Lots of good advice. I’d simply state that there needs to be an opportunity cost to mid-play resting. Like the Angry DM (shout out) talks about in his article about travel, you need to make the players aware of the costs so that resting becomes a choice with impact.
There might be others, but this cost is probably in the form of enemy reinforcement/rallying/preparation, random encounter/events, lost opportunities, or resource depletion (food, water, time, etc).
Yeah, this sounds like the best way of doing it. Overused, it sounds like random encounters could feel a bit cheap, and fighting for the sake of fighting.
I'm running LMoP, and it doesn't really have anything like that. I mean, I guess I could lean in on "what's happening to poor Gundren while you lot are fannying about?", but that seems a double-edged sword encouraging them to skip chunks of the adventure. Some of the side quests don't feel very well integrated into the main plot, only being there to level up the characters rather than bring them closer to the end goal.
We'll probably do Icespire Peak next, and unless it already addresses this issue, I'll definitely be using the ideas in this thread to up the urgency a little. I think I'll carefully read through and put together what I think is a reasonable in-game time frame for how long things will take, and find some reason to press that as a time limit.
LMOP has plenty of opportunities to add in consequences without bending the story too much. My party decided to follow the "main quest" and were getting overwhelmed at Cragmaw Castle. Understandably, they decided to retreat since they triggered half the castle and were running on fumes. As a result, I'm going to have the raiding party that is mentioned after Cragmaw Castle return in their absence, reinforcing the castle. Additionally, they haven't taken care of Tresander Manor yet. They have fought the Red Brands in town, though. It seems reasonable that the Red Brands would ransack the town looking to avenge their comrades... or at least try to put the fear back in the populace. They haven't found out about the family that was imprisoned (and the father killed), so it will be reported that at least one family was abducted (doesn't matter that they were abducted before if the town folk didn't know).
Further, I had a couple that were trying out D&D and decided that they didn't like it. I've taken over their characters as NPCs and they were left in Phandalin to guard the goblin and bugbear (Klarg) that they had decided to capture. I'm thinking of having the goblin decide to help the party but after the attack on the town both prisoners escape. Klarg returns to Cragmaw Castle, further bolstering its defenses. The goblin will follow to identify where Klarg is going, then return and report.
Meanwhile, one of the PC/NPCs is a ranger and will lead the duo out to the party so they can report. This gives the party something to consider. Go back to Cragmaw Castle or venture into Tresander Manor.
This also doesn't take in to account the fact that King Grol could decide that half his forces are now missing and he should really relocate with Gundren or cut his losses completely. What that could lead to could be any number of things, depending on what has taken place already, if the campaign is going to stop at the end of LMOP or continue, where it is continuing into if it continues, and any other circumstances that might arise.
You've already done some of this by letting the party think that Sildar was beaten because of their decision to rest. The best part about it is that may be the actual reason in your story. It doesn't matter that he would have been beaten had they gone straight to him from the initial ambush and been able to successfully sneak straight to Sildar. What matters is what is taking place with your narrative and what makes sense in that context. The adventure is simply there for structure and guidance and can be adjusted to fit the narrative on the fly. This can help with replayability (if so desired) as well personalizing the narrative so it fits more concretely within the actions that your party is taking.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm blending the two deliberately.
I'm talking about preventing the 15 minute work day, through narrative means - which any DM with a modicum of skill & experience, should be able to do, with minimal effort.
I don't know how to make that any clearer: there is no metric ton of work involved for any GM who is reasonably competent.
Besides, pacing control is something a good GM should be building into their scenario design, even if the Players are not taking rests every 15 minutes. There is no extra work. There is no "alter[ing] the plot or the story to prevent players from gaming the system". Pacing should be baked into your adventure designs already - no alterations needed. That's work you should be doing anyways.
If you are unwilling to put in the minimal required effort, or don't have the skills to bake basic pacing control in your adventure design so that performing that basic task is a "metric ton" of work for you - and you are willing to keep beating your Player with random monsters until they are dead as some form of negative conditioning, rather than making the effort to learn basic pacing skills - well, I can't help you there.
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OK - I'm done. You're not reading my posts; your comprehension of my points is non existent; and your argued position is inconsistent as you flip-flop all over the place to what you think will make you "win". This is not news, based on other threads we've both participated in.
You're attributing points of view that you've raised to me, and actions and techniques you've advocated and defended to me, and then you've criticized them ( which, btw, is hilarious, since you're essentially criticizing yourself :D ). I'm guessing you keep mentally editing what you think my position is so that you're still "winning". Too bad the position you attribute to me bears no resemblance to what I said.
FFS, you don't even get the tongue-in-cheek humor in my tagline.
I have zero interest in converting you, and you've got zero to teach me, so ... guess that debate is over.
Congratulations? I guess you "win"? Get in your customary last word, and we can call this one done.
Oh hey! DnD Beyond has a user ignore feature! Blessed silence ....
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Vexedent is telling you that it's not railroading to bake time pressure into the plot. You may not like it, and that's fine. Some players respond poorly to time pressure, and a DM needs to adjust their strategies when they realize their player group doesn't respond well to time pressure.
The answer is not "ensure the players are never able to rest ever again, ever, until and unless I deign to give them permission to do so." Random encounters have a place in specific areas where they make sense, and can serve the goal of the game as both a means to expand the narrative and as a means to emphasize how dangerous a given location is. Being that guy who gleefully rolls up twelve Deadly encounters 'randomly' every time your players dare to try and do something so heinous as sleep in the woods on the way to their goal, or simply cover ground overland between their starting location and where the adventure is, is not good DMing. It's being a dickbat.
What Vexedent and I both are advocating is simply that resting excessively carries a cost. You want the cost to be "constantly attacked by Storm Giants every time the party tries to nap", while the rest of the world pauses so the players can deal with their storm giant problem. Vex and I both prefer the cost to be "the world is getting worse and your narcolepsy means you're not keeping up with it."
Lemme tell ye, Lizard. As a player? the "constantly attacked by Storm Giants" thing feels a WHOLE lot more like DM railroading than does baking a realistic sense of pacing and time pressure into the plotline of the game.
Now, if the players want to make that decision? That's on them. I will run the game as it plays out. I have a group running a custom mini-adventure I bolted into Ghosts of Saltmarsh right now, chasing a batch of duergar raiders who attacked the Silvermarsh Kingsmine and stole an experimental mining engine. The longer the players take to catch the raiders, the better the raider's position will be when they do. They'll encounter a rearguard for the duergar as well; that rearguard will be attempting to carry information back to the duergar leader, not just die uselessly. If the players allow that to happen? Their situation gets worse, especially if they then decide to nap the day away and take a few weeks to get to the duergar camp, instead of a day or two. Or, if they apply themselves and push hard, they could potentially catch the duergar before they've fully raised their defenses and figured out the mining engine, making that final encounter easier for them.
That's the job of a DM, and how to bake time pressure into a plot. Tell your players that a Bad Thing is happening, and it's getting worse the longer it's allowed to happen uncontested. Then simply play the game. I'm fortunate in that my table is staffed with experienced roleplayers who know the value of not dicking around and spending forever to cover ground. If your table is pulling the fifteen-minute workday shit, then no amount of beating them over the head with random encounters is going to fix it. All that does is tell them they're not allowed to rest, which is not a message you want to send.
You instead need to get your players on board with the idea that if they sleep all the time, the world will end up Ruined instead of Saved, because the people responsible for saving it are a bunch of narcoleptic wanks who're afraid of adventuring.
Heh. The "random predefined series of events/encounters" are only built into the stories of prebaked modules. No DM I've played with, and now that I'm doing it myself no game I've run yet, uses the prebaked module as more than a skeleton to hang the actual game off of.
You seem to be under to mistaken impression that a DM is attempting to force a certain decision on the players when they create time pressure in their game. This is not true. I am not attempting to lead my players when I create a plot thread with a time element, or at least not any more so than any other game does when they offer you a Quest Objective. I am simply telling my players that there is something here they can do, then asking them to make a decision.
Making decisions, deciding the course of your character's story, is the essence of a roleplaying game. Decisions are interesting when they have consequences - if you can have everything you want free of charge, your story becomes boring. A world that constantly presents characters with choices and asks them to weigh their options and choose what they think is best is a world that is interesting and engaging to play in. A world where the DM exerts no effort to create stories, tension, or decisions because they instead opt to run their entire game off of randomizer tables is one you could do without having a DM at all.
Random encounters do not create decision points. They're just things that drain the player's resources. Sometimes that's exactly what an adventure needs, a way of applying pressure to discourage inefficiency and impress upon the players that they need to be expeditious about their work in a given place. Random encounter tables are a tool in the toolbox. If they are your only tool, I recommend trying to broaden your technique and see what happens.
Lizard, I'm glad that you clarified what you meant by random encounters since I was under the assumption that you meant that each random outcome was simply a creature encounter that would become a battle with the possibility of no encounter. Broadening it out to any number of types of encounters does provide a way to show that things are happening in the world. I don't agree that it lessens the amount of work that the DM has to accomplish, since that work would have to be done before the campaign began. Otherwise, the encounters would have to be generic enough to be applicable across many different campaigns. The time pressure aspects are usually something that I come up with between sessions and usually it's either a way to remind the party of other things that are happening in world, usually other options that they could have taken earlier. They can choose to ignore it and continue on their course or redirect. They usually aren't much different than your dragon flying off in the distance.
Of course, there can be events that are more central to the plot that would be much more important for the party to interact with. This can be some catastrophic event that must be stopped or else. You either have to railroad the party at this point or do something like introduce another party that has been hired to also handle the issue. This can prevent the catastrophe from happening, but it also leads to a loss of possible rewards for the party to earn.
Of course, you don't want the entire campaign to be this type of event because then you might as well be reading a book. On the other hand, having consequences for choosing to go one direction instead of another also brings some interesting role play elements, including making some skill checks harder while making some easier due to their choices.
Overall, I think all of those approaches come down to the same thing - the world has to keep moving while the players rest, and that might have consequences.
"The world keeps moving" might mean that the players get closer to failing their quest objective, such as if the hostage they're trying to rescue stays captured, the BBEG has more time to advance their plot or foil the heroes. Or it might mean that the heroes get into some sort of conflict because they hung around in a dangerous place - a random (or nonrandom) encounter.
Overall, making the adventure have time pressure or some in-game reason not to constantly rest is part of adventure design for the DM. That's the challenge - making an adventure that's both mechanically challenging AND narratively cohesive.
Overall, I think all of those approaches come down to the same thing - the world has to keep moving while the players rest, and that might have consequences.
"The world keeps moving" might mean that the players get closer to failing their quest objective, such as if the hostage they're trying to rescue stays captured, the BBEG has more time to advance their plot or foil the heroes. Or it might mean that the heroes get into some sort of conflict because they hung around in a dangerous place - a random (or nonrandom) encounter.
Overall, making the adventure have time pressure or some in-game reason not to constantly rest is part of adventure design for the DM. That's the challenge - making an adventure that's both mechanically challenging AND narratively cohesive.
I just recently made a calendar for my game to help keep track of events that were coming. I got pretty detailed with mine but its not necessary. It helps a lot. I also have it available for my players. Now there are some things I just dont put on it but its there if the players want to make notes of there own.
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Lots of good advice. I’d simply state that there needs to be an opportunity cost to mid-play resting. Like the Angry DM (shout out) talks about in his article about travel, you need to make the players aware of the costs so that resting becomes a choice with impact.
There might be others, but this cost is probably in the form of enemy reinforcement/rallying/preparation, random encounter/events, lost opportunities, or resource depletion (food, water, time, etc).
LMOP has plenty of opportunities to add in consequences without bending the story too much. My party decided to follow the "main quest" and were getting overwhelmed at Cragmaw Castle. Understandably, they decided to retreat since they triggered half the castle and were running on fumes. As a result, I'm going to have the raiding party that is mentioned after Cragmaw Castle return in their absence, reinforcing the castle. Additionally, they haven't taken care of Tresander Manor yet. They have fought the Red Brands in town, though. It seems reasonable that the Red Brands would ransack the town looking to avenge their comrades... or at least try to put the fear back in the populace. They haven't found out about the family that was imprisoned (and the father killed), so it will be reported that at least one family was abducted (doesn't matter that they were abducted before if the town folk didn't know).
Further, I had a couple that were trying out D&D and decided that they didn't like it. I've taken over their characters as NPCs and they were left in Phandalin to guard the goblin and bugbear (Klarg) that they had decided to capture. I'm thinking of having the goblin decide to help the party but after the attack on the town both prisoners escape. Klarg returns to Cragmaw Castle, further bolstering its defenses. The goblin will follow to identify where Klarg is going, then return and report.
Meanwhile, one of the PC/NPCs is a ranger and will lead the duo out to the party so they can report. This gives the party something to consider. Go back to Cragmaw Castle or venture into Tresander Manor.
This also doesn't take in to account the fact that King Grol could decide that half his forces are now missing and he should really relocate with Gundren or cut his losses completely. What that could lead to could be any number of things, depending on what has taken place already, if the campaign is going to stop at the end of LMOP or continue, where it is continuing into if it continues, and any other circumstances that might arise.
You've already done some of this by letting the party think that Sildar was beaten because of their decision to rest. The best part about it is that may be the actual reason in your story. It doesn't matter that he would have been beaten had they gone straight to him from the initial ambush and been able to successfully sneak straight to Sildar. What matters is what is taking place with your narrative and what makes sense in that context. The adventure is simply there for structure and guidance and can be adjusted to fit the narrative on the fly. This can help with replayability (if so desired) as well personalizing the narrative so it fits more concretely within the actions that your party is taking.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm blending the two deliberately.
I'm talking about preventing the 15 minute work day, through narrative means - which any DM with a modicum of skill & experience, should be able to do, with minimal effort.
I don't know how to make that any clearer: there is no metric ton of work involved for any GM who is reasonably competent.
Besides, pacing control is something a good GM should be building into their scenario design, even if the Players are not taking rests every 15 minutes. There is no extra work. There is no "alter[ing] the plot or the story to prevent players from gaming the system". Pacing should be baked into your adventure designs already - no alterations needed. That's work you should be doing anyways.
If you are unwilling to put in the minimal required effort, or don't have the skills to bake basic pacing control in your adventure design so that performing that basic task is a "metric ton" of work for you - and you are willing to keep beating your Player with random monsters until they are dead as some form of negative conditioning, rather than making the effort to learn basic pacing skills - well, I can't help you there.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
OK - I'm done. You're not reading my posts; your comprehension of my points is non existent; and your argued position is inconsistent as you flip-flop all over the place to what you think will make you "win". This is not news, based on other threads we've both participated in.
You're attributing points of view that you've raised to me, and actions and techniques you've advocated and defended to me, and then you've criticized them ( which, btw, is hilarious, since you're essentially criticizing yourself :D ). I'm guessing you keep mentally editing what you think my position is so that you're still "winning". Too bad the position you attribute to me bears no resemblance to what I said.
FFS, you don't even get the tongue-in-cheek humor in my tagline.
I have zero interest in converting you, and you've got zero to teach me, so ... guess that debate is over.
Congratulations? I guess you "win"? Get in your customary last word, and we can call this one done.
Oh hey! DnD Beyond has a user ignore feature! Blessed silence ....
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Vexedent is telling you that it's not railroading to bake time pressure into the plot. You may not like it, and that's fine. Some players respond poorly to time pressure, and a DM needs to adjust their strategies when they realize their player group doesn't respond well to time pressure.
The answer is not "ensure the players are never able to rest ever again, ever, until and unless I deign to give them permission to do so." Random encounters have a place in specific areas where they make sense, and can serve the goal of the game as both a means to expand the narrative and as a means to emphasize how dangerous a given location is. Being that guy who gleefully rolls up twelve Deadly encounters 'randomly' every time your players dare to try and do something so heinous as sleep in the woods on the way to their goal, or simply cover ground overland between their starting location and where the adventure is, is not good DMing. It's being a dickbat.
What Vexedent and I both are advocating is simply that resting excessively carries a cost. You want the cost to be "constantly attacked by Storm Giants every time the party tries to nap", while the rest of the world pauses so the players can deal with their storm giant problem. Vex and I both prefer the cost to be "the world is getting worse and your narcolepsy means you're not keeping up with it."
Lemme tell ye, Lizard. As a player? the "constantly attacked by Storm Giants" thing feels a WHOLE lot more like DM railroading than does baking a realistic sense of pacing and time pressure into the plotline of the game.
Now, if the players want to make that decision? That's on them. I will run the game as it plays out. I have a group running a custom mini-adventure I bolted into Ghosts of Saltmarsh right now, chasing a batch of duergar raiders who attacked the Silvermarsh Kingsmine and stole an experimental mining engine. The longer the players take to catch the raiders, the better the raider's position will be when they do. They'll encounter a rearguard for the duergar as well; that rearguard will be attempting to carry information back to the duergar leader, not just die uselessly. If the players allow that to happen? Their situation gets worse, especially if they then decide to nap the day away and take a few weeks to get to the duergar camp, instead of a day or two. Or, if they apply themselves and push hard, they could potentially catch the duergar before they've fully raised their defenses and figured out the mining engine, making that final encounter easier for them.
That's the job of a DM, and how to bake time pressure into a plot. Tell your players that a Bad Thing is happening, and it's getting worse the longer it's allowed to happen uncontested. Then simply play the game. I'm fortunate in that my table is staffed with experienced roleplayers who know the value of not dicking around and spending forever to cover ground. If your table is pulling the fifteen-minute workday shit, then no amount of beating them over the head with random encounters is going to fix it. All that does is tell them they're not allowed to rest, which is not a message you want to send.
You instead need to get your players on board with the idea that if they sleep all the time, the world will end up Ruined instead of Saved, because the people responsible for saving it are a bunch of narcoleptic wanks who're afraid of adventuring.
Please do not contact or message me.
Heh. The "random predefined series of events/encounters" are only built into the stories of prebaked modules. No DM I've played with, and now that I'm doing it myself no game I've run yet, uses the prebaked module as more than a skeleton to hang the actual game off of.
You seem to be under to mistaken impression that a DM is attempting to force a certain decision on the players when they create time pressure in their game. This is not true. I am not attempting to lead my players when I create a plot thread with a time element, or at least not any more so than any other game does when they offer you a Quest Objective. I am simply telling my players that there is something here they can do, then asking them to make a decision.
Making decisions, deciding the course of your character's story, is the essence of a roleplaying game. Decisions are interesting when they have consequences - if you can have everything you want free of charge, your story becomes boring. A world that constantly presents characters with choices and asks them to weigh their options and choose what they think is best is a world that is interesting and engaging to play in. A world where the DM exerts no effort to create stories, tension, or decisions because they instead opt to run their entire game off of randomizer tables is one you could do without having a DM at all.
Random encounters do not create decision points. They're just things that drain the player's resources. Sometimes that's exactly what an adventure needs, a way of applying pressure to discourage inefficiency and impress upon the players that they need to be expeditious about their work in a given place. Random encounter tables are a tool in the toolbox. If they are your only tool, I recommend trying to broaden your technique and see what happens.
Please do not contact or message me.
Lizard, I'm glad that you clarified what you meant by random encounters since I was under the assumption that you meant that each random outcome was simply a creature encounter that would become a battle with the possibility of no encounter. Broadening it out to any number of types of encounters does provide a way to show that things are happening in the world. I don't agree that it lessens the amount of work that the DM has to accomplish, since that work would have to be done before the campaign began. Otherwise, the encounters would have to be generic enough to be applicable across many different campaigns. The time pressure aspects are usually something that I come up with between sessions and usually it's either a way to remind the party of other things that are happening in world, usually other options that they could have taken earlier. They can choose to ignore it and continue on their course or redirect. They usually aren't much different than your dragon flying off in the distance.
Of course, there can be events that are more central to the plot that would be much more important for the party to interact with. This can be some catastrophic event that must be stopped or else. You either have to railroad the party at this point or do something like introduce another party that has been hired to also handle the issue. This can prevent the catastrophe from happening, but it also leads to a loss of possible rewards for the party to earn.
Of course, you don't want the entire campaign to be this type of event because then you might as well be reading a book. On the other hand, having consequences for choosing to go one direction instead of another also brings some interesting role play elements, including making some skill checks harder while making some easier due to their choices.
Overall, I think all of those approaches come down to the same thing - the world has to keep moving while the players rest, and that might have consequences.
"The world keeps moving" might mean that the players get closer to failing their quest objective, such as if the hostage they're trying to rescue stays captured, the BBEG has more time to advance their plot or foil the heroes. Or it might mean that the heroes get into some sort of conflict because they hung around in a dangerous place - a random (or nonrandom) encounter.
Overall, making the adventure have time pressure or some in-game reason not to constantly rest is part of adventure design for the DM. That's the challenge - making an adventure that's both mechanically challenging AND narratively cohesive.
I just recently made a calendar for my game to help keep track of events that were coming. I got pretty detailed with mine but its not necessary. It helps a lot. I also have it available for my players. Now there are some things I just dont put on it but its there if the players want to make notes of there own.