Bedtime
We talked about the 15-minute adventure day back in (appropriately enough) “Adventuring Day”, but this is a whole nother ball of wax. The question of kicking open one more door, of pushing that little bit farther into the unknown before resting and resupplying, is at the core of resource management games like D&D. As a player, finding the balance between risk and reward is half the fun. As a GM, it’s vital that you let your players make that decision for themselves.
In a classic dungeon crawl this stuff is easy. Generally speaking, these are your options:
- Forge ahead and you may meet a boss monster while you’re unprepared.
- Rest in town and the previously cleared rooms might fill up again with “revisit” encounters.
- Camp in the dungeon and you may meet with dire consequences in the form of nocturnal random encounters.
I think that this is the way the game was designed to be played. When your resources run low different choices have different consequences, and it’s incumbent on the players to weigh them against their remaining strength. If you stray from the forge ahead/rest in town/camp in the dungeon trifecta, then you’ve got to come up with something to replace it. That might be a ticking clock (the cultists gather at the next full moon), a competing band of adventurers (sound familiar?), or the PCs’ own sense of pride (what kind of wimps take a nap right outside the BBEG’s door?). Regardless of what you choose, it’s important for this central part of the game to remain in play. Pushing your luck is at the heart of the adventurer’s life, and kicking open one more door should always be an exciting gamble.
Question of the day then. Have you ever made the wrong choice when it comes to resting vs. not resting? Did the dungeon flood while you were napping? Did you walk into a storm giant mess hall with half health and no potions? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I hear your question and promptly ignore it* to ask one of my own: as a DM, how painful should you make resting for the party? I’m not talking about rushing against a ticking clock, I’m talking about the kind of crap you throw at the party when resting, and knowing when to throw it.
In my experience as a DM: I’ve only ever interrupted a party’s rest exactly once: while the party was resting at an inn, an invisible stalker snuck through a window and tried to assassinate one of them. The thing is, I was very sure the party would win: the one with the highest perception was up on watch, and the party wasn’t recovering from any fights or resource-draining activities, so they were at full strength. The main purpose of this was to establish an invisible stalker was coming after them so when it ambushed them in the future (always as a gank while they were in another fight) the party wouldn’t feel like it was just the DM pulling something from where Pelor don’t shine to screw them when an encounter was too easy; it is an established part of the narrative that they know to be aware of, and when it gets the drop on them anyway (twice) they’re mad at themselves and each other rather than me.
The thing is, I’m afraid of screwing the party too hard on a rest, but I also don’t want them to view rests like pausing a game and free resource refreshment. Ticking clocks are a classic that I’ve used before, but you can only make them rush through a mummy lord’s tomb to steal his heart before he returns so many times before it starts becoming predictable, and steals the heart-pounding pressure when the ticking clock should be most important.
So my question to you, fellow gamemasters, is this: how do you know when and how to punish parties during their nap break, and doing so such that it feels natural rather than contrived?
*Ok, it’s mostly because I don’t have any interesting stories on topic
For fairness, I decide with dice. This is something I’ve learned from the official modules. When they rest, roll a d20. If the result is X or higher, they have an encounter. For easy campaigns like LMoP, it’s 17 or higher; for more difficult ones like Curse of Strahd, it’s 15 or higher. I like to amp up the danger a little more and have them roll for each watch shift if they do a long rest.
For me, there’s no mechanism. It’s an art rather than a science, and the real skill lies in gauging the table. In terms of my own GMing style, I like to think in terms of dynamics. If it’s been a while since the last combat and the fighter is getting itchy, I’ll throw a random combat. If the party are beat up and haggard and just came off a boss fight, I might describe them tromping unmolested through the dungeon and back to town:
“More of the kobold tribe have come to fill the ranks atop Ambush Rock. They seem to recognize you though: the little lizard warriors hiss among themselves, pointing in your direction. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, they melt back into the side passages without a sound.”
This doesn’t just apply to resting, but to retreating from the dungeon and “off-days” in town as well (viz. your invisible stalker).
Have you ever played the Left 4 Dead games? The AI director decides when to send more zombies at you as a means of increasing tension. Sometimes there’s eerie silence, and sometimes there’s a horde of undead sprinting after you. As a GM, you might kick it over to random encounter tables, or you might go pinball wizard style and play by sense of smell. The only solid rule I have on the subject is this: vary it up. Constant pressure is just as boring as the 15 minute adventuring day.
We had one dungeon that was a huge slog with no rests. Beyond running out of resources, we started taking Exhaustion levels. It was on that day my Arcane Trickster popularized coffee for adventurers. I worked with the DM and we decided that it temporarily removes 1 level of Exhaustion for 1d4 hours.
Ultimately we got our asses kicked by Mind Flayers and had to flee the dungeon, effectively failing the quest we were on.
What’s your analysis? Was the dungeon unbalanced, or were the PC unprepared? And more importantly, was the experience any fun?
I may have told you about this before. After our long dungeon, we encountered a puzzle that required us to have our Warlock stay behind and call out directions while a few of us went through to get the macguffin. Halfway through the puzzle, some Mind Flayers came in and starting attacking the group that stayed behind. We were pretty beat up already and there were some bad judgment calls all around; in the end, two party members had their brains slurped out.
Was it fun? Absolutely. The added element of dealing with an intricate puzzle during a deadly encounter was thrilling. We might have pulled it off had we made different choices, but it was a lesson well learned.
Gotta love that possibility of failure. Maybe not every day and certainly not every encounter, but the occasional CR ☠ encounter puts the extra bounce in my d20. 😀
Well this wasn’t quite a case of the casters needing sleep, but rather my cavalier being too eager to explore. Rise of the Runelords spoilers ahead. Turn away all ye who do not want to be spoiled.
A half-elf cavalier of mine (I might have mentioned before, he was going through his mid-life crisis) was eager to clear the goblin tower (Thistletop) from the first book of Rise of the Runelords.
Anyway, we got to the room right before the fight with Lyrie the Wizard (On the map it’s room d14). So without checking to make sure the rest of the party was ready, my Cavalier opened the door. He lost the initiative roll and Lyrie cast Mirror Image.
The next in order was the Cavalier, so he looked back at his party and asked if they were ready. During the surprise round they’d already ducked out of her view. Now they knew that Lyrie knew the Cav had allies, so they yelled at him “Why the hell would you even ask that‽‽”
So with a clear answer from his team, the Cavalier closed the door. She got away and went down the stairs behind her, and her Mirror Images spell was basically wasted. But the fights were harder after that because she had backup.
So I guess the lesson from this story is that it’s not just whether or not the casters need to sleep, but just get ready. And if you’re going to do something, go balls deep no retreat, don’t back out if it will result in a worse situation.
Cavalier sounds hilarious.
“Oh, you were not ready? How discourteous of me! Please, take a moment. I shall wait.”
*goblin knots bed sheets and climbs out the window*
That’s basically how it played out. After that it became a running joke to have the Cavalier open a door or bust open a door and then just close it, using the open-door round to get a look at the opponents. But then you lose the surprise round.
After a while the rest of the party caught on, and the Snowball-cheese Witch took Improved Initiative so she could beat the Cavalier on initiative, cast an aoe spell with extra effects (and damage over time I think), then when the Cav closed the door they’d have got something out of it.
I’ve actually been asking myself this question for the past week or so. A pbp game of Storm King’s Thunder I’m in had an encounter immediately after resting, which got interrupted mid-fight by another encounter, and after a short rest we’ve gone to yet a third encounter we’re in the middle of…. and in the middle of our fight it seems reinforcements are arriving… and during this fight my summoned creature has scouting around a bit and we haven’t found the people we’re there to try and save and have been warned there are deeper depths to the cave we’re in. Which might mean further encounters.
So not only are our resources quickly dwindling (and were in a questionable state before we even arrived to the present situation), we have no real way of knowing whether we should sleep after this encounter so we can survive when we move forwards or if we need to press on lest our rescue attempt end in failure as we nap.
I can’t make up my mind whether I’m frustrated or titillated. I do appreciate that the moment is striking a particularly fine line between the two that is very difficult to intentionally achieve.
Funny you should mention Storm King’s Thunder. A user over in the reddit thread brought it up as an example of a good implementation of resource management in a published product. Spoilers I guess, but here it be:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/765fqq/tfw_youre_out_of_spells_and_the_big_stupid/
So here my beginning Sorcerer/Rogue with his friend the Bard/Fighter have finally ‘cleared’ the small keep that he’s been retrieving dead miner’s from for 3 days. This is the first night he stays there. Some one hit’s the both of them with gases requiring high fortitude saves if awake. No effects when sleeping. Also highly explosive. The two of them start failing saves so the not wise S/R goes out the nearby window. At which point a figure reveals itself. The pair begin to attack but can’t actually land a blow. At which point some one lights the gas on fire and the B/F becomes a party of one. It was hilarious.
In other news, I like to send ‘random’ encounters when the players start saying something like, “I bet GM is planning x, y, and z.” At which point I will weigh the pros and cons of derailing my own game to fit in x, y, and z. I suspect they still don’t realize how frequently they have pushed themselves to the brink of destruction with this.
The other thing is, I like to tie in my random encounters later on. Call backs and such are for when I really couldn’t figure out how to reattach the encounter. For example there was an anti-party that just happened to come near the party when they were returning to their favorite dungeon. They sent the anti-party into what was a potential trap. This way they didn’t fight them nor did they have to share with them.
Said Anti-party got hit hard by the ‘potential’ trap. The party then walked into the trap which was a single wight. Until the Anti-party showed up and suddenly gave it two minions. The lone surviving member of the Anti-party has sworn revenge on the party. He started out has a nameless mook with out stats. He has given the cleric more grief than just about anything else yet in the game.
I think it’s cool to give the occasional random encounter broader development. You never know when the party is going to capture/question/get the life story out of a random mook. You’ve got to be ready to tap dance.
Not a tabletop story but a D&D story nonetheless:
If you’ve ever played the old computer game “Champions of Krynn” (based on the D&D Dragonlance setting) there’s a chase scene at the end of the first dungeon where you’re trying to catch up to the villains before they can pack up and move all the tools and evidence of their nefarious activities and in the middle of that chase scene it is possible to rest for eight hours, in the dungeon, without being accosted. Which is particularly ridiculous because it’s less difficult to rest in the dungeon before this sequence. No matter what you do you catch up the the villain in the same place under the same circumstances.
Is there a picture of a steam locomotive on the box art?
Haha I have to admit that I am often the one in Fighter’s position here – either playing a non-spell reliant character, or a Warlock, who can recover a lot on the short rest. Many DMs I know are also pretty generous with allowing resting in a dungeon – to the point that I have had my character loudly comment about the dangers of such things, to try influence the DM to punish us if we do try to rest. My main motivation is a good one though – I find the idea of frequent sleep stops (the 15-minute day you’ve referenced before) to be a major immersion-breaker.
The immersion thing is one half of the problem. The mechanical replenishment is the other half.
One interesting solution I’ve heard is to tie recuperation directly to encounters. Every X encounters is a short rest, every Y encounters is a long rest. You lose the metaphor of “resting,” but you gain a lot of mechanical balance in turn.
When my party was playing Carrion Crown, I added a recurring assassin in the form of a pack of shadows that would occasionally attack them while resting, or if they were in dark places. I foreshadowed, pun intended, with warnings from various townspeople that “the night has eyes” and “The hungering dark comes for you” from various townspeople and NPCs.
The reason for this, was that I was running with 7 players in a Paizo AP, which basically means that the players are a little bit undergeared, but everybody is crafting. Having 1-3 attacks per chapter after the first, with the “Shade Lord” being in the final battle, allowed me to bring the challenge of the AP up to normal, keep party EXP levels where they should be, and all without adding a ton of extra loot or challenge.
I really liked that I could add a looming threat, that the Whispering Way was aware of the party’s growing strength, and was putting at least a modicum of effort into slowing them down. It didn’t help them all that much, as the run was done during the Hybrid Classes playtest, and the players demolished all the roadblocks, but it was a blast.
Props for altering the AP to suit the party. That’s how you’ve got to do it IMHO.
I always appreciate when GMs pay attention to encounters-per-day and the central play loop that is daily resource management. I feel like that help you to work with rather than against the system.