Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7879609" data-attributes="member: 6801228">This actually reminds me of an anecdote. A DM in a recent session of mine pulled a truly nasty trick out of their hat for a big fight. We were in a pocket dimension that seemed to be a planar bleed between the Shadowfell and the Abyss (oh, and we are like 5th level) and fighting a long drawn out battle to reach some heroes that had been sealed. The entire time we were fighting through this forest of statues and there was a poisonous miasma. Every turn, roll a con save, fail and you got a mark. Once you got 5 marks you got a level of exhaustion. I think the next level was at 10 marks, but no one got there. We win the day, head home, and then nastiness comes out. We have to make another series of saves, lower DC, but one for every mark we had accumulated. Each fail was another level of exhaustion. We had people with seven marks, so they already had level 1, and if they failed five checks, it was death. The reason I bring it up (other than gushing at how awesome it was, we were all terrified, and we are definitely going to be more terrified of this stuff in the future) is because we were planning some downtime in our home base after this, timeskipping two months. The DM wanted to wait though, because he wanted the exhaustion we had gathered to be meaningful. He seemed confused when I pointed out that he would have to bring the adventure to us in that case. Because none of us were going out adventuring and exploring for our community with multiple levels of exhaustion. And so, I bring this anecdote back around. Spending long times healing doesn't really affect anything once your players can access a safe haven, unless you force the issue. If it takes a month to heal, and the players have no reason to not wait for that month (because they are not on a time crunch and there are no villainous plots) then they will do so, and it adds nothing to the game except time. Now, I'm not against downtime, but you actually become more likely to skip it I feel, when it is mostly about healing up for the next adventure instead of a "and now we focus on other things". But, you definitely aren't going to get a lot of parties going out into the wilds at half strength, unless they cannot afford to wait to heal. And, they will be more likely to hire armies of backup, so that they can reduce the risk while traveling, and save their strength for the big fights that only they can win. Lots of cascading potential effects based around a simple premise. Players want to survive, and will act to maximize that survival by any means you make necessary.  If all it takes is a long rest, then they are more willing to take risks and be heroic, because they can easily recover. If it takes 3 months and a cadre of doctors costing hundreds of gold. They will be hyper-cautious and eke out every possible advantage to keep themselves safe... which generally makes for a less fun time for the table. Not always, but generally.</blockquote>

Verification