D&D 5E Where did the 6-8 encounter standard come from?

robus · Nov 14, 2017

Saelorn said:
If it's not reliable at high levels, then I have no reason to trust it at low levels. Given that I'm going to second guess everything anyway, it's easier to just ignore the guidelines and go with my intuition at every step along the way.

Absolutely an experienced DM with a regular group should definitely do that.

But would you do that if you were writing an adventure for other groups to use? Or if you were inexperienced yet wanting to develop original encounters for your own group?

In other words if you couldn't rely on your intuition what would you do?

Gadget · Nov 14, 2017

In regards to the 6-8 encounters per day being roughly necessary for intra-class balance, I remember hearing a suggestion once on these boards about letting any PC take a round's worth of actions to "focus" and gain the benefits of a short rest. Then a limit was placed on the number of "focus" events a PC could take per long rest, say two. This way short-rest focused classes did not feel as short changed by fewer number of encounter days, as they had the opportunity to 'recharge', even in the middle of combat (though with a cost). I wonder how that would work out; perhaps make the DM's job with managing the number of encounters per day easier. Or would it make it harder?

Nevvur · Nov 14, 2017

robus said:
Absolutely an experienced DM with a regular group should definitely do that.

But would you do that if you were writing an adventure for other groups to use? Or if you were inexperienced yet wanting to develop original encounters for your own group?

In other words if you couldn't rely on your intuition what would you do?

Regarding the inexperienced DM, I would dare to make mistakes and learn from them. There are just way too many variations in party and player makeup for a one size fits all approach to suggest there's a "right number of encounters" for a "typical adventuring day" for any particular group.

When it comes to furnishing adventures for public consumption, I agree that 6-8 encounters is a fair target. That number was derived from thousands of iterations played by thousands of groups, and thousands of groups is probably your target audience, so yeah, you probably want to aim for the middle. And you can safely release your publication to the public confident in the knowledge that a significant number of people who use it will modify the $%^ out of it to suit their tables, anyway.

Nevvur · Nov 14, 2017

@Blue

Citing 6-8 encounters as a class balancing act, how great do you think the actual disparity in effectiveness is between a short rester and long rester given a difference of 1 short rest? 2? I know there are many variables to consider, and whatever answer you or I can give ultimately amounts to wild conjecture, but I suspect it's not very great.

Certainly not greater than class imbalance resulting from issues unrelated to recovery rates.

Speaking from experience, I've never had a player complain about class imbalance caused by the frequency of rests, and this despite these facts: all my players embrace charop, every group has included a mixture of short and long resters, and I routinely run 2-4 hard/deadly encounters per adventuring day. After 3 years of DMing this way, if any of my players felt disserviced, it should have come up by now. They're vocal about other issues so it's not a matter of avoiding confrontation or whatever.

This is the evidence upon which I base my aforementioned suspicion. Whatever % difference in effectiveness exists simply isn't enough to raise a stink among my players, so it's not enough for me to treat 6-8 encounters as a meaningful number as it relates to class balance.

jgsugden · Nov 14, 2017

If it helps, many of us are actually *effectively* playing the 6 to 8 encounters per LR when we play 3 to 4 encounters per LR.

Why?

Because what people tend to drop out are the real easy combats the book suggests we add to the game. A lot of games have difficult and deadly encounters, but none of the easy ones. In those battles, PCs rarely use limited resources and often lose little or no hps. So, by dropping them out of the game, you're not changing balance perceptions much.

What you are doing is missing out on fun ways to challenge the party with threats that are not battles for survival, but instead are challenges n other ways. Can the third level PCs kill the 5 goblins before one of them escapes with the pouch? Can the 9th level PCs kill the fire elemental before it burns down the town hall? Can the PCs endure attacks from the townsfolk long enough to escape without having to kill one of them?

Oofta · Nov 14, 2017

I found in my games that if I don't follow the 6-8 encounters with 1-2 short rests, certain classes and builds felt quite overpowered, especially at medium-high levels. I felt like I had to throw deadly or harder encounters just to give them a challenge.

I switched over to the optional rules where a short rest is overnight and a long rest is several days (usually a week or so) and it "feels" more balanced. I was also able to throw more of a mix, some easy, some medium and some hard encounters.

YMMV of course. I feel like the slowed-down pacing works for me and better emulates several fiction tropes where everything is going fine and then the **** hits the fan and everybody is pushed to there limits for a few days.

The Crimson Binome · Nov 14, 2017

Nevvur said:
Citing 6-8 encounters as a class balancing act, how great do you think the actual disparity in effectiveness is between a short rester and long rester given a difference of 1 short rest? 2? I know there are many variables to consider, and whatever answer you or I can give ultimately amounts to wild conjecture, but I suspect it's not very great.

Just as an example, a level 7 wizard has four fireball slots and can recover another one during their first short rest, while a level 7 warlock has two fireball slots per short rest.

An ideal routine (two encounters, short rest, two encounters, short rest, two encounters, long rest) would let the wizard cast a fireball in every encounter up until the last one, at which point they are reduced to burning hands or thunderwave; a warlock in that same situation can cast a fireball in every encounter.

A variant routine (as above, but omitting the second short rest) would have no effect on the wizard, but it would reduce the warlock to cantrips for the last two encounters.

In terms of total contribution per day, the wizard looks to be right in the middle of the ideal warlock and the variant warlock. In practice, I think that warlock is going to be pretty sad for two entire combat encounters.

Rofel Wodring · Nov 14, 2017

The 6-8 encounters per short rest is stupid because very few stories in action-adventure fiction, even when they're doing Fighting Anime-style gauntlets, actually adheres to that guideline.

It's a basic genre emulation fail, so I'm not surprised that both hardcovers and actual published DDAL modules completely eschew it. You know, since they have to worry about things beyond some game designer's arbitrary benchmarks in order to get their paycheck.

Oofta · Nov 15, 2017

Rofel Wodring said:
The 6-8 encounters per short rest is stupid because very few stories in action-adventure fiction, even when they're doing Fighting Anime-style gauntlets, actually adheres to that guideline.

It's a basic genre emulation fail, so I'm not surprised that both hardcovers and actual published DDAL modules completely eschew it. You know, since they have to worry about things beyond some game designer's arbitrary benchmarks in order to get their paycheck.

So you've never read (off the top of my head) The Dresden Files? Watched a Die Hard movie?

guachi · Nov 15, 2017

Blue said:
I disagree with the conclusion. The reason that I use the 6-8 encounters is because there is a large amount of empirical evidence across a lot of tables that shows that this is the point the at-will, short-rest-recharge and long-rest-recharge classes balance against each other as well as common attrition tactics take a toll.

Fewer, harder encounters favor some classes more and disfavor other. Number one common element in "5e is easy mode" threads is that they don't do 6-8 encounters.

BTW, I'm not defending 6-8 encounters - I really enjoy 5e and it's by far my biggest complain about the system. I'm just saying that the reason the 6-8 gets talked about is because not only do they suggest it, but it holds up. Like as if they balanced against it.

Before I read 30 other comments I want to say ^^^THIS^^^.

It sucks being that guy who runs off of short rests (or not rests like the Rogue) for your abilities and have a stream of one combat Adventuring Days like I've encountered with the random encounters in ToA. I was that guy, the fighter, and the three full casters in the party were awesome, but I felt overshadowed for encounter after encounter. They didn't need to spend any spells on healing (Bard, Druid, Cleric) and could spend all their slots on other spells.

We are level five now and we've had exactly one Adventuring Day with one short rest since I hit level three and got my Battle Master Maneuvers and had one short rest while we were level two. Every other Adventuring Day was no short rests at all.

Even if you ramp up to 3 hard to very hard encounters instead of 6-8 medium, if they are spaced to grant a short rest or two it really goes a long way towards making everyone feel cool!