6-8 Encounters a long rest is, actually, a pretty problematic idea.

robus · May 2, 2018

Tony Vargas said:
Well, it doesn't 'add up' in that any encounter with more than one monster and/or any party with more/fewer than 5 PCs changes the /difficulty/ calculation. But the XP awarded for the encounter is just the total value of the creatures involved.

It certainly can't be that an adventure left out XP because the handful of characters would've 'bloated' the module or rendered it unprofitable to produce!

Good point. I got a little carried away there!

Tony Vargas · May 2, 2018

robus said:
Good point. I got a little carried away there!

Worst case, an encounter could lead with it's XP value & difficulty vs a party of 5 level X, and end with some notes on how it could be varied for a larger or smaller party (6 PCs, add one whatever, 4 remove two otherthings.....) or higher or lower level party (swap in stronger or weaker monsters).
A few lines.

Oofta · May 2, 2018

I think what people are asking from mod writers is either not practical or wouldn't be much help. What are they supposed to do? Say "if your party is not challenged add more monsters"? Or "run the NPCs as living, breathing individuals who respond intelligently based on the PCs actions"?

I'm not saying they couldn't be improved, there's always room for improvement. I just don't know how you could add text that would be helpful if you can't figure out the basics.

Maybe that should be another thread. Take an existing older mod and give examples of what you think would be useful and see what other people think of the additions. Prove me wrong, it wouldn't be the first time I've been mistaken.

robus · May 2, 2018

Oofta said:
Maybe that should be another thread. Take an existing older mod and give examples of what you think would be useful and see what other people think of the additions. Prove me wrong, it wouldn't be the first time I've been mistaken.

I’ve had a dream of doing that with LMoP. Then I wake up and realize how much work would be involved!

iserith · May 2, 2018

Yeah, [MENTION=6801558]robus[/MENTION], get on it!

5ekyu · May 2, 2018

Tony Vargas said:
I'm sure Hasbro would be delighted to render D&D 'lifeless' enough to pull in the orders of magnitude larger player base & income stream of an MMO. But, it's really a meaningless comparison. TTRPGs and MMOs are both RPGs, but trying to paint one as better than another, when they're just different media, gets nowhere. Plus 'your RPG is an MMO' is just fight'n words since the edition war, anyway. It's like a liberal calling conservative policies fascist or a conservative calling liberal policies communist. Just a red flag waved in front of a bull.

Not really. If you present many options, some of which are substantially & strictly superior to most others, you are actually restricting freedom to create the characters players want, because only some of those options are real, the rest are non-viable 'traps.' If you present fewer options that are at least arguably balanced/viable, they're at least all real options. The same goes for tactical options, if 'rest' is a tactical option with many benefits, and 'press on' is a tactical option with no benefits, then there's not much of a choice, you rest unless forced not to - the crux of the issue, really.

Again, that's essentially destroying options, only, in that case, for the DM. Might the DM want to run a scenario where significant time passes between challenges? Yes. Can he, if his responsibility includes forcing balance on a party that includes classes with who derive radically different benefits from 1/24hr 'long' rests? No, because his freedom is being restricted by a need to compensate for
Can a DM make a campaign in which Brewing tool-proficiency is as plot-important as Thieves' Tool proficiency? Yes. Does it greatly restrict the kinds of scenarios he can use. Heck yes. Is that a good thing? No. But there's a way around it: don't 'charge' players as much for generally-Adventuring-useful abilities as for generally trivial ones. If Expertise in Brewing comes up twice (or even never) in the course of a normal a campaign, while Thieves' Tools come up virtually every session, you can afford to essentially let a player have the former 'for free' (or darn near it), because it's mainly window-dressing. It's worth noting, in this context, that 5e /does/ make it pretty easy to add languages & tool proficiencies without build/level-up resources, via downtime, so it's really only the insistence on layering Expertise on what is otherwise a trivial ability that's problematic.

Well, the rules structure certainly doesn't focus much on balance, and leaves plenty of 'balancing' to be done by the DM - inevitably so, with so many optional modules (with even feats & MCing being optional, for instance). Guidelines are, I guess, still not there. Early in the playtest we were 'promised' (not really, Mike made no promises, per se) crystal-clear guidelines in terms of the intended balance point of encounters/day. In spite of being a don't-hold-me-to-it not-really-a-promise promise, the 6-8 encounter day guideline did deliver on it. But, yeah, beyond that, there's really not a lot of explicit 'balancing' advice...

I suppose you could have a party Level calculation that's more in depth than just the average level of the PCs...? So a party that's mostly 3rd, but 'optimal' in a variety of senses, might be 7th, while a botched 8th level party could be 5th, that kinda thing...
...then the party's equivalent level could drop as the day progresses...?

I was actually think more of a set of pre-set challenges selivering a variety of challenges and metrics to put youself on a scale. Key being to not only teat but teach about the types of things to prepare for.

But anything practical could help.

Wiseblood · May 2, 2018

Rofel Wodring said:
As someone who has run quite a few 3E, Pathfinder, and 4E D&D games and only a handful of 5E D&D games, I have to say that running large numbers of encounters in a 'workday' is problematic for two reasons:

1) A lot of players get very disengaged by their character going 'I Fire Bolt it.' 'I Fire Bolt it.' 'I Fire Bolt it.' repeatedly because they have to budget their abilities. There are a lot of players who legit don't mind describing how they're swinging their sword after taking the Attack action ten rounds in a row, but there are a lot of players who DO in fact mind, and I think it's both projectionist and unfair how the gaming community paints the former group as Proper Roleplayers Making The Best Use Of A Limited Toolkit and the latter group as Dirty Powergaming Munchkins Who Want To Show Off All The Time.

2) If things go south and the players end up blowing a lot of their abilities in the first one or two encounters, they feel like you're picking on them as you drag their characters through the rest of the gauntlet. This is also true if the players are casual or new to the group and aren't in tune with how D&D structures workdays. They aren't going to be sympathetic to your rejoinder of 'that's just bad luck/you not getting the rhythm of the game; better budget your abilities better next time', especially if it runs up against caveat one.

I also think that 6-8 encounters does violence to the narrative of action-adventure fiction (since it's a D&D-specific trope that doesn't have genre or metafictional justification) that can only be justified as a gameplay/story tradeoff but that's a separate discussion altogether. Just speaking from a gameplay perspective, it disengages certain kinds of players and I'm getting rather tired of boards like these treating such players as powergamers or n00bs.

Problematic.....

In answer to number one:

This doesn't have anything to do with 6-8 encounters per day. It seems to be about lack of flavorful options outside of limited resource options.
Sometimes I (we) use shorthand to describe things. It doesn't always work out.

In answer to number two:

This is also not about 6-8 encounters per day.
Sometimes encounters do not go as we imagined and sometimes encounters go very badly. D&D doesn't structure workdays. The DM and the players structure the workday. Just one encounter can disengage players. 6-8 encounters, is at best a rule of thumb, not a formula for success.

It might be that you take it too personally when someone gripes on the internet. I don't identify as a n00b or powergamer or as a projectionist so it doesn't feel personal to me. I for one think 6-8 encounters per day leads to leveling too fast but that doesn't make it problematic.

Tony Vargas · May 2, 2018

robus said:
I’ve had a dream of doing that with LMoP. Then I wake up and realize how much work would be involved!

Well, see, there's your answer, you can't expect a professional designer writing a module to do /work/ when he could just leave it to every DM who ever runs the module to do the work, themselves.

Oofta · May 2, 2018

Tony Vargas said:
Well, see, there's your answer, you can't expect a professional designer writing a module to do /work/ when he could just leave it to every DM who ever runs the module to do the work, themselves.

Ummm ... except he said it was a significantly difficult task.

Like I said earlier, if you have examples of what you would do take a mod and try it since you think it's so simple. I personally don't know what I would add that's not already in the DMG.

But seriously, ever tried to write a mod? It's not simple, and yes there are word and page count limits to take into consideration. Add too much bloat to your mods and nobody will use them.

Maybe I just have sympathy because I've hear the words "how hard can it be to add that button to my web form? All it does is ... followed by vague instructions that basically boil down to "read my mind and do things the system was never designed for".