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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7153985" data-attributes="member: 29398">From the DM side these are a problem, but from the player side (and from the realism side where characters are people with a reasonable sense of self-preservation) this is often the most effective means of defeating a module and-or completing a mission, provided the table has enough patience to pull it off.In the game I play in we're doing this nibbling tactic right now: we know that if we just try to gonzo in and lay waste to the place (a frost giant/white dragon stronghold) there's far more in there than we can handle, and we'll get annihilated.  So, we're nibbling - a patrol here, a roomful of ogres there, then back off and reload for the next day; lather rinse repeat until we've beaten the population down to something we can handle in an all-out blitz.And even some of the nibbles are proving to be almost more than we can chew! <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=":)" />All it would take would be to set an arbitrary start point - for example, 'Day 1' is whatever day it is when the party first enter the ogre's cave that hides the real dungeon, and the module-as-written is a 'snapshot' of things as they are on that day - and a day by day or even week by week "development track" as to what happens next unless the adventurers somehow interrupt it.  This development track might even include resting notes, e.g. "Day 8: The Fire Titan begins to awaken.  Earthquakes become frequent and harsh enough to prevent long resting within the dungeon or immediate surrounds, and short-rest benefits can only be regained by passing a DC 12 saving throw on each attempt."In some modules e.g. Tomb of Horrors this might just be a one-liner saying, in effect, "Other than by direct PC action the dungeon environment will remain unchanged for years to come."  For other modules it might become much more complicated - and thus more necessary.Take Keep on the Shadowfell.  The entire premise of the module is the PCs are supposed to arrive just in time to disrupt what's going on in the big set-piece encounter at the end, but there isn't a word about what happens if the PCs get there early...or worse, three months late like my crew did.  This is an example of a module that really could have used a "what if" timeline of events that I-as-DM could use as a backdrop behind what the PCs are doing, but as a 4e module the writers obviously expected (and it shows!) the party would be blasting through it non-stop.  My crew nibbled, in no small part because they were busy fighting each other at the same time, and made repeated trips back to town; and at 6 days each way that makes time pass quickly!Lan-"there's limits, of course, to how many 'what ifs' a module can answer but a development track would catch a lot of them"-efan</blockquote>

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