The Nick of Time
I love it when a plot comes together! Succubus gets to face her nemesis. Inquisitor discovers her girlfriend’s evilness. Patches is friggin’ distraught. At the risk of injuring my elbow, it’s a wonderfully orchestrated bit of drama. All the elements come together in one climactic clash, with our protagonists arriving with only a moment (or seven) to spare. Unfortunately, it’s all a bit artificial.
This is one of the basic problems of interactive storytelling. The narratives we all know and love feature orderly plots in sensible shoes. They proceed along Freytag’s Pyramid like British people queuing for an escalator. Upwards from Inciting Incident, progressing slow and steady through Rising action, our polite plot people step off at Menswear, Home Appliances, and Climax without making a fuss.
Unlike literary characters, players don’t behave like this. Players are chaos beasts. You can never know when exactly they’ll bust down the door, make a speech about friendship, and finally get around to triumphing over evil. We all want the dramatically ticking timebomb, but achieving last-minute heroics is a tough when the literal last minute is variable. Just suppose your players take a few rounds too long defeating the guardian before arriving in the nick of time. What if they decide to take a short rest after the battle? What if they decide to take a long rest for that matter? Hell, they might even decide to finish up a few quests on that other continent before finally fighting the end boss. It’s all a variation on the sleeping outside the door problem, and it can be a tough one to work around. Happily, we’ve got a number of go-to solutions choose from.
- Polite Fiction — You might think of this as the default solution. No matter when you arrive at the final encounter, it’s always just in the nick of time. This solution is equal parts gentlemen’s agreement and suspension of disbelief. It does tend to work OK, but it can also fail spectacularly. If you’ve ever had to tap-dance to accommodate a party’s ill-advised delays, you know how hard it can be to keep the tension alive.
- Evil Agenda — Rather than the aforementioned ticking timebomb, this is more of a looming threat. While the players faff about and finish their side quests, antagonistic forces advance their own sinister plots in the background. You generally communicate this information to players via setting details. Increased prices because of war, brutal policing thanks to tyranny, or PCs’ hometowns getting burninated by un-slain dragons are all examples. Of course, if you’re too subtle with the background hints, it’s possible for your players to ignore the threat entirely. When that happens there’s a very real risk of, “Campaign over, world destroyed, you lose.” And that can be a great big feels-bad.
- Progress Clocks — I’m a big fan of this Blades in the Dark mechanic. You can read about the technique in full over here, but the basic idea is a highly-visible threat-o-meter. If you find your players saying, “We really ought to appease The Inspectors before they get their sixth Trivial Pursuit pie wedge and raid our lair,” then the mechanic is doing its job.
- Other Clocks — In this formulation, anything that communicates “time is running out” to a player is a clock. Types of clock include random chance (“We have to escape before the ancient red dragon regains its breath weapon in 1d4 rounds!”), a finite number lives (“Friend computer won’t give us more clones if we run out!”) or even real-time dungeons (“We have one IRL hour to solve this escape room style puzzle before we die!”). In all cases, these clocks represent player-facing methods for making ‘bad ending’ a palpable possibility.
- Resource Depletion — This is the resource management option baked into a game’s mechanics. When you’re running low on ammo, health, spell slots, or any other finite resource, “saving the day” just means “surviving.” Take my own The Siren’s Lament mini-dungeon. Once the players put the titular siren to rest, her watery temple floods with sea water. Players have to make it back through the maze of flooded chambers before they run out of air. That makes the character sheets themselves a source of “we made it out just in time” stress.
- Ozymandius — As usual, you can opt to subvert the trope. The option of allowing your players to arrive a minute too late is always on the table. “You dawdled. The sacrifice was slain. Now you’ve got to fight a demigod.” That’s a judgement call though, and outraged cries of, “How were we supposed to know?” are a risk. So if you do go this route, I’d urge you to make the your you-guys-need-to-hurry-up messaging abundantly clear before pulling the trigger.
Now that we’ve got a common vocabulary to work with, what do the rest of you think? When you want to ratchet up the tension with a “nick of time rescue,” how do you avoid making the party’s ultimate arrival irrelevant? Let us hear if you’ve ever adopted one of today’s named strategies in your own game. And if there’s another option that we left off the list, tell us all about it down in the comments!
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Antipaladin! Nooooo~! >_<;
Don’t worry. I’m sure everyone will be fine and no characters will be permanently harmed in this arc.
I mean, this is a dnd world. Guy could get tossed into a woodchipper, and all it would take is one quick trip to the cleric and he’d be right as rain.
Fighter #48 might have a comment
On a couple of occasions I have used these small glass stones as a visual measure of counting time, as a little gimmick.
Each one would represent an in-universe minute/round/other appropriate amount of time for what they are doing. I’d then take and add an appropriate amount each time they did stuff to a container in front of the players so they could easily see (and hear from them clicking into the ones already there) how the clock is ticking.
It gives a nice and tactile effect I find.
For best use it should be combined with both an in-universe information that time is ticking and preferably stuff should also happen at various points during the count rather than only at the very end.
(It also pays to be a bit coy about exactly how much time they have, that way they might feel it was just in the nick of time even if they really had a bit more than that left).
I also feel that it can help to have several steps of things getting worse rather than one big final one where it’s too late.
If the final boss get’s a buff each round for instance (again communicated), the players can feel the pressure and might well conclude that it was in the nick of time whether they won round 3 or round 6.
This also helps with the run-up towards the final confrontation. I find it’s much easier to sell the time taken as mattering when the consequences are small enough that you might actually invoke them, rather than just blowing up the world.
I vary the method from plot to plot, but there are three most common ones that I use. Polite fiction is very, very useful, but I try to avoid overusing it, as then it becomes harder for players to suspend their disbelief, and as stated in the commentary, the tension starts to drop. The second is a mix of Evil Agenda and Other Clocks, where the players are unambiguously given a vague timeline of what the villains are up to, so please stop them in 3-5 working days. The last one and my personal favourite (though again, try not to overuse) is a classic “You’ve given me the final piece of my plan”, where the doom ritual starts when we roll initiative because it can only start once the PCs/sacrifices/MacGuffin bearers arrive.
A fourth method I like is Evil Agenda with lowered stakes. If the stakes are “the world dies”, then from a meta perspective, the PCs know that isn’t going to happen, as then the campaign will end unsatisfyingly. But if the stakes are instead, “Every person you have even saved and every city you have ever visited is going to burn”, or, “This enemy you can escape but not defeat is hunting you”, then the Bad Thing can happen without the campaign being over. It requires the players to care about the Bad Thing happening, and it can be tough to balance stakes to the point where they’re threatening but not campaign-destroying, but if done right, the players will be aware that the DM doesn’t need to stick to a Polite Fiction agreement for them to arrive in the nick of time, so it’s entirely in their hands to stop it.
I use method 4, as you call it, a ton. The world is huge and a truly world ending threat is going to be dang hard to stop. It’s much more fun to have local concerns like “we have to wait five years for another shot at the treasure trove” or “the fate of an entire species hangs in the balance”. Win or lose are both acceptable and the story continues.
Wow, your name is really fitting for introducing that additional solution to the “nick of time” question.
Honestly, my biggest issue isn’t arriving in time as asked in the commentary, but instead immediately after arrival, what is posed in the comic itself, namely, “Rounds till unstoppable”. How long do the players have from rolling initiative to stop the evil ritual? Should it be seven rounds, giving enough time for the players to win with the risk of both sides rolling low/using tactics that cause the battle to drag out? Ten minutes, replacing winning in time with simply having to win? Or maybe even several days, so that if the final battle ends up bit too overcooked, the players can teleport out/get captured, then come back for round two? The last method lowers the tension perhaps too much, but I also don’t want the campaign to end with a loss, everyone dead. I guess this is just an extension of the eternal struggle between creating the appearance of stakes vs the actual risk of losing.
When I was at the big climactic final session, I used a Literal Clock, which i guess counts as a Progress Clock. I pulled out my phone and turned on the timer, and said if they failed to win before the time ran out in real time, their supporting army would be overwhelmed and they would be captured and sacrificed. Everybody agreed that having an actual, literal countdown to failure made things really tense because they couldnt faff around and crack jokes like they normally would in a session, because that sucker did not pause for combat.
I think that falls under the heading of “real-time dungeons” in the “other clocks section. I tried to google for my example during this post, but could not find it. There was a style of game in 4e called “4core” (or something like that). You had 4 IRL hours to clear a super-lethal dungeon. Every time you died and resurrected you got -30 minutes to the timer. Never tried it myself, but I always thought it sounded like an exciting experience.
I think using every single one of those options is totally viable in a grand campaign that is running for years and hundreds (at least 100+ probably) sessions of 3-5 hours of gaming each time.
Generally, the Evil Agenda and Progress Clocks format in some form or another, work very well together to keep the group moving forward, but also give them abstract time to accomplish other goals and “side quests”.
As long as the group is not literally just wandering about aimlessly, doing a bunch of meaningless crap, pushing all the red buttons, and searching the mystery holes to see if they can find the white rabbit they swear they saw… then I think some amount of “down time” and dealing with a few character important side quests can be a nice change of pace or scenery in an otherwise doom and gloom epic villain plot.
The villains are still doing their things, but just like the heroes, the villains have to take literal time to wait on some things to be done. Oh, sure, a small group of 5 or 6 (or 7+ or less than 5) can eventually start teleporting places and taking airships or whatever other methods of fast travel are at their disposal, but, aside from the villain themselves, or a few henchmen of high level, the rest of the minions have to march, take a ship (that travels on the water! those poor lowly fools), or take a caravan that moves slower than their own two feet.
And not to mention how slow real communication is. Sending might “only” be a 3rd level spell, but how many peons in the force are going to be spell casters of 5th level or higher? And how many of those are going to want to “waste” a precious spell slot on a simple message. Just send a letter, it will get where it needs to eventually.
The general villain ego also means that while the heroes might technically need to feel like they are in a rush to stop said evil plot, the villains think everything is going “according to plan” and from their perspective, they have time to spare.
Of course, part of running a well plotted out campaign is also knowing when to indicate that the villains are on to the heroes and starting to ramp up production, pushing the engines to 123%, and getting their ducks in a line to start really moving on their big evil plot.
Half way through the campaign, having thwarted every attempt of the BBE to kill the heroes and/or move their evil machinations forward, maybe they start sending assassins to kill the heroes, or maybe they just start pressing the lower ranks to move faster at their tasks, maybe the evil starts getting more obvious and possibly even clumsy as a result.
Either way, you can have fun leading the party to the end with just barely time to spare… or if they decide to faff around too much with proper hints having been given and actively ignored, then… they arrive too late and have to figure out how to stop whatever has already occured! Dun dun duunnn!
How do I avoid making the party’s arrival irrelevant? I don’t, and I make this clear in session 0 then remind them if they ever find themselves against a clock. I tend strongly towards the Evil Agenda style, with no signalling beyond in-world context clues (ie no clocks, etc.) of how far advanced those agendas are. Since none of my plots ever really risk the instant destruction of the entire world, whether the players make it in time or not they’re going to have an interesting situation to deal with.
-) Polite Fiction: One adventure of mine suggests an It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Mad,_Mad,_Mad,_Mad_World), but the heroes are (nearly) the only ones with a correct map to the prize. Regardless of the path taken, the (soon to become recurring) villain is sitting, Fox & Grapes -style, considering the macguffin in the final room. The boss in this instance lacks opposable thumbs and is genuinely pondering the logic puzzle of how to fetch the thing down. His ultimate brainstorm is to try to bully/cajole the inconvenient PCs who have just arrived into getting it *for* him.
-) Evil Agenda/Ozymandias: In college, I was DM for one group that *loved* shipboard adventures. They loved them so much, they abandoned the rest of their campaign world for a life of infinite, disposable, “port of the week” sessions. I had a dilemma: I’d already introduced a looming threat, hinted at its approach, and outlined the ticking clock in mile-high, flaming letters. They didn’t care. My solution was to reset one feature of my campaign world (remove a god) by destroying his main temple, causing the bulk of his followers to lose faith and switch religions. The players honestly never expected I would blow up a major campaign feature, so the permanent change caught their attention. I then avoided the “Campaign Over” scenario by hinting that the villain responsible might strike again and engineered a second cataclysm that (like the first) could be stopped if only the heroes could mount a solid defense in time…
-) Resource Depletion: In what sounds a little similar to your Siren’s Lament example, I once let the PCs encounter a floating “dungeon” with sealed, pressurized chambers. Only backtracking or somehow magically communicating with someone back on their ship would they learn that every time they opened one of the sealed doors, the floating island lost a tiny bit of buoyancy and sank a bit lower in the sea. Opening the final door triggers the final encounter (I no longer remember what that was even about), but also opens the room (with a central pool and underwater entrance/exit for whatever lives there) to the outside air. The entire dungeon is headed back to ocean floor and the PCs have (roll dice) to (resolve the final room/stuff pockets with loose coins/run and swim for the ship) before they’re consigned to a watery grave!
I don’t “plan” out Nick o’Timmey rescues, the Party usually dawdles more than enough that it’s either “Apocalypse O’Clock” when they get around to the “final battle” or it’s Ozy Time and they missed out. It’s a real rare moment when my Players push hard and fast a roll up while the “BBEG” is just laying int he foundations of their ‘epic evil plan’.
But then that has happened on a few occasions. But in other words, I don’t time my game events for “drama”, it’s all organic. I’m not a slave to the narrative device, it’s a tool for me.
Because it’s boring as frick if there’s always a “nick of time” rescue.
For reference, the average 5E combat by design is 3 rounds: 18 seconds. 5-6 rounds is usually pushing it. 7+ rounds is an absurd marathon.
Do you read the hover text?
I did, I was providing the actual gameplay context.
“At the risk of injuring my elbow, it’s a wonderfully orchestrated bit of drama.”
Hey… at least you HAVE elbows. The denizens of Handbook-world all seem to have bendy noodles for arms. But I guess it’s a much lower risk of self-inflicted injury that way…
Those are Fleischer arms, thank you very much!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischer_Studios
I prefer the Ozymandius route. But I’ve found that you have to do it from the jump. Once the players get it into their heads that events in the world will wait for them to do their thing (in other words, that the setting behaves like most video games {although Deus Ex subverted the trope}) before allowing anything bad to happen, it’s hard to re-establish that time waits for no-one. I generally make time pressure the big threat in my adventures, because “realistically” it should be. Spend too much time poking about in the Orc lair looking for every last bit of treasure in a room, and there will be 50 Orcs outside the door. Once adventures move away from the idea of random monsters in disconnected rooms, it’s fairly easy to convey to the players that bodies will be found and alarms will be raised, so they have to keep it in gear.
> I generally make time pressure the big threat in my adventures,
Fair. But in my head, the big question is how you convey that time pressure to the players. How do you make it visible at the table?
It depends on how emergent the situation is.
I try to give the players an idea of how much time their characters have at the start of a situation by having NPCs communicate that information. So they might know that at the next new Moon, the stars will be right for the Sorcerer to kick off the next Conjunction, or that it should take the thief who stole the protective amulet five days to make it to the seaport.
Maybe they can hear the tapping of Kobold hammers on the walls of the mine, as the little beasts communicate. Maybe they can hear the jabber of Orc voices growing louder as they gather outside. The chanting of the cultists grows louder. Or the rush of animal life way from the oncoming dragon. But there is no direct communication to the players that it’s going to hit the fan.
And so in situations where the characters have no way of judging how much time they may have left, the players don’t, either. And that, I find, tends to be the best driver of a sense of urgency. But, like I said, the players have to be expecting that the world won’t wait around for them, so I don’t normally lead with the time being completely undefined unless the players have done something that prevents them from getting the information.
Your question of “What if they decide to take a short rest after the battle? What if they decide to take a long rest?” reminds me of my first time DMing 5e. (The answer, btw, is “DM gets fed up with this bullcrap and punishes everyone”.)
So the party was exploring a dungeon. I think they were there to capture a bandit chieftain, or something. It was a collapsed tower laying on its side with a few neat little terrain hiccups, like the door to the next room sometimes being up at ceiling height, because the dungeon wasn’t meant to be oriented this way.
Things were going well. The Sorcerer had gotten to fireball some mooks, and was happy. The Ranger had gotten to show off his skill with nature, and was happy. The Bard had gotten to talk down a terrified NPC prisoner, and was happy. The Rogue had gotten to do some stealthy stuff, and was happy. They’d pushed through the dungeon, and were in the penultimate room when the Bard declared that they were talking a long rest.
This being literally my first time DMing 5e (and I’d only played it once before that, in a one-shot where we hadn’t used long rests) I said “Right… Okay, wait a second…” and moved to check exactly how the long rest worked.
Without waiting for me, hit point counters were reset, a spell list post-it note was torn away, binned, and replaced with a fresh one, and there were declarations of “Now that we’re rested, let’s do this!”
I was mildly miffed that they’d gone and assumed they’d get a free rest (right in front of the bandit chieftain’s door) without waiting for my say-so, but I decided I wasn’t going to be petty. The bandit chieftain and his retainers emerged, battle stances were assumed, the final fight was just about to begin…
And the Bard’s player, out of character, gloated in smug tone of voice: “Nice of them to wait for us to long rest. Idiots.”
Screw it. I decided to be petty after all. Y’know what? Never mind, the bandit chieftain and his retainers aren’t coming out to face you because they escaped in the middle of the night through the trapdoor in what used to be the roof. They’re long gone. And hey, remember how I said it was raining last night? Oh, you weren’t paying attention to my descriptions? Well, good luck tracking them. Also all the good treasure in that dungeon was in that final room, and they took it with them, and the Countess isn’t going to reward you at all for just taking down a few of his minions and letting the boss get away.
Cue Willy Wonka: “YOU GET NOTHING!” gif.
Yeah, I was pissed. And whoops, that wasn’t really an answer to your actual question so much as a rant about something else.
All of that is why that when the party camps, we stop for an RP session. It’s not “And the next day…”, it’s alright. You guys setup camp. X, Y, and maybe Z are ticking away. There is also Pi, which you’re only aware of and not sure how that one is going to fall. You’re also aware that the moon hangs in the sky, growing ever larger to that full moon zenith of prophecy in, now, two days. So Progress Clocks + Evil Agenda I suppose?
I think in a given game, all of those concepts you mentioned are valid, and have their place at different times.
All that said, the weirdo chanting gibberish at the head of the room needs some kind of major interference plan passed about level 7. Like absolute nonsense that forces the party to close to at least close range, or some kind of shield the players can turn off *during the encounter,* otherwise no amount of HP is going to save your BBEDB from getting murdered by round two, which will probably undercut your dramatic tension a smidge.
The background motive for adventurers in the “Tomb of Annihilation” is that a number of prominent people are slowly losing life every day. So I decided to roll with that. I created a visible clock for the players and told them that at certain points along clock, famous heroes and even their sponsor was on the clock. I even included Elminster on the clock.
And it worked. Kept the heroes on track while not entirely discouraging them from doing the occasional side quest. Unfortunately, the campaign ended earlier then I would have liked due to real world circumstances.
Color me intrigued! How did the characters know who was going to die when? Or was this player-facing rather than character-facing knowledge?
Once in a game that was a blend of Naruto with Fable: The Lost Chapters something we made was kinda like another take on Ozymandius. Basically the villain, that was an Orochimaru expy was expecting for the heroes to battle him. They rushed to stop his evil plan but his evil plan was for them to go after him and use them as sacrifice for an immortality ritual. Basically the BBEG needs the fight and the rounds to complete his scheme 🙂
In last Saturday’s Blades game that I ran, the players (and NPCs) all had individual “your air runs out” clocks because I’d contrived a score that put them in diving suits. It worked really well for building the pressure (pun intended) and as a result I saw a lot of clever ways of reducing the clocks and when needed I was able to relieve just enough of it by offering options myself.
It wasn’t end of the world stakes, but the threat of potentially having to abandon the mission (or start taking harm from suffocation) was still pretty solid. Solid enough that they did opt to let their hired muscle leave just so they could take their air to continue on to face further threats alone to try and complete the job.
I generally lean towards the polite fiction or at worst resource depletion. If the players constantly dawdle and put off dealing with the bad guys, the gloves come off.
Given Anti-Paladin’s presence on team Bounty Hunter and her BFF Magus also being on it, any chances Succubus is gonna be a new recruit?
I use Evil Agenda a lot. Basically I think about what the BBEGs plan is and what would happen if the PCs don´t stop all the little steps in it. But mostly on a smalles scale, not all avenger style with all the apocalyptic events.
For example, if the PCs dont stop the graverobbers stealing corpses, the necromancers army in the next few sessions is getting bigger and zombies will plague the farms around town a bit.
So more dead farmers, aka more zombies…and now it is getting personal for the PCs.
If they don´t stop the necromancer? Well, looks like his plan to open a portal the negative plane succeeds…too bad for the people around as negative energy stains the landscape for centuries. Another bleak spot on my hexmap, and every time my players look at that it is a reminder.
And that makes the whole campaign setting come alive for them.