Adventuring Day
For those of you who aren’t familiar, here’s a nice little primer on the 15-minute adventuring day. It all boils down to the idea that, as soon the party expends a few resources (spells per day, hit points, etc.) they’ll call a halt, find the nearest broom cupboard to hole up in, and camp for the night. Eight hours later they rise refreshed, ready to take on the world (read: another measly encounter) with all their renewed powers. Needless to say, this is less than heroic behavior.
For all of its shortcomings, 4th Edition D&D did a great job combating this problem, introducing the concept of the short rest. This 5-minute breather allowed players to regain “encounter powers” and spend “healing surges” to replenish their hp. 5th Edition continued the trend, allowing for players to spend hit dice to recover hit points on a short rest. Sadly, as much as I love me some Pathfinder, the solution there appears to be “buy a wand of cure light wounds.”
If you look for articles and troll the forums, you’ll see a lot of the same advice about “harass the lazy jerks with wandering monsters” and “put in some kind of time limit.” Maybe I’m blessed with good players, but my current group tends to make it a point of honor to make progress before nap time.
As for myself, I’ve learned to accept the 15-minute adventuring day as the cost of doing business. This probably has something to do with my experience in Oblivion. I couldn’t understand why the game was so hard! I’d spend hours running into dungeons, hacking away at zombies, and then running outside again. I can’t tell you how many sandwiches I made for myself waiting for that stupid health bar to replenish. Thank Gygax my buddy came over, mocked me mercilessly, and told me about the sleeping mechanic.
“You mean I can just hit two buttons, pass out, and regain my HP?”
“Dude…yeah.”
After that I started referring to my hapless bard as Snorlax.
How about you kids? Do you find the 15-minute adventuring day to be a problem at your tables? How do you combat it?
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I do recall it coming up from time to time back in the days of my playing 3.5. It never was a huge problem, more of a one off situation with this group or that when we just found ourselves completely out of resources and knew we’d need them going forward.
Since then I’ve been very happy dealing with systems that circumvent this problem with short rests or other way of recuperating your class specific go juice.
Heck even my Star Wars system I mentioned a ways back just deal with force points you got back after a short rest…. and that was before 4e came around. I guess it’s just a logical solution to the problem.
Oddly I can’t recall this being a major issue that ever came up in any of the non-d20 systems I’ve played.
Ima bottle “Class Specific Go Juice” and sell it in vending machines.
“The magus tastes like real mage berries!”
Is that a euphemistic way of saying the magus flavor is terrible or are mage berries just a poorly named fruit, probably due to weird translation from elvish?
To be perfectly honest, the magus flavor is our worst selling line. However, we’re working on a re-branding operation to make it a “sports drink.” Those are supposed to taste awful.
Fortunately the 15-minute Adventuring Day hasn’t been a problem in my group… with one exception. First time we ever did high-level play, we found ourselves woefully under-equipped (hadn’t seen a shop in, oh, 5 levels and all the loot was stuff that one, maybe two of our 6-person party could use) in a super-dungeon that absolutely LOVED throwing incorporeal undead and ability damage/drain at us. Oh, and if any of us died and wasn’t immediately Rezzed by a Breath of Life there was a Perma-death effect. So yeah, we were not taking chances in there. We’d go until we hit about half resources, then we got the frick out of the Perma-death aura and rested for the night. Took us several days in-game, and a few months out of game, but we got through it with no real casualties.
Oh man… stat drain is the worst. I thought I was playing smart with my wand of lesser restoration in the special snowflake game:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/special-snowflake
Too bad lesser restoration does diddly squat vs. drain.
We expend a use of a heal kit and 10 minutes of in-game-time to heal 1/2 the result, rounded down.
It’s a nice bit of utility for heal kits at the cost of some time. So obviously it’s not an option when time is of the essence.
Aah yes. Oblivion.
I didn’t know there was a fast travel thing before a friend did it while I was watching over his shoulder.
“What’d you just do?”
“Do? Do what? Fast travel?”
“Fast travel? What’s that?”
“You don’t know what fast travel is? Remind me, how many hours have you spent on this game?”
“… I’d rather not say.
It is good to know that I am no alone in my derpitude. These games, man… they are not intuitive!
I think my tables have generally just avoided the 15-minute adventuring day as an unspoken gentleman’s agreement, because it never seemed right. Apart from that, my plots usually don’t lend themselves to the party taking their sweet time about things. Captives need to be rescued, armies need to be held off, that sort of thing.
But conversely, if a dungeon really is so static that the party can camp outside and make brief forays into it at their leisure, then it’s a legitimate tactic, and honestly I would expect the PCs to take full advantage of that. That would seem to be a dungeon based more on traps than monsters, and a dungeon that’s mostly traps is less a “monster lair” and more an “archaeological dig”. Real-life expeditions of that nature take weeks if not months, so why should I expect the PCs to try to speed-run it? Go ahead. Make elaborate maps. Take charcoal rubbings of everything. Get the rogue to take 20 on searching every 5′ square for traps. Set up a supply line with the nearest town and employ the locals to bring you supplies. Play it slow, play it smart. It’ll still be a challenge, I assure you.
Archaeology dungeon is one way to play it. Another method is the megadungeon style. Unless you’re in a quest-specific time crunch you’ve got time to relax in town: you’re either delving or down-timing. The trick is that, with such a big space boasting multiple exits that are miles apart in the world above, you’ve got plenty of excuse to allow the dungeon to continue to live as an ecology while your heroes are back at the guild hall doing whatever else.
In practice, I find that the gentleman’s agreement makes the setup work. The “pressure’s off” nature of gameplay is also a relief to crafters and studious wizards and similar.
old school D&D ‘isle of dread’ .
we were level 10-ish. my wizard had only one level 5 spell baleful polymorph for a day (other one was set for something else.if i had an other one, can’t remember). we were sent to get dinosaur specimens by a researching wizard guild.
the GM looked at the hex map did some calculation and figured our speed to be 2 hex a day. which was fine by us. turned out that meant no more then one encounter a day (beside wondering monsters which were push-over).
i mentioned my spell, should also mention my black d20 dice. that one for some reason NEVER rolled higher then 10 on a save (beside for me, it is an amazing dice!) and the gm was borrowing my dice…i went on baleful-morphing big dino’s into small tiny turtles (easier to transport. once we get there we can kill them and they turn back into their full grown body.)
it went fine -we walk. we meet a dino(gm “you see a-‘ and i yell ‘turtle!’) gm try to save. fail horribly (roll 3\4\5) we pick up said turtle and carry on.
…then we come into what the gm was really hopping to surprise us with. the only hex in the map with 2 dino. first we come across a crazed herbivore (i think it was a stegosaurus. it was the largest dino he had) that eat something wrong and went into a rampage. well i did my turtle shtick and it worked. but THEN it turn out the module had in the very same hex the meanest dino in the game -a full blown (i think 20 HD) T-rex. and here i am out of polymorph spells. rest of the party not really up to fight that thing.
so i say: “i chuck the new turtle i ‘found’ into it’s mouth” . take my black dice roll my 19 (it generally roll 15+ for me). T-rex gobble up the turtle kill it (as a turtle it had a lot less hp then it’s former body) and then explode from inside as the big dino turn back into it’s body bursting out.
it was glorious!
Turtle grenades! All you need is a gnome to design a turtle launcher and you’ve got a new siege engine.
My gaming groups tend to be too good at not doing the 15-minute adventuring day. For instance, in 5e, where a short rest takes an hour, we almost never take one; either we’re at a point where it makes sense to call it a day, we don’t see a good justification for waiting around an hour in the middle of a dungeon, or we retreat before we’re completely annihilated. Sometimes after being partially annihilated.