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I am taking a group through the old 3.5 World's Largest Dungeon using Pathfinder rules (because they are better). An interesting question popped into my mind yesterday.
How long can a character, or group of characters explore a dungeon, deal with traps, and fight monsters, etc. without resting? Leave out spellcasters having to rest to regain spells. Imagine a group of fighters and rogues with enough potions and other magic to keep them healed. (My group is not like this. There are a couple of spellcasters) I want to know how long can such a group go on without being just too doggone tired to keep going?
Oh, and what's the penalty for going too long and getting too doggone tired? If there is one.
scroll down to the "Forced March" section, there it says that after 8 hours of walking you have to start making Constitution checks, which get harder with every hour. If you fail (and after about 7 hours the DC is so high that most characters can't succeed anymore) you take non-lethal damage and get fatigued.
That's not exactly what you asked, I know, but its the closest I found, and I guess it applies to doing other stuff besides walking as well.
A character with lots of HP can go for a day or longer, but even they'll have accumulated alot of non-lethal damage by then.
Here are the only relevant rules I have never known of
PRD=Forced March: In a day of normal walking, a character walks for 8 hours. The rest of the daylight time is spent making and breaking camp, resting, and eating.
A character can walk for more than 8 hours in a day by making a forced march. For each hour of marching beyond 8 hours, a Constitution check (DC 10, +2 per extra hour) is required. If the check fails, the character takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from a forced march becomes fatigued. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue. It's possible for a character to march into unconsciousness by pushing himself too hard.
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If you are just speaking of dungeon crawling though I would let them go until they decided to rest, and I might also cut back on the potions since if it ever became an issue.
Also remember that once your fatigued already, it will cause you to be exhausted instead, which is when it gets really nasty.
Honestly if they risk that they're risking a party wipe, since then even enemies several levels below them become a serious threat.
But really, it won't happen too often, since as you said, spellcasters usually insist on resting often enough.
How long can you avoid the toilet without soiling yourself?
How much can you eat before throwing up, or maybe get a ruptured stomach?
And so on, and so forth. :P
Some things just aren't in the rules. Though I must agree that the other stuff isn't quite the same, but my point is still that sometimes, you just use common sense.
So I'd say that 16 hours are no problem. After that, it's a DC 10 save each hour (+1 to the DC each hour) or you become fatigued. Fail it again and become exhausted. Fail it yet again and sleepytime.
There is no hard rule about how long characters can be awake and doing stuff before they become fatigued or exhausted.
A good place to start for a guideline would be your own and medical knowledge of human endurance/sleep psychology. If that's to iffy for you or your players try the overland movement rules. Hustle is essentially a Double-Move (Full Action). It is not a great leap to say a character doing Move+Standard actions for an hour would be equally fatigued.
Remember active use of perception is move action itself (checking bodies is still at least a move action equivalent), so a hyper vigilant just moving down a corridor could be considered to be ruled using a full round action for fatigue peruposes.
Force March, PCs can walk 8 hours a day with the rest of the 24 hours being short rests, breaks for sanks, etc. This is using just a Move Action. Going longer then 8 hours of pure movement in a day requires Con checks. Extending this to party exploring a dungeon, if they don't take a total of 16 hours worth of sleep/breaks have them start rolling Con checks. Or for ease of tracking they have 8 hours worth of just move actions. Going over this means Con checks for each extra hour worth of Move Actions.
High Con characters with Endurance (feat) could go for quite some time. The can also reduce the fatigue causing non-lethal damage with Cure spells or other magic.
Hope that gives you a place to start.
is anyone curious as to what brought up the question or is that just too irrevalant?
Oh, we found out about that when we shot you with the thought control ray.
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The problem with using the forced march rule is this: forced marching, such as what Marines and Soldiers do, is done at a speed of at least 4 mph. That's pretty fast considering any gear you're carrying. After about 45 minutes, you need a break. I don't think the PC's are blasting through a dungeon at 4 mph. I would go with the longer estimate of 16 hours and go from there.
No, not in this context. What marines and soldiers do has literally zero influence on what heroes in a magical D&D world do :)
What you're talking about is "Hustle", which you can do for 1 hour without penalties. Follow my link in the 2nd post, it's all there.
Walking for longer than 8 hours is considered a "Forced March". Walking itself is defined as moving at your normal speed, which for unencumbered humans is 3 miles/hour, encumbered (which is usually the case) it's 2 mph.
As someone has pointed out, moving is just using your move action per round, not your standard action. During combat and other stressful events, you're most likely also using that action.
So instead of saying "16 hours without problem" I'd actually say "less than 8 hours", depending on how much was actually done.
Also note that a "hustle" is any round in which you move and take another standard or move action. You can only hustle for a maximum of 1 hour between rest cycles without becoming fatigued.
You could also, logically, extend the definition of "hustle" to any round in which you take both a standard and a move, or a full-round action. That's 600 rounds of combat (or doing anything other than walking or resting) before you become fatigued.