What to do for the rest of the 15-minute adventuring day?

[Harrow]

TL;DR What do you do in-character when you've got a bunch of time to kill?

I know there are ways around it. If the whole party is made up of mundane martial-types, ToB martial-types, invocation users, or psionics with power point recharge tricks, or are high enough level and optimized well enough that all of their buffs last the whole day, with healing done via a stash of wands, then you can kind of just keep adventuring until you run out of dungeon. A ticking clock with a strict time limit also encourages getting as far as you can without resting.

But.

Sometimes these methods don't work or aren't appropriate. Maybe you've just got a 10-character-level long dungeon, no time constraints, and a party make-up that requires resting every few encounters. It happens. And, when it does, it often leads to the 15-minute adventuring day, where you overcome maybe half a dozen encounters, but they're all back-to-back and take up very little in-game time. So, you end up in some kind of fortified position, be it a side room you've cleared out or a Rope Trick or whatever, and you wait.

What are good things for your characters to do to kill time in this kind of scenario? This will vary from character to character to some extent, of course. Martials will do weapon training, divine casters and monks will spend a lot of time in prayer and meditation, wizards can spend their time working with magical equations and reading, sorcerers... repeat affirmations into a mirror? Then, in a more general sense, some small games could work. Card games, dice games, with some chalk you could set up a game of marbles.

That's what I want to know. What kind of activities can characters do to kill time? I'd be happy with either character specific stuff ("My character is an aspiring actor and spends their free time rehearsing monologues") or more general stuff that anyone might be interested in.

[Troacctid]

Easy! Keep going through the dungeon, you cowards! :smallwink:

[Kurald Galain]

TL;DR What do you do in-character when you've got a bunch of time to kill?

Nothing, really. It is vanishingly rare to decide in-character to have a 15-minute adventuring day.

[RandomPeasant]

I think the traditional answer for "what do adventurers do in their spare time" is "drinking".

[icefractal]

Nothing, really. It is vanishingly rare to decide in-character to have a 15-minute adventuring day.
IDK, groups I've been in have decided to do that IC a number of times.
I mean, we didn't say "Let's have a 15-minute day". We said something like: "Wow, between the giant snakes and the cultists sniping with poison darts, we're really beat up and depleted. Time to retreat and recover."

Note 1 - It's not "lazy" to rest after a life or death fight. If I had to fight off a mugger IRL, you'd better believe I'd take the rest of the day off.
Note 2 - For that matter, five or more fights fit within a 15-minute span if they're close together.
Note 3 - Even if you had a eight-hour adventuring day, that's 6-7 hours of time to fill besides sleeping / preparation.

So the question of "how do you spend free time when on the road" is one of the things I always try to consider when making a character. Some things my characters have done:
* Reading / studying
* Playing cards or dice games, with or without gambling on it
* Performing little hologram-plays using minor illusions
* Keeping up with news and sending back updates
* Taking the scorpion terrarium out of storage and feeding / watching them
* Experimental cooking
* Wittling or other portable art
* Exercise / yoga
* Recording the group's exploits, possibly with some exaggeration

[Eurus]

Nothing, really. It is vanishingly rare to decide in-character to have a 15-minute adventuring day.

I've seen it happen a few times, when the situations are right for it. If the PCs have, effectively, a bottle dungeon that they can afford to take their time methodically clearing, it's not out of character for them to go about it cautiously. Go in, make some progress exploring and clearing monsters/traps, then back out and recover.

The party I'm running through Dungeon of the Mad Mage tends to base their retreats on when they have loot they want to sell, so if they're lucky and have a profitable encounter early on they'll gladly go back up to the surface to drink and haggle for a while. :smallamused:

[Seward]

It is fairly common with old school superdungeons. Temple of Elemental Evil was a whole campaign of return trips, only the Hill Giant steading of GDQ was usually cleared in one go until you hit the smaller underdark stuff etc. For 3.0, Forge of Fury and the thing with the giant undead tower of massive-respawn was like that.

You don't start out doing 15 minute days, it is more like careful scouting for a couple hours, trying to pick off patrols and outposts without alerting the whole freaking place, and a bit of cat and mouse when the alarm is raised to get them to waste resources when you don't push further. (in 3.5, we'd try to time assaults on places with evil divine casters after dusk, but outside the 8 hour window for spell recovery before dawn when our divine casters and items recharged. If we could trick divine casters into buffing with a strong assault then pull back we could go in a couple hours after sunrise and they couldn't have recovered spells. Arcane casters with rings of sustenance would sometimes rest for a couple hours and go right back in before enemies could recharge. You could only "back to back" once usually then have to pull out for a while. First edition training requirements to level meant that dungeons like TOEE could enjoy an occasional few weeks with nobody bothering them simply to level up from prior incursions, and they used that time to recruit, build more defenses, start whispering campaigns or otherwise mess with PCs. 3.x has less of that, because downtime isn't forced by anything but player decision most of the time, and few parties are going to let the wizard take 3 weeks off to craft something while an active dungeon is threatening the local area.

But yeah...in lower levels you might have to pull all the way back to a fortification or city to completely elude pursuit, but eventually you progress to where you can set up nearby and be pretty immune to response (rope trick, teleporting in and out, having a way to cover yourself with enough rock between you and any detection spell+fuzz scent or other tracking etc) and then you start thinking about buffing and working your whole in-and-out strategy around buff timers. Sometime around level 8ish in 3.5 you start to see a lot more of this if you bump up against a really hard target. The urgency is more to keep pounding them day after day to prevent bringing in reinforcements or coming up with defensive strategies that actually work, not giving them any extended period to recover.

What do people do the rest of the day? Mostly sleep and do watch schedules over an extended period, scared that the combined might of the hornet nest they poked will somehow find them. Very occasionally that nightmare happens and woe betide a party that doesn't either have an extremely fortified campsite or some kind of rapid retreat escape plan.

[Maat Mons]

I recall in one game we had a martial character who would polish his sword whenever nothing else was happening. I think he even had "sword polish" recorded in his inventory. We once spent a week traveling on a ship. We joked that the sword must have had a mirror finish by the time we got to our destination.

In my current campaign, my character has a Safecamp Wagon and a Pavilion of Grandeur. The DM ruled that I can set up the Pavilion (a 10x10 tent that's 30x30 and climate controlled on the inside) on top of the wagon (10x15 except when it's shrunk down to toy size). My plan is, if we ever see enemies coming for our campsite, the campsite has a move speed of 50.

And it all fits inside my Haversack. Well, except the horse. But if f I don't want to bring the horse somewhere, I just dismiss the Mount spell, and cast it again later.

[Seward]

And it all fits inside my Haversack. Well, except the horse. But if f I don't want to bring the horse somewhere, I just dismiss the Mount spell, and cast it again later.

Some pathfinder sourcebook or other had a portable bath. I had a character that already had a big white warhorse, gold-plated armor, all sorts of vanity stuff, down to his spiked gauntlet being mithril, but he didn't have prestidigitation, just create water. So yeah, in his downtime he'd put up a tent for privacy, get out the portable bathtub, fill it with water and soak. Soap was already in his inventory. Fortunately we were never attacked while he was taking a bath, although he got it late enough in his career I'm sure he would have been fine.

[rel]

research new spells, craft new magical items (assuming you have the spell slots), train (if your GM requires it), general research (if your GM offers a benefit for taking your time), craft mundane objects, improve your logistics and support infrastructure, administer / advance your non-adventuring projects like realm building, work on a fluff project.

As usual, the magic users have more mechanical support in terms of what they can do.

[Venger]

15 minute adventuring days are usually in dungeons, so pure hack n slash or I might suggest role play and having the characters talk to each other. If it's just a matter of killing the guys in rooms 1-4 and then resting before moving to room 5, crafting magic items is pretty much the only useful thing to do mechanically with downtime.