Skipped encounters due to time limit - players get the gold?

[Matt2VK]

What rewards (gold) should the players get if time runs short?

Example: Due to roleplaying (or anything else) some encounters run long. Then due to having to finish the scenario because of a time limit, the GM has to skip a encounter or two.

Do the players get the gold (and item access) to those skipped encounters?

[David Haller]

Technically, no - they do not. The theory is that they avoided the potential financial losses due to encounter risk (like death, or needing to have a disease removed, etc) as well as having avoided expending resources such as wand charges, scrolls, and so on.

No risk, no reward.

That said - and, caveat, I am Chaotic Neutral - here's what I do:

First, time never actually runs short - it's the players who run long, right? I assess the cause of "running long".

If the players made some bad calls which delayed them, then I penalize them the gold. This could mean camping to rest when they should have pressed on, following a red herring, just sucking at combat (thus taking to long), and so on. It's a player-side problem.

If we were all just having a blast roleplaying, and "oops, look at the time!", and I haven't egged them on to completion (judging that the RP should be encouraged), then that's really on me, not them; I don't penalize them. Full gold.

My general guideline is that if the pacing dragged because of me, I'm not docking gold; if it's because of them, I am docking gold. It's a bit subjective, obviously, but I've GMed organized play at cons for 15 years, and I don't recall any particular umbrage among players.

I will try to assess the nature of a group of players when we sit down at the table - do they seem like the kind who are just going to want free-form roleplaying? or the murder-hobo type? and adjust the pacing (and even the encounters) accordingly: I might remove a thug encounter/resource soak so we can spend more time at the Duke's dinner party, or shorted the dinner party to a few roles so I can fit in the tactically rigorous optional encounter - it's all about the feel I get for the players' (collective) preference.

[GM Lamplighter]

I always cross off item access that they didn't get to. Even though it is not a "real" penalty since there are so few items worth gaining from Chronicle access, it does make the point that they missed out on stuff which should not be encouraged. If the group is wasting time or goofing around, I penalize the gold as well.

One note: skipping the optional encounter is fine, but you aren't allowed to skip non-optional encounters.