PDA

View Full Version : Time based campaigns



Traab
2013-02-26, 10:46 PM
Would you, as players find something like this interesting? Basically, the entire point of the campaign is that you cant waste time, because every day you take in game to save the day, the bad guy gets that much stronger. So as an example, your party hears rumors of a necromancer getting started on his quest to take over the world and make everything dead, undead, and under his control. Going by the gossip rumors, and hard info you can gather from people, you learn he is not only taking over more towns, he is creating higher level undead.

This is basically letting you know that the longer you take to sort this out, the harder things will get for you as you go from fighting level 1 skeletons to, I dunno, specters or higher end undead than that, whatever they may be. It doesnt scale with your level, so the faster you level up, the better off you are with encounters. But if you are a fan of the 8 minute day style of play, you will find yourself overwhelmed by increasingly higher level undead. The goal is to move quickly, in game days, towards the necromancers hideout and take him down before he becomes too powerful to kill.

dps
2013-02-26, 11:29 PM
In theory, it's a great idea. In fact, when it comes to CRPGs, one of the reasons that I liked Daggerfall better than the later games in The Elder Scrolls series was that in Daggerfall, the quests had time limits, so you couldn't waste time once you'd accepted a quest.

In practice, in a pen-and-pencil RPG, it would usually be too railroady for my taste.

JusticeZero
2013-02-26, 11:50 PM
I was in a very hurried game a few times.. I hated it.

At one point it was in Deadlands, and I was seriously hurt. In order for me to heal up, I needed a couple of days of bedrest. With all of the assassins and other crazy motivating stuff going on, I went through three entire game sessions as dead weight, just questing unsuccessfully for a good night of sleep so I could contribute. There was no fourth, I just stopped going after realizing that the only way that I could heal damage was by intentionally letting myself get caught by assassins and encounters and rolling new characters.

Some things people want to do, they have a good reason for, and they eat big chunks of time. Other things don't take much time at all. It really starts getting sour when you all need to achieve both objective A, which requires your character to be out of play for a couple days, and objective B, which involves several sessions of banging around and having fun. People in the group may realize that they could reasonably do both at the same time, but at the cost of making the game non-fun to you.

Though the same goes for other consumables, too. I've had to leave a few DnD sessions early because I ran out of spells but the other characters felt they could finish without me, and that they had a time crunch. The rest of the party continues on through the night to chase down the BBEG while I lamely spend the night in the village we just got the clues from.

ArcturusV
2013-02-27, 12:08 AM
It isn't really such a strange idea. I mean this is the concept that should exist in "Sandbox Roleplaying". There is a world, and the world continues to move along regardless of the actions of the players. Things develop, things change. It doesn't just all go into Stasis the moment that the players leave the scene.

This can also be really satisfying if, after helping save a village you wander off... come back to it a year later and see what it made of the second chance you gave it, particularly if it changed in a way that the savior characters might have appreciated. They liked the example of the pious War Cleric in the battle to save their village and adopted his god as their patron protector, and when you come back in a year they are in the middle of raising a temple dedicated to said god, etc.

It's little things like that, which make a lot of difference. But it should be a double edged sword. If you run into a villain and say "Pssh, not worth my time..." and ignore him, things should get worse.

As an example, in the 3.0/3.5/PF/D20 section of the board someone asked what would/should happen if the heroes had ALMOST cleaned out a dungeon but left the final boss completely unscouted and unhindered other than what thralls they already eliminated. They were going to go back to town, rest up, and give the Final Boss 48 hours while the players get their ducks in a row.

The responses were almost entirely towards either A) The Final Boss is given time to retreat with all his treasure and loot, and the players missed out entirely, or B) The Final Boss who has mindjacking powers, and who's lair is underneath a large city, will replenish all his thralls, knows the PCs tactics now, and will guide his thralls, trap layout, and tactics to be the "hard counter" for how the PCs beat his minions the first time.

So most people already seem kind of on board with that general idea. They may not agree when it happens to them... but when given an example out of the blue, with them commenting from the sidelines, they'll go, "Pssh, you ignored the villain and let him get away? Hell yeah he's coming back and harder than before!"

mjlush
2013-02-27, 04:41 AM
This is basically letting you know that the longer you take to sort this out, the harder things will get for you as you go from fighting level 1 skeletons to, I dunno, specters or higher end undead than that, whatever they may be. It doesnt scale with your level, so the faster you level up, the better off you are with encounters. But if you are a fan of the 8 minute day style of play, you will find yourself overwhelmed by increasingly higher level undead. The goal is to move quickly, in game days, towards the necromancers hideout and take him down before he becomes too powerful to kill.

I think you'd be amazed just how much players can do in a 'day'. In fact I suspect that your going to be hard pressed to slow them down enough to get any dramatic tension going. Simply putting squads of undead in the way won't work.. any party level action takes about 10-20 minutes game time to finish. You have to use literal roadblocks something that will take days to get round and that is something you are doing to them rather than them getting sidetracked

In the campaign you have outlined I can see three challenges which boil down to 1) Find the necromancer, 2) get to the necromancer, 3) Kill the necromancer

I guess finding the necromancer is going to be a matter of detective work which means there going to various towns where they split the party to cover more ground. At this point your going to have to start the bookkeeping "OK it took 20 minutes for you to walk from the Moldy Rye to the Temple of Tukip and you had to wait an hour to see the high MuMu"

Getting to the necromancer requires the use of 8 minute days unless you want to roleplay 12 hours on horseback in the rain.

One they find the necromancer the time pressure is off its back to standard adventureing.

There are a couple of other things that spring to mind

One is campaign length I rather suspect that if it lasts more than 1-2 months real time the players are going to lose that sense of urgency key to the game and the schtick wears a bit thin.

Another is leveling, I don't think characters can level fast enough to have any significant effect on the escalating encounters. By the book its 13 encounters per level, I'm not sure how many of those you can do in one day. But I would budget at least 26 hours playing time 3-5 sessions so they could make perhaps 2 levels in 2 months play (assuming weekly sessions)

W3bDragon
2013-02-27, 05:22 AM
There is a fine line between a dramatic sense of urgency and an unbearable time pressure that makes the players lose interest. That line usually defined by how often they are allowed to rest.

I've played and DMed some games that were time sensitive. Some worked, others didn't. Here are some examples:

Example 1: I played in a campaign where we had a hard limit of 5 years until a catastrophic event occurred and we have that long to prepare for it. The time limit didn't present a lot of pressure, but the passage of time compared to our preparations was a topic of constant concern by the players. The timeline became very important to all of us and was a good method of adding urgency, without feeling too pressured.

Example 2: Another game I DMed had a vague time limit of Soon tm when some big ritual would be complete and the gates of hell or some such would be opened. The players carried on with no concern to the timeline, mainly because Soon tm could have been days, weeks, months, or years. By the time they found out how much time they actually had, it was so short (1 week) that they felt they couldn't realistically stop the ritual in time. They proceeded with the (player, not character) assumption that there must be a catch that'll allow them to stop the ritual. As such, the time came and went and they were nowhere near the ritual when it was completed. I had to dramatically shift the direction of the campaign to deal with this new development. The objective changed from stopping the ritual to dealing with the demon hordes and closing the gates. Had I been more clear on the time limit, they might have acted differently. However, since I saw it coming, I managed to prepare for it and smoothly changed the direction of the campaign.

Example 3: Lastly, I played in a campaign where there wasn't a time limit as such, but that things were happening around us so quickly, that we couldn't stop to rest. At all. It seemed that the DM wanted us to feel the gruel of being always out of time and one step behind. That setup really grated on our casters, who couldn't rest for spells for encounter after encounter after encounter. We didn't have any easy encounters either. It eventually got to the point where we had gone about 4 or 5 sessions without resting (each session is 6 to 8 hours of playing). The campaign eventually fizzled due to lack of attendance.

tl,dr: So to sum up from my experiences, time limits on campaigns can be used to dramatic effect. However, the time limit must be well defined to the PCs ahead of time, and mustn't encroach too much on the PCs' resting.

DigoDragon
2013-02-27, 08:16 AM
I've ran "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" as a *loose* time-based campaign. The PCs were allowed as much time as they needed to solve the riddles and defeat Count Strahd, but for each day that went by, Strahd was able to replace 2 encounters in his castle with something of equal value.
Also, any encounters where creatures had survived the PCs were allowed to heal slowly each day.

Otherwise after 3 days that castle was going to be really empty. :smallbiggrin:

With this mechanic in place, there were always going to be at least two wandering active encounters remaining on any particular morning. This meant that the party was always on alert throughout their stay at the castle.

Rhynn
2013-02-27, 09:09 AM
Generally, yes, I'd find this sort of game interesting and fun to play in or run. It does depend on execution, obviously, and the game system used. In D&D, it's easy enough - you don't need to take out entire days to rest anyway.

If it's a narrow, story-based campaign, though, you run the risk of the PCs seriously "screwing things up", as W3bDragon relates, by not doing the right thing in the right place at the right time. So soft time limits are better than hard time limits. mjlush brings up another issue, specific to D&D: the PCs don't need a lot of time anyway. This you can mess with by giving them options that are widely geographically distributed (at least before they get teleportation magic), and leaving them enough time only for a small part of those options. Of course, if you do this, you should not make any of them - or any that eat up a lot of time, anyway - red herrings, because that will just frustrate and annoy your players. Whichever dangled hook they choose, if it was a significant investment, it should be useful to their greater aims. ("Well, you denied the necromancer his giant allies, but you didn't have time to stop his death furnaces, and now they've finished churning out ten thousand undead to serve him.")


It isn't really such a strange idea. I mean this is the concept that should exist in "Sandbox Roleplaying". There is a world, and the world continues to move along regardless of the actions of the players. Things develop, things change. It doesn't just all go into Stasis the moment that the players leave the scene.

Yes, yes, yes. I think every open campaign world ("sandbox") should be seeded with many, many things that will happen if the PCs never interfere with them. If the PCs never explore Hellgate Keep and defeat the fiends within, they'll eventually attack the Silver Marches (incidentally giving the PCs great motivation to explore Hellgate Keep and defeat the fiends).

Of course, contrarily, I think a lot of the stuff you slap on your maps should exist in a stasis. No matter whether the PCs first get to this village on Day #10 or Day #410, it's just been raided by orcs who went that-a-way, etc. Some things only start moving once the PCs contact them, some have been moving all along.


I've ran "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft" as a *loose* time-based campaign. The PCs were allowed as much time as they needed to solve the riddles and defeat Count Strahd, but for each day that went by, Strahd was able to replace 2 encounters in his castle with something of equal value.
Also, any encounters where creatures had survived the PCs were allowed to heal slowly each day.

This is essential to what is now often called "megadungeon" play - if your campaign centerpiece is a large dungeon, it needs to change, grow, react, and live separate of the PCs. Their actions in the dungeon should change it, it should react, and it should also go on changing when they're outside it. If they killed all the goblins on the level, the kobolds from the next level down might take over the goblins' rooms and remaining resources or treasure... etc.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-02-27, 09:55 AM
Dungeon World took this from Apocalypse World (and it's implemented in Monster of the Week, another AW fork)--in Dungeon World, the GM sets up a number of Fronts. Each front represents a distinct faction/threat, such as the vampire plotting to enslave the village or a sect of cultists trying to finish a ritual. Each front has a Doom (what happens if the players don't intervene) and Grim Portents (things which will happen on the way to the Doom).

When the game kicks off, the players are brought into conflict with the fronts. As they fail important rolls or waste time, the GM checks off Grim Portents, continuing to march each front towards its Doom. As the players interfere and change things, the GM modifies Grim Portents accordingly.

It's a really neat way to abstract this sort of mechanic. Monster of the Week has something a bit simpler: you're facing off against a monster, and there's a six-step countdown which represents things that will happen over time if the players don't intervene.

JusticeZero
2013-02-27, 11:02 AM
There is a fine line between a dramatic sense of urgency and an unbearable time pressure that makes the players lose interest. That line usually defined by how often they are allowed to rest.
Example 3: Lastly, I played in a campaign where.. things were happening around us so quickly, that we couldn't stop to rest. At all. It seemed that the DM wanted us to feel the gruel of being always out of time and one step behind. That setup really grated on our casters, who couldn't rest for spells for encounter after encounter after encounter. We didn't have any easy encounters either. It eventually got to the point where we had gone about 4 or 5 sessions without resting (each session is 6 to 8 hours of playing).

I've been in a few of those games, and they always fizzle quickly. After a couple of them, when rolling a new character in my next game, my first purchase as a Wizard was a suit of armor and a quarterstaff +1, because I was used to spending the majority of my time as a spell-less second rate front line melee combatant just so that I would have a reason to show up to the game at all.

Ormur
2013-02-27, 11:20 AM
I think it's okay to have time pressure if you still let the players set the pace. At least over the long term, a session or two with repeating encounters are okay.

In my first campaign we knew there was a dragon intent on collecting all the pieces of the artefact of doom and he was also looking for us. If we slacked of he could find a new piece, bringing the world closer to destruction as well as unleashing waves of zombifying negative energy. If he did find one we only had a day or two to reclaim it and prevent that.

This ever-present sense of doom really made us hurry but we could still set the pace somewhat, we were usually the ones seeking encounters and that meant we rested to regain spells. What it didn't allow us was downtime for crafting, scrollwriting or just strolling around. It felt very intense.

W3bDragon
2013-02-27, 11:21 AM
I've been in a few of those games, and they always fizzle quickly. After a couple of them, when rolling a new character in my next game, my first purchase as a Wizard was a suit of armor and a quarterstaff +1, because I was used to spending the majority of my time as a spell-less second rate front line melee combatant just so that I would have a reason to show up to the game at all.

I know what you mean. In that game I mentioned, I was playing a Blade Singer. So I spent most of the time as a second rate fighter with no interesting feats to deploy. It got so bad that some of the players were openly (between each other) fudging what spells they had left just to be able to do something. "What? Where do I have a fireball from? I kept one fireball unused to power my reserve feat." (three sessions later, still no rest) "What? I told you I kept 3 fireballs saved to power my reserve feat!" Other players nodding: "Yes, we remember!"

As for myself, I convinced the DM that elves needed only 4 hours of meditation to regain spells. One of the players was surprised that I'd mistaken the rule, being the rules expert usually. As he was about to speak up, I just gave him a look. He went: "Oh... yeah... that's really cool that elves get to regain spells so quickly."

Not my proudest moment. At least I got my Wraithstrikes back.

Traab
2013-02-27, 05:46 PM
The downside to an open world sandbox with a few cases of it will get worse as time goes on, is making sure the players are aware of what is going to get worse. As someone said, in some cases no matter what "day" the heroes get there, itll be the day the orcs raided the town and you have to go get them. But if one of those threats, or god forbid, 2+ of the threats will grow with time, then if they dont choose the right adventure, they will get killed later on no matter what they do. Unless that necromancer is staying put in his tower doing nothing but replacing his weaker undead with progressively higher level ones out of sheer boredom. :p

Mjlush, by 8 minute day I was talking about the groups that like to fight a single encounter, rest to regain all spell slots, fight another encounter, rest to regain all spells, etc. From a roleplaying standpoint, if you are in the enemies castle, you cant spend a month inside it killing off sentries one group a day. In some adventures that could work, like one where there is no intelligent big bad and its literally a lot of random encounters as you wander through a cave system and find a safe spot to hole up for a rest. But in a situation like I setup, the necromancer isnt going to stop building units or upgrading the ones he has just because you want to take a nap after every battle. I was honestly throwing together an example off the top of my head though. Clearly it would require a lot of fine tuning to work.

So cool, what im seeing is, that this kind of campaign CAN work, its just a finicky setup that has to be handled the right way to avoid boring players, or being too hard to complete without sheer perfection. I was just wondering, because it honestly sounded like an interesting idea to me.

Gnoman
2013-02-27, 06:05 PM
It depends heavily on how focused the campaign is. If it's simply the BBEG foucusing solely on defeating the party and vice-versa, then it's a bad idea to have tight time limits. At most, you should allow the same degree of recovery for the bad guys as the good guys take. (Which would be in the party's favor as long as the damage they did takes more effort to recover than the damage they took, and against them if it does not. It remains firmly player-driven, though.)

If there is a much larger scale, then strict time limits can work. If the PCs aren't solving all the world's problems anyway, there is less need for them to rush from crisis to crisis, especially if you give them leadership positions that allow them to delegate some of the heroing to vassals. In such a campaing, slowness on the PCs part can lose them some battles and make the war harder, but it will not force them to expend every second on simply staying ahead of the status quo.

mjlush
2013-02-27, 06:33 PM
Mjlush, by 8 minute day I was talking about the groups that like to fight a single encounter, rest to regain all spell slots, fight another encounter, rest to regain all spells, etc.


Ah you mean 8 minutes game time rather than playing time...
<snip>


Clearly it would require a lot of fine tuning to work.


Indeed... I think my point about travel still stands and I suspect it represents a major element of uncertainty in your time line. On one hand its hardly fair to penalize them for time they have to spend getting from one place to another, on the other hand they could get their hands on a head of pegasus or the like cut the journey times in half and convert the adventure into a cake walk. (Don't laugh.. they could use some throwaway comment you made in a previous adventure or some element from a supplement your using never underestimate the low cunning of the players :-)

Personally I'd just lie about having a mathematical increase in undead level and just add a one to the Challenge Rating every time you feel there lagging :smallwink:



So cool, what im seeing is, that this kind of campaign CAN work, its just a finicky setup that has to be handled the right way to avoid boring players, or being too hard to complete without sheer perfection. I was just wondering, because it honestly sounded like an interesting idea to me.

It should work, but pay attention to what W3bDragon and JusticeZero said about how it sucked for spellcasters not having downtime. This effects the noncasters he heartbeat of D&D how fast healing magic can be recovered

Raum
2013-02-27, 07:00 PM
Time sensitive sessions can be lots of fun. It'd get old over the course of a campaign. I'd suggest occasional 'races' to get whatever the BBEG is using to gain power interspersed with other adventure types - quests, chases, challenges, etc. Variety is a good thing!

NichG
2013-02-27, 07:15 PM
The biggest thing to be careful about when creating new failure modes is that you must be prepared for failure. If the PCs 'fail' in a combat encounter then its a TPK and you do a new campaign. The game doesn't have to be designed to survive them.

Once you add the possibility for passive failures, such as by not doing something fast enough, then you need to consider that a failure may happen in such a way that the PCs are still around and possibly worse, have no way of really knowing that they failed immediately. So you have to design things so that there's a way forward even if the PCs fail because of time.

Once failure is not absolute but just changes the direction of the campaign then you can be a lot freer with the precise timing. Lets say travel times can vary hugely as was suggested; well okay, thats fine. Its the PCs' responsibility to be clever and travel quickly when time is an issue. If they do something clever and succeed, well, thats a success! Its no different than someone figuring out that the party is going to face fire-based creatures and packing fire resist or immunity. Its part of the game.

If they don't pull off something clever, well, things get harder for them. Or probably better, things 'look worse' for the world in general, without necessarily ramping up the difficulty (failure leading to difficulty increase creates a death spiral kind of situation that can be pretty depressing to play through, after all). You could even justify the PCs be 'rewarded' for being late with easier encounters, because all of those enemies are out burning cities.

Acanous
2013-02-27, 07:45 PM
Don't forget as well, that given a time limit, PCs can REALLY go off the rails.
Tell them they have a year, you can usually keep things on track. 6 months? They're going to start cooking up some unusual plots and bypass what they can.
One month? Your PCs are going to ignore anything that isn't the big bad, and they're probably going to avoid fighting him, instead using explosives to bring down his dungeon.
One week? Your players kill everyone in the village, the surrounding countryside, and then eachother in order to gain levels. The one left standing uses his much-higher-level spells to just win against your necromancer, take over his army, and continue from there.

Traab
2013-02-27, 09:20 PM
Don't forget as well, that given a time limit, PCs can REALLY go off the rails.
Tell them they have a year, you can usually keep things on track. 6 months? They're going to start cooking up some unusual plots and bypass what they can.
One month? Your PCs are going to ignore anything that isn't the big bad, and they're probably going to avoid fighting him, instead using explosives to bring down his dungeon.
One week? Your players kill everyone in the village, the surrounding countryside, and then eachother in order to gain levels. The one left standing uses his much-higher-level spells to just win against your necromancer, take over his army, and continue from there.


Hah! That last one would be hilarious. And Mjlush, yeah, all that stuff like travel time would have to be included in calculating how the difficulty progresses. And the thing with spellcasters is also true, I would have to find a way to balance encounters so the casters could last a few fights and be able to rest, but not so much that they can rest after every battle and the group can take its sweet time.

Another undead focused idea that works with a time limit would be a ripoff of the warcraft 3 campaign where arthas has to defend a town from the undead. He receives a report that there is an undead caravan systematically wiping out small hamlets and raising the victims as undead, building up a vast army that will attack towards the end of the clock. Meanwhile the established undead base nearby is sending out sporadic attacks that are also getting stronger and stronger. Sometimes including some tougher bad guys.

So you have a choice. You can hunker in the bunker and try to build up your defenses to withstand a massive swarm, you can try to dash out and intercept the caravan to stop it in its tracks while hoping the village can hold without you long enough to get back, you can split the party and try to do both, you can even try to directly attack the outpost itself. Thats a really dangerous and possibly futile plan, but if you can pull off a win there, then you have the campaign locked up nice and tight.

Of course then the balance issue becomes, how often do the attacks come in per day, will the party have time to recover? How will they know when its the final battle? How can you arrange things so the base attack option is really tough but still doable? After all, you just KNOW they will want to bullrush the enemy camp and fight it out somehow, just because you have a 3 week siege planned out and they think it would be awesome to end it day 1. :smallbiggrin:

geeky_monkey
2013-02-28, 10:56 AM
I’ve tried this and it was fun, but a real nightmare to DM.

It was designed as a 2/3 session game for a ground of mid lv (lv 12 I think) with a 1 month deadline – that’s when the moons aligned and the BBEG would be able to perform a ritual that’d turn him into a god, dooming the world in the process.

The players had this long to sabotage the ritual by destroying macguffins - each one they destroyed would remove a layer of magicial protection from the BBEG (he was inspired by the Mayor from Buffy The Vampire Slayer and started off basically unkillable). They were free to directly confront him at any time (assuming they fought their way through his guards) but each one destroyed would make the fight easier.

In the end the players managed to destroy 6 of 10 of them before time started to run out and they decided to go on a do or die final charge against him.

I realised they’d arrive a day late due to an ‘easy’ encounter that went badly wrong due to really bad dice rolls on their behalf and far too many 20s from me so I’m afraid I fudged it slightly – I realised we’d never actually established how long months were in my setting so hey suddenly it turned out they were 32 days long so they managed to arrive there on the day of the ritual itself.

(Unfortunately they also all died to the BBEG who managed to survive with a whole 3hp left after the last remaining hero fumbled with a natural 1 but that’s another story)

Traab
2013-02-28, 03:15 PM
You know, thats actually a pretty epic ending to the storyline. Sure it would have been cooler if it went the other way, a single remaining hero with 3hp left due to the boss making a 1 last second, but honestly, if that happened to me, I would never believe it had happened on its own and think the dm fudged it for the epic ending. Just because it would have been TOO awesome.

geeky_monkey
2013-03-01, 05:40 AM
Oh yes - I had no problem with fudging the game so there would be a epic final confrontation but once they got there their fates were in the hands of the dice gods.

The players were all happy with the outcome of the game and there was some talk of doing a follow-up campaign in the same world which was now ruled by an insane evil god, but nothing came of it.