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Does the game assume that there is a clock? That characters will be expected to always be facing multiple encounters in a day?
If the game assumes there is no clock, then that needs to be explicit in the GMing advice and playing the game section. This also needs to be the baseline assumption of challenge ratings (and challenge ratings should increase in any situation where there is a clock).
If the game always assumes the PCs are on a clock, then that needs to be explicit in the GMing advice and playing the game section. If a clock is assumed then the assumption of challenge ratings should decrease in any situation where PCs are not on a clock.
If this is explicitly noted in the rules it will assist GMs with understanding the power level of characters. Something that PF1E had trouble with.
Does the game assume that there is a clock? That characters will be expected to always be facing multiple encounters in a day?
If the game assumes there is no clock, then that needs to be explicit in the GMing advice and playing the game section. This also needs to be the baseline assumption of challenge ratings (and challenge ratings should increase in any situation where there is a clock).
If the game always assumes the PCs are on a clock, then that needs to be explicit in the GMing advice and playing the game section. If a clock is assumed then the assumption of challenge ratings should decrease in any situation where PCs are not on a clock.
I'd say no RPG should assume any absolutes. There can't always be a clock present, neither could you expect single encounter adventuring days all the time. What would be nice to have though is how to adjust encounters by CR with an expected clock in mind, and I'm sure many experienced GMs have been doing this anyway, but having official guidelines is most often very helpful.
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There is more than one clock.
If the party breaks into a castle to steal a particular item, they want to run in quickly before an alarm causes half the guards in the castle to surround them. That is a short-term clock.
If the party knows that the big bad evil guy is amassing an army and will attack in two months, killing hundreds of innocent villagers, that is a long-term clock.
Sometimes the party in a dungeon delve runs out of resources and has to retreat for the day to rest. The GM can have the other dungeon residents compare notes overnight, figure out that an adventuring party is invading, and make nasty preparations for their return. That is not a clock, but it is a consequence for not being on a clock.
The GM's problem with using a clock or consquences is that if the party retreats, then the GM has to change the setup. The party had been trying to grab the MacGuffin in the forgotten tomb, but now the bad guys arrived first and they have the MacGuffin. Fortunately, it is only in the hands of the lieutenant bad guy and the party can stop its delivery to the head bad guy. But all those beautiful tomb rooms that the GM designed are now useless and he has to write a new adventure on the open road.
One benefit of facing the consequences of missing the deadline is that the party sees that their actions mattered. They could have stopped the enemy already, but they didn't. That adds narrative weight to the game.
Some adventures occur at the speed of plot. The party can take their time in reaching the evil wizard's stronghold. They can spend days shopping, they can walk slowly on foot rather than riding horses, etc. But once they reach the stronghold and gain the information about how long they have on the clock, then they learn that they have a couple of hours left. If they had arrived a day earlier, then the clock is a day early, too. Oh, if the arrival of the party had triggered the clock, such as a sentry spotting them, then it is not a speed-of-plot gimmick. The speed of plot occurs if the party arrived on a tight deadline only by sheer coincidence.
I like to reduce the speed-of-plot effect by giving the party benefits for showing up early. For example, in Fortress of the Stone Giants, after giants raid the town of Sandpoint, the party is supposed to spend weeks tracking the raiding party back to their fortress. Instead, in my game the sorcerer charmed and interrogated a captured giant, "We came from the Black Tower." The wizard was a scholar of ancient Thassilonian lore who made his Knowledge(history) check, "I know where that tower is." They teleported to a familiar location not far from the tower and arrived at the fortress before the enemy learned that their raid had failed. That gave the party a chance to encounter the enemy totally by surprise.
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By coincidence, while reading up on Chapter 2 of Doomsday Dawn, I just found the following words of wisdom from James Jacobs on Aug 8, 2018:
Countdowns are REALLY hard to pull off in adventures, because of the randomness of combat and bad rolls and the like. If, for example, a PC happens to get hit with a condition that takes 24 hours to resolve and the party mix just happens to not have access to magic that can lift the condition early, a countdown of 10 hours, which might not be a big deal for most groups, suddenly could become an auto-failure for another group simply due to the result of an unfortunate saving throw that's completely out of control of the players or GM.
In the context of this particular adventure, the countdown exists mostly as something to keep the players focused on moving forward and to help prevent distractions. The trip to the site in question is a linear one through a large wilderness area, and we didn't have time or space to put a lot more interesting stuff out there to explore, so in this case, the countdown is a sort of railroad element to justify WHY the players characters shouldn't divert from the path as the adventure lays out.
A good way to handle it, if you can, is to get to the end of the dungeon exploration and then tell the players, "According to your characters' notes, the Night Heralds will likely be arriving tomorrow, so you have one day to rest and recover and prepare."
It's a bit heavy handed and breaks verisimilitude, but the goal of the adventure is first and foremost to be a playtest that follows a relatively rigid structure, not a sandbox where there's a lot of variation. (We try some elements of sandbox stuff in a later chapter, but even then this adventure's not really meant to handle that style of play.)
Perhaps the BEST way, but not necessarily the most immersive way, to handle it is to just tell the players out of character that, while their characters wouldn't necessarily know this, the Night Heralds are scheduled to arrive one rest period after the PCs finish exploring, but that if the players deliberately decide to slow-motion the adventure by doing one encounter a day, then you'll have the Night Heralds show up early.
I would, in any event, love to hear about actual-play feedback of how the countdown element played out, since as I've said, countdowns are one of the trickier elements to include in an adventure.
And the actual-play feedback contained:
I am confused - so the whole rolling survival, choosing exploration tactics (which are mostly harmful to an indicated Countdown Scenario, btw) is completely pointless? No matter how quick or slow my guys are, I am supposed to reset the timer to one rest period? What is then the point of testing this element?According to one narrative school of GMing, this is a perfectly reasonable way to handle time limits, as long as your players don't figure it out. So they'll end up saying:
"Thank goodness we got here so fast! We've only got one day left! If we'd been any slower, we'd have been too late!"
Or maybe it'll be:
"We were so slow! We've only got one day left! If only we'd got here sooner!"
Either way, it seems like an exciting race against time.
Finding these statements was not a total coincidence. I was reading up to gain ideas for rewarding my players for making good time on that adventure.
Wait, you don't need to know the CR, healing capabilities, and standard assumptions were when dealing with clockwork constructs?
Wait, you don't need to know the CR, healing capabilities, and standard assumptions were when dealing with clockwork constructs?
In my Iron Gods campaign, an NPC party member Val acquired a clockwork familiar, which she named Sparky. Healing was a major consideration for tending it, because it was unaffected by regular healing spells. Nor did overnight rest or the cantrip Mending work for healing constructs. It required the 2nd-level spell Make Whole. Val could not cast Make Whole. She used her Craft(clockwork) skills to repair it during downtime, or found Make Whole from another source. She kept Sparky out of combat when possible, so Sparky was mostly for roleplaying rather than helpful.
Misreader's post reminded me that I had not answered the implied questions in the title. How does being on the clock affect challenge rating and healing.
Racing against the clock don't affect the CR of the first few encounters. The party would have gone through them even if it weren't facing a deadline. However, a smart party, if they knows they will face more encounters without a chance to refresh their hit points and spells, will pull out their consumables early. For example, the wizard might pull out a wand of lightning bolt rather than cast the stronger lightning bolt spells he prepared himself.
The party will be operating less than optimally when facing the later encounters on the clock. The wizard might have used up his favorite spells already, the gunslinger might have depleted his grit pool, and limited uses per day on the Boots of Speed might have been used up. Avoid giving them an excounter that they can win only if operating optimally. However, this is usually the time when the fighter character shines, because fighters have few options that get depleted. Even losing half their hit points does not make them weaker; instead, it simply increases their chance of dying.
The infamous wand of Cure Light Wounds keeps the party alive, but it does not restore the non-hit-point daily resources. Its only effect is reducing the chance of a character dying. With that chance reduced, the party will be willing to risk presssing on rather than admitting defeat by retreating to restore their resources overnight. In a clever party, we could see good use of lesser resources, such as 1st-level spells or a tanglefoot bag, to save the day, rather than the usual high-level tactics. But in Pathfinder 2nd Edition, lesser resources would be pitted against inflated proficiency bonuses and could be useless.
Racing against the clock don't affect the CR of the first few encounters.
I would think racing against some kind of clock is the default assumption. Otherwise the party can rest overnight after every single battle, and resource conservation becomes irrelevant.
In cases where the party can expect to only fight once in a day, battles would probably have to be around CR=Level+2 to be challenging, if the CR system is working right.
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Racing against the clock don't affect the CR of the first few encounters.I would think racing against some kind of clock is the default assumption. Otherwise the party can rest overnight after every single battle, and resource conservation becomes irrelevant.
In cases where the party can expect to only fight once in a day, battles would probably have to be around CR=Level+2 to be challenging, if the CR system is working right.
One of the Doomsday Dawn scenairos is exactly like this, so I wouln´t be worried that they don´t understan the difference. This is being tested out specifically to see how it affects balance.
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Racing against the clock don't affect the CR of the first few encounters.I would think racing against some kind of clock is the default assumption. Otherwise the party can rest overnight after every single battle, and resource conservation becomes irrelevant.
In cases where the party can expect to only fight once in a day, battles would probably have to be around CR=Level+2 to be challenging, if the CR system is working right.
The default assumption is that so long as the enemy is nearby, the right time to deal with the enemy is right now. Going off to find a safe campsite, set up a camp, schedule an overnight watch, recovery with good rest, prepare spells in the morning, and return to defeat the enemy slows down progress without giving a significant advantage.
The players find it boring, too, but some timid players are afraid to lose any advantage. One purpose of random encounters is to discourage this playing style. Yes, you rested up during the night, but the morning attack of the random wolf pack has you slightly injured again. Do you want to immediately return to your campsite and see what random encounter the evening brings? Heh heh heh.
In some cases, frequent retreats are easy and could feel necessary. In Fires of Creation, the 1st module in Iron Gods, the caves the party is exploring are right beneath the town. After 90% of the encounters, the party could retreat and safely rest up in town. The town is on a clock, but they already lost 4 expeditions into the caves, so they cannot risk the players' expedition by insisting that the party hurry. Slow and cautious would be a sensible style for a weak 1st-level party. In my own Iron Gods campaign, 2 out of 3 party members were residents of the town, so they felt the clock personally. Instead of slow and cautious, they recruited an NPC to strengthen the party.
In other cases, the party is on the road and the encounters are days apart. They cannot have consecutive encounters no matter how eager they are. I typically set up both easy challenges and average challenges on the road to give a sense of time passing on the journey, but the hard challenges are reserved for plot-related encounters.