D&D was strategically built around the expedition. In its most basic form, your group gathers its resources, journeys into the unknown, and attempts to maximize the treasure they can gain for the resources you’ve invested. If you plan your expedition carefully and execute it well, you’ll return home with riches.
At low levels, these expeditions generally descended into dungeons. At mid-levels, funded by resources from the dungeon, more complicated expeditions would be mounted into the wilderness, with commensurately larger rewards. The resources thus gained, at high level, could be used to clear the wilderness and found baronies or establish churches.
The game has long since evolved to support many more styles of play than this three-tier expedition structure, but its DNA remains deeply embedded in D&D’s mechanics.
A dungeon expedition, for example, is largely about managing a pool of daily resources: Once you’ve expended those resources (spells, hit points, etc.), it’s usually time to withdraw from the dungeon and regroup for your next expedition. Many of these resources, of course, were baked into the class and level of player characters, and most of them are still there today.
The drawback of leaving the dungeon to regroup, of course, is that you’re back at the entrance, and your next daily expedition will have to start over from the beginning. While you were gone, the bad guys will have reoccupied rooms, reset traps, raised new defensive barricades, and generally made it difficult for you to get back to where you were and continue your exploration.
(Or, worse yet, they might just pack up and leave, taking with them whatever you were there to obtain in the first place.)
In other words, it’s going to raise the costs of your next expedition, which will result in it being less profitable.
So even today, whether you’re in the dungeon to liberate treasure or not, it can be very tempting to skip the withdrawal and stay in the dungeon while resting to recover your pool of daily resources. If you can pull it off, you can avoid some or all of the costs of leaving the dungeon and then working your way back to where you are.
Now this is the point where many DMs – particularly new DMs – make a mistake: Their dungeons are static and reactive. In other words, the challenging content of each dungeon room simply waits for the PCs to enter the room. Furthermore, when a dungeon room is emptied by the PCs, it simply remains empty instead of being restocked.
The result is that there is no challenge to resting in the dungeon, and rarely any cost for leaving and then returning.
This breaks the expedition cycle at the heart of D&D’s mechanics. Instead of needing to carefully budget and strategically employ your pool of resources, you can instead simply burn through them as quickly as possible, automatically rest to regain them without consequence, and then do it again. (This is sometimes referred to as the 15-minute adventuring day or the nova cycle.)
In 5th Edition the cycle of daily resources has been disrupted somewhat through the short rest mechanic, allowing PCs to regain some of what would have previously been daily resources with just an hour of rest instead of eight hours of rest. This can alleviate some of the narrative oddity of the literal 15 minute adventuring day (because after a short rest, the PCs can continue accomplishing things in the same day), but structurally and in terms of mechanical balance, you’re still looking at many of the problems of the nova cycle. In fact, in some cases they can be worse, because it’s far easier to justify being able to catch your breath for an hour than it is to take a break for twenty-four hours.
ACTIVE DUNGEONS
So you’re the Dungeon Master. What can you do about all this?
Well, the first thing is to make sure that there’s a cost to leaving the dungeon to rest. The way to do that is by having the dungeon actively respond to the PCs.
An adversary roster can make it much easier for bad guys to actively respond to PCs. It also makes it very easy to redistribute them into new defensive positions if the PCs retreat and give them time to prepare for their return.
Other restocking procedures, which will refill previously cleared rooms with new adversaries, are also possible.
Beyond that, you really just need to think about what the NPCs would logically do in response to the PCs’ assault and then have them do that. There’s not really a big trick here: Your goal is to make it harder for the PCs to freely return to the dungeon, and that’s conveniently also what the bad guys are going to want.
Note: There are ninety umptillion exceptions to this, because there are any number of dungeon concepts which logically wouldn’t stage an active response to the PCs. That’s just fine. But you’ll probably want to design such dungeons with the nova cycle in mind (or provide some alternative explanation for why the PCs can’t freely rest, like a looming deadline).
RESTING IN A LAIR
A lair-type dungeon is one in which all of the inhabitants are part of the same organization or otherwise closely aligned with each other. (It might be the sewer lair of an organized crime family, a cavern complex swarming with goblins, or a fortified slavers’ compound.) If the PCs attempt a short rest within a lair-type dungeon, here’s a quick procedure you can use:
Is the compound on alert? Do the NPCs know that the PCs have infiltrated the dungeon or been killing them off? Then they’re probably actively looking for the threat. The PCs need to make a Stealth check opposed by the Wisdom (Perception) of the NPCs.
Give advantage and disadvantage for the check appropriately. (If they made some efforts to identify an out-of-the-way portion of the dungeon or disguise their presence, it’s probably a standard check. If they just closed the door to a random room, they should probably have disadvantage. Did they not even bother to close the door? The bad guys find them. You can’t succeed at hiding if you don’t even try.)
If the NPCs don’t find the PCs, they may assume that the PCs left. They’ll spend the rest of the hour calling for reinforcements, raising barricades, or getting ready to pack up and leave (depending on the situation).
If the compound is not on alert, make a random encounter check. 1 in 6 chance if the PCs closed the door, so to speak; 2 in 6 if they didn’t.
If an encounter is triggered and the PCs set a watch, let them make appropriate checks to detect the approaching encounter before they’re spotted. (They may still be able to salvage the short rest if they take clever/decisive action, or if they’ve taken appropriate actions to disguise their presence beforehand.)
If the PCs left evidence of their presence, make an additional random encounter check for each area where they left evidence. If an encounter is indicated, the NPCs have discovered the evidence and the alarm is raised during the short rest. The NPCs will start looking for the PCs, but they’ll make their Wisdom (Perception) checks with disadvantage (since they’re only searching part of the time).
If the PCs took efforts to hide the evidence or clean up after themselves, use an Intelligence (Stealth) check to see if the NPCs actually spot the evidence on an indicated encounter.
Note: Similar techniques can be used if the PCs fully retreat from a dungeon without raising the alarm to determine whether or not evidence of their trespass is discovered after they leave (which could result in pursuit and/or defensive preparations being made).
RESTING IN A MEGADUNGEON
A megadungeon, or any larger dungeon featuring multiple distinct factions, should be broken into zones, with each zone corresponding to territory controlled by one of the factions. These zones can be prepped ahead of time, but this is not strictly necessary: It’s usually pretty easy to eyeball what faction’s territory the PCs are currently in.
Each zone is simply resolved using the procedures for a lair-type dungeon, above.
No Man’s Land: In large dungeons like this, there may be abandoned sections which are not claimed by any faction. It’s also possible that the PCs might clear a zone (by wiping out the faction that lairs there). It’s much safer for the PCs to rest in such locations; even if the alarm is raised elsewhere, factions will generally focus on searching and securing their own areas of the dungeon, rather than venturing out into uninhabited regions. (An exception might be made if the PCs have really pissed somebody off and can be directly tracked to their new location.)
Make a single encounter check at a much reduced rate (1 in 20 if they’ve taken reasonably precautions; 2 in 20 if they haven’t), with a successful check indicating creature(s) from a nearby zone have unluckily entered the area and threatened the PCs’ rest.
It’s not necessary to make checks in such areas to see if evidence left by the PCs has been noticed, although you might make a similar check at a reduced rate (1 in 20) to see if a nearby faction has noticed that the a zone has been recently cleared. (This may also be indicated through general restocking procedures.)
LONG RESTS IN THE DUNGEON
If the PCs attempt a long rest in the dungeon, simply repeat the procedures listed above eight times (once per hour).
This does make it extremely likely that their rest will be interrupted, unless they’ve made a concerted effort to find a truly safe location AND taken precautions to avoid detection even if foes draw near. This is, of course, quite intentional: Dungeons are dangerous places, and if the PCs want to reap the rewards of pulling off a successful long rest in the middle of a delve, they’ll need to earn it.
We play mostly 3.5 and we always, always respect the dungeon using a rope trick to rest. Extended if we are low level.
Justin,
This is excellent advice, and something I’ve often griped about with regards to modern adventure design. There’s the assumption that the PCs wander from room-to-room while the monsters stand about idly, awaiting the inevitable slaughter to come. Make the dungeons come alive with wandering encounter checks, make them deadly, make them profoundly hostile locales that make the PCs think about the logistics of dungeon delving.
Another great post with solid advice.
Love this advice. However, I have one particular player who seems to take it personally if the party’s rests are interrupted. In other words, she feels entitled to recoup her expended resources basically at will, and thinks the nova cycle should be taken for granted. I’m not trying to run a grimdark/full-on gritty realistic campaign, but it’s also hard to balance encounters in 5e when resource scarcity isn’t a concern.
Maybe this is a different topic, but I’d be grateful for your feedback.
@Stevil: This can actually be one advantage of having a procedure — rather than simply GM fiat — to determine if the bad guys discover the PCs’ camp. It takes some or all of the responsibility for an interrupted rest away from the GM and places it on the PCs: You want to have an uninterrupted rest in the dungeon? Then you need to take the actions necessary to mitigate that risk and make that happen.
You can literally make the procedure player-known (by explaining exactly how you’re resolving this), but just making sure that the procedure is being cued mechanically and diegetically will generally clue-in most players: He asked us to make a Stealth check = we should take more effort to hide our camp. “Without a guard set, you awake to discover orcs have…” = we should set a watch. And so forth.
>Now this is the point where many DMs – particularly new DMs – make a mistake: Their dungeons are static and reactive. In other words, the challenging content of each dungeon room simply waits for the PCs to enter the room.
I feel one of the big reasons for this is encounter math. I as a DM wanted to bring about more fluidity when it came to Dungeons but I came to the realisation that by doing so you created what was a generally ok combat encounter to a really deadly one very easily.
I struggled as a GM to find a way to have a more fictional thing happening, as the encounter rules and maths and wanting to be “fair” to the players always got in the way. It essentially forced me into making single rooms that would not be affected by anything else.
Great write up, with some excellent advice! I wanted to share something that I use for a party that *loves* to cast Leomund’s Tiny Hut whenever they rest, no matter what. Many players will assume that they’re entirely safe in the hut, since the spell states that it stops creatures, objects, or spells from passing through the walls. But, since it also appears from the outside as a mysterious opaque dome that certainly wasn’t there before, I like to have curious patrols leave someone to observe this strange intruder in their territory. If they have enough bodies to spare, they may even set an ambush for whatever emerges from the strange dome.
> the first thing is to make sure that there’s a cost to leaving the dungeon
> stay in the dungeon while resting to recover your pool of daily resources can avoid some or all of the costs of leaving the dungeon and then working your way back to where you are.
> Similar techniques can be used if the PCs fully retreat from a dungeon without raising the alarm to determine whether or not evidence of their trespass is discovered after they leave (which could result in pursuit and/or defensive preparations being made).
Uh…?
The NPCs do the same things regardless of whether the PCs are still in the dungeon or not. So…there’s no reason for any PCs to ever rest in the dungeon, then? There’s no cost to leaving the dungeon that you can avoid?
This is as baffling as Mike Mearls replacing cold resistance with bonuses for getting hit with cold-based attacks.
Your goal is to get players to rest inside the dungeon, instead of walking a few miles in any direction. Right?
I don’t know why that’s your goal. But that’s apparently your goal.
So you provide a bunch of rolls to make to determine the NPCs’ actions. But absolutely none of those rolls have better results if the PCs stay in the dungeon rather than leave. So this doesn’t achieve your goal of encouraging players to rest inside the dungeon.
To be honest, your goal is pretty confusing to me in the first place.
Thought experiment: imagine you found yourself with a full slate of tabula-rasa players who had never played video games and never played D&D before.
They would never rest in the dungeon. They would never even think of it. Because only a crazy person would think to try that. Which isn’t to say that similar “hiding right under their nose” things don’t happen in fiction, but usually only comedically, and always framed as “the bad guys would never believe anyone would be crazy enough to actually try this.”
Pretty much every published dungeon is small enough that if the NPCs suspect someone is in the dungeon in the first place (because some of their people have come down with a case of being dead), it takes less than ten minutes to look in literally every room.
If the PCs attempt to rest via the ordinary common-sense method of leaving the enemy stronghold and walking a few miles in any direction, then fundamentally the questions of stealth, detection and ambush are the same…but the dramatic question is “Do the PCs successfully hide their trail, or do the goblins’ wolves track them down?” instead of “Are the goblins too stupid to remember how to open doors?”
(Well, for my own part I usually give the first incursion as a freebie if the goblins weren’t expecting murderhobos, on the grounds that when someone kills a bunch of your people and disappears, it’s not obvious that it wasn’t simply a one-off grab-whatever-you-can raid. But that’s getting into the weeds.)
Given that, why would you want resting inside the dungeon to be a thing?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/oy7WA488B_E?start=75&end=124
Maybe once in a great while you’d have an entire party so stealth-focused that they’d show off by hiding in the rafters just for giggles, but it seems like for a typical party you could just have resting inside the dungeon…not be a thing.
(Some spells can make it marginally less doomed to rest inside the dungeon, but you’d still be vastly better off casting the same spells anywhere besides the bad guys’ kitchen.)
Encampent wrote: “Your goal is to get players to rest inside the dungeon, instead of walking a few miles in any direction. Right?”
No.
You have critically failed your reading comprehension check.
@Encampment: Leaving the dungeon means giving up the progress you’ve already made *into* the dungeon. If the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, returning to where they left off isn’t just a stroll in the park. For that matter, getting *out* of the dungeon may not be a stroll in the park.
I think that Justin’s goal is to ensure that neither option is transparently the “correct” one, but rather that each comes with pro and cons which have to be weighed by the players. Resting in the dungeon is much riskier, but it saves the party from having to spend time and resources retreading the same ground they’ve already covered.
Also, I don’t think anybody would suggest that camping out in the bad guys’ kitchen is a good idea. More like camping out in their attic, or their disused storage room.
Also, if you think every published dungeon can be searched in ten minutes, I have to wonder how many published dungeons you’ve actually seen. Pretty sure you couldn’t do that with Rappan Athuk, or the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, for instance.
@Wyvern
> I think that Justin’s goal is to ensure that neither option is transparently the “correct” one, but rather that each comes with pro and cons which have to be weighed by the players.
Well, that is also what I took to be the article’s goal. (That was why I got confused, since none of the suggested mechanics move in the direction of that goal.) Justin later commented to say that no, that wasn’t the goal at all, but did not elaborate, so…I dunno. But in any case, you have some interesting ideas in the direction of that goal.
> If the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, returning to where they left off isn’t just a stroll in the park.
If the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, getting back to their previous physical location is usually valueless anyway. If the Black Prince launches a successful incursion into French territory followed by a successful retreat…why would you want to go to the same place again, you know? But okay, assume that in context there’s a reason you do want to get back to the same place. You got to the kitchen, and you don’t want to have to fight your way back to the kitchen. Resting inside the dungeon still won’t get you that, because you won’t camp out in the kitchen, you’ll abandon the kitchen to go hide in their attic or their disused storage room.
Given that you’re hiding in their disused storage room, the only way you can benefit from doing so is if, when the bad guys “have reoccupied rooms, reset traps, raised new defensive barricades”, they leave holes in their defenses in the specific direction of the disused storage room. So they have a storage room that they know exists, know they don’t use, know they haven’t cleared, but nevertheless treat as part of their cleared safe zone. That’s obviously not impossible, but that’s an extremely specific mistake that you’re relying on them to make.
> If the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, getting *out* of the dungeon may not be a stroll in the park.
Now that is a fascinating idea.
To be clear, I’m pretty sure what you’re talking about there is quite different from whatever Justin was talking about, since the article says that staying in the dungeon is meant to be a way to prevent bad guys from reoccupying rooms, resetting traps, and/or raising new defensive barricades.
> The drawback of leaving the dungeon to regroup, of course, is that you’re back at the entrance, and your next daily expedition will have to start over from the beginning. While you were gone, the bad guys will have reoccupied rooms, reset traps, raised new defensive barricades, and generally made it difficult for you to get back to where you were and continue your exploration.
> stay in the dungeon while resting to recover your pool of daily resources can avoid some or all of the costs [above] of leaving the dungeon and then working your way back to where you are.
What you’re talking about is coming at it from the opposite direction: literally getting out of the dungeon is a challenge of its own.
Hmm. Staying in the dungeon has obvious and severe downsides, but if getting out is hard enough, then getting out might not be worth it. Can you point to a specific example? I can’t really picture it. It seems like that would require the players to be very slow or the guards to be very quick to act, or for those quick-acting guards to know someone is there, yet be unable to find them, because they closed the door to the disused storage room. That seems…weird. Or…well, I can certainly think of a lot of very dumb things that players could do to wander gormlessly into a place they can’t escape, but if we’re assuming players will do dumb things then it seems pointless to try to provide balanced choices where e.g. neither leaving the dungeon nor staying is obviously dumb.
Like…the other bad guys didn’t respond to the original sounds of combat. But after the PCs move away from the entrance, within a few minutes, the other bad guys show up at the entrance? Just…by coincidence? I guess they could have regular check-ins for this exact purpose, but that raises awkward questions of why they were *that* well-organized but not well-organized enough to actually reinforce the entrance when it was attacked.
> Rappan Athuk, or the Dungeon of the Mad Mage
That’s a fair enough point that megadungeons exist and I shouldn’t have said “pretty much every”, but in context lair-type dungeons were specifically treated *in contrast to* megadungeons. I’m talking about “RESTING IN A LAIR”, not “RESTING IN A MEGADUNGEON”.
To be conrete, consider, say, the Dungeon of the Dead Three. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44445/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus-part-3f-c-dungeon-of-the-dead-three-adversary-roster
It’s not a big place. The NPCs, unlike the PCs, already know the layout.
One obvious option for that specific dungeon is to split them up along ideological fault lines. Play up animosity between the factions to the point that the other two factions would not investigate if you roll in and butcher the third. But if you don’t do that, if you run it as a lair-type dungeon and have the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, then the PCs remaining inside the dungeon to rest seems goofy, and again, the more important point, even if they could pull it off, there would be no benefit to doing it.
@Wyvern
Actually, I’m getting lost in the weeds there. Probably more importantly, I have to ask you the same question I asked Justin back when I thought he had the same goal you do: why do you want resting inside the dungeon to be a thing?
> Thought experiment: imagine you found yourself with a full slate of tabula-rasa players who had never played video games and never played D&D before.
> They would never rest in the dungeon. They would never even think of it. Because only a crazy person would think to try that. Which isn’t to say that similar “hiding right under their nose” things don’t happen in fiction, but usually only comedically, and always framed as “the bad guys would never believe anyone would be crazy enough to actually try this.”
> Maybe once in a great while you’d have an entire party so stealth-focused that they’d show off by hiding in the rafters just for giggles, but it seems like for a typical party you could just have resting inside the dungeon…not be a thing.
It’s about tone. Sure, the players are allowed to have fun, and sometimes it’s fun to go “We’re hiding RIGHT UNDER THEIR NOSES!”
And you can get away with that. Sometimes. But if the players and their pet bear on a unicycle are routinely going into a room and closing the door and sleeping in the enemy’s house, to my way of thinking, it’s time to have an out-of-game conversation about tone and expectations.
> Remember The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Awful Movie? There is a scene during the escape from Goblin Town wherein Bilbo and the Bearded Extras end up on a bridge that collapses. They ride the bridge, like a rubber raft, as it tumbles down into a chasm that is, scientifically speaking, approximately one bajillion miles deep. Seriously. That fall goes on for a LONG time. And when it finally hits bottom on solid rock, the bridge is fine. The characters are fine. It’s fine.
> Now, I’ve seen movies where characters can fall long, LONG distances and end up totally fine. They are called cartoons. And they derive their emotional weight from the absurdity of the action. They are funny things. But The Hobbit was purporting to be an action adventure. I was supposed to care about the characters and worry about their lives. Later on, I was supposed to be afraid for them when they were cornered on the cliff by all the orcs and the wolves. But all I could do was wonder why they didn’t just jump off the cliff because Middle Earth has the most unforgiving gravity of any terrestrial planet ever.
> The cartoony physics of that scene – played for laughs – didn’t match the dramatic tone of the rest of the film.
https://theangrygm.com/tone-policing-sir-bearington/
Sleeping in the dungeon is just…silly.
> I don’t think anybody would suggest that camping out in the bad guys’ kitchen is a good idea. More like camping out in their attic, or their disused storage room.
This sentence sounds stranger and stranger to me the more times I read it. Like, I’m half-expecting you to come back and say “Hey, be fair, they’re not going to put the bear on a unicycle, and if they did they’d keep it well-oiled so it doesn’t squeak.” On the one hand, it is inarguably literally true that camping out in the attic is less risky than camping out in the kitchen. But it seems like you’re missing the forest for the trees. Camping out in the kitchen, or the attic, or any part of the bad guys’ house is just…silly. It’s not something that someone would do when they were taking the fictional world seriously.
Your idea of making it difficult to get out of the dungeon sounds promising. I’m sure with enough effort you could design an ant-lion-type dungeon that would make escape even riskier than sleeping in the dungeon, making it actually a sane choice to sleep in the dungeon. But why go to the trouble? Why would you want sleeping inside the dungeon to be a thing in the first place?
Like, in principle it’s theoretically better to have balanced choices where neither choice is obviously dumb. But I’m not sure that needs to extend to, say, having your sled pulled by rabbits instead of dogs, or sleeping inside the dungeon instead of walking a few miles in any direction. It kind of seems easier to find balanced choices elsewhere.
I suspect your difficulty here, given the house metaphors, is that you’re picturing a dungeon with, like, 6 rooms. That’s not the type of dungeon we’re talking about here.
It’s less “camping in an attic” and more “SEAL Team 5 taking a short rest while in hostile territory.”
Couple examples from adventure fiction off the top of my head:
– Luke, Han, and Chewie hanging out in the security room on the Death Star. (Luke eventually convinces them to go back to adventuring when he discovers Princess Leia is being held prisoner.)
– Sam and Frodo taking a short rest in Cirith Ungol (after Sam has rescued Frodo).
– John McClane, frequently in the first Die Hard movie.
The place where I’ve found this hard to execute is when the players find a space behind a secret door that’s been unvisited for centuries. (I’m running Dwimmermount, which has plenty of these.) There have been several long rests taken in the secret chapel of Caint, and as long as they’re even slightly cautious to not leave tracks as they approach it, having dungeon residents just happen to discover the secret door *now* is a bit too gamey.
@Justin Alexander
That is extremely helpful, thank you. Concrete dungeons to talk about, like the Death Star, are extremely helpful.
Do I understand you correctly, then, that these mechanics (“The PCs need to make a Stealth check opposed by the Wisdom (Perception) of the NPCs.” and so forth, and for that matter the discussion about “it can be very tempting to skip the withdrawal and stay in the dungeon while resting to recover your pool of daily resources. If you can pull it off, you can avoid some or all of the costs of leaving the dungeon and then working your way back to where you are.”) are intended to apply to the Death Star and not intended to apply to https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44434/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus-part-3f-a-dungeon-of-the-dead-three-design-notes , or https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44501/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus-part-3i-vanthampur-manor , or anything else in https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus ?
“If the dungeon’s inhabitants react dynamically to the party’s actions, getting back to their previous physical location is usually valueless anyway.”
Not at all. Suppose the party’s goal is at point X in the dungeon, and they got halfway there (let’s call it point A) before deciding that continuing without a rest would be too risky. If they leave the dungeon and camp out overnight, then when they return the next day, they have to fight their way *back* to point A in order to continue their quest. In the process, they’re probably going to spend almost as many resources as they did getting to point A the first time, which means they’re not going to be much better off than they were before. Unless the dungeon isn’t restocked, but in that case, backtracking 20 feet down the corridor and camping out in a room they’d already cleared is no more risky than traveling a few miles away from the dungeon.
“If the Black Prince launches a successful incursion into French territory followed by a successful retreat…why would you want to go to the same place again, you know?”
You’re assuming a “successful incursion”. If the party’s first foray into the dungeon accomplished their goal, then clearly there’s no reason to stick around. (Unless they’re exhausted, and they know that it’s going to be a hard fight getting back out.) But that’s not what we’re talking about. A better analogy would be WWI. Why didn’t the commanders say, “This trench is really wet and miserable and full of rats, and the enemy keeps shooting at us and spraying us with mustard gas. Wouldn’t it be more sensible if we all went back to HQ and rested up, and then came back tomorrow to continue fighting?”
“Resting inside the dungeon still won’t get you that, because you won’t camp out in the kitchen, you’ll abandon the kitchen to go hide in their attic or their disused storage room.”
That only matters if the kitchen itself is a position that must be held for some reason. The point isn’t that staying in one precise spot is vital, it’s that leaving the dungeon means you have to literally start over from square one.
“So they have a storage room that they know exists, know they don’t use, know they haven’t cleared, but nevertheless treat as part of their cleared safe zone.”
Haven’t you ever seen any movies where the heroes are infiltrating a building, and they manage to escape the notice of the guards by hiding out in a crawlspace or a janitor’s closet?
“… the article says that staying in the dungeon is meant to be a way to prevent bad guys from reoccupying rooms, resetting traps, and/or raising new defensive barricades.”
No, it doesn’t. The point of the bit you quoted isn’t that camping in the dungeon will *prevent* those things from happening, it’s that if those things *do* happen (which they logically should), it’ll make it harder to get back *into* the dungeon if you left.
In fact, the first line you quoted is the rebuttal to your entire argument, but you ignored it: “The drawback of leaving the dungeon to regroup, of course, is that you’re back at the entrance, and your next daily expedition will have to start over from the beginning.”
“What you’re talking about is coming at it from the opposite direction: literally getting out of the dungeon is a challenge of its own.”
That was only a tangential comment. My main point is that getting back *into* the dungeon isn’t as easy as you seem to think.
“Why do you want resting inside the dungeon to be a thing?”
I never said I did. I was only pointing out the reasons why *leaving* the dungeon isn’t the always-superior option that you make it out to be.
As to what Justin’s goal is, I think this sentence is crucial:
“The result is that there is no challenge to resting in the dungeon, and rarely any cost for leaving and then returning.”
In other words, the way many people run the game, there are no serious consequences to *either* camping in the dungeon *or* leaving and coming back, and this is a bad thing. The rest of the article is about how to *prevent* resting in the dungeon from being totally risk-free. (Maybe he needs to do a follow-up article about why it’s also not risk-free to leave and come back, since that point is clearly lost on you.)