the concept of time (dungeoncrawling)

[punkorange]

I've had the issue of my player's not thinking about the concept of real-time versus game time, and I'm curious how others deal with this.

Mainly what I'm refering too is the group wakes up, has a couple encounters and is then ready to rest (camp) again?

Is the problem the CR of the encounters they are facing, or is there something else I can do to give them a better sense of they've only been up for a few hours.

Let me say that I don't generally try to overdo it on EL's, I try to keep it about average for the group.

 

[Castellan]

I've found that this behavior in players is born out of the fear of getting into a fight with anything less than full spells/hitpoints/whatever. First, I try to make sure that the party is encountering foes appropriate for their level (it sounds like you're already doing this); second, I tell them, "Only two hours have passed since you woke up"; and third, if they still choose to camp, I hit them with additional wandering monsters.

Let's face it: if the party camps in one place long enough in a monster-filled dungeon, eventually something is going to come check out the newcomers. Whether the monsters are just curious (hey, what's that?), opportunistic (sneaking in and stealing something shiny, like the paladin's sword), or predatory (elves tase yummy), the party will get the hint pretty quickly that they either need to retreat completely to rest, or press on to wipe out the baddies in the dungeon complex.

I have been a player in a party that regularly wanted to have one fight in the dungeon and then retreat back to town -- a week's march away! -- to heal up before returning. The DM in that game finally wised up and had the dungeon inhabitants band together and create a stalwart defense against the party. On our next foray into the depths, we were slaughtered, and deservedly so.

It might be helpful to provide a knowledgeable NPC who can inform that party that excessive camping leads to shortened lives.

Good luck!

 

[Thunderfoot]

Right on Castellan! You hit almost every major point, however, there are a few details missing punkorange. How many players do you usually run and what is the adjust EL vs CR ratio. By the rules, if you are running a four person party of equivilant level into monster EQUAL to their CR/EL then in 14 encounters they will level up, that means that they will be using a fair amount of their available resources on every encounter.

If the party is heavy in one area versus another that will swing the balance one way or another too; for example, a heavily magic using party will exhaust most of their 'available power' with just a couple of encounters as they all try to stand back and blast away with magic, especially at the lowere levels when magic-using characters have very little in the way of multiple spells per day. On the other hand a party of just clerics at lower levels could easily go after monsters outside of their CR range and keep on going, as each one drops back and buffs the others or heals to keep them in the fight. Never using all of their magic and each one fighting as effectively as a low-level fighter (for the most part).

For the party's part, they have to remember that this isn't a video game, there are no save points and character death really does happen. If the group you run is made up of rather young players (born after '80), I doubt any of you would remember the days of the 'killer dungeon' when you EXPECTED your character to be killed, sometimes before you ever got to the dungeon. If you are older, (born before '72) tell them to suck it up or you'll pull out a copy of 'Tomb of Horrors' and remind them of the bad old days.

As for your part, do a very critical and unbiased evaluation of the encounters they have had versus the 'relative power' of the party. If their fate is due to poor dice rolls, hey that's fate and it happens, if it is due to your specific choice of encounters to counter their strong points, you need to make some serious decision about your DMing style. Without getting into psycho-analyzing your play style and just stating as a general rule;
Remember you are not at odds with the players and you are not playing against them, you are in a partnership to challenge them in a setting of fantastic design. It is meant to be both fun and memorable for both parties involved. I speak this general warning in most of these 'what am I doing wrong?" posts, because I wore the 'me versus them cap' for a long time before I figured out what I was doing wrong.

In conclusion, evaluate them, and evaluate yourself. If it is truly their problem, then speak to them, through NPCs or out of game if need be, and then following the advice from Castellan by hitting them with the random encounters to get them to change. If it is a failure on your part, make the adjustments to help them have a great time, but never let them off the hook entirely, remember that dungeoneering is dangerous work and casualties and character death is just a part of life.

Hope this helps
TF.

 

[punkorange]

Without trying to sound full of myself, I don't think the problem lies in my DMing. I am not the type of DM that play's against the characters, rather I enjoy watching them succeed. A group of say 5 adventurers each level 4 are normally put up against an encounter level of around 3-5. If that is the problem, then I will try to start lowering the EL's.

Otherwise I will pull the random monsters and talk to them about it out of game.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Well, if you have five players and are runnning ELs of 3-5, you should be just about in the right ballpark. I would love to sit in on a session and see what are players are doing, without trying to sound too much like an old grognard, it might be...amusing.

Yeah, let them in on the concept of time, I think they should get the hint.
Happy Gaming.

 

[Hussar]

First off, there is another point of view to take. The party gets up, adventures for a few hours then rests again. Is this really a problem? I in no way mean to sound snarky, but, if that's what they want to do, is it a problem? Party goes in, makes some headway, then backs off to rest and recuperate.

For a static trap filled dungeon, this would make perfect sense. Say some sort of tomb where the enemies do not move, only react. Since there is no need for speed, why should the players hurry? It makes very good tactical sense to maximize advantages and minimize risks.

However, not every adventure will be this way. Tomb of Horrors, mentioned above, is a good example of an adventure where there is absolutely no reason for the party to press ahead if they don't have to. There's many, many safe places to rest in ToH and, again, it makes tactical sense to do so.

But, let's look at other types of dungeons. In any sort of "lair" style dungeon where the PC's have invaded the home of some sort of intelligent being, then resting becomes tactically unsound. After all, even the stupidest troll isn't going to sit around waiting for the invaders to come to him, he's going to go out and hit them. Giving the bad guys time to react will have major consequences, the primary being the time for the bad guys to get organized.

Now, the encounters will no longer occur in the "rooms" but will move out into the corridors. Patrols (or random gaggles of critters) will be milling about looking for the invaders. Organized groups will start laying traps and ambushes at choke points.

In other words, the difference between a lair that's unaware and one that's alerted can be worth several EL's worth of difficulty in encounters. No longer will there be that lone orc sentry, but, now, he's backed up by six of his buddies. No one is sleeping. Rooms consolidate from being odds and sods in each room to being organized groups in a small number of rooms.

Depending on the organization of your dungeon, taking your time, resting often, could be a lethal choice. Even if there is no real time limit on the adventure, simply being slow and methodical (read plodding) should dramatically increase the difficulty of the adventure.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Good points Hussar, I hadn't even thought of going that route with it. Of course, if the party chooses to rest (especially if there are clerics involved, they have to make sure that they pray at the appopriate time or penalties ensue. I always think of the scene in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' when Robin is fighting for his life and the Moor is off praying, when this becomes an issue.

 

[Hussar]

Really there are far more dungeon types where time matters than don't.

Another option is to use very small dungeons. If there are only 6 encounters in your dungeon then it is unlikely the PC's will rest too much.

 

[Woas]

My problem with the concept of time isn't just with dungeons. I have a problem with in-game time of combat just in general whether it be in a dungeon or on a city street. But it does heavily relate to time in dungeons.

Sometimes I feel that 6-second base is just too fast. The most recent example of this was about six game sessions back the adventuring party was involved with some ship-to-ship combat. Now, the combat went smooth and took us a usual amount of time to play through it which was fine. But after 45-minutes or so (this is how long it took to run the combat) when the battle was over I was recapping the events and then one of the guys at the table asks the $6,000,000,000.00 question, "So, how long did all of that take in game?". And when I thought about it... and entire combat on sea where two dozen plus people were jumping across ropes, boarding ships, slaying and casting spells took six rounds. Six rounds!
Thats 36 seconds! I mean, if you were to somehow render that combat on a computer with 3d models in real-time, the sails would nearly look frozen in space as there wasn't even enough time for the wind to move much. All the action would look like it was on fastfoward and flash infront of you eyes and be over with before you knew it.
Evne with the understanding that perhaps when an adventurer attacks an opponent, it isn't like that character is just making one swing with their weapon: but could represent multiple attacks to add to the flare/story-telling (in effect, not having any in game result. Just window dressing to flower up the combat). But still, in the end, a round is six seconds no matter how much you dress it up.

And here is where I believe a major part of the problem of time spent in dungeons is derived from. Say you had about 15 encounters for one floor of a dungeon prepaired. Five of those ten are actually traps. So that is ten combats that we can assume are going to be "fair" (around the correct EL and what not for the party) with no crazy wild card encounters that are too hard or too easy.
Now for my gaming group that ship combat I described above isn't that atypical. Combats for us can put in a good six-ten rounds and by then a clear victor (either the party is going to be retreating by then, or the opponents have been all but beaten) is present. So taking the average of eight, that means on average the party is engaged in combat for 48 seconds game time. So ten 48-second encounters is going to occupy on average an astronomical six or seven minutes of the characters in-game life. When the characters have 12-16 hours in a day to be active, those seven minutes isn't going to cut it.
Add on the top of that, assuming correct ELs and CRs for those encounters and the party should have expended a majority of their "resources" by the fifth or sixth encounter anyway! So now we're down to only six 48-second encounters before the party has to completely re-charge. So that by the time the party hits this point where they will need to recharge, the in game time has only progressed maybe an hour if you add in time spent searching for traps and treasure around the dungeon. Perhaps less? But never a "good days worth" of adventuring.

Obviously there are ways the alter this with changing EL/CRs for the encounters but you walk a fine line with trying to keep everything equal. If you lower average difficulty you also tend to lower the # of rounds it takes for that combat to be done and over with. If you try to increase the # of oppoenets per encounter to make it longer overall, then your also raising the EL/CR.

 

[T. Foster]

A "living" dungeon (which is to say a dungeon with living/intelligent inhabitants, as opposed to something completely passive/static like the Tomb of Horrors) should always react to the PCs' activity. Every time they leave the dungeon (or even hole up inside it overnight) when they come back they should find it a changed place. if the PCs inflicted a little damage they might find that the remaining monsters have increased patrols (more wandering monster checks, harder to surprise) and may have set traps and ambushes for them (especially if they always follow the same routes in and out); if the party inflicted a lot of damage they might find that the monsters have brought in extra help in the form of tougher monsters, or hidden themselves away, or even packed up and left the dungeon altogether (taking their treasure with them, of course). Depending on how long the party is away additional monsters who were out raiding or on patrol might have returned home, or new monsters might have moved into formerly cleared areas (especially scavenger monsters like rats, beetles, carrion crawlers, etc.). Ideally, the DM should completely re-key the entire dungeon (both those parts the party's already passed through, and those parts they haven't reached yet) every session in reaction to the party's actions in the previous session.

This is easy enough to do between sessions, but what happens when the party insists on resting/retreating and continuing several times in a single session? The answer is, you have to discourage them from doing so. If they're camping out inside the dungeon you can discourage them through wandering monster checks (it's hard to get a good rest when every hour or two you've got a monster knocking at the door -- and even if they can't get in doesn't mean they won't come back later, in force -- that kobold patrol that came sniffing around during the night by morning may well be 100 kobolds set up in ambush formation), by emphasis on supplies (torches and oil will run out, leaving them in the dark, so will water, leaving them thirsty; standard rations spoil in dungeons so if they want to eat they'll need iron rations (at least in OD&D and 1E -- I don't know if this distinction still exists in the current version or not), horses left outside the dungeon overnight without guards might get eaten, guards left outside overnight without supervision might run off with the horses (or get eaten), etc.), and by making them rest longer than they'd planned -- in AD&D it takes 4 hours 15 minutes to memorize a 1st level spell, but that's on top of the fact that spells can only be used once a day, so if you start adventuring at noon, use up all your spells by 2 pm, and decide to rest and re-memorize them, you won't be ready to go again by 6:15, you'll have to rest that long and wait until at least midnight (the "next day") -- that's a lot more torches used up and a lot more wandering monster checks!). Resting overnight inside the dungeon is usually a pretty unwise tactical decision, and it shouldn't take more than a couple practical demonstrations to impress that point on the players.

If the party's actually leaving the dungeon, and returning either to town or to some safe hide-away (a la the Dead Gnoll's Eye-socket) to rest/recouperate, then it's much easier -- all you have to do is employ the "1 session/1 expedition" rule (the rule that says that the party must leave the dungeon by the end of each session) in reverse -- once you've left the dungeon, you can't go back in during the same session. You can spend the rest of the session playing in town or wandering in the wilderness if you like, or perhaps even going to a different dungeon (if the DM has one ready) but you can't go into the same dungeon twice in the same session. If the players complain, tell them the metagame reason -- that as DM you need time to adjust the dungeon to take into account the consequences of their actions during the last expedition. Most players should understand this, and if not, screw 'em -- ask them if they want to be DM instead and see how they like it when it's your turn to complain and mess up their adventures