r/osr•
HainenOPRP

Time pressure/tension for dungeon delving?

theory

Hey everyone.

I recently ran across this video (not OSR-specific) which described my own experiences pretty well from a multitude of games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MICPH0it_Fo

In my current campaign of forbidden lands, which is osr-adjacent, an issue i keep running into is the external time pressure. Basically the players are very good at wilderness survival, so they reach a dungeon, then delve down for a bit until they run low on resources, then retreat to the surface and spend a day or two hunting, foraging, resting, getting firewood and crafting torches. Without interventions on my part, they could do that indefinitely.

This leads to a kind of low-stakes, low-risk, slow-paced dungeon delve where they nope out at the first sign of trouble and come back with full health. Dungeons take forever and dont really have any tension.

There are obviously solutions here, like putting a clock on the entire dungeon (making it sink/collapse over time etc), or restricting their resource gathering abilities on the surface, but I figured this ought to be a common enough problem in campaigns. Does it pop up for you and how do you handle it, or is this just a FL problem because of the wilderness survival skills?

Posted Mar 10, 2026, 11:40 AM UTC

2042
Loading comments…