Developing the Sandbox: The Town

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here. The series will, when necessary, go into detail on the development of my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, but will also discuss sandbox development more generally. You can read play reports from my B1 campaign here.

(It's actually surprisingly hard to find a map from a classic D&D adventure of the sort of town I'm referring to here, since so many famous modules deal in either villages or cities - very little in between.) 

What I'll be discussing in this post are settlements which are big enough that it's not worth it to spend time detailing each individual location, where it's instead better to break the whole thing down into a few thematic "chunks" (for example, "Herald's Market" and "Alchemist's Ward" in the image above, which is taken from donjon's Fantasy Town Generator).

What I won't be discussing here is smaller settlements - thorps, hamlets, and even villages - where the whole place is essentially one big area. Development of those locations will look different, and I'll discuss that in another post.

If you refer back to my post on Prioritizing Points of Interest, you'll find why I decided to detail the town of Timbershore first and foremost when developing my B1 sandbox. The road into the region leads straight into town. Unless the players decide to go around it, it's the first location they'll interact with in their adventure.

However, a town like Timbershore is a complex environment, and it will require a great deal of development. It's one of those locations, like a tentpole megadungeon, which a DM could theoretically sink limitless hours into as the campaign progresses, fleshing it out as demanded by in-game events and the players' interests.

You can read a lot about how best to utilize settlements like this in play. There was a whole blog bandwagon about it (technically this was about cities, but any advice on that subject is equally applicable to towns as well). Of course, the most important writing on this subject is my own. Or, at least, being familiar with my writing on the subject will likely aid you in understanding my perspective and this post in particular. Check out my posts on settlements in general and the implied setting of towns and cities in AD&D specifically.

So, where to start? If you refer first to my post on minimalist location sketches for sandboxes, you'll find that, knowing that this first location is a town, I'll next want to know its population, any character-type NPCs who live there, who rules the town, and how the powers that be respond to the player characters when they first arrive there.

Let's start with population. This will determine the number of character-type NPCs in the town, which will in turn determine their level distribution, which will in turn determine who are the town's "bosses". I determine population using AD&D's INHABITATION table:

A town's population is 1d6 x 1,000 + 500. For Timbershore, I rolled a 5, so its population is 5,500. You are also free to look at your hex map and determine the hectares of airable land in the region and do some realistic calculations based off of that. I hope you have fun. I'm going to go with the dice roll.

My towns and cities and such are primarily populated by humans. Large groups of dwarves and elves and halflings don't live in such places - at least not at this scale (though perhaps they used to). They are "monsters" with wilderness "lairs". But, some of them do live in human towns and cities.

To determine racial demographics, you could use this table:

Or even this table:

I prefer the first. What's the difference? The first one is 80% human, 5% dwarf, 5% elf, 2% gnome, 5% half-elf, 2% halfling, and 1% half-orc. The second is 70% human, 8% dwarf, 5% elf, 2% gnome, 8% half-elf, 2% halfling, and 5% half-orc. Do you want fewer humans and more dwarves, half-elves, and half-orcs? Use the second table. Or make up your own arbitrary percentages. It doesn't really matter.

Timbershore has a population of 5,500. That's 4,400 humans, 275 each of dwarves, elves, and half-elves, 110 each of gnomes and halflings, and 55 half-orcs. This isn't really important, except:

While this excerpt applies specifically to the recruitment of henchmen, I extrapolate from it that 1 in 100 of the human and half-orc populations and 1 in 50 of the remainder are character-type NPCs. This is, incidentally, why I prefer the demographic breakdown which yields more humans and fewer of everyone else - it's fewer character-type NPCs that I have to deal with, which is less work.

Using our demographics and this rule of thumb, Timbershore has:

• 44 human character-type NPCs
• 5 to 6 of each: dwarf, elf, and half-elf character-type NPCs
• 2 to 3 of each: gnome and halfling character-type NPCs
• At most 1 half-orc character-type NPCs

That's 63 to 69 NPCs with character levels. That's a lot, and if we were detailing a city, it'd be even more. Surely we're not going to detail them all (not yet at least - you can do it, but it's totally optional). Instead, we're going to figure out who are the important ones, and detail those first. How do we determine who's important? 

First, let's go back to that excerpt on Number of Prospective Henchmen. 1 in 1,000 people in the general population will be interested in employment as henchmen. I generalize this a bit by saying 1 in 10 of those identified character-type NPCs will be interested in employment as henchmen. For Timbershore, that's 4 to 5 humans and, at most, 1 of any other given race. 

You can roll a d10 to determine this, with the number of total character-type NPCs of each race serving as a percentage chance that one is interested in employment as a henchmen. For example, if there are 5 dwarves in Timbershore, then there's a 50% chance that one is recruitable as a henchman.

Henchman are locked in at levels 1 through 3:

For these NPCs, I'll just determine their level (1d3), and give just those of 1st level (because 2nd and 3rd level henchmen can only be recruited at higher levels) a name, a class, and an alignment, then put them aside. Nonhumans will have a chance to be multi-classed (see Race and Multi-Class above). Their alignment can be anything. I will usually have demihumans tend towards their Monster Manual alignment (dwarves will often be Lawful and/or Good, elves will often be Chaotic and/or Good, and so on), whereas for humans I'll roll 2d3 to determine it. I determine class by rolling on the Character Subtable ("Used For Encounters On All Dungeon Levels" - but ignore that!):

(Note that just because this is all AD&D stuff does not mean you must be playing AD&D. You can change out the races for whatever you like. You could rule that a result of "Ranger" is actually a 50/50 chance of being a ranger or barbarian. A result of "Illusionist" could instead be a sorcerer or warlock. These are generally very useful worldbuilding tools regardless of your prefer system. I am merely attempting to demonstrate their usefulness. Adjust to taste!)

Henchmen are one of the most important NPCs to detail first because the players have a good chance of interacting with them early, if for example they feel the need to bolster their numbers before beginning their adventure. The next most important will be the high level NPCs - those who run thieves' and assassins' guilds, rule strongholds, and command factions within the town.

These high level NPCs will be drawn from those remaining - let's say 40 humans, 5 dwarves, 5 elves, 5 half-elves, 2 gnomes, 2 halflings, and 1 half-orc. What to do with these? I start with breaking them down based on a loose notion of "tiers" comparable to D&D 5e's "tier of play". 65% are Tier 1 (levels 1 to 3, or 1d3, but not interested in employment as henchmen), 20% are Tier 2 (levels 4 to 7, or 1d4+3), 10% are Tier 3 (levels 7 to 12, or 1d6+6), and 5% are Tier 4 (levels 9 to 20, or 1d12+8).

That gives me 26 Tier 1 humans, 8 Tier 2 humans, 4 Tier 3 humans, 2 Tier 4 humans, and so on. Start with the highest level NPCs and work your way down, detailing them the same way you did henchmen. Don't generate all of them. For now, you only need to worry about those NPCs which have strongholds. They are the ones who will have large amounts of henchmen and followers to command, which means they'll be factions.

These high level NPCs and the factions they command will provide the most basic level of color to your large settlement - a town ruled by an evil wizard is much different than one ruled by a paladin, and a city with half a dozen thieves' guilds is much different than one with a like number of temples.

So then, who can rule a stronghold? Luckily, I wrote a whole post about this. At 8th level, clerics can build places of worship, and monks can build moat houses and friaries. At higher levels, fighters, paladins, rangers, thieves, magic-users, illusionists, assassins, and bards can build strongholds as well (note that druids do not build strongholds in towns and cities - you might rule that rangers, monks, and bards do not, either, according to taste).

You might prefer a system in which a character can build a stronghold at any level provided they have the means and the desire to do so, but I find that woefully unhelpful when trying to develop a location like this. I for one really appreciate AD&D's black and white approach to this. "X class can rule a stronghold at Y level" is a very useful rule of thumb for a DM trying to build a setting.

So for now, we need be on the lookout for character-type NPCs of 8th level or higher only - that's our Tier 3 and Tier 4 NPCs. When I rolled up these NPCs, I got a LN human fighter 7, a N human magic-user 7, a LG human ranger 8, a LN human magic-user 11, a CE human cleric 13, and a NE human illusionist 16 (since AD&D 2e has specialists of all eight schools of magic, I treat the illusionist instead as a specialist and roll d8 for their specialization, determining that this one is instead a diviner). 

Surprisingly, that gives me just two NPCs who rule strongholds (fighters and rangers get their strongholds at 9th level, and magic-users get theirs at 12th level). I determine that the human cleric 13 rules a large shell keep and that the human diviner 16 rules a large walled castle with a keep, using this table:

I make some reaction rolls and determine that the cleric is unfriendly and the diviner is friendly. This suggests to me at least that the cleric will be uncooperative with the party and that the diviner is willing to work with them - he is NE, so this doesn't mean he's altruistic, only that he thinks he stands to gain something by working with the party.

Remember that while the powers that be may be willing to work with the party to accomplish their goals, high level NPCs view adventurers as a threat to the established order, and none will be permitted to grow too powerful without being checked by their overlords.

This bit tells me that NPCs with strongholds will have 1d4+1 henchmen and several men-at-arms:

And this bit tells me what level these NPCs' henchmen ought to be:

The 13th level cleric will have 2-5 henchmen of at most 8th level, and the 16th level diviner will have a like number of henchmen of at most 10th level. Some of those lower level characters I rolled up (the LN fighter and N magic-user) can fill those rolls (the LG ranger's alignment is incompatible with both). Since the LN magic-user 11 is too high level to be a henchman to either and also falls into that "Tier 4" 9th to 20th level range, I'll make her an important NPC too, even if she isn't high enough level to rule a stronghold.

With my three most important NPCs identified, I'll make some contested reaction rolls to determine how they feel about one another. I determine that the diviner is aligned with the magic-user (friendly) and has an uneasy truce with the cleric (indifferent/neutral), and that the cleric wants the magic-user dead (hostile). 

I mill this over a bit and determine that the diviner and the cleric have some sort of agreement wherein the cleric is allowed to collect tithes and is exempt from taxation. Although the diviner is higher level, AD&D clerics get a small army and tons of fanatical followers when they build a stronghold, whereas magic-users must rely on paid men-at-arms and henchmen, so the cleric actually wields the more threatening force in town. The place is probably crawling with the cleric's agents. 

At the same time, the diviner possesses powerful scrying magic and is aware of everything that goes on in his domain, rarely needing to leave his stronghold at all. The cleric is certainly not a good influence in town, but her agents sow chaos and keep the people divided and frightened, which makes them easier for the diviner to control.

The magic-user is, in turn, the diviner's boots on the ground agent, carrying out his laws and orders. She is on the cusp of being able to build a stronghold, so perhaps she is dutifully serving the town's overlord in hopes that he will grant her permission to begin construction when the time comes. Since the magic-user is an agent of law and order, the cleric wants her eliminated, which may push the town over the brink into all-out chaos. She's not bold enough to take out the magic-user herself, but would perhaps align herself with some outside agents to get the job done.

I think that's a pretty good initial sketch for my town. After this, I would move on to sketching out my other locations, then circle back around for another pass at the town.

Somewhere in all of this, you're going to have to stat out these NPCs. You can wing it to a certain extent. For example, if you know an NPC is a 7th level human fighter, it's easy enough to run them at the table by simply looking up the relevant statistics when needed. The tricky part is in the finer details, like what magic items the NPC possesses, or, if they're a wizard, what's in their spellbook, and what spells they usually have prepared. 

I don't particularly like figuring all that out at the table. And if the high level wizard happens to have a ring of three wishes or some other powerful magic item, I like to know that as soon as possible, as that is potentially game-altering information. Once I'm done with my initial location sketches, I will usually do a second pass through all of my locations, during which I jot down stats for monsters and NPCs and roll up their treasure hoards. 

This can be really tedious when dealing with a place like a town where there's a high density of high level NPCs. There's not really an easy way to do it - I just put my head down and power through it. The players are unlikely to decide to try and confront some high level NPC in their first session, but players are unpredictable, so I like to be prepared in case they do.

The next most important step - really the last one to get your town ready for your first session - is to break it down into districts. This is an idea I took from Brave, and I find it really brings settlements like this together in a simple, gameable way. There's this nifty little table:

Personally, I'm only really looking at the Districts row, though you may find the rest of the information illuminating. A town has 1d4 districts. Instead of rolling, I base it on population size. Timbershore has a population of 5,500, which is about 85% of the maximum population for an AD&D town (6,500). Since the maximum number of districts is 4, I multiply that by .85 and get 3.4. Thus, Timbershore will have three districts, with a 40% chance of a fourth. I check for a fourth and determine there are indeed four districts.

I want one of these districts to be where the diviner lives and one to be where the cleric lives, so I create the High Ward - a wealthy administrative district at the town's center, with the diviner's castle atop a high hill - and the Chapel Ward - filled with hostels, almshouses, and minor shrines (remember there are no other clerics of high enough level to have actual temples here), with the cleric's religious stronghold at its center. The town is on a river and right next to the forest, so I also have a River Ward with docks and warehouses and a Timber Ward with lumber yards and sawmills.

I draw up a little flowchart map to show how the districts connect and create a brief description for each, including what general sorts of locations and people are found there:

• Chapel Ward (NE): Blanchefleur’s Keep looms over this district. Features minor shrines, cult safehouses, “charity” kitchens, mortuaries, hostels, graveyards, and catacombs. Flagellant processions make their way through the streets daily. Devotees of Blanchefleur, desperate wretches, cultists, and hospice workers live here. Connections: Timber Ward (S), High Ward (SW)
• High Ward (C): Situated atop a hill. Surrounds Lambrecht’s Castle and observatory on an even higher hill ("the High Hill"). Features markets, spell licensing offices, the courthouse, elite guard barracks, and residences of wealthy merchants and officials. Senior officials, licensed magi, wealthy traders, and administrators live here. Connections: Chapel Ward (NE), Timber Ward (SE), River Ward (S)
• River Ward (S): Noisy, profitable, and corrupt, where outsiders enter town when sailing downriver. Features docks, warehouses, guildhalls, caravan yards, river shrines, taverns and flop houses, smuggler dens, and toll houses. Boatmen, dock workers, traders, caravan guards, smugglers, and transients live here. Connections: High Ward (N), Timber Ward (NE)
• Timber Ward (SE): The working population center, closest to the forest. Features woodcutters’ lodges, charcoal burners, sawmills, tanneries, cheap inns, labor markets, militia mustering yards, fence yards and animal pens, repair shops, and the hunters’ guildhall. Laborers, trappers, foresters, hunters, and militia families live here. Connections: Chapel Ward (N), River Ward (SW), High Ward (NW)

From here, it's pretty easy to improvise where different things might be located in town. Need healing or want to visit a shrine to a deity? Go to the Chapel Ward. Want to yuck it up with the elite or auction off a captive dragon? Go to the High Ward. Want to secure passage downriver or fence some stolen goods? Go to the River Ward. Want to sell some giant beaver furs or hire a guide to help you navigate the forest? Go to the Timber Ward.

From there I can flesh out a few additional locations, like an inn in each district, a graveyard in the Chapel Ward, a bath house in the High Ward, a smuggler's den in the River Ward, a boxing yard in the Timber Ward, or whatever. I try to think of what the players might want to do in town (looking over your list of downtime activities is a good place to start), then create a few locations that make sense for each, with maybe a sentence or two of description. For example, my list of locations for the High Ward looks like this:

For now, there's just one thing left to do, and that's encounter tables. You can pretty much get by simply riffing on AD&D's CITY/TOWN ENCOUNTERS MATRIX, but I like to be a little more prepared. I generate four encounters each for day and night in each district (that's eight encounters per district, so 32 total for Timbershore). This is probably overkill - I didn't roll up any encounters in either of our sessions which took place in town, so you can probably get by with like, one prepared encounter per district per time of day, improvising as needed.

Since the encounters are by district, the district in which they occur should color the encounter. A demon or devil encountered in the Chapel Ward was probably summoned by the high level cleric herself. A high level magic-user encountered in the High Ward could be the diviner (or a projected image of the diviner) wandering the streets. A press gang makes a lot of sense in the River Ward, but less so elsewhere. Laborers in the Timber Ward might be woodcutters, but in the River Ward they would be dockworkers, and so on.

These encounters can also aid you in fleshing out the town. Some encounters will include character-type NPCs with levels. You can use these to "backfill" those other character-type NPCs which were too low-level to detail up front, adding them to your roster as you go. By doing this, I was able to determine the identities of all my remaining character-type NPCs. For example, the River Ward's roster looks like this:

One can also encounter monsters like fiends, lycanthropes, and undead wandering the streets. Because these are unusual, they're worth rolling up ahead of time. These can further flesh out the town by allowing you to add monster lairs as locations. If I roll up doppelgangers in the High Ward, I may want to add a location to that district where a wealthy family has been replaced by imposters. If there's a vampire wandering the Chapel Ward, it probably lairs in some old mausoleum where the locals fear to tread. If there are wererats in the River Ward, there's probably a sewer or an abandoned ship where they make their lair. This is all worth adding to your rumor tables as well.

When rolling up these encounters, remember to disguise them using vagueness and similarity, and that dealing with NPCs should be expensive and irritating.

We're not quite done with this town. We will need to come back and fill in any monster lairs as determined by our random encounters, and we will need to key our high level NPCs' strongholds as well. Since the party is likely too weak to confront either of these locations at the start of the campaign, we can circle back around to that later. For now, the town is probably quite ready for play.

Developing the Sandbox: Prioritizing Points of Interest

This is the first in what will probably be a series detailing my method for developing a sandbox. I will be using my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown (which I am currently running and writing play reports for) as an example when appropriate. That post provides only a minimalist sketch of each location in the sandbox. Where do you go from there? This series will hope to provide some guidelines for proceeding.

To briefly summarize that post, my B1 sandbox contains the following locations:

• 01.05 Zerelda's Camp: A temporary camp for a party of high level adventurers who are looking to build a stronghold.
• 02.02 Timbershore: A large town ruled by an evil high level wizard and an evil high level cleric.
• 02.05 Giant Eagle Nest: The lair of a flock of giant eagles.
• 03.01 Fayette's Hold: A high level fighter's castle, now occupied by brigands.
• 03.02 Ebongrove: A humble thorp, terrorized and occupied by the brigands of Fayette's Hold.
• 03.04 Okorg's Den: The lair of a band of ogres.
• 03.05 Quasqueton: The dungeon which itself is the subject of Dungeon Module B1.
• 04.03 Owlbear Den: The lair of a pack of owlbears.
• 04.04 Jinglepuff's Burrow: The lair of a tricksy leprechaun.

I already have perfectly adequate sketches of each of these locations. I know who are the adventurers that make up Zerelda's Company, who rules Timbershore, who the brigands' leader is, how many giant eagles and owlbears there are, what the ogres want, what Quasqueton is like, and what Jinglepuff gets up to. I know that the evil wizard is plotting against the adventurers, that he was once aligned with the brigands but now desires to be rid of them, and that he is courting the ogres. I know that the ogres are pissed at the townspeople because they suspect them of stealing their treasure (when really Jinglepuff is responsible).

That's all gameable, and a DM who's comfortable with improvisation can probably make a little bit of detail go a long way. But the benefit of having a sandbox of this size is that you can go really detailed and still probably have most or all of the material fully prepped before or shortly after starting to run it. As of this writing, I have one and a half important locations within Timbershore left to detail. Everything else is pretty much done, and we're only a few sessions in.

But where do you start? Surely, Jinglepuff's Burrow, buried and secreted away deep in the woods, is not as important as the starting town or the dungeon. If I prepped all the monster lairs first, then showed up to the first session with only those ready for play, we wouldn't have much to work with. Surely there's some order of operations to follow. Where to begin...

Fortunately, I have a blog post which points the way. Here, I take a deep dive into settlements, strongholds, ruins, and monster lairs, describing each location type's gameplay feel and purpose. I also place each on a complexity/player agency gradient. Less complex location types like small settlements and dungeons offer the players a great deal of agency even at low levels, while more complex location types offer little agency until the characters accumulate the power and resources to deal with them as they wish. 

At 1st level, the players have more agency in the dungeon than they do in the 20th level wizard's stronghold. They can go to either place and poke around if they wish, but their lack of power and resources will limit the extent to which they can do so. They can go most places in the dungeon with the proper use of tactics and spells, but in the wizard's stronghold they might be limited to an audience with one of his henchmen in the receiving chamber, whereas at high levels they might be able to use their superior abilities to teleport directly into the wizard's inner sanctum to confront him.

To summarize, the final gradient I ended up with looks like this (from least complex to most complex): dungeons/simple settlements (thorps, hamlets, and villages) > simple monster lairs (where monsters are unintelligent/unorganized or very few in number) > moderate complexity settlements (towns)/moderate complexity monster lairs (where monsters are intelligent/faction-like but not huge in number)/strongholds > complex monster lairs (where monsters are intelligent, organized, and vast in numbers) > complex settlements (cities).

Looking at my B1 sandbox, the order of operations might be: Ebongrove/Quasqueton > Giant Eagle Nest/Owlbear Den/Jinglepuff's Burrow > Zerelda's Camp/Timbershore/Fayette's Hold/Okorg's Den. We do not have any complex monster lairs (this would be something like the lair of 300 orcs) or complex settlements (like a city), although we will see that Timbershore is plenty complex on its own.

This makes enough sense. Quasqueton should certainly be the first place I detail (and much of the work is done for me already), and Ebongrove should be simple enough. However, there is a wrinkle - the road into the region leads directly to Timbershore. This will likely be the first place the characters visit (unless, for some reason, they decide to navigate around it) and will probably be their base of operations. That should be a priority as well.

The town will prove to be plenty complex, however, and I will not need all of it fleshed out to navigate the party's first visit. In fact, I'll end up detailing the town in a series of passes, starting first with broad, important details, then drilling down into specific locations within the town, once again according to our complexity/agency gradient. It will be important to know the general layout of the town and where certain services can be procured immediately, but the thieves' dens, ruined mansions, and haunted tombs can wait, as can the strongholds where high level NPCs live.

Instead, my order of operations might look more like this: Timbershore (first pass - districts and broad details) > Quasqueton > Ebongrove > Timbershore (second pass - keyed locations and monster lairs) > Giant Eagle Nest/Owlbear Den/Jinglepuff's Burrow > Zerelda's Camp/Fayette's Hold/Okorg's Den > Timbershore (final pass - high level NPC strongholds).

Your order of operations may vary. If the characters enter the region in a hamlet before reaching the town beyond, you will start with the hamlet. If there is a monster lair blocking the way to the dungeon, you'll want to detail that before the dungeon. You should identify locations that your players will definitely encounter first, then anticipate those locations they are likely to want to investigate early.

Looking at my map, I might be more flexible with my order of operations. Timbershore and Quasqueton will still be first, followed by Ebongrove, but after those, I might want to mix things up and take a look at Zerelda's Camp, Fayette's Hold, and Okorg's Den (due to their proximity to inhabited lands). The Giant Eagle Nest, Owlbear Den, and Jingelpuff's Burrow can come later because they're more remote. Or, because they're relatively simple and easy to detail, I might wish to knock them out early. I might want to jump around for more variety, or simply maintain momentum by focusing on whatever seems interesting to me at any given time.

Just as I created minimalist sketches for every location before detailing any of them, I might do a "second pass" at each of them before diving in further, just to give me a little more to work with. For example, I might roll up exact numbers of monsters and their treasure and jot down their stats at each location before digging in to actually key them. That's the kind of stuff I definitely don't want to do at the table, but I can probably improvise an owlbear den on the fly if the players zig when I thought they would zag.

Don't panic if you don't have everything prepared by session 1. It doesn't have to be perfect by the time play begins. The intention is to anticipate the players' actions as best you can, but to also give yourself just enough to cover your bases when and if the players do something unexpected. If it goes according to plan, you'll have each location fully realized before it makes contact with the players. 

Then, they get to wreck it. That's where the fun is. But you have to build it for them first. Future posts in this series will describe how that's done.

On the Adventuring Day

As far as I can tell (usual disclaimer: I am not very familiar with 3rd or 4th edition D&D, at least not from a DM's perspective), the term "adventuring day", as defined by D&D, originated with 5th edition. From the 5e DMG (page 84):

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how far the party is likely to progress.

For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party's adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

Since XP is tied to Challenge Rating, and CR is (allegedly) tied to how difficult a monster or other challenge is to overcome, XP is used as a measure of how many and what degree of challenges a given group of player characters can overcome before needing to take a long rest - this collection of challenges per long rest is then called an "adventuring day". (Note that the DM is intended to award XP to the players for overcoming challenges of all kinds, and not just monsters - thus, an entire "adventuring day" could also be spent exploring a dungeon or talking to NPCs, so long as doing so is challenging and requires expending resources.) 

Because the adventuring day is simply a measure of how much challenge a group of characters can overcome before needing to take a long rest, an adventuring "day" needn't be a day at all. If a DM instead prefers to use the "gritty realism" resting variant detailed in the DMG (page 267), an adventuring "day" is instead any period interrupted by a week's worth of rest - it could be a day, a week, a month, a very long year, or even a merciless lifetime. Even if the DM uses the default rule - in which a long rest is 8 hours (6 hours of sleep and 2 hours of light activity) - an adventuring "day" can be much longer than a single day, if for some reason the characters are prevented from resting. Perhaps an antagonistic illusionist is haunting their dreams.

The point of all this is to illustrate that D&D 5e is a game that relies on attrition to create true challenges. Well-rested player characters have a lot of hit points and spells, and other abilities that they can use to soften, overcome, or utterly trivialize challenges - even "deadly" ones. However, they have a finite amount of these resources that they can use each "day". Challenges become harder as the "day" goes on, because fewer resources are available. Eventually, resource-depleted characters will encounter something truly challenging - life-threatening, even. 

This is how it's supposed to work, anyway - the player characters push their luck as their resources dwindle, and it's a matter of player skill to determine when would be the wisest point to stop and recuperate. But if all of a character's resources are regained on a rest, and characters are more powerful when well-rested, isn't it wisest and most prudent to simply rest after every resource expenditure? This results in what is frequently referred to as "the 15-minute adventuring day". 

Let me clarify exactly what I mean by that. I have seen some people get hung up on the "15-minute" part - that is, they get upset that, because a combat round lasts just six seconds, and most combats are over in just a few rounds, that all of the action of the adventuring day takes place in about 15 minutes. They are interpreting "the 15-minute adventuring day" literally. I don't care about that. It makes plenty of sense to me that 15 minutes of battling magical monsters, dodging life-threatening traps, and negotiating with orcish warbands is enough for someone to want to call it a day. Adrenaline is exhausting once it wears off.

What I'm referring to (and what people usually mean when they use the phrase "15-minute adventuring day") is the tendency of players to liberally abuse D&D's resting mechanics to ensure that they have the optimal resources for every encounter - that is, the characters use all of their most powerful abilities in their very first encounter of the day, then rest as soon as possible so that they'll have those abilities back for the next encounter. Because D&D's design is predicated on the assumption that attrition is taking place, this behavior often renders the game toothless - DMs complain that player characters are too powerful, or that monsters are too weak. Maybe that's true. Or maybe we just need to stop player characters from resting so much.

Was It Always This Way?

Before I get into it, I want to take a detour to talk about older editions of D&D. Do players of OD&D, B/X, and AD&D run into problems with the 15-minute adventuring day? Maybe. One thing that has never changed is that player characters get all of their spells back when they take a long rest. So even way back in OD&D, magic-users had good reason to beg for a break after they'd burned their one spell for the day and had to resort to feebly wielding their dagger.

Throughout the editions, player characters have accumulated abilities aside from spells which recharge on a daily basis. In AD&D, paladins can lay on hands once per day, and druids can shapeshift into a either a bird, mammal, or reptile once per day each. 4e codified "daily" powers alongside "at will", "encounter", and "utility" powers. This has been further complicated in 5e by the introduction of abilities that can be used a number of times per day equal to a character's proficiency bonus, or ability score modifier, or an even more arbitrary value.

The main difference between editions when it comes to this issue is the speed of natural healing. The amount of hit points recovered after a rest has ballooned over time, and the limitations on what constitutes a rest have grown much looser. In OD&D, B/X, and AD&D 1e, characters require complete rest (i.e., no adventuring activities whatsoever) to heal naturally. In 2e, characters can heal naturally while doing light adventuring activities (i.e. traveling from place to place), but heal more quickly when resting for a full day, and never heal naturally on a day when they engage in combat.

Natural healing begins to take on super heroic qualities in 3e, in which characters can finally regain hit points at the end of a strenuous adventuring day - and not just one hit point, but a number of hit points equal to the character's level. 

The super heroic trend continued with 4e, in which characters could use healing surges (equal to a quarter of their total hit points) to heal themselves at any time between combats (and sometimes mid-combat). Characters had different numbers of healing surges determined by their class, Constitution score, and other factors, with rangers, rogues, warlocks, and wizards having the smallest baseline number of surges (6) and paladins having the largest number (10). At the end of the day, an extended rest recharged all healing surges and hit points, meaning even the frailest characters had not just their usual hit points, but an additional pool of hit points equal to 150% of their maximum in nearly on-demand healing every day. The distinction between a full day of rest and a night's sleep at the end of a strenuous adventuring day - which had persisted all the way up to 3e - is lost to time at this point.

5e rolled back the extremes of 4e somewhat, replacing healing surges with hit dice. A character has hit dice equal to their level (rather than a number of surges determined by their class), the size of the dice is determined by the character's class levels (rather than being a 25% heal), and the character's Constitution modifier is added to each die. A short (1-hour) rest is required to use the hit dice (rather than being an at-will heal outside of combat). Essentially, the character has an additional pool of hit points roughly equal to 100% of their maximum (more or less, depending on how they roll) which they can use to heal in the middle of the day. Characters regain only half their expended hit dice on a long rest (compared to all expended healing surges in 4e). The healing of all lost hit points on completion of an extended/long rest survives from 4e.

The point is that the earliest editions of D&D use a different timescale of attrition. On day one of the adventure, the fighter may take only 5 points of damage, but when they rest that day, they regain no hit points. On day two, they take another 5 points of damage, and again cannot regain hit points from resting. There may be a cleric in the party aiding them with magical healing, but the point is that the damage compounds over time - no natural healing is possible so long as the fighter continues to exert their self each day. In 3e, the fighter can heal at the end of a strenuous day, but usually not completely. In 4e and 5e, the damage the fighter took on day one of the adventure no longer matters on day two, assuming that they were able to successfully rest - everything resets (except 5e's hit dice, which only reset halfway).

In other ways, the earliest editions of D&D don't rely on attrition to create challenges at all: the stench of the zombie lord kills the characters if they fail a saving throw; the touch of the wraith drains a level of experience from the affected character; rocks fall, everyone dies - no whittling away of hit points, spell slots, or per-day abilities necessary in any case.

I'm not suggesting that 5e needs slower natural healing, or to distinguish between resting at the end of an adventuring day and taking a week or more to rest completely between adventures. Instead, I hope to have demonstrated that "the adventure" (i.e., the days or weeks at a time during which the characters are adventuring, where little to no recovery is possible) has gradually transformed into "the adventuring day" (i.e., the single, brief unit of time during which the characters are adventuring, after which they recover rapidly and almost completely) - and how the adventuring day is more important to the game's assumptions of balance than ever before.

How Long is an Adventuring Day?

Well, a day is 24 hours. A long rest is 8 hours, so that leaves 16 hours of adventuring. Characters can travel 8 hours per day before needing to check for exhaustion, which leaves 8 hours for poking around dungeons or whatever. Solved.

This is wrong. For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't really matter how long a day is. What matters is how challenging a day is. The quote from the DMG at the beginning of this post says that a "typical" adventuring day consists of "about six to eight medium or hard encounters". People get hung up on this. The more important part is this:

For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party's adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

The important thing is to determine how much challenge the party can handle before needing to take a long rest, and the challenge isn't measured in a number of encounters of X or Y difficulty, but in XP. Every encounter has an adjusted XP value determined by the number of monsters and the monsters' CR. Add up the adjusted XP value of each encounter/challenge until the party's daily XP budget is reached - that's an adventuring day. (The DM is also supposed to award XP for non-combat challenges, but assigning an XP value to these is more of a gut feeling with loose guidelines than a mathematical equation.)

Five 1st-level characters can handle 1,500 XP of challenges per day. That could be 6 medium encounters or 4 hard encounters, sure, but it could also be 12 easy encounters or 3 deadly encounters. It could be 1 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard, and 1 deadly. It could be a single encounter which is beyond "deadly" but still within the 1,500 XP budget. A common problem I see is 5e DMs planning for one "big damn encounter" per day, but still adhering to the easy/medium/hard/deadly encounter categories. Those categories are still assuming there will be multiple encounters per day! If the DM really wants to run one big damn encounter per day, they need to make that encounter much more robust, with an adjusted XP value nearly equal to the party's daily budget.

Technically, that is all true. But is it for the best? Another thing worth considering is that 5e introduces short rests. Every character gets all of their hit points and daily abilities back on a long rest, so every character is incentivized to long rest eventually. Likewise, every character can spend hit dice to heal during a short rest, but many characters benefit from short rests in ways which are unique to their class, and almost every class benefits differently, so every character is incentivized to short rest to a different extent.

On the one hand, bards, clerics, and druids, for example, regain some secondary features on a short rest: Bardic Inspiration, Channel Divinity, and Wild Shape (the primary feature of all of these classes is spellcasting, which is tied to long rests). On the other hand, fighters, monks, and warlocks regain their primary features every time they take a short rest. It's part of the balancing act between classes. Characters that recover their features on a short rest maintain their potency throughout the day - the longer the day (i.e., the more short rests they can take), the better they match up to the long rest-dependent classes. If the day is too short (especially if it consists of just one encounter), they pale in comparison, and any attempt at balance between the classes falls apart.

The 5e DMG says:

In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.

So if, for example, the adventuring day consists of 6 medium encounters, the party is expected to have two such encounters per short rest. Frankly, if I'm playing a fighter, monk, or warlock, I'm proposing a short rest after every encounter, so long as there isn't some time pressure. Even if I'm playing another class, so long as I get something back on a short rest, I'm taking one. It's fun to be a bard and have all of my uses of Bardic Inspiration to throw around every single encounter.

Let me just say now that I don't really do all this encounter planning and math when I'm prepping a D&D session. If I'm creating a dungeon, I'll stock it with a mixture of different types of monsters and encounter difficulties - there will be easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounters designed for a group of characters of the level I think is appropriate for the dungeon, trivial encounters designed for lower-level characters, impossible encounters designed for higher-level characters, indifferent, unfriendly, friendly, and helpful monsters in addition to hostile ones, traps of varying deadliness, and magical benefits of varying potency. I'm not making spreadsheets with XP values to plan my dungeons. It's not that deep.

Sometimes, the goal of the adventure at hand is to travel across the wilderness, find the tower where the harpies are roosting, and kill them. The characters might have a random encounter in the wilderness on the way there, but most likely, they're going to arrive with all their resources at hand. The tower won't be a complex mythic underworld with a variety of monsters, tricks, traps, treasure, and the like. The adventure will most likely big a big damn fight with a bunch of harpies, and that's okay too, so long as it's only sometimes.

The point is that characters are intended to face a certain amount of challenge (measured in XP) per day. Because some classes rely more than others on short rests to keep pace, it is better to spread the day's challenges out across multiple encounters. That being said, variety is the spice of life, and a mixture of different numbers and types of encounters per day is vital to an exciting game.

No Rest for the Wicked

The most common solution to adventuring day woes is to limit long rests in some way, forcing the characters to deal with attrition. Usually, this is done in one of two ways: either resting has to take place in a location that is some combination of safe and/or comfortable, or the "gritty realism" optional rule is used, extending the length of a short rest to 8 hours and a long rest to 7 days.

From what I can tell, Basic D&D is the only version that explicitly required resting in a particular location in order to recover resources:

Each day of rest and recuperation back "home" will regenerate 1 to 3 of his hit points for the next adventure.

One might imagine that past editions' "bed rest" rules require, well...resting in a bed, but they don't. From 2e:

If a character has complete bed-rest (doing nothing for an entire day), he can regain 3 hit points for the day. For each complete week of bed rest, the character can add any Constitution hit point bonus he might have to the base of 21 points (3 points per day) he regained during that week.

3e also defines "bed rest" as "doing nothing for an entire day". No literal bed required. Thus, I don't really think there's much precedent for forcing characters to sleep in a "safe" location (aside from the Basic D&D rule). It seems to me like a somewhat arbitrary limitation imposed by the DM to prevent resting in the dungeon. There are other ways to do that, though, which I'll get to later.

As for "gritty realism", I most often see this solution championed by true adventuring day believers who insist that it's "unrealistic" to fit that many encounters into a single day. How does one possibly solve that problem? Where might a party of adventurers face 6 to 8 encounters worth of monsters in a single day? Perhaps in some ancient complex of densely interconnected, labyrinthine rooms, where a vast array of monsters, traps, and tricks can lurk around any corner - a mythic underworld of sorts where the common sense laws of the natural world no longer apply? No, no, that simply doesn't make sense. That's not what they do on the actual plays I watch. Those people are actually playing the game, after all! How could they be doing it wrong?

Something I find interesting about "gritty realism" is this, from the DMG (page 267):

This puts the brakes on the campaign, requiring the players to carefully judge the benefits and drawbacks of combat. Characters can't afford to engage in too many battles in a row, and all adventuring requires careful planning.

This approach encourages the characters to spend time out of the dungeon. It's a good option for campaigns that emphasize intrigue, politics, and interactions among other PCs, and in which combat is rare or something to be avoided rather than rushed into.

This is not really an angle I had considered. I only ever see people discuss this optional rule as a way to fit an adventuring "day" worth of encounters more easily between long rests, not as a means to make players more carefully pick their battles, or to encourage more social interaction gameplay. It makes sense - if a combat lasts a minute but takes a week to recover from, the players may think twice before engaging, and if they're spending a week at a time in town, they may prioritize building relationships with NPCs in their home settlement.

Truthfully, aside from the atrocious name, there is a convincing case to be made for adopting the "gritty realism" rule variant. It does seem to fix a pacing problem that many people experience. I have a few quibbles with the rule and how it interacts with spell durations, preparing spells, exhaustion, and recharging magic items, but my greatest concern is that it breaks down in dungeon play. 

Dungeons are still, for me, the main focus of play in 5e, and they're exactly the place where the adventuring day makes sense. It is crystal clear to me that 90% of 5e's design was done with dungeon play in mind, even if the rules do a poor job explaining that or instructing DMs in how to run dungeons. "Gritty realism" makes sense if the adventure involves a few encounters on the way to the dungeon, a few encounters in the dungeon, and a few encounters on the way back. It doesn't make sense if the dungeon is a densely-packed collection of challenges designed to test the players all on its own.

Personally, outside of dungeon play, I don't really care all that much if combat is "balanced" or challenging. The challenge of traveling from place to place isn't fighting (at least, not entirely). The journey from place to place is interesting because the characters can find unexpected things, get mixed up in unforeseen side quests and shenanigans, make new friends and enemies, and the like. 

When they do end up fighting while on a journey, those encounters should be swingy. The journey to the tomb shouldn't be carefully preplanned to provide the appropriate amount of challenge for X characters of Y level. It's the wilderness - who knows what's out there? 1st-level characters can get wrecked by an ancient dragon if they're unlucky, and 20th-level characters can pick a fight with five goblins if they feel like it. The wilderness is wild. It has always been more dangerous than the dungeon.

The dungeon traditionally has levels, which correspond to the characters' levels. The dungeon is balanced - it's the site of the adventuring day. It's where the game actually works - unless the players decide to abuse rests, and thus break it. So without changing anything else about how resting works, how does one prevent this?

"YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" (AD&D 1e DMG, page 37)

Gygax comes off unnecessarily strong in the above quote, but he's not entirely wrong. I would revise the sentiment as such: "You can have a meaningful campaign without keeping strict time records, but it helps a lot to keep at least some records and solves a lot of the game's problems." Not pithy or prescriptive enough for the grognards I guess.

Some people advocate for putting every adventure on a time limit. There is an evil spellcaster in the tomb doing an evil ritual! The characters have to go through the dungeon and stop them before the ritual is complete! This happens on every adventure for some reason! This certainly works sometimes, but it's hard enough already to come up with quest hooks to propel a campaign forward. It's doubly hard to create some artificial time limit for every adventure. It also just isn't very fun for the players to never be able to slow down and simply live in the fictional world for a while.

Instead, I use wandering dungeon monsters to exert time pressure. In my games, I use a loose interpretation of AD&D's 10-minute dungeon turn concept. Here's my basic procedure for running a dungeon crawl:

1. The characters enter the room. I describe it.
2. Players ask clarifying questions and I answer with just enough detail to either spur the players to action or elicit more questions.
3. At least one player says they want to do something.
4. I ask every other player what their character is doing (even if it's "Just standing around" or "Waiting for so and so to do their thing").
5. I give each player new information based on what they're doing, call for ability checks, etc.
6. Repeat.

A 10-minute dungeon turn is when all of the characters are doing their chosen thing in that room. If the fighter is muscling open a sarcophagus, the wizard is studying a tome, the cleric is examining an altar, and the rogue is checking for traps, that all takes the same 10 minutes. Every turn, I make a wandering monster check, with a 10% chance of an encounter. On average, the characters can do ten things before they encounter a wandering monster.

This accomplishes two things: It puts time pressure on the players without needing to make every adventure a "stop the ritual" quest, and it also obviates the need to put arbitrary limits on resting in the dungeon. A short rest is 1 hour, which is six wandering monster checks. The characters have a decent chance of squeezing that rest in without having an encounter (I am considering changing short rests to 10 minutes, just to really juice those fighters, monks, and warlocks a bit). A long rest is 8 hours (and because of the one-long-rest-per-24-hours rule, the characters may need to wait around for a bit before they can actually start the rest). That is, at minimum, 48 wandering monster checks. Long resting inside the dungeon is an exercise in frustration, at best.

By comparison, in the wilderness, encounter checks are made every four hours, so resting outside the dungeon is a much safer bet. Okay, so the characters just leave the dungeon to rest after every fight. The problem is still there.

I fixed this by checking for wandering monsters every time the characters reenter a room they've already been through. If the characters have to backtrack through ten rooms to leave the dungeon, they will probably have an encounter on their way out. Then, they will probably have another on their way back in. I justify this by telling myself that monsters are more likely to be patrolling areas where the party has already caused a ruckus or are known to be using for ingress and egress. It also rewards the players for finding additional entrances and exits to/from the dungeon which allow them to go in and out without passing through as many rooms.

I've gone back and forth on whether or not wandering monsters should be drawn from the dungeon's key or should materialize out of thin air. I am inclined towards the latter because if wandering monsters are taken from the key, it actually becomes beneficial to run into them. If there are 20 goblins in one room, and the party randomly encounters half of them wandering the dungeon, they've now split the single difficult encounter into two easier ones purely by chance, due to a mechanic that is intended to be a disincentive.

I like wandering monsters that materialize from the dungeon itself because I like a mythic, otherworldly dungeon. I like to fill my dungeons with supernatural creatures like elementals, fiends, oozes, and undead - monsters that be conjured, seep through cracks in the floor, or manifest from the shadows themselves. I don't really have to justify it because the characters haven't explored the whole dungeon yet - the players don't know what's all in it, so they have no way of knowing where the monsters are coming from. If a specific type of monster has a lair in the dungeon, I'll cross them off the wandering monster table once they've been defeated in their lair, allowing player characters to eliminate threats as they progress.

Okay, so the characters fought through ten rooms in the dungeon. Let's say two rooms had preplanned encounters (medium and deadly), and the characters encountered a wandering monster while exploring (hard). They decide to rest, and leave the dungeon the way they came, having another encounter (medium) on their way out. Assuming they are our aforementioned 5 1st-level characters with a daily budget of 1,500 XP, that gets us to 1,375 XP (250 x 2 = 500, + 375 + 500 = 1,375). Not 1,500, but very close - some delves will be easier and some will be harder (and remember, not all of the encounters will be with hostile monsters, and characters have abilities which allow them to avoid combat with hostile monsters, so players can still pick and choose their fights, and often expend resources when doing so).

While They're Sleeping

The characters have made it out of the dungeon and get to rest. They might have two to four wilderness encounter checks while making camp and resting - depending on the terrain, they will have fewer or more checks with a lesser or greater chance of having an encounter. They go back into the dungeon the way they went the previous day and maybe have one wandering encounter. So what? They cleared out a bunch of rooms the day before. The dungeon is easier now.

But it isn't, necessarily, because the dungeon and its denizens do things while the characters are away. There's plenty of commentary and differing philosophies about restocking dungeons. Generally, it's most common in old school play, where dungeons are tentpole megaplexes intended to support entire campaigns on their own. However, I've found that restocking works plenty well in 5e and with smaller dungeons. 

Now, restocking makes a lot more sense in editions of D&D where natural healing occurs much more slowly. If the characters spend a week recovering in town, it's understandable that the dungeon would change - if they spend just a day camping directly outside, not so much. This is another decent argument for the "gritty realism" rest variant, but again, I like my dungeons to be filled with supernatural creatures that can magically materialize at a moment's notice, so the sudden repopulation of monsters doesn't bother me.

I already linked some pretty well-considered ways of restocking, but I like to keep it simple - basically, every room the characters have "cleared" has a 10% chance of being restocked, usually with monsters, but sometimes with traps (it is almost always something bad, because the point is to introduce some new challenge into the cleared space, unless the characters have allowed some friendly faction to move in). The new monsters are drawn from the wandering monster table, excluding those monsters whose lair within the dungeon has already been cleared.

Using the aforementioned example of ten cleared rooms, on average, one would be repopulated. The characters are still making progress through the dungeon, but now on their way back in, they are probably dealing with one wandering monster and one restocked room. Then, they still have to deal with the rest of the dungeon, which they haven't touched yet.

There are also more common sense ways of restocking - if the remaining monsters are aware of the characters' initial foray, they may move around to different areas, set traps, make common cause with other monsters, and the like. I like to be surprised as a DM, so I randomize all of this and try to create a fictional justification for it after the fact.

I personally prefer not to award XP for defeating wandering monsters and restocked monsters, because both are intended to be avoided. Between wandering monsters, restocked rooms, the time-consuming nature of combat in D&D, and little to no XP being gained, this probably sounds like unnecessary cruelty and a big hassle for the players, and in a way, it is. 

By encountering these monsters, the players have already failed at the challenge, which was to use their time efficiently and avoid doing extra work. If the players are getting unlucky on the die rolls and end up dealing with a bunch of extra encounters, I might throw them a bone, but the bulk of XP is for clearing the dungeon, not clearing it again because they didn't go far enough the first time. I'm always very clear with the players: "This is when I'm checking for wandering monsters" and "If you want to leave, you might want to try to find a shortcut out first" and "If you leave now and rest, there might be more monsters when you come back".

The trick is this: if I want to (and I don't always want to), I can decide how many "days" I want the characters to have to spend in the dungeon before "clearing" it. If it's meant to be a small dungeon, it will probably have an adventuring day's worth of challenges. If it's a three-level dungeon, it will probably have three adventuring days' worth of challenges (one per level). 

The point is for the characters to push themselves, and for the players to feel motivated to get a full "day" in. After they "clear" a level, maybe that level is safe enough to rest on, and won't be restocked. I'll say "Hey, you cleared this area. It's safe if you want to rest before pushing on." The players are rewarded for actually pushing themselves to complete a full day of adventuring, and for clearing the dungeon efficiently. If they dilly dally too long or backtrack for breaks too often, they're only hurting themselves by having unnecessary encounters.

Again, I don't always abide by this by-the-numbers, balancing act approach to adventure design, but I do think it's helpful to understand the concept of challenge by attrition and the unit of measure that is the adventuring day. A little time pressure goes a long way towards pushing the players to play the game the way it was designed, and it turns out that when they play it that way, it works pretty well.

Can't Someone Else Do This?

I'm currently catching up on Blogs on Tape's backlog of excellent, well...blogs on tape. I haven't always been super tuned-in to the blogosphere, so there's plenty of quality stuff I've missed. I'm grateful for Blogs on Tape for giving me the opportunity to catch up on what I've missed (and reexperience old favorites) while I'm driving, cooking, playing Mariokart, etc.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the reading of Nick LS Whelan's Questgivers are Evil from his Paper and Pencils blog. In this post, Nick writes:

Your PCs are not an army, they’re a handful of dudes with weapons who are willing to kill stuff for money. Who hires people like that?

People who want you to do some bad shit. People who want to deny knowledge of something. People who want to blame “those outsiders.”

In other words, questgivers are evil.

There is pretty much NEVER going to be a long chain of dudes who want to hold your hand while you become an icon of heroic heroism and noble nobility, all while making sure your endeavors remain profitable.

Accepting a quest should mean that you’re about to do some shady ass shit that will probably hurt some good people.

I really like this conclusion. It doesn't make a lot of sense that people (whether they be commoners, nobility, or the merchant class) would turn to crazy, heavily armed outsider mercenary warriors and mysterious sorcerers to solve their local problems. Commoners would expect their rulers to protect them. The nobility presumably have some sworn vassals or other means of asserting their authority, which they would also use to keep the goblins away from the homesteads at night. The merchant class's resources are more limited, but they would likely appeal to the authorities with their problems as well, rather than turn to unknown elements.

I don't necessarily think that questgivers should be Evil. I like to occasionally sprinkle an Evil questgiver into my campaigns. A wizard who offers boatloads of gold to any adventurers willing to butcher a nest of pegasi and steal their eggs for his weird experiments offers a hook for Evil characters, a dilemma for Neutral ones, and an inverse hook for Good ones - "We have to take out that wizard!" The occasional questgiver who willfully gets the player characters into trouble to accomplish their own insidious ends adds some spice to an otherwise textbook campaign - but only if used sparingly.

If all questgivers are Evil (or at least, all the ones offering money are), then players might simply stop doing quests (at least, not for the gold). This might be a good thing, as the players will learn to start doing things out of the Goodness of their hearts, rather than due to the lightness of their purses, and their characters will become true heroes in so doing. Alternatively, they can dance with the devil, getting in trouble from one settlement to the next, suspecting every patron of ulterior motives, getting the gold, burning bridges, and escaping just before the other shoe drops.

That does actually sound kind of fun. D&D should be more like a picaresque - the player characters are Cugel the Clever or Larry David-like protagonists (not heroes), who do things for their own benefit, alienating others and either getting their comeuppance or causing some hapless associate to take the blame instead. But that's not what I'm arguing for here.

What I'm coming to find that I prefer in my own games is instead this: the authorities - or those in power in the setting - are either Evil, incompetent, indifferent, or powerless. People in these tight-knit communities turn to strangers for help because their rulers or would-be protectors either actively prey upon them, approach the communities' problems ineffectively, don't care about them, or lack the means to address them directly.

Perhaps the rulers are Evil, motivated solely by greed or domination. Maybe the government, as it exists, is in a state of decline or negligent decadence. The bureaucracy functions poorly or not at all. The rulers are not interested in doing good work or getting things done. Their hands are tied by distant wars. Their ideology is one of self-reliance and hands-off rulership. The government is physically far away and unable to project power - which works especially well in a typical "frontier" campaign setting.

This also solves the issue that I refer to as "exceptional individual demographics". Surely, the 1st-level player characters are not the only exceptional individuals in the setting, or else where do replacement player characters and henchmen come from? Who trained the fighter, tutored the wizard, or initiated the cleric? Who rules the strongholds, churches, and thieves' guilds? My general rule is that 1% of people in the setting are such individuals with class levels. Most of them are low level, but 5% are very high level. Why don't these people solve the setting's problems?

Because they're Evil, or indifferent (it would probably be wrong to characterize 20th-level NPCs as incompetent or powerless). They may have bigger fish to fry or they may simply not care.

The crux of the issue is that the local power structure - and powerful individuals in the setting - are flawed in some critical way, unable or unwilling to affect change or help regular people. This allows for a variety of scenario set ups. The government and powerful NPCs may be antagonists, or allies with limited accessibility/utility. They may be accustomed to employing mercenaries and regularly post rewards for work that needs doing. The merchant class may be the ones driving progress, or communities may pool resources to attract entrepreneurial adventurer types. 

Of course, on occasion the questgiver is or should be Evil, but it is this general, dominating zeitgeist of anarchy, indifference, or self-interest which allows those Evildoers to flourish, and to recruit stooges (the player characters and/or their rivals and enemies) to do their dirty work and to take the fall.

When the Players Don't Care

Sometimes, the players just don't care to do something. They may have other priorities, the quest may not sound interesting to them, the reward may not be compelling enough, the patron may be too suspicious, or the players may simply be too afraid to fight the dragon. This is totally fine. The game is about players making choices, and while those choices should always have consequences, it's not exactly fun gaming for the fictional player characters and the setting to be punished over and over again because the real-world players simply weren't interested in the hook. 

Some hooks land with some groups, players, and characters, and some don't. It's why I throw out as many hooks as I can reasonably prep scenarios for. Eventually, something will interest them, and I can prep the next volley of hooks while they're busy pursuing the one they're currently invested in.

But what happens to the other scenarios? I just said that the powers-that-be in the setting are unwilling or unable to do anything about these problems, so don't they just get worse?

Maybe. The players have chosen to leave it to fate. I like to use a simple 2d6 roll to determine what happens when a scenario is neglected:

• On a 2 or 3, the worst possible thing has happened. Another group of adventurers or the local ruler has finally gotten around to intervening, with disastrous results. The source of the problem has triumphed and strengthened, and is retaliating in some way. If the local power structure is Evil, perhaps they have resolved the scenario in a way which strengthens them instead. The Evil sorcerer-king has aligned with the orc warband and is now using them to enact their next nefarious scheme.
• On a 4 or 5, a setback has occurred. Someone tried to do something about the problem and failed, and now the problem is worse in some minor way. Adventurers tried to defeat the necromancer, but died, and now the necromancer's dungeon is more dangerous (guarded by the reanimated corpses of said adventurers). The goblins are emboldened by their victory, and now are raiding homesteads closer to the local settlement.
• On a 6, 7, or 8, the status quo is maintained. No meaningful action has been taken towards resolving the scenario.
• On 9 or 10, something good has happened. The local rulers have finally gotten around to sending soldiers to guard the town against the nearby gnoll stronghold, or, another group of adventurers made a foray against the gnolls and managed to clear out a few rooms before retreating. The scenario is now easier, should the players choose to pursue it.
• On an 11 or 12, the problem has been resolved in the best possible way for the setting (though this might not benefit the characters). A rival band of adventurers have solved the problem, and are hailed as heroes. The player characters have to listen to everyone constantly talk about how brave and strong these other heroes are.