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So I've been playing Persona 5 recently and it is pretty neat. It will give you a mission with a dungeon you need to clear by a certain date. The deadlines are usually like 20+ days when you only really need two or three to clear the dungeon. However, they create a lot of competing uses for your time beyond just going to the dungeon. Things that can boost your stats, earn currency, cement alliances, and gain various other advantages, many of which will persist beyond the current dungeon.
It got me thinking how a lot of my favorite AP books have used variants of this strategy. Often they use some variation of victory points. You build up Defense Points to prepare a town for an upcoming attack. Or you gather research points that give you bonuses on initiative in the final fight. Allies to draw away enemy forces, or treasure to gain new items.
The board has had lots of conversations on managing 10 minute rest cycles or dungeons remaining static vs reacting to nearby battles, how often you should long rest, and so on. The firm but generous deadline model does a lot of interesting things for this.
It is a good opportunity to establish the stakes in very concrete ways. It makes players reluctant to rest after every fight but doesn't force them to keep going if it means certain death. It makes downtime investment more meaningful. It lets you mix up the pacing a bit-- clearing out a whole dungeon consecutively can be an awful lot of combat.
Travel time also becomes important. The farther apart you make encounters, the more time the party loses between them but the fresher they will be for resources on any given fight.
I don't really have a thesis or a question here, but it didn't quite fit into any of the existing threads and I thought it might be worth discussing how this kind of pace can work for adventure writing, be it ameteur or professional. We often have either a "racing the clock, every second matters, push until you're dead" scenario vs "bad things will happen at some nebulous future date without our intervention." This seems like a decent middle ground and seems worth using more often.
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I like the general idea, and I think it also opens the floor for some twists on standard dungeons.
For example, if you know you have ten days to clear the dungeon, but there are four different things you could do to prepare for it, but doing all of those will take more than ten days. Then you need to choose which preparation you desire most. Also, you could do less preparation and have more days left over to do the dungeon itself.
Or if you know the supreme mystical council will meet in five days, but there is far more than five days' worth of possible preparations you could do. You could go lobby the individual members before the meeting, rehearse speeches, do library research to build your case, spy on rivals, do a sidequest to get someone else to assist you in return...
I think there are some key elements here compared to how it's often done in adventures:
Firmly known deadline This builds tension and gives the players an anchor for their decision-making. It avoids the "bad things will happen... eventually... take as much time as you need" slippery slope.
Sufficient deadline There is actually enough time to do it. In particular, avoid the super-large dungeon that sounds like it has to be cleared in one go. But even better is if there is enough time that strategic decisions can be made, like "how many days do we spend researching in the library before we go to the duneon, and how many days do we have left for the dungeon then".
Not enough time to do everything PFS has a bit of a habit of a shopping list of sidequests, all of which you do. APs can be even worse when on the one hand you have some kind of super urgent fate of the world task but also a dozen sidequests half of which sounds rather trite.
Racing In some cases, how well you do tasks determines how long it takes, and a party doing a great job can manage to do more tasks before the deadline. At its simplest, you can rank the tasks in a clear order and the challenge is to get as far as possible down this list. Maybe the order is dictated to the party. Maybe it's just really obvious which ones have the best (time)cost/benefit ratio. But I think it's cooler when you have...
Choices! While there isn't enough to do everything, there is enough time to do a couple of things. And you get to decide what they are. You have some idea of how long tasks are likely to take, what they might be worth to complete, and what skills/abilities are required. If the rewards they offer are quite varied (information, specialized gear, buffs, allies, more time to do the dungeon itself because you went there sooner instead of doing more prep in town, ...) then it's also not immediately obvious which is the "correct" priority list of tasks. Rather, the players get to decide what they want to do, based on how much they want each possible reward and what they thing is going to work out best for them.
I like the general idea, and I think it also opens the floor for some twists on standard dungeons.
For example, if you know you have ten days to clear the dungeon, but there are four different things you could do to prepare for it, but doing all of those will take more than ten days. Then you need to choose which preparation you desire most. Also, you could do less preparation and have more days left over to do the dungeon itself.
Or if you know the supreme mystical council will meet in five days, but there is far more than five days' worth of possible preparations you could do. You could go lobby the individual members before the meeting, rehearse speeches, do library research to build your case, spy on rivals, do a sidequest to get someone else to assist you in return...
I think there are some key elements here compared to how it's often done in adventures:
Firmly known deadline This builds tension and gives the players an anchor for their decision-making. It avoids the "bad things will happen... eventually... take as much time as you need" slippery slope.
Sufficient deadline There is actually enough time to do it. In particular, avoid the super-large dungeon that sounds like it has to be cleared in one go. But even better is if there is enough time that strategic decisions can be made, like "how many days do we spend researching in the library before we go to the duneon, and how many days do we have left for the dungeon then".
Not enough time to do everything PFS has a bit of a habit of a shopping list of sidequests, all of which you do. APs can be even worse when on the one hand you have some kind of super urgent fate of the world task but also a dozen sidequests half of which sounds rather trite.
Racing In some cases, how well you do tasks determines how long it takes, and a party doing a great job can manage to do more tasks before the deadline. At its simplest, you can rank the tasks in a clear order and the challenge is to get as far as possible down...
Yeah, I was thinking of some posts of yours when I made this. Having time spent be a product of the 4 tiers of success at a task is a good idea which I've seen limited implementation of, especially during the playtest.
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The four tiers of success can certainly be used for this sort of thing. I also think you were on to something in the disease thread. Disease is a good example of a "setback" that threatens to cause unexpected delays that throw you off-plan, forcing new choices.
I think the minigame chapter of the GMG is also a good one to think about in this context. Some of the minigames, like Influence, have a pretty natural clock built in. The dinner party for example where you have a number of courses (=rounds of influence rolls) to try to butter up some people. Good influence encounters in general use the "this meeting lasts only so long" framework to put some pressure on.
On the other hand the library research encounters I've seen so far often fell a bit flat, giving you the feeling that "grind these checks long enough and we'll get everything there is". I think that goes poorly because they didn't take their own advice on page 18:
If the group isn’t in any danger and has time for a really
thorough search, that’s a good time to allow them to
automatically succeed, rather than bothering to roll, or
you might have them roll to see how long it takes before
they find what they’re looking for, ultimately finding it
eventually no matter the result.
Basically, most minigames are only interesting if you don't have enough time to exhaustively grind your way to completion. If you have to make some choices. For example, maybe you only have two hours in the library while the normal scholars are away to see the opera. But you got a whole shopping list of stuff you wanted to find, and clues pointing to various sections of the library. So now you have to make choices about what you want most.
And in a way, a dungeon on a dumb "do a room, rest until fully healed, do a room" schedule is not really much better than an overly generous skill challenge.