It’s a problem: you give your PCs an objective, a goal, and they spend most of their time pursuing every side distraction they can think of. You need to get them focused on the task at hand, but how to do that? One way to help keep the PCs moving forward is to give them a time constraint—a deadline. If the PCs don’t accomplish their objective by an appointed time, something bad will happen (or something really good, if they do make it).
Deadlines can give your adventure a sense of urgency and help keep players on track, making them less likely to take unnecessary side-trips. But they can also push players too fast. With the threat of time looming over them, PCs will be more likely to rush through the adventure, perhaps missing necessary clues and information. It can also cause them to finish the adventure well before you were ready for them to, as the adventure you’d planned to last four weeks or so gets resolved the first night.
There are many ways to impose deadlines: the villains can give the PCs a specific one, as can the PCs’ employer, if they have one. The PCs can also stumble across the deadline during the course of investigating the adventure. Perhaps their research tells them that the evil cult will perform their next blood sacrifice at the summer solstice, or something like that. Note that deadlines don’t have to be specific date; they can also be a particular event, such as needing to find a lost child before an impending blizzard begins.
Before you give your PCs a deadline, you need to know what will happen if they meet the deadline, and what will happen if they don’t. You need these to be things that will really motivate the PCs: make the rewards for success extremely mouthwatering, or the consequences of failure truly awful. These need to be things your players will find compelling, otherwise your deadline may be greeted with a yawn. And you have to be ready to follow through with the consequences, for good or ill, or your players will never take another deadline seriously.
Even if the prepared adventure you’re using doesn’t have a deadline written into it, you can set one yourself. Figure out why your PCs would go on this adventure in the first place, then set a logical reason why it has to be completed with a particular time frame.
Not every adventure needs a deadline. In fact, this is a trick that’s easy to overuse. Deadlines are particularly appropriate for adventures that have real-world time limit, such as convention games that have to run in a specific span of time, such as four hours. Use them too often, especially for adventures that don’t really need it, and they lose their impact.
Jade
I’ve been gaming since August of 1980 when I crashed a D&D game at summer camp. Two weeks after that, I DM’ed a game for the first time. Since then, I’ve GM’ed everything from D&D to World of Darkness to Toon. Basically, if I can get my hands on it, I’ll try to run it. I’m a web designer and freelance writer by trade, and I’ve written articles for Inphobia (originally called White Wolf Magazine), Challenge, and Ars Magica’s supplement Medieval Tapestry. I also write two other blogs: Evil Machinations and On My Own Two Feet.
I completely agree that deadlines should not be used all the time. I remember making that mistake.
Excellent article! You make a great point about using deadlines judiciously, and the risks of the players rushing so much they miss the good/important stuff.
Even with the risks, deadlines appeal to me as a DM to combat that 5-minute workday nonsense. If I can establish a (literal?) drop-dead date, the players would be less inclined to taking extended rests every couple of minutes.
This is an equally fantastic article if you stumble across it at three in the morning and, in your dreary sleep/gaming deprived state, fail to make the distinction between player characters and personal computers. Damn stumble.