5-minute workday

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:11 am

The easiest way to make time management meaningful is to put the bad guy on a schedule and hide that schedule from the players. Thus, when they finally get tho the BBEG's lair he can explain that he carried out his master plan last week.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:25 am

This is essentially what I said, and yet PL and unnamed apparently think that's the Bad Evil GM saying "No! You can't rest!"

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:34 am

Prak wrote:This is essentially what I said, and yet PL and unnamed apparently think that's the Bad Evil GM saying "No! You can't rest!"

I wish that there was a practical way to make a tabletop version of Half-Minute Hero.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:40 am

hyzmarca wrote:
Prak wrote:This is essentially what I said, and yet PL and unnamed apparently think that's the Bad Evil GM saying "No! You can't rest!"
I wish that there was a practical way to make a tabletop version of Half-Minute Hero.

But even Hero gets to rest. It's called eating an herb and buying more time. The player gets to rest in towns because time stops.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:44 am

See I always saw "you're on the clock" as a vital component of a good 3e adventure. 3e is a game of fantasy logistics where you can trade time for other resources. That decision isn't meaningful unless you have limited time.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 2:14 am

Prak wrote:This is essentially what I said, and yet PL and unnamed apparently think that's the Bad Evil GM saying "No! You can't rest!"

No.

I said that additional time management formalization is desirable, but that, and anything else you formalize, will not eliminate essentially arbitrary GM decided interruptions to rests, which is OK, because those things SHOULD remain a possibility.

How the fuck you can take that as just short of the exact opposite of what I said is pretty impressive, I wouldn't have thought it possible even if you tried.

Now if I were to simply directly address your stupid bad guy on a timetable scenario (as presented most recently by hyzmarca) right now, which I didn't before since I was actually responding to the poster I quoted, not you...

I'd just call it a stupid scenario that not everything should damn well be minor variations on. "Race Against Time" is all very well, and better formalized time management will help it just as it would help other scenarios, but not every god damn scenario gets to be "Race Against Time" and if your rules design plan is to rely on "Race Against Time" as a balancing factor then your plan is fucking stupid.

Because the second anyone uses any other scenario ever your stupidly planned system will immediately break.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 2:22 am

Ok, fair.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 2:35 am

As much as possible I prefer to make the advancement of Baron von Evil's scheme visible, or even better, have establishing spies/scouts/whatever who can keep the player informed of things that might signal the advance of Baron von Evil's scheme be a part of gameplay. But what's important is that players either know or have a clear means of finding out how much time they actually have to spend. Time's a resource and players shouldn't be asked to allocate it completely blindly the same as any other resource.