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Message: <blockquote data-quote="painandgreed" data-source="post: 2066831" data-attributes="member: 24969">Wandering monsters, or rather wandering guards. Remember, the point of guards is not to keep people from entering through a door or kill the people who do, it's to scream really loudly so everybody can come and keep the people from getting through the door. The more time they spend looking around and making noise, and  suspect that taking 20 while searchign a room makes a decent amount of noise, the more chance somebody will hear them and raise the alarm. Once the alarm is raised then the entire dungeon is on guard if nothing else. People will be watching or searching for the PCs and groups will most likely be helping eachother to do so. Several times* parties I've DMed have ended up basically fighting everything in the dungeon at once because they botched an attack on guards or spent too much time doing stuff like searching rather than clearing the dungeon. Any dungeon with a central leader who suspects they might be attacked by outside forces will have guards wandering around whose job will be to notifiy the rest of the dungeon, not defeat the party directly. Even if the PCs kill that wandering guard, when he doesn't show back up at his station in 10 more minutes, they'll start getting suspcious and notifying people.*Once was in G3, the Hall of the Fire Giant. they totally missed the guard in the first hallway and he raised the alarm. All the giants in the main hall attacked and by time they started clearing them out, more were showing up from the rest of the complex. They barely escaped with their lives but still managed to put a serious hurt in the number of fire giants. The other was in Keep on the Borderlands. While trying unsuccessfully to burn the tapestries in the evil temple and chasing after the PC who refused to give up the cursed chalice and plate, the gong started sounding as per the adventure. Since they had killed the zombies and priest that were suppossed to be summoned by the gong, I decided it would call the remaining monsters out of their caves to defend the evil temple.  made it clear what was happening by interrupting their argueing ever minute or two by screaming "BONNNG!". By time they had finally got their <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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /> together and tried to leave, they were met by a bunch of orcs and gnolls with a minotaur in the front.</blockquote>

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