So a living world is lame compared to a random collection of dungeon rooms where time stands still unless the PCs do something?
A rule to prevent longer adventuring days is only needed when you play a boardgame or simple H&S game. But if you play a real RPG game there are nearly always setting reasons why you shouldn't take too long.
Derren, you are fond of deriding those whose play experience is different from yours as hack-and-slashers etc, but your assertion doesn't make it so.
First, there is a fairly traditional D&D set-up - investigate and loot the long-lost tomb - in which "living world" is not going to make a big difference over a timescale of days or even weeks (maybe over months or years caves erode, new monsters move in, new hauntings arise, etc).
Second, even when dealing with living, reactive enemies, a day or two is often neither here nor there. Suppose that Han and Luke had taken an extra two days to rescue Leia - would it have made a big difference? Instead of being held prisoner for N days, she's held prisoner for N+2.
Upthread, [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] canvassed a respawn time for the Caves of Chaos of 1d3 days. Mechanically that might work, but within the context of a living world, where are those extra bodies coming from? Why do the Caves of Chaos inhabitants not just sit on their "respawners" for a week or two and then conquer the world?
Within the confines of a genuine living world, as opposed to a very tightly constructed RPG scenario, I think that it is actually quite hard to make time matter to within a day or two (as opposed perhaps to weeks or months).
Which suggests a much more obvious solution, for those who
do want time to matter within a living world - make the recovery period (for spells, hit points, surges etc) a week, or a month, rather than a day. Then the PCs
will have to tackle the adventure on a single set of resources. (This still won't give LostSoul what he wants, though, of making resource recovery a strategic decision. I think that requires shorter timelines, and other factors to be at stake, of the sort [MENTION=6695556]Wexter[/MENTION] talked about.)
The amount of bloodletting even a lazy party typically dishes out every day is so huge that it is not necessarily sensible for the survivors to do much about it (otherwise than just flee for the hills). Replacement monsters would not be expected to just respawn for the party's inconvenience at a high enough rate to matter.
Yes.
Fairly recently, I ran a pretty typical set of encounters for my 4e group: fight some cultists, track them down to their headquarters and fight some more cultists, clean up in time for the dinner at the Baron's place where more cultists attack and are fought off, then go to the (now dead) cult leaders' house where wererats and bodyguards have to be fought off.
In D&D terms, this is a fairly typical adventuring day: 4 encounters. But because it was taking place in an urban environment, the bodycount felt more "real". Including the NPCs that the cultists killed, at the end of the day around 30 or so people had died in a town of about 5000 inhabitants. That is carnage on a pretty grand scale!
As a GM, my rationale for running the scenario at such a hectic pace is the recovery dynamics of 4e (ie the game is more interesting when the players have to make choices about resource use, which means I want the scenario to unfold within a given rest period); within the story, I based the hectic action around a prophecy and an astrological event.
But it's hardly the case that, had the scenario been slowed down (eg because I had put the pacing into the hands of the players, and they had in turn stopped to rest), that the cultists would have been able to recruit new members at the rate they were being killed off.
At best they might have fled.