I think some dungeons are more "raid" and others are more "excavation".
That devil that's been contracted to guard that one room? He's not coming out. Nor is the golem. The ooze has a hunting ground that it wanders around in, but it doesn't systematically go checking up on other monsters in the other room to see if they want a cup of coffee. And maybe the undead horror is stuck in a room that's inaccessible until you dig it out.
On the other hand, the gang headquarters has posted guards, alarms, wandering patrols, and people coming to lay a bet with their mates about the upcoming dogfight in their favorite dive bar.
Now it becomes easier to reason about why a rest in one dungeon is more plausible than in the other.
I guess I should say, I don't actually necessarily think of a "Dungeon" as a physically underground space, though it can be.
I would say the first thing you described isn't a "Dungeon" in the game space sense, despite being physically described as a dungeon. But this distinction definitely makes a difference, but is confusing because the setting for scene can be whatever, but for me if things are far enough away from one another they're individual set pieces vs "Dungeons", even if they're set in a dungeon.
The dungeon thing is something I struggle to make narrative sense of, despite knowing that the party needs to have rests in between encounters it really doesn't make sense in a "dungeon" (any place where multiple encounters exist that are physically separated such that they won't immediately be pulled in, but not so far that not having them be involved within 10 minutes would strain my believability in the setting).Inventing plausible rest opportunities is part of good Pathfinder dungeon design. As Ascalaphus pointed out, most dungeons are not realistic. Instead, they merely have to be understandable so that the players can recognize the clues that a particular room or situation is a safe place to rest.
For example, in Fortress of the Stone Giants at least one stone giant opposed the war and was willing to hide the party for an overnight rest.
Let's take a "typical" dungeon type scenario. How big is one floor of a dungeon? 100 ft by 100 ft?100 feet by 100 feet (20 squares by 20 squares) is small for a dungeon floor. A dungeon that small would not require a rest unless it was jam packed with troops.
The Infested Caverns that I mentioned in an earlier comment is 40 squares by 50 squares, which is 200 feet by 250 feet, five times the area except that half that area is stone between caverns.
Prisoners of the Blight in the Ironfang Invasion adventure path has a reasonably-sized dungeon that is the home of Queen Arlantia. It is split across 3 maps representing 3 floors. The Upper Reaches map measures 175 feet by 100 feet and has rooms G1 through G12. The Deeper Reaches measures 175 feet by 90 feet and has rooms H1 through H5. The final map Arhlantu is one big oval room measuring 300 feet by 150 feet. My players rested once for 10 minutes in room G8, after the 7-member 16th-level party fought a 19th-level Primal Bandersnatch. The gargantuan dead bandersnatch blocked...
Let's talk about size, yes 100ft x 100ft isn't a huge space for a combat in Pathfinder, you're right, but if we think about it in terms of an actual building that's 10,000 square feet of space. As I sit in my multilevel home that has a combined space of ~3,000 ft square, thinking about 1 floor being 10,000 is really large frickin space, especially if underground. The problem here being how every person takes up a 5ft cube, and movement speeds, etc all play together.
I understand your point completely, but for interior spaces to not end up with enemies on top of one another you'd have to make building absurdly huge. Which is maybe the root of the problem honestly.
I think it's definitely true that a lot of environmental setups make 10 minute breaks (much less 20 or 30 minute ones) kind of strain credulity.
But in that case I think the better answer is to simply not make it take 10 minutes if that interval feels bad.
This is how I see it as a DM. 10 minute is an arbitrary amount of time chosen. I decide the number of rests by the circumstances and tell the players how many rest periods they have between an encounter whether I envision it as exactly 10 minutes per rest or not.
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I think there is one common misconception floating around about wave encounters and collapsed encounters always being more difficult than tackling encounters discretely after short breaks. Casters can get a lot of bang for their buck out of spells when encounters happen seconds after each other or collapsing into each other. Sometimes, a string of encounters tackled at once becomes a little easier than taking it one at a time when things like magic weapon, bless, floating flame, etc. last their whole 10 rounds rather than 2 or 3. Spells and consumables really provide for a different kind of experience when you have a round before reinforcements show up instead of 10 minutes.
As a GM you can foreshadow that pretty easily with the sound of alarms or one enemy opening the door to check and see what is going on. Enemies don't all have to come running, weapons drawn, at every first disturbance to create fun change-of-pace encounter strings.
They don't inherently have to much harder than facing each encounter discretely, if you prepare your party for it.
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Collapsed encounters can often be easier if you have powerful AoE. You can level entire groups very quickly if you can set them up for the AoE hammer. If you lack caster power, then collapsed encounters can be tough if you have to piecemeal them. It can turn into a real slog when you can't bring caster AoE to bear on them. Casters shine when crushing groups.
I think there is one common misconception floating around about wave encounters and collapsed encounters always being more difficult than tackling encounters discretely after short breaks. Casters can get a lot of bang for their buck out of spells when encounters happen seconds after each other or collapsing into each other. Sometimes, a string of encounters tackled at once becomes a little easier than taking it one at a time when things like magic weapon, bless, floating flame, etc. last their whole 10 rounds rather than 2 or 3. Spells and consumables really provide for a different kind of experience when you have a round before reinforcements show up instead of 10 minutes.
As a GM you can foreshadow that pretty easily with the sound of alarms or one enemy opening the door to check and see what is going on. Enemies don't all have to come running, weapons drawn, at every first disturbance to create fun change-of-pace encounter strings.
They don't inherently have to much harder than facing each encounter discretely, if you prepare your party for it.
Thats true. Wave encounters can get more use out some spells.
It might depend on the reasons why rest is not happening too.
If there is a time factor that keeps players on the move they get less out of spells that sustain in a specific location and but might get addition use of a spell that goes with them as they go to the next important point.
Like a situation where the party was infiltrating to free an important prisoner from an enemy encampment. But they failed at being stealthy and it turned into a set of fights meant to keep them from catching up to the boss taking the prisoner to a more secure location. There may be a wave encounter at the encampment but even here you can give the party a break allowing them to pursue before a second wave arrives if they dont take to long with the first wave. If they pursue the boss they can expect that second wave from before to catch up to them.
Rest is not an option here if the party wants to save the prisoner now and avoid fighting this areas boss alongside the more secure areas boss later. Spell mileage may vary depending on how the performed and what kinds of spells they deployed.
Sorry Unicore, this post ended up less of a response to you and more of me just rambling an example.
Let's talk about size, yes 100ft x 100ft isn't a huge space for a combat in Pathfinder, you're right, but if we think about it in terms of an actual building that's 10,000 square feet of space. As I sit in my multilevel home that has a combined space of ~3,000 ft square, thinking about 1 floor being 10,000 is really large frickin space, especially if underground. The problem here being how every person takes up a 5ft cube, and movement speeds, etc all play together.
I understand your point completely, but for interior spaces to not end up with enemies on top of one another you'd have to make building absurdly huge. Which is maybe the root of the problem honestly.
The house my family lived in in Savage, Maryland, is listed as 1,740 square feet. My current home, shared among 4 adults, is 1,120 square feet. If anything as noisy as combat occurred in any room, the rest of the house would hear it.
But a single-family house seldom serves as a site for combat. The map I had used for the bandit hideout in the Seven Samurai chapter of my Fistful of Flowers campaign was a village map, Nesbitt-Hill from Dyson's Dodecahedron blog. It lists 10 separate buildings. I sized it as 220 feet by 220 feet in Roll20, a little bigger than 1 acre.
The other battlemaps in Prisoners of the Blight are two half-page maps called Blighted Depths and Rotten Duchess's Slough. Rotten Duchess's Slough's is on a scale of 1 square = 10 feet. Blighted Depths is eight clearings in a forest with the scale of 1 square = 30 feet. I had to divide it into six maps to create playable spaces in Roll20. One of those clearings is labeled Accressiel Palace and contains the ruins of a palace the size of a small church.
And I had the blightguards in one clearing notice the party battle the froghemoths in an adjacent clearing. They idly watched the fight and made bets. They had no love for the froghemoths and preferred for the party to get bruised up before their own conflict. Once the blightguards saw how easily the party defeated the froghemoths--five 14th-level blighted froghemoths versus seven 15th-level PCs is a Moderate-Threat encounter--they were happy that the party wanted to talk rather than fight. The party did not rest and heal between those two clearings, because they wanted to impress the blightguards with their indifference to their minor injuries. Roleplaying is fun.
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Not all encounters are combat encounters.
Pathfinder seems not to track the passage of time generally. Say you're in Otari, and you're preparing to go see what's what in that ruined lighthouse up the road.
Day one: you get up at dawn, do your prep, have breakfast, assemble in the street, and start walking. Maybe twenty minutes to get to the ruins if you don't stop along the way (you do walk right past a druid circle). If dawn is at 6, it's now probably close to 8:30. In the entranceway, you have an encounter. Nobody gets hurt, and nobody expends any significant resources. The encounter takes maybe five minutes. You move on. You have another encounter. This one might take fifteen to thirty minutes, or even longer. Again, probably no need for a rest. Now you're finally actually inside the keep proper. You move on. Eventually, the sun starts to go down. Do you 1) camp where you are? 2) return to Otari to spend the night? 3) ignore such silly things as the need for sleep and a good meal - and light - and keep exploring? How far have you got today? There are some 27 encounters on this level. Suppose each one takes on average 10 minutes (we're talking in game time here, not real time) plus a 10 minute rest or two. That's about 13 1/2 hours plus "exploring" time between encounters to finish the level. Call it 24 hours, or two or three days. That's just a rough estimate. Point is that a session should not just be a series of five minute combat encounters separated by some number of "10 minute rests". If that's what you want, play BG3. :-)
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I think there is one common misconception floating around about wave encounters and collapsed encounters always being more difficult than tackling encounters discretely after short breaks.
Going on from this, what I've found makes a BIG difference in difficulty is how new enemies enter the fight.
If new enemies suddenly appear and take a turn, that's very different from if you see them coming from a round away and get a chance to move around, maybe block their path, or get out of a blast zone.
Some of the times when I've misjudged the difficulty of two connected encounters have been when I had the new enemy enter just a bit too fast. If I'd given the party a round to get ready it could have gone very differently.
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Interestingly, the Remaster barbarian no longer gets fatigued when rage ends.
In a pre-remaster adventure the writer "helpfully" but in a three-round break in between two encounters to let the party recover and drink some potions. But that just meant the barbarian was out of enemies, out of rage, and in the second fight for a long time couldn't rage. With the remaster, the barbarian can rage again immediately, but doesn't get new temporary HP.
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Generally as many as what is required to get the PCs back up to full is not full hit points and focus points. If you don't fights because far to easy on the enemy side to commit to a TPK. The gam expects near full resources outside of Spell Slots which I don't know how balance is suppose to take in to account for a Spell Caster at max slots or one at half slots.I would like to dispel the idea that the game expects rest before every encounter. I don't think it does.
Rest is just another gauge to make consecutive fights easier or harder for the players, it also helps set the sense of danger of an area if the party doesnt feel safe enough to rest.For example you can think of consecutive moderate encounters as more difficult when there is no reasonable opportunity to rest in between them.
PF2E has a decent amount of inbuilt volatility, particularly at lower levels, and topping off between encounters is an important measure against it. Poor RNG is far less devastating at full HP. This is probably the biggest reason this became common advice: people got hammered by early AP encounter design, and came to realize these fights were much more doable with a rest between each.
You can play the game without resting between encounters, yes. But for most players at most tables throughout most of the level range, the lethality shoots through the roof unless the encounters you string together are commensurately easier. This is a bit of a task for a GM designing a home game, though—especially at lower levels—because the game has fairly coarse difficulty levers. There isn't a lot of daylight between "boring encounter" and "extremely dangerous encounter" for a party at half health.
And that only applies to custom, homebrew content! There aren't many AP encounters designed to be strung together, and someone just running encounters by-the-book is like to accidentally tpk their party when they chain a moderate into a severe without knowing or thinking about the consequences. A lot of the people you see discuss the game online are playing APs, especially older ones. And that strongly informs how they perceive the importance of resting between encounters.
EDIT: I'd also like to emphasize that "a party that can effectively chain encounters" is a much harder optimization ask than "a party that can effectively kill encounters after a short rest." Tables are much more likely to have a party capable of the latter than the former, especially since the former practically requires a reliable source of burst healing like a cleric. The much memed three fighters and a bard, for example, would struggle without rests between encounters.
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Generally as many as what is required to get the PCs back up to full is not full hit points and focus points. If you don't fights because far to easy on the enemy side to commit to a TPK. The gam expects near full resources outside of Spell Slots which I don't know how balance is suppose to take in to account for a Spell Caster at max slots or one at half slots.I would like to dispel the idea that the game expects rest before every encounter. I don't think it does.
Rest is just another gauge to make consecutive fights easier or harder for the players, it also helps set the sense of danger of an area if the party doesnt feel safe enough to rest.For example you can think of consecutive moderate encounters as more difficult when there is no reasonable opportunity to rest in between them.
PF2E has a decent amount of inbuilt volatility, particularly at lower levels, and topping off between encounters is an important measure against it. Poor RNG is far less devastating at full HP. This is probably the biggest reason this became common advice: people got hammered by early AP encounter design, and came to realize these fights were much more doable with a rest between each.
Yeah, this. Also very true in PFS, of which a lot of it takes place at low level and going into a low level encounter at half health makes it very easy to get one-shot.
I remember one scenario in particular that threw multiple encounters at us with exactly one 10 minute rest between each one. Literally the most powerful ability we had during that was Ward Medic. It would have been really rough without it.
Let's talk about size, yes 100ft x 100ft isn't a huge space for a combat in Pathfinder, you're right, but if we think about it in terms of an actual building that's 10,000 square feet of space. As I sit in my multilevel home that has a combined space of ~3,000 ft square, thinking about 1 floor being 10,000 is really large frickin space, especially if underground. The problem here being how every person takes up a 5ft cube, and movement speeds, etc all play together.
I understand your point completely, but for interior spaces to not end up with enemies on top of one another you'd have to make building absurdly huge. Which is maybe the root of the problem honestly.
The house my family lived in in Savage, Maryland, is listed as 1,740 square feet. My current home, shared among 4 adults, is 1,120 square feet. If anything as noisy as combat occurred in any room, the rest of the house would hear it.
But a single-family house seldom serves as a site for combat.
Agreed, a single family home shouldn't be a typical combat site, but just pointing out that 10,000 sqft of space isn't a small space, especially underground.
Doing a little research I found a source (don't know accuracy) that said a standard motte and bailey design would cover 3 acres (~131,000 sqft). To me, if I have 1floor of dungeon that is 10,000 sqft, that's a pretty big space, because I'm also assuming there will be at least 2 to 3 floors that size (and that's something I didn't make clear before).
Anyways, I go back to saying the mechanics of combat make interior spaces and distances in general awkward when we compare them to real life spaces/distances.
Edit: And I just saw this info in the same source, that the largest keep was 100ft x 100ft.
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PF2E has a decent amount of inbuilt volatility, particularly at lower levels, and topping off between encounters is an important measure against it. Poor RNG is far less devastating at full HP. This is probably the biggest reason this became common advice: people got hammered by early AP encounter design, and came to realize these fights were much more doable with a rest between each.Yeah, this. Also very true in PFS, of which a lot of it takes place at low level and going into a low level encounter at half health makes it very easy to get one-shot.
I have never played PFS, but one reason that my players excel in combat is that they know the capabilities of every PC from playing together every week. Thus, they can see when a PC is overextended and too injured to hold out for long, and thus rearrange their tactics to protect that PC. This is more difficult with a new 1st-level party in which the players have not learned the capacity of every PC. I presume that a PFS group that has unfamiliar PCs in it would have similar trouble with protective strategies.
Playing the same PCs together for many game sessions allows strategies that are more resistant to bad luck from the Random Number Generator. Familiarity lets the party protect or heal the PCs before they drop unconscious.
Doing a little research I found a source (don't know accuracy) that said a standard motte and bailey design would cover 3 acres (~131,000 sqft). To me, if I have 1floor of dungeon that is 10,000 sqft, that's a pretty big space, because I'm also assuming there will be at least 2 to 3 floors that size (and that's something I didn't make clear before).
The motte-and-bailey castle design is a great example for this thread, because it provides a natural resting point between the bailey (a tiny village inside a palisade on a hill or moated island) and the motte (a taller hill with a keep). It would easily divide into two battlemaps, one for the bailey and another for all the levels of the keep. The party could fight the enemy forces inside the bailey and then rest up to full health before tackling the motte.
Or in the reverse order, which is weird but that is what my party did. Fort Trevalay in Fangs of War is a fort on a river island with a keep at the downstream end. The oval island measures 285 feet long by 125 feet wide, about 2/3 of an acre. The keep is circular with diameter 60 feet. My players entered the keep first, stringing ropes to a 2nd-lfoor unguarded riverside balcony via a Jump spell. The opponents on the 3rd floor heard the battle on the 2nd floor, but the 2nd-floor battle ended while the reinforcements were still on the stairway. The 1st floor did not hear the battle, and the dragon on the partially-roofless 4th floor was away. One 3rd-floor inhabitant surrendered, so the party interrogated her and learned about the shifts on the 1st floor and that the dragon would be away until the next day. They waited until the night shift took over, and then attacked the 1st floor. Afterwards the party slept for the night in the locked keep before tackling the rest of the unsuspecting fort.
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If you had to guess, in general, how many 10 minute rests do you typically take:
1. Between moderate encounters?
2. After an extreme encounter?
3. Over the course of a whole level?
I really would be guessing because as a GM I almost never keep very good track of this, but I have some vague thoughts.
First off, there’s a strong focus on out-of-combat healing in the groups I GM, so unless everyone is at very nearly maximum hit points and actually at maximum focus points, the default is at least ten minutes to catch breath. My players tend to pretty heavily invest in out-of-combat healing, so beyond very low levels, they tend to be pretty efficient about it, anyway.
In the absence of diegetic time constraints, I just say “you took the time it required, and everyone is healed up.” If multiple focus points need renewed, we usually say “Okay, I guess it was [20 or 30] minutes.” I hate the feeling of the “15 minute adventuring day,” and assuming that the party takes time to regroup between fights mitigates that feeling.
Yeah, this. Also very true in PFS, of which a lot of it takes place at low level and going into a low level encounter at half health makes it very easy to get one-shot.
I have never played PFS, but one reason that my players excel in combat is that they know the capabilities of every PC from playing together every week. Thus, they can see when a PC is overextended and too injured to hold out for long, and thus rearrange their tactics to protect that PC. This is more difficult with a new 1st-level party in which the players have not learned the capacity of every PC. I presume that a PFS group that has unfamiliar PCs in it would have similar trouble with protective strategies.
Playing the same PCs together for many game sessions allows strategies that are more resistant to bad luck from the Random Number Generator. Familiarity lets the party protect or heal the PCs before they drop unconscious.
Yeah, agreed. The home games I GM are similar. PFS games at a convention or such you may have players who don't know each other, new players, new characters for experienced players, a party of 4 that has 3 Wizards, etc. It can be pretty chaotic and mixed up as a result of that, and I've seen some groups struggle with something just due to an unfortunate party composition.
Not giving them recovery time exacerbates that pretty badly as some PFS groups will just have no means to cope with that.
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Doing a little research I found a source (don't know accuracy) that said a standard motte and bailey design would cover 3 acres (~131,000 sqft). To me, if I have 1floor of dungeon that is 10,000 sqft, that's a pretty big space, because I'm also assuming there will be at least 2 to 3 floors that size (and that's something I didn't make clear before).The motte-and-bailey castle design is a great example for this thread, because it provides a natural resting point between the bailey (a tiny village inside a palisade on a hill or moated island) and the motte (a taller hill with a keep). It would easily divide into two battlemaps, one for the bailey and another for all the levels of the keep. The party could fight the enemy forces inside the bailey and then rest up to full health before tackling the motte.
Or in the reverse order, which is weird but that is what my party did. Fort Trevalay in Fangs of War is a fort on a river island with a keep at the downstream end. The oval island measures 285 feet long by 125 feet wide, about 2/3 of an acre. The keep is circular with diameter 60 feet. My players entered the keep first, stringing ropes to a 2nd-lfoor unguarded riverside balcony via a Jump spell. The opponents on the 3rd floor heard the battle on the 2nd floor, but the 2nd-floor battle ended while the reinforcements were still on the stairway. The 1st floor did not hear the battle, and the dragon on the partially-roofless 4th floor was away. One 3rd-floor inhabitant surrendered, so the party interrogated her and learned about the shifts on the 1st floor and that the dragon would be away until the next day. They waited until the night shift took over, and then attacked the 1st floor. Afterwards the party slept for the night in the locked keep before tackling the rest of the unsuspecting fort.
Yeah, that is an example of how you can run it, but the point at which I call things into question is that the first floor didn't hear it or try to go upstairs for something during the course of the day. Taking (presumably hours) for the night shift change to happen and then waiting again (in the keep) until the morning before attacking the courtyard, all that bit is where I say "to me this isn't realistic" but I understand that for the game to work as it's supposed to it's kind of required. Or the GM has to intelligent adjust the enemies so that the whole thing is done without any long resting periods (to clarify 10 minute rests feasible but hour long+ rests are not) and the enemies are adjusted to reflect that change in difficult for "chaining" fights.
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Going on from this, what I've found makes a BIG difference in difficulty is how new enemies enter the fight.
If new enemies suddenly appear and take a turn, that's very different from if you see them coming from a round away and get a chance to move around, maybe block their path, or get out of a blast zone.
Some of the times when I've misjudged the difficulty of two connected encounters have been when I had the new enemy enter just a bit too fast. If I'd given the party a round to get ready it could have gone very differently.
This is a huge factor that I don't think gets enough focus. It's also a pet peeve of mine in video game design. Was one of my cited reasons for strongly disliking "modern fire emblem" when I was talked into trying it out. A square-based tactical game looses the concept of tactics altogether when foes can pop out of nowhere, move to and attack your backline as in FE:Fates
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I think in general GMs seem to be nervous about going fully off-book when there is a need for "gameplay mechanics" and not just flavor.
The 10 min rest, and the narrative nonsense of foes waiting for players, is a big victim of this, imo.
A GM who is confident enough can tell a party something like "and from the door to the E, you hear sounds of shouting and a set of fading footsteps. From your experience, you can guess you have about a minute before they return with help."
As a way to signal that the party has triggered something due to their noisy fighting.
Meanwhile, a more "by the book" GM would be too conservative to risk collapsing 2 fights on the opposite sides of an unlocked door (which the APs have plenty of...).
So instead of improvising mechanics to take what could a bullshit surprise and turn it into a cool ticking clock, you get GMs allowing players to outright pop a tent and camp for 20min after fireballing the atrium and killing the guards.
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Or in the reverse order, which is weird but that is what my party did. Fort Trevalay in Fangs of War is a fort on a river island with a keep at the downstream end. The oval island measures 285 feet long by 125 feet wide, about 2/3 of an acre. The keep is circular with diameter 60 feet. My players entered the keep first, stringing ropes to a 2nd-lfoor unguarded riverside balcony via a Jump spell. The opponents on the 3rd floor heard the battle on the 2nd floor, but the 2nd-floor battle ended while the reinforcements were still on the stairway. The 1st floor did not hear the battle, and the dragon on the partially-roofless 4th floor was away. One 3rd-floor inhabitant surrendered, so the party interrogated her and learned about the shifts on the 1st floor and that the dragon would be away until the next day. They waited until the night shift took over, and then attacked the 1st floor. Afterwards the party slept for the night in the locked keep before tackling the rest of the unsuspecting fort.Yeah, that is an example of how you can run it, but the point at which I call things into question is that the first floor didn't hear it or try to go upstairs for something during the course of the day. Taking (presumably hours) for the night shift change to happen and then waiting again (in the keep) until the morning before attacking the courtyard, all that bit is where I say "to me this isn't realistic" but I understand that for the game to work as it's supposed to it's kind of required. Or the GM has to intelligent adjust the enemies so that the whole thing is done without any long resting periods (to clarify 10 minute rests feasible but hour long+ rests are not) and the enemies are adjusted to reflect that change in difficult for "chaining" fights.
The scenario makes more sense if given the full module-spoiling details. But yes, I did bias the events in favor of the party's deceptive plan, because my players have a lot of fun pulling off these deceptions. Anyway, here are the missing details:
The plot of Fangs of War, 2nd module of Ironfang Invasion, is that the party sought out the three hidden forts of the Chernasardo Rangers, the people who were supposed to protect the Chernasardo region of Nirmathas from the invasion that occurred in the 1st module. They discovered that with the aid of some trolls and an adult black dragon the Ironfang Legion had secretly conquered the forts before their invasion. Fort Trevalay was the third of these three forts and the dragon Ibzairiak had claimed its keep for himself. Ibzairiak was the final boss, and the module writer had assumed that the top floor of the keep would be the last room of Fort Trevalay that the party would enter. Ibzairiak was away because the module writer did not want the final boss helping defend the bailey portion of Fort Trevalay.
The hobgoblins of the Ironfang Legion had claimed the rest of the fort and had requested use of the 1st floor of the keep so that they could keep their human prisoners locked up in its jail cell. The 1st floor consisted of L12, Tower Entry (CR 7), and L13, Prison. Room L12 was supposed to have a 4th-level (CR 3) hobgoblin warpriest of Hadregash and three CR 3 Ironfang Forest Soldiers for a CR 7 challenge. After defeating them, the party would release the slaves, 9 Chernasardo Recruits CR 1/2, 4 Chernasardo Rangers CR 4, and Chernasardo Ranger Cobb Greenleaf CR 6.
The issue of slavery was big in my campaign with the players wanting slavery gone entirely upon their victory (How can I remove slavery from Ironfang Invasion?). They loved rescuing slaves, so I had the Ironfang Legion use the helpless Chernasardo Recruits as slaves during the day. The three Ironfang Forest Soldiers escorted them, so they were absent from the keep during the day and returned to the keep at night. Only the warpriest remained active on the 1st floor. And his favorite activity was preaching to the remaining prisoners, so he was not in place to listen up the stairway.
Furthermore, the occupant of the 2nd floor was the CR 7 troll Parthuk, whom the hibgoblins disliked. Parthuk's hobby was training dire weasels for combat. Thus, the 2nd floor often had the sounds of Parthuk shouting as his trained animals attacked dummies. The CR 3 dire weasels were factored into the challenge rating of the room, but I switched them to goblin dogs in my PF2 conversion, because dire weasels had not yet been published in PF2 Bestiary 3.
Combat details can be found at Arkus, playtest inventor.
The module established that the Ironfang Legion was not using the keep as a stronghold. It served as a holding cell for slaves and a residence for allies that the Ironfang Legion did not trust. Thus, the sole Ironfang soldier on the 1st floor was 3 levels below the 7th-level party and not alert. Adding him to the battle on the 2nd floor would have made little difference. On the other hand, having him run out of the keep to warn the rest of the Ironfang Legion abourt suspicious battle sounds would have been smart tactics, but would have robbed the party of a chance to use their stealth and deception skills to rescue the slaves. Thus, I chose to keep him unaware.
Hobgoblins tend to be well-disciplined troops, but they also have a lazy streak about assigning menial chores to slaves rather than performing the chores themselves. This weakness, combined with the isolation of the keep from the rest of the fort, created an unusual opportunity for my players. But unusual is typical in my campaigns, because my players seek these opportunities.
I think in general GMs seem to be nervous about going fully off-book when there is a need for "gameplay mechanics" and not just flavor.
The 10 min rest, and the narrative nonsense of foes waiting for players, is a big victim of this, imo.
A GM who is confident enough can tell a party something like "and from the door to the E, you hear sounds of shouting and a set of fading footsteps. From your experience, you can guess you have about a minute before they return with help."
As a way to signal that the party has triggered something due to their noisy fighting.
Meanwhile, a more "by the book" GM would be too conservative to risk collapsing 2 fights on the opposite sides of an unlocked door (which the APs have plenty of...).
I am willing to let the party's actions shape enemy actions and have collapsed fights together so often that my players have invented routine tactics for dealing with reinforcements. But the players have learned how I shape events and they exploit that to trick the opponents into making themselves more vulnerable, such as luring enemies out of fortified positions to investigate strange noises or deducing a 20-minute gap between enemy patrols for a healing rest followed by ambushing the next patrol.
It might also help some people to understand that every exploration activity is done in ten minute blocks. So as soon as you leave combat nearly anything you do is going to take ten minutes. If you alert some enemies then it should take them one single block of time, ten minutes, to get ready and come after you.
Having listened to several play podcasts it does seem like many people seem to have trouble with distances and time when doing theatre of the mind or describing things. So instead of thinking ten minutes is a long time for X or Y thing to happen, try thinking more along the lines of all out of encounter things taking one block of time.
Most of the time any situation where you aren't expected to rest to full should be foreshadowed to the players.
What do you mean by "rest to full"?
It might also help some people to understand that every exploration activity is done in ten minute blocks.
This is patently false. The only guarantee on the length of an exploration activity is that it takes more than a turn, as per the rules text of the exploration tag.
Take the Search activity, for example.
You Seek meticulously for hidden doors, concealed hazards, and so on. You can usually make an educated guess as to which locations are best to check and move at half speed, but if you want to be thorough and guarantee you checked everything, you need to travel at a Speed of no more than 300 feet per minute, or 150 feet per minute to ensure you check everything before you walk into it. You can always move more slowly while Searching to cover the area more thoroughly, and the Expeditious Search feat increases these maximum Speeds. If you come across a secret door, item, or hazard while Searching, the GM will attempt a free secret check to Seek to see if you notice the hidden object or hazard. In locations with many objects to search, you have to stop and spend significantly longer to search thoroughly.
Nothing about this says it takes a minimum of 10 minutes. It would take ~8 seconds to search 20 feet of wall thoroughly, even, since that's how far you'd travel in 8 seconds at 150 feet per minute (and that's longer than a turn, which would be 6 seconds).
This is a common misconception because people normally treat wounds or refocus while doing other things during exploration, and those two take 10 minutes.
It might also help some people to understand that every exploration activity is done in ten minute blocks.This is patently false. The only guarantee on the length of an exploration activity is that it takes more than a turn, as per the rules text of the exploration tag.
Take the Search activity, for example.
You Seek meticulously for hidden doors, concealed hazards, and so on. You can usually make an educated guess as to which locations are best to check and move at half speed, but if you want to be thorough and guarantee you checked everything, you need to travel at a Speed of no more than 300 feet per minute, or 150 feet per minute to ensure you check everything before you walk into it. You can always move more slowly while Searching to cover the area more thoroughly, and the Expeditious Search feat increases these maximum Speeds. If you come across a secret door, item, or hazard while Searching, the GM will attempt a free secret check to Seek to see if you notice the hidden object or hazard. In locations with many objects to search, you have to stop and spend significantly longer to search thoroughly.Nothing about this says it takes a minimum of 10 minutes. It would take ~8 seconds to search 20 feet of wall thoroughly, even, since that's how far you'd travel in 8 seconds at 150 feet per minute (and that's longer than a turn, which would be 6 seconds).
This is a common misconception because people normally treat wounds or refocus while doing other things during exploration, and those two take 10 minutes.
Nevertheless, someone running around risking triggering encounters while the rest of the party is trying to regain their much needed hit points is likely to get a stern talking to.
I think in general GMs seem to be nervous about going fully off-book when there is a need for "gameplay mechanics" and not just flavor.
The 10 min rest, and the narrative nonsense of foes waiting for players, is a big victim of this, imo.
It's not about being nervous, it's just how the game is designed.
"Realistically" combat is loud, and options within Pathfinder to mitigate sound are extremely limited and not always particularly feasible.
"Realistically" in a dungeon of any kind of density, enemies will hear or notice things. There should be zero room for rest until the entire area has been secured, and even then stopping for any amount of time at all should be risky unless the entire dungeon has been completed.
But that's not how Pathfinder 2 is built. Running a campaign like that would be an obnoxious experience for any number of classes that have mechanics centered around short rests.
Occasionally, under specific circumstances, fiddling with encounter dynamics can be fun and interesting.
But as a matter of normal course as some in this thread seem to be suggesting it just sounds... really lame?
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to be a brave, confident GM without leaving the alchemist twiddling their thumbs because they ran out of versatile vials eight rounds ago.
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Nevertheless, someone running around risking triggering encounters while the rest of the party is trying to regain their much needed hit points is likely to get a stern talking to.
Oh, it'd be an awful choice to do anything with a risk of triggering an encounter during that time. I agree.
I just don't want anyone thinking it takes you 10 minutes to examine a statue in exploration mode.
I think in general GMs seem to be nervous about going fully off-book when there is a need for "gameplay mechanics" and not just flavor.
The 10 min rest, and the narrative nonsense of foes waiting for players, is a big victim of this, imo.
It's not about being nervous, it's just how the game is designed.
"Realistically" combat is loud, and options within Pathfinder to mitigate sound are extremely limited and not always particularly feasible.
"Realistically" in a dungeon of any kind of density, enemies will hear or notice things. There should be zero room for rest until the entire area has been secured, and even then stopping for any amount of time at all should be risky unless the entire dungeon has been completed.
But that's not how Pathfinder 2 is built. Running a campaign like that would be an obnoxious experience for any number of classes that have mechanics centered around short rests.
Occasionally, under specific circumstances, fiddling with encounter dynamics can be fun and interesting.
But as a matter of normal course as some in this thread seem to be suggesting it just sounds... really lame?
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to be a brave, confident GM without leaving the alchemist twiddling their thumbs because they ran out of versatile vials eight rounds ago.
Those cautious GMs need to practice with unusual encounters more. That is how I learned to judge the difficulty of back-to-back encounters.
Realistically, combat is loud, but also realistically, loud noises are ambiguous. The people in the next room might take a round simply talking, "Did you hear that?" "Yeah, that sounds Brutus yelling but I can't make out his words." "I hear strange voices, too, and the sound of steel. "It's a fight. Let's go help!" Then the reinforcements take another round to travel the distance to the room with combat. The first combat ended in two rounds, so the reinforcements do not form a merged change; instead, it forms a second combat before which the party was denied a rest break.
This works fine for two Moderate-Threat challenges. Perhaps a PC has spent their single focus point on a focus spell so they are without that resource for the second combat, perhaps the front-line martial character had lost 1/4 of their hit points already, but all of these difficulties only weaken the party. They don't cripple the party. On the other hand, merging two Moderate-Threat combats immediately, before one is wiped out or mostly wiped out, could lead to a Total Party Kill.
I can understand the players wanting to heal and refocus after each combat encounter. To them the next room might contain a Severe-Threat boss so they need to be at their best. But the GM knows that the next encounter is merely Moderate Threat and can add more realism with only a little extra risk.
And in my combat on the non-keep part of Fort Trevalay, all Ironfang soldiers came running when the party emerged from the keep in the morning. But the fort was so large, and the sorcerer cast Spike Stones to slow down the reinforcements, so that the party had killed the nearest soldiers before the other soldiers reached them. Plain distance can separate combats, so the party fought many nonstop Low-Threat battles rather than one big Beyond-Extreme-Threat battle.
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Nevertheless, someone running around risking triggering encounters while the rest of the party is trying to regain their much needed hit points is likely to get a stern talking to.Oh, it'd be an awful choice to do anything with a risk of triggering an encounter during that time. I agree.
I just don't want anyone thinking it takes you 10 minutes to examine a statue in exploration mode.
Source GM Core pg. 38 2.0
Exploration mode is rarely measured down to the second or minute. If someone asks how long something takes, the nearest 10-minute increment typically does the job.It is in fact the basic unit of time in exploration mode. It helps to regulate things instead of everything being what ever the GM decides. It sets a baseline expectation for people to work with.
Doing a casual search of a room or an in-depth search of a statue should indeed take ten minutes. You can do that while someone in the group bandages and someone else identifies things, it's helpful to keep things relevant so someone isn't doing a dozen things while someone else is doing a single thing they need to do.
Ed, I meant full HP, the encounter rules are built with having full HP in mind. You can make encounters for your group however, but the basic rules presume at least having full HP. Being able to adjust encounters to your group or situation is a skill, it's great to have but when talking about baseline assumptions, you should always get full HP between fights. Chaining encounters, boss mechanics, attrition, etc can all be great experiences but they aren't the baseline. So the answer to the thread title should always be, baring extraordinary circumstances, how ever many rests you need to get to full HP. How often you get away from the baseline might be a more informative question perhaps, as it's obvious some like doing that almost exclusively.
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Source GM Core pg. 38 2.0
Exploration mode is rarely measured down to the second or minute. If someone asks how long something takes, the nearest 10-minute increment typically does the job.I would note "typical," which is an important word. When I read the passage, I took it to say "Don't sweat exact numbers. You'll waste time. Just say 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes and move on."
"Typically" is a word I use often in my writing, and see often in Pathfinder entries. It is a good word, because it only works to set trends, not to impose limitations.
But the primary reason typically is such an important word, is because it makes GM override easy, because "typical" trends can be ignored, and it is not breaking or bending any rules to ignore a typical trend.
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You know, 1E and 2E D&D also used "turns" for measuring out of combat time, which also took 10 minutes. The frequency of how often you should do wandering monster checks was also measured in turns.
Many of the most important timespans for out of combat stuff in PF2 is in 10m blocks: Treat Wounds, Refocus, Repair (shield), Identify Magic (loot), Affix Talisman, and refreshing Versatile Vials (alchemist).
Exploration Modes aren't measured in 10m segments because they do something else entirely: they simplify what you're doing while moving. It's comparing apples to Rubik's Cubes.
Overall 10m spans are a pretty easy to think about unit of time. If we're already measuring what the PCs are doing in it, why not use them to measure the enemy response too?
"If the alarm wasn't previously raised, it'll take them 2 turns (of 10m) to mobilize, locate and confront the PCs; if the alarm had already been raised, it takes only 1 turn" is very practical for the GM.
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It is in fact the basic unit of time in exploration mode. It helps to regulate things instead of everything being what ever the GM decides. It sets a baseline expectation for people to work with.
Doing a casual search of a room or an in-depth search of a statue should indeed take ten minutes. You can do that while someone in the group bandages and someone else identifies things, it's helpful to keep things relevant so someone isn't doing a dozen things while someone else is doing a single thing they need to do.
No, the basic unit of time in exploration mode is “eyeball it”. Combat is rounds, exploration is real time. It doesn’t take ten minutes to search each item, it takes ten minutes to perform a thorough search of an area. Maybe more depending on the size.
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Whether or not something takes 10 minutes or 1 minute matters a lot. If the DM casually says everything takes 10 minutes, even just looking at a single statue, then buff spells with 10 minute durations are accidentally nerfed. Purposely stringing together encounters when you're uninjured (or by using fast healing methods like the Heal spell) can be a very useful tactic to help maximize buff value. If you can't do that, a 10 minute duration is often functionally identical to a 1 minute duration.
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If anything as noisy as combat occurred in any room, the rest of the house would hear it.
My house is a bit larger and double brick. I sometimes don't even hear the front door bell.
When I think of dungeons, I think the creatures in each room and whether they would care if some sounds were coming from the other room.
If you have a room full of trolls, then it is likely not unusual to hear fighting and lots of noise.
If a monster like a velstrac is in another room, it may not even care what is happening in another room.
It all depends on what the creatures are and if they would even care about a neighboring room. In a lot of modules, there is a bunch of stuff that doesn't care or wouldn't go near another room out of fear and hopes that other occupant never comes to their room or any number of reasons why encounters don't collapse.
A bunch of monsters living in close proximity not going into each other's room wouldn't make sense unless they had good reason to stay in their own room. Otherwise, the alpha monster would just eat the others and take the whole place over as a hunting ground.
So it often doesn't matter if combat is occurring or noise is made as the monsters don't respond to each other and at best would be ready to see what comes into their room.
I only collapse encounters if it makes sense to do so like a group of creatures that are working together and are trained to respond to each other in distress. A bunch of disparate monsters living in different areas in close proximity with no real interest in helping each other are likely accustomed to avoiding and not responding to each other's activity to keep the peace.
Hm. I hear a lot about this "ten minute rest" business, but you know what? I can't find anything on it in PC or GMC. There's info on "Rest and Daily Preparations" (PC page 439, GMC page 42), but that's about "PCs need 8 hours of rest every day", and even that won't necessarily restore full hit points. 8 hours of rest will restore 1 to 4 HP at first level, depending on CON modifier, and up to 120 HP at 20th level, again depending on CON modifier. A full night's rest allows you to do "daily preparations, which takes one half to one full hour and in addition to restoring "CONxlevel" HP will restore all your focus points, reset all your spell slots to "unused", allow you to (re)invest up to ten items that need investing, reset any wands so that they can be used (once) in the coming day, and maybe a couple of other things. I also know that you can spend ten minutes on the "Refocus" Exploration Activity to regain one Focus Point. In that same ten minutes someone can "treat wounds", try to repair damaged gear, and a bunch of other stuff. You can cast healing spells which may "top you off", at the cost of losing those spell slots until your next full night's rest. But no number of ten minute "rests" will restore you to full HP just by "resting". I know that dnd has the concept of "short rest", but this ain't dnd. :-)
They mean refocus. Some people like to see it as the same as a short rest, but it is a separate thing known as refocus and not necessary to keep going. Helpful, but not necessary.
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We might as well call it a ten minute rest. Many of the things PCs do to get fueled up for another encounter take ten minutes. Enough of them that it's convenient to have a name for it.
If you think it's too D&D-sounding? Consider this line from Starfinder:
Once an ally has benefited
from your inspiring boost, that ally can’t gain the benefits of
your inspiring boost again until he takes a 10-minute rest to
recover Stamina Points.
We might as well call it a ten minute rest. Many of the things PCs do to get fueled up for another encounter take ten minutes. Enough of them that it's convenient to have a name for it.
If you think it's too D&D-sounding? Consider this line from Starfinder:
Once an ally has benefited
from your inspiring boost, that ally can’t gain the benefits of
your inspiring boost again until he takes a 10-minute rest to
recover Stamina Points.
But it's not a 10 minute rest. No use calling it something it isn't.
Starfinder is a different game.
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I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by focusing on that. I know "10 minute rest" is not an official game term. And I know there are things that are not measured in chunks of 10 minutes. But for the purpose of how long it takes the party to recover from an encounter, 10 minute segments really are the key unit of time.
Would you feel better if the title of the thread had been "How many 10 minute breaks do you take?"? Does it feel better if we're not using the same word as D&D?
If the fighter wants to repair their shield, the wizard wants to refocus and the cleric wants to Treat Wounds, and a player says "okay, so we take a 10 minute rest" do you really need to reprimand them?
It's not a defined game term. So what? It's useful for talking in natural language about what's going on in the game.
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And to circle back to the point that OrochiFuror was making;
It's already a concept that plays a big role in the players' planning. They're wondering how many 10 minute rests they need before they're confident to keep adventuring.
So why not also think that way as a GM? Instead of wondering "how many minutes do they have before they're interrupted", why not ask "how many 10 minute periods in which they can recover do they have, before they're interrupted?"
If they would have 6 or 7 minutes, the difference is not important. If they would have 19 or 20 minutes, that would be an important difference.
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I'm reminded of the PF2 playtest (after upgrading Medicine) where there was a 10 minute window between waves of enemies. Except that means the party loses out if the party takes any time to check entrances & exits, discuss tactics, or otherwise not leap right into 10-minute activities, while in enemy territory with ongoing battle where they don't know they have a break nor know how long it'll be.
IMO enforcing that rigorously would be a horrible way to GM this.
The intent seems clear that the PCs were meant to fit one set of 10-minute activities in the loose, meta-, sense of combat balance way, not in the "start the timer now" way. So yeah, IMO 10-minute breaks are a tool, and if it's better wielded as shorter (or longer??) chunks, then sure. BUT, many feats (esp. Medicine) do help alleviate the time pressure, so GMs should inform the players of the norm so they can determine whether these feats would have much or any use.
I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by focusing on that. I know "10 minute rest" is not an official game term. And I know there are things that are not measured in chunks of 10 minutes. But for the purpose of how long it takes the party to recover from an encounter, 10 minute segments really are the key unit of time.
Would you feel better if the title of the thread had been "How many 10 minute breaks do you take?"? Does it feel better if we're not using the same word as D&D?
If the fighter wants to repair their shield, the wizard wants to refocus and the cleric wants to Treat Wounds, and a player says "okay, so we take a 10 minute rest" do you really need to reprimand them?
It's not a defined game term. So what? It's useful for talking in natural language about what's going on in the game.
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And to circle back to the point that OrochiFuror was making;
It's already a concept that plays a big role in the players' planning. They're wondering how many 10 minute rests they need before they're confident to keep adventuring.
So why not also think that way as a GM? Instead of wondering "how many minutes do they have before they're interrupted", why not ask "how many 10 minute periods in which they can recover do they have, before they're interrupted?"
If they would have 6 or 7 minutes, the difference is not important. If they would have 19 or 20 minutes, that would be an important difference.
I don't care what you call it in your game, I don't call it a 10 minute rest. I call it whatever it is: treat wounds or refocus. I don't write it as rest when doing recaps and I don't think of it as a 10 minute rest.
I tend to color it to the class and describe it as what it is like treating wounds has an active person treating people. Refocusing for a wizard is different than refocusing for a bard.
I responded to the thread because I know what the OP is speaking about: refocus and treat wounds periods. If they want to refer to it as a 10 minute rest, I don't care.
But in game terms, it's a 10 minute activity to refocus or treat wounds. They're basically asking how many periods do you give your players to refocus and treat wounds.
10 minutes flies by. I don't have a problem considering it a different time. Real fighting doesn't occur over six seconds with perfectly timed back and forth attacks. It's all abstract.. I describe it and run it in the abstract as these games were built to run.
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As we used to say in the Army: "Take ten, expect five, get two". :-)