Preventing Rests in D&D

Recently I posted about having a visual element to represent time and attention that players had generated while in a dungeon or on an adventure. If you're wondering what that looks like, it's a very simple technique. The first time I saw it, it was referred to as "tension dice" and you can see an example/adaptation in both Necromancer's Curse and the upcoming Gold Dragon Egg adventures.

But first I just want to recap the why and impact using this technique would have on your game, the technique itself, then I'll describe my experience with it.

Why do this

For why, it comes back to a common complaint you see on the internet where DMs find their players getting into a fight, then they retreat and rest. Now they're topped off for their next fight. Sometimes they don't even retreat, they'll just rest right there in the middle of the dungeon.

In d&D 5e, specifically, this is an issue because the game isn't balanced by encounters. Instead, it is balanced by a series of encounters between long rests. So if you want your game to have an appropriate challenge, it is important to send your party through a few encounters each adventuring day. In this way, you don't run as big of a risk of a single encounter TPK (total party kill), because each encounter can be easier.

Rather, it is the series of encounters that drains the party's resources. A dozen hit points gone here, a few spell slots gone there, some daily powers used up. Then, ideally, you have your climax when the players are drained of a good portion of their resources. This concept is called resource attrition. It adds an additional tactical element to your game where your players need to think when and if they want to expend resources. For example, do they want to burn a spell slot now or later? This conflict creates challenge in your game.

However, if you don't do this in your game, one of two things will happen. Either a) you'll have your characters easily handle encounters with resources to spare, creating an easy game or b) you'll ratchet up your difficulty in order to compensate for the ease, which risks TPK and long drawn out combats.

Impact on your game's fun

So the impact, here, is very obviously around the "challenge" type of fun. If it is important to you and/or your players, then you'll notice this as an issue in your game. If it isn't important to you or your players, this won't be such a big deal, and you don't really need to use the "tension dice" technique.

Now, just to be extra critical, a few other types of fun are affected by this technique and this "resource attrition" style of difficulty inherent in D&D 5e. For example, the "fantasy" type of fun involves suspending belief and buying into the fantasy world. This often involves increasing immersion. Well, if time and attention in your dungeons doesn't matter, that can stress the suspension of belief. For example, shouldn't the goblins do something after the party has been raiding their home for the last in-game hour?

It can also affect the "narrative" type of fun, which is the fun you get from experiencing a well-told story. While it won't specifically impact your story beats, if you're incorporating them (call to action, rising tension, climax, point of no return, resolution) because you can still hit all those points. It will affect the tension, which is important in stories. If right before the point of no return, the party can retreat and have a cozy campfire, that releases all the tension from your narrative before its time. This technique can keep them going, instead.

For the sake of brevity, I'll let you consider the other types of fun. I think it is a good practice to critically think of anything you add, take away, or modify in your game in the terms of types of fun. Which does it enhance, change, and detract from? Let me know if you can think of some others.

Using the Tension Dice technique

So, the technique itself is pretty straight forward. The way I initially saw it described was a visible pool of dice (d6s) on the table. Each time your players attract attention (e.g. breaking down a door, shouting, fighting), you add a dice to the pool. As well, anytime time has passed, generally ~10 minutes in game, you add a dice to the pool. For example, if the players investigate a room, take extra time to unlock a door or solve a puzzle, or get caught up in talking in character about what to do next, you add a d6.

Once the pool reaches six dice, it is "full". You take the dice out and roll them. Any 1s represent an occurrence. Now, typically these are negative things, but they don't have to be. For example, in a volcano dungeon home to kobolds and a red dragon, the following could happen:

1. a kobold raiding party attacks the players

2. hot gas fills the current room

3. lava flows through the room

4. the chamber shakes violently from an eruption, causing rocks to fall

5. a lost traveler stumbles on the party and needs help getting out

It is up to you to think of more. You can pre-select, choose on your own, improv, or make a roll table and roll. These are essentially just random encounters. What you choose for them will affect various types of fun, again, in your game.

Once the pool is rolled, it starts back at zero. Optionally, you can also use it roughly for the passage of time, saying that at six dice, about an hour has passed.

Insights after using this technique for several years

My experience with this system is pretty much what I expected, but it did have one unintended side effect. First, as expected, players were much more conscious of wasting time in the dungeon. There is a sense of urgency that I don't really get from players when I don't use this.

Second, the dungeon feels more alive and believable, and the feelings that an adventurer party would experience while exploring a dangerous area are very closely aligned with the players' own out of character tension and stress they feel as the tension pool fills up with dice.

The one thing that this did "hurt", was the "discovery" type of fun. I will say "hurt" in quotes, because of some nuance in the discovery type of fun. Discovery involves uncovering secrets, exploring, finding everything there is to find. If your dungeon has 15 rooms, good discovery fun would involve exploring them all!

Or does it? If you can always discover everything, are you really discovering? Perhaps the discovery aspect of D&D requires a tradeoff - a conflict. You want to discover everything, but you can't. So you have to choose - do I keep exploring, or is it time to leave this dangerous dungeon? I am still not sure if this conflict or challenge in discovering everything enhances or hurts the discovery type of fun.

However, what I did see, and was unexpected, was that my dungeons went unexplored. And this happens without fail when I am using tension dice, compared to when I don't. When you don't use this technique, it is much more likely your players will fully explore the dungeon. However, when you do, there is this conflict that inhibits or pushes back on the discovery element.

Technically, that's exactly what you want, right? If we were adventurers in a dangerous dungeon, would we stay and explore after we got what we came for, or accomplish what we came for? Maybe we would make a run for an extra treasure chest on the way out, but would we go out of our way to see what's on the second level?

In that sense, the tension dice technique can really amplify the "fantasy" type of fun, in that the dangerous world feels more real and tangible. It also really engages the "challenge" type of fun - those will be the players who get really bent out of shape, in a good way, over each dice that gets added to the pool. Because that type of fun wants to win. And filling up the tension pool means bad things, and could mean losing.

So you get this conflict which was unexpected. You have the players that want to see everything now getting pushback from the ones that want to do what they came for. That can stress the "fellowship" type of fun, which is everyone getting along, because you now have two competing types of fun in your game.

Regardless, it will make the game more immersive, it will give your players real feelings over the time and attention they generate in the dungeon, and it's all done by a pretty standard system of random encounters. Just now, instead of you trying to emphasize the danger, or hoping your players will be serious and consider the danger, you just add a little visual element, and the players will do with it what they will.

Would not recommend for casual games that really focus on "submission" type of fun.