Do you like the dungeon rest?

[BobTheCoward]

Before I get started, I have a preamble from a different geek hobby. I respect comic books, but I'm not a fan. I can't embrace the timelessness of characters and constant lack of permanent death.

I always had the same issue with resting between dungeon attempts. It works for "old" dungeons but I have trouble making it exciting when it is the HQ of a villain engaged actively. To give an idea, I can do book 5 of hotel, but have trouble with tone in books 1 and 4.

I understand why it is in the blood of the hobby, but I can't do it justice.

How do you like to handle this when it comes up?

[Atarlost]

If you can't keep your dungeons day trip sized, try the Unearthed Arcana recharge magic variant and kludge something similar for all other resource pools.

Unearthed Arcana is on the d20SRD.

[BobTheCoward]

Atarlost wrote:

If you can't keep your dungeons day trip sized, try the Unearthed Arcana recharge magic variant and kludge something similar for all other resource pools.

Unearthed Arcana is on the d20SRD.

But most dungeons in this genre are more than day sized, right?

[tonyz]

Well, work with it. Figure out what the inhabitants of the dungeon will be doing in reaction, and have them do it. (If you're the GM, that is -- if you're a player, talk to your GM about it.)

[BobTheCoward]

tonyz wrote:

Well, work with it. Figure out what the inhabitants of the dungeon will be doing in reaction, and have them do it. (If you're the GM, that is -- if you're a player, talk to your GM about it.)

For the record, I'm not asking for advice. If using a dungeon, it even explains how to handle this.

I'm asking about opinions of the aesthetic elements of the multi dungeon-day adventures common in the genre.

[Das Bier]

The problem here is 'realism' vs 'game' vs 'fun'.

Is it realistic to let your players rest between dungeon plunges, and the dungeon not change while an intelligent foe is within being besieged?

No.

This playstyle is often called 'Gygaxian'. Let the chips fall where they may. Encounter too tough for you? Too bad. Monsters act realistically, run away, come back, use their loot, have cunning tactics?
Yeah.
And it can be a TOTAL PITA for people who are raised on different expectations of what a fun game will involve.

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Are the players playing according to what the game allows?

Yes. The rules aren't set up to allow massive dungeon crawls. Primary factor, once the party's spells are used up, especially healing resources, they are courting death to keep going, and must retreat or face a TPK. After all, the enemies in front of them aren't being deprived of resources, are they?

To fight against this is to fight against the reality of the game. To compensate for this kind of thing requires either massive power to blow away minor encounters with no resource expenditure, OR to simply have massive amounts of non-expendable resources...both solutions of which trivialize encounters that are NOT siege-like.

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Thirdly, do your players LIKE being forced to keep fighting when low on resources? Is that kind of resource management and careful play 'fun' to them?
Is rewriting encounters and changing dungeons around to reflect counter-attacks and clever strategies fun for you, the GM? Because it takes time and work to do it right. You need to change spell lists, possibly consumables for NPCs, make up new encounter areas and tactics if you are going to attack the PC's, etc etc.
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These three points are why playing the game is different from a video game or from a book.

IN a video game, you are generally either given 'quick retreat' options to regain spells/health by sleeping so no time passes in safe areas, at which point you pick up the dungeon delve again, OR you have options to very rapidly regain both, by use of rapid regenerating health or mana systems, so you start out every fight at full strength. Furthermore, having access to lots of healing/restoral options is very common.

IN a novel, those things are 'glossed over'. Encounters are managed in discrete lots, and the issue of recovery is generally not fixated on at all, or is dropped down to a very mundane or simple level, generally healing magic. If the main character is in danger, you just write the story so he survives and gets his health back over a longer period of time, building time pressure to get things back on track.
Because in a novel, the GM and the player are the same thing. "Random" encounters in novels are dangerous, or travel time is a sentence, and a hundred battles are won with a stroke of the pen to get to the next main act and big fight.
You can't do that in a game easily

Look at the Pathfinder line of novels. How many of the main characters are spellcasters?
Answer...very few. Because spells wreck encounters, but if you run out of them, you are useless. You can always swing a sword and fight, and so the massive numbers of Novels are centered around martial characters. "Difficult' encounters are solved by cleverness and tactics, instead of having magic on hand. Even the series with the 'inquisitor' of Pharasma, the main character is a martial character who loathes using his magic, doesn't prepare magically, and so is constantly overmatched because he doesn't have the appropriate magic to solve problems. He's an idiot from a PC standpoint.

[Gaekub]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but it doesn't bother me. Harassing a villain where he lives day after day seems perfectly reasonable to me. It's basically guerrilla warfare.

[Riuken]

Firstly, I rarely see characters resting in the dungeon. It is usually understood to be dangerous, so they will leave before resting when possible. If they do rest in the dungeon, they typically fortify their position heavily and keep watches. The dungeon inhabitants will reset traps and shuffle guards in response.

Assuming they do leave the dungeon, it usually isn't in the villain's interest to pursue. After all, when an enemy is attacking your stronghold, the best use of resources is typically to repel them where you are fortified instead of extending your forces in an attack. This pattern can be shown true in the basic strategies for multiple MOBA-style competitive video games.

Apart from that, you're going to find yourself displeased with the aesthetics of resting in a dungeon because it doesn't seem to make sense, when if you step back and look at the entire situation as a whole, a large dungeon such as you would need to make a multiple day foray into doesn't really make sense to start with. So really, if you're already accepting the game construct of that type of dungeon, it's best to also accept the game constructs that allow those other elements of the game to function.

EDIT: Also, if the inhabitants know you're coming, and you're not sneaking, they should realistically attack you with everything they have in one massive fight. The dungeon will be short, one way or the other.

[Randarak]

In my experience, it depends on the dungeon setting. Some places are written conducive towards being able to take a break and rest from exploring, others not so much.

There are a variety of factors: age of the place, the number and specifics of the dungeon's population, how active said denizens are, if there, territorial, etc. I'm sure that I could find others.

For instance, I've been running the Kingamker AP for some time now. There are a few dungeon crawls in it. Some they could rest in, others they either couldn't, or didn't need to. Its usually pretty obvious by what you encounter in the first few rooms if you are going to be bothered or not by trying to rest (and knowing your GM well enough).

[tonyz]

As far as the aesthetic side goes, I like having enemies react to the situation as it develops. It makes things feel realer and more interesting. (I admit that this is a highly subjective metric.)

[GM 1990]

I find I tend away from the type of dungeons I used when I was younger playing 1E. Aside from system variance, I'm just running a different style of campaign now. Longer con's, PC development, and the story is just as important as the combat and exploration.

Those older multi-level dungeons were a different style of gaming and play in most cases. The dungeon "was" the campaign, and also was part of the encounter all by itself, plus the denizens. It can be a fun style of play, but IMO only if you don't demand logic or even magical/mythical reasons for the dungeon and its ecology. Why didn't the kobolds trigger this trap long ago? Why didn't the owl-bear eat all the kobolds? How did this green-slime get in here in the first place? Why does this riddle help me get to the dragon....the dragon in the 3rd level of the dungeon? There have been articles written trying to define dungeon ecology and make it all workout as some kind of micro-habitat where everything is symbiotic. I find that requires just as much suspension of believe/logic as just deciding to take the approach that it doesn't matter. If you're going to stock the dungeon to have a significant # of encounters, and those encounters haven't eaten each other over the 10's/100's of years they've been in the ruins of XXX, then also don't sweat having the players stake shut a door and sleep in a room after clearing it.

If you want to run a game that is more like a board game to a degree, then those old style dungeons work great. But if you're running a more development style campaign, where even with magic a dragon in the bottom of a dungeon doesn't make sense, then don't use that style of dungeon, unless you and your group can decide you won't debate the merits of "how did this even fit through the door???".

[BobTheCoward]

GM 1990 wrote:

I find I tend away from the type of dungeons I used when I was younger playing 1E. Aside from system variance, I'm just running a different style of campaign now. Longer con's, PC development, and the story is just as important as the combat and exploration.

Those older multi-level dungeons were a different style of gaming and play in most cases. The dungeon "was" the campaign, and also was part of the encounter all by itself, plus the denizens. It can be a fun style of play, but IMO only if you don't demand logic or even magical/mythical reasons for the dungeon and its ecology. Why didn't the kobolds trigger this trap long ago? Why didn't the owl-bear eat all the kobolds? How did this green-slime get in here in the first place? Why does this riddle help me get to the dragon....the dragon in the 3rd level of the dungeon? There have been articles written trying to define dungeon ecology and make it all workout as some kind of micro-habitat where everything is symbiotic. I find that requires just as much suspension of believe/logic as just deciding to take the approach that it doesn't matter. If you're going to stock the dungeon to have a significant # of encounters, and those encounters haven't eaten each other over the 10's/100's of years they've been in the ruins of XXX, then also don't sweat having the players stake shut a door and sleep in a room after clearing it.

If you want to run a game that is more like a board game to a degree, then those old style dungeons work great. But if you're running a more development style campaign, where even with magic a dragon in the bottom of a dungeon doesn't make sense, then don't use that style of dungeon, unless you and your group can decide you won't debate the merits of "how did this even fit through the door???".

It is unfair to call them older. I think every adventure path has these large dungeons in them. It is very much the current game.

[GM 1990]

BobTheCoward wrote:

GM 1990 wrote:

I find I tend away from the type of dungeons I used when I was younger playing 1E. Aside from system variance, I'm just running a different style of campaign now. Longer con's, PC development, and the story is just as important as the combat and exploration.

Those older multi-level dungeons were a different style of gaming and play in most cases. The dungeon "was" the campaign, and also was part of the encounter all by itself, plus the denizens. It can be a fun style of play, but IMO only if you don't demand logic or even magical/mythical reasons for the dungeon and its ecology. Why didn't the kobolds trigger this trap long ago? Why didn't the owl-bear eat all the kobolds? How did this green-slime get in here in the first place? Why does this riddle help me get to the dragon....the dragon in the 3rd level of the dungeon? There have been articles written trying to define dungeon ecology and make it all workout as some kind of micro-habitat where everything is symbiotic. I find that requires just as much suspension of believe/logic as just deciding to take the approach that it doesn't matter. If you're going to stock the dungeon to have a significant # of encounters, and those encounters haven't eaten each other over the 10's/100's of years they've been in the ruins of XXX, then also don't sweat having the players stake shut a door and sleep in a room after clearing it.

If you want to run a game that is more like a board game to a degree, then those old style dungeons work great. But if you're running a more development style campaign, where even with magic a dragon in the bottom of a dungeon doesn't make sense, then don't use that style of dungeon, unless you and your group can decide you won't debate the merits of "how did this even fit through the door???".

It is unfair to call them older. I think every adventure path has these large dungeons in them. It is very much the current game.

Didn't mean it in a bad way. I didn't realize published material was still making them like that. I assumed less so based on some of the podcasts I've listened too. I think the big dungeon filled with many different creatures is still looked at as "old-school" though.

The only module we own is Rune Lords, and my son is running us through it - we just finished Glassworks. I wouldn't quantify that one as old-school, but I'll know more as we continue through the AP.

In my homebrew I stick to smaller dungeons with lots of open rooms now, mostly just when they fit into story. If I want to go mega-dungeon, it'll be when my players start exploring my world "underdark".

[Dosgamer]

When required, I think it's part of the fun to have adventurers try to figure out where to hunker down in the dungeon so they can rest and regain their strength. The aesthetic totally depends on the dungeon, though. I don't have a problem with it in general.

[tonyz]

I generally think hunkering down in the dungeon is a bad idea -- but that ties in with me wanting enemy forces to be reactive.

I'm not much for mega-dungeons, unless the whole campaign is going to be about them. (It's like a city, only underground; LOTS of stuff is going on.)

But I do want adventure design that includes, say, an evil temple, or a bandit lair, or a mysterious castle, to have some idea of how the sort of reasonably capable people of questionable sanity that inhabit the place would plan against the threat, or react against the reality, of outside attack. Of course, you can't write that all up in an adventure, because there'd be too much of it (and guaranteed your players WOULD come up with something the module writers never saw coming), so a lot of boils down to "GM judgment call".

But some suggestions and plans might be very helpful to a GM, even if most of it is only "basic watchkeeping 101" combined with "first-order effects of how magic changes that".

[thejeff]

tonyz wrote:

I generally think hunkering down in the dungeon is a bad idea -- but that ties in with me wanting enemy forces to be reactive.

I'm not much for mega-dungeons, unless the whole campaign is going to be about them. (It's like a city, only underground; LOTS of stuff is going on.)

But I do want adventure design that includes, say, an evil temple, or a bandit lair, or a mysterious castle, to have some idea of how the sort of reasonably capable people of questionable sanity that inhabit the place would plan against the threat, or react against the reality, of outside attack. Of course, you can't write that all up in an adventure, because there'd be too much of it (and guaranteed your players WOULD come up with something the module writers never saw coming), so a lot of boils down to "GM judgment call".

But some suggestions and plans might be very helpful to a GM, even if most of it is only "basic watchkeeping 101" combined with "first-order effects of how magic changes that".

My problem as GM is that if I do any of that in any area that should have decent defences it's either a total pushover if the party does everything right or TPK if they make the slightest mistake. If an alarm gets raised and they can't/don't teleport out or otherwise get clear in a matter of minutes, they should just die.

There's got to be some room to make the adventure possible. Which is partly why I like to stick to smaller scale missions.

[412294]

I'm not fond of the idea, but most adventure paths seem to assume it happens, the dungeons tend to be far longer than it's reasonable to do without resting, and if you try you'll be lucky to make it out with everyone alive.

[Tacticslion]

It's funny. We don't tend to have this happen much with most for our games. It might just be the APs we've chose to though: King Maker, Council of Thieves, Serpent's Skull, and Carrion Crown, so far. The exceptions are in Serpent Skull (but you're actually exploring a whole city, soooooo...) and Carrion Crown (where the haunts can't exactly set forth to strike back). Carrion Crown is pretty early, still, but at least in part two there's really nothing like that (one was the centerpiece of part one, but that's literally exploring a haunted prison, and besides - you're literally right next to town, so you just go down the hill to sleep in a comfortable bed). The "longest" Council of Thieves dungeons were time-sensitive, or were long due to an interlocking set of related dungeons instead of a single long thing. Kingmaker was similar (though we're on part five).

I know that Iron Gods and Shattered Star are supposed to be "dungeon" heavy, so maybe those will give us such experiences?

I know 3.X still considered them typical. In both the Dungeon magazine's "Queen with the burning Eyes" (Eberron) and the stand-alone "Twilight Tomb" (Forgotten Realms), for instance, it presumes that the PCs will likely stop and rest at some point (and, in fact, in the latter, there really isn't a choice of where to stay...); but it wasn't constant, as neither "Forgotten Forge" (Eberron; found in the back of the ECS), nor "

[GM 1990]

Usually, the requirement to rest in general is all about resource availability - and in our games its most often spells and healing.

I'm running an alchemist 1/wizard 2 currently in our RotRL campaign, and I'm conservative with my bombs and spells because I don't want to blow them all at the first contact and then be stuck either getting too close to combat or setting back with no options except a 1d3 cantrip (and we actually add 1/2 level up to +5). Its a carry over from my 1E days where the spell-casters had to decide when to use their very limited spell count (no specialist school slot, no bonded item slot, and no bonus for INT slot). Sure, I've ended the day with unused resources, its happened. however, I'd rather do that than be out when the party needs it the most. I don't expect to be able to use my primary spells in every encounter, so resting will only become a requirement when the whole group is getting relatively depleted. I also don't think its smart on my part to blast off all my key abilities early, not just for the groups sake but my own survival.

I feel like its the casters job to husband their resources and at least attempt to not always be the reason the group has to stop pressing forward. This doesn't have to even be a dungeon, since plenty of encounters happen above ground and actually the world moving on without you is just as logical if you stop to rest. In those cases, the ability to control the battle field or blast or heal between encounters so the party can push on to the culminating scene can be even more important than being able to go through another door in a dungeon. Spell casters, IMO owe it to the story to keep something in reserve.

Finally, the group as a whole (and the GM needs to be aware of and factor this in) needs to have a feel for how much more they can press when their resources start to dwindle. I'm in this very situation in the campaign I run right now. The group's cleric was arrested and kidnapped from the jail, and the 2 fighters and rogue have now been in 2 battles in the same day trying to find him. We ended last session with them clearing a building, and finding the smuggling tunnel under it, they're at around 1/2 HP and only 1 potion of healing left. But they don't want to leave him with this group longer than they need to (the player is running one of their old NPC pals who came to their aid, so he's still involved in the sessions). For my part, I had never expected the culmination of this arc to be done with the cleric out of the group (he did this to himself and I'm rolling with it at this point). So I've really got 3 choices now. 1. Reduce the difficult of the upcoming final encounter; 2. Leave it and probably be a TPK; 3. If the group stops to rest....the crime gang will have killed the PC (which feels a bit harsh, even though he's in this position due to player free-will). This is where the group out of character have to have some level of trust, that I as GM will at least give them a chance to save him if they press on, while still keeping it challenging. If the group was together, I would expect they'd still probably press on because this crime gang is not going to sit idle at this point when they know the group has uncovered one of their key front businesses as well as their smuggling tunnels and the group assumes they know since a couple of them fled the battle.

[Kolokotroni]

One of the things I have done as I have grown older in gming is eliminate unimportant throwaway encounters. Even if I am using a module and it has a dungeon crawl in it, in my game I try very hard not to make it a crawl. If you remove the throwaway encounters you tend to end up with something that is close to manageable in 'one day' of resources, which I vastly prefer to the sort of meta 'resting in a dungeon' or reactive denizens altering the nature of the later encounters.

Mostly I do this because my group and I don't have the time we once did, and I have a 'get to the point' feeling about it. But also, it feels more organic and exciting to actually storm the keep in one go, instead of repeat attempts.

[Sundakan]

Tacticslion wrote:

and Carrion Crown (where the haunts can't exactly set forth to strike back). Carrion Crown is pretty early, still, but at least in part two there's really nothing like that (one was the centerpiece of part one, but that's literally exploring a haunted prison, and besides - you're literally right next to town, so you just go down the hill to sleep in a comfortable bed).

"

AHAHAHAHAHA

I don't want to spoil the AP for you, but keep this post in mind for when you get to the end of Book 2, you'll have a laugh.

[GM 1990]

Tacticslion wrote:

It's funny. We don't tend to have this happen much with most for our games. It might just be the APs we've chose to though: King Maker, Council of Thieves, Serpent's Skull, and Carrion Crown, so far. The exceptions are in Serpent Skull (but you're actually exploring a whole city, soooooo...) and Carrion Crown (where the haunts can't exactly set forth to strike back). Carrion Crown is pretty early, still, but at least in part two there's really nothing like that (one was the centerpiece of part one, but that's literally exploring a haunted prison, and besides - you're literally right next to town, so you just go down the hill to sleep in a comfortable bed). The "longest" Council of Thieves dungeons were time-sensitive, or were long due to an interlocking set of related dungeons instead of a single long thing. Kingmaker was similar (though we're on part five).

I know that Iron Gods and Shattered Star are supposed to be "dungeon" heavy, so maybe those will give us such experiences?

I know 3.X still considered them typical. In both the Dungeon magazine's "Queen with the burning Eyes" (Eberron) and the stand-alone "Twilight Tomb" (Forgotten Realms), for instance, it presumes that the PCs will likely stop and rest at some point (and, in fact, in the latter, there really isn't a choice of where to stay...); but it wasn't constant, as neither "Forgotten Forge" (Eberron; found in the back of the ECS), nor "

I watched Dice-Stormers doing the Carrion Crown prison crawl. I think you're right on - why wouldn't you return to your safe house when you've culminated your resources. especially in that case where the denizens of the "dungeon" are undead - they're not going to move out, plan a counter-strike into the town, etc if you take a day off to rest and research. It does demonstrate though that different scenarios would lead to different party/monster reaction.

[tonyz]

>different scenarios would lead to different party/monster reaction.

Very much so!

[Devilkiller]

Resting in the dungeon can be risky since even lower CR encounters can be pretty dangerous when the party is low on resources and likely to be surprised. My advice to PCs who want to rest in a dungeon is to rest while you still have enough resources left for one encounter rather than when you're totally out.

If you have to rest in the dungeon because you've expended all your out of combat healing you might want to look into buying more Cure wands. If your DM won't let you buy or craft them maybe you could mention that having them might make the party more prone to pressing onward and less prone to blowing all their offensive powers quickly since they know they'll run out of healing after a few fights anyhow.

I also concentrate on not losing HP in the first place, but I'm a bit of an AC enthusiast.

[Atarlost]

The fundamental problem is that the dungeon designers don't listen to the game designers and the game designers completely ignore the dungeon designers.

By design a CR=APL encounter should drain 1/4 of the party's resources. This is off because resources increase as you level and the difficulty is calibrated to a very unoptimized party, but it's the design intent.

When is the last time you saw a dungeon with just four encounters averaging CR=APL? That's what a Paizo adventure should be delivering according to spec. Properly calibrated to a group that can optimize but isn't hardcore about it you should have 4 encounters averaging CR=APL+1. When's the last time you saw that either? It doesn't happen much. You get little house clearing ops and you get big endurance dungeons and the game mechanics don't scale properly to either.

The module writers ignore the specs for the CR system and the rules designers blithely ignore the way adventures are and always have been written in actual reality.

Except the recharge variant in Unearthed Arcana, whoever came up with grit and the people who did 4e. Per encounter or renewable abilities are critical to making the game work for both the one or two encounter per day hex crawl and the properly guarded lair of evilness.

[BobTheCoward]

Devilkiller wrote:

Resting in the dungeon can be risky since even lower CR encounters can be pretty dangerous when the party is low on resources and likely to be surprised. My advice to PCs who want to rest in a dungeon is to rest while you still have enough resources left for one encounter rather than when you're totally out.

If you have to rest in the dungeon because you've expended all your out of combat healing you might want to look into buying more Cure wands. If your DM won't let you buy or craft them maybe you could mention that having them might make the party more prone to pressing onward and less prone to blowing all their offensive powers quickly since they know they'll run out of healing after a few fights anyhow.

I also concentrate on not losing HP in the first place, but I'm a bit of an AC enthusiast.

This thread isnt about how to rest in the dungeon but how resting in a dungeon differs from the narrative in other creative works.

[BobTheCoward]

Atarlost wrote:

The fundamental problem is that the dungeon designers don't listen to the game designers and the game designers completely ignore the dungeon designers.

By design a CR=APL encounter should drain 1/4 of the party's resources. This is off because resources increase as you level and the difficulty is calibrated to a very unoptimized party, but it's the design intent.

When is the last time you saw a dungeon with just four encounters averaging CR=APL? That's what a Paizo adventure should be delivering according to spec. Properly calibrated to a group that can optimize but isn't hardcore about it you should have 4 encounters averaging CR=APL+1. When's the last time you saw that either? It doesn't happen much. You get little house clearing ops and you get big endurance dungeons and the game mechanics don't scale properly to either.

The module writers ignore the specs for the CR system and the rules designers blithely ignore the way adventures are and always have been written in actual reality.

Except the recharge variant in Unearthed Arcana, whoever came up with grit and the people who did 4e. Per encounter or renewable abilities are critical to making the game work for both the one or two encounter per day hex crawl and the properly guarded lair of evilness.

Do you think designers might like the multi day dungeons design as part of the fantasy rpg aesthetic?

[Atarlost]

BobTheCoward wrote:

Do you think designers might like the multi day dungeons design as part of the fantasy rpg aesthetic?

They rarely make sense as multi-day dungeons. They have to be played that way because the rules don't work for long dungeons, but break points and safe retreats are not generally provided and the issue of the denizens reacting is present in almost all dungeons. Only entirely trap and mindless creature inhabited tombs and ruins are reasonable to run as static and a dungeon must be static to be assayed over multiple days.

When there are breakpoints they aren't enclosing single day segments.

Let's take the Emerald Spire cellars. The party should probably be level 2. There's an APL+2 encounter, two APL encounters, an APL+1 encounter, another APL+1 encounter, another APL encounter, an APL+3 encounter, an APL-1 encounter, and an APL+2 encounter. That's nine encounters, five of them CR>APL: more than a day's work for even a moderately optimized party, especially at that point when there are no lower level spell slots and non-renewable resource pools are only 6+stat or 3+stat. You take Kyra, Lem, Ezren, and Valeros in there and they're going to retreat with their tails between their legs halfway through and the level boss will be forewarned and slaughter them on their second foray. That's a fairly typical length for a level and the natural unit of that dungeon is the level.

Designers make large dungeons as part of the fantasy RPG aesthetic, but they usually aren't meant to be multi-day and when they are the days are much longer than spec.

[BobTheCoward]

Atarlost wrote:

BobTheCoward wrote:

Do you think designers might like the multi day dungeons design as part of the fantasy rpg aesthetic?

They rarely make sense as multi-day dungeons. They have to be played that way because the rules don't work for long dungeons, but break points and safe retreats are not generally provided and the issue of the denizens reacting is present in almost all dungeons. Only entirely trap and mindless creature inhabited tombs and ruins are reasonable to run as static and a dungeon must be static to be assayed over multiple days.

When there are breakpoints they aren't enclosing single day segments.

Let's take the Emerald Spire cellars. The party should probably be level 2. There's an APL+2 encounter, two APL encounters, an APL+1 encounter, another APL+1 encounter, another APL encounter, an APL+3 encounter, an APL-1 encounter, and an APL+2 encounter. That's nine encounters, five of them CR>APL: more than a day's work for even a moderately optimized party, especially at that point when there are no lower level spell slots and non-renewable resource pools are only 6+stat or 3+stat. You take Kyra, Lem, Ezren, and Valeros in there and they're going to retreat with their tails between their legs halfway through and the level boss will be forewarned and slaughter them on their second foray. That's a fairly typical length for a level and the natural unit of that dungeon is the level.

Designers make large dungeons as part of the fantasy RPG aesthetic, but they usually aren't meant to be multi-day and when they are the days are much longer than spec.

You picked the one by Ed Greenwood. That might be exactly what h was going for .

If we pick a Paizo staffer who is a forum regular who wrote a level that has this issue, we may even get a direct answer.

...or maybe I will hop over to the James Jacobs thread and ask there.

[GM 1990]

BobTheCoward wrote:

This thread isnt about how to rest in the dungeon but how resting in a dungeon differs from the narrative in other creative works.

They differ, but I feel primarily its because they're two very different forms of story telling. (RPG vs books/movies)

The writer of a book/movie has 100% control over the choices and outcomes of the entire plot. The heros die when the writer feels its time to have one die, or they narrowly escape death (or appear to die and then a twist in a subsequent chapter shows they miraculously survived). There are tried and true ways to build that drama in a set plot. Gandalf and the Fellowship don't leave Moria to regroup, not because the lurker in the lake blocked up the door, but because they were never at any risk of a TPK (and conversely Balin's crew from the Lonely Mountain -had- to be TPK'd because it was part of Tolkien's story). Of course, they are resting near Balin's Tomb when Pippin fails his dex-check and tosses a rock down the well, but I digress. Neo and Trinity could assault the tower where Morpheus was being held captive with zero chance of being defeated, not because by knowing they were in the Matrix they could "bend reality", but because the outcome was already written down.

However, any group that doesn't think tactically about what they're doing in a long string of encounters (be it a dungeon or outdoor adventure) or forces an obviously horrible position is risking a TPK. There is no script that dictates at what point the group defeats or escapes a situation, and unlike some online games there is no way to just clear the map by leaving a room, resting a few minutes while HP and mana regenerate, and then trying to clear it again. There are situations you're going to have to stop, rest, reboot or really risk a TPK if you push on. As a GM you have to be watching this just as much as the players if you're trying for that "epic feel".

And I think we as GMs and players really want that epic feel we get from our books and movies, and we can have them, but not in the same way as they play out in those other works. If we put together an epic dungeon or sequence of encounters with 100's of goblins/orcs, even a group of high level PCs at some point will either get overrun/grappled, or need to rest/flee due to the random nature of d20's and probability over time. Or if not...it won't be much fun - Helm's Deep is awesome to read/watch, but not fun to play out on table-top with 1000 mini's.

[thejeff]

GM 1990 wrote:

BobTheCoward wrote:

This thread isnt about how to rest in the dungeon but how resting in a dungeon differs from the narrative in other creative works.

They differ, but I feel primarily its because they're two very different forms of story telling. (RPG vs books/movies)

The writer of a book/movie has 100% control over the choices and outcomes of the entire plot. The heros die when the writer feels its time to have one die, or they narrowly escape death (or appear to die and then a twist in a subsequent chapter shows they miraculously survived). There are tried and true ways to build that drama in a set plot. Gandalf and the Fellowship don't leave Moria to regroup, not because the lurker in the lake blocked up the door, but because they were never at any risk of a TPK (and conversely Balin's crew from the Lonely Mountain -had- to be TPK'd because it was part of Tolkien's story). Of course, they are resting near Balin's Tomb when Pippin fails his dex-check and tosses a rock down the well, but I digress. Neo and Trinity could assault the tower where Morpheus was being held captive with zero chance of being defeated, not because by knowing they were in the Matrix they could "bend reality", but because the outcome was already written down.

However, any group that doesn't think tactically about what they're doing in a long string of encounters (be it a dungeon or outdoor adventure) or forces an obviously horrible position is risking a TPK. There is no script that dictates at what point the group defeats or escapes a situation, and unlike some online games there is no way to just clear the map by leaving a room, resting a few minutes while HP and mana regenerate, and then trying to clear it again. There are situations you're going to have to stop, rest, reboot or really risk a TPK if you push on. As a GM you have to be watching this just as much as the players if you're trying for that "epic feel".

And I think we as GMs and players really want that epic feel we get from our...

OTOH, many of us came into RPGs from reading fantasy and like to play out similar patterns.

I'd have nothing against doing something like the Fellowship in Moria in Pathfinder - Most of it is closer to a wilderness adventure than a PF dungeon - because it's mostly empty. There's an encounter at the entrance. They wander through the "dungeon" for a long time until they finally reach Balin's Tomb, get in a fight and then run away to the bridge. Gandalf holds the bridge and falls, while the others flee. They rest a couple times between the entrance and the Tomb. 2 encounters in one day, basically.

Huge epic feel battles versus lots of weak opponents aren't fun not so much because the writer can give script immunity and the players don't have it, but because the writer can summarize and the players can't. Imagine Tolkien describing the entire battle of Helm's Deep, blow by blow, even for just the 3 fellowship characters.

[Devilkiller]

I thought my post was pretty relevant since it included advice on how to avoid resting in the dungeon, why resting in the dungeon can be a bad idea, and how to handle it when it comes up.

Anyhow, I think that there are some difference between a piece of literature and a dungeon adventure which make it OK for them to work differently. I used to read a lot of books, and I'd say that very few of them featured the nearly incessant level of combat which is normal in Pathfinder. I guess that having way fewer fights could reduce the number of times the PCs need to rest.

[Atarlost]

GM 1990 wrote:

Pippin fails his dex-check and tosses a rock down the well, but I digress.

That was a WIS check. Thus, "Fool of a Took."

[Derklord]

I think the main problem here comes from the "x per day" system. You are expected to have 4 CR=APL encounters per day - maybe ones with lower CR and others with higher CR, but in general, four relatively easy encounters per day.
If you'd only fight people that are at least as good as one of the party members, that means you fight less then four people a day. In any way, even if you have very long combats at 10 rounds each, you are expected to only fight four minutes a day. There are 1440 minutes a day, and you spend 1436 of them not fighting. For a dungeon that takes you one day to complete (let's say 13 hours hours so you can enter after breakfast, complete the dungeon, get out, eat supper and go to sleep at the same time as yesterday), that means you spend on average over three hours of walking and resting between encounters.

The "x per day" system (and the Vancian magic system it's connected to) is easy to use (you don't have to track a large number of different cooldowns or calculate mana after every spell cast), but doesn't actually work too well for combining a combat centric playstyle with storytelling.

A different point of view would be to blame having a few seperate encounters in a dungeon over the course of the day. It doesn't really make sense for a bad guy to send his troops out in small groups, with the weakest one in the first levels scaling up to his throne room.

There are examples of both styles in fiction. What we play in Pathfinder is more Die Hard then Lord of the Rings. John McClane picks of the bad guys in doable numbers, the whole moving is over in a few hours in-universe. On the other side, the goblins in Moria didn't attack the Fellowship in easy to defeat groups - they attacked with maximum strength. Indeed, in all of LotR, Frodo was only in a total of eleven combat encounters over the course of six months!