem. Just cast a spell that has a 1 hour/level duration at caster level 8. When the spell expires, eight hours has elapsed

Hee-hee! I like it...

I also got a chuckle out of Malum's sample prayer.

Werk writes, "If you allow them to rest for 23.5 hours, that's the problem." I'm not sure I understand. If the party has the food and water, and finds a secure enough campsite, how exactly should I *stop* them? Rest assured, I always tell the party to mark off a day's worth of rations. And I consider whether the bad guys (or wandering monsters) would raid them during the night. But my players have caught on to this and have become very creative at finding highly secure campsites.

Besides, should I really be trying to find ways to punish my players for using the rules to their benefit? Don't the rules *encourage* this behavior? That's why I was suggesting that the designers should have come up with some other way to recover spells that wasn't so time-related and didn't lead to such cheesy consequences.

 

[tzor]

Well it all depends, there is the technical explanation and then there is the generic hand waving explanation. I love to speculate on the former, but much prefer the later.

In the real world, it was those pesky monastics who wanted to get up to pray at the oddest hours of the night that drove the development of mechanical clocks. Prior to this there really was two time systems used, an accurate sun based one for the day (with "hours") and a simple system used at night when the only people not sleeping were guards (with "watches"). Mechanical clocks extended the accuracy of hours into the night. Their only problem was that they were stationary, but since most monastics were stationary, that wasn't a major concern. The evolution of the clock that would work on a rocking ship allowed accurate determination of longitude which made navigation possible. This in turn led to the pocket watch, and the rest, as they say, is the reign of the tyrany of the clock.

That as they say is the real world. In the hand waved fantasy world, clerics really sought to, ought to pray at a certain time in the day, which is more of a philosophical concept than a absolute requirement. It's not like his god clocks into the office at precicely 6AM and then clocks out at 9AM for his coffee break. (Plus the fact that it's always 6AM in some part of the fatasy world right?) So the questions of whether the natural cadian rhythm of people who are not shown the cycles of the sun is exactly 24 hours is a point only for science fiction and real world studies. Handwaving a 24 hours cadian rhythm is good enough for gaming purposes, although evil DM's might adopt a 25 hour cycle and cause a party underground to gain one hour for every "day" they think they spent in the dark. A couple of weeks underground and when they return they will wonder why the calendar seems to be a few days ahead.

How does your body know when it is time to go to sleep and to wake up? Inyour brain, in a place called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), there is a col-lection of cells that have the ability to keep time and function as a pacemakerfor your sleep-wake cycle. It turns out that this pacemaker controls not onlythe times when you are sleepy or alert, but it also controls the function ofmany systems in the body. The word many, in fact, may be an understate-ment. Most of the systems in the body have a pattern that varies over a twenty-four-hour period. This is true for the secretion of many hormones, bloodpressure, heart rate, and other functions in the body. This natural, internalrhythm in function has been called the circadian rhythm. The word comesfrom circa meaning “about” and diem meaning “day.” In other words, the circadian rhythm changes the way many systems in the body work over thetwenty-four-hour day so that the function of the systems matches what thebody needs. As a result, we usually don’t have to go to the bathroom and wedon’t have hunger at night. If you have traveled across time zones you knowhow discombobulated or out of sync you can feel because of a disconnectbetween your own body clock and the time where you happen to be.

 

[werk]

If the party has the food and water, and finds a secure enough campsite, how exactly should I *stop* them? ... But my players have caught on to this and have become very creative at finding highly secure campsites.

Besides, should I really be trying to find ways to punish my players for using the rules to their benefit? Don't the rules *encourage* this behavior? That's why I was suggesting that the designers should have come up with some other way to recover spells that wasn't so time-related and didn't lead to such cheesy consequences.

You are going to have this situation whether the time between 'refreshes' is 8 hours or 24 hours...it's just 24 hours gives you a lot more time for something interesting to happen. Plus, they are really wasting a ton of time. The best solution would be to start putting time limitations on their quests. "Recover the bloody fist of Mardrigan before the full moon or all is lost!"

I do think you should punish them for that behavior. Entering every combat fully loaded and cocked is going to skew their CR, so you'll raise the EL's to present a challenge, so they will literally be rewarded (in xp) for that type of play. There is no detriment to blowing all of their disposable resources in the first encounter they...encounter.

I don't know of any alternate system that wouldn't be a bookkeeping nightmare.