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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5754819" data-attributes="member: 2067">This isn't always appropriate.Take yer standard dungeon crawl (since it is the base model for D&D). There's no one villain really trying to "accomplish" anything. Acererak is sitting in his tomb of horrors, and might have some Vague Evil Plan hundreds of years off, but he's not an active (or reactive) force. Or the goblin warrens. Goblins live there. They've lived there for a while. People might be nervous. Maybe some folks are getting killed. But that's the Status Quo, and while it suuuuucks (and could use some heroes), nothing really changes until the party comes and kicks the goblins out. This is a character-focused game. The characters drive the action. Their desires and wants and schemes are what make the game happen. The Tomb of Horrors is sitting there being temptingly full of treasure and evil and traps and your character wants the shiny, and has a reckless disregard for his own well being, so he goes into it. If the character does not want the shiny, he can rest for a week. Or he can go grow crops on the farm. Or he can try his hand at The Temple of Elemental Evil, or The Steading of the Hill-Giant Chief instead. All of those are passive forces in the game world. They exist before the PCs, and, given the death rates, they might well exist after the PCs are dead. Any evil plots that lie within are in the distant future. Everything with a time limit is essentially a plot-focused game. The plot drives the action. The plot's desires and wants and schemes are what make the game happen (well, specifically, the villain's). Acererak now comes after you, or at least after NPCs whom he can then kill, just to...be evil? Prove he can? Give you an artificial time construct so that your characters are motivated by fiction to try and expend all their resources rather than retreating to rest after every encounter? Yes.Plot-focused games are all well and good and great, but they are not always appropriate, even for groups that love them. "ADD A TIME LIMIT!" isn't always useful advice. It's not always the case that the particular playstyle or threat wants or needs or would benefit from a time limit. And reactive dungeons are ideal in theory, but complex in practice. I think [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] has done some extensive and awesome work in this regard, but just looking at the most basic idea of adding another encounter to the dungeon, or adding a level/CR or two to the encounters, has cascading problems. More/harder encounters = more XP = more levels = easier encounters. Also, more/harder encounters = more "adventure grind" = longer time spent in a single adventure = "We have been trying to go through the Tomb of Horrors for six months of real-world time and I want to do something else." Also, more/harder encounters, if not properly balanced against when the game assumes you rest, leads to a "death spiral" of encounters, where you are forced to rest because there are more/harder encoutners, but each time you rest, there are more/harder encounters, making you rest sooner, etc....It'd be nice to have a ruleset where a reactive dungeon is easy peasy, but for 3e and 4e, that's not really the case (of course, the general rule of A Good DM Can Make Anything Work applies -- it might not be a problem in your games). So the OP, here, was an attempt to get at how you could make one little change to your game and keep the 15-minute adventuring day down, by making recharging something the DM controlled access to. It's apprently waaaay too abstract to be generally useful (though it's encouraging to see that a good chunk of folks already do something similar!), and unnecessary for those who are already happy with their own solutions, but I was specifically attempting to avoid the problems with the other solutions I've heard.Problems like changing a character-focused game to a plot-focused game, or figuring out the right maths for a reactive dungeon. Don't let me stop the convo, though, it is interesting to be a fly on this wall. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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