Pacing a megadungeon

[Vahnavoi]

Why would you respond to your players saying "we want things to be easier" by making things harder? That's not good GMing. You should choose a different style of carrot/stick.

Making a particular strategy less viable is not the same as making a game harder overall. Even if the goal is to just get players to switch from one easy approach to another, the old easy strategy must be removed from the table or players will keep using it simply due to familiarity.

Also? Appealing to worst instincts of players is not a great move. Talakeal's players suck and giving them what they say they want means they will continue to suck. Talakeal most likely should stop caving in, to the extent of stopping playing with them entirely.

Also, why would the dungeon restock with tougher monsters over time? That doesn't make much sense to me.

No-one has a reason to care whether it makes sense to you, but inventing reasons why (enemy reinforcements, adaptive opponents, curse of undeath etc.) is not hard. They just aren't very relevant. A character might not know why the sun rises, the important part is that it does.

[Talakeal]

So, we had the first session, it actually went pretty great.

There was a lot of good RP, and though the characters all kind of red-flagged me at first, they ended up working together pretty well.

We swapped out two of the players from the usual group, and the new makeup is a lot less risk averse. They pushed on pretty well, then got swarmed and almost beaten down by kobolds (by kobolds! It was amazing!) and decided to pull out for the night, but they actually debated whether they should continue, and I actually came down on the side of withdrawing as it was getting late and the kobolds had hurt them badly (not that it was my decision to make, I just gave my opinion to them while they were on the fence).

I did explain that the dungeon is going to get more dangerous over time, and Bob grumbled as he always does, but so far so good!

I will right up a session log and post it sometime later today.

TLDR: Talakeal starts new campaign, no horror story found!

I missed the irony of that earlier, but I can point it out now.
so there is some huge underground structure, and it was somehow abandoned and never resettled, and it somehow got filled with monsters, and somehow it is filled with treasure that nobody else took before, and the monsters are casually all just strong enough to be level-appropriate for the level the characters happen to be at.
Once you accept that premise, how can you complain about contrived coincidences?

It is, yeah.

But I have gone to great lengths to explain why the dungeon is as it is to minimize contrivances; but its an exceptional situation and the PCs just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I don't want to go into too great a detail here, but essentially it was sealed for centuries, and it is now being colonized from underneath, pushing a stable (if dangerous) ecosystem ever upward toward the surface and the people who live there.

[Quertus]

I have to stop for a tangent here to heartily disagree.
as a dm, I play the game too. nobody is paying me, I'm there to have fun, same like everyone else at the table. So how I want to play matters as much as how the players want to play; more, because I am also putting in all the extra effort. The dm is not supposed to sacrifice his wishes to the players.
unless they are actually paying him, that is.

Anyone who thinks that their fun is worth ruining the experience for everyone at the table should be shown the door. Doubly so if that person is the GM.

The GM will almost invariably make content that is fun for themselves; they should always be asking, “what will be fun for the table?”, and be willing so sacrifice some of their fun for the health of the game.

Making a particular strategy less viable is not the same as making a game harder overall. Even if the goal is to just get players to switch from one easy approach to another, the old easy strategy must be removed from the table or players will keep using it simply due to familiarity.

Eh, maybe. When your players’ most common complaint is “it’s too hard”, removing their means of making things easier - by which I mean, specifically contriving the scenario to prevent that particular tech - isn’t exactly a productive strategy conducive to improving the situation, any more than screaming “be smarter, you idiots!” at the players every session would be.

But, yes, there are ways to encourage new “easy mode” strategies that you believe will be more fun for the group - communicating with the players about this new idea and getting buy-in for it is generally a good approach, IME.

No-one has a reason to care whether it makes sense to you, but inventing reasons why (enemy reinforcements, adaptive opponents, curse of undeath etc.) is not hard. They just aren't very relevant. A character might not know why the sun rises, the important part is that it does.

I don't want to go into too great a detail here, but essentially it was sealed for centuries, and it is now being colonized from underneath, pushing a stable (if dangerous) ecosystem ever upward toward the surface and the people who live there.

It has to make sense… to the GM, and their evil overlord mandated 5-year-old advisor. If the players pour a volcano down the hatch of the megadungeon, they’ll see different results from “overpopulation”, “magical spawn areas”, “time loop”, or “they’re running away”. And those results should inform their understanding of the megadungeon. The sun rising should be understandable to someone sufficiently knowledgeable who studies it.

Not that Talakeal’s players are historically likely to understand things, including things they have already figured out.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus: Talakeal's players saying something is "too hard" should be given same credibility as children saying it is "too hard" for them to put on a proper hat when going outside during winter.

As for the other thing, "this thing works so in a game because I need it to serve that game aesthetic", is all it takes for a thing to "make sense" for a game master. You are vastly overstating necessity of knowing "why" in in-character terms, and the sun analogy should've made that clear. After all, it took thousands of years before anyone properly understood "why" sun rises. Not only have most humans throughout history not understood the why, for majority of them, it was impossible. So no, it does not follow any curious character "should" be able to get accurate information of such things.

[King of Nowhere]

Anyone who thinks that their fun is worth ruining the experience for everyone at the table should be shown the door. Doubly so if that person is the GM.

The GM will almost invariably make content that is fun for themselves; they should always be asking, “what will be fun for the table?”, and be willing so sacrifice some of their fun for the health of the game.

I can accept it worded this way. the way you worded it the first time - and a few other times in various posts - made it seem like claiming that the dm should do stuff that's unfun to him if the players like it.

[Satinavian]

The GM will almost invariably make content that is fun for themselves;

And the players only play content that is fun. So every table is full of people having fun, right ?

No. Sometimes people have less fun than they imagined they would have when they joined/started a group. But as a long running group activity, there is always some sense of obligation that makes leaving harder. Doubly so for the GM because the campaign ends when the GM quits.

You can't just assume that the GM will automatically have fun anyway and that it thus is only worth to talk about player fun.


Everyone at a table should consider the fun of the others and try to find ways that are fun for the whole group. And everyone should be honest about their wishes. The GM is not special here.

[Talakeal]

Write up of the first session and a half here:


https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?654504-Gateway-to-the-Dreamscapes-Megadungeon-Campaign-Log&p=25718877#post25718877

Long story short; it went great and, at least so far, my fears were for nothing.

I told them at the outset that their advancement is linked to accomplishing things in the dungeon, but the dungeon gets more dangerous over (in setting) time. Bob grumbled at this (but then again, he always does) but everyone got the picture that the optimal strategy was to intended to be for them to stretch their resources as far as they reasonably could before turning back and played accordingly.

[gbaji]

We swapped out two of the players from the usual group, and the new makeup is a lot less risk averse. They pushed on pretty well, then got swarmed and almost beaten down by kobolds (by kobolds! It was amazing!) and decided to pull out for the night, but they actually debated whether they should continue, and I actually came down on the side of withdrawing as it was getting late and the kobolds had hurt them badly (not that it was my decision to make, I just gave my opinion to them while they were on the fence).

Noticed this. Are you actually enforcing in-game stops with on-table stops? Just seemed so by your statement there that it was "getting late". I just stop the game session when it's time to stop. Heck. I've on occasion stopped in the middle of a battle (don't like to, but sometimes it becomes apparent that the fight is going to go on another 4 or 5 rounds, and it's like 11PM on a Sunday night and folks need to go to work in the morning). A game session need not completely encapsulate an adventure. You can just stop after a fight, and with the characters standing around in the room wondering what to do next.

I find that actually works better, because it gives the players time between sessions to make a better decision as to what to do next. It's not uncommon at all for us to break the session right when they first run into some new "thing" that requires a hard decision for just this reason. Dunno. I could be wrong in interpreting what you said though.

[Talakeal]

Noticed this. Are you actually enforcing in-game stops with on-table stops? Just seemed so by your statement there that it was "getting late". I just stop the game session when it's time to stop. Heck. I've on occasion stopped in the middle of a battle (don't like to, but sometimes it becomes apparent that the fight is going to go on another 4 or 5 rounds, and it's like 11PM on a Sunday night and folks need to go to work in the morning). A game session need not completely encapsulate an adventure. You can just stop after a fight, and with the characters standing around in the room wondering what to do next.

I find that actually works better, because it gives the players time between sessions to make a better decision as to what to do next. It's not uncommon at all for us to break the session right when they first run into some new "thing" that requires a hard decision for just this reason. Dunno. I could be wrong in interpreting what you said though.

We generally do one adventure equals one session, but it isn’t a hard rule. Especially when doing a more sandbox campaign like this.

In this game I thought about using a real time calendar like the DMs of old, but decided against it. In the future I expect to run multiple expeditions per game session.

[gbaji]

We generally do one adventure equals one session, but it isn’t a hard rule. Especially when doing a more sandbox campaign like this.

In this game I thought about using a real time calendar like the DMs of old, but decided against it. In the future I expect to run multiple expeditions per game session.

How long are your game sessions? My games usually run the opposite, with 3-4 game sessions per expedition. We usually play once a week for maybe 4 or 5 hours though. That's often just enough time to have some plot discussions, planning, in-character interaction between PCS and/or NPCs, then <something happens>, and maybe a short combat or two. It's not uncommon for something "simple" like clearing out a small fort with maybe 2 or 3 combats, to take a session getting to the fort, and maybe two sessions clearing it out. Then we pick up the week after that to go over stuff they found, then RP the next step in the adventure, and then move on. I never use a "real time" calendar. Game time passes in game, based on what they do in game. Period. A session could take 15 minutes of game time, or could cover 6 weeks. Doesn't matter.

Medium length adventures could literallly go 4-6 months of weekly game sessions, with the entire thing being the adventurers "out in the wilderness doing stuff". Heck. One of our GMs ran just one small part of his adventure, which was us exploring an ancient Ziggurat, and just that one bit took a couple months to clear though. That was after travelling to nationA, learning about <bad stuff> (and encountering some bad guys), then sailing down a river to <nationB>, and learning more stuff (and fighting some more bad guys there), then hopping on a ship and traveling to <continentC>, then wandering inland some distance, finding said ancient ziggurat and exploring it (and finding some info we were after), then finding some other ancient portal thingie and using the info to travel to <planeD>, then wandering around there dealing with more bad guys and gaining some mcguffin we needed, returning to our home plane, then travelling back to <nationA>, meeting up with some allies, then traveling far inland there and having a big climatic battle with the final end boss bad guy. The whole adventure took us most of a year to go through.

So yeah. I'm just confused at your players having this "leashed to town" mentality going on. They should be perfectly willing and able to travel for long distances and time "in the wilderness". And should have the tools and abilities to defend themselves while doing so. Finding a "safe place to camp" is somewhat of an important skill to develop. And sure, a "megadungeon" set up near a town may have some "return to town to sell loot and buy potions/whatever" aspect to it, but I'm still finding it strange that they are so hesitant to just jump the heck in and do the dungeon thing.

[Talakeal]

How long are your game sessions? My games usually run the opposite, with 3-4 game sessions per expedition. We usually play once a week for maybe 4 or 5 hours though. That's often just enough time to have some plot discussions, planning, in-character interaction between PCS and/or NPCs, then <something happens>, and maybe a short combat or two. It's not uncommon for something "simple" like clearing out a small fort with maybe 2 or 3 combats, to take a session getting to the fort, and maybe two sessions clearing it out. Then we pick up the week after that to go over stuff they found, then RP the next step in the adventure, and then move on. I never use a "real time" calendar. Game time passes in game, based on what they do in game. Period. A session could take 15 minutes of game time, or could cover 6 weeks. Doesn't matter.

Medium length adventures could literallly go 4-6 months of weekly game sessions, with the entire thing being the adventurers "out in the wilderness doing stuff". Heck. One of our GMs ran just one small part of his adventure, which was us exploring an ancient Ziggurat, and just that one bit took a couple months to clear though. That was after travelling to nationA, learning about <bad stuff> (and encountering some bad guys), then sailing down a river to <nationB>, and learning more stuff (and fighting some more bad guys there), then hopping on a ship and traveling to <continentC>, then wandering inland some distance, finding said ancient ziggurat and exploring it (and finding some info we were after), then finding some other ancient portal thingie and using the info to travel to <planeD>, then wandering around there dealing with more bad guys and gaining some mcguffin we needed, returning to our home plane, then travelling back to <nationA>, meeting up with some allies, then traveling far inland there and having a big climatic battle with the final end boss bad guy. The whole adventure took us most of a year to go through.

So yeah. I'm just confused at your players having this "leashed to town" mentality going on. They should be perfectly willing and able to travel for long distances and time "in the wilderness". And should have the tools and abilities to defend themselves while doing so. Finding a "safe place to camp" is somewhat of an important skill to develop. And sure, a "megadungeon" set up near a town may have some "return to town to sell loot and buy potions/whatever" aspect to it, but I'm still finding it strange that they are so hesitant to just jump the heck in and do the dungeon thing.

We generally play ~8 hours every two weeks, although sometimes our sessions run really long because nobody can focus and we just spend several hours talking about video games.

It sounds like your definition of adventure and mine are a bit different. What you are calling an "adventure" I would call an "arc".

I am used to playing games where resource recovery is slow, mostly White Wolf Games were it is on the scale of weeks or months rather than hours or days, although as Quertus pointed out vampires can probably keep going indefinitely as long as there is a steady supply of mortals for them to chomp down on, as well as Games Workshop's narrative skirmish games where you alternate between battle phases and recovery phases, and my Heart of Darkness system plays like a fusion of those.

A typical "adventure" in my system plays like an "adventuring day" in D&D, with 4-8 encounters per, and then a downtime phase after.

My understanding is that the "15 MWD" is originally a problem in D&D, where the game assumes 4-8 encounters per day, but players decide to sleep and recover all of their spells after each. This is certainly the mentality I always used in D&D video games when it was allowed, and I see a lot of people having problems where the casters outshine the marshals and wilderness encounters are tedious and pointless as a result.

My last hex-crawl required an extended rest in town to recover spells, and as a result the players went back there every time because they realized the odds of dying to the first encounter after a rest were negligible, but the odds of dying on subsequent encounters went up, so they did everything possible to ensure that every encounter was their fist.

I am just hoping that attitude doesn't carry forward to this campaign.

[Satinavian]

My understanding is that the "15 MWD" is originally a problem in D&D, where the game assumes 4-8 encounters per day, but players decide to sleep and recover all of their spells after each. This is certainly the mentality I always used in D&D video games when it was allowed, and I see a lot of people having problems where the casters outshine the marshals and wilderness encounters are tedious and pointless as a result.

I would say the main problem was balancing the system around 4-8 combat encounters a day in the first place. That is not really how it works in most kinds of fantasy fiction.

[DrMartin]

there are way to address the issue in-game and out of game. as far as i understand your table's dynamic, the answer has to be strictly in game and reflected by the game mechanics and setting, right?

maybe the megadungeon has its own rules, enforced by its own infrastructure. Access to deeper parts of the dungeon has to be earned through a series of feats, tasks, checkpoints, etc, and the "access rights" are reset every time you exit the environment. So you can enter, do one encounter, blow all your resources, and exit, but when you re-enter you will probably have to face the same encounter or trap again. Only now you know how, and can do it in a more resource-savvy way - this way your players, who apparently like to play "optimally", get rewarded.

If there are some abilities you don't want the players to use, you can use the dungeon's safeguard system to account for that, in-game. Maybe there's a cold themed area in your megadungeon. with a central hyper-cold core that your characters need to reach. But the dungeon has a safe-guard that won't grant access to the hyper-cold core to anyone carrying or using fire - so in this delve your players will have to navigate through the cold area and its fire-susceptible denizens without using fire spells

Once you reach certain milestones in the dungeon you might get permanent access right to some areas, to allow for direct navigation past early areas and save table play time. Once the characters have reached certain levels they might be able to bypass some of the dungeons restrictions entirely - passwalls, etherealness, teleport, etc - I would say this can also be fine, if your players embrace this newfound freedom of exploration and become able to find and reach parts of the dungeon that have been so far completely out of reach - not just from them, but from other parties as well. The early areas that every other party in town has to navigate through to get a bit deeper might be very well mapped, the middle strata might have some information that can be obtained for coin or favors, but now you can suddenly dig straight through the dungeon's structure to areas where nobody has ever been - I'd say that is something to be encouraged rather than forbidden with a blanket "teleportation doesn't work here".

All I am saying can be boiled down to - a megadungeon is its own environment, with its own laws of physics and internal logic. As long as you keep that logic consistent and you telegraph it clearly to your players, almost anything goes.

[King of Nowhere]

I would say the main problem was balancing the system around 4-8 combat encounters a day in the first place. That is not really how it works in most kinds of fantasy fiction.

+1
I don't like the model of multiple combats. Starting from the fact that you are supposed to have to keep a certain (innatural) pace, down to the fact that the first few combats are very easy and feel kinda pointless, ending with it being hard to justify that the opponents will stand and fight to the death to drain the party resources instead of running or surrendering.

The whole model, to be believable, requires many special circumstances. I prefer to balance around a single fight, and mitigate caster supremacy in other ways

[stoutstien]

I would say the main problem was balancing the system around 4-8 combat encounters a day in the first place. That is not really how it works in most kinds of fantasy fiction.

They didn't? They put a warning sign before the sharp curves not a minimum speed limit.

[Satinavian]

They didn't? They put a warning sign before the sharp curves not a minimum speed limit.

I don't get that metaphor at all, sorry.

[GameMaster_Phil]

My next campaign is going to be an old school mega-dungeon.

In short, I am wondering how to incentivize the characters to actually push themselves in exploring it rather than falling back on the old 15 minute adventuring day routine.

I have never had much success with this in the past. The last time I tried to run a hex-crawl game everything I did, from wandering encounters to non-lethal death just made the problem worse.

The dungeon is directly under the town, Diablo style, so long journeys and expensive supplies are going to be tough to justify.

Likewise, tying resting to a RL clock is annoying and honestly more of a punishment for me as the DM than it is for the players.

Any ideas?

Maybe tweaking XP based on time since a rest? Random encounters getting more lethal over time?

Here is what I did. 5 Years of monthly megadungeon sessions here.

There are 2 crucial parts. Communicate these and their intentions clearly to your players, before game start.

The first important part is to not grant XP for killing stuff. Exploration or 1 point of XP for each gp worth of loot brought back to town is a good choice. Make your wandering monsters medium dangerous, but, on average, poor (as in, no loot whatsoever). So if they go into the dungeon and retreat after the first fight, let them. The first few times, there might still be some loot to find (and XP to gain), but the well-explored parts of the dungeon will run dry of loot (and thus, xp), pretty quickly. My players loitered on the first level for a number of sessions, and their leveling slowed significantly over time. The game was "easy" at this time for my players, because they were (PF 1e) Level 3-4 characters on level 1, but I didn't mind. Eventually, they found info for greater threats and rewards deeper down, and went for that when they felt ready. Have patience.

The second important part is to encourage resting in town and strongly discourage resting in the dungeon. XP are granted only in town. Wandering monsters should really sting if someone tries to stay 8 hours in the dungeon. I even implemented stuff like haunts and demonic possession attempts on resting characters, and warned them about it IC and OOC. Have a reason for at least several ingame days passing between game sessions. This justifies restocking.


For time tracking in the dungeon, look up AngryDMs Tension Pool mechanic and use that. It works pretty well. Go no more granular than that. Knowing your players from your posts, do a full review with all of them of this house rule and get them on board.

For restocking: A megadungeon needs to restock. I roll a d20 for each "explored" room when restocking happens (usually roughly every 10 days). Between sessions, 2d6 days pass. There is 15% chance for an encounter without extra treasure, and a 10% chance for an encounter with (additional) treasure. And again, not all encounters have intrinsic treasure (like an NPC with gear). And a 5% chance for new treasure without an encounter. That means, the monsters will restock faster than the treasure. The treasure and encounter difficulty should not scale with player level, but with dungeon depth or rather, danger. The lower you go, the higher the danger and the better the loot. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder have nice loot tables for this.

You can also mine the recruitment post in the OOC link in my sig for more information. Feel free to ask me about it.

[Talakeal]

I would say the main problem was balancing the system around 4-8 combat encounters a day in the first place. That is not really how it works in most kinds of fantasy fiction.

Maybe I am reading the wrong kind of fiction then.

Half a dozen or so fights per adventure seems pretty normal to me.

[Satinavian]

Per adventure or per day ?
Most of the fantasy stuff i read has has weeks or months between most fights and often not more than one or two in total for whole story arcs. There are exceptions but those are, well, exceptions.

It might work for your megadungeon setup. But i found that regularly playing D&D makes it a struggle to hit such numbers without contrievances. Which is why many groups probably get far less encounters per rest even without the players particularly trying to do so.

[BRC]

It's a matter of the table-time experience.

In a fantasy story, action scenes and non-action scenes can move the plot forward at similar paces from a reader's perspective.

In a TTRPG, while action scenes can be fun, they heavily decompress time from the audience perspective. If you do six fights in an adventuring Day, that's a TON of table time for fairly little story advancement or actual achievement. It can also lead to grinder fights, which exist to do nothing but sap PC resources to make later fights more challenging and are not particularly fun to play through.

A fight can easily be 2 hours of play time, so six fights can mean 12 hours of table time covering maybe five minutes of time in-story. Sure there are scenarios where that can work and still feel good, but if you try to make that a constant pace things will be very sluggish, as you can reach a point where your players have to wait months for any real plot advancement.

[stoutstien]

I don't get that metaphor at all, sorry.

The entire 4-8 encounters a day angle doesn't exist as a goal or system standard. It's solely a reference point for DMs who use daily exp budget. It's a warning when they *might* start seeing strain due to volume or intensity. It's cautionary not obligatory.

[Vahnavoi]

The entire 4-8 encounters a day angle doesn't exist as a goal or system standard. It's solely a reference point for DMs who use daily exp budget. It's a warning when they *might* start seeing strain due to volume or intensity. It's cautionary not obligatory.

Yup. In 3.x., it was originally an average of what the actual guideline was. Amount of encounters was meant to vary both in quantity and challenge rating, from masses of weaker enemies to just one overpowering enemy. The extreme ends weren't even supposed to yield experience points, either because the enemies were so much weaker than the player characters, or because they were so much stronger that a purposeful victory was not considered possible. In total, these extreme ends covered 10% to 15% of all encounters.

But, in any case, balancing a game system around any given number of daily encounters is madness, because it is way too constraining for scenario design. It is much better to explain how to vary both frequency and intensity of encounters to match desired gameplay and difficulty.

[Talakeal]

Maybe I am reading the wrong kind of fiction then.

Half a dozen or so fights per adventure seems pretty normal to me.

Per adventure, which might be per day or it might not.

Which is why its, imo, really dumb to pace the game around resource attrition and daily rests when an action heavy dungeon crawl might have ten fights in a day and an overland travel game might have one fight a month.


Looking at Tolkien's works, the ur example of a modern fantasy story, it seems like they have a rhythm of one random combat encounter, one dangerous plot relevant encounter, resting at an allies home, repeat.

[kyoryu]

The problem is, like many other things, that D&D has gone significant drift of how it is played.

In megadungeon play, attrition makes sense (with some of the things mentioned in this thread). The goal is to get in and get as much out as you can - and retreating after any attrition is not a great tactic. Combat is to be avoided. Getting treasure is the point. There aren't "expected" combats. Trivializing an encounter doesn't break the game. There's a lot of "press your luck" involved, so long-term attrition made sense as a central mechanic. You figure out how to use your resources efficiently to get as far as you can. There's a lot of cool gameplay involved there. And the GM didn't plan a number of encounters, the players decided what they wanted to deal with and when they wanted to turn around.

When the game was moved out of the dungeon, that assumption broke down. But, it's what the game does, so that's what we have. I'd absolutely argue that, for most D&D games, a long-term attrition-based model based upon days in the game world doesn't make a lot of sense, and the fifteen minute workday is the first and most obvious symptom of this.

[QUOTE=Talakeal;25719847]
Which is why its, imo, really dumb to pace the game around resource attrition and daily rests when an action heavy dungeon crawl might have ten fights in a day and an overland travel game might have one fight a month.[/quote[

Well, yes. Or, more like "it's dumb to pace a game around daily resource attrition when the game does not scope things so that they actually occur on that schedule."

[Vahnavoi]

Again, the "fifteen minute workday" is just basic tactics. Outside tabletop roleplaying games, it would just be called shock hit-and-run.

Players engaging in this is not a symptom of a game not working. It is them adapting to a specific tactical and strategic environment. Even within confines of modern D&D, it isn't hard to craft a scenario where such basic tactics are no longer sufficient. If different play is desired, the spotlight ought to be on the scenario designer.

[gbaji]

It sounds like your definition of adventure and mine are a bit different. What you are calling an "adventure" I would call an "arc".

Ok. Fair enough.

I am used to playing games where resource recovery is slow, mostly White Wolf Games were it is on the scale of weeks or months rather than hours or days, although as Quertus pointed out vampires can probably keep going indefinitely as long as there is a steady supply of mortals for them to chomp down on, as well as Games Workshop's narrative skirmish games where you alternate between battle phases and recovery phases, and my Heart of Darkness system plays like a fusion of those.

I play in a game with mixed resource recovery rates. There are "short term" resources (magic points basically), that recover constantly at a set rate over time. So while travelling, they're regaining this stuff. This allows them to cast basic spells in the game. There are "long term" resources, which take the form of more powerful and faster casting spells, but they basically require spending time at a temple/shrine/whatever praying to recover the spells from your deity. Which takes a day per point of spell. A typical priest might head off on an adventure with say 20-30 points (or a lot more depending on how long the person has been adventuring). So recovery takes "weeks" of sitting around in specific locations. Not something you can do on the move, or even just resting some random location.

We also have various items/artifacts/whatever that may have x/day uses of various spell effects.

The point is that there's resources spent during a series of encounters in a single day. That's a management in terms of "can we run through this series of encounters, and perhaps multiple combats without running out of our short term stuff?". A lot of adventuring may be wandering around, travelling, exploring, investigating, but then time somewhat compresses when they're delving into a dungeon, or assaulting some bad guy lair. And those can often involve a fairly large number of encounters in a relatively short amount of time. That's where we can literally spend 8 or 10 sessions just in a single day of game time (or just a few hours), as the PCs are managing short term resources trying to work their way through something difficult.

And in many cases, they may also expend long term resources along the way doing that (they're more powerful spells, and basically "get out of pickle" kind of things). But they have to consider whether they're going to be albe to spend the time getting those back, or whether they're going to have to head from where they are to some new thing and deal with that. I don't have to deal with the "go home and rest after every fight thing", since the short term stuff recovers automatically, and the long term stuff isn't going to recover from one nights rest "at hom". There's literall no value in "going home", unless they plan on spending several weeks there. All my adventures are done in a way that they must complete the thing in front of them in one go, or they will fail. And, often, having done that one thing, they now have to head off immediately to some other location to do something else in a story arc, or they will (again) fail. You don't just smash the bbeg's minions in lairA, find out the secret location to lairB where they're <doing something evil> and then sit around for a month recovering spells. That's not going to work.

Now, while they are on longer adventures, there may be natural break points. They're in a city along the way, nothing is immediately pressing, and they can decide to spend a week or two getting long term spells back. Maybe they're waiting for a ship to take them to some distant land they need to get to. Or there's some other event/contact they need to encounter/meet and have some time. That's usually a component of the adventure they are in. I don't tend to just let them do things on their own time scale. The PCs are almost always reacting to something else going on, and that "plot" is being driven by the bad guys and their time line.

My last hex-crawl required an extended rest in town to recover spells, and as a result the players went back there every time because they realized the odds of dying to the first encounter after a rest were negligible, but the odds of dying on subsequent encounters went up, so they did everything possible to ensure that every encounter was their fist.

I am just hoping that attitude doesn't carry forward to this campaign.

Yeah. Not a huge fan of hex crawls in general. But I do get that if you're doing that, you're are basically engaged in "exploration", and it's not so much about story arcs, and NPC driven adventuring. Again, not my cup of tea, but that does mean that I don't run into the kinds of timid timing use that you are seeing.

I balance the adventure timeline to the PCs ability to manage it. The PCS then have to actually do the managing to make that work though. If they dawdle there are consequences. If they waste resources, there are also consequences. It's pretty natural feeling IMO. Just works.

A megadungeon presents additional challenges. But I still suggest thinking in terms of single "chunks" of content that must all be managed in one go. There are a number of ways to make this work, but you really need to do this, otherwise they will just chip away at the content if you let them.

[kyoryu]

Again, the "fifteen minute workday" is just basic tactics. Outside tabletop roleplaying games, it would just be called shock hit-and-run.

Players engaging in this is not a symptom of a game not working. It is them adapting to a specific tactical and strategic environment. Even within confines of modern D&D, it isn't hard to craft a scenario where such basic tactics are no longer sufficient. If different play is desired, the spotlight ought to be on the scenario designer.

Except the fact that D&D isn't reality. It was designed, and the rules are there for a reason. They're there to create pressure on pushing progress, trying to find efficiencies, etc.

The game hasn't really been played that way in years, but it still echoes today.

And, yes, you can handle that with scenario design... but in a lot of ways, you shouldn't have to.

[Vahnavoi]

I disagree with that last part. To be played, a roleplaying game needs a scenario, and since tactical and strategic environment depends on that, it is the scenario designer who should handle. The obvious follow-up is that if a game master wants to make their own scenarios, at no point can they credibly say they "shouldn't have to" handle this.

Worth noting is that I don't disagree with your statement about how the way people play has drifted. As an observation, it is valid and true. I just wouldn't draw far-reaching conclusions about the quality of the game from that.

[gbaji]

I disagree with that last part. To be played, a roleplaying game needs a scenario, and since tactical and strategic environment depends on that, it is the scenario designer who should handle. The obvious follow-up is that if a game master wants to make their own scenarios, at no point can they credibly say they "shouldn't have to" handle this.

I agree, er, with your disagreement. While you certainly can just toss monsters and treasure somewhat randomly at the PCs (and given that we're talking about a megadungeon, that's a distinct possibility), that doesn't mean that's how you *should* do things, and certainly not necessarily "by design". Most scenarios are just that: A scenario. There is an objective that the PCs are trying to achieve beyond just "kill monsters and take their stuff".

And yeah, it's absolutely up to the GM to write that scenario and present it to the players such that the pace of the game flows in whatever way is desired. I've found that the only case in which the players have such control over the pace that they can just "kill a single room of monsters and then retreat back to town to recover" is when the GM has created absolutely no "objective" to the game other than "clear out these monsters" (and even then has somehow structured the monsters such that they don't communicate with eachother or seem to notice that the room full of their neighbors has been previously attacked or take any action in response). I always structure any section of an adventure as an interlocking set of elements. You can't interact with one of them, without being noticed by others (at least to some degree). A lot of the time, this means that once you do one thing significant (like kill a bunch of creatures) you have to continue on while you still have the element of surprise on your side. Going home for a day or so and coming back later is a really horrifically bad idea (again, if there's any structure to the area at all).

I would argue that it's relatively easy to put those objectives into the game *and* that GMs really should do so. It makes the game so much more interesting to the players if they have a reason to be doing what they are doing. To put it in OotS terms. It took exactly 13 strips for Rich to decide he needed to have a reason for his characters to be in the dungeon other than "kill monsters and take their loot". I find that it's somewhat the same thing with actual tables of players. They will have no interest in the characters or the game setting if you, the GM, don't fill in this sort of stuff.

[Talakeal]

Again, the "fifteen minute workday" is just basic tactics. Outside tabletop roleplaying games, it would just be called shock hit-and-run.

I think I mentioned already, the big difference between real life / narrative and game rules / hit points is that a single arrow through the chest is potentially deadly or debilitating, while in game it is just something you can sleep off.

This makes hit and run tactics a lot more effective in most RPGs than they would ordinarily be.