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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Transformer" data-source="post: 5835590" data-attributes="member: 70008">I think I may have been unclear. By "adjust based on whether the players did or did not sleep in the middle of the adventure," I meant what you're calling 'not adjusting', i.e. having the villain's plans be in a different state depending on whether the players rest or not.You seem to be assuming--correct me if I'm wrong--that the DM actually has the villain's plan plotted out and knows how long each stage will take: he has written down somewhere "the villain will have infiltrated Big City's high council in 3 days, will have laid siege to Big City in 7 days, and will have taken Big City in 9 days if the players don't do something in that time frame to stop him." If the DM does in fact have a plan that detailed, then you're right, he's set to prevent the 15 minute workday simply by following through on what he has planned. If the PCs rest for 6 hours and have to spend a day running the kobolds down because they escaped, and so they get to Big City on day 8 instead of day 7, then the city is already taken. A DM who is in such a position, and has set the precedent of following through on his strict and objective time records, can just keep doing what he's doing.But I don't think most DMs actually have that level of detail planned out. I think most DMs sorta just run the campaign world around the players. The players are infiltrating the kobold lair to get the artifact, and the big bad is off doing...something. Maybe the DM has a vague idea that the PCs might go to Big City next, and he has a cool encounter with the big bad planned out there, but he certainly doesn't know exactly how many days have to pass before the big bad takes Big City. So, if the PCs rest in the middle of the kobold lair, and so, have to waste a day tracking down the kobolds, what should the DM do? How does he alter his plans for the cool encounter with the big bad in Big City? Maybe there's a quick and easy way to make it so the villain's plans are farther along than originally planned when the players reach Big City, but then again maybe there's isn't.So I think we're saying the same thing about what's ideal. The ideal is that if the players spend 6 hours resting in the middle of the dungeon, ridiculously, and that sets them back 2 days, then ideally the villain's plan should be 2 days farther along than it otherwise would be. But practically, for most DMs, that's very hard to achieve consistently, and so players get away with running 15-minute workdays.As for the XP thing, you certainly have a point. Having XP based on the strength of monsters killed leads to some odd incentives. From a metagame perspective, the 15-minute workday is incentivized, because if you run 15-minute workdays you can consistently take on tougher encounters, and so in terms of real-world time you level faster. Meanwhile, if accomplishing goals or foiling evil plots gives no XP, there is little metagame incentive to do so unless the players are all really into the story. I don't have a solution, and I don't really want monster-based xp to go away, but I acknowledge the point.</blockquote>

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