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Message: <blockquote data-quote="scholz" data-source="post: 1415426" data-attributes="member: 10028">I have always had trouble pacing dungeon crawl style adventures, that is adventures with a large number of encounters (more than a typical party can handle without rest). On one hand, it is always fun to see the party low on resources, healing, etc.. struggle to fight against the omnipresent evils. On the other hand, there is something weird about the typical D&D dungeon day. Wake - 1 hour spell prep.Adventure - Time to getting to the first encounter or from one encounter to the next, (traps, puzzles, etc), what have you. Typically this is a fair short time in dungeon since dungeons are not miles long (usually).Fights tend to last fewer than 10 rounds (2 minutes). If a single CR equal to the party level is suppose to drain 20% of the resources, five such encounters will mean the party has to rest. Maybe a bit more assuming most encounters are less than the party's EL (is this the case?). So a typical day in a dungeon (or evil forest, cave, castle, etc..) is going to be 10 minutes plus travel time. The result of this is that party will wake, memorize spells, go adventure, and be done for the day before lunch. Then they will want to rest or sleep before adventuring again. I've seen this many times, an adventure with numerous encounters wears a party out so quickly they end up spending hours camped out in the dungeon. It just seems very weird to me. Q. What do I want?A. Adventures that last all game day or more. How to achieve this.Possible solutions. 1. Reduce number of resource draining encounters, increase time to move, mapping, role playing, puzzle solving, etc.. This is a pretty good idea, but is much more labor intensive for the DM, and can get boring for the players. 2. House Rule: Rest and Recovery. I tried this once, moving all the natural healing and spell recover to one hour of rest. Result. Party was never low on resources because they would rest after every encounter (why not, it is only an hour), so even more time was spent 'camping'.3. Impose time limits: this old school technique can work in some games, but gets tedious from a player point of view, especially if every game is like that. Also it seems to hurt spell casters more than fighters and rogues. With adequate HPs the latter group is good to go, but wihout spells, the former are reduced to using whatever magic items you provide them with. 4. Encourage multi-classing, all characters will be able to go with just HPs. Not a bad situation especially if you provide cheap healing (wands). But without same level Priests and Mages the party may suffer against equal CR encounters. 5. House rule some kind of Mana system so that spellcasters can recover spells at a faster rate, but not so fast they are never drained. I've never come on a good mana system that managed this feat. Another spin is to give spell casters items or abilities that do not go away and provide them with something to do each round the fighters and rogues are in there, even if they are out of spells (or saving them). I tend to get bored of wands of combat spells, but I haven't quite figured a good substitute. I am not really happy with any of the above solutions. Hence my post. Is there a way to keep the drain of resources (spells, HPS) a feature of the game, but prolong the period of activity for all players beyond a few encounters?</blockquote>

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