Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7124040" data-attributes="member: 37579">That is certainly what happens when the only failure condition is "death". At that point, there's no reason NOT to rest after every fight. Seriously. If the only way to "win" is to survive, then you want to maximize your chances for survival. It'd be stupid not to take every opportunity you can to increase your survivability.And if the DM is unwilling to actually make things more difficult - to actually kill you or overly penalize you for rest related game decisions - then you're subtly encouraged to rest whenever you can. Again, the solution to this is to add other failure conditions beyond death. Or the end of the world.  I don't think the point is about having a set time limit. That's the wrong take-away from the discussion. A growing pool is as effective as a countdown to an unknown. Neither are particularly dramatic as there's no predetermined lasting consequence. "Don't do X or *something* might happen at some point in the future" is a weak incentive not to do that action. Instead, the point is that there should be a reason to keep adventuring beyond a vague threat. As I mentioned earlier, having a time related pool that just penalizes taking unimportant actions risks penalizing the party for taking any risks. It discourages roleplaying and side tasks by increasing the chances of a wandering monster. If the only penalty for failure is still death, then facing a wandering monster is an appropriate penalty, provided there is a real chance of dying. It also works if the penalty is significantly and lastingly draining resources. However the problem is that the players can rest whenever they want. So a random encounter isn't much of an inconvenience if the party can just rest immediately afterward. This creates a vicious cycle where you have multiple random encounters - literal and actual session filler, since it doesn't fill a narrative or tonal role - that depletes resources encouraging the players to stop and rest. Especially prior to any difficult fight. Adding increased chances of random encounters that only deplete resources but don't have other lasting penalties just encourages the players to keep resting and hoping the odds end up in their favour and they don't get a random encounter. The only cost is time at the table.  First, removing player decisions from the story is so foreign to how I look at the game and what I expect from a campaign that I had to read that two or three times and refresh my browser to take it in. It's effectively encouraging metagaming. o.0 I spend most of my time as a DM working hard to ENCOURAGE the players making decisions from the story.  That aside, if you want to encourage them to press on shouldn't, y'know, encourage them? Positive reinforcement. Maybe some variant of the milestone system.  Emphasis added. Because the other problem with the rules you're presenting is that when the party does need to rest (such as after a rougher than expected fight) they're penalized for that failure. If they don't rest they risk death, and if they do rest they risk death. There's no winning.  Now, the easy rebuttal to this is that the DM isn't required to increase the time pool when the party has no choice but to rest. But, if you're bringing in fiat like that to manage the rules, you don't really need the rules in the first place. The DM can just increase the chances of random monsters or arbitrarily add more encounters (or make the encounters more difficult) if the party rests.  Okay… the underlying reason we want players to press on. It is *kinda* mechanical in that we, as DMs, want to challenge the party and have the drama of a harder fight. We don't want the party to nova and obliterate the enemy. But it's equally narrative. In that we want climactic fights that feel climactic. And fun, because nuking everything gets old and we, as DMs, also want to have fun and do cool things with our monsters.That's what we want. But that's not whom the mechanics are aimed at. It's the underlying reason the players want to rest is the problem. That's what needs to be addressed. In this instance, they want to rest or to regain powers and hit points. That's just the means to the end. The players rest because they want to obliterate their enemies. And because they want to win. Those are the desires at play. Those are what needs to be addressed by any solution, either narrative or mechanical.  Narratively and mechanically the first is easy. As the DM, give the players some fights they can just faceroll over. Easy fights or even mathematically hard fights where the players have a strategic advantage. Because if every fight is hard, the players will need to find other ways of getting their fun (i.e. the aforementioned obliteration). If the DM enables them to scratch that itch without resting, the players might feel good and not be as quick to nova. The second is the trickier one. The players want to win.  Narratively this requires more work. As I mentioned before, there needs to be other win conditions. Just beating the encounter is not enough to "win". Lives at stake, treasure being lost, the enemy is gaining power, a ritual is being completed, etc. If they win by beating encounters, then the easiest route to victory is nova-ing. That's a tried and true strategy that's been effective since OD&D. How do you counter this? Mechanically, you counter this by making it as hard to win by not taking as rest as by taking a rest. If the difference between resting and continuing is going into the final chamber with one fight under your belt (a random encounter) rather than two fights (the fights prior to potentially resting) then the advantage is clear. You rest. If not, you keep going. But that's hard to communicate to the players, and the challenge of encounters is variable. If the random encounter was harder than the two previous fights, the players have actually lost resources by resting and might feel cheated. Nothing was gained and only time was lost. That's not fun.  The thing is, people are also bad with odds. That's how Las Vegas stays in business. Since the lost condition (a random encounter) is not a certainty, many players will test their luck and risk it. Either way, someone loses at the result. If there's no random encounter, the players "win" but the DM "loses". If there is a random encounter or other consequence, the DM "wins" but the players feel like they have "lost". But if they don't gamble the DM still "wins" while the players feel like they have lost. And there's the uncertainty of whether they would have rolled well or not, that will make them second guess themselves.  I don't think I need this thread, no. I'm lucky in terms of players (mostly). But I opted to read based on the subject, under the assumption I might still get ideas from this thread. I can always learn new tricks.  And I replied assumed you might actually want feedback from a variety of sources, not ones that agree with you...</blockquote>

Verification