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Author Topic: How to: Pacing the player actions in OSR dungeon crawling?  (Read 1907 times)

mAcular Chaotic

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Re: How to: Pacing the player actions in OSR dungeon crawling?
« Reply #30 on: October 13, 2020, 03:59:53 AM »
I agree for the most part -- you don't want to try to micromanage things.

BUT -- it's a lie that you don't want to think of their experience, right? When you think of what encounters and monsters to put down, before you get into the monsters heads, you're deciding what would be fun to play. You don't want to set things up so it becomes an unbearable slog. So from the start, you do take the player experience into account when designing a scene. It's just that once the thing starts you play it out instead of trying to control what the players themselves do.
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Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.

EOTB

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Re: How to: Pacing the player actions in OSR dungeon crawling?
« Reply #31 on: October 13, 2020, 06:17:44 AM »
Of course.  Micromanagement doesn't mean something drastically different than its common usage in the workplace.
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Libramarian

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Re: How to: Pacing the player actions in OSR dungeon crawling?
« Reply #32 on: October 13, 2020, 01:11:46 PM »
Quote from: S'mon on October 11, 2020, 04:25:37 PM
Quote from: Libramarian on October 11, 2020, 12:57:28 PM
I've been doing real-time dungeoncrawling in my Roll20 campaign.

E.g. if an effect takes 1 hour, set a real timer for an hour.

The players explore by moving their tokens around the map with arrow keys, so the passage of real-time maps in-game time pretty closely.

Interesting!

I guess time does actually map pretty closely, if you take a 1 hour Short Rest in game after each 5-round combat that takes 1 hour IRL. :D

Of course I did have 9 players last night in Roll20, so might have slightly skewed experience....
With TSR D&D I find even combat is pretty close to real-time. I do assume the 1e one minute combat round, since I use 1e spells, many of which have durations given in rounds.

E.g. I have Hold Person lasting for ~10-20 RL minutes, and so if cast in combat, it might wear off before the combat ends.

In the case of a complex combat that is clearly taking much longer to resolve IRL than in-game, I would probably delay the results of timers until after the battle. E.g. wait until after the combat is over to check for a Wandering Monster & reset the timer.

Although the party's light source going out during combat IS very fun :D
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