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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7910344" data-attributes="member: 97077">I could put this all on the design side, but probably the most effective way is through DM design and player buy-in on when it's time to head back to town (before session end). The DM won't need to mess with anything during play in this case.This reminds me of my first D&D 5e town-to-dungeon campaign which was designed to have the PCs return to town at the end of each session for long rest (1 week long). The game basically ran like this: Town Phase (downtime resolution), then Overland Travel to Dungeon, then Dungeon Delving, then Overland Travel to Town, then End of Session Discussion. What would trigger the return to town was actually real time. The fictional contrivance was that the dungeon only appeared in the world for a certain amount of time and if you stayed in there when it transported back to whatever gods-forsaken demiplane it came from, you went mad and became an NPC dungeon denizen. So, about 30 minutes before session ended, I'd sound a horn and they had to haul butt out of the dungeon. Sometimes that was easy. Other times it was not. Thirty minutes was sufficient time to resolve overland travel back to town and any wandering monsters plus the end of session discussion. On time, under budget, every time.If I'm advocating for anything, it's for folks to realize there's more than one way to design and run an adventure that could suit any audience and that maybe some could benefit from doing something outside their comfort zone. My campaign, for example, is plot-based. My one-shots for pickup groups are location-based or plot-based. My next campaign will be location-based. I'm writing one-shots based entirely on shopping and ordering breakfast in a tavern simply because I hate that sort of thing, but I bet I can make them fun and that's an interesting challenge to my DMing skills.As I mentioned upthread, most DMs in my experience run plot-based games because it's the easiest to prep. Players on the whole (again, what I'm seeing) are so inured to this that they hardly even know how to act if the DM isn't cramming storyline down their gob. They're passive as heck. But give them some freedom in a location-based adventure and some encouragement to be proactive and they eat it up and come back for more. There's a real hunger out there for this. So yeah, I encourage folks to give it a shot. Design the watch, wind it up, and see what happens without messing about with it during play to preserve a plot or whatever. It's pretty fun and a good learning experience.</blockquote>

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