@Anyone who responded to my comment on never seeing the described "death spiral":
I may have misunderstood what was meant by this term, because when I said that I've never seen it happen before, I was responding to the original description of it, which was:
My reading of this definition of death spiral is:
1. Party does not have full resources because they've been in battle a few times and have not long rested yet
2. Party gets more injured and cannot heal further -- they must make downtime if they wish to heal
3. The DM decides that this downtime is a hard and fast rule -- the players must take the time to rest or continue on; it won't happen as quickly as overnight
4. Now the game is unwinnable -- The PCs are doomed to fail
^^ I have never seen this happen in all my years of playing D&D. What I have seen happen is one of 2 things:
A) The party decides it's time to rest after all, and they take the down time (I never put the PCs in a situation where an adventure is "unwinnable" beause too much time has passed, however I do create consequences. They simply have to live with the consuquences, or sometimes undo them)
B) The party decides they want to take the risk, and they either pull ahead as champions with gret luck, or one or more of them are killed in a bloody battle. If there is a TPK, we roll up new charaacters and continue on.
In neither case is the game "unwinnable". The world changes, consequences of course always happen, but some protagonists will always rise. I suppose a group of players could decide they no longer want to play D&D after a TPK but that hasn't happened to me, yet. One of my procedures of play in D&D is that every player has a backup character already made for when theirs dies.
I apologize if my imprecise language caused an issue. I never meant to say the players couldn't win DnD. That's not even a thing.
However, they can end up in a series of choices where every outcome is negative, or where they are stuck in a repeating cycle of events that they have no power to overcome.
For example, I believe it was earlier in this thread where someone pointed out they had a 3.5 game where they were using the natural healing rules, but were caught out in the wilderness. They bunkered up, but before they could fully heal, a random encounter occured that dropped their hp back down. So, they bunkered up again, and the same happened.
The players have no recourse in this scenario, unless they have a cleric or other healer. Because in the time it takes them to heal, they are attacked and brought back down into dangerous territory.
And, again, I do wonder about the differences in handling players choosing to rest. You say you "never" put the players in a situation where they cannot "win" because too much time has passed, but you also say there are consequences for waiting. However, if they were struggling enough that they missed your presumed idea of how long it would take, and that happens more than once, wouldn't the consequences stack, and could that stack not lead to a situation that the PCs simply cannot overcome except by the DM handing them a new path to follow which allows them to overcome it?
We all handle downtime differently, and I think that assuming that players can just choose downtime and nothing directly happens to them is not supported by a few different styles of play. For example, a game I am in as a player has us defending a town full of survivors. If we are injured and choose not to fight an army marching on our town... our town gets destroyed, and if we were resting in that town... well, we might be captured or killed. We are forced into this conflict, because there is no "safe place" where we can take two weeks and not do any adventuring. We are under constant assault and threat from various forces.
If a demon is to be summoned in the catacombs of the city, and you decide to rest in the inn for a week letting it happens, unless the demon was weaker than you feared you just ended up with a massive demon problem on top of your other problems, and you can't really just "keep resting" because you are in the city where it is happening.
And since safe rest cannot be guaranteed, the longer it takes, the more likely the party will be faced with a challenge they are unprepared and unhealed for.