Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hedonismbot" data-source="post: 6291137" data-attributes="member: 6715154">Sorry, I probably wasn't very clear in my post. I try to be mindful of the mechanical implications of my decisions as both a player and a GM, but I'll try to explain below:I mentioned non-combat actions because those can sometimes take more time than combat. In most D&D games, a combat will only take a minute or two of 'game time' so it's not often a real factor in time-sensitive quests (unless the timelimit is really tight! "You have 8 rounds before the vault fills with water and you drown! Do you really want to fight those skeletons?")When I wrote the post I was envisioning a quest like "you have three days to track down the cultists, learn of their plan, and how to stop it." So potential non-combat actions might be gathering rumours, shadowing suspected cultists to meetings, or doing research in the town archives. Those will all take more time than a four-to-five round combat if you decide to jump a few cultists and kill them. I in no way meant to suggest that combat was the only option, only that non-combat solutions can sometimes be more affected by a time-sensitive mission than combat-related ones.The flip-side of this is that a combat that takes 30 seconds of game time might use up a lot of PC resources, like spells and HP. So they have to weigh the potential benefits of starting a combat against potential down-time they'll need to take (for example "this cultist knows where the ritual will be held, but he's surrounded by cronies right now. Do we attack here, risking a big fight that might eat up spells we don't have time to rememorize? Or see if we can catch him when he's alone?") That's what I meant by 'number of short/long rests' - a combat might only take 30 seconds, but it could use up resources that require a short or long rest to complete. If the time limit is three days and a short rest is five minutes, there's no real limit on short rests, but if a short rest is a day, suddenly that 3 day limit is saying "you won't have much downtime and have to do all of this with the resources you have at hand."Obviously you can come at it from different perspectives, but that's mine.</blockquote>

Verification