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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9461885" data-attributes="member: 29398">In other words, an adventure on a clock.  With those, it's easy to force the press-on-or-rest choice; but putting every adventure on a clock gets tiresome fast for all involved.That still counts as the enemy "doing something".  The PCs might not realize it (and it would admittedly be boring for the players) but sometimes their best in-game course of action might be to to Do Nothing for a while, let the enemy defeat itself, then roll in and mop up what's left. <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=":)" />IME that's fairly rare at the per-adventure level; and missions without an enemy usually involve some sort of specific task that needs doing under a time crunch of some sort e.g. "get this book to Waterdown ASAP" or "find our missing livestock before the rains come".On the campaign level, sure - a true sandbox campaign might not have a common "enemy" - but that's different; and see below.Staying in Rivendell as long as they did gave Sauron time to build his forces and further cement some alliances.  That said, the fellowship had to wait for some of its members to arrive; so the net benefit was probably to the PCs in that case.I don't want to deny them the chance to do that foolish thing, if it's what they'd otherwise do.I don't mind letting the players/PCs set the pace most of the time; and rarely if ever try to push that Sword & Sorcery pacing model.  If they want to rest, that's fine...but there may or may not be consequences of so doing.Now, what ties all of this together?  Simple.  All of the above elements cause more time to pass in the game world.Nothing annoys me more from a believability standpoint than adventurers who go from 1st level to 15th+ in just two or three in-game months of hard-core adventuring.  And yet, the recent WotC editions (4e in particular) support and encourage exactly this: that you'll blast through a typical adventure in an in-game day or two, gain a level or two, and take little or no downtime before diving straight in to the next adventure.  The only way a DM can make some time pass is by placing the adventure sites far enough apart that travel time becomes a significant factor.  At the design level they've taken out forced downtime for level-up training and shunted aside or designed away most other downtime activities (stronghold building, magic item creation and-or buying-selling, spell research, even simple carousing - people had to push for the inclusion of any of these and some are still missing), leaving a default that, from a believability standpoint, is somewhat ridiculous.I guess the disconnect here is that the way I see it, both for PCs and monsters hit points should themselves be a much more precious resource than 4e-5e would have them be; i.e. fewer in number and harder to recover once lost.As 5e has it now, the only hit point that really matters is the last one you have, and thus that's the only one anybody cares about curing.  I'd like to see a system where they all matter - where losing any hit points is a small problem and losing a lot is a big problem - but then the cries of "Oh noes, it's a death spiral, what will we do?!" arise and the idea gets shot down. Ideally, losing hit points should lead to a death spiral; in that the more you lose the worse off (mechanically) you should become.  This would make it more important to heal up hit points as they are lost, rather than waiting until someone drops on reaching 0.</blockquote>

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