To be nice, I’m not going to do a TPK (I considered it briefly), and I don’t think I’m going to do something that guarantees the death of one or two of them either (which I really considered). I think I’ll give them a chance to relocate. An invisible spy will probably be caught by their rouge (who never requires sleep because of his race), and perhaps killed. I’ll have something about it tip them off that much much worse is coming and they are not safe.

Unless I can just come up with a reason why they didn’t get ambushed and slaughtered… (My DM’ing style is that there must be a reason behind everything.)

Lastly, I would like to say that it would be nice if magic worked in a way where it was “by encounter”. Or just required a “decent bit of time to rejuvenate”. The trade off would probably be less spell slots. 4th edition may have fixed it, but I’m not a big fan of 4e so far.

Huh, I’m missing the issue. Supposing the players are in an area of the dungeon that is suited for their current level. Then the badies that get ‘regenerated’ or healed will also be appropriate for their level.

Actually I think this ‘problem’ only results from skimping on the part of the DM and short cutting all the rules about sleeping and armor. Unless your players just wander around in dungeons AT RANDOM and kill shit (which is a bad game anyway) they usually descend into dungeons to accomplish specific goals and often there is some intelligence or group opposing them. If the players are smart enough to barricade themselves in a room the baddies should be smart enough to attack them in the middle of the night or lay an ambush for them outside the door.

If the baddies come busting through the door and you make all the fighters in the party take the full time to done their plate mail (complete with attacks of opportunity) and the like your players will learn fast that sleeping in dungeons is a bad idea (if they make it out alive). At the very least this will force the players to use some pretty hardcore magic to keep themselves safe mitigating the value of resting and relearning spells.

But even if they make it through the night the players should run into an ambush in the next room. Given the harms of being flat footed and suffering through a surprise rain of poisoned arrows before being rushed by a *larger* body of baddies should make the dangers of sleeping in dungeons clear.

Moreover, if you are careful about keeping track of provisions the players will have to lug carts around to carry drinking water around with them. Of course they could just try and find water in the dungeon but that carries with it more risks (clever baddie might poision them).

@Thorin

What does that even mean? Taken literally it actually seems to suggest that if you cast a spell before going to bed you can’t relearn that until the next evening but this seems to be contradicted by the examples in the PHB.

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To clarify my earlier point I meant that unopposed barricading themselves in the dungeon makes for a bad game. I don’t think players ought to be punished for it, the situation should just be roleplayed and the players should suffer from all the risks that would reasonably occur. There is a host of spells in the PHB designed just to protect players while holing up and players should be allowed to make full use of them. However, the reason the spells are there is because of the risk that this tactic carries.

Alternately, if there isn’t a lot of backtracking then there won’t be many extra encounters…until they complete the adventure and have to fight their way out. Which is anticlimactic, and leaves 3rd level characters facing L2 and then L1 threats, even more anticlimactic. Or worse yet, there isn’t really any backtracking and the last encounter has an alternate exit, so there is zero backtracking. The repopulated dungeon has no effect.

None of that means I have an answer. So far the best I have done is wondering monster once got a party to move on, and once the party abandoned a strategically valuable space after killing the guards, so extra guards were posted, they were extra alert, and there was a trap of sorts. Nothing that has really made a strong impact.

“Like other spellcasters, a wizard can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. Her base daily spell allotment is given on Table: The Wizard. In addition, she receives bonus spells per day if she has a high Intelligence score.”

It very clearly states that the spell slots listed on the table are how many are available per day. Doesn’t matter if you get a power nap in the middle of the day, if you’ve used up your slots they’re gone.

Remember, only a cruel DM would let townspeople flood the dungeon. ;)

Storm

Also I don’t like most of the heavy handed solutions here. Saying the party can’t rest because of noises or can’t get to sleep again are unfair and ineffective. They are unfair because surely any adventuring wizard should already know whether insomnia is going to cause him problems. They are ineffective because a reasonably smart wizard will just learn a sleep/quite cantrip or buy some light sleep aids.

The real problem here is the stupidity of the sleep to relearn spells system. Still if you don’t want to tear that out having dungeon creatures come to bother the party seems like a fair solution. In fact anytime the party is resting and healing up the monsters should be doing so as well. Any other solution will just run into huge trouble with the various spells letting players rest in pocket dimensions

In short I don’t like it when the party is punished for taking the game seriously and being clever. It’s the DM’s responsibility to make sure sleeping in dungeons isn’t a good strategy in his world not the player’s responsibility not to use it.