D&D General Time Pressure and Adventures

[beancounter]

A time limit on my group?!?

They would fail every attempt...

They once got into an hour long discussion about puppies that was really hard to pull them away from.

 

[R_J_K75]

They once got into an hour long discussion about puppies that was really hard to pull them away from.

A conversation about puppies as in out of game topic?

 

[aco175]

My games tend to have campaign time limits, but those are more leisurely like, "Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the key-hole. We hardly have a night where there is something immediate, so once in a while it would be fun.

 

[Jer]

As a DM I don't know that I've ever announced that there would be a time limit. Except for real world time limits ("I've got a thing tomorrow so we have to be done by 10 so I can go to bed" sorts of things).

I've definitely put time limits in, but they're more like "if you don't get to this shrine by the time the full moon rises tonight the curse will be permanent" sort of time limits. Like in our current game they have hit a point where they have 2 days to get out of the dungeon they're in or an ally they've found will be reabsorbed back into the dungeon. Since the entrance that got them into the dungeon is now closed to them, and they're deep in its bowels at this point, they're racing to find another exit.

 

[beancounter]

A conversation about puppies as in out of game topic?

Yep.

 

[R_J_K75]

Yep.

I thought the last session I DMd was bad. Between the beers, bud and the one player wanting the hockey game on, at points I had trouble keeping the players focused and getting sidetracked by out of game side conversations. I threatened to end the game for the night on a few occasions and they eventually came around. If I had to deal with an hour-long conversation on puppies, I think I'd have unleashed Clifford and Marmaduke on the party while they weren't paying attention for the TPK.

 

[Oofta]

I put in de facto time limits all the time. The world keeps on ticking along whether the PCs do anything about it or not. I also use alternate rest rules, so it's not a blitz, more like "if we take a week off to get a long rest things will happen". So if you're in hostile territory, you can try to rest. It may work, or you might wake up to find yourself surrounded by a patrol. Decide not to track down that kidnapper so you can get a long rest? Oops, the mayor's son was sent home in several boxes.

One of the reasons I enjoy playing D&D instead of a video game is because video games are almost always static until activated. The real world doesn't work like that, I don't want my game to be like that either. Kill the patrol? When the patrol doesn't report in, things are going to happen. The PCs may not know what, exactly but it's probably not going to go well for them.

I don't normally do super tight deadlines, we're normally talking about a matter of days not hours. Once in a while it's also fun to have a sprint to the finish.

 

[payn]

Im quite positive to this. I am very much in favor of the resource attrition concept of older days. In my defense, I usually build adventures that should take a day, but can really go pear shaped if the players engage poorly. How much they accomplish and what happens if they dont is the best part of playing! Also, I dont like megadungeons in general, so I never use them.

 

[the Jester]

Assuming that it fits the scenario and my character cares about it, I'm all in.

 

[el-remmen]

While I have certainly run adventures with time limits and try to run a "living" setting (or at least the illusion of a living setting) so there is always some kind of clock/calendar moving forward even if it is not "the hostages will be sacrificed/the town will be blown up" type time limits - so something like, if the PCs hoped to speak to High Priest Payn when he is in town for the Festival of Oofta, but ended up taking an extra five days traveling back from the Caves of Amathal, welp, the festival is over the high priest has moved on. . . Now they need to consider, it is important enough to travel after him? Find a replacement source of info? Etc. . .

Most of the time, however, I am blessed with a group who set their own time limits in terms of reacting to the world and making reasonable assumptions about how much time they have to accomplish something.

The current adventure I am running, "The Wayward Wood" from Dungeon #32 (1991) has a time limit in the form of the animated forest approaching a town and potentially destroying it and then causing an ecological disaster as farmlands are torn up and then a forest from the hills tries to take root in wetlands (the party has a Circle of the Land Swamp druid, so this adventure is really focused towards his motives). The PCs know they have about 3 to 4 days to stop the worst of the results - and at one point after a big fight they had a chance at long rest but decided it made more sense to accomplish a couple of tasks first (despite their weakened state) because this was too important to put off and for all they knew they'd be harder to accomplish later - but I never told them that.

I see this kind of play as a result of knowing that the DM is going to follow through on consequences.